Dr. Jamie Krashnin: When I came to New Mexico, for the previous four years, I had been providing abortion care in North Carolina and Georgia. So I moved to New Mexico, where they had expanded Medicaid and Medicaid covered abortions, and it was like this utopia. It’s like, oh my goodness. I was trying to explain to my trainees how amazing this was. There were no 72-hour consents. It just felt like being back in residency, like this is how we should be able to provide care for people. And then I would argue that what happened in New Mexico predated Dobbs. So first, it was either in March or April of 2020, Texas– I don’t have the right legal terms, but essentially shut down abortion care in Texas for a month, because– or two months, I don’t remember how long– it was deemed non-essential healthcare, and so it couldn’t be provided. So we had our first huge wave of patients coming in from Texas at that time.

Interviewer: This was COVID, right?

KRASHNIN: Spring of 2020. We were all like, this is what it would look like in a post-Roe world. Our governor at the same time was like, “Abortion is essential healthcare, tubal ligations are essential healthcare, it’s all time dependent, these aren’t things that can wait.” So then, Texas opened abortion care back up after a few months, or one to three months, I can’t remember how long, and then [Texas] Senate Bill 8 in September 2021, and then we were flooded.

Interviewer: And what did that look like, being flooded?

KRASHNIN: I just remember being overwhelmed. It was a huge increase in volume. It was a large increase in second trimester care. It was patient stories of trying to get care. It was staff being burned out. It was trying to do everything we could. It felt like crisis mode, trying to care for all these people who were coming with their stories of all the hoops they had gone through to try and get care.