Right-wing misinformation and confidence about the new Supreme Court lurk behind anti-abortion ballot measures in 2020
Published
Citation Molly Butler / Media Matters
Christina Taylor was 20-weeks pregnant with her third child in May 2017 when she, her husband and two children excitedly went in for an ultrasound to check on development and to learn the sex.
“The ultrasound tech was looking at me, and she was pretty quiet,” Christina said. “I learned later that they can't give you a diagnosis. You have to wait for the doctor to look it over.”
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“The doctor had come in and told us that our baby had no kidneys, and I had no amniotic fluid,” she said. “He was squished basically in a sort of sausage of my uterus without the aid of any fluid in there.”
A second opinion and an MRI later, they discovered the fetus, who they named Gene, was a boy, and not only was he missing his kidneys and amniotic fluid, he was also missing his bladder.
They decided to get an abortion at 21 weeks and one day.
“They were able to give us our son, and I was able to hold him, you know, in my hand. And at the time he weighed about a pound, so he was extremely small,” Roy said. “There was nothing gross or horrible. It was just our son. He was just very small and wasn't alive. And we got to hold him. The way that they paint these as this is just horrible, bloody, graphic, just some kind of horror novel situation is just so, so different than the reality that we experienced.”
The average one-way driving distance for a Colorado woman of reproductive age to a clinic that could provide later abortion care would increase from 15 miles to 445 miles — a stunning 430-mile increase, or almost 30 times farther.
Moreover, under a ban, 100% of Colorado women of reproductive age would have to travel at least 300 miles — again, one-way — to reach the nearest clinic providing abortion care later in pregnancy. And four out of every five Colorado women would have to travel at least 400 miles each way to reach the nearest clinic providing abortion care later in pregnancy.
It doesn’t stop there. Banning later abortion in Colorado would affect people in surrounding states, most of which are hostile to abortion rights, who would no longer be able to seek care in Colorado.
Last year, the Colorado Department of Health reported that 11% of abortions provided in the state were for patients who traveled from more than 30 states, many overcoming enormous logistical barriers and politically motivated restrictions in their home states.
It was pitched as a way to ensure that if the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, which currently makes the pregnancy termination procedure legal, then states would be allowed to decide the issue on their own and Louisiana courts would enter that new world with the knowledge the state’s residents prefer forbidding abortions.
In Louisiana, no major obstetrics and gynecology group performs abortion services. Because my baby’s heartbeat still flickered weakly, my obstetrician could do nothing to help hasten my miscarriage. She squeezed my hand as she gave me a yellow Post-it with the information of the closest clinic. On it she wrote, “You’ll get through this.” What I learned when I called the clinic was the demand for abortions in Louisiana far exceeds the number of providers who can help. It would be nearly three weeks before they could see me; there would be no way for me to avoid a surgical procedure at that gestational age. A week later, I crossed three states to end my pregnancy in Florida on the very last day they could provide a medical abortion. I walked through a small crowd of protesters to enter the clinic. One sign read: “Welcome to hell.” Inside the clinic were dozens of women, packed into the waiting room. An employee told me that most of the clinic’s patients come from Louisiana and Mississippi.