Women who had abortion access when they needed it fight for future generations

Abortion supporters hold up signs condemning recent abortion restrictions and calling for the election of pro-choice candidates at a rally in Phoenix on Oct. 8, 2022. A day before, the Arizona Court of Appeals decided in favor of pausing a near-total abortion ban from 1864 while Planned Parenthood of Arizona challenges its reinstatement. Photo by Gloria Rebecca Gomez | Arizona Mirror

A generation of Arizona women who were young when Roe v. Wade was decided and who believe their lives were saved by the landmark abortion rights decision are fighting for their children and grandchildren to have those same rights.

Val Smith remembers when her 15-year-old neighbor — a year older than her — had to go to a pediatrician’s office, through the back door at night, to terminate a pregnancy.

“I just remember thinking it was really weird that a pediatrician would do it and that she had to go at night,” Smith, a 64-year-old who lives in Tempe, told the Arizona Mirror.

Smith was around 13 years old in 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court made its decision in Roe v. Wade , recognizing that the Constitution grants the right to an abortion. Her neighbor’s procedure happened in the year or two after that, when the stigma surrounding abortion was still intense, she said.

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June 2022, the constitutional right to abortion that had been accepted for nearly 50 years was stripped away from women across the country, returning regulation of abortion to the states — and meaning that women in many states, mostly Republican controlled, no longer have that same kind of access.

Advocates in the Grand Canyon State are working to give women back the right to access an abortion through Proposition 139 , the Arizona Abortion Access Act, which will be put to voters in November.

If voters favor it, the act would amend the state constitution to guarantee a woman’s right to an abortion up to the point of fetal viability, which is generally regarded to be around 24 weeks of gestation. Abortions beyond that point would be allowed, as well, if a health care provider determines it is necessary to preserve a patient’s life, physical or mental health.

When Smith was 20 years old, she found out through her own painful experience that the stigma surrounding abortion still existed. She was more than five months pregnant, with a baby who she wanted and had prepared for, when doctors told her they could no longer detect a heartbeat.

Looking back, Smith is thankful that her abortion happened in a hospital, with access to the proper equipment and experienced providers, unlike her neighbor.

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Smith, who gathered some of the more than 800,000 signatures that the Arizona Abortion Access campaign collected to get the initiative on the ballot, said she changed hearts and minds during the process by sharing her own story.

When doctors couldn’t find her daughter’s heartbeat, they told Smith to wait a week, and then another. Then they told her that her body would “take care” of the unviable pregnancy itself.

After three weeks, Smith demanded action.

“I can’t do this. I can’t do this,” Smith told her doctors. “People are asking me when my baby is due, and she’s not.”

So, after four weeks with no heartbeat, and after she had developed a fever of 104 degrees, doctors finally agreed to induce labor. But even though her procedure happened several years after abortion was legalized, and her pregnancy was no longer viable, the opinions of some of the health care providers who treated her were clear.

“It was a horrible experience, because the nurses thought I was terminating the pregnancy (voluntarily), and they were really ugly about it,” Smith said.

At the time, she thought about how unpleasant it would be for any other woman or girl who needed an abortion to have her health care providers to judge her decision without knowing the circumstances.

“I don’t want to see our country go backwards,” Smith said, adding that now a woman in the same situation that she was in all those years ago would have to wait until she was much sicker to get the care that she needed.

Arizona law bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions only in the case of a medical emergency, meaning that doctors might have to wait until the mother is very sick before they are legally able to perform the procedure.

Smith knows from her experience talking to voters and gathering signatures that some of the people who say they oppose abortion don’t understand the myriad reasons that it might be necessary.

“I had one young man say that it’s murder,” Smith said. “I told him my story, and he signed.”

She also spoke to a labor and delivery nurse who said she could not support the initiative, until Smith shared her story and the nurse acknowledged that Smith could have gone into septic shock if she didn’t have access to abortion.

“Sharing my story is incredibly difficult for me, but also we have to protect a woman’s right to make her own decisions,” Smith said. “The price of sharing the story is worth the benefit of people changing their mind.”

Smith went on to have two more daughters, and said she often wonders if the child she lost would look or act like either of them.

‘It just makes my blood boil’

Julie Neff-Encinas, 67, who lived in Tucson for decades before retiring to travel the country with her husband, remembers what the discourse was like leading up to the Roe decision.

At the time, Neff-Encinas was a teenager with politically active parents, living in the suburbs of Chicago.

“I have vivid memories of conversations with my closest friends about the abortion issue,” Neff-Encinas told the Mirror. “It was huge in our world.”

One of her close friends was from a German-Irish Catholic family, with five siblings.

The friend told Neff-Encinas that, in the view of the church, abortion was wrong. Neff-Encinas asked her friend what she would do if she were to accidentally get pregnant.

“‘I’d have to have an abortion,’” Neff-Encinas said her friend responded. “‘My parents would just be nuts if they found out I’d gotten pregnant.’”

Years later, when she already had two children who were 7 and 4, Neff-Encinas had to have an abortion herself.

