Two Texas abortion clinics shut down Thursday, adding to a growing list of the state's providers closing due to restrictions the state legislature passed last summer.
Whole Women's Health, operator of one ambulatory surgical center and five abortion clinics in Texas, will shut down its clinics in McAllen and Beaumont. The Beaumont clinic was the only abortion provider between Louisiana and Houston, and the McAllen clinic was the last location serving women in the Rio Grande Valley.
The new law requires that abortion providers have admitting privileges at a local hospital. It also requires that all abortions take place in ambulatory surgical centers. Whole Women's Health CEO Amy Hagstrom Miller said that compliance under the new law is "next to impossible."
"The majority of the rural providers in Texas are now closed," Miller said. "I'm stubborn or stupid to have kept mine open this long, but I can't keep my doors open when I can't see my patients."
Known as HB 2, the bill signed by Gov. Rick Perry last summer also restricts how doctors can administer abortions with medication and bans abortions following 20 weeks of pregnancy. Republicans who supported the bill said it was meant to protect women's health.
"We've been well aware that Texas has been against us and on us for many, many years," said Marva Sadler, a regional director at Whole Women's Health. "But I did not think I would see a day where they would have put up such barriers that now that we're actually closing clinics, and they're essentially taking away the right to fair and safe comprehensive health care that all women, not only in the state of Texas, deserve to have."
Since the Texas legislature began passing new restrictions on pregnancy termination in 2011, the number of Texas abortion clinics has decreased by more than half. In 2011 there were 44 clinics. Now there are 20. Just six of the remaining facilities are ambulatory surgical centers, meaning that the remaining 14 will have to close soon unless they can follow the new building requirements by the deadline of September 2014.
Miller said that, as a consequence of the closings, desperate women will turn to unsafe measures or illegal providers to terminate their pregnancies.
"Abortions are supposedly legal on paper, and women still need to have the service whether or not they can access it through professional medical channels or not," Miller said. "I would not be surprised if medical providers start to pop up who do them illegally. It's just a matter of time."
