TINA: WHAT WILL THE JUDGE SAY

Tina Hester: I had an abortion when I was in my mid-twenties, and it was obviously a very different experience for me. I was living in D.C. I went to my private OB-GYN. My health insurance paid for it. I did not have to cross a picket line or see pictures or have people harangue me. So I got more interested in the work, just seeing what women had to go through in either Kentucky or Texas or wherever I was living.

Jenn Stanley: This is CHOICE/LESS, a storytelling podcast from Rewire Radio about reproductive injustice and the laws that put people in choice-less situations.

I’m Jenn Stanley, senior staff reporter at Rewire, and the host of this podcast.

In each episode, I talk with someone about their experiences with reproductive injustice, and the stories are varied, as there are many obstacles to accessing reproductive health care in the United States, including financial burden, family pressure, religious obligation, clinic protesters, shame, and stigma, just to name a few.

But even if one can get past those barriers, many states’ laws are so restrictive that for some, it’s near impossible to get an abortion in their home state. As of 2015, 27 states in the U.S. had four or more abortion restrictions. Eighteen of those states had between six and ten restrictions, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Texas is one of those 18 states, which Guttmacher labels “extremely hostile to abortion. And it’s come to the forefront of the U.S. abortion debate, in part because of the Supreme Court case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which could determine the future of abortion access for people across the country.

Earlier in the season, we heard from Candice and Valerie about how Texas’ restrictive abortion laws forced them both out of the state for their procedures. Today’s episode rounds out our coverage of Texas for Season One. We’ll hear from someone who helps some of Texas’ most vulnerable citizen in their struggle to gain reproductive autonomy: minors who, for whatever reason, don’t feel like they can involve a parent in their decision to have an abortion.

Thirty-eight states have some kind of parental involvement law on the books regarding abortion. They vary in intensity—some need both parents, some need a signed, notarized consent form, some do not.

States allow some kind of judicial bypass, meaning the minor can ask a judge to waive the parental involvement requirement if she can prove she is mature enough to make the decision on her own, or if she can prove that it would be in her best interest not to tell a parent. That’s where our storyteller comes in.

TH: My name is Tina Hester. I am the executive director of a small legal services group called Jane’s Due Process. I’m originally from Lubbock, Texas, which is up in the panhandle, and I currently live in Austin, Texas.

As the executive director, it sounds very important. But really, it’s a two-person staff. We have a part-time legal director. And I have a part-time office assistant. But basically we’re a nonprofit of volunteer attorneys and hotline volunteers.

We ensure free legal representation for pregnant minors in Texas. Our services are many but the majority of our calls for our 24/7 hotline are for young women who are seeking to terminate a pregnancy, and can’t find or don’t want to involve a parent in that decision.

It was founded when Governor Bush – the second, W – when he signed the first parental notification law in 1999, a group of attorneys realized that it was a very daunting task for young women to go to a courthouse and get an application and go through the process of a judicial bypass. So they put together a group of attorneys across the state and hired a part-time coordinator who was actually an ACLU employee to begin with. Since then, we now have hundreds of trained attorneys across the state who help minors.

Most of the calls we get, it’s interesting, most people think they’re going to be these terribly sad cases, and there are some terribly sad cases. But a lot of the young women who call our hotline are ambitious, and they want to graduate and they want to go to college, and they already have a college scholarship, and by God, they want to get out of the situation they’re in. So there’s kind of a mixture. I’ve had phone calls from well-to-do young women from private schools. And I’ve had phone calls from homeless girls.

I probably have spoken to more young women who want to terminate a pregnancy and can’t involve a parent than anybody else in Texas right now. But there’s one story in particular that really broke my heart. It was a young woman who lived about an hour outside of Austin.

She was 17.

Her personality seemed so muted. And she seemed so tired when she called the hotline. She already had one disabled child, and had spent months in the neonatal intensive care unit and the child had to have a constant breathing machine. She was petrified that the home visiting nurses that the state was paying for to come to her dilapidated home would not be able to cleanthe stoma and make sure that her child didn’t suffocate. So she had no transportation

Her living situation was that her mother had kicked her out, and that may have been due to the first pregnancy. I don’t think she ever knew her father. She was living with her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s mother who did not want her there. And it was obvious from what she told me about their relationship that she had such little support, and her boyfriend didn’t seem to be around much. So I don’t know if he had other girlfriends or what was going on, but he didn’t seem to be really in the picture as well.

But when I went to pick her up, and walked up the stairs and said can I use the restroom because we’re about to make a long trip, I went by the room where her child was and went in and introduced myself to the visiting nurses that were there. And it’s gotta be hard to have strangers in your house, coming in and out of your house all the time, particularly when it’s not really even your house, not knowing whether your boyfriend’s mother is going to ask her to leave at some point.

And so I went to pick her up to go take her to court, and she had never been to Austin, Texas. She lived an hour outside of here.

It was interesting that she wanted to stop early on and get lunch and was about to buy a bunch of junk food, and I said, you know, let’s just wait a few minutes, can you wait 30 minutes and we’ll really have a full meal, and she agreed to do that. But I think she was happy in many ways just to get out of the house, because it was so depressing there. And just it kind of lifted her mood a little bit, to be in Austin for day.

