Abortion

Texas Pro-Choice Groups Help Navigate an Anti-Choice Landscape

A coalition of Texas groups have come together this summer to launch two new efforts intended to help residents access legal abortion care and to communicate more broadly about Texans' families, their lives, and their reproductive decisions.

A coalition of Texas groups have come together this summer to launch two new efforts intended to help residents access legal abortion care and to communicate more broadly about Texans' families, their lives, and their reproductive decisions. Andrea Grimes / RH Reality Check

A coalition of Texas groups have come together this summer to launch two new efforts intended to help residents access legal abortion care and to communicate more broadly about Texans’ families, their lives, and their reproductive decisions.

These pro-choice efforts come as state lawmakers conduct politically motivated “investigations” into fetal tissue donation programs and Texas abortion providers look to the Supreme Court for relief from the state’s omnibus anti-choice law.

A joint effort between NARAL Pro-Choice Texas and the Lilith Fund, NeedAbortion.org is a one-stop clearinghouse for facts about where to get an abortion in a tumultuous legal landscape, in which clinics close or sustain with every new court decision; it also has information about how Texas’ growing web of anti-choice laws affect people who need the procedure.

Illuminate RJ is another NARAL collaboration, this time with the Texas Freedom Network and abortion provider Amy Hagstrom Miller’s new nonprofit project, Shift. It’s an art and activist project meant to tackle abortion stigma and reproductive justice issues.

It’s a creative—rather than expressly political—approach, NARAL Pro-Choice Texas Executive Director Heather Busby told Rewire. It’s a way for Texans to talk about a full spectrum of experiences with reproductive issues with personal, artistic expressions “instead of chants and slogans and protest signs.”

Poet Sonya Renee is the featured artist at Friday’s kick-off event in Austin, which will also include an art installation of cut-out paper birds decorated by Texas reproductive justice activists.

Illuminate RJ’s birds echo the soaring avians of the Repeal Hyde Art Project, but they’re specifically mockingbirds—the state bird of Texas. And those mockingbirds will make appearances across Texas in the coming weeks and months, as activists launch new “pop-up” art events around the state.

Submissions to Illuminate RJ can be made online.