The struggle to save a clinic that can no longer provide abortions
ON THE MORNING THE SUPREME COURT announced it had overturned Roe v. Wade, we had 21 patients in our lobby waiting to have an abortion. We cried as we were forced to turn them all away. They cried as they realized the very same medical procedure that was legal only a few minutes earlier was no longer available to them. But the reality was that each of those people represented a potential felony for my staff—and up to 99 years in prison. Within hours of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the injunction on a 2019 law was lifted and abortion became illegal in almost all instances in the state of Alabama.
Before the ruling, 95% of the patients we saw at West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa were terminating pregnancies. By the time it came down, we were seeing
