Courtesy Wendy Wolf
Local artist Wendy Wolf with a uterus puppet she and her friends are building for Saturday's rally.
Activists in Santa Fe and around the state plan to demonstrate at the Roundhouse Saturday morning in support of women’s rights—and against the newly inked Texas law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
Dozens of similar rallies and marches are planned for the same day nationwide.
Donna Thiersch, chair of Indivisible Santa Fe, one of several local groups sponsoring the rally, says the event has been in the works for about three weeks.
Thiersch tells SFR she’s done activist work for decades, including in the 1990s, when an anti-abortion group used a fetus preserved in a container of formaldehyde as a prop at an event in San Diego.
“Nothing is guaranteed if we’re not still fighting for rights,” Thiersch says, adding that organizers will be passing out pamphlets with information about supporting people in Texas and encouraging rally attendees to fill out pre-addressed postcards to their senators, urging them to take action to protect abortion rights.
The rally is being advertised through a Facebook group that had over 500 members as of Thursday afternoon.
It is also included on a map created by the Women’s March, an organization that originated in 2017 with worldwide protests held the day after former President Donald Trump’s inauguration. In addition to Santa Fe, rallies are expected in five other cities throughout the state: Albuquerque, Taos, Las Cruces, Alamogordo and Silver City.
Thiersch says organizers hope to see a couple thousand people show up for the rally at the Capitol.
Wendy Wolf, an artist who moved to Santa Fe last year, will be there—with a giant uterus puppet she and her friends are building out of wood and cardboard. Wolf says a knitted uterus she saw while at a women’s march in Washington, DC inspired her.
“It’s something that stands out and brings attention to the hidden thing that’s inside of us that people are trying to legislate and control,” Wolf tells SFR. “It’s all about controlling women and the only way for that to end is for us to stand up.”
The US Department of Justice is set to argue against the Texas law—which allows private citizens to sue anyone suspected of facilitating an abortion—on Friday, joining several legal challenges that started after the US Supreme Court decided not to block the law on the day it went into effect on Sept 1.
While abortion remains a constitutional right under Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationally in 1973, the Texas law skirts around the precedent by handing off enforcement from the government to citizens.
The ban highlights how essential it was for the New Mexico Legislature to repeal the state’s own anti-abortion law earlier this year, advocates say.
A 1969 statute banned abortion in New Mexico with limited exceptions. The law became unenforceable under federal law four years after it passed, but advocates pushed for its repeal, warning that the conservative-majority Supreme Court would gut Roe v. Wade.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed the repeal into law on Feb. 26, striking down the 1969 ban.
“Reproductive health rights are and have been under attack for years and this is the moment we knew was coming,” Ellie Rushforth, a reproductive rights attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, tells SFR. “Folks who could not imagine this day told us over and over that there was no reason to repeal this law and we knew that was wrong.”
Local community organizations and clinics in the state that provide abortions have seen an increased demand for services in the past month.
Indigenous Women Rising, which maintains one of three abortion funds in the state, saw an influx in donations in the week following the passage of the Texas ban that’ll allow them to assist more undocumented and Native people seeking care, co-founder Rachael Lorenzo told SFR in early September.
From Sept. 1 to Sept. 11, people from Texas made up 29% of the total abortion care patients at Planned Parenthood health centers in New Mexico, Neta Meltzer, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, writes in an email.
Santa Fe’s Planned Parenthood center offers the abortion pill, while one of two Albuquerque centers offers the pill as well as in-clinic abortions.
RALLY FOR REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS:
11 am Saturday, Oct. 2. New Mexico State Capitol, 490 Old Santa Fe Trail
