Throughout their early teens, DakotaRei Frausto struggled with premenstrual dysphoric disorder, a severe form of premenstrual syndrome, as well as anemia and chronic nausea. In 2021, at age 16, Frausto went to a handful of clinics in their home state of Texas to seek out a birth control prescription, hoping it would help address their symptoms. But each of the clinics brushed off their pain or referred them to brochures rather than getting them in front of doctors, and Frausto, feeling defeated, gave up on trying to access birth control.

Soon after, when Frausto was 17, they started to experience more severe PMDD symptoms than usual. A pregnancy test confirmed they were eight weeks pregnant. “When I did test positive, I knew for a fact abortion in Texas wouldn’t be an option for me,” Frausto said, noting that the state’s six-week abortion ban went into effect in September 2021. “My immediate next thought was: How am I going to scrape together the resources to travel?”

Out-of-state travel has become the primary option for pregnant people in anti-abortion states to get the reproductive care they seek. But the logistics of visiting a state with fewer abortion restrictions come with legal risks and high costs, especially for teenagers. In Texas—a state with some of the most restricted abortion access in the country—a network of nonprofits is working together to usher minors over state lines.

Texas’s Senate Bill 8, also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act, prohibits physicians from performing abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, usually at around six weeks of pregnancy. Given the strict law, there are now two primary ways for women in Texas to get abortions after six weeks of gestation. The first is the abortion pill, which is not legal in Texas, even when purchased through the mail, but can be procured through an underground network of online providers. Still, those providers are subject to felony charges if they are caught distributing the pills. Also, the pill is recommended only until the 10th week of pregnancy—meaning that many women, particularly teens, won’t catch their pregnancies in time and will need to pursue the second alternative: to travel to one of the states where abortion is still protected.

Texas has one of the highest rates of pregnancy among teens between 15 and 19. Nationwide, people pay an average of $478 for abortion care, and nearly half of abortion patients delay other important expenses or sell personal belongings to cover their costs. But adolescents are less likely to have an income, making those costs especially prohibitive, according to a report from the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health research organization. Teens are also prone to irregular periods and mistaking early signs of pregnancy for PMS, meaning they usually find out they’re pregnant later than older women and are more likely to need second-trimester abortions.

In 2022, the rate of teen pregnancy in Texas increased for the first time since 2007, according to the latest data from the University of Houston. That may be because it has become progressively harder in Texas for minors to get confidential sexual health care and contraception. As of 2022, Texas clinics that receive federal funding for reproductive care can’t provide contraception without parental consent.

“People try to paint abortion patients as irresponsible,” says Frausto, who is now 19. “But this wasn’t my presumed irresponsibility but the negligence of my state legislatures, both when it came to sex education and access to contraception. My situation was completely preventable. It made me feel like a failure, even though I did everything right.”

Frausto drove 700 miles to a Planned Parenthood in Albuquerque—with the help of their mother and partner—for their abortion. They raised money via an awareness campaign on TikTok, which helped cover a portion of the $2,000 travel and clinic costs.

“My abortion saved my life,” says Frausto, who while in New Mexico got a prescription for birth control that has significantly reduced their PMDD symptoms. “It allowed me to find myself and not be stuck as a child in a situation being thrown into adulthood.”

The hostility in Texas toward abortion, even in the most egregious circumstances, is a major hurdle for young people seeking care. Women in Texas who become pregnant as a result of rape or incest are barred from terminating their pregnancies. Doctors or providers who perform or aid abortions at any stage of pregnancy in Texas face criminal charges, and they are restricted from performing even medically necessary abortions, threatening the health of mothers. Meanwhile, local governments including those representing Mitchell, Lubbock, and Dawson counties have passed ordinances in the last two years that prohibit Texans from traveling through their jurisdictions for an abortion outside the state.

“The purpose of the laws is fear, misinformation, and cruelty,” says Neesha Davé, executive director of Lilith Fund, which provides financial support to Texans seeking abortion. “Each time new abortion laws are passed, there’s new confusion and fear for abortion seekers about what they can and cannot do.”

Almost a quarter of Texas women incorrectly believe their state as a whole has passed a blanket law prohibiting travel to another state to get an abortion, according to a 2023 survey by Resound Research for Reproductive Health, a Texas-based research collaborative. And in 2023, nearly 6,000 teens reached out to Jane’s Due Process, which helps the state’s youth get birth control and abortions, in many cases to ask whether or not abortion was legal in Texas.

