This article appeared in the October 3, 2025, New Yorker issue.
Above photo: The waiting area of the Women’s Reproductive Clinic in Santa Teresa, New Mexico. Photograph by Robyn Beck / Getty
In May 2022, when Politico published a leaked draft of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, presaging the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Andrea Gallegos realized that she would probably have to move. Gallegos and her father ran Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services, an abortion clinic in San Antonio, and Texas had a trigger law on the books which would ban abortion if Roe was overturned. When Gallegos and her father considered where they would be most useful, Albuquerque, New Mexico, kept coming up. “It seemed like a place where we could still help Texans, and of course we knew the political climate in New Mexico would be friendly,” she said. The Dobbs decision was announced publicly in June; Alamo’s Albuquerque clinic opened in August. (Later that year, Gallegos and her father also opened a clinic in southern Illinois.)
New Mexico shares a border with Texas, but the experience of providing abortion care in the two states was “vastly different,” Gallegos told me. “It took awhile to adjust.” In Texas, legislators had always seemed to be enacting new regulations aimed at making the clinic’s work more difficult. “There were so many loopholes and unnecessary things that we had to overcome, that our patients had to overcome,” Gallegos said: a mandatory twenty-four-hour waiting period; a requirement that patients had to view ultrasound images; a statement that providers had to read to patients which referred to the fetus as an “unborn baby.” None of that was the case in New Mexico. Even the protesters were less alarming. “What we were used to experiencing was more aggressive, with Texas’s open-carry laws,” Gallegos said. “A lot of our protesters made it known that they were carrying guns with them while they stood outside our clinic. In New Mexico and in Illinois, it’s not allowed, so we don’t see that.” Being treated like “a legitimate health-care clinic” was a “huge change,” she said. “Many times my dad has said that it’s nice that we can just do what we need to do to take care of patients—he can just be a doctor and not have to worry about calling an attorney over something ridiculous.”
In recent years, New Mexico has quietly emerged as a progressive health-care sanctuary in the Southwest. Since the Dobbs decision, the number of abortion clinics in New Mexico has more than doubled, as clinics that were forced to close their doors elsewhere have reopened in the state, which has no gestational limits on abortion. More than ten thousand women have travelled there to receive abortion care. New Mexico is “taking on the burden for women who don’t have these protections in places like Texas and Oklahoma and Nevada and Utah,” Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham told me. The state also has among the strongest protections in the Southwest for gender-affirming care for both adults and minors. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidance limiting the administration of the covid-19 vaccine to certain populations, New Mexico’s Department of Health promptly ordered pharmacies to make the vaccine available to anyone who wanted it. This November, New Mexico will become the first state to offer universal free child care to all residents, regardless of income—an initiative that Lujan Grisham has spoken about as being part of a broader attempt to improve the health of New Mexicans.
New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the country; it also ranks near the bottom in terms of health outcomes. It’s banking on the idea that improving access to abortion, as well as other progressive health-care priorities, will help not only out-of-state patients but residents as well. “New Mexicans always think of their state as last, and I don’t know why that is”, Lujan Grisham told me. “these are huge announcements. There’s a lot we can do better, but New Mexico is at the forefront in many ways. “
Abortion was effectively outlawed in New Mexico in 1969. But, years before Dobbs, a group of activists calling themselves the Respect New Mexico Women campaign began petitioning lawmakers to overturn the ban. As part of the initiative, a coalition surveyed New Mexico voters on their abortion. “The prevailing cultural attitude was, I may not believe in abortion, but I trust people to make the best decisions for themselves and their families,” Eve Espey, the former medical director of the University of New Mexico’s Center for Reproductive Health and the former chair of the U.N.M. medical school’s ob-gyn department, told me. (Espey was a participant in the coalition.) “We’re purplish, but we’re more blue relative to abortion care.”
There was a “strategic, well-executed plan,” according to Deborah McFarlane, a professor of political science at U.N.M. and a co-author of “Regulating Abortion: The Politics of US Abortion Policy.” “They primaried out Democrats who weren’t progressive enough to change state law,” she said. The ban was overturned in 2021. In 2023, the state legislature passed House Bill 7, which enshrined the right to abortion and gender-affirming care in state law.
Espey, who attended medical school in California, moved to New Mexico in the early nineties, to work for Gallup Indian Medical Center. She found that, though people in the state were broadly tolerant of abortion rights, access was another matter. The state’s only consistent abortion clinics were in Albuquerque; access to reproductive care, and to health care in general, was a struggle. “Reproductive-health outcomes across the spectrum of pregnancy are worse than in many areas of the country,” Espey said.
When I spoke with Espey over the phone, she was on her way to Las Cruces, just a few miles from the state’s border with Texas, to care for patients at the Planned Parenthood clinic there. As demand from out-of-state patients increased, she said, clinics have opened throughout the state. “Even in Gallup, which is a much more conservative town, some very brave providers there are now providing abortion care.” Between 2020 and 2023, the number of abortions performed in the state increased by more than two hundred and fifty per cent, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for sexual and reproductive health. Most patients were from out of state, the majority of them Texans. As Texas has sought to access patients’ medical records in other states, New Mexico passed a shield law that protects such information.
New Mexico’s strong stance on abortion may seem surprising since it is more rural and more religious than much of the country. “New Mexico’s the West, not the South,” McFarlane said. “It might be religious, but it’s not as evangelical as some other states.” She also pointed out that more than half of the members of the state legislature are women, making the state second only to Nevada in terms of female representation. Lujan Grisham said she believes that the state’s high rates of poverty contribute to general support for abortion. “When you have access-to-health-care problems, as we do, it is not lost on any New Mexican how risky taking away our fundamental reproductive rights are,” she said. “And when you’re a particularly poor state, that can be much more pronounced.”
