As Abortion Clinics Close, Student Creates Travel Fund
Lenzi Sheible is well versed on Texas' divisive abortion debate. The 20-year-old student at the University of Texas at Austin made the three-hour drive from Houston to Austin multiple times last summer to protest House Bill 2, the strict abortion regulations Republican lawmakers proposed and later passed.
Not long after they banned the procedure after 20 weeks of gestation and required physicians who perform abortions to have hospital-admitting privileges within 30 miles of an abortion facility — a measure that has reduced access to abortion statewide — Sheible founded Fund Texas Women, a nonprofit organization that pays travel expenses to help Texas women get abortions in and outside of the state.
“I fought, and I got caught up in the spirit of fighting, but I realized that while everyone was interested in fighting HB 2 so that it didn’t pass, not a lot of people were prepared to accept the fact that it would,” said Sheible, who is seven months pregnant. “And that once it did it would be a totally different world in Texas.”
When the hospital-admitting privileges rule took effect in November, an effort, Republican lawmakers said, to make the procedure safer for Texas women, a dozen abortion providers — a third of those operating in Texas — were forced to discontinue abortion services. That left some women hundreds of miles away from the nearest provider. On Nov. 8, Fund Texas Women launched a volunteer-run hotline that women could call seeking financial assistance to travel to an abortion clinic elsewhere in Texas or the nation.
Since then, Fund Texas Women and its donors have paid for plane and bus tickets, hotel accommodations and other expenses totaling about $10,000 to help 35 women receive abortions, including trips to New Mexico and Colorado for those past the 20-week mark.
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http://www.texastribune.org/2014/03/12/abortion-clinics-close-advocates-fund-farther-trav/
Good on her!
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