DALLAS — Nine months after shuttering its Texas clinics, one of the nation’s largest independent abortion providers has opened a clinic in neighboring New Mexico.
And it wants Texans to know.
Whole Woman’s Health opened its Albuquerque clinic March 23. Since then, nearly all of its patients have come from Texas, said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the organization’s founder and CEO.
“Texans need to know they still have access to safe, legal abortions,” Miller said. “They can count on getting health care in New Mexico.”
Whole Woman’s closed its clinics in Fort Worth, McKinney, Austin and McAllen in June 2022, after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, effectively banning the procedure in Texas and roughly a dozen other states.
Women continue to call the Texas clinics looking for information on abortion, Miller said. To get the word out, Whole Woman’s is running social media ads in Fort Worth and Austin with the message: “Think access to safe legal abortion is a thing of the past? Think again.”
The provider launched a GoFundMe page with a goal of raising $750,000 for the clinic in New Mexico, as well as travel costs for out-of-state patients. It has so far raised nearly $450,000.
With some of the nation’s most progressive abortion laws, New Mexico has reported an influx of patients from Texas and other states in recent months.
A March 2022 analysis from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project found that 27% of Texans who traveled to other states for abortions went to New Mexico. Nearly half went to Oklahoma, which has now implemented its own abortion ban.
Yet driving or flying isn’t feasible for all Texans, many of whom aren’t able to take time away from work or caretaking responsibilities, Miller said. Albuquerque is roughly 650 miles from Dallas. The closest abortion clinic to North Texas is in Wichita, Kansas, more than 350 miles from Dallas.
Founded in Austin in 2003, Whole Woman’s now operates clinics in Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota and Virginia and provides abortion pills by mail. That, too, could change after a federal judge in Texas ruled on Friday to suspend the FDA’s approval of the mifepristone. The Justice Department on Monday appealed that ruling, calling the decision “extraordinary and unprecedented.”
Miller said the organization is closely watching the developments, but that it has no plans to stop prescribing mifepristone, which is widely used to end pregnancy in the first 10 weeks of gestation.
“We don’t take our orders from that judge,” she said. “We take our orders from the FDA, and we’re still offering medicated abortion.”
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