OKLAHOMA CITY — Ianthe Davis ended her bartending shift at 4 a.m. one recent morning in Dallas. An hour later, a friend picked her up and drove her three hours up Interstate 35 to this capital city so she could get an abortion — a procedure that became almost impossible to obtain in her home state of Texas after a new law went into effect this month.
At a clinic in Oklahoma City, Davis was treated by another woman who was far from home, Dr. Rebecca Taub. The obstetrician and gynecologist travels once a month from her home in the East Bay to the small clinic, where she performs dozens of abortions over the course of two days.
After the procedure, Davis and her friend turned around and drove home. As a bartender, Davis said, “If I don’t work, I don’t make money.”
A Texas woman, an Oklahoma clinic and a California doctor: The scene offered a snapshot of the landscape under the Texas law that bans nearly all abortions after an embryonic heartbeat is detected — usually around six weeks — and makes no exceptions for rape, sexual abuse or incest.
The new law also enables private citizens to sue anyone who either performs an abortion or “aids and abets” one — and collect $10,000 plus their legal fees if they win the case. The law has narrow exceptions to protect the life of the mother or if continuing a pregnancy would cause “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”
The Chronicle spoke to several women on a recent weekend who traveled from Texas to a one-story, mustard-brick building in suburban Oklahoma City called the Trust Women clinic, where Taub has been working.
Clinic officials said they have seen a roughly 50% increase in patients overall since the new legislation took effect, including 110 women from Texas over the past seven days. That is as many as visited the clinic during all of August.
The length of Davis’ journey is not unusual. Before the ban, the average woman of childbearing age in Texas lived 17 miles from the nearest abortion provider, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. Now, the average driving distance is 247 miles.
The Texans most affected by the new law will be women of color, who constitute 70% of those who received abortions in 2019, according to Guttmacher.
Abortion access is so limited in Dallas, the nation’s ninth-largest city, that Davis contacted a clinic there before the law took effect this month but was turned away. “They said they wouldn’t be able to” perform the procedure, she said. Demand for the clinic was so strong that she would have been 14 weeks pregnant by the time an appointment was available.
The new law confused Davis. She feared telling many people about her situation “because if you do, you might get charged or something like that. I know there are $10,000 rewards for people” who supply information about women obtaining abortions, she said.
She had heard of clinics in Arkansas and New Mexico that were seeing patients, but Trust Women was closer. When she arrived in Oklahoma City, she was just a few days over six weeks pregnant.
Davis said she understands placing limits on abortion. Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that provided women the right to have an abortion, permits the procedure until about 24 weeks, when the fetus can survive outside the womb.
“I do understand putting a limit, I get that part,” said Davis, 27. “Most people don’t find out because it’s like, soon as hell. And then there are people who were raped.”
Davis had a supportive family and a friend willing to drive her to a clinic. But she said she knows other Texas women who, because they can’t afford to travel out of state, are trying scientifically dubious methods of pregnancy termination that are popular online, like taking large amounts of vitamin C.
“But that just didn’t sound that effective to me,” she said. “So I made the drive.”
She worried about the extreme measures that others confronting unwanted pregnancies might attempt.
“It’s probably gonna get bad,” Davis said. “I mean, I heard one girl tried to drink bleach.”
The U.S. Justice Department sued the state of Texas to try to block the abortion law, saying it violates women’s constitutional rights by creating an “undue burden” on those who want to have an abortion. A hearing is scheduled for Oct. 1 in Texas.
Until then, a steady stream of women like Davis will continue coming to the Trust Women clinic, where they will be greeted by doctors like Taub.
The 35-year-old East Bay obstetrician and gynecologist, clad in blue surgical scrubs, performs roughly two dozen abortions a day when she is in town because it is difficult for the clinic to recruit local doctors, a common situation in states where the procedure is culturally shunned and women are required to scale many hurdles to obtain one.
To Taub, this is a form of activism. After seeing out-of-state patients and calls to the Oklahoma City clinic swell after the Texas law passed — two-thirds of the calls to the clinic inquiring about services are now from the neighboring state — she wants to do more.
On this day, the waiting room was full of women seeking services they couldn’t find close to home. The clinic’s halls and waiting rooms were full of affirming messages, including posters saying, “We Love You!” “Everyone Loves Someone Who Had an Abortion” and “Prove Them Wrong.”
