page_title: Abortion in Texas
section_title: Clinic history
hierarchical_section_title: Abortion in Texas / History / Clinic history
caption_attribution_description: English: Number of abortion clinics in Texas by year. Data is from articles linked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LauraHale/Template:Abortion_by_US_state
context_page_description: Abortion in Texas is legal. In the South Central United States 52% of people polled by Pew Research Center believed that abortion should be illegal in most cases. Abortion was illegal in the state in 1900, with a therapeutic exception put in place in 1950. In the early 2000s, the state passed a parental notification law. In 2007, the state passed a mandatory ultrasound bill, and then started funding women's reproductive health programs that did not include abortion services and tried to cut off any state funding to facilities for reproductive services if they offered abortion services. Attempts to ban abortion in all cases were underway by 2007. By 2009, the legislature was actively trying to defund Planned Parenthood. Fetal heartbeat ban attempts were underway by 2013 when Phil King introduced such a bill on July 18, 2013, in the wake of Rick Perry signing Texas Senate Bill 5 into law. On February 7, 2019, Briscoe Cain, a member of the Texas House of Representatives, introduced a fetal heartbeat bill entitled the Texas Heartbeat Bill. It was jointly authored by Representatives Phil King, Dan Flynn, Tan Parker, and Rick Miller.
context_section_description: Between 1982 and 1992, the number of abortion clinics in the state declined by 49, going from 128 in 1982 to 79 in 1992.   During a six-year stretch in the 1980s, Carol Everett ran a number of abortion clinics in Austin; she later shuttered these after she had a "come to Jesus" moment.
  The state ranked sixth  in the total number of abortion clinics lost between 1992 and 1996, dropping by 15 to 64 total clinics. The rate of closures of abortion clinics in Texas is increasing as more clinics are forced to close because of increased regulatory requirements. In a one-year period, in 2011, 85 abortion clinics closed. Between 2012 and 2016 the number of abortion clinics in Texas dropped from 40 to 19 as a result of the state's House Bill 2, which was struck down by the US Supreme Court in June, 2016. After TRAP laws came into effect in Missouri and Texas, women had to travel even greater distances to be able to visit an abortion clinic.
  In 2014, there were 28 abortion clinics in the state. In 2014, 96% of the counties in the state did not have an abortion clinic. That year, 43% of women in the state aged 15 – 44 lived in a county without an abortion clinic.  As a result of TRAP legislation passed in 2014, several abortion clinics in Texas were forced to close. In 2017, there were 35 Planned Parenthood clinics in a state with a population of 6,621,207 women aged 15 – 49 of which six offered abortion services. Southwestern Women’s Options was one of the abortion clinics open in 2019. A 2019 study found that the TRAP law increased the number of second-trimester abortions by restricting women's access to abortion services.
  The passage of the June 7, 2019 legislation around local governments ability to do business with abortion service providers impacted Planned Parenthood in East Austin.  This was because the East Austin had signed a 20-year lease agreement in November 2018 with Planned Parenthood, with the rent being $1 a month.  The East Austin clinic was impacted even though it provided no abortion services because its parent organization, Planned Parenthood, does offer such services.
caption: Number of abortion clinics in Texas by year.
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