Court pushed abortion back to the states. It isn’t staying there.
This time last year, Carbondale had zero abortion clinics. Now, this college town of fewer than 22,000 people has two – and lots of out-of-state visitors.
The majority of license plates in Choices Center for Reproductive Health’s parking lot are not from Illinois, but from neighboring states: Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
A few miles away at Alamo Women’s Clinic, the other clinic to open here over the past several months, an employee estimates that “.0002 percent” of their patients are from Illinois. Every day “is crazy,” says another employee. She estimates that the clinic performs about 50 abortions per day: 25 surgically, 25 with a pill.
Fridays and Saturdays are even busier. Those days are more convenient for out-of-state travel.
As nearby states have passed more and more restrictions on abortion over the past several years, the southern tip of Illinois, and Carbondale specifically, has become a hub for abortion access. And since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June, interstate health care commutes across America have skyrocketed.
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court ruled that the Constitution does not grant a right to abortion, that the authority for regulating abortion would be returned “to the people and their
