FORTH WORTH, Texas — Whole Woman’s Health is shuttering its four clinics in Texas, including two in North Texas, and working to move to New Mexico to offer abortion services.
The abortion provider has in clinics Fort Worth, McKinney, Austin and McAllen, but after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court last month, abortion services are mostly unavailable in the state. Whole Woman’s Health has launched a GoFundMe to raise money to move to New Mexico, where abortion laws are less restrictive, according to a news release. There, it will provide first and second trimester abortions.
“We’re not closing because we want to, we’re closing because we’re forced to,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the president and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health and Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, told the Star-Telegram.
The clinics have already stopped providing abortions in Texas.
The abortion provider doesn’t have the financial reserves to open a New Mexico facility without community support to help vacate its clinics, move equipment, buy and renovate a new building, and relocate and hire staff, Hagstrom Miller said in a Friday statement.
Hagstrom Miller said Whole Woman’s Health’s Texas clinics continue to see patients for follow up visits and are taking care of things like medical records, “staff wind down,” and helping people find their way to other states where they can get abortions, Hagstrom Miller said.
She expected buildings to be put up for sale in the next month or two.
“Our care model has been dismantled by the overturning of Roe,” Hagstrom Miller said. “We are abortion providers and we are banned from providing that service, and so we are forced to migrate to other communities where abortion is affirmed as essential health care, which unfortunately, Texas has not done.”
Texas has a “trigger” law banning most abortions in the state, with an exception for medical emergencies, following court’s overturning Roe on June 24. The law goes into effect 30 days after a judgment is issued, so it’s unclear exactly when the law will go into effect.
In the days since the ruling, there have been questions about the applicability of Texas’ pre-Roe abortion ban that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said was still on the books 50 years after the landmark decision.
Abortion providers, including Whole Woman’s Health, sued to block enforcement of the decades-old law and were briefly able to provide services after winning in a Harris County district court. But on Friday night, the Texas Supreme Court blocked the order. A hearing in that case is set for July 12.
Blocking the pre-Roe ban only buys time until the “trigger” law goes into effect, Hagstrom Miller said. Whether the clinics will be able to again temporarily provide abortions depends on what happens with the court case, Miller said.
New Mexico’s abortion laws are less restrictive than Texas’ other bordering states. It does not have “waiting periods, mandated parental involvement or limitations on publicly funded abortions,” according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Hagstrom Miller said Whole Woman’s Health is looking to move somewhere along the border of Texas and New Mexico. They offer an Abortion Wayfinder Program to access clinics in other states.
———
