When Dina Ortega, 37, found out that Texas had passed Senate Bill 8 (SB-8), one of the strictest abortion laws in the country, she started crying at her desk at Roosevelt General Hospital in Portales, NM just 18 miles from the Texas border. 

“I was like, oh my God, we’re going back to the 1900s? What are they going to take from us next?”

Dina knew that the abortion ban in the neighboring state would impact her town of less than 12,000 in eastern New Mexico. 

New Mexico state laws protect abortion without a gestational limit, but the eastern side of the state looks and votes more like Texas — the majority of residents on these vast and windy plains are Republican. In the last presidential election, about 70% of people in this region voted for Donald Trump.

After the abortion ban in Texas passed in 2021, in what looked like a domino effect bringing down reproductive rights across the country, Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022. That summer, Dina joined pro-choice protests in her hometown of Portales, where her family has lived for generations.

“I remember in high school I used to always say I would love to live in like the 60s, the 70s, so I could do the protests, and then 30 years later, here I am doing it,” Dina says. “You’re not supposed to go backwards. You’re supposed to go forward.”

Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, 14 states have banned abortions and another eight have passed laws restricting them, especially in the South and in the Midwest of the country. This new reality has turned New Mexico into a “hub” for people who are looking to end their pregnancies. New Mexico is the state where the number of abortions has grown the most over the last three years:

Abortions went from less than 5,000 total in 2019 to more than 20,000 in 2023.

In eastern New Mexico, which is very rural and conservative, the issue of abortion has sparked tensions. 

In this episode, which is part of our election coverage “The Latino Factor: How We Vote,” we explore how the Texas abortion ban has triggered many New Mexicans in these border towns —where about half of the population is Hispanic or Latine— to take a strong stand pro or against abortion —especially Latina women. This story is a collaboration with WHYY’s health and science show The Pulse.

Whole Woman’s Health (WWH) had been operating clinics in Texas for years when SB-8 forced them to curtail their services to attend only women who were under six weeks pregnant. And then in July 2022, after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, they had to close. The plan looked simple —open a clinic in eastern New Mexico, a state that has strong abortion protections but still be close to the west Texas border, so that women don’t have to travel too far. WWH was considering two towns to open a clinic: Clovis and Hobbs.

“Primarily it was proximity,” says Amy Hagstrom, the CEO and founder of Whole Woman’s Health. “And part of what we were looking at in those border communities was one, will our patients feel safe? And two, will our staff and our providers feel safe?”

Clovis seemed like an ideal choice: it’s only 8 miles away from the Texas border. But the makeup of the region tells another story. The first thing you see when you drive into Clovis from the south is a welcome sign that reads “Welcome to Clovis, a community for family” next to a huge steel cross and a replica of the Ten Commandments. Clovis has less than 50,000 residents and 66 churches. A few yards after the sign, there’s one of these churches, and next to a bright white cross there’s another sign. This one reads: “Abortion is cold-blooded murder.” 

When pastor Erick Welsh heard that his hometown of Clovis was being considered by an abortion provider to open a new clinic, he knew he had to do something to stop it. “That raised the flags,” Erick says. “We started looking into the things that we could do. We didn’t know where to start.” 

The Clovis pastor, who identifies as Hispanic, was born in Amarillo, Texas and spent most of his childhood with his maternal family, who are from Mexican and Spanish descent. His family wasn’t very religious growing up, in fact some of his aunts and his mother are strongly pro-choice, but his maternal grandparents were Roman Catholic and antiabortion.

“My view of abortion is that it’s a great evil,” Erick says. “And it is one that must be dealt with in the way that evil is dealt with. It has to be attacked head on.”

In order to hinder an abortion clinic from opening in Clovis, Erick says he reached out to Texas pastor Mark Lee Dickon, the founder of the anti-abortion group, Right to Life of East Texas, and conservative lawyer Jonathan F. Mitchell, the former Texas Solicitor General and one of Donald Trump’s personal lawyers. Dickson and Mitchell are the architects behind SB-8, the Texas abortion ban. 

After many Facebook messages and emails, Dickson agreed to visit Clovis. In September 2022, Erick and his parish organized a public event at Grace Covenant Church to keep abortion clinics out of town. 

