Robin Marty on Preparing for a Post-Roe America
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Welcome to Access, a podcast about abortion. I'm your host, Garnet Henderson. Today, I'm excited to be bringing you a bonus conversation with Robyn Marty. Robyn is a former journalist and the current director of communications at West Alabama Women's Center. She wrote a book called Handbook for a Post-Roe America, which was just reprinted with lots of new information.

So we talked about the book, why abortion access isn't as safe as you might think, even with Democrats in charge of our national government, and what we all need to do to prepare for a future in which abortion could be outlawed in large regions of the country.

If you've been to our website, you've actually seen Robyn's photos. She's got a great collection of abortion stock photos that I've used many times, especially for our first episode, which was all about what happens during an abortion. So if you haven't seen those yet, go check them out. And without further ado, here's my conversation with Robyn.

So my name is Robin Marty. I use she, her pronouns. And I am formerly from Minnesota. But as of a couple of weeks ago, I've moved now to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And I'm going to be talking about the

I spent the last decade as a reproductive rights reporter, primarily reporting on abortion access, clinic access, and also people within the pro-life movement. Over the last couple of years, though, my focus has moved primarily towards abortion access and especially abortion access in red and rural states and regions.

where there are very few, if any, clinics and where clinic abortions are really difficult to get in general. Because of that, I ended up about two years ago, time is meaningless, two years ago, I believe, writing a book called Handbook for a Post-Roe America. And it was specifically written with the idea that at that point, Justice Anthony Kennedy had just retired from the Supreme Court

And everybody was convinced that Roe v. Wade was on its deathbed. And by that point, most of the activists had realized that even if Roe v. Wade wasn't overturned, the actual right to an abortion was already so restricted that for many people it was impossible to get in any way, shape or form as it was.

So the handbook was a guide for helping people figure out both how to navigate trying to get an abortion legally if they need one, how to navigate getting an abortion outside of the legal system if that was the route that they needed to take, and then also how to best plug themselves into advocacy in order to try to get abortion access available for everyone again. And that ended up then being republished just this week.

The new handbook for Post-Rome America is most of the content of the old version, but we've added to-do lists at the end of each chapter so that people have concrete actions that they can take and work their way through. To-do lists on everything from how to go protest an anti-abortion protest.

how to prepare yourself if you're going to go do some form of civil disobedience, or even how to make a list to have everything all prepared if you want to do your own abortion at home so that you have all the things that you need for comfort and safety. And then there's a huge section, much expanded, on how to make sure that you stay safe online as well as how to make sure that you avoid any sort of surveillance should you decide that you need to get an abortion through a means that's less legal.

And I think that's really important. We did an episode of the podcast on self-managed abortion and something I didn't get into very much in that episode just happened.

because there was so much to cover in that one episode, was that issue of digital security, which is huge, especially when we look at the criminalization of people who self-manage their abortions and how common that is, despite the fact that it's not expressly illegal in very many states at all. So I would love to hear a little bit more about some of those steps that you highlight that people can take to keep their information safe.

Most definitely. One of the reasons why this became such a focus in the second go around of the book was because over the last year or two, we've seen both a large explosion of personhood laws that have been introduced. Some of them have gone into effect. Some of them have not.

For instance, in Alabama, which is where I am right now, we've seen how the states has written into the Constitution that a fertilized egg from the point of fertilization has constitutional rights.

And we've seen this play out in everything from the so-called meth lab bills that have criminalized people who are giving birth and are discovered to have drugs in their system. So they're being put in jail for that. But also the case last summer of the woman who got into a fight with somebody else when she was pregnant and ended up being shot by the other woman and the

she was the one who ended up in jail for murder because she lost the fetus that she was carrying during that altercation. They said that she was the one who put the fetus in danger and so she was the one who should be in trouble, whereas the other woman was acting in self-defense. So a whole expansion of all of these things that we already knew were happening regarding pregnant people being punished for not remaining pregnant or not taking care of a pregnancy.

So one of the things that we've been doing is we've also seen this very large surge of people who are going online in order to access help. This is happening for a number of reasons. One is because clinics are closing.

