Ali Block
speaker
886 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2023
last heard Oct 2023
Ali Block’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Oklahoma was already two months into an essential total ban on abortion, but without Roe, it felt like all hope of maybe climbing out of this pit of restrictions was lost.
Soon after Dobbs, Truss Women pivoted to providing gender affirming care, care for drug users, and general all-around reproductive care.
It was becoming increasingly clear that the United States was being carved into two halves, one that protected the right to abortions, and another that sought to eliminate that right.
Among those who felt this split most acutely were the handful of providers spending time in both Texas and less restricted states.
To learn more, we talked to a provider who had been spending half her time in California and half her time in Texas, close to the border of Mexico.
Because of the precarity of her position, she requested to remain anonymous, so we'll call her Lydia.
Lydia told us that after SB eight, the culture clash between her two medical worlds became sort of intolerable.
One thing she heard a lot was, well, at least Texans can still receive care somewhere else, but she told us it's just not that easy, especially in a state that's home to an estimated 1.8 million undocumented immigrants.
The way SPA was written not only prevented clinics from providing abortion care in Texas, it also made it dangerous for Texas providers to even counsel their patients on the option of getting an abortion elsewhere.
The law was smart, really smart, and intentionally written to bypass the protections that Roe had offered.
Instead of relying on state officials to enforce the ban using civic or criminal penalties, SB8 empowered private citizens to sue any person who provided, aided, or abetted abortion after a fetal heartbeat could be detected.
This meant doctors, nurses, health aides, even potentially taxi drivers bringing a person to get an abortion.
It also meant that the federal court injunctions that usually sprang up against statutes like this couldn't occur.
Okay.
Abortion providers would have to break the law first, then wait for a private citizen to sue them before they could even think about challenging the law's constitutionality.
So what were your options if you were an abortion provider in Texas at the time?
Despite the dangers, one person did actually risk the lawsuits, a physician named doctor Alan Braid, who was close to retirement and performed an abortion for a fetus with cardiac activity.
He published a piece about it in the Washington Post and ended up getting sued by a few people.
But all the lawsuits came from people outside of Texas, so he was never prosecuted.
For most people though, the possibility of a lawsuit just felt too high stakes.
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