“Young people see one scary headline and they’re led to believe that they can’t access the care that they want,” says Jane’s Due Process youth advocacy and community engagement manager Ariana Rodriguez. “We remind teens that they have the right to travel and make those decisions for themselves.”

Ariana Rodriguez (right) and Brenda, a former youth fellow for Jane’s Due Process, attend a Planned Parenthood South Texas event.

Despite Texas’s antagonism toward reproductive freedom, organizers there and in other states where abortion is restricted haven’t given up. The Austin-based Jane’s Due Process funds travel for minors seeking abortions outside of Texas. That includes road trips or flights to nearby states like New Mexico or Colorado, where people under 18 can get abortions without parental consent. Lilith Fund, also based in Austin, helps Texans of all ages, including minors, book and pay for abortion procedures at out-of-state clinics. Together, the two organizations—along with others, like Fund Texas Choice and Buckle Bunnies—have built a grassroots network that has maintained Texans’ access to abortion even as the state’s laws become increasingly threatening to pregnant people.

Funding for these organizations comes from a number of sources, including donations, national grants, and, in some cases, local governments. Last year, a group of five reproductive rights organizations—including Jane’s Due Process, Lilith Fund, and Buckle Bunnies—joined together to advocate for a reproductive justice fund administered by the city of San Antonio. In September, the majority-female city council approved the fund in its annual budget process, and $500,000 was allocated to the city’s health department for reproductive care and out-of-state abortion travel.

Almost immediately after the council approved the fund, anti-abortion advocates filed a lawsuit that aimed to shut the San Antonio program down, arguing that funding out-of-state abortion violated Texas’s laws against “aiding and abetting” abortion procedures. In May, the judge on the case threw out the suit because it was premature—the funds hadn’t even been allocated yet.

Abortion access has been found to reduce teen pregnancy rates and increase women’s enrollment in college, particularly among Black women. At Buckle Bunnies, which helps young people in Texas get the abortion pill or find funding for out-of-state travel, “thousands of people have been equipped with abortion information, and because of that, we get to see them graduate high school or college and be better parents,” says founder and co-director Makayla Montoya Frazier.

In 2018—before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, rendering abortion effectively illegal in much of the country—Montoya Frazier got an abortion in Texas at age 19. “Buckle Bunnies wouldn’t exist without my abortion,” she said. “So many people get to live the rest of their lives the way they want to because I was able to access an abortion.”

The lengths these Texas nonprofits go to, to fund and organize abortion care, bring to mind underground networks like the Jane Collective of the 1960s and 1970s, which helped women in Chicago get abortions when they were banned in most of the United States. While modern Texas reproductive organizations operate within the bounds of the current legal environment, there are parallels.

“Women speak to women and they almost always find ways around a gender hierarchy that is controlling them,” says Mary Fissell, J. Mario Molina professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University and author of a forthcoming book on the history of abortion. “History echoes, it doesn’t repeat. But there are moments where you think: Wow, that feels familiar. That’s where we are now.”

Lilith Fund operates “in broad daylight because we want our organization to be able to serve people for a long time to come, but of course you cannot help but make corollaries and comparisons to what people are facing now and what they faced in pre-Roe America,” executive director Davé says. “These restrictions hit all pregnant people. Anytime anyone’s access to health care is restricted, their health outcomes are harmed.”

Thanks to a temporary injunction from a federal judge in Austin, organizations that support out-of-state abortion can’t be prosecuted for funding a legal procedure outside Texas. But the case is ongoing, meaning the legal landscape could change at any moment.

Even if the decision in Austin holds, San Antonio City Attorney Andy Segovia says he expects the city to be sued if dollars from its Reproductive Justice Fund go to organizations that support out-of-state travel, because of the aggressive nature of both the Texas state government and anti-abortion groups.

While San Antonio is still determining which organizations will receive the funding, it has allocated 40 percent of the total funds for what’s known as “downstream” care, which includes emergency contraception, travel to receive abortion care, and testing and treatment of sexually transmitted infections, says the city’s medical director, Dr. Junda Woo.

