Supreme Court Ruling On Abortion Regulation Impacts Texas Border Region

By Mónica Ortiz Uribe
June 27, 2016
(Photo by Mónica Ortiz Uribe- KJZZ)
Samantha Romero is the president of the West Fund, a non-profit that helps women in El Paso pay for abortion services. She shared her personal story at a community rally outside the El Paso courthouse after today's Supreme Court decision.
(Photo by Mónica Ortiz Uribe- KJZZ)
Pro Choice supporters gather outside the El Paso County Courthouse after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to strike down parts of a Texas law that mandated stricter regulations on abortion clinics.

Pro-choice advocates celebrated Monday's Supreme Court ruling striking down parts of a Texas law that represented some of the nation's strictest regulations on abortion providers. 

Access to abortion services became especially difficult for Texas women who lived along the U.S.-Mexico border after 2013, when many clinics closed as a result of the state's tighter restrictions. Two of three clinics located in the border region closed, forcing women who sought an abortion to drive hundreds of miles or across state lines.

Reproductive Services in El Paso was one of the clinics that closed.

"Local women had to go to New Mexico, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin," said administrator Gerri Laster. "We're still seeing women from West Texas because there are no services there."

The border clinics were able to reopen after the Supreme Court issued an injunction last year. But about half the state's other clinics remained closed. Those that stayed open, most located in big cities, had to take on more patients. Laster said that resulted in wait times of up to five weeks at those clinics.

"[Women] don't have that kind of time, so they start looking elsewhere," she said. 

Some began to show up at her clinic in El Paso from places like Wichita Falls, nearly 600 miles away. 

The stricter Texas rules required abortion clinics to meet the building standards of an ambulatory surgical center and required doctors who preformed abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Texas lawmakers who favored the regulations argued they made abortion safer for women.

The majority of the Supreme Court judges disagreed with that argument in today's ruling, saying the law places an undue burden on abortion access and thus violates the Constitution. 

Today's ruling means Laster can keep her clinic open. In 2012, the last full year Reproductive Services was open, the clinic provided 1,600 abortions.

Texas border clinics also serve women from Mexico where abortion is mostly illegal.