DALLAS -- Nearly 50 years have passed since Jane Roe sued then-Dallas County Distrct Attorney Henry Wade for the right to have an abortion in Texas, forever making Dallas ground zero in the country’s ongoing fight about reproductive rights.
Since the Supreme Court’s ruling last month to reverse that constitutional protection, protests erupted across the country, especially in Texas, one of 12 states with laws that nearly ban abortions. Demonstrations contine in and around Dallas.
Last Wednesday, a few hundred demonstrators gathered at Dallas City Hall around lunchtime for a protest and impromptu march. The Dallas Morning News asked individuals in the crowd why they attended, and how Roe v. Wade has impacted their lives, families and futures.
Bethany Miller
Bethany Miller, 22, said she was raped in 2019 and would have “automatically” chosen to have an abortion, had she been pregnant.
“It was a relief to know I had that choice in the midst of something already so traumatic,” Miller said.
Later that year, Miller was rushed to the hospital with her body entering sepsis, a serious condition that can result from infection. It was an ectopic pregnancy, meaning the fertilized egg was not in the right place in the uterus and cannot be saved, a condition that could be fatal to the mother. After taking Nexplanon, a form of birth control, for three years, she had no idea such a pregnancy was even possible.
“I had that removed,” she said. “If I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be here today.”
Miller underwent a D&C, or dilation and curettage, a procedure to remove tissue from inside the uterus. She said she doesn’t consider that an abortion, but rather a life saving procedure, “the same as any other emergency surgery.”
“I even asked my husband, I said, ‘If I was pregnant again, and it was something like that, would you understand if I had an abortion? Would you get it?’ And he said ‘Absolutely, I would choose you,’” she recalled. “Because at that point, it’s not a fetus. It doesn’t have a heartbeat. It’s trying to kill you.”
The D&C cost about $1,400. After having her son about six months ago, Miller said she recently decided to get back on birth control, which now costs $350 for a single month.
“Thankfully, I can afford it, but for someone who is low income, who doesn’t have insurance, it could be impossible,” she said. “Thank God I didn’t have a daughter. Thank God.”
Jessica Zavas
Jessica Zavas, 34, said she was upset by counter-protesters Wednesday because she heard similar messages when she had a medically-necessary abortion.
“When I was going into the clinic, I was devastated,” Zavas said. “I didn’t want to have to do it.”
Outside the clinic, Zavas said she was told she was “going to hell” by protesters who hurled insults at her over a procedure that didn’t feel like a choice to her.t didn’t feel like a choice for hersomething she didn’t have a choice in.
“We can’t continue to let a few people tell us how we’re living our lives, tell us what to do with our bodies, tell us how to raise our children and all the women around us,” Zavas said. “It makes no sense at all.”
Shailey Epps
Shailey Epps, 24, attended the rally with her dog Zevi and held a sign that said “I don’t regret my abortion.” Zevi wore a sign that said “Good Boys Aren’t Sexist”
Epps said she had an abortion earlier this year.
“I’m so thankful that I did,” she said. “The guy I was with wasn’t going to be supportive at all … . And financially, the child wouldn’t have had the life that I wanted it to have. So I chose what I chose.”
Since the Supreme Court ruling, Epps said she has felt anger, fear, and sadness, especially for pregnant women who will experience medical, life threatening emergencies because of the pregnancy and might not be able to recieve an abortion.
Epps is frustrated about the lack of options women have over their reproductive health, and said she is not on birth control since many options for women are hormonal and have negative side effects.
“We have so many risks involved,” she said. “And it doesn’t seem like [men] are facing anything.”
Kyjana Jordan
Kyjana Jordan, 19, said she broke down crying when he heard about the ruling.
“It hurts to know I live in a country where I have fewer rights than guns” and gun owners have, Jordan said. “So I just feel like I have to be here, and I have to do something. I can’t just sit at home, I want to be a part of the change.”
Jordan said after a relative suffered an ectopic pregnancy, the human cost of outlawing abortions “became all too real.”
“If she didn’t have that abortion, she wouldn’t be here,” she said. “If she would have had that happen today … what could have happened? Because at that point, do you not do the (procedure) because of the bill? Or do you keep doing it to save her life?”
While Texas’ trigger law has narrow exceptions only to save the life of a pregnant patient or prevent “substantial impairment of major bodily function,” Jordan said she’s concerned about who will be authorized to make that distinction.
Jordan said she remains “cautiously optimistic” Roe v. Wade will one day be reinstated.
“It probably won’t happen right away because things like that never do,” Jordan said. “But I just hope people out in the world can see how hard we’re fighting, and will join the fight with us to make that change happen just a little bit faster.”
