Abortion, From a
Distance
By EYAL PRESS, Op-Ed
Contributor from the NYTimes on the Web, March 12, 2006
LAST week, Gov. Michael Rounds of
South Dakota signed a sweeping new ban on abortion. Some abortion-rights
advocates raised an alarm: soon women in particular states will have to
board buses and airplanes to have their pregnancies terminated, the way they did
in the era before Roe v. Wade.
The concern is understandable. But the truth is that for many poor women
living in remote areas, the dark predictions have already come true — and they
did so some time ago.
Consider Wyoming. In 1988, according to Stanley Henshaw of the Alan
Guttmacher Institute, 61 percent of women who had abortions traveled out of
state to get them. By 2000, the figure had climbed to 95 percent.
In Mississippi, where the number of places that offer abortion services has
shrunk from six to one, 60 percent of women traveled to neighboring states to
terminate their pregnancies in 2000, up from 33 percent 12 years earlier.
In Kentucky, the percentage jumped from 22 percent in 1988 to 41 percent in
2000. In South Carolina, the rate also nearly doubled, to 35 percent from
19 percent.
Limits on access to abortions — and long distances separating the dwindling
number of providers — are increasingly the norm in rural areas and much of the
heartland. Even with Roe in place, the number of hospitals and
doctors performing abortions has diminished nationwide, to the point where 87
percent of counties in America have no abortion providers at all. In South
Dakota, only one abortion provider remains, and it is a Planned Parenthood in
Sioux Falls.
The women most affected by this situation are the same ones who would feel the
brunt of the impact were Roe v. Wade overturned: those who have
little money, are geographically isolated, and happen to live in states where
the social climate is hostile to reproductive rights. Often they are
single mothers for whom having to buy a bus or plane ticket may mean not being
able to afford an abortion. Many must scrape together their savings in
states where Medicaid does not cover the procedure.
To point this out is not to suggest that nothing would change were Roe
overturned. Without Roe, the socioeconomic and geographic divisions
that now mark the abortion landscape would undoubtedly grow more pronounced.
While states like Texas and Louisiana would most likely ban the procedure, more
liberal states would become magnets for women throughout their surrounding
regions. In this sense, America would return not to the 1950's, when
abortion was illegal, but to the early 1970's, when places like New York, which
decriminalized abortion in 1970, were besieged by women from Ohio and
Pennsylvania.
My father began an obstetrics-gynecology medical residency in Buffalo in 1973, a
few weeks after Roe. What he and other doctors witnessed after the
Supreme Court decision was not a sudden influx of women seeking abortions but a
temporary reduction in demand as women from other states were able to turn to
local providers. Later, he would hear stories about how, prior to Roe,
Buffalo was so inundated with out-of-state patients that hospitals worried about
how to accommodate them, and a local abortion clinic had to stay open seven days
a week.
Although things have not come full circle just yet, the news from South Dakota
is the latest indication that, with or without Roe, access to abortion is
increasingly limited in states that have never accepted the decision's
legitimacy. For that reason, it seems that abortion-rights advocates ought
to focus less on the specter of a Supreme Court reversal than on the reality of
who is — and is not — able to exercise choice under current laws. We'd do
better to view South Dakota's action not as transformative, in other words, but
as an effort to formalize what for many women already exists in practice.
Eyal Press, a contributing writer for The Nation, is the
author of "Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City and the Conflict That Divided
America."
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