The efforts in San Antonio signal that despite Texas’s strict anti-abortion state laws, organizers and local governments are having some success when it comes to expanding access to reproductive care. “Texas may seem to be a red or an anti-abortion state,” Davé says. “Fundamentally, Texas is a state with anti-abortion state leaders, but it’s not what everyone in Texas wants or needs.”

HK Gray, a youth program coordinator at Jane’s Due Process, found out she was pregnant at 17, about a year after having a daughter at age 16. At the time, Gray was waitressing to support her family and studying for her GED on the side. She didn’t have help from her parents because her father was homeless and her mother was incarcerated, so raising a second child was financially impossible.

Gray, now 23, was able to get an in-state abortion because Senate Bill 8 hadn’t passed yet, but she says if she were in a similar situation today, the trajectory of her life would be completely different. “Now, I would’ve had to continue the pregnancy because I wouldn’t have had someone to watch my daughter while traveling out of state,” Gray says. “Instead, I live with my daughter, I’m able to work from home and dedicate my time resources to her in a way I couldn’t if I had two children. At the same time, I’m putting myself through college. There wouldn’t have been money to pay for school with another child.”

Jane’s Due Process youth advocacy manager Ariana Rodriguez and Serena, a former youth fellow, at a table at a social worker conference

For all Texas women, particularly those from low-income households, leaving the state to get abortion care is costly and logistically challenging. But minors “have more significant barriers than anyone we serve,” says Anna Rupani, executive director of Fund Texas Choice.

Many people under 18 don’t have driver’s licenses or access to a vehicle, and others have never been on a plane. They can’t book hotel rooms, rent cars, or go to medical appointments alone, so they need an adult to accompany them when they travel. And many teens have trouble calling out of high school classes or finding substitutes for part-time jobs.

In many states where abortion is legal, parental consent is required to get an appointment, meaning that teens often get later-term abortions because they either have to wait for judicial bypass—a petition from a judge that allows a minor to get an abortion with parental consent—or face long wait times in states where bypass isn’t required, says Rodriguez of Jane’s Due Process.

And as backlogs mount and wait times increase, requests for assistance are higher than ever. In all of 2023, Lilith Fund committed about $1 million to clients—a figure that was exceeded in the first half of 2024. Fund Texas Choice, meanwhile, gets up to 400 monthly calls from patients seeking abortion travel support, about 10 times the average three years ago. As demand goes up, services are getting more expensive and donations have slowed. Since the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe, the cost per client at Jane’s Due Process has tripled.

“When people see these terrible things in the news, they want to be part of the solution and this work that they care about,” Davé says. “But often, the shock can wear off and people are busy with their lives and their challenges, so we have seen a slowing in that outpouring of support.”

Reproductive rights organizations are also facing higher expenses, including information security costs and legal fees. “We are under such scrutiny and we are targets,” Davé says. “We work really hard to comply with the laws that are in place, though they are wildly unjust.”

The biggest risk for the Texas organizations is the regularly shifting legal environment, which could shut down their services at any moment. Rodriguez says Jane’s Due Process is gearing up for a “brutal” legislative session next year.

Out-of-state abortion travel is at risk in a handful of states outside Texas. In Missouri, which also has an abortion ban, the city of St. Louis in 2022 created a $1 million fund for abortion travel that is now held up in court. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sued the city, arguing that the fundviolated state law, and was granted a preliminary injunction to stop the city from allocating the monies to reproductive rights organizations.

“Hope is a discipline, and every day we get up and strap on our shoes and do what we need to do,” says Rodriguez. “If they do pass more bills, we’ll be out here fighting.”

The Texas Rangers will play their third double-header on Wednesday in Chicago.

The Rangers series opener against the White Sox Tuesday night at Guaranteed Rate Field was suspended because of rain.

The game was only four pitches in when it was suspended. Leadoff batter Marcus Semien will have a 2-2 count when the game resumes at 4:10 p.m. Wednesday. Game 2 of the series will start about 30 minutes after the completion of Game 1. The series concludes at 1:10 p.m. Thursday.

Andrew Heaney (4-13, 4.04), who was scheduled to start Tuesday, will start for the Rangers. It’s unclear if White Sox left-hander Garrett Crochet (6-9, 3.64) will remain Chicago’s starter.

Rookie Jack Leiter (0-1, 16.39) makes his fourth starter for the Rangers in Game 2 against right-hander Chris Flexen (2-12, 5.34).

