New Mexico is emerging as a key battleground between abortion providers and opponents after women started flocking in from other states in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision effectively striking down a national right to abortion.
It’s the Land of Enchantment’s proximity to several strongly Republican states that has made it a haven for women seeking the procedure. New Mexico shares a long border with Texas and has become a destination as well for women living in Oklahoma and Louisiana, among other states. All three have laws on the books that ban abortion in most circumstances, which went into effect after the June 24 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
The Supreme Court held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion, so the decision overruled both Roe v. Wade, in 1973, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in 1992. Instead, Dobbs gave states the power to regulate any aspect of abortion.
And unlike surrounding or relatively close red states, in New Mexico, abortion is currently legal at all stages of pregnancy. That led to the virtual recreation in Las Cruces, New Mexico, of the abortion clinic in Jackson, Mississippi, which was the focus of the Supreme Court’s ruling changing abortion law nationally.
Las Cruces Women’s Health Organization, in addition to attracting women patients, also has drawn abortion opponents hoping to keep the state closed to providers.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, has pledged to be a “brick wall” to any efforts in the state that seek to block women or their doctors from providing or receiving care.
That approach has drawn the ire of anti-abortion activists.
“The reason the abortion facilities are moving to places like New Mexico is that it’s abortion-friendly,” said Mark Lee Dickson, an anti-abortion advocate who helped champion abortion bans in Texas towns.
“If they move somewhere, they want to move someplace that they actually can be safe to do what they do,” Dickson told the Washington Examiner.
Whole Woman’s Health announced last month that it would be closing four abortion facilities in Texas and moving its operations to New Mexico, seeking the public’s assistance to cover its moving costs.
“Opening a brick and mortar clinic site in New Mexico, where we already offer Virtual Services, will allow us to provide first and second trimester abortions to people from Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona and elsewhere in the South where safe, legal abortion care is restricted,” the organization said on its GoFundMe page. “New Mexicans are also going to struggle with access as their local clinics book up with patients traveling from out-of-state.”
One of the few existing abortion clinics in New Mexico, the University of New Mexico Center for Reproductive Health, told the Texas Tribune that it has to schedule patients four weeks out. The clinic reported that roughly 75% of the patients in its waiting room had come from Texas in the last few months.
As abortion providers scale up operations in the state to keep up with demand, abortion opponents have set their sights on turning public opinion in their favor.
The Southwest Coalition for Life, an anti-abortion organization, announced plans in July to open a crisis pregnancy center near Las Cruces Women’s Health Organization.
Dickson said Republican lawmakers in New Mexico are resistant to seeing the state become an “abortion mecca,” suggesting that efforts to restrict abortion access will likely play out on the local level.
“For so long, we have thought that this is a battle that needs to be taken, that needs to be fought in our state capitol, our nation’s capital, and we’ve forgotten the local side of things,” said Dickson. “If an abortion facility moves to Hobbs, New Mexico, that is not Santa Fe’s problem. That is not Washington, D.C.’s problem. It’s Hobbs, New Mexico’s problem.”
