Texas Women Are Inducing Their Own Abortions [View all]

OLGA KHAZAN

“I didn’t have any money to go to San Antonio or Corpus [Christi]. I didn’t even have any money to get across town ... I was just dirt broke.”

That was the response given by a 24-year-old woman in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley when asked by researchers why she had attempted to terminate her pregnancy on her own, without medical help.

Between 100,000 and 240,000 Texas women between the ages of 18 and 49 have tried to end a pregnancy by themselves, according to a pair of surveys released Tuesday by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, a University of Texas-based effort aimed at determining the impact of the state’s reproductive policies.

The figure was found by asking an online, representative sample of 779 women whether they themselves or whether their best friends had ever tried to self-induce an abortion. Of the Texas women surveyed, 1.7 percent said they had performed an abortion on themselves, but 4.1 percent of them said their best friend had or they suspected she had.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/texas-self-abort/416229/?utm_source=SFFB