Another Woman Dead Thanks to the Anti-Abortion Movement

A perfect storm of "pro-life" politics stole a Texas woman's life.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

If you read just one thing today, make it this piece in the New Yorker about Yeniifer “Yeni” Alvarez-Estrada Glick, who died while pregnant a few months after Texas passed its strict abortion ban — and just weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed the Texas ban to stand.

If she had terminated her pregnancy, Yeni would almost certainly be alive. But no one gave Yeni, who had serious, life-threatening complications from very early on, the option of abortion.

The whole piece really is worth a read, because it makes clear that Yeni’s death wasn’t just from Texas’s abortion ban, although her death certainly was in par from Texas’s abortion ban. But it was also from Catholic healthcare. It was also from the particular kind of poverty that so many “pro-life” states throw women and children into, and that “pro-life” leaders on a national level help to maintain country-wide. It was also from the lack of health care access that “pro-life” states have guaranteed for their poor residents, and the poor health outcomes that result.

Yeni grew up in a struggling, loving immigrant family, had big dreams, got married, planned to move abroad with her husband, got pregnant and stayed in Texas for what was supposed to be the short term. She had a lot working against her from the beginning. She lived in a town that, like so much of Texas, was a healthcare desert, and a maternity care desert in particular: It had a single hospital, a Catholic one, with no maternity ward and no OB/GYN. The ER has four beds and one doctor.

This is not unusual in “pro-life” America. Even before Roe was overturned, healthcare shortages were plaguing the nation. But with abortion criminalized and doctors who care for pregnant women realizing that they may have to choose between letting a patient die or going to prison, a lot of obstetricians in red states are retiring early or leaving entirely — leaving vast maternity care deserts behind them. Medical students who want to practice obstetrics and gynecology are avoiding red states, as they cannot get the training they need to meet the requirements of their profession in states that ban abortion. In turn, “pro-life” states are looking at a landscape in which births are up, but there aren’t enough doctors to care for all of these pregnant women and new mothers — and there will be even fewer healthcare options in the future.

From the New Yorker:

What conservative lawmakers hailed as the saving of infant lives, medical professionals I interviewed in rural Texas saw as a beleaguering challenge. According to state data, even before S.B. 8 half the counties in Texas were unequipped to treat pregnant women, lacking a single specialist in women’s health, such as an ob-gyn or a certified midwife. Multiple doctors told me that the overturning of Roe v. Wade, in June of 2022, exacerbated the crisis, as practitioners retired early or moved to states where they’d have more liberty to make medical judgments. So who, exactly, was supposed to handle the extra deliveries in women’s-health deserts such as Caldwell County? What would become of women in remote locales who experienced a hemorrhage or a ruptured fallopian tube?