“We just made a simple little flier on Facebook and that sanctuary was packed,” Welsh says. “There was a standing room, people were listening from the foyer.”

The Comstock Ordinance

At the meeting, Dickson presented an ordinance that would make abortion providers who wanted to practice in Clovis to abide by the Comstock Act, a federal law from 1873 that bans the transportation or shipping of any tools, drugs and other materials into the town that can be used in an abortion. 

The ordinance would also require potential clinics to apply for a business license and confirm that they will “comply with federal laws,” therefore, that they won’t violate the Comstock Act —rendering abortion services impossible.

This wasn’t the only town where Dickson and Mitchell were promoting these ordinances. They’re part of a broader, well-organized anti-abortion strategy they call “Sanctuary Cities of the Unborn.” According to their list, currently 69 towns have joined this movement. Most of them are in Texas, but there are also cities in Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois, among other states. Several of them are border towns in states that protect abortion, but are close to states with strict abortion laws.

When Victoria Robledo, 25, found out about the Comstock ordinance, she knew very little about local government—let alone what an ordinance was. Victoria was entering the third trimester of her pregnancy at the time, and she had already faced several challenges when trying to access reproductive healthcare in Clovis. 

She’s originally from Corpus Christi, Texas —like the singer Selena, as Victoria likes to point out— and she moved to Clovis because her husband got a job at Cannon Air Force base, which is nearby. For Victoria, living close to family is important, but so is living in a state in line with her political beliefs, so she knew she wanted to live in a Democratic-leaning state.

“So, moving over here, I was like, this is not that different,” Victoria says. “Even though the state aligns with my values, the town doesn’t. So, I feel like I’m just in Texas all over again.”

Earlier that same year, Victoria had experienced a miscarriage very early on. A few months into her pregnancy, Women’s Medical Center, the main OB-GYN clinic in Clovis where Victoria had started seeing a doctor, closed its doors after 35 years. 

They informed her that they could transfer her to a doctor in Lubbock or Amarillo —both in west Texas, more than 1.5 hours away from Clovis. But by then, the abortion ban was already in place in Texas, and there had been reports of doctors who were afraid to perform any medical procedures on women who were having pregnancy complications, like natural miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies. As a pregnant woman, Victoria worried about her healthcare options. And she saw the abortion ordinance they were trying to pass in Clovis as a threat to it.

“It’s not just about abortion, because abortion is only part of reproductive health care as a whole,” says Victoria. “And to limit that one just because you have placed some sort of false, moral grandstanding on it is ridiculous, because it’s not a moral issue. It’s just healthcare.”

The same goes for Dina Ortega, who works as a pharmacy technician at the local hospital in Portales, about 30 minutes south of Clovis. It isn’t only about abortion access, it’s about women’s healthcare access more broadly getting reduced. 

Last January, Dina needed to get a hysterectomy and she had to travel to Roswell, about 1.5 hours away, because she could not find an OBGYN who had the capacity to do the procedure in Portales or Clovis.

“I honestly feel as a healthcare provider that a lot of the doctors are scared to come to New Mexico,” Dina says. “Because so many women from different states are coming here for abortion access and they see on the news how this doctor, that doctor gets in trouble for trying to help a lady that was simply having a horrible miscarriage and her life was at risk.” 

Dina understands that doctors are scared about losing the licenses they worked so hard for. 

“These doctors have to protect themselves, but then who’s protecting us?”

“I Never Wanted to Go Through that Again”

Victoria and Dina’s worlds collided when they met at pro-choice demonstrations. Besides both being Latinas and sharing the same views on reproductive rights, they had something else in common: they both became mothers at 19.

“I was just young and stupid. There, there’s no excuse,” Dina says. Her daughter Sarah was born with spina bifida, a condition where the spinal cord doesn’t form properly. She was also born two months early. “She weighed four pounds. She was literally the size of a roller when I had her.” 

Sarah has always needed a wheelchair because of her condition. She was born with one kidney and needed a colostomy —an overture in her large intestine. “So we learned how to change a bag before we even learned how to change diapers,” Dina says. 

Sarah needed so much attention that Dina couldn’t look for a job until her daughter was 2 years old. And she was lucky that her parents helped her raise Sarah, because the father was never involved.

