A woman with a mental disability was raped in her Texas group home and needed an abortion. Under the state's new bill, she would have had to keep the baby.

• An abortion provider shared a Twitter thread of patients she's helped get abortions after six weeks.
• She posted the viral thread after Texas passed a bill banning abortion after six weeks.
• She said she wanted to show that every patient's story is unique, and they all deserve treatment.

When Kate was raped by an employee at her Texas group home, she and her family didn't learn she was pregnant until over two months later, when they went to a reproductive-health clinic.

Kate, who was in her mid-20s at the time, didn't know about her pregnancy because she had a disability that caused stunted mental maturation and prevented her from explaining what she experienced.

After Grace McGarry, a healthcare worker at the clinic, confirmed Kate's pregnancy, she was able to get an abortion. That was 10 years ago, said McGarry, who still provides abortion care in Texas.

If Kate went through the same experience today, she would not have been able to terminate her pregnancy, as she learned of it after more than six weeks.

On Tuesday, Texas legislators passed SB 8, a bill banning all abortions, including for rape and incest, after six weeks. The bill incentivizes Texans to sue fellow residents involved in abortion care performed after six weeks of pregnancy. If a resident sues and wins, they get $10,000 in damages and their attorney fees are compensated.

"This is somebody who we didn't know she was pregnant until she was after six weeks because the patient didn't have any means of communicating that information," said McGarry, who has been working in abortion care since 2004.

McGarry said Kate was one of hundreds of her patients who would have lost abortion access today.

McGarry said she's helped abused women, trans men, and homeless people get abortions after 6 weeks

After SB 8 passed, McGarry posted a Twitter thread, sharing the stories of 25 abortion patients she's worked with after the six-week threshold, including Kate. In the thread, McGarry changed each patient's name for privacy, she told Insider.

"Tonight I'm thinking about Imani, who had a condom break the first time she had sex. Six and a half weeks," McGarry wrote at the start of her thread.

She also mentioned how abortions helped a transgender man overcome his gender dysphoria and allowed a homeless woman to live more comfortably out of her car.

McGarry said she also worked with a woman who didn't speak English who had seven children and wanted to terminate her latest pregnancy. She'd never seen a doctor, McGarry said, and she'd never heard of birth control before meeting McGarry.

'Everybody who's in the position to need an abortion is the expert on their lives'

McGarry said she created the Twitter thread for the same reason she became an abortion-care provider: "I know that everybody has a story. I know that everybody who's in the position to need an abortion is the expert on their lives, and we need to trust them with that."

Since posting her message, McGarry said she's had an overwhelmingly positive response, including from people she knew were personally against abortion but understood that "it's a much more complex issue than outright banning the procedure."

Strangers on Twitter have responded, too, telling McGarry their own abortion stories.

"Regardless of how anyone feels about the procedure, I really want people to recognize that everyone loves somebody who has walked in those shoes, even if they don't know it," McGarry said.

"Every story is unique. When you blanket bans like this, it does far more harm than good to the most vulnerable people, especially people of color, especially low-income people, especially trans people."