SAN ANTONIO – Less than a year after it was sued by anti-abortion groups, the City of San Antonio revealed its Reproductive Justice Fund won’t likely help women access abortion care after all.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg left the door open to the city finding another way to help cover travel costs for women seeking legal abortions outside Texas.
The new fund was included in last year’s city’s budget after a push by groups supportive of abortion rights.
Though supporters have been careful to note the fund wasn’t only about abortion access, the issue featured prominently in the past 13 months of council debate and was the reasoning behind a lawsuit against the city last fall.
Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, abortions are almost entirely banned in Texas.
While the city included out-of-state travel costs for abortion seekers in a request for proposals on how to spend the $500,000 fund, it also included numerous other services like contraception and prenatal care.
City staff said Wednesday it was the non-abortion-related services that received the most response from groups applying for the money. Only two of the 10 applicants included travel costs in their proposals: Best AIDS Coalition Trust and Parenting Plus.
However, both groups lacked experience in that area, and neither made the final cut of organizations recommended for contracts.
Instead, the four recommended finalists would provide other reproductive health-related services, including free contraception, STI testing and wraparound prenatal support.
Though city council could overrule the recommendations, most council members seemed to support moving ahead with the contracts as they are, noting it has already been more than a year since they first approved the funding.
Both Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2) and Councilwoman Melissa Cabello Havrda (D6), though, were visibly frustrated by the absence of travel costs for abortion seekers.
“We’ve lost the plot, and we’ve lost the purpose on this one,” McKee-Rodriguez said. “And there’s a huge, huge gap in what this fund is going to be provided versus what it was supposed to be intended for.”
Cabello Havrda, who is eying a run for mayor in 2025, called the staff’s recommendation “watered down” and “unsubstantial.”
“I think there was an intention here,” Cabello Havrda told reporters. “We stood up, I think, for something that we really believed in. And I thought as a full council, at least the majority of (the) council did. And then today, some of them just kind of laid down. And I’m disappointed.”
Cabello Havrda suggested some applicants may have been scared off from including abortion travel costs within their proposals over the sentiment of “maybe the community, or the council, or maybe the city.”
At least two of the groups that pushed for the fund’s creation, Jane’s Due Process and Sueños Sin Fronteras, didn’t include abortion travel costs in their own funding applications. Neither group made the list of finalists either.
Nirenberg said the council had been “dancing around” directly addressing whether it wanted to support the travel assistance and said that it should have a discussion on funding that element specifically.
However, the council did not include the Reproductive Justice Fund in the FY 2025 budget it passed last month, and it was not immediately clear from where any additional money may come from.
Councilman Marc Whyte (D10), who avoided voting on the FY 2024 budget because of the Reproductive Justice Fund’s inclusion, shook his head during the mayor’s comments.
“Pandering comes to mind,” Whyte later told reporters. “Politics come to mind to me when I was sitting there — or came to mind to me when I was listening to those comments.”
Whyte also said he was concerned about legal exposure if the city tried to fund out-of-state travel.
The City of Austin set aside $400,000 for a similar purpose in its current budget, and the Texas Tribune reports the city has already been sued twice, including by the state.
San Antonio has already been sued over its Reproductive Justice Fund. Anti-abortion groups quickly filed a lawsuit after the FY 2024 budget vote, but a Bexar County District Court judge dismissed the case in April after the city argued that no money had been spent yet.
The groups quickly appealed the decision to Texas’ Fourth Court of Appeals, but no decision has been made.