“I never wanted to go through that again. I don’t want to put another child through that,” she says.

About two years after her daughter was born, Dina got into a new relationship. He had a substance abuse problem and had problems with alcohol. Over their 13 years together, he was abusive and exerted control over her. “I wasn’t allowed to curl my hair to go to work. I wasn’t allowed to have a lock pass on my phone. I wasn’t allowed to be on birth control.”

Dina knew she couldn’t rely on birth control pills, because he would find them. For that reason, every three months, she made up some work excuse and went to Women’s Medical Center in Clovis, about 30 minutes north from Portales, to get a birth control shot. That’s the same clinic where Victoria started seeing an OBGYN for her pregnancy. 

“God forbid if I would have gotten pregnant, I would have done whatever I had to do. Because there was no way I would have been able to get out [of that relationship] if I had a child with him,” Dina says. “I would have done whatever I had to do to get out.”

Dina is a devout Catholic, like 60% of Hispanics living in New Mexico. “If somebody knocked on my door right now and asked, would you die for your Catholic faith? I would say yes. I would do anything for my Catholic faith. My faith is my life.” 

She goes to church every Saturday evening with her daughter, her parents, her uncles and aunts. She leads a youth group on Wednesdays.

But her experience also makes her an ardent defender of women’s right to choose. She doesn’t see this as a contradiction to her religious beliefs. “At the end of the day, I only have one judge. And that’s God. Because the person next to me, the person down the street, the person yelling at me at the march, they don’t decide where I go at the end of my time. Only God does.”

She feels for the young girls whose reproductive rights are getting curtailed. “It could be a girl that’s in the middle of nursing school. And she had an accident one night. The condom broke.  Her birth control failed. Stuff happens. So that girl’s life should just stop trying to better her life because of one mistake?”

For several years, Dina also worked at the local sexual assault and child advocacy program. They had a helpline and sometimes she’d get calls at 2 a.m. from rape victims. Dina says sexual abuse is a lot more common than people think in eastern New Mexico.  

“And what about the 10-year-old girl that her uncle did something to her? This little girl hasn’t even hit puberty, and she’s getting violated in ways no human should ever get violated. She can’t even drive, but she’s gonna have to be a mom? That doesn’t make sense,” Dina says. 

For Dina, it all comes down to one thing: “No place in America, home of the free, should be telling me what I can and cannot do.”

“This is my issue. This is the one.”

Victoria also struggled after she gave birth to her first son Jaxx, when she was 19 years old. She dealt with postpartum depression and felt she didn’t have access to the resources she needed as a young mother in Corpus Christi. This made reproductive health a central issue in her life: “It was like, okay, this is my issue. This is the one.” 

Victoria reunited with her high school sweetheart and got married in 2020. When she got accidentally pregnant and then miscarried in 2022, she struggled again to recover from that loss. “We were processing this, but I think it made us realize that we do want to expand our family.” 

She got pregnant again very fast and less than a month before giving birth, on November 3rd 2022, Victoria spoke up at what has probably been the crowdest city meeting Clovis has ever seen: the town was the first one in eastern New Mexico to vote on the ordinance anti-abortion leaders from Texas had written.

In front of more than 200 hundred people, her big belly covered by a black dress and a red blazer, Victoria asked her city commissioners not to pass the Comstock ordinance that aimed to prevent abortion clinics from opening in town.

“This city cannot be a city for the unborn when pregnant women like me can’t get the timely care they need. I’m due in less than a month with no appointment scheduled this week,” Victoria said with a shaky voice. “We have an existing problem that will get worse with this ordinance.”

Victoria raised concerns about exposing the city to a potential multi-million lawsuit, since the ordinance goes against New Mexico state laws protecting abortion, and similar concerns were echoed by other citizens, commissioners and even state representatives. 

“The language is purposely vague, the legality is a mess and the whole thing is completely rushed, with no regard for asking the people this will actually affect,” Victoria added. “It took me longer to grow this child and for you all to consider stripping away my rights tonight.” 

She closed her statement with a call for caution: Table this ordinance —which means, postponing the decision. 

After nearly two and a half hours, the commissioners voted seven to one in favor of tabling the ordinance.

