We’re not Texas yet, but North Carolina already makes abortion inaccessible
The Supreme Court’s decision not to stay Texas’s latest abortion law should not be surprising.
Instead of waiting for Dobbs v. Jackson, an upcoming Supreme Court case that will examine whether pre-viable abortions are still constitutional, the justices made their stance clear Wednesday night when they decided 5-4 not to interfere with a new Texas law that bans abortions after six weeks. In reality, this equates to four weeks after conception, and two weeks after one could even know that they’re pregnant.
This is a continuation of a years-long effort by conservatives to undermine Roe v. Wade. If similar legislation passed here, it wouldn’t be surprising — abortion has long been inaccessible for marginalized people across the state.
At least two residents of every North Carolina county received an abortion in 2019; almost 23,500 people overall. Despite this, only 15 clinics in nine counties offer abortion services.
To get an abortion in North Carolina, you must travel to one of these 15 clinics to see a doctor — unlike Virginia and West Virginia, where nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants can perform the procedure. You can’t be treated over telehealth. Once you’re at the clinic and have your consultation, you have to wait 72 hours before undergoing the procedure. This ties North Carolina with five other states for the longest wait time in the country; Texas’s waiting period is 24 hours.
Aside from patient barriers, clinicians also have to adhere to costly building regulations that provide no benefit to the patient. And if bureaucracy doesn’t keep patients from having an abortion, money, reliable transportation or stigma could.
“This is, I think, a very intentional effort to further stigmatize abortion care, such that folks are really challenged to talk about their own experiences with abortion care,” Jenny Black, the president of Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. “We allow this discourse to continue and get a lot of momentum that is really perpetuated by what we’re seeing in Texas.”
Abortion access in North Carolina has been in jeopardy for years. In the 2021-2022 legislative session, at least five bills have been filed by Republican lawmakers to restrict access to abortion. House Bill 453, known as the “Human Life Nondiscrimination Act,” passed the legislature and was vetoed by Gov. Roy Cooper. Around this time, a federal court shot down a law that had been on the books since 1973 that restricted abortion to 20 weeks, instead of waiting until after the pregnancy is deemed viable.
“It isn’t hard to imagine that the same type of hurdles that the Supreme Court has allowed to be erected in Texas could very easily be erected here,” Black says. “We’ve built the hurdles this high, it’s not that much further to go.”
For some, the hurdles don’t matter.
Before Roe v. Wade, wealthy patients would travel abroad to countries with legal abortion access to receive care; others crossed into Mexico or Puerto Rico, where the illegal procedure was still more affordable.
The law in Texas is an attempt to keep abortion from poor people, something made clear by the $10,000 bounty awarded to accusers who turn in people suspected of “aiding and abetting” an abortion. This money comes from the defendants.
This Texas law and the nod the courts gave it could foreshadow a movement across the country and in the state to try again. For Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, it’s something that they have been anticipating for more than a year. They have already started preparing for an influx of patients from states that strictly regulate abortion.
“These are post-Roe conditions that already exist with Roe because of the burdens and hurdles that already exist in this state, and we are expecting and anticipating those to get much, much worse and our system to become even more constrained,” Black says. “It could constrain to the point of absolute inaccessibility.”
Like North Carolina, Texas is not a true “red” state. Neither Texas nor North Carolina Republicans have supermajorities in their state legislature right now; this could change in the 2022 election cycle.
As in Texas, there are also ways to support the right to health care: contributing to abortion funds, contacting legislators or even just helping reduce the stigma around the procedure. It may also be helpful to volunteer as clinic escorts for added protection for those seeking abortions, as well as nurses, receptionists and doctors.
“We’re a hair’s breadth away from it,” Black says of similar bills coming to North Carolina. “It could happen, but it doesn’t have to. We have time.”
This story was originally published September 3, 2021 at 1:41 PM with the headline "We’re not Texas yet, but North Carolina already makes abortion inaccessible."
