Where Roe Doesn’t Reach
“I would drink bleach right now.”
Kate shakes her head, and her long, sun-streaked brown hair, piled high in a messy bun, shivers. “That’s so bad, and I don’t mean it,” she quickly adds.
She’s exhausted; shadowy crescents frame her bright eyes. Just a few weeks ago, she graduated from the University of Mississippi. “My one goal, as pathetic as it sounds, was do not walk across that stage pregnant,” she says. “Everything I worked for…I’m going to remember graduating and being pregnant.” Kate has been trying to get an abortion since March. It’s a Friday evening at the end of May, and she was just turned away from an Arkansas clinic, about 200 miles from home.
In the morning, she’ll have to go back home to Oxford, Mississippi, where she’ll wait yet another week, and return to the clinic in Little Rock for the third and hopefully final time.
Her day began at 3 a.m., with a text from Laurie Bertram Roberts. Roberts helms the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, the nonprofit that was helping Kate get her abortion. Around 7:45 a.m., a white medical transport van arrived at her apartment, and Kate climbed in to join two of Roberts’ daughters, Sarah and Aolani, as well as Roberts’ partner, who was driving but did not want to be named. The crew journeyed northwest, through Mississippi, then Tennessee, then Arkansas. Traffic on the interstate slowed them down; by the time they made it for her 10:45 a.m. appointment, it was nearly noon.
Tired and dusty—the van’s air conditioning was broken, so the windows stayed down—the foursome stepped out into the humid Arkansas air. About 15 protesters hemmed in the clinic, and Kate kept her head down as a man bellowed that God would not judge her, if only she would turn around. Another protester, a woman with an infant, shrieked that Kate should carry to term and give the baby to her. It was that image—the baby nestled in the stroller, in the edge-of-June heat—that Kate says was seared
