When I spoke with Espey on the phone, she was on theway for Las Cruces, a few kilometers from the state border with Texas, to take care of patients from the Planned Parenthood clinic there. As the demand of patients outside the state increased, she said, the clinics opened throughout the state. “Even in Gallup, which is a much more conservative city, some very courageous suppliers there is now abortion care.” Between 2020 and 2023, the number of abortions carried out in the state has increased by more than two hundred and fifty percent, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates sexual and reproductive health. Most patients came from outside the state, the majority of which are Texans. While Texas has sought to access patient medical records in other states, new-mexic has adopted a shield law that protects this information.
The strong position of the New Mexico on abortion may seem surprising because it is more rural and more religious than a large part of the country. “The New Mexico is the West, not the South,” said McFarlane. “It can be religious, but it is not as evangelical as certain other states.” She also pointed out that more than half of the members of the State Legislative Assembly are women, which makes the State secondly against Nevada in terms of female representation. Lujan Grisham said she thought that high state -of -state rates contribute to general abortion support. “When you have problems with health access, as we do, it is not lost for any new Mexican how much we may withdraw our fundamental reproductive rights,” she said. “And when you are a particularly poor state, it can be much more pronounced.”
Lujan Grisham, who was elected governor in 2018, after having served a visit to the House of Representatives, made the defense of abortion a key objective of his political career. “I was the first candidate for the congress, I believe, to care for abortion and to use the term. Yes, this is the choice, and these are the reproductive rights, but I will protect the access and the right of a woman to and right to an abortion“She said.” I had a lot of decline in many people, but, in fact, that’s why I won the elections. The New Mexico allows the Governor a certain amount of discretionary financing which can be spent on projects that require significant capital expenses.
Espey, which will help put the current Cruces clinic in progress, said that it will provide “care spectrum of women’s reproduction health”, including contraception, basic fertility treatments, doula services, menopause care and abortion, as well as basic primary care, immunization and screening for cancer. Although the clinic is intended for New Mexicans, Espey expects many Texans to be also treated. The treatment of patients outside the state will help the financial viability of the clinic, said Lujan Grisham to me. “They pay the total cost of their care, and it’s useful,” she said. “They can help compensate for the losses of new menxicans who have no coverage or who are on Medicaid.”
Lujan Grisham also hopes that the adoption by the state of abortion care will help attract more doctors and to approach the long -standing shortage of the state of health care. Last year, the New Mexico broadcast full advertisements in five Texas newspapers, urging health professionals to move. “I certainly respect those of you who remain determined to take care of patients in Texas, but I also invite those of you who can no longer tolerate these restrictions to consider practicing alongside the New Mexico,” said the announcement, supervised as an open letter signed by Lujan Grisham. “We are fiercely determined to protect medical freedoms here and we take measures to ensure that what happened in Texas never happens in New Mexico.”
The adoption by the state of abortion encountered some reactions. The anti-abortion groups paid display panels near the Texas-New Mexico border, urging women traveling for abortions to turn around. An organization called Stop The Clinic attempted to prevent the construction of the Las Cruces Center, in part by urging local businesses to refuse to work on the project.
Some of the fiercest battles took place in the cities of the East New Mexico oil, the most conservative part of the state. (In the county of Lea, in the southeast corner of the State, Donald Trump won ninety percent of the votes last year.) In 2023, Laura Wight, co-founder of the east of New Mexico, a local progressive group, spotted a church in Clovis, near the anti-abortion border of Texas. Dickson has spent the last decade to urge cities and counties, mainly in Texas, to declare itself “sanctuary cities for the child”. After his appearance in church, Dickson spoke before the municipal council, urging Clovis to join the ranks of sanctuary cities. “We have no clinic here. We have never had a clinic here, ”Wight told me. However, she saw Dickson’s lobbying as a “five alarms fire”. In Texas, Dickson’s efforts had initially seemed symbolic – most of the self -on -off sanctuary cities were places that had never had an abortion clinic – but they were finally part of a new legal strategy which led to the “Bounty Hunter” law on the state, which allows private citizens to prosecute abortion providers.
