Susanna was young, single, broke and pregnant in southern Texas where, thanks to the State’s strict laws, her chances of getting a surgical abortion at a clinic were slim to none.
So she did what an estimated 1,00,000 women or more in Texas have done — she had a self-induced abortion, a process that lasted 12 hours. With the help of a friend, some online instructions and quick dash across the Mexican border for some pills, she addressed the issue of unwanted pregnancy in a State where women are finding abortion services too expensive and too far away.
Restrictive State laws Restrictive laws took hold in Texas in 2013, forcing so many clinic closings that fewer than 20 remain to serve 5.4 million women of reproductive age.
Experts say that if the U.S. Supreme Court upholds Texas’s restrictive abortion laws, the numbers of self-induced abortions will escalate.
So far, the number of Texas women who have taken that option could be as high as 1,00,000 to 2,40,000, depending on how it is calculated, experts say.
“We certainly hypothesise that if there is a bad ruling from the Supreme Court that leads to more clinic closures, yes, this will only become more common,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, a researcher with the Texas Policy Evaluation Project at the University of Texas at Austin.
Susanna, a musician in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley who chose to use an alias to protect her identity, described her self-induced abortion two years ago at the age of 23 as “almost primal”.
Research shows U.S. women opt to self-induce due to the closing of their local clinic, the expense of a clinical procedure or the costs of travelling to a distant facility.
Most commonly they take misoprostol, available in Mexico without a prescription, at home.
How-to instructions are easily found online on websites belonging to Women on Waves and Women on Web, Dutch reproductive rights groups, and the World Health Organization, said Selena (28), a friend of Susanna and a social worker in the State.
