Is Roe about to unravel? The view from Mississippi’s only abortion clinic.
In 1988, Laura Duran felt the spiritual call to advocate against abortion access for women, and to save the lives that, in her view, are being taken with each procedure. That same year, Derenda Hancock walked into a women’s health clinic, received an abortion, and hasn’t regretted it since.
Although their decisions more than three decades ago helped send both women on divergent life trajectories, today they’re standing across the street from each other on a hot May afternoon in Jackson, Mississippi. As a woman walks into the Jackson Women’s Health Center, Ms. Duran walks after her, saying, “There are other choices.” Meanwhile, Ms. Hancock gently escorts the woman inside the building. “Ma’am,” Ms. Hancock calls out to the next woman to arrive. “Sweetheart,” to another.
Ms. Duran is an anti-abortion activist with the group Pro-Life Mississippi. Every day the center is open, she says, she stands outside, at times on her own, waiting for an opportunity to give the women entering the building pamphlets with titles like “I regret my abortion” and “I’m glad I chose life for me and my baby.”
For the past eight years, Ms. Hancock has worked as a patient escort with the group the Pinkhouse Defenders, volunteers who wear rainbow-striped vests and guide each person through any protesters and into the facility.
The Jackson Women’s Health Center is an unobtrusive building on Jackson’s State Street,
A challenge to five decades under RoePublic opinion – clear or complicated?
