This week’s closure of two more Texas abortion clinics in the wake of the state’s strict new regulations means women from rural areas seeking to end pregnancies face journeys of hundreds of miles to the nearest facility.

Workers and activists held a candlelit vigil on Thursday night outside the Whole Woman’s Health clinic in McAllen to mark the closure. The shutdown means that people in the Rio Grande Valley, an area on the Mexican border with about 1.3 million inhabitants, will face logistical and financial challenges to undergo legal abortion procedures.

The valley’s metropolitan areas are often cited as among the poorest in the country. The nearest abortion clinic that meets the new required standards is in San Antonio, 240 miles away. While abortion is largely illegal across the nearby Mexican border, black-market drugs are widely available, leading to fears that women could put their heath at risk by crossing the frontier and attempting to terminate their pregnancies using unapproved and unsupervised methods.

The McAllen facility stopped providing abortions last year after doctors were unable to obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals – a new state requirement – but remained open to provide other services. However, management decided that the restrictions meant it was no longer feasible to continue operating.

The other clinic was in Beaumont, a city of about 120,000 people near the Louisiana border that is a 90-minute drive from Houston.

Amy Hagstrom Miller, the chief executive of Whole Woman’s Health, said: “Families from the Rio Grande Valley and northern Mexico, to east Texas and western Louisiana, have been turning to our clinics for safe, compassionate care since abortion was made legal in 1973. We have done everything possible to keep our clinics open but we are simply unable to survive with the new, medically unnecessary guidelines required.”

Her statement added: “The consequence of [the bill] is an injustice, plain and simple. It is an injustice to the women we serve and to our communities.”

Paula Saldana, a women’s health care educator in McAllen, told the Associated Press that the closure will have a drastic effect on impoverished women. “When women come up to me and they are in desperate circumstances and they ask where they can go, I will not have a place to send them,” she said.

Joe Pojman, executive director of Texas Alliance for Life, said he welcomed the clinics’ closure.

“Requiring a doctor at an abortion facility to have admitting privileges at a local hospital is common sense,” he said. “In the event of a serious complication from an abortion, the physician should be able to follow the patient to the emergency room to continue caring for his or her patient.”

Texas passed a law in 2011 requiring a doctor to conduct a sonogram at least 24 hours before an abortion and describe the images to the woman. Doctors are also obliged to offer the woman the chance to look at an image of the fetus and hear its heartbeat. Legislators at the time also made heavy cuts to state funding for family planning.

Much of the funding was restored in 2013 but another bill was passed that introduced new abortion restrictions and prompted public protests in and around the Texas capitol building in Austin. Wendy Davis, a Democratic state senator from Fort Worth and now a candidate for governor, drew national attention for her filibuster against the bill.

Her efforts provoked chaotic scenes which temporarily frustrated the bill’s passage. The Republican-dominated legislature passed the measures after governor Rick Perry convened a special session.

Among the requirements, all doctors performing abortions must have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles, and abortions must take place in a facility that meets the standards of an ambulatory surgical centre. Almost all abortions after 20 weeks were banned – a reduction of four weeks on the previous limit.

Proponents of the new rules argue that they impose higher standards which safeguard women’s health. Opponents claim they are unnecessary and risk having the opposite effect by causing more women to seek illegal abortions, as well as violating a constitutional right.Texas’s abortion-related death rate between 2000 and 2010 was 0.57 deaths per 100,000 procedures – slightly lower than the national death rate – according to the Texas Tribune.



The number of abortion clinics in Texas has almost halved in the past three years and now stands at 24, according to the Tribune. Nineteen of the closures have come since the new regulations were passed last summer. Texas is the second most populous state in the US, with over 26 million inhabitants.

More clinics are expected to close in September, when the section of the law that requires procedures to take place in facilities with the standards of surgical centres will take effect.

Abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood have challenged the law in court. Lee Yeakel, a district judge in Austin, ruled last year that the admitting-privileges requirement is “without a rational basis and places a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a non-viable fetus.”



However, another court ruling meant Texas could enforce the law while it appealed. The case is being considered by a federal appeals court. Several Republican politicians running for high-level positions in last Tuesday’s Texas primary election cited their staunch opposition to abortion as part of their campaigns. The four candidates for lieutenant governor said that abortion should not be allowed even in cases of rape or incest.