Opinion | Texas Is Trying to End Roe v. Wade All by Itself

On the other hand, more than 1.7 million female Texans live in what one nonprofit calls “contraceptive deserts,” where simply finding a range of options is, at the very minimum, difficult. A pregnant woman who lives in the region around Big Bend National Park in West Texas, for instance, has access to one hospital (and seven doctors) in a patch of land that takes up more than 12,000 square miles.

Just to make things as difficult as possible for the women who don’t have lots of frequent-flier miles, Texas has also barred Planned Parenthood — one of the leading providers of contraceptives in the state — from getting funding through Medicaid.

“That’s making it harder for the most low-income folks,” said Dr. Bhavik Kumar, a physician at the Planned Parenthood Center for Choice in Houston. He spent the first day of September telling patients who came in search of an abortion that anything past week 6 didn’t qualify. “They could have yesterday, but they couldn’t now,” he explained.

We will pause here to note that the vast majority of women who obtain abortions in Texas are past that new six-week deadline. And from now on, they have three choices: continue an unwanted pregnancy, get out of their very large state or go somewhere illegal and very possibly dangerous.

The best option, of course, is to avoid the pregnancy entirely. How many of you would be shocked to hear that many Texas schools are terrible at sex education?

“Texas has an abstinence-plus curriculum at best,” said Dr. Kumar. It reminded me of a brief foray I took through the Texas system about a decade ago. One of the more popular sex education textbooks listed “8 Steps to Protect Yourself from STDs,” none of which involved using a condom. Instead, one was, “Get plenty of rest.”

Texas, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, is one of the fastest-growing states in the Union and a power center of increasing political wattage. It also has one of the highest rates of residents without health insurance in the country, including about a quarter of the women of childbearing age.