World News Korner

As Texas closes two more Women's Health Clinics, legal abortion, for all intents and purposes, has been rendered virtually impossible in most parts of the state.

Courtesy of the Guardian:

This week’s closure of two more Texas abortion clinics in the wake of the state’s strict new regulations means women from rural areas seeking to end pregnancies face journeys of hundreds of miles to the nearest facility.

Workers and activists held a candlelit vigil on Thursday night outside the Whole Woman’s Health clinic in McAllen to mark the closure. The shutdown means that people in the Rio Grande Valley, an area on the Mexican border with about 1.3 million inhabitants, will face logistical and financial challenges to undergo legal abortion procedures.

The valley’s metropolitan areas are often cited as among the poorest in the country. The nearest abortion clinic that meets the new required standards is in San Antonio, 240 miles away. While abortion is largely illegal across the nearby Mexican border, black-market drugs are widely available, leading to fears that women could put their heath at risk by crossing the frontier and attempting to terminate their pregnancies using unapproved and unsupervised methods.

The McAllen facility stopped providing abortions last year after doctors were unable to obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals – a new state requirement – but remained open to provide other services. However, management decided that the restrictions meant it was no longer feasible to continue operating.

The other clinic was in Beaumont, a city of about 120,000 people near the Louisiana border that is a 90-minute drive from Houston.

Amy Hagstrom Miller, the chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, said: “Families from the Rio Grande Valley and northern Mexico, to east Texas and western Louisiana, have been turning to our clinics for safe, compassionate care since abortion was made legal in 1973. We have done everything possible to keep our clinics open but we are simply unable to survive with the new, medically unnecessary guidelines required.”

Her statement added: “The consequence of [the bill] is an injustice, plain and simple. It is an injustice to the women we serve and to our communities.”

Not only are legal abortions, which were guaranteed by Roe vs Wad, becoming a ting of the past in Texas, but these clinics also provided caner screenings, prenatal tests, and birth control, which means that Texas is now becoming a third world country when it comes to providing health care for women.

Especially poor women, because Texas also refused to implement the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion.

For the record Texas had 44 clinics in 2011, and today only has 20. And that should send a chill up every Texas woman's spine.

But you know what Texas?

You can do something about it.

And it can start happening this year.

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