It felt like a victory for Victoria and her friends, who had started organizing around this issue and coming together as a movement that they coined, Eastern New Mexico Rising. Dina Ortega came from Portales to attend the meeting as well. For a moment there was joy and excitement in the air.

On the other end, Pastor Erick Welsh, who also spoke at the meeting in favor of the ordinance, was quite disheartened. He says he felt manipulated by the local government representatives who were supposed to oppose abortion, but then decided to table the ordinance. 

A Wave of Ordinances

Four days later, Erick attended another city meeting, this time in Hobbs, about 2.5 hours south of Clovis and less than five miles from the Texas border. The town voted on an ordinance that was very similar to the one they had presented in Clovis, which was also written by the Texas anti-abortion leaders Dickson and Mitchell. Dickson was present at the Hobbs city meeting like he was at the one in Clovis.

Assistant City Attorney Valerie Chacon, a young Latina who was born and raised in Hobbs, made a presentation defending the Comstock ordinance and explaining why it didn’t conflict with New Mexico state laws. As Chacon moved through the slides, she confused case names, as if she were reading a script she hadn’t written. Pastor Erick Welsh thought having someone explain the ordinance in detail was the right move, and they should have done the same in Clovis.

“They educated their people and when it came to a vote, it was unanimous,” Erick says. The Hobbs city council approved the Comstock ordinance 7 to 0. “They realized that this is not the kind of thing that we’d have to sit around in fear.”

Two months later, on January 5th, 2023 Clovis held another city meeting to vote on the Comstock ordinance —with very few changes from the one they had discussed in November. This time, Victoria Robledo watched it online from home, still recovering from giving birth to Sylas, her second son, on November 29th. 

City commissioners mentioned several times that they had been experiencing a lot of pressure to vote on the Comstock ordinance, that they had been “called names.” 

“I think that we annoyed them to the degree where it just became too much,” pastor Erick Welsh says. 

This time, the City Council voted seven to one in favor of passing the Comstock ordinance. Only one female commissioner, Lauren Rowley, abstained. She was also the youngest member of the council.

“I was probably lost in a haze of baby tending,” Victoria recalls, but the words of one of the commissioners, Helen Casaus —the only Latina woman and the only Democrat representative in the council— stuck with her: “If anyone thinks they can do a better job, they should run. It’s not an easy job.”

Right then and there, when Casaus voted in favor of the ordinance, Victoria made up her mind: “I’m going to take your seat. I’m going to run for office.”

On January 10th, 2023 another Comstock ordinance was brought to a vote, this time in Roosevelt County, where Portales is located. Dina Ortega was in the room again. She put her name on the list to speak publicly at the meeting, but she wasn’t able to because they cut the public speakers. The commissioners voted 4 to 1 in favor of passing the ordinance. 

“I remember I walked out of that meeting and I called my mom as soon as I got out and I told her, ‘Mom, I’m gonna become a politician. I’m gonna get into politics,’” Dina says. “You feel that rush and I said, ‘What are these women, these girls gonna do?’”

Whole Woman’s Health Chooses Albuquerque

In March 2023, Whole Woman’s Health finally opened its first clinic in New Mexico. After considering Clovis and Hobbs, they ended up choosing Albuquerque, the biggest city in the state where several abortion clinics are located. The clinic had to open a second waiting room where there are toys and games because over half of their patients have children, and they’re coming from so far away that they need to take the children with them.

Amy Hagstrom, the founder and CEO, says that 95 percent of their patients come from Texas now.“I think in a community like Albuquerque, it’s big enough that we can blend in. Our patients may not be surveilled in the same kind of way that they might be in a small border community,” Amy says. 

Amy does think that these border communities are being targeted by the Sanctuary Cities of the Unborn movement, led by Texas pastor Mark Lee Dixon and Texas lawyer Jonathan Mitchell. They’ve used a similar strategy in eastern New Mexico, in West Wendover, Nevada, next to the border with Utah; and also in Danville, Illinois, next to Indiana, where abortion is also outlawed.

Several legal experts say that the conservative strategy is to push for these states that protect abortion to sue the towns that have passed Comstock ordinances. The end game, these legal experts say, is that at some point, one of these cases will make it up to the Supreme Court and maybe even lead to a national abortion ban. 

