Pro-choice protesters chant outside the Senate chamber
Patrick Michels

The Last Two Rural Abortion Clinics in Texas Close

A third of Texas' abortion clinics have now closed due to HB 2, including remaining clinics in the Rio Grande Valley and East Texas.

by

Above: Pro-choice protesters chant outside the Senate chamber minutes before lawmakers sent House Bill 2 to Gov. Perry's desk.

Following the legalization of abortion in 1973, the first abortion clinic to open in Texas was in the small town of McAllen. Today, after serving women from the Rio Grande Valley and northern Mexico for more than forty years, the McAllen clinic closed for good. Another clinic in Beaumont that had provided abortions to women from East Texas and Louisiana also closed its doors today. The two clinics were the last ones remaining in rural Texas.

Whole Woman’s Health, a network of abortion facilities that operates both the McAllen and Beaumont clinics, cited in a statement the “burdensome and medically unnecessary hurdles places by Texas legislators in House Bill 2” for the closures.

Specifically, Whole Woman’s Health points to a clause in HB 2 that requires all abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Doctors who were unable to gain admitting privileges from their local hospitals because of bureaucratic obstacles or local politics stopped providing abortions on October 31, when portions of the bill went into effect. Overnight, 14 of Texas’ 36 abortion clinics ceased serving patients.

Neither the McAllen nor the Beaumont clinics could gain privileges at local hospitals and so haven’t provided abortions since November. Instead, they have provided follow-up care to women who’d previously had abortions at the clinic, or who had induced abortions themselves.

With today’s closures, there are only 20 abortion clinics remaining in Texas, according to Whole Woman’s Health. (Update: Research from RH Reality Check’s Andrea Grimes estimates the current number of open clinics at 25).”Women seeking to terminate a pregnancy must now travel to Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Fort Worth, El Paso or Corpus Christi, a journey that could entail hundreds of miles for patients from the state’s far-flung corners. Whole Woman’s Health noted in a background brief that those most likely to struggle to obtain an abortion now will be low-income women, women of color and rural women. Indeed, more than 22 percent of Beaumont’s population is below the poverty line while McAllen has one of the highest poverty rates in the United States.

“A pre-Roe landscape is now emerging in Texas where your ability to receive abortion care is determined primarily by your socioeconomic class and zip code,” Whole Woman’s Health noted. The Beaumont abortion clinic treated 1,200 women annually while the McAllen facility provided abortions to roughly 1,700 women per year.

Proponents of abortion rights in Texas predict dire health consequences from the closures. “Valley residents who do not have the ability or the means to drive to San Antonio or Corpus Christi [may] take matters in their own hands,” Heather Busby, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Texas told the Observer. “Based on what we’ve been hearing from medical providers, women have already been attempting to induce by taking pills and herbs and other home remedies. These could be ineffective or dangerous.”

Amy Hagstrom Miller explained to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last night just how dangerous those practices might be. “People go over the border, they try to get medication to try to self-induce an abortion, and so sometimes they’ll come to us afterwards for an ultrasound to see if they’re still pregnant,” Hagstrom Miller said. “We have seen women putting things into their vagina, trying to dilate their cervix. We’ve seen women asking their partner to beat them, just the same stories we’ve heard pre-Roe. We’ve seen women douching with coke or douching with Lysol. We’ve seen people taking a lot of herbs.”

Meanwhile, the anti-abortion group Texas Alliance For Life, which argued that HB 2 was necessary to improve patient safety, was delighted by the closures. “We are pleased that women will never again receive substandard care from either of these abortion facilities,” said Joe Pojman, Texas Alliance for Life’s director in a press release.

Tonight in McAllen, abortion rights activists including NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, the ACLU of Texas, the Texas Freedom Network and Progress Texas, will rally outside the shuttered clinic to protest the law that brought about these closures.