Over the past year, Mark Lee Dickson has convinced 12 towns to pass ordinances banning abortion. For women in those towns, fear and confusion reigns.
On the morning of the ordinance vote, I met with Stephanie Vela Anderson, 39, a third-generation Mexican American who was born in Big Spring and lived there until 2009. The night before, she drove six hours back to her hometown, through a lightning storm, so that she could protest Dickson’s actions. It was personal to her.
She was flooded with anger, imagining a pregnant teen girl like herself, living at home with religious parents, scared and lonely and trying to work out what to do. There was already so much stigma around abortion in Big Spring, she said. Dickson’s ordinance would only make things worse. Anderson went on Facebook to vent. Soon, she connected with another woman in east Texas doing the same thing after her town passed one of Dickson’s bans.
At issue is a restrictive Louisiana law that requires abortion doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. Dickson was struck by the idea of how much one person can influence another. “The absence of one person leaves a void in so many other lives,” he said, a tear rolling down his cheek.
A half-hour before the meeting was scheduled to begin, Anderson got in line. The city chambers fit only 86 people and while normally meetings were sparsely attended, the past two times that the abortion ban was discussed the room had filled to capacity and latecomers were forced to wait outside. Dickson arrived too, and joined the end of the line.
Those who did testify against the ordinance shied away from sharing their personal views on abortion. Instead, they argued that the city had no place in dictating a women’s health care choices. Others, choosing to sidestep the contentious issue altogether, worried that the hastily written ordinance — Roe was misspelled as “Row” in the version offered online — would backfire on the town, opening it up to litigation.
Then Anderson was up. She shook a little, and turned to address the council. “I don’t know how to connect with people right now on the other side,” she said. She went on, looking around the room. She had heard a lot about protecting life, but none of the supporters of the ordinance seemed to care much about mothers and children in Big Spring.
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