Abortion-rights advocates in the 13 trigger law states refuse to give up post-Roe

On the morning of May 25, Julie Burkhart got a call that her soon-to-open clinic, Wellspring Health Access, was on fire.

The clinic would have become the second in Wyoming to provide abortions and the only one to provide the surgical procedure for people who were past being able to end a pregnancy through pills. The clinic was set to begin patient services on June 13, according to Burkhart. But the destruction made that impossible.

Almost immediately, officials concluded that the fire had not been caused by an accident or electrical malfunction. It was arson.

A woman — described as white and wearing jeans, a dark hoodie and a mask — had broken into the clinic carrying a large red gasoline container and had set the place ablaze.

"It was a terrorist act. There's no other word for it," Burkhart told NPR.

"It's heartbreaking but also appalling that someone so recklessly would come in and start a fire when you could almost touch the wall of the apartment building next door where people were sleeping in their beds."

She added, "It just showed me that there is this grave disregard for the lives of the people right there in the neighborhood."

Burkhart notes that the clinic would likely have been in operation for only a few weeks, given what she read in May's leaked Supreme Court draft opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a case that last Friday resulted in the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

"We knew with this decision coming down that we probably wouldn't have long, but it would be something," she said.

It's not lost on Burkhart that the extremist violence of the arson serves as a painful metaphor for the situation that reproductive health advocates currently find themselves in. With every state legislature that passed tight abortion restrictions over the last few decades and with every win by conservatives who gained greater influence over presidents and other elected leaders, it has been like watching a raging fire get closer and closer — putting innocent people's lives at risk — and all while equipped with a measly fire extinguisher.

That's especially true for abortion-rights supporters in the 13 states that preemptively passed "trigger laws" designed to immediately ban or severely limit abortion in the event of Roe's reversal.

In the week after six conservative judges undid a half-century of legal protections for people seeking an abortion, NPR spoke with a handful of reproductive rights supporters — activists, doctors, abortion clinic escorts and women who made the choice to end a pregnancy — to gauge how they're feeling and what their plans are, moving forward in a post-Roe world.

What we found is a group of people bound together by immense grief, frustration and outright fury, but who are all committed to continuing to fight in whatever ways they