The Mexican abortion option, part 3

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Misoprostol

Between 100,000 and 240,000 Texans have attempted to terminate their pregnancies without medical assistance, according to new research released Tuesday. Based on interviews and a statewide survey, the unprecedented study by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP) estimates that between 1.7 and 4.1 percent of Texas women between the ages of 18 and 49 have attempted to end their own pregnancies outside of a clinical setting.

According to TxPEP’s interviews with Texans who’ve attempted self-induction, the top four reasons they tried to end their pregnancies on their own fall into four categories: financial constraints for the cost of the procedure or travel to the nearest clinic, clinic closures, recommendation from a family member or friend, or an intention to avoid shame or stigma of going to an abortion clinic, especially if they had had an abortion before.

“I didn’t have any money to go to San Antonio or Corpus,” one woman living in the lower Rio Grande Valley told researchers. “I didn’t even have any money to get across town. Like I was just dirt broke. I was poor.”

The study also found that Latina women living near the Texas-Mexico border are more likely to have attempted to induce their own abortions, or know someone who has, than non-Latina Texans.

[…]

Researchers believe the likelihood of self-induced abortion in Texas is higher than elsewhere. According to a 2008 national study by the Guttmacher Institute, less than 2 percent of American women reported taking something to terminate their pregnancies on their own. In 2012, TxPEP conducted a survey of Texans seeking abortions and found that 7 percent of women interviewed spoke to reported taking something to induce their own abortion.

Lead TxPEP researcher Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California at San Francisco, warned that clinic closures after HB 2 may lead to an increase in self-inductions.

“This is the latest body of evidence demonstrating the negative implications of laws like HB 2 that pretend to protect women but in reality place them, and particularly women of color and economically disadvantaged women, at significant risk,” Grossman said in a press release. “As clinic-based care becomes harder to access in Texas, we can expect more women to feel that they have no other option and take matters into their own hands.”

The most common method women reported using to induce their own abortion was a medication called misoprostol, also called by its brand name, Cytotec.

Spoiler alert: we have heard this before. I have often heard it said that trying to ban or regulate something – guns, drugs, gambling, what have you – doesn’t work and can’t work because people will still want those things, so the net effect is to push the activity in question underground and thus make it more dangerous for everyone involved. Funny how that never seems to be applied to abortions, especially by those who so piously intone that they’re just making them safer because they care so much about women’s health. Thankfully, at least some federal judges have been willing to point out the dangerous absurdity of the recent spate of anti-abortion laws; whether SCOTUS follows suit or not remains to be seen. The AusChron, the Press, and ThinkProgress have more.

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