In print, the Texas laws banning abortion are colour blind. The state’s Heartbeat Act, which has banned most abortions since last September, contains no language about race, ethnicity or social class.
The Texas abortion law has made the state a legislative pioneer in the U.S. The act, which bans abortions once fetal cardiac activity is detected, has also made Texas into a real-life preview of what may come later this year in more than two dozen states across the U.S. if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this summer, as aIt’s a preview that raises questions about how heavily the weight of abortion bans will fall on the country’s disadvantaged.
She knows of two women who recently got abortions, one forced to travel to Louisiana, another to Miami. The woman who went to Florida had been raped. “The majority of your white women have financial resources. What about the African Americans that don’t?” Dr. Matthews asked. State statistics show that in the first month under the new law, the profile of people obtaining those abortions was similar to the previous year. That indicates “those who are able to get abortions in Texas, in terms of their racial and ethnic identity, are pretty similar between those two time periods,” said Kari White, a University of Texas at Austin scholar who is principal investigator at the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, which has tracked the impact of the abortion legislation.
The demand for assistance in Texas has already outstripped the ability of some organizations to help. Fund Texas Choice receives 200 to 300 calls a month. It can only help about 100. “There’s just not enough hours in the day to return every call we get,” said Ms. Harvin. “We now serve the number of people in a week that we used to in a month.”
Even among those who aren’t pregnant, the law has created fear. “I’m just really scared,” said Nia Jones, a young Black activist who founded Social Justice Solutions, a group that also calls itself Hoochies of Houston.Her mother, Mia Williams, previously worked for the Texas Office of Minority Health Statistics and Engagement – but that office was defunded in 2018 and shut down. That has affected the state’s ability to track the impact of abortion law on disadvantaged communities, Ms.
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