The second is because COVID has made it very difficult for people to be able to access these clinics in the first place, even if they do have one nearby. They're finding that they can't bring their partners with them for support. They're finding that doctors will set up appointments, but then something will happen to one of the staff. And so the clinic's no longer operating for a few weeks.

All of these things are making it very difficult in states, especially where we already had two time waiting periods where you had to go into a clinic more than once a few days apart, those sort of issues. And then, of course, is the very obvious fact that a lot of people are in serious economic issues right now.

The pandemic has left many people at home without jobs. Stimulus took forever to get here. There's just a vast number of reasons why it's simply not possible to be able to say, OK, I need an abortion. I have money. I can go and do that.

So we're seeing things that are happening online, especially in Reddit and then a vast number of Facebook groups of people who aren't necessarily trying to seek out an abortion outside of a clinic, but who will have questions about what's going on with the clinic, what clinic is safe.

And then other questions that will come from there, like not having enough money to be able to do it, not having the vehicle to be able to go, all of those sort of things. When people are doing this on Facebook, they often don't think to themselves, hey, there are people who are infiltrating these groups who are more than happy to expose me.

Or there are people who are looking to preach at me. There even might be law enforcement that we just don't know about that are in there. So people come in and a lot of times they will post under their own name with their own profiles. Luckily, there are some groups now that make it so that you can do anonymous posting.

So that's a huge change from the point in which the book happened. But one of the things that we were recommending to people was making sure that they lock down their profile before they go into places like this to make sure that they see what their profile looks like from a stranger, which is something that you can do on a Facebook page before you actually enter a group and ask questions. Do burner accounts on Reddit if you can. Set up something completely new, a new email address, a new username, whatever.

Use as little specific information as possible. If you live in a small town, don't say I live in this small town. If you live in an area where there aren't going to be a lot of people, you don't want to give a lot of private information that could allow people to figure out who you are. And then there's just really simple things like a lot of people are on Facebook and they are seeking out abortion and maybe have not told their partners or their family about

And if you go into their profiles, you can see these are my family members. This is my spouse. So these are all things that people need to look at and make sure is not visible before they start to do any sort of questioning online, whether legal or not. We see people who have said somebody contacted my boyfriend that they saw on my Facebook page and said, your girlfriend is thinking about an abortion. You need to stop her.

These are the things that happen in social media now that are even outside of, oh, crap, I could get arrested. It's, oh, my God, my family now knows about this thing that was supposed to be private and just for me. Right. That's a great point that digital security really isn't just about the risk of criminalization. It's about who you do and don't want to have access to your private information. So.

So, you know, I think that most people are aware right now that we have a Supreme Court that's very hostile to abortion rights. But I also think there's generally a perception that now that Joe Biden is in office, things are going to be at least a little bit better. And I would love to hear what you think about that. Yeah, I know you don't agree. So tell us about it. So.

So I always tell people that when, yeah, it's great. I'm obviously really happy that Trump is out of office. I'm really happy that there are Democrats in charge of the House and the Senate and the White House. But obviously, A, we can't overcome the Supreme Court. And unless we actually expand the court, I don't know how that's going to get fixed.

So knowing that we have one arm of the government that is very much out of power in comparison to the other arms and has so much more oversight than anybody else does. So there's only so much that can happen from a federal standpoint as it is.

One of the things that I tell people to look at is if they look back to 2009, there we had President Obama in the White House. We had a majority in the House. We had a, for a while, veto-proof majority in the Senate.

And we got what we all recognize now as a really, really watered down version of health care reform out of it. So the federal government is never going to save us in general. And even if the federal government could save us by doing things like, OK, we've gotten rid of the Hyde Amendment. And so now Medicaid can cover all of abortions or we

We've gotten rid of the protocol that says that you cannot mail medication abortion out to people. So now everybody can have medication abortion. What people tend to forget is that while these are great federal victories, these are victories that have already been cut off from ever being applied or accessible in red states and especially in the southeast, because

When it comes to states that have not expanded Medicaid, of 13 that are left, 11 of them run from Texas over to Florida. So we're not talking about like here are some states that have not done this. We're talking about there is an entire chunk of the country all placed next to each other that does not have the same access to health care that the rest of the country has. Right.

