By Susan Cashin
Note: This story contains some graphic descriptions.
Reproductive Healthcare is one of the most important issues at stake in the U.S. Elections. Voting has started overseas and American Voters in South Africa need to cast their ballots now to win back and protect reproductive freedom.
In the fall of 1980, I moved to Texas – Austin, Texas to be precise. Hailed as the Music and of course BBQ Capital of the world according to its residents, Austinites proudly held their heads high living the good life in the most youthful and progressive town in Texas.
Seven years earlier in 1973, Texas women won a war waged against them since 1857 – a total of 116 years. Roe v. Wade – a case born in Texas – became the law of the land establishing reproductive freedom for all women in the U.S. The door to a world of possibilities and promise was flung wide open. For the women in Texas – especially in Austin – reproductive freedom allowed a greater pathway to educational and professional opportunities. And for the 50 years, it was the best of times…until it wasn’t.
The Past is Prologue
The history of Texas’ two-stepping with abortion rights is revealed in this excerpt from an excellent article by Eleanor Klibanoff, the women’s health reporter for the Texas Tribune.
When Mollie Smith learned she was pregnant by her former school teacher, the 20-year-old was “mentally depressed and despondent.” She asked the man who impregnated her to help her seek an abortion.
It was 1897. Options were limited in the rural region of Texas where she lived, along the Red River that would, two decades later, come to form the Oklahoma state line. So Smith’s former teacher got a blacksmith to make a “metallic instrument,” which he used to open her vagina to allow him to insert a 7-inch metal rod inside of her womb.
“She stated that this operation gave her pain, and that for a short time she felt sick and faint, but it soon passed off,” according to court records. Smith also drank a compound of cotton root and oil of rue, and a month later, delivered a stillborn fetus.
At the time, Texas was under a near-total abortion ban that outlawed performing or “furnishing the means for” an abortion, except to save the life of the pregnant patient, punishable by up to five years in the penitentiary.
The law had been on the books for as long as Texas had books, dating back to the creation of the state’s penal code in 1857. It remained in effect, largely unchanged but only intermittently enforced, for the next 116 years until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973.
Today, Texas women are living in a twisted version of that same world from a past thought long gone. Maternal mortality in Texas has risen 56% since the ban against abortion went into effect. Accompanied by unclear directives as to when an abortion to save a women’s life may be allowed, women are left to wait until they are at death’s door. The plight of Mollie and these modern women is a distinction without a difference. And things recently got worse.
On Monday, (Oct. 7th) the Supreme Court let stand a ruling that emergency abortions violate the Lone Star State’s already draconian abortion laws, upholding a ban on the life-saving procedure even in emergency circumstances.
Across Texas, “healthcare deserts” are massive and growing. Clinics that provided abortions along with other crucial healthcare services have closed. Thus, affordable and easy access to other healthcare services critical to women – mammograms, pap smears, screening for sexually transmitted disease – are disappearing. Doctors, especially ob-gyns, are leaving the state to practice medicine in a way that honors their Hippocratic oath to “do no harm”. For many, the inability to provide necessary and life-saving reproductive care without threats of losing their medical license, staggering fines and potential imprisonment is untenable.
Today, a woman in Austin seeking an abortion will discover the closest abortion provider is in Pittsburgh, Kansas – a 7 ½ hours’ drive. Two other clinics clock in at 8 ½ hours to 9 hours away. No direct flights from Austin are available. A woman experiencing a reproductive medical emergency is in dire straits. The costs emotionally, physically, and economically are beyond the pale.
Be forewarned that more reproductive freedoms are at risk. This term a major case U.S. v. Skrmetti is on the U.S. Supreme Court docket.
How this case is decided will go beyond affecting solely the rights of transgender children. The stage is being set to dismantle other “super precedent” rulings protecting the right to birth control for married and unmarried couples along with law legalizing same sex-marriage. Count on new cases coming before the Supreme as laid out in Project 2025. Trump handed MAGA a Supreme court majority along with their Dobbs decision as a gift for MAGA’s support in 2016. If elected president again, a national ban on abortion, birth control and IVF will be his next. There will be no “sanctuary” states left.
What do we do? We VOTE and VOTE BLUE UP AND DOWN THE BALLOT IN FEDERAL, STATE AND LOCAL races. To Democratic men out there, share this story with other men. Ask them is this the future they wish upon the women they love, the daughters they adore? Texas women fought for 116 years to win this battle for reproductive freedom. Let’s join them once again. For as Kamala says, “When we fight – WE WIN!”
Susan M. Cashin has been a permanent resident of South Africa since 2009, Susan is a freelance journalist from Austin, Texas and a certified sommelier. A feminist foodie, she has written for Austin Woman Magazine and Edible Austin along with other regional publications – covering everything from personal profiles to politics to finding a great Pinot Noir. As a past Democratic precinct block captain for 15 years in Austin, she is a get-out-the-vote gal!
Democrats Abroad South Africa is a Country Committee of Democrats Abroad, the official arm of the Democratic Party representing the millions of US Citizens living outside of the United States. www.democratsabroad.org/za