SB 8 is despite the violation of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court`s decision to legalize abortion in the United States As a result, Texas has had the most restrictive procedural ban in the country since the law went into effect. Thousands of Texans received state abortions within four months of Texas` strict abortion law going into effect on Sept. 1, according to a new study by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP) at UT Austin. “Between September and December 2021, an average of 1,391 Texans per month underwent abortions at these outstate facilities, with monthly totals ranging from 1,330 to 1,485,” the researchers wrote. Most went to Oklahoma or New Mexico. Kari White, an associate professor at UT Austin and a senior researcher at TxPEP, said the law “has done nothing to change the need for abortion treatment” in Texas. The researchers looked at Texas residents who received the procedure between August 1 and December. 31 of 34 of the 44 facilities opened in Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma. In August, the month before SB 8 went into effect, they found that 235 Texas residents had had an abortion at one of those out-of-state clinics. “That`s much greater than the number of Texans who received abortion treatment outside the state when about half of Texas facilities closed after previous abortion restrictions in 2013 and 2014,” she said. “And that number is even greater than the number of Texans traveling out of state in the spring of 2020, when Governor Abbott issued an executive order interpreted as banning most abortions in the state at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.” White said his team interviewed about 65 people who had left the state for an abortion and heard “over and over again” how difficult it was to get an appointment. White said SB 8 has trained more Texans seeking abortions outside the state than during any other procedural restriction adopted in Texas so far.

Since they couldn`t get data from about 10 facilities in those states, the numbers are an undercoverage, the researchers said. The data also does not include abortions given to Texans in other U.S. states. The law, known as Senate Bill 8, prohibits the procedure as early as the sixth week of pregnancy — often before many people realize they are pregnant. Abortions in Texas halved in September compared to the previous year. “What he`s done is radically change the way people receive care and the extent to which they will receive that care,” she said. Travel has an economic cost for many of these Texans, she said. “They had to overcome so many obstacles: they had to figure out that they were not eligible for services in Texas,” White said, and then “call many clinics — six or 10 — in other states to try to find a place that had an appointment.” “They delay their bills, they take out loans, they borrow money from families, they borrow cars because their car is unreliable,” she said.

“[They are] unable to buy food for their families to cover the costs of their travel and departure from the state.” White said many of these states have been invaded by patients from Texas. Some also had their own restrictions on the procedure, she said, which required waiting and several visits.