She was around 20 weeks pregnant when she caught a strep infection that attacked the fetus.

The amniotic sac lost integrity, all of the fluid leaked out and the sac was compressing the fetus, something that doctors told her it could not survive, Neff-Encinas said.

They waited 24 hours to give the sac time to heal and refill, but told her that, if it didn’t, she needed to terminate — or she could become septic and die.

Neff-Encinas chose to end the pregnancy after her condition didn’t improve. Doctors induced labor, which lasted a grueling 39 hours.

“It was two of the worst days of my life, ever,” Neff-Encinas said. “I held the fetus after they brought her out. She was not anywhere near ready for life outside.”

Looking back, Neff-Encinas said she is thankful that she was able to terminate her pregnancy before she began feeling ill, and before she could suffer damage to her uterus. She went on to have another child.

It angers her that women in Arizona now could not make the same choice, but would have to wait until they were in immediate danger before inducing an abortion.

“There was no point in waiting,” Neff-Encinas said. “Delaying the inevitable is just meaningless. It just hurts more. It was a horrible time for our family.”

And Neff-Encinas, who worked for the Tucson Unified School District for 30 years, was the family’s breadwinner, so if something had happened to her, it would be an even bigger blow to her family than the tragedy of losing a wife and mother.

“If they didn’t have my income, it would have been a very different world for my husband and kids without me if —  God forbid — I had died,” Neff-Encinas said.

Now, when she reads about women in other states with strict abortion bans, like Texas, being forced to leave the state to get access to the procedure even when it’s medically necessary, she said she gets angry. That’s one of the reasons she volunteered to gather signatures for the Arizona Abortion Access Act.

“I see that kind of stuff and it just makes my blood boil,” Neff-Encinas said. “It’s just so wrong.”

Those decisions should be up to women, their medical providers and any family members who they choose to involve, she said.

“Just get out of their business,” Neff-Encinas said. “Trust that women and their family members and their medical team know what they’re doing. It’s just so offensive that women are so disrespected.”

She said she’s worried for her daughter-in-law, who is currently pregnant, as well as her grandchildren, and what kind of future they face if abortion remains restricted in Arizona, or if a nationwide ban were to be put in place.

“It’s a very basic concept,” Neff-Encinas said. “Bodily integrity. Bodily autonomy. It’s our body. If pregnancy is at a terrible time in our life, if it’s in some way a risk for us, or if it’s the most inconvenient point in your life and you just can’t have a baby, you need to have control and be able to get with medical professionals and take care of it.”

Former President Donald Trump has waffled in his public statements about abortion over the past 25 years , most recently promising not to enact a nationwide ban, and saying regulations should be up to the states. However, he has bragged about appointing the three conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who tipped the scale to rescind the rights that Roe v. Wade had provided and indicated that he might support a nationwide 15 or 16 week ban earlier this year.

And some of his closest advisors and aides helped craft Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for a second Trump administration that calls for a nationwide abortion ban.

We ‘never thought’ women would lose their rights

Heidi Ross believes that if a strict abortion ban was in place 25 years ago, she wouldn’t have lived to tell her story.

When she was carrying her youngest son, Ross was diagnosed with peripartum cardiomyopathy — heart failure that happens late in pregnancy. She was told that if she became pregnant again, it could kill her. But birth control pills increased her blood pressure, so she was told to just “be careful.”

Ross, a 58-year-old Buckeye woman, already had two young sons in 1999 when she found that she was pregnant for a third time.

Ross’s OBGYN told her that the decision was in her hands, but if she chose to keep the pregnancy, it could not go past 32 weeks and doctors would have to constantly monitor her heart.

Her cardiologist, who shared that he was Catholic, with four children, told her the sobering news that, if she went through with it, the pregnancy would most likely kill her or leave her bedridden.

“So, I made my choice,” Ross told the Mirror.

Her sons were 2 and 6 at the time, and she didn’t want to leave them without their mother. Now, she worries that her granddaughter will have the same pregnancy-induced heart condition, without the same access to abortion.

“That is why I fight for my granddaughter, because I don’t know if she’ll have what I have,” Ross said. “Back then, you never thought about all of this going away.”

After her abortion, Ross went to nursing school and became a maternal care nurse. She’s currently in school to become a nurse practitioner.

Learning about Arizona’s abortion ban, as well as others across the country, inspired Ross to get involved with Democratic groups in the Valley.

“All I could think was maternal mortality was going to rise,” Ross said. “And it did. And now you have all these women in Texas screaming for their lives because they are allowed to lose organs before they can get an abortion.”

In 2022, Texas implemented a near-total abortion ban , with an exception only if the mother is at risk of death or “impairment of significant bodily function.”

Since then, numerous Texas women have shared harrowing stories about their travels outside of the state to access medically-needed abortions that they weren’t yet sick enough to receive inside the state.

Because Ross was not ill at the start of her pregnancy, but very likely would be by the end of it, such a law would have forced her to travel out of state, or to wait until she was very sick to gain abortion access.

“I’m scared that future women won’t have the same rights that those in my mother’s generation fought for,” Ross said.

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