Alpha Thomas
Alpha Thomas, 64, says she attended the protest to represent Black women and women of color who could not be there. She said challenges to reproductive justice aren’t new, and there is a history of Black women being involuntary sterilized and raped.
“I know plenty of Black women who have had abortions and what-have-you, for various reasons,” Thomas said. “They won’t show up here because of shame, embarrassment and humiliation. I’m here to represent those women. I’m here to be their voice.”
Thomas said she is a public health educator and activist who, after graduating college, returned to the Fair Park area.
“I’m very angry with what has happened regarding Roe v. Wade, and I just want to do whatever I can as a decent human being who loves, honors and respects humanity to make a difference.”
Andrea Huseman, Andrew Ballenger and their daughter Emma Ballenger
Andrea Huseman, 37, said it was a life-or-death emergency when she had an abortion more than a decade ago. Without the procedure, she wouldn’t be around for her husband, Andrew Ballenger, or her now 4-year-old daughter, Emma Ballenger.
“My burning rage about this being overturned is hotter than the Texas sun, and I could have died if it wasn’t for the ability to have a legal and safe abortion,” Huseman said. “I don’t want that for anybody. My daughter, especially.”
Huseman’s husband, Andrew Ballenger, said if Roe v. Wade was overturned back then, “this little girl wouldn’t be here, and [Huseman] wouldn’t be here either.”
Huseman still remembers getting the call from her doctor’s office. “Hey, you have to go to the hospital right now,” they said.
She wanted to have a child, but she had an ectopic pregnancy.
“If there wasn’t a doctor that felt comfortable to provide me with that, the prognosis is, I die,” Huseman said.
Huseman said she wants more compassion in the conversation about abortion.
“Pregnancy isn’t always a fun, glorious, shining moment,” Huseman said. “It can be hard. It can be traumatic for a lot of women.”
Leigh Honeycutt
Leigh Honeycutt, 62, was emotional as she recounted watching abortion restrictions tighten around the country in recent years. She worries about victims of sexual assault who might become pregant, especially children.
She said for the majority of her life, abortion was legal and “to see our country, our great country go backwards, it’s tragic to me. I feel like the United States is supposed to be a leader.”
Honeycutt and her partner Selena Dodge have considered leaving Texas. “I don’t want to give my tax dollars to a government, in particular this state, that treats women like second-class citizens.”
She and Dodge have even discussed getting married since Justice Clarence Thomas in his opinion suggested the court reconsider gay rights rulings.
“There have been lots of threats or implied threats that LGBTQ rights are next,” she said. “Why is our country going backwards?”
Natalie O’Neill
Originally from Maryland, Natalie O’Neill’s mother was a nurse practitioner in Baltimore in the 1980s. She mostly worked with 13- and 14-year-old Black girls who lived in public housing and had been raped or abused, sometimes by family members.
“She had to deal with children who had no resources and no support in their family and had diseases and pregnancies,” said O’Neill, 63. “They didn’t even know, they were just too young to even understand the whole thing.”
These stories shaped her worldview and pushed her to fight for every woman’s “right to make their own decision.”
Friends online often tell her the Texas abortion law is “no big deal, all they need to do is get in a car and drive to another state.”
But not every person has a car, money for gas or the ability to drive hundreds of miles for such procedures, she said, and abortion will become a “privilege” for those who can afford to travel.
“This is really only going to hurt people who don’t have the means to deal with it,” she said.
Oma Lesley and Valeria Barbosa
Valeria Barbosa, 19, said growing up in a Catholic family, the belief was “abortion is wrong.”
“It was ‘No, you have to do everything because of what I think, because of something that I might believe in, because of something that may or may not exist,’” Barbosa said. “Then I started doing research on my own … and realized it was about so much more than some battle between people; it became this incredible thing that I’d never realized so many people had been taken from them.”
Oma Lesley, 17, who came to Wednesday’s protest with Barbosa, said showing up felt like the only way to be heard as a young person in the United States.
“There’s nothing leading up to this that I had a say over,” Lesley said. “I didn’t vote for the president who elected the Supreme Court justices — they’re making these decisions for us, and we have no say in them.”
Barbosa said a friend’s mother had an abortion when she became pregnant at a time she knew she couldn’t afford to take care of a child. She went on to have three children “when the time was right for her,” Barbosa added, “and they’re all wonderful people I know.”
A relative of Lesley has a condition that caused the lining of her uterus to be too thin to support a pregnancy, so the option to have an abortion “is critical,” Lesley said, because the woman could die.
“People get abortions because they need them, because a baby isn’t viable, because they’re not in the right place to care for a baby, because of rape,” Lesley said. “It’s a health thing. It’s always been a health thing. It’ll always be a health thing.”