When it comes to medication abortion being able to be done via telemed, there are, I believe, 16 states that have actual telemed abortion bans, and most of them are in the southeast again. So we are not going to be able to benefit from any of these new things that could get changed federally.

And unfortunately, what we see tend to happen over and over again is that when people say, hey, federal laws are happening, everything's going to be OK, they move on to a different topic.

So then we lose the urgency. We lose the support. We definitely lose the organizing money and those sort of resources because people want to move on to climate change or immigration. And these are all really worthy things. Don't get me wrong, but the South gets left behind every single time. Right. And I also think it's worth noting that we haven't really seen change.

a lot of action on abortion from the Biden administration anyway. Essentially, he's kind of just restored the status quo from before Donald Trump became president. But we haven't seen a move from the president to, for example, get rid of the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funds from being used to pay for abortions, although there is a law that's been reintroduced in the House that

that would do that. One of the things that's really frustrating to me is that people look at this changeover as something that can be like, it's not even about the status quo. When Obama was in office,

And the House and the Senate belonged to Democrats. There was like a year in which that was a victory. And then the Tea Party started and everything focused and switched completely on the right to state power.

I mean, Obama in a lot of ways and that total Democratic victory was what led to the now 500 plus abortion restrictions that started in 2011 through model legislation that was fed out to all of the states.

It's like for some reason, progressives cannot work on two levels at once. We can either work on the federal or we can try to regain things in the states, but we don't seem to know how to do both of them. And so now that we're working on a federal level again, I am terrified that all the work in the states is just going to get kicked to the side, just like it was in 2009. Right, because there are a few states that have started to take

proactive steps to protect abortion access. Virginia, in particular, I would say is the state who's kind of done the most reversal of abortion laws. I'm really, quite frankly, extremely proud of New Mexico right now because New Mexico has been working for so many years to try to get its old pro ban on abortion off of the books.

And it has failed every single year until this year. And this year they managed to hold the entire coalition together, whereas last year they lost because of pro-life Democrats.

So the fact that New Mexico is now able to actually turn some of this around, New Mexico is such a really important spot because it is a place where it's a, I don't want to say access oasis, but that's really the only language I can use right now because everything around it is going to be so bad if Roe is overturned. Right.

I mean, we heard from somebody in a previous episode of the show who when clinics were shut in Texas because of COVID this time last year, one of the options she was considering, which fortunately she didn't have to, but she was considering driving to New Mexico to get an abortion as the closest place that she could have gone.

Well, and that's going to become even so much worse once you look at if abortion is actually allowed to be illegal state by state. There is an entire section, again, that will not have legal abortion based on previous laws and what has been happening in their state legislature. So New Mexico is literally going to be the state in the South because all the way across the

there would be, everybody has so far said that they will ban abortion outright.

Except for Florida. And Florida is still iffy because now Florida has a new Supreme Court that might take out the constitutional right to an abortion from the state constitution. If that happens, then we are looking at literally no abortion from New Mexico. Like New Mexico would be the only place and then all the way across nothing. Right. And people who live in the South and in the Midwest already have.

have to travel so far to get to the clinics that are left in their states. And now we're looking at people having to make

multi-day trips or having to fly somewhere in order to get an abortion potentially yeah we did we did a a poll together for just to give alabama media a background as to we do this at the beginning of every year to make them understand like what is the state of access in alabama what is the state of access in the surrounding area and we figured out that based on what is already set up

Florida will be the only place that people basically from Texas over can go to. But if Florida does flip, then the closest abortion clinic, if everything ends up going the way that we suspect, would be in Illinois. Wow. Yeah. It's not pretty. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. And so we know that a lot of states have what are often called trigger bans on the books that would immediately ban abortion if Roe v. Wade were overturned. So that's a lot of what you're talking about there. Yeah. Either on those that have said because they have trigger laws or the other part of it is just any state that has introduced a heartbeat ban and had it passed and signed.

because, I mean, we have to prepare for a possibility that the Supreme Court is not going to overturn Roe. They can say instead something like, well, states should have more leniency to be able to make whatever sort of laws that they want. And that's why the heartbeat bans, the ones that ban abortion basically at six weeks from your last menstrual period. That's one of the things that we've really been trying to hit is that we're talking about four weeks from abortion.

