Accessing reproductive health as a Latina woman in the borderlands: Mobility, money and fear

While positionality impacts a woman’s access to abortion, other parts of a woman’s identity factor in her level of access: Ethnicity, race, economic situation and immigration status are all sites of oppression that must be taken into consideration when assessing access to abortion care - in the borderlands and beyond. Indeed, identity markers impact how the body is controlled by the state. Citizenship, as race, is a social construct legitimizing subordination of one group and justified, through history and still today, the fact that the system gives noncitizens limited rights (Johnson, 1996), and limited means to defend the rights they are entitled to. Restricting access to abortion is problematic for all women seeking abortions, but once analyzed through an intersectional geopolitical lens, restrictions in Texas and Arizona carry discriminations with varied levels of impact on women, depending on their identities.

As aforementioned, both states border Mexico, and both have a large immigrant - both documented and undocumented - population. Therefore, looking at abortion access solely in terms of socioeconomic status and positionality render invisible how laws restricting access to abortion have differentiated articulations when coupled with citizenship status, and the existing laws, both federal and state-level, with regards to immigration and migrants' rights. Indeed, while immigration laws are a federal prerogative, both states have been using their prerogative with regards to health to further their conservative agendas and try to increase immigration controls. The laws impact access to all types of healthcare services, including abortion care, transforming laws that do not aim at abortion into means to control (un)documented immigrant women’s agency over their bodies and their reproductive health. One such requirement is mandatory identification in publicly funded clinics. In Texas, a 2015 law makes it mandatory for

Map 9.1 Access to abortion in the border zone and the rest of Texas and Arizona (2017). Source: Andréanne Bissonnette, 201S.

Reproductive care in US-Mexico borderlands 157 clinics to request a valid ID before proceeding (HB3994, 2015), while in Arizona, a 2005 modification to the state statutes requires all state government employees “to verify an applicant’s immigration status with the Department of Homeland Security’s Secure America with Verification and Enforcement (SAVE) program before providing services” (Ochoa O’Leary and Valdez-Gardea, 2013: 79). Abortion clinics, as private providers, are not obligated to verify immigration status, and none of the interviewed clinics checked for immigration status. However, it still acts as a deterrent for women who might know of the rule, but not of where it is applicable as opposed to where it is not. While not all women are undocumented, there has been, in the last few years, an assimilation between “Latinxs” and “immigration” and between "immigration” and “undocumented migration”, contributing to a hostile environment, impacting the quality of care received and the propensity to seek care.

Undocumented women’s access to abortion in Arizona and Texas cannot be addressed solely in terms of women’s rights or migrants’ rights. The two legislative frameworks overlap and create special consequences for Latina women, which inform their reproductive health opportunities. Their bodies are thus doubly controlled: First, in a racial/migratory perspective and then in terms of their reproductive health. These policies surrounding access to abortion affect all women residing in these two border states. However, the mapping of the abortion clinics in Arizona and Texas (see Map 9.1), coupled with the representation of the border area, show how these policies, apparently unrelated to immigration, become places of control of the migrating bodies.