From her kitchen table in McKinney, just north of Dallas, Mohini Lal spends a good portion of her weekends intently pouring over case files and answering Slack messages as her young children pay on the floor beneath her.
“It looks like what I think a regular Saturday or Sunday looks like for most people—it’s just that I’m on my phone and helping people get abortions,” Lal says.
As a volunteer for the Texas Equal Access Fund’s text message hotline, Lal fields questions from dozens of Texans during a typical 12-hour shift. More than six months since the state’s near-total ban on abortion, Senate Bill 8, went into effect, she and other activists across the state have had to ramp up efforts to help facilitate access. A recent study showed that the number of procedures performed in Texas dropped by half compared to the previous year in the month after the law was passed.