From conception. So when it's six weeks, there's two weeks that are still before you even would have the sex to get pregnant.

So this is just like a matter of two, three weeks in which a person would need to be able to try to get into a clinic and get an abortion. It's not going to happen. It's going to be basically impossible. And there's a very strong possibility that the Supreme Court will say it's not an abortion ban. So Roe is technically upheld. Every state has legal abortion.

Right. And we've heard from so many people on this show who did not discover that they were pregnant until after, in some cases, long after six weeks. It's really a lot more common than people realize. Six weeks is about the point where someone would start to suspect that maybe they're pregnant, usually. Right.

One of the things that I so there's a lot of different types of activism in the book and especially the new book. And one of the things that I sadly have to recommend to people is that one of the best things that you can do and invest in that is super cheap is the idea of going into Amazon or someplace online and ordering bulk pregnancy tests.

There are these tiny little strips called OneFroze, and they are basically the pregnancy test without the actual plastic on it, and you can get...

like 50 of them for $8. And it's awful, but they're really good. If you are ever going to be in a state where you would need to know immediately if you got pregnant, that's one way to do it really cheaply. And also I recommend them to people who are managing their own care because a lot of times they don't want to go into a doctor afterward because they're worried about some sort of, some sort of followup being a thing that would either make their doctor not,

give them the same kind of care or could turn them into the state or whatever. I recommend them for people to use every couple of days after they've had their own self-managed care so that they can check and make sure that the pregnancy hormones leaving their bodies. Right. And, you know, I think something you see a lot on Twitter especially is people talking about

stocking up on emergency contraception or even trying to get abortion pills and stock up on those. And so I'd love to hear what you would say about that. So I would say a couple of different things. One is that emergency contraception is something that everybody should have one pack, maybe two packs on hand for. But obviously, the idea of stocking up is how you end up taking it away and emptying the shelves for people who would actually need it.

So I say to people, unless you have an actual network that you work with where you are getting emergency contraception out to people, nobody's just going to walk up to a stranger on the street and say, hey, do you have any EC?

So you have one for yourself. You have one maybe for if somebody that you know has an emergency and you know they can't get to a store, but you never need more than two on hand. There are a lot of groups now that are doing really great work on emergency contraception dispensal. I'm working with Yellow Hammer Fund, which actually has a

free emergency contraception by mail for any person who has a zip code in Mississippi, Alabama or the Florida panhandle. And I'm also talking to a number of groups that are trying to expand their own. And so there are going to be a lot of places where people can get free emergency contraception.

And that's really important. And as that network grows, it's something that we need to make sure more people find out about, especially in COVID times and especially in rural areas where a lot of times people just won't even put it on the shelves at all. So that's already a problem. And then I'm going to say something that's kind of interesting. So I really honestly believe that and I'm not sure how it would work.

But I believe that any person who is capable of becoming pregnant and is worried about it should find a way to order one abortion kit themselves. It's a thing that I believe that everybody should do because I know a lot of people are purchasing them through Aid Access.

And that is a system that is the most affordable for most of them. But also it is a system that is so unbelievably slow. And I have huge concerns about whether people are going to get their medication in time. That's one of the things that I see the most on in different groups online is people asking. So I used aid access. I'm waiting for my pills. How long is this going to take?

And I believe it's getting better now that we no longer have Trump kind of stalling things at customs. But it's still a long time. And it's like any other clinic. It gets backed up. So there should be a way that people can have it ahead of time. I know that it can't be done through aid access because you need to give an ultrasound and other things. But we look at all of these...

countries that are now doing complete no-touch abortion pill distribution. And there's no reason why it can't be something that a person has in their medicine cabinet. So I do have lists of places where people can go to try and find medication, abortion pills that are not through clinics. A clinic is never going to give you pills, of course, if you don't actually have

have a pregnancy that they can see and confirm. So it's never going to be able to happen through that system. But I do believe that when you look at places like Plan C that have the listings of places where you can get medication, if it's a pharmacy, then you shouldn't need any sort of verification, in which case I recommend that if a person has the means, they should do that.

