Watch Abortion Access Vanish in Texas (GIF)
You can see women’s abortion access trickle away in the interactive map above. Some things to note: Before the state required admitting privileges, 13 cities had abortion clinics. Now, just seven do. After September, only five Texas cities—Dallas, Forth Worth, San Antonio, Austin, and Houston—will will have abortion clinics. Women in the Rio Grande Valley must now travel to Corpus Christi, a two-and-a-half hour drive, for abortion services. Soon, there won’t be a single clinic providing abortions west of San Antonio. A clinic in Dallas that will operate as an ambulatory surgical center opened after the state’s new law passed and does not initially appear on the map.
In addition to making it harder for abortion providers to operate, the law also bans abortion 20 weeks after conception and forbids the use of medication to terminate pregnancies. At the time of its passage, anti-abortion lawmakers claimed that tougher requirements for abortion providers were necessary to safeguard women. But mainstream medical groups, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, argue that requiring admitting privileges doesn’t increase the level of care. Transfer agreements with hospitals offer patients the same protection in the rare cases when an abortion requires hospitalization. Plus, abortion foes have made it highly controversial for hospitals to grant abortion providers admitting privileges. In April, for example, two Texas providers claimed in a lawsuit that a Dallas hospital withdrew their admitting privileges because associating with them ginned up negative publicity.