Abortion rights advocates protest a possible decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade at the Federal Courthouse in Downtown Las Vegas Tuesday, May 3, 2022.
Saturday, June 4, 2022 | 2 a.m.
When Brenda Rodriguez found out she was pregnant again last year, just a few months after giving birth to her son, she said she felt like the “world had ended.”
She and her partner agreed they were not in the right place financially and mentally for another child.
“I don’t even know if I would be here if I would have been forced to have that child,” said Rodriguez, an organizer with the Las Vegas-based group Battle Born Progress. “I look at my son and I love him. But I just don’t know that I would be here for him and another child. I have to think about my only child. … I think it’s the best choice I ever made in my whole life.”
At a roundtable discussion this week, reproductive rights advocates like Rodriguez shared their stories to destigmatize abortion and speak against the U.S. Supreme Court’s expected decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the court’s landmark 1973 decision that protects a woman’s right to an abortion.
Robin Franklin, a Las Vegas resident who works in child welfare services and is a member of Service Employees International Union, says she sees many girls who are pregnant and cannot take care of a child. In her job, she said, she also comes across many young, low-income women who have four or five children already and can barely take care of them.
“It really is important for them to have access to their own bodily autonomy,” Franklin said.
When Franklin was 21 and in college, she was dating an abusive partner and got pregnant. She chose to have an abortion.
“I imagine what my life would have been, had I had that child, I don’t think I would have graduated from college,” said Franklin, who has a bachelor’s and master’s degree.
Franklin now has a 15-year-old daughter. While a woman’s right to choose is protected in Nevada,said she wonders what could happen to her daughter should she decide in the future to live in another state?
“I don’t want my daughter to have less than I had,” Franklin said. “I don’t want her to have that life. I want her to be able to choose.”
Cassandra Rice, a business owner in Nevada, said she went to college in Oklahoma at age 17 and got pregnant.
“You’re in the college world, and you know, you’re not smart, not as educated as you should be,” Rice said. “At that time in Oklahoma they did have Planned Parenthood, and I was able to delay having a family at that time. I wasn’t ready. It wouldn’t have been good for the child I brought into the world.… That saved my life, I think.”
Last month, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed into law the nation’s strictest abortion ban.
Rice and her husband have since made the decision to have children. They had two biological children, and they also adopted two boys from Uganda.
Rep. Katherine Clark, D-Mass., the assistant speaker of the House, who spoke at the Las Vegas event, said while news of her pregnancy was unexpected years ago, it was wanted. But when she went to her doctor’s appointment, they could not find a heartbeat. Her doctor told her to go home and wait to miscarry. The miscarriage never came, and because of the risk of lethal infection, Clark had to schedule an abortion. Her insurance paid for the procedure.
Donna West, a 65-year-old activist and volunteer chair of the Clark County Democratic Party, recalled what it was like before Roe v. Wade.
“I remember the dark old days. I remember the coat hangers,” West said. “This has been the cause of my life.”
When she was a young teenager, one of her friends got pregnant, and the father was the local pastor’s son, West said. She and her friends scraped together lunch money and allowances and put her friend on a bus to New York, where she went to a back-alley abortionist, West said.
“He put her back on the bus while she was still bleeding,” West said. “Five hours later she got off the bus, and she was still bleeding and (was) white as a ghost.”
When the friend arrived back in town, they had to call an ambulance. Luckily, West said, the friend survived.
“The right wing doesn’t seem to understand that they’re not going to stop abortions,” West said. “All that’s going to happen is that women are going to die again.”
There’s a stigma around abortion that it is scary and hard, said Macy Haverda, president of the Wild West Access Fund, which started in July 2021 to help people access abortions, but that is not the case.
According to The New York Times, about half of the women in the United States who get legal abortions use a two-pill regimen to end their pregnancy. In December, the Food and Drug Administration made access to these so-called medication abortions significantly easier by lifting the requirement that patients obtain the first of the two pills, mifepristone, by visiting an authorized clinic or doctor in person.
Now, patients can have a consultation with a physician via video or phone or by filling out online forms, and then receive the pills by mail.
Abortions, which range between $600 and $2,600, are not covered by many insurance plans.
Abortion is not covered by Medicaid in Nevada, Haverda said. The Wild West Access Fund helps offset as much of the cost as possible for anyone, including non-Nevadans.
“We have to make sure nobody thinks there’s a stigma to abortion,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
Restricting access will disproportionately affect low-income women of color, Timmaraju said, and because they will be forced to undergo economic hardship, it will push women of color further down.
“To force birth, it’s quite hateful,” Timmaraju said.
Franklin, the child welfare services worker, said child mortality will skyrocket if Roe is overturned.
“People. They hurt their kids,” Franklin said. “I see it every day.
“When we’re forcing people to have children, these kids will be in our care and it will weigh on us financially because we, the taxpayers, pay for it,” she added.
Additionally, Franklin said, there are fewer foster parents and there are not enough resources to care for foster children in Clark County.
Americans overwhelmingly support Roe v. Wade, Timmaraju said. A Wall Street Journal poll from this week found that more than two-thirds of Americans want Roe upheld.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, Nevada will be a “sanctuary state” for abortions and the increase in women coming here for an abortion will overburden an already overburdened health care system, said Rep. Susie Lee, D-Nev. The number of abortion providers in Nevada also dropped recently from 13 to 11, Lee said.
“I know it gets frustrating. I know it gets exhausting and I know no one would have imagined that we’d be sitting here defending Roe v. Wade at this point in time,” Lee said.
But it’s not just about Roe v. Wade.
It’s the “beginning of a snowball,” Lee said. She worries next will be restrictions on LGBTQ rights, contraceptives and in vitro fertilizations.
In the draft Supreme Court opinion that was leaked to Politico at the beginning of May, Justice Samuel Alito argues that the abortion rights ruling was a “deeply flawed decision” that invented a right that was not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.
“Justice Alito laid it out,” Clark said. “If you weren’t in the Constitution in 1789, they don’t really see a place for you, and that’s every single one of us around this table. There is no place for us in their vision of constitutional rights.”