One of the biggest issues that I'm having right now, and this goes back to our whole talk about federal versus state and what happens when people stop paying attention to abortion access still being a problem, is that we're seeing all of these new telemed programs

And they're great. Like, I'm very happy that Gainuity is offering care, that Planned Parenthood can offer care in some places that we see Hey Jane come in and start offering care. But it's places like Hey Jane that actually kind of worry me, not because of their ability to provide, but because when you have a place that can give more, like, more affordable pills to

But they can only do it in certain states. That's where we're really going to see this huge divide between northern states, southern states or coastal states, Midwestern states. And so we're going to have these states like New York and California, which they can already use Medicaid to pay for their abortions.

But also now they can get these much cheaper, like I believe they're $200 or $300 medication abortions as opposed to in clinic abortions, especially down here in the South, a medication abortion is going to be at least $600. So we are setting up a system that is so tiered now. And it's very frustrating to me to see that access...

is going to get better and cheaper and so much easier in states where people already have pretty good access. And obviously, I want everyone to have access to an abortion as easily, cheaply, quickly as they possibly can get it. It's just I wish that it wasn't always going to be in the same places because people in the South deserve abortions cheaply, safely, and quickly too. And

I'm starting to wonder how that's ever going to happen. Right. And another issue there, too, is that not everybody wants to have a medication abortion. Not everybody can have a medication abortion safely. There are a lot of people who may end up choosing that option just because it is easier or more affordable when that's not actually what they want.

That is such a real thing. And it's such a real thing that is honestly kind of disturbing and coercive in a lot of ways because there are so many cases of people going to clinics and having clinics kind of talk them into medication abortion simply because it's easier for clinics as well.

there's always going to be the need for an abortion clinic and there's always going to be a need for people to a be able to do procedural abortions and also to be able to have procedural abortions, whether it's because of trauma in the past, because of longer gestational periods, whether somebody just needs a followup because their medication abortion failed, like there's always going to be all this need for abortion clinics. And that's another side effect of the abundance of medication abortion is that there's

there's like, what if we end up in a place where there's one abortion clinic that actually does procedural abortions in every state and everything else is just medication? That's going to be just as bad as where we're at with,

things now. Right. And there already are a number of clinics. You know, I think this is one of those things that a lot of people just don't realize. There already are a lot of clinics that only or or doctors in private practice that only offer medication abortion. There are a number of clinics that only do medication abortion. Another thing that's really disturbing that I don't think people have like a visual grasp on is how few clinics there are that do second trimester abortions.

In a lot of places, it's because there are laws that have been set up that make it so that you cannot, like the Dakotas, you cannot have a second trimester abortion unless it's done in a medical center. So abortion clinics do not count. Those sort of laws have passed. And then obviously there are clinics that just find when you get into a second trimester, it opens you up to a lot more risks, which clinically,

clinics are becoming more and more risk averse, rightfully so, because of the way that they're being castigated by legislatures and stupid lawsuits and Operation Rescue and all that fun stuff. There are not that many

second trimester and especially not third trimester care, but second trimester care in independent clinics. And that's another thing is that they're primarily independent clinics that are doing second trimester care at this point, too. And they don't have the same sort of system for being able to keep themselves afloat that Planned Parenthoods do. Right. Yeah. And second trimester care is also a lot more

for both the clinic to provide and the patient to pay for. And that's a really alarming thing because one of the things that we're seeing is in the South, our clinics are backing up again. I work for West Alabama Women's Center in Tuscaloosa, and we spent the last six months operating in

Maybe once a week, sometimes less, because we had a problem with licensing with one of our doctors. All it takes is one clinic in the South to not be able to operate. And then suddenly there's this cascade effect that goes all throughout. And when that happens, because we see so many people who are you don't have money and who

need assistance from abortion funds, then abortion funds start to get even hit even harder. And that when they have later appointments, then they need to start providing more money. So it's not just the patient or the clinic that's doing this whole chasing the fee thing that we talk about, but it's the funds trying to keep up too. And we're seeing so many requests

for solidarity funding, which means that it takes multiple funds for a person to get financed in order to be able to get a second trimester abortion now and be able to get to a clinic that provides it. Right.

