Subscribe to The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers abreast of Texas ’most essential news.
SAN ANTONIO – On Friday morning, a nurse from the Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services in San Antonio took a patient to an examination room. He handed her a dressing gown, told her the doctor would come in soon, and left the room for a changed world.
“I saw the other nurses standing in the hallway,” said Jenny, a nurse who has been at the clinic for five years and asked to be identified only by her name for fear of being the target of anti-abortion protesters. “And I just knew it.”
In the few minutes he had been inside the examination room, the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, paving the way for Texas to completely ban the procedure for which he had just prepared a patient.
Jenny and four other staff members were in the hallway, paralyzed. They had a dozen patients sitting in the lobby waiting for abortions, all seemingly unaware of the seismic change that had just shaken the world of reproductive health.
Before they could decide how to proceed, the clinic door slammed open and a young woman ran in, shouting about Roe v. Wade and saving babies. They did not recognize her, but believed she was associated with anti-abortion protesters who often concentrated outside the clinic.
The woman quickly fled, leaving the clinic staff alone with a dozen pairs of eyes staring at them from the waiting room chairs.
“Obviously, it wasn’t like we wanted him to come out,” Jenny said.
As other nurses headed for the elephant in the waiting room, Jenny returned with the patient she had just left.
A patient returns to an appointment on Friday to make sure her abortion treatment was successful. The clinic still offers follow-up appointments to people who have recently had an abortion, some of the last patients the clinic can see. Credit: Kaylee Greenlee Beal for The Texas Tribune
“I just said,‘ You have to get dressed and go back to the lobby, ’” he said. “I told him, ‘The doctor will tell you more … but today we can’t even get you a consultation.’
The legal status of abortion in Texas was murky immediately after Friday’s ruling. The state has an “active law” that automatically prohibits abortion 30 days after sentencing certification, a process that could take a month or more.
But in a notice issued Friday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said abortion providers could be held criminally liable immediately because the state never repealed abortion bans that were in the books before decided Roe v. Wade in 1973.
Instead of risking criminal charges, Texas clinics stopped performing abortions on Friday.
Andrea Gallegos, executive director of Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services, said she hopes the clinic’s lawyers can find a way to allow her to resume abortions shortly before the trigger’s ban goes into effect.
But either way, abortion will soon be banned in the country’s second-largest state. Clinics will close. Staff will move or find new jobs. And the people they would have served melt into the shadows, fleeing across state borders, seeking illegal abortions, or silently indulging in decades of raising children they never wanted.
Bringing the bad news
Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services staff is no stranger to bad news. For years, they have had to navigate increasingly harsh restrictions that force them to delay care or keep patients away.
But they had never had to give so much bad news in such a short period of time. Dr. Alan Braid, the clinic’s owner, told the women in the waiting room — and those who had already been admitted to the examination rooms — that they should stop all abortions immediately.
Some got up and left. One woman got angry and angrily demanded that Braid continue the abortion anyway. He had driven hours to get to that appointment after his Oklahoma home state banned all abortions.
“I understand why she’s upset and has every right to be upset, but here we are not the enemy,” Gallegos said. “All we could tell him was that it wasn’t our fault, it was the Supreme Court’s fault.”
A woman was on her fourth visit to the clinic. She had been too early in the pregnancy for an abortion during the first two appointments, but finally, yesterday, staff were able to detect a pregnancy on ultrasound. But Texas requires clinics to wait 24 hours after an ultrasound to have an abortion, so they sent her home.
He arrived at the clinic on Friday morning, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled. When the staff told her the news, she was heartbroken: swaying back and forth, crying, asking the staff to help her.
“I told her you did everything right and we did everything we could, but unfortunately today we have our hands tied,” said clinic director Kristina Hernandez.
Executive Director Andrea Gallegos speaks with some of her employees at Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services in San Antonio after the Supreme Court on Friday overturned Roe v. Credit: Kaylee Greenlee Beal for The Texas Tribune
Gallegos said it is devastating to know how easily they could have helped this patient.
“Sometimes it’s just a matter of giving a pill to someone and for surgery [abortion]”It’s less than five minutes,” he said. “It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s safe, it’s done. It’s health care.”
Instead, they had to expel her.
After clearing the waiting room, staff headed to the stack of two dozen appointments scheduled for the rest of the day. They handed out the files, took a deep breath and started scoring.
They explained over and over again: No, you can’t have an abortion here anymore. No, it cannot be reprogrammed. No, you can’t go to another clinic in Texas, not even Oklahoma, or many other states. No, it doesn’t matter if you’re less than six weeks old. No, not even if you walk in right now. No, this is not our fault. No, no, no, no.
They offered a list of out-of-state clinics and groups that help fund abortions and trips they made when Texas banned abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy. They spent most of the day listening to busy signals and voicemails from New Mexico clinics, where abortion will continue to be legal.
They make that effort because they can do little else. But they are well aware that many of their patients struggle to find kangaroos for the duration of their appointments, let alone to travel out of state to have an abortion.
And even if they can find kangaroos and have free time from work and get out of the state safely, Friday’s ruling will only make it harder for low-income jeans to access resources to pay for those trips. Texas abortion funds have stopped paying for out-of-state travel and abortions until they can better assess the legal implications of their work.
Fear for the future
As the morning pandemonium subsided, something much worse settled into the clinic: silence. Staff sat around the check-in desk, archiving documentation and tidying up. Someone ordered pizza.
They listened to televised press conferences, hoping to gather information about their own destiny. They talked about where the fight could go from here and some of the biggest battles they have had to fight over the years. They talked about what this meant for their daughters and the patients they had treated over the years and those they would probably never get a chance to see.
Many of the staff members have been working for the clinic for years. Hernández was there with Braid when this place opened in 2015.
“That’s what I’m good at. That’s what I want to keep doing,” says Kristina Hernandez. Credit: Kaylee Greenlee Beal for The Texas Tribune
“This is my baby,” she said. “That’s my life, right? That’s what I’m good at. That’s what I want to keep doing. I can’t do anything else. I mean, I can, but I don’t want to.”
When Hernandez thinks of all the patients he has been able to help over the years, it is overwhelming. She has had women approach her at HEB, years after she helped with her abortions, and give her hugs before disappearing into the hallways.
On days like this, he thinks a lot about a young woman with whom he spent three hours having a theological discussion before the woman finally decided to have an abortion, and her own sister, who decided not to.
The clinic plans …