Anti-Abortion Lawmakers Are Death Panels for Women

Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick grew up in Luling, Texas, a rural town about an hour’s drive south of Austin. By the age of 26 she had developed health conditions familiar to the poor: hypertension, diabetes, and swelling of the heart. She also lacked the health insurance she needed for preventative care. When she became pregnant in 2021, she was high risk by default.

The local hospital, as The New Yorker recently reported, was ill-equipped to treat pregnant people in crisis. There was no OB/GYN, and the women in her family routinely traveled 30 miles away or further for care. It had one baby-warming crib, and that was missing a wheel, “A nurse had to prop it up with her feet to prevent the newborn from falling out while the doctor received obstetrics counsel over the phone from a specialist in Austin.” An employee told the magazine: “Anything that fails in society, anything that’s broken, ends up being the emergency room’s problem.”

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