And another thing I always try and emphasize for people is that when you have somebody who's waiting for care like that just because a clinic is backed up or they can't afford it, that's somebody who doesn't want to be pregnant, who has to remain pregnant until they can get to that appointment and know that they can pay for it. For starters. I mean, I've been pregnant four times and I've given birth three times. Pregnancy when you don't want to be is...

It's like pregnancy is not easy by any means ever. But pregnancy when you don't want to be pregnant is so awful. Like it's I don't understand how that's not seen as some sort of torture to people. Yeah. And then this is another thing I was thinking about when we were talking about six week bans as well. I mean, none of those are have been enacted right now, but.

We are certainly looking at a future where those types of laws could start going into effect. And even if somebody were to discover that they were pregnant right before six weeks, you know, five weeks or whatever, you would need a clinic to be able to get you an appointment immediately. Right.

So that's another reason why it's an effective ban. And these are a lot of times in the same states that are hostile and are passing six week bans are also the same states where doctors don't want to live there. And so doctors often fly in in order to do procedures. So they'll only come in once, twice a week, that sort of thing.

So it's really a rough thing. But another thing that I want to just make really clear about these so-called heartbeat bands is that we call them six week bands as shorthand and we really shouldn't because most of them are written to state the point in which some sort of heart tone can be detected. That's not six weeks.

So, and this is another thing that I had to do for the book because I realized that there are so many people who don't like truly, there's so much minutiae as to what is gestational age, what is last menstrual period, like all this timing. And when we're talking about days, it really matters. And so what happens is in a lot of cases, heart tones can be detected by an ultrasound vaginally within like, I believe it's,

21 to 28 days after implantation. So we're talking like three weeks, maybe. So you can technically see in some cases what they would consider a heartbeat at a week, a week after a late period.

But also, a lot of times there are a lot of abortion clinics won't do abortions that early. I know. Yeah. OK, we don't want to do an abortion until we can definitely see a heartbeat. But then also a heartbeat is the point in which we can't do an abortion. Right.

So it's very deliberate the way that this has been set up to make it so that people can't get care. And one of the reasons why clinics often wait until after a heartbeat can be detected is so that they are also aware of whether there might be an ectopic pregnancy. If there were like somebody who were to come in and say, okay, I just missed my period. I'm three days past

past my period, please give me medication or please give me a basically like a menstrual extraction so that I don't have to worry about this, then that person could still have an ectopic pregnancy and not know that because they went in so early that they weren't able to see. And I want to be really clear now that I just brought up the ectopic

pregnancy thing because this is one of the things that aunties use all the time to explain why you shouldn't be able to have a medication abortion. So using ectopic pregnancies as a reason to ban anything is

It's a ridiculous thing simply because if you have a medication abortion and you are pregnant with a regular non-tubal pregnancy, that will take care of the pregnancy. If you have a medication abortion and you have an ectopic, then yes, you could end up with a ruptured ectopic that way. But the thing is, any person who is pregnant runs that exact same risk.

Because almost nobody, especially with the way our medical system is set up now, is able to get in and have a pregnancy confirmed. And usually there are no ultrasounds within the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy. Like a lot of times doctors will say, okay, come back to me when your first trimester is over after you pee in a cup and they give you some prenatal vitamins because they're like, we're not going to do the medical expense that's going to be involved in this until we know for sure that you're not going to miscarry because so many people miscarry in the first trimester. The

The one thing that doctors always tell you, they don't give you an ultrasound when you first come in. They just say, okay, yeah, your pee says you're pregnant. By the way, watch out for if you get pain in your shoulder or pain in your side, because that could be an ectopic. So every pregnant person is at risk for an ectopic. It does not matter whether you have an abortion or whether you don't have an abortion. It's all the same risk. So if you just tell a person, okay,

You think you're pregnant. Here's the medication. By the way, after that's done, if you feel any of these signs that could be an ectopic pregnancy, go into the ER. Like that does the exact same thing and alleviates the risk just as much as any other way. Yeah. And I wonder if you could say a little bit about West Alabama Women's Center, just because one thing that we've touched on a little bit in the show is that

One of the problems with abortion access, too, is that there are a lot of doctors who've been doing this for a long time and they need to retire and there's no one to replace them. And I think that was the case with West Alabama Women's Center. And I know that Yellowhammer saved up to buy that clinic. So I'd love it if you could tell us a little bit about that. Sure. So what happened is that West Alabama Women's Center basically is responsible for women's

most years about half of the abortions in the state of Alabama. And it had been run for decades by a woman named Gloria Gray. And also the doctor that she had in was named Dr. Payne. Dr. Payne wanted to retire. Gloria wanted to retire.