Lujan Grisham, who was elected governor in 2018, after serving a stint in the House of Representatives, has made abortion advocacy a key focus of her political career. “I was the first congressional candidate, I believe, to run on abortion care, and to use the term. Yes, it’s choice, and it’s reproductive rights, but I’m going to protect a woman’s access to and right to an abortion,” she told me. “I got a lot of pushback from a lot of folks, but, in fact, it’s why I won the election.” New Mexico allows the governor a certain amount of discretionary funding that can be spent on projects that require significant capital outlay. Lujan Grisham has allocated twenty million dollars to build reproductive-health clinics, one currently under construction in Las Cruces and another planned for northern New Mexico. “I want more abortion and abortion care available where people are, and I want more primary-care access for women and their families,” Lujan Grisham said.
Espey, who will help get the Las Cruces clinic up and running, said that it will provide “care across the women’s reproductive-health spectrum,” including contraception, basic fertility treatments, doula services, menopause care, and abortion, as well as basic primary care, immunizations, and cancer screenings. Though the clinic is intended for New Mexicans, Espey expects that many Texans will be treated there, too. Treating out-of-state patients will help with the clinic’s financial viability, Lujan Grisham told me. “They’re paying for the full cost of their care, and that’s helpful,” she said. “They can help offset losses from New Mexicans who have no coverage, or who are on Medicaid.”
Lujan Grisham is also hoping that the state’s embrace of abortion care will help attract more doctors and address the state’s long-standing shortage of health-care workers. Last year, New Mexico took out full-page ads in five Texas newspapers, urging medical professionals to relocate. “I certainly respect those of you who remain committed to caring for patients in Texas, but I also invite those of you who can no longer tolerate these restrictions to consider practicing next door in New Mexico,” the ad, framed as an open letter signed by Lujan Grisham, said. “We’re fiercely committed to protecting medical freedoms here and we’re taking steps to ensure that what happened in Texas never happens in New Mexico.”
The state’s embrace of abortion has met with some backlash. Anti-abortion groups have paid for billboards near the Texas-New Mexico border, urging women travelling for abortions to turn back. An organization called Stop the Clinic has been attempting to prevent the Las Cruces center from being built, in part by urging local companies to refuse to work on the project.
Some of the fiercest battles have taken place in the oil-field towns of eastern New Mexico, the most conservative part of the state. (In Lea County, in the southeast corner of the state, Donald Trump won eighty per cent of the vote last year.) In 2023, Laura Wight, a co-founder of Eastern New Mexico Rising, a local progressive group, spotted a flyer advertising the Texas anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson’s appearance at a church in Clovis, near the Texas border. Dickson has spent the past decade urging cities and counties, mostly in Texas, to declare themselves “sanctuary cities for the unborn.” After his church appearance, Dickson spoke before the city council, urging Clovis to join the ranks of sanctuary cities. “We don’t have a clinic here. We’ve never had a clinic here,” Wight told me. Still, she saw Dickson’s lobbying as a “five-alarm fire.” In Texas, Dickson’s efforts had initially seemed symbolic—most of the self-anointed sanctuary cities were places that had never had an abortion clinic—but they eventually became part of a novel legal strategy that resulted in the state’s “bounty hunter” abortion bill, which allows private citizens to sue abortion providers.
The sanctuary-city bill that Clovis ultimately passed cited the Comstock Act, the nineteenth-century obscenity law that some anti-abortion activists are hoping to leverage into a national abortion ban. “Those sanctuary-city folks were, like, Well, we can access eastern New Mexico because it’s red,” Taylor McCoy-McCabe, a member of Eastern New Mexico Rising, added.
Wight rallied groups to speak against the sanctuary-city proposal. The city-council meetings were “horrible,” Wight said; a local pastor posted Wight’s name and work information online and urged people to call her employer to demand that she be fired. “It very much felt like we were fighting the fight on our own,” Wight said. “The folks in Albuquerque and Santa Fe were shocked, because they just assumed that everybody’s safe in New Mexico.” Although the Clovis council initially voted to table the bill, they eventually passed it, and similar sanctuary designations were enacted across much of eastern New Mexico, including in Hobbs, Eunice, and Edgewood, as well as in Roosevelt and Lea Counties. Dickson and his frequent collaborator, the former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, were outspoken about their plans to use the New Mexico ordinances as a stepping stone to get the expansion of the Comstock law ratified before the Supreme Court.
In 2023, however, New Mexico’s attorney general, Raúl Torrez, sued to block the sanctuary-city declarations, arguing that H.B. 7 preempted the local ordinances. A year later, the state Supreme Court unanimously agreed, and avoided ruling on the Comstock issue, which makes it unlikely that the ruling will be used to force a national showdown.
Before moving to eastern New Mexico, McCoy-McCabe lived in a small town in Indiana. That community was just as conservative as Clovis, but it felt “completely different,” she said. “Here, maybe the city and the county want to do things that are very Republican-leaning, but they can’t. The state is protecting us.”
Even so, both McCoy-McCabe and Wight told me that they were taking a step back from public activism for personal reasons. Instead, they’ve been engaged in smaller-scale projects: organizing a gender-neutral clothing swap; pooling money to help a single mother from South Texas travel to Albuquerque for an abortion. “It’s just a scary time for everybody,” Wight said. “We’re just trying to take care of each other, you know? Support your neighbors, support your community, taking care of ourselves. You do what you can when you can. I think everybody’s struggling with how best to do that.”