In a groundbreaking vote, the City of San Antonio took a monumental step toward ensuring health equity for its residents by approving $500,000 for a Reproductive Justice Fund in its $3.7 billion 2024 fiscal year budget.
The fund will create access points to vital reproductive health resources, such as pregnancy tests, at-home STI tests, emergency contraception, menstruation products, ovulation tests, diapers and prenatal vitamins; provide community doulas to birthing and postpartum people in clinical settings; provide logistical support for people traveling out of state for an abortion; and will share culturally and linguistically competent reproductive and sexual health education.
Supporting these services is critical right now. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, allowing Texas to enforce a total criminal ban on abortion on top of Texas’ 6-week abortion ban that had been in place since September 2021, further decimating access to abortion and other life-saving reproductive health services.
Despite current state law, it should be noted that the Supreme Court decision does not affect a person’s right to travel. State law does not prohibit organizations from providing people with logistical support such as childcare, transportation costs, and hotel accommodations when traveling out of state for an abortion. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that abortion funds cannot be criminally charged for helping people travel out of state to terminate their pregnancies. San Antonio would not only be following but expanding on the steps Austin took to ensure the full range of reproductive care is available to its constituents.
Since the Supreme Court decision, we at Sueños Sin Fronteras de Tejas have seen low-income LGBTQIA+ people, immigrants, unhoused people, people experiencing mental illness and survivors of violence disproportionately impacted by state restrictions and existing gaps in public benefit programs, like Medicaid and the Texas Healthy Women’s Program, creating insurmountable barriers to accessing health care.
Many community members without access to adequate healthcare may be drawn to anti-abortion centers, often known as “crisis pregnancy centers,” because they offer free pregnancy tests, counseling, and sonograms. However, these centers are known to coerce pregnant people into keeping their pregnancies by spreading misinformation. Undocumented community members have shared stories with Sueños Sin Fronteras de Tejas about center staff telling them they will be deported if they have an abortion. Centers have also been known to lie to people seeking abortion care about how far along they are in their pregnancy to make it appear that they have more time to access care.
Without access to safe reproductive health care, we further harm our communities by giving them no other choice but to turn to deceptive state-funded anti-abortion centers or to carry a pregnancy to term in a state with existing high rates of maternal mortality and infant mortality, repeated teen pregnancy, poverty, and interpersonal violence.
In April of this year, 22-year-old Jade Alvarez was fatally shot by her partner in the Beacon Hill neighborhood after telling him she did not want to have a baby with him. Data shows that pregnant and postpartum women are twice as likely to die by homicide than any other cause of maternal mortality, and the 2017 Status of Women in San Antonio report shows that women face “higher risks associated” with homicide and murder by a male intimate partner in San Antonio than in Houston, Dallas or Austin.
The San Antonio Reproductive Justice Fund, controlled by the Metropolitan Health District, will directly support community-based organizations providing comprehensive reproductive and sexual health resources, services and education to community members disproportionately affected by barbaric and neglectful state policies.
Although public benefit programs like Medicaid, the Texas Healthy Women’s Program and Title X aim to offer support to uninsured people seeking reproductive health care, the politicization of these programs makes them fall short of addressing the full spectrum of needs. Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for Medicaid and the Texas Healthy Women’s Program. The city’s Reproductive Justice Fund will not replace existing programs but rather aid in addressing the gaps. It operates around the core belief that all people, regardless of income level or citizenship status, deserve access to adequate sexual and reproductive healthcare.
Reproductive justice is a human-rights framework that asserts that people have the right to determine whether or not to have a child, the right to have a child and the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments regardless of age, gender identity, sexuality, immigration status, disability or income level. In a city as diverse and vibrant as San Antonio, our commitment to social justice and health equity must extend to every facet of our community.
The City of San Antonio has taken a significant stride toward ensuring health equity by creating a Reproductive Justice Fund to support San Antonio residents in accessing safe, culturally competent, evidence-based reproductive and sexual health care. The fund will serve as a vital investment in our community’s future that will support and empower San Antonians in accessing the services, resources and education they need to make safe and informed decisions about their reproductive and sexual health.
