On the line
SHANNON BREWER’S EYES DART TO A grid of grainy images on a wide, black screen above her desk at the Jackson Women’s Health Organization (JWHO). Live footage shows a large truck creeping into the clinic’s parking lot, its side emblazoned with a pair of blue, ghostly baby feet and the words WHERE ARE OUR CHILDREN? Brewer doesn’t recognize the driver. Her spine stiffens.
As the director and de facto head of security at the last abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi, Brewer is not easily spooked. In her two decades there, she has seen bomb scares and stalking incidents, and protesters getting in fights with her staff. She keeps the number of an FBI contact amid a sea of sticky notes beside her desk. But this year, she says, everything feels more intense. More dangerous. More consequential.
Her clinic, known as the Pink House for its bubble-gum-colored exterior walls, is at the epicenter of the fight over abortion access, in Mississippi and the country. On Dec. 1, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case, about a Mississippi state law banning nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. If the court allows the law to remain in effect, the decision the landmark 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to an abortion before fetal viability. “This is not gonna just affect Mississippi,” Brewer says. “It’s gonna affect women everywhere.”