And this wouldn’t be the first time this happens, Amy Hagstrom says: “Oftentimes I have said, anti-abortion strategies, what starts in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas. And I meant that about the Roe v. Wade case, the Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, the SB-8 case. These are all cases that started in Texas that have affected people all across the country.”

Because there’s a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, there is a real chance that the anti abortion movement could get another outcome in their favor.

In a written reply, Mark Lee Dickson, the Texas pastor, was quite blunt about their final goal. He said his movement would like to seethe end of abortion in all fifty states, and that the Comstock Act is “a means to that end.” Dickson described Comstock as “the law of the land” and said that this federal law is above any state laws, or state constitutions.

Dickson also said that he never intended to provoke a lawsuit against the ordinances, but that he’s not afraid of the ordinances ending up before the Supreme Court of the United States. And he adds, “such a challenge could very well lead to the end of abortion in America as we know it. If that were to happen, I do not see that being a bad thing for America.”

Whole Woman’s Health founder, Amy Hagstrom, says it’s important to pay attention to this anti-abortion strategy. “They’ve had a lot of success sort of rebranding a lot of things that initially sound like absolute nonsense and then they introduce them over and over and over again and their diligence with that messaging can oftentimes make something that started sounding extreme, somehow normalized.”

Comstock Ordinances Face An Uncertain Future

The future of the Comstock ordinances passed in eastern New Mexico is still in legal limbo. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a petition to the New Mexico Supreme Court to declare the ordinances void. 

“The practical effect of all of these ordinances is to prevent physicians from performing abortions within the boundaries of the local governments,” wrote Torrez. “These are matters of statewide concern. The ordinances affect New Mexicans’ access to health care and unlawfully create a patchwork of regulation for a single medical procedure.” 

The New Mexico Supreme Court heard testimonies in December 2023, but it still hasn’t issued a final decision. Victoria Robledo traveled all the way to Santa Fe to be in the courtroom that day. And she didn’t go alone —she brought her baby, Silas, with whom she was pregnant when she first spoke at the Clovis meeting.

It wasn’t the first time that Silas was joining his mother in her activism. “He’s been to everything. He was a hit among the Capitol, the security guards, the legislators. It was very easy to get people to talk to you when you have a baby strapped to your chest.”

Victoria and her husband recently purchased a new house here in Clovis. They’ve decided to raise their two sons there in the community.Victoria did end up running for city council last March. What she enjoyed the most was knocking on doors and listening to people from her community —people who looked just like her. She didn’t win a seat in the city council, but she did get about a third of the vote. 

“I was disappointed, but at the same time I felt very hopeful because like those numbers looked a lot better than I had thought they would,” Victoria says. “I may not be the best person for this, but we’re still going to keep doing it because if not now, then when, and if not, me, then who? No one’s gonna save us. We got to do it ourselves. And so, we got to keep going.”

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Dina helped her daughter Sarah get out of her grandparents car and into her wheelchair to attend mass at their local church. Sarah is now a freshman at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales. 

When Sarah was three years old, Dina went to see yet another doctor. “He said she wasn’t going to amount to nothing, that she was just going to be a vegetable. There was no hope,” she recalls. “She’s come so far, but that wouldn’t have happened without God. I wouldn’t have gotten free from my ex without God.”

Sarah has shiny almond hair, cut in a perfect straight line, full cheeks and an unstoppable smile. She wears a pink sweater with the heart-shaped eye emoji. She’s proud of her mother and her fight for women’s right to choose. 

“I think it’s really good to show up for women’s rights coming from a woman,” Sarah says about her mother Dina. “I think it’s good to get herself out there and show what she stands for.”

Sarah says she’s already passing the tradition to the younger generations as well, teaching her little cousins. “You got to stand up for yourself. You got to watch for yourself,” Sarah says. “You never know what can happen, but you got to just be a woman and do things that you know that you could do.”

This story was produced in collaboration with WHYY’s health and science show The Pulse and supported by The Commonwealth Fund.

Featured image by Marta Martinez.

This episode was reported and produced by Marta Martinez and Maria Hinojosa and edited by Mitra Bonshahi. Fact-checking by Monica Morales-Garcia. It was mixed by Stephanie Lebow.