“There’s an urgency to the work that people who work with the clinic follow because they’re activists and they believe in this work,” Taub said. Since the Texas law took effect, her work “has definitely taken on a new urgency.”
The people who work at the clinic see the urgency in the faces of women like Daffnay McCoy. She, too, had an appointment for an abortion scheduled in Dallas. But she said that when the law took effect, clinic providers there explained that things had changed: They could give her a sonogram, they said, but wouldn’t perform an abortion.
“It kind of kind of freaked me out.” McCoy said. “I got hysterical and started panicking. I was hallucinating like I was going crazy.”
She said she has suffered from depression in the past and was worried that not being able to secure an abortion “was about to bring me back to that dark place.”
McCoy was already so stressed by her job in the payroll department for a Texas company, she said, that she had been suffering minor seizures. She has two children and felt she wouldn’t be able to adequately care for another. She said she is no longer with the father of her two children — who also impregnated her most recently — though he drove her to the clinic along with their children.
McCoy said she wouldn’t have known she was even pregnant if she hadn’t gone to the hospital because she was ill.
“But at that time, I was already past six weeks,” she said.
Once she arrived in Oklahoma City, wearing a T-shirt that said “Fierce and Fabulous,” she said she summoned an inner strength. She wished people who wrote the Texas law — or those who criticize women for having abortions — would be more empathetic toward women with unwanted pregnancies.
“You don’t know how this life came about. You don’t know if someone has been raped. Or if someone is going through an illness or a mental(ly unstable) state of mind. You just never know,” she said. “So to be on the safe side. I just feel as though no one should be obligated to make decisions for another individual. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Judith said she felt the same way. The 33-year-old nurse’s assistant, who asked that her last name not be used because she does not want her family to know about her abortion, was five weeks along when she learned she was pregnant — too far along to find a clinic that could accommodate her before the onset of the law’s time limits.
She left her home in Houston at 6:30 a.m. so she could arrive at the Oklahoma City clinic in time for her surgical procedure. She completed the 6½-hour drive alone, but said it “wasn’t bad. I prayed. And I listened to my gospel music.”
It was worth it, she said, because she didn’t feel healthy enough to have another child. She has diabetes, and her partner has kidney problems that will soon require dialysis. Plus, she already has four children.
“We both are sickly people. We’re just not well,” Judith said. “If anything happens to us, who’s gonna take care of our baby?”
Courtney, who also asked to be identified only by her first name, drove three hours to the clinic from a small town near Dallas. She was eight weeks pregnant.
The 20-year-old’s reasons for seeking an abortion were both personal and medical. She feared that if her devoutly Catholic family learned she was pregnant and unmarried, “they would isolate me from the rest of the family. So going to term with this is not an option for me.”
She also has a medical condition that causes seizures, which had increased since she became pregnant. “And so with that I’m scared that being pregnant while having seizures could end my life,” she said.
She tried to find a clinic in Texas, but “all of them said that they wouldn’t do it because of the heartbeat bill,” she said.
Adding to her stress was a clutch of anti-abortion demonstrators beyond the 6-foot-high wooden picket stockade fence that surrounds the Oklahoma City clinic. As she walked inside, she said she heard them say, “You’re committing murder. You’re sinning. If you need money, or a prayer, we can help. Your baby can be put up for adoption.”
“I’m sitting there having to bite my tongue. Literally having to bite my tongue to keep from speaking,” she said. “My arms are shaking, my hands are shaking, not even able to ignore them, because my emotions were being stirred up.”
Trust Women clinic officials are expecting the flood of Texas women driving north to grow. They’re considering expanding their hours and adding staff, and are trying to recruit more doctors like Taub — even if they have to pay to fly them into town. On Nov. 1, a similar fetal heartbeat bill is scheduled to take effect in Oklahoma. Abortion rights organizations are attempting to block it.
Since the Texas ruling, Taub said some of her California colleagues have asked her about traveling to clinics like she does.
But she has more immediate concerns about her patients once they leave Oklahoma and drive home to Texas.
“There are so many unknowns in how this law can and will be enforced that I am concerned that pharmacists in Texas may not fill prescriptions that they know come from an abortion clinic, even though they are not the medications that are going to enact the abortion,” Taub said, referring to ibuprofen and anti-nausea medication she prescribes.
Her advice to patients before they head back to Texas: “I told them that they had to fill their prescriptions in Oklahoma.”
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