Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje: Remembering the impact of legal abortion — with no regrets

Robbie Ausley discovered she was pregnant for the fourth time in 1973, the same year abortion was legalized through the Roe v. Wade ruling. It was an unplanned pregnancy — her husband had gotten a vasectomy two years earlier, but it had apparently failed. Ausley, then 29 and a stay-at-home-mother, already had four children including a set of twins. She wasn’t aware yet that abortion was legal. But she knew one thing for sure: She couldn’t handle another child. “I found myself screaming at my kids, then feeling guilty and depressed,” Ausley, now 78, said. “I was already under a great deal of stress. When I found out I was pregnant again, it put me on the edge of hysteria. I decided to have an abortion, which felt like a moral, life-affirming decision, because my responsibility was to the four children I already had.” Her husband, a young lawyer, supported her. They traveled from Austin to San Antonio for her procedure, making Ausley one of the first women in America to exercise the newfound right to female bodily autonomy under Roe.

She still believes it was the right decision. Indeed, Ausley became an activist, raising money for a Planned Parenthood clinic in Austin. In years past, she testified before the Texas Legislature, trying to ensure that other women had the same ability to control the trajectory of their lives as she did. When the current U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe in June, Ausley was devastated. “My first reaction was that women of my economic status will always have access to abortion,” she said. “It’s poor women who are going to be affected the most, poor women and their children. We’re going to see more kids not getting the care and nurturing they need, more ending up in the prison system.” Ausley’s story is emblematic of how a freedom that women possessed for five decades was suddenly ripped away by judicial fiat. It’s also representative of another truth, one that has been lost amid the tumult surrounding Roe’s reversal. Namely: A great deal of attention has focused on how states with near-total abortion bans — like Texas — make no exception for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest, or that feature fetal anomalies.