Abortion after Dobbs

I'm going to start with the parking lot, because that's where the policy actually lives. Not in the Dobbs opinion I printed double-sided and highlighter-murdered like a first-year, not in the group chat where my cousins in Las Cruces keep sending screenshots of appointment portals that crash. The parking lot on Alameda. There's a chain on the gate now. Somebody tied a faded recuerdame ribbon to it last winter and it bleached out by May.

I escort at a clinic that is still open, barely, on the New Mexico side, which means I spend a lot of Saturdays watching Texas plates pull in like they're late to a funeral. Women who left El Paso at 5 a.m. with a gas-station coffee and a story about a "checkup" if anyone in the car asked. I am not a lawyer. I am the person who walks you from the lot to the door and talks about the weather so you don't have to fill the air with the thing you're about to do.

Dobbs did not invent the drive. We already had women coming from Juárez, from small towns with one OB who also does football physicals. What it did was make the drive the main event. My aunt said, after the decision, that at least now the states decide, which is the kind of sentence that sounds clean until you live in a state that decided you can look at a parking lot.

I know the other argument. I have sat with it. If you believe a fetus is a child, then a clinic is not a clinic, it's a place that ends a life, and no amount of my parking-lot poetry is going to move that. My neighbor Mrs. Galvan believes that. She brought me tamales after my dad's surgery and she also stands on the sidewalk with a rosary. I do not think she is a monster. I think she is wrong about the law, and I think she is more honest than the men in Austin who talk about "life" and then vote against the Medicaid expansion that would keep actual born babies in the NICU.

That last sentence is the one that gets me uninvited from certain family group chats. Fine.

What I cannot stand is the federalism shrug. Oh, just move. Oh, just vote locally. I work two jobs. The 915 is not a lifestyle brand. When the San Antonio clinic calendar filled up, people here didn't become more virtuous. They became later. Later pregnancies, later money, later everything. I had a woman last fall who thought she was eight weeks and she was fourteen because she had been calling numbers that rang into voicemail. I am not going to pretend that was empowerment.

People who have never been inside a waiting room love to talk about "rare cases." Ectopic. Rape. The twelve-year-old. Those cases are not hypothetical in a border city with a huge young population and a lot of silence around sex. I have handed tissues to a girl who still had braces. I have also handed tissues to a 39-year-old with two kids and a husband who would have been kind about a third and she still didn't want a third. Both of those people used the same door. The law that treats them as one morality play is a law written by people who don't do doors.

I used to think the Supreme Court was this marble adult in the room. Then they handed the country a 1973 fight and told us to have it at the county level, which is cute if your county has an airport and a hospital system. Hudspeth County is not going to host a thoughtful symposium. Hudspeth County is going to have a sheriff and a rumor.

Do I think some abortions are tragic. Yes. I have watched people cry in a way that is not "choice" as a slogan. I have also watched people look relieved, which is an emotion Americans only allow men after a medical procedure. Relief is not cruelty. Relief is what a body does when a future you cannot afford stops sitting on your chest.

There's a Whataburger on Airway where we used to debrief because the clinic coffee is an insult. One of the other escorts, Rosa, said something I keep turning over: they didn't ban abortion, they banned the poor version of it. Money still finds a way. Money always finds a plane to California. The rest of us find a Civic with 180,000 miles and a cooler in the back because the wait at the new place is long and you don't eat when you're nervous.

If you want to argue viability, argue viability. I can have that fight. Viability is not a vibe, it's a neonatal unit, and we do not have spare neonatal units sitting around West Texas. If you want to argue thirteen weeks versus six, say the number and own what six weeks means when your period is already irregular because you work nights at the hospital laundry. Don't hide inside "states' rights" like it's a personality.

I vote. I knock. I am not naive about New Mexico staying a refuge forever. I am also not going to flatter the justices by calling this a return to democracy. Democracy would have been a statute with a date on it, debated, ugly, voted. This was a theory about 1868 dressed up as humility. My cousin in Horizon City asked me, after a town hall that smelled like gym rope, whether knocking even matters if the clinic is already a chain. I said knocking is how you get a legislature that might fund a bus, or at least stop pretending a 90-minute drive is a reasonable accommodation. She looked at me like I was selling something. Maybe I was. I still knocked the next Saturday, in heat that made the flyers curl.

Last Tuesday a woman asked me if I thought she was going to hell. I am Catholic enough that I didn't laugh. I said I thought hell, if it exists, is probably full of people who had more options than she did and used them to make her drive. Then I walked her in. The air conditioning in that building is too cold. It always is. She still sat down.

Call it federalism if it helps you sleep. I call it a chain on a gate and a calendar that doesn't care what you named the doctrine.