Late last night, the Texas Supreme Court ruled to let the state’s abortion ban that’s been on the books for nearly a century take effect once more. After just 3 days of reprieve, abortion is again banned entirely throughout Texas.
The Texas Supreme Court has failed to protect the health and safety of Texas families and our communities. They had the power to stop enforcement of Texas’ abortion ban, but they chose instead to impose their ideologies and political agendas to block thousands of Texans who need abortion care over the next two months from getting it. With the pre-Roe ban reinstated, Whole Woman’s Health is forced to cease providing abortion in our 4 Texas clinics. This morning, our clinic staff embarked on the heartbreaking conversations with patients whose appointments must be cancelled, and our clinics have started the wind down process.
Today, we turn to the health and wellbeing of not only our patients, but also our staff and providers who are now banned from doing the work they love — the work they are highly trained to do and have dedicated their hearts, minds, and bodies to provide to Texans for decades. As I wrote last night to everyone who works at Whole Woman’s Health and Whole Woman’s Health Alliance:
“I ache for us, and for the people we have dedicated our lives to serve with the fabulous abortion care we provide, many who will be denied that right in the months and possibly years to come.
The days, weeks and months ahead will have uncertainty and pain, and they will also have resistance and power. Despite the minority rule we navigate at present in our country, we stand on the right side of history. Times like this call on us to summon our deepest strengths; we will need to lean on each other and extend grace to one another to make it through. And we will.
What has already happened and what is yet to come is an injustice – to each of us and to our children, our families, and our communities. You deserve better, our patients deserve better.
Don’t let this setback define you; you are a good, kind, dedicated and skilled abortion care worker and you should be proud of all you have done to make this world a better place for the thousands of people you have touched through your work at Whole Woman’s Health and Whole Woman’s Health Alliance.
We fought a hard fight. And this hurts.
Abortion rights are human rights.
Abortion is freedom.”
We are grateful that despite the heartbreak today in Texas and the pending doom we feel for our work in Indiana, we may continue to provide fabulous abortion care in the clinics we operate in Virginia, Minnesota, and Maryland and through our medication abortion by mail program in those states as well as New Mexico and Illinois. We are relieved that we built our Wayfinder program to help people denied abortion care find their way to the places where that abortion care may be provided. But, today, all of these post-Roe initiatives are bittersweet; for something has been lost in the USA this week that is fundamental to our equality, liberty, freedom and autonomy. This happened on our watch in 2022 – an epic backslide of human rights. We can’t go around that, we can’t gloss over it – we have to go through it. And it is going to change us forever.
In Solidarity,
Amy Hagstrom Miller
President & CEO
Whole Woman’s Health
Whole Woman’s Health Alliance
