What Abortion Access Looks Like in Mississippi: One Person at a Time
'With state legislatures passing new abortion restrictions, the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund follows its own compass on how to best help clients.
When Brandy found out she was pregnant for the fifth time, she was 25 and single and had given birth to her third child two months earlier. Soon after that, she lost her retail management job of six years. It was midwinter 2013, and she could barely pay her heating bill. “I knew I wasn’t going to keep it if I could do anything about it,” she says now of the pregnancy. A month later, once she could afford the cab fare, she called a taxi to drive her 20 minutes to Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the only abortion clinic in Mississippi.
But once she was in an exam room for her ultrasound, the doctor said there was nothing JWHO could do: The clinic did not perform abortions after 16 weeks of pregnancy, counted from the first day of a patient’s most recent period, because the state mandated that those take place at a hospital. The doctor estimated Brandy’s pregnancy at 17 weeks. The nearest place she could have the procedure done legally was a clinic in Tuscaloosa, Ala., about 200 miles away.
This presented a few problems. One was that Brandy (who asked to be identified by only her first name) did not own a car. Another was the cost — . . .
She left JWHO in a daze and was startled when a young woman — black, like Brandy and like a majority of Jackson residents — appeared beside her. Surely, she thought, this was an anti-abortion protester. “But then she asked me if I was O.K. and started talking to me, and I just knew that she wasn’t,” Brandy told me. The woman, who introduced herself as Yolanda, seemed uninterested in persuading Brandy of anything about her pregnancy. She said she just wanted to know if Brandy needed a ride. In the car, Brandy explained her predicament. Yolanda said she worked with a local black feminist activist who might be able to help; could she give the woman Brandy’s phone number?'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/magazine/abortion-mississippi.html?
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