The stories trace the nationwide push that began in 2011 by Republican-led state legislatures to increasingly regulate abortion in the U.S. In this series of stories, I connected the dots to show the nationwide assault on abortion rights, mapping out one of the biggest shifts in reproductive health care since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which in 1973 legalized abortion in all 50 states.
• “Regulating Away Abortion,” a six-page feature spread in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, explores how, in the 40 years since Roe v. Wade, the main threats to providers have shifted from intimidation, harassment and the threat of violence to regulations passed in statehouses across the country. It’s told from inside the business and life of a clinic owner in suburban Detroit, chronicling her fight to keep her practice open after losing at the statehouse in Lansing.
• North Dakota’s passage of the earliest gestational ban in the country last spring made it the ideal place to illustrate the strategy behind states passing laws intended to directly challenge the U.S. Supreme Court’s abortion rulings.
• As lawmakers in Austin debated new abortion regulations, I headed to dusty border towns in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. There, in one of the poorest regions in the nation, I discovered how women were coping after the 2011 state budget slashed funding to family-planning and subsidized contraceptives. My story revealed how women were already turning to dangerous alternatives via a growing black market for abortion-inducing drugs. This illegal trade had now crossed the U.S. border, moving from unregulated Mexican pharmacies to open-air flea markets in Texas itself. My reporting conveyed the uptick in women suffering from life-threatening hemorrhaging and incomplete abortions — the full extent of which we have yet to discover.
• My compilation of clinic closures across the country is the only documentation if its kind, and shows how effective the new laws have been at making it too expensive or logistically impossible for providers to remain in operation.