As mandated by Texas law, women have to wait at least twenty-four hours after receiving paperwork and a sonogram that confirms their pregnancies. Only four weeks along, she, like the vast majority of the morning’s patients, was coming for her second of two visits. The woman, dressed in black pants and a gray hoodie, was assigned a patient number to protect her privacy. “Let me see your I.D., mija,” Ivy said to the first woman to reach the light-filled lobby, where a large fish tank was murmuring away. Friday, patients began arriving at eight o’clock, having negotiated picketers who were working the parking lot. Wade was imminent and the procedure could be banned at any time, Ivy would warn the pregnant women who approached the front desk, after the perfunctory good mornings. Now every greeting had to come with a disclaimer.Ī ruling on Roe v. Only Ivy’s message to her patients had changed. Tucking her graying, hip-length hair into a bun and covering it with a black surgical cap, she sterilized all the syringes, counted the curettes one by one, and waited for her colleagues to trickle in. ![]() But neither the likely end of a woman’s right to an abortion, nor Texas’s existing onerous regulations against it, had altered her brisk morning habits. Wade, Ivy, who is fifty-six and asked to be identified only by a nickname, went to work each day knowing that it might be her last. ![]() Since May, when the draft of a Supreme Court decision leaked, revealing its conservative majority’s intention to overturn Roe v. At seven o’clock on Friday morning, Ivy turned on the lights of the Houston Women’s Clinic, the largest abortion provider in the state, where she has worked as a supervisor for nearly two decades.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |