At least 100 Texas children aged 17 and younger got abortions in other states during the first year after Texas banned the procedure, including six aged 11 and under, according to the latest state data available.
The total is a nearly ninefold jump in the number of children getting out-of-state abortions from five years earlier and comes as virtually all abortions have ground to a halt in Texas under a ban that makes no exception for fetal abnormality, rape, or incest. Texas’ age of consent, when a person may legally consent to engage in sexual activity, is 17.
The figures underscore the effect of blocking the procedure for one of the state’s most vulnerable populations. Children typically see more complications during pregnancy than adult women, doctors said, including high risks of premature delivery or preeclampsia, a serious condition that causes high blood pressure.
“These are not just statistics,” said state Rep. Mihaela Plesa, a North Texas Democrat, in an interview Wednesday, the 50th anniversary of the now-overturned Roe v. Wade case that had previously established a federal constitutional right to abortion.
“These are real stories about people who are having these traumatic experiences. It’s happened right here in my district in Plano. This isn’t happening just in low socioeconomic areas or certain districts. This is happening all over our state.”
The rise in out-of-state abortions comes as the overall number of Texas minors accessing the procedure has plummeted.
In the years before the abortion ban took effect in August 2022, between 1,000 and 1,400 Texas minors received abortions in the state annually. There were none in 2023, data from Texas’ Health and Human Services department shows. At least 105 Texas children got an abortion out of state in 2023, the majority of them between the ages of 16 and 17.
The annual data, which was released this fall, is likely an undercount. Texas receives information about out-of-state abortions from a national data exchange called the State and Territorial Exchange of Vital Events, or STEVE, but an HHS spokesperson said not every state provides data on abortions.
The out-of-state data also only covers the first half of 2023. HHS officials did not respond to questions from Hearst Newspapers about why the rest of the data is missing or when it may be published. Data on out-of-state abortions from 2024 have not yet been released.
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Teenage pregnancies typically see more complications than those of women, said Dr. Tracey Wilkinson, an associate professor of pediatrics and affiliate professor of obstetric and gynecology at Indiana University.
Their future fertility could also be affected by complications, she added, noting that in a situation where a patient is hemorrhaging, the doctor sometimes has to remove their reproductive organs to save their life.
“While their body has the capacity to be pregnant, their ability to carry that pregnancy to term without having bodily harm happen to them during the pregnancy or the delivery is much lower,” Wilkinson said. “Just because puberty has occurred doesn’t mean their body is capable of carrying a pregnancy to term.”
“Think about the trauma of delivering a child when you are a child,” she said. “Their brains are still developing. Their bodies are still developing. This is a huge deal.”
There’s more, including some truly awful statements by one of the main forced-birth ghouls, so read the rest. I don’t really have a point to make here. The facts speak for themselves. The main purpose of our state’s abortion ban is to make life worse for a lot of people. It’s working splendidly.