Before Rick Perry signed the new antichoice bill into law? Well, in what we’ll soon look back at as the good old days, McAllen, Texas, a border town, has a women’s health clinic offering safe, accessible, cheerful, and often free treatment for women. That will now be lost.
In a tour of the Whole Woman’s Health clinic here, Ms. Ferrigno noted some of the design and equipment requirements in the new law that would force the clinic to shut down. The clinic, part of a chain in Texas and other states, performs about 1,900 abortions a year using doctors that fly in from other states.
The clinic, like most in Texas, performs abortions only through the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, using medications or a suction method that takes 10 to 15 minutes and involves no incisions. The center uses donations to offer subsidies to many women, Ms. Ferrigno said.
The suite does not have the wide hallways required of a surgery center to facilitate the movement of stretchers in an emergency. In nine years and thousands of abortions, she said, the McAllen clinic has sent only two patients to the hospital, both for readily-treated bleeding.
With plush recliners, a Georgia O’Keeffe flower print on the wall and herbal tea, the center’s recovery room resembles a small first-class lounge.
Ambulatory surgery centers, in contrast, must have large, hospital-style recovery rooms, with medical equipment on the walls. Patients must rest on gurneys, separated by ceiling-mounted curtains. The herbal tea would not be allowed.
To enter the McAllen clinic, women must cross a gantlet of protesters. Florine deLeon, 72, was out front last week with her husband, both of them fingering rosary beads….NYT
But there is another source of immediate help for women. When it comes to inexpensive medical care and dental check-ups, plenty of Texans and Texicans from all parts of the state have known where to go for reasonable (and often very good) medical services of all kinds. While some Americans are used to regarding Mexico as a third world country, actual experience closer to the border turns that upside-down. For years and for many Americans and Mexicans living in the US, medical services in Mexico rival the same services on this side of the border and at much lower cost.
So this New York Times report with the dateline of McCallen, TX, comes as no surprise.
At the Whole Woman’s Health center here, a young woman predicted what others would do if the state’s stringent new abortion bill approved late Friday forces clinics like this one to close: cross the border to Mexico to seek an “abortion pill.” … The woman, who requested that her last name not be used to avoid stigma, was referring to a drug that can induce miscarriages and is openly available in Mexico and covertly at some flea markets in Texas.
In Nuevo Progreso, only yards past the Mexican border, pharmacists respond to requests for a pill to “bring back a woman’s period” by offering the drug, misoprostol, at discount prices: generic at $35 for a box of 28 pills, or the branded Cytotec for $175. …NYT
Of course, doctors will tell you that you shouldn’t used misoprostol without supervision. But Americans are used to over-the-counter meds about which doctors say the same thing — as well as some handy stuff like Tylenol that really can do serious harm when over-used. So those warnings fall on deaf ears. We are casual with drugs. So what’sa big deal with Cytotec?