So I drove her around the campus, I went over and took her to Schlotzky’s, which is one of our favorite places and got her lunch. It’s almost like, I wanted to give her a day, just one day of respite from the child care that she was already involved in. I took her to the courthouse. She worked with one of our veteran attorneys. We want to make sure in those kinds of cases that we have a really well-trained attorney working with those clients. She got the bypass granted. Our legal intern was to drive her back and meet at the Walmart where her boyfriend’s mother and her boyfriend were supposed to pick her up. And they didn’t show up. They just left her there. And so my intern said, what do I do, And I said, well you just can’t leave her at the Walmart, so you just need to go ahead and drive her all the way back or stay with her. One or the other. An hour later they show up. And this is traumatizing for this young woman. She’s leaving her baby at home, and she has no support.

And she realized she just couldn’t do it. She had ambivalent feelings, like a lot of people do. And it wasn’t clear-cut for her but she realized that there was no way that she could take care of another baby. And she was unwilling to consider adoption.

Her boyfriend was to take her back to the clinic for the procedure, and I did talk to her as she drove up and she was crying about what she was about to have to do. She was upset about, as often people are about having to make this tough choice, and I said, you know, it’s up to you. You don’t have to do this. You have the bypass, it doesn’t require you to have the termination. But it allows – it grants you the opportunity. You’re going to have to make the decision as to what you’re going to do.

It’s just one of those things that I always wonder what happened to her. Who knows. If there was, it seemed like there was drug dealing going on in the house, it seemed like there was domestic violence in the house.

I kept trying to talk to her about trying to find a safe place to live but she couldn’t really because there’s no place she could go with her disabled child.

I feel discouraged when the young women seem so downtrodden like no one has ever asked them their own personal opinion. What they want. What they want for their life. They’ve always been told to do something from their parents or from their church or whatever. So those are some sad cases where they’re just ambivalent.

Some girls call and they’re not sure if they want, what they want to do, because they don’t have really see a future for themselves. And those are sad cases. We had a minor recently who just was the best client we’ve ever had. She was the first in her family to speak English. Her family is from Central America. She takes care of her younger siblings, she was doing an internship at a major company. She was on a full ride to a private school due to her own initiative. And those kinds of cases, and yet the judge decided that she wasn’t mature enough. Or we had one judge who said well if you can’t talk to your parents that shows you’re immature. It’s kind of like a catch-22. Like, circular.

JS: A judge’s personal views can often affect the outcome of the minor’s case. Each minor is appointed a guardian ad litem in addition to a lawyer. The guardian ad litem is supposed to help investigate what solutions would be in the best interest of the child. Tina says that as the state of Texas is becoming more hostile to abortion rights, so are many of the judges and guardians ad litem.

TH: We’ve had a whole lot more judges who recently have appointed guardian ad litems who are active with crisis pregnancy centers, who try to talk the young woman out of having an abortion, that’s not really the role of the guardian ad litem, it’s to be representing the interest of the minor, not to force their religious views on the minor. But some of the judges have appointed, we have one judge who appointed a Catholic priest as the guardian ad litem.

What they end up having to do is either carry the pregnancy to term or go out of state.

JS: Tina says one of the hardest things about her job is not knowing what happens to the girls they help.

TH: It’s extremely hard because you get attached to them. And you think, “Oh my God, are they ok?” And, well, they’re teenagers, and so they just want to deal with that one crisis and move on. And you know maybe later – we’ve had letters come to us saying – I remember one letter in particular the woman lived out-of-state and said, “You helped my niece with a judicial bypass and I want you to know that she graduated, she’s a Montessori teacher, and she’s about to have her first child. And none of that would have happened if you hadn’t been there.”

We have one attorney, when she takes a minor to court she says, “I want you to send me a high school graduation notice.” And you know, the girls just kind of look at her blankly like, you know my mother would find out. And she says, “I’m not going to come, but I just want you to send me a graduation notice so that I know that you really pursued your dreams and you graduated from high school.” Sometimes you know, sometimes you don’t. And we purposefully don’t ask anything from our minors. Because we want them to know that we’re just there for them when they need us right then.

A little piece stays with you, but you can’t keep it all or you would drown in worry. So I don’t really know how you let go particularly, but you know the next case moves along. It may just be that this sort of ever flowing river of need you just have to let the water roll on down because there’s no way to dam it up.

Nine out of ten young women involve a parent in this decision. It is a big decision. And it’s just a small fraction who don’t. I think most of the girls that could tell their parents don’t call us. I think that the people who call us are the ones who really need us.

So there are rarely cases, but there are a few cases in which we would suggest that the minor involve the parent. I would talk to young women about you know, your parents maybe much more understanding than you think they are, and while they may have said something to you in the past if they’ve talked to you about being on birth control, they probably knew you were sexually active, and they don’t want you to be pregnant. Obviously and they want you to graduate from high school. If there’s a way, maybe have a cousin go with you. Or your favorite aunt, or your sister and talk to them. And then go to your parents.

For me, I didn’t tell my parents about the termination for many years. And I think having grown up in a small West Texas town, Lubbock, where there’s a church on every other corner, I was embarrassed about my decision. And then finally I realized there’s a lot of us out there, and that we’re being quiet about it. And we need to speak up. If one in three women have had abortion, I’ve had a lot of comrades who’ve had abortions.

We need to tell our stories so that people can understand that it’s not a cut-and-dried issue.

JS: For more information on Jane’s Due Process, visit their website at janesdueprocess.org.

This episode was produced by me, Jenn Stanley, for Rewire Radio, with editorial oversight by Marc Faletti, our director of multimedia. Jodi Jacobson is our editor-in-chief. Brady Swenson is our director of technology.

Music for today’s episode was by Doug Helsel.

Special thanks to all the staff at Rewire.

For more on this story, including an op-ed by Tina Hester, and more information of parental involvement laws, please visit our website at Rewire.news/choiceless.

Thanks for listening.