The Rise of the Abortion Cowboy
The doctor wants a pair of boots.
Not just any boots, either. A specific brand of cowboy boot, handcrafted in Texas. Boots that adorn the feet of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, for instance, and singer-songwriter Chris Stapleton.
We’re at the airport in El Paso, after a seven-hour journey from a small regional airport in the Southeast to a major metropolitan airport to, finally, this airport, about an hour from the abortion clinic in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where Dr. Aaron Campbell will work for a couple of days before flying back home. Campbell, who asked that his precise travel route not be published for safety reasons, has made this journey 10 times in the last year. But today, before he starts his rotation, he’s got plans. He wants proper cowboy boots and a cowboy hat to complete the look.
You cannot begrudge the man this indulgence. Campbell is a mild-faced doctor from Knoxville, Tennessee, who only finished medical residency about a year before the fall of Roe v. Wade. But for most of his adult life, he’s known that he wanted to go into this line of work—it’s what his father, Dr. Morris Campbell, did, too. The elder Campbell had graduated from medical school in 1973, the year that Roe became law of the land, so he had witnessed what life was like before his patients had access to safe and legal abortions. He was determined to help women who did not want to be pregnant. Aaron was still in college when his father passed away suddenly in 2012. By the time he finished his medical school residency at the University of Pittsburgh, his father’s clinic was being run by someone else, who was ready to retire. If Campbell didn’t step up, it wasn’t clear anyone would. In June 2021, he moved back home and took over.
The next summer, all hell broke loose.
In the months following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, as abortion ban after abortion ban went into effect across the country, including in Tennessee, physicians who’d once had thriving abortion practices were forced to shutter their clinics and decide what to do next. Dr. Campbell was faced with a choice: Stay in Tennessee and give up providing abortion care (not an option for him), move to a state with liberal abortion laws (away from his partner), or remain in Tennessee and become a traveling abortion provider.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/10/abortion-new-mexico-aaron-campbell-pink-house/
Long, interesting article from the doctor's POV
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