The White Sox (31-101) have the worst record in the Majors and are flirting with setting an MLB record for futility. The 1962 New York Mets, the first season for the franchise, lost an MLB modern-day record 120 games. A few teams in recent years have come close. The 2019 Detroit Tigers lost 114 games. The 2018 Baltimore Orioles lost 115 games. The 2003 Tigers lost 119 games. The Orioles and Arizona Diamondbacks both lost 110 games in 2021. The Astros lost 111 in 2013.

The Rangers most losses in the season was 105 in 1973, their second season in Arlington. The franchise’s worst record, include the Washington Senators, is 106 losses in 1963, the club’s third season.

You can follow Stefan Stevenson on X @StefanVersusTex.

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Texas A&M University’s College of Engineering has achieved a milestone by surpassing its 25 by 25 initiative. As of last Fall 2023, the college has enrolled 25,132 students across its various campuses and engineering programs.

The initiative, launched in 2013, set out to increase the enrollment of engineering students to 25,000 by 2025 in response to the critical demand for engineers in Texas and across the nation. At that time, enrollment was about 11,000 engineering students on campus, including 8,000 undergraduates and 3,000 graduates.

Aimed to provide greater access to high-quality engineering education for qualified students who might otherwise be denied due to limited enrollment capacity, 25 by 25 focused on increasing enrollment without compromising the quality of education and maintaining rigorous academic standards. It ensured talented students had access to an outstanding public education leading to high-demand engineering professions and pursuits.

“The success of the 25 by 25 initiative exemplifies our commitment to addressing the critical demand for engineers in Texas and beyond,” said John Sharp, chancellor of The Texas A&M University System. “By expanding access and maintaining excellence, we are preparing our students to tackle the challenges of the future.”

The college’s success in exceeding its enrollment goals was achieved through a multifaceted approach. The initiative had three guiding principles: increase accessibility to engineering education at all levels; transform the educational experience to better prepare students to engage in and meet the future needs of the engineering marketplace; and deliver engineering education in a cost-effective and affordable manner.

“This milestone is a testament to our unwavering commitment to our land-grant mission,” said General (Ret.) Mark A. Welsh III, president of Texas A&M. “The College of Engineering’s dedication to excellence ensures that the university remains at the forefront of engineering education, equipping our students with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in a competitive global economy.”

Sofi English ’25 is a senior aerospace engineering student who began pursuing her degree at the Texas A&M Engineering Academy at Austin Community College. The Engineering Academy program was developed during the 25 by 25 initiative to help increase the accessibility and affordability of an engineering degree. Students are co-enrolled in Texas A&M and one of 10 affiliated partner colleges. They take core curriculum courses from the partner college while taking all engineering courses from Texas A&M faculty who teach on the partner college campus.

“When I graduated from high school, I was already taking courses through Austin Community College and learned about the Texas A&M Engineering Academy,” said English. “I am fully funding my own education, so the financial advantages of living at home and working a full-time job my first year while co-enrolled was a no-brainer.”

English has benefited from multiple internships that include NASA, the SETI institute and most recently, Collins Aerospace, where she was involved with space suit systems engineering and bioastronautics.

“The high-quality classes at Texas A&M prepared me well for each of my internships,” English said. “I will graduate in May and feel absolutely ready to begin a career in aerospace engineering.”

Dr. Robert H. Bishop ’79, who was named the vice chancellor and dean of engineering in April and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering at Texas A&M, is committed to leading a college that will always be intent on student success and positive societal impact.

“Students like Sofi English will drive progress and address the complex challenges facing our state and nation,” said Dr. Robert H. Bishop, vice chancellor and dean of engineering. “By investing in cutting-edge facilities, attracting world-class faculty and fostering innovative research, we are preparing the next generation of Aggie engineering leaders. I want to thank Dr. Kathy Banks, former dean of engineering, for launching 25 by 25. And — together with our students, faculty, staff and stakeholders — I am excited about the opportunity to redefine engineering education at scale and meet the complex challenges of tomorrow.”

As the college continues to build on the success of the 25 by 25 initiative, it remains committed to providing students with a world-class education and the opportunity to engage in cutting-edge research and hands-on learning experiences as we launch new initiatives in technology, computing, and space exploration, while maintaining leadership in energy, health, sustainability, and national security. The college’s dedication to innovation and a global perspective ensures that its graduates are well prepared to meet the demands of a rapidly changing world.