SB 8 has banned almost all abortions in Texas after six weeks: “With this bill, there are no choices.”
Hannah S. had gotten her period three weeks earlier and was on birth control, but something just didn’t feel quite right with her body.
A few days later at the clinic, Hannah requested to hear the heartbeat . She repeatedly told medical providers she was sure about her decision to terminate the pregnancy. At six weeks and four days of pregnancy, she took the first of two abortion pills at the clinic and swallowed the second one back at her dorm.
Texas law SB 8, which went into effect Sept. 1, outlaws nearly all abortions after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, usually around the sixth week of a pregnancy. Pregnancy weeks are counted from the first day of a person's last menstrual period, so week six is typically two weeks after a missed period. And as more than 200 readers told BuzzFeed News, that’s often not enough time for a person to realize they’re pregnant, particularly if the pregnancy is unplanned.
She didn’t really expect to be pregnant; as a survivor of Hodgkin’s lymphoma with polycystic ovary syndrome, she and her husband had already tried and given up on fertility treatments. She took the test, she said, “for grins” before going out for drinks with her husband since her self-monitoring had shown she’d ovulated that month.
Shah told BuzzFeed News it’s more common than not for people to have irregular cycles, not track periods, or attribute pregnancy symptoms to something else, leading them not to notice they’ve conceived until much later than six weeks. Multiple people who found out near or after six weeks said they were not able to schedule an appointment with their doctor earlier.
By the time her pregnancy was finally confirmed and she took the first abortion pill, she was seven weeks and six days. A year later, with SB 8 in effect, that would have been too late. Bos, who is the mother of a 4-year-old daughter, has already been jerked around by a state law limiting abortion access.When she became pregnant as a 20-year-old college student in Ohio, she knew she didn’t want to raise a child with her former partner, who she described as mentally and sometimes physically abusive.
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