Both of them... Well, Gloria was very concerned about the idea that if she sold the clinic that it would get closed or even worse, become a CPC. It's right next door to a CPC. So it was a reasonable concern. And that has happened, too. All the time. Yeah. So when...

After Yellowhammer Fund raised a lot of money because of the total ban on abortion in Alabama in May of 2019, Gloria approached Yellowhammer Fund and said, I would like to sell the clinic. Would you be interested in purchasing it? And obviously that was not necessarily part of the Yellowhammer Fund's big overall vision, but...

We recognized that it was a chance to not just purchase an abortion clinic to keep abortion accessible, but if we could find the right doctor, it meant that we could actually expand services to be able to do more birth control, more sexual health care, trans health care, STI testing, all of these other things that we always wanted to be able to bring in because Alabama is huge.

so devoid of especially respectful sexual health care, but just any sort of preventative health care at all. Like I said, this is one of the places where Medicaid hasn't even been expanded yet. So we ended up contacting Dr. Leah Torres, who agreed that she would be willing to move to the state in order to be a full-time doctor and medical director at the clinic.

And then this is where things get complicated and why it's so difficult to keep clinics open. Alabama has certain rules that are set up for if an abortion clinic changes ownership.

as to how it would have to then be relicensed. And as anybody who has ever worked in a hostile red state has dealt with medical boards will know that that's a very daunting process and one that often the boards are politicized, so it can be very difficult. Because of the way that the sale was arranged, that was not something that we needed to do. However, we ended up running into a huge issue when it came to getting Leah licensed in the

And that was a process that was extremely long and extremely drawn out. And finally, Leah came and began working in August. Leah had her license suspended for this process near the end of August. And Leah's license was reinstated last week.

So as you can see, there is a medical process and it gets worked through and it's very politicized and can often be very hostile, especially to abortion providers. And it was something that we knew we would have to face going in. We didn't know it would be quite this long.

But as of this week, Leah is licensed again and we are able to start looking at expanding all the telemed care and other care that we were hoping to do. But this is why it is so difficult to find a provider that is willing to live in the same community

as where an actual abortion clinic is. A lot of the clinics are places where you have to have a provider come in because they don't want to live in the area. It's not because they don't like the state. It's because they feel threatened or they know that their livelihood is

When Leah's license was taken away, there was a question about whether that would affect all of her other licenses in other states. Like, that's a really scary thing to know that you could move to a community and lose your entire ability to practice medicine altogether because there's a politicized board that's after you. Mm hmm.

Absolutely. Well, is there anything we haven't talked about yet that you want to add? Anything I didn't ask you that I should have? I do want to say that there is a perception of the South and especially of the South when it comes to organizing against reproductive rights being taken away, all of these other things. There's this idea that that's

It's too far gone to be able to do anything to help. Like a lot of times we see people, people that really excited about Georgia. So like, hey, there can be a change made in Georgia. And obviously, we saw with the last Senate race that things could be changed. We've seen all this work that has gone into voting rights, all this work that has gone into racial justice.

And it's amazing. But it was work that has been happening forever. And it was work that came out of a network and a coalition that was built up in Georgia and was built up in Georgia, to be frank, because people wanted to have federal political power. Like if Georgia did not have the chance for people to be able to flip Senate seats,

We would not have seen nearly as much attention, money, resources going into it. So it's really difficult to be in states like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, where people don't think that it's worth investing in it because there isn't going to be a election that can be won.

Maybe someday there could be but because of that we have to build our infrastructures all ourselves and people don't understand that in Alabama We have a really strong growing progressive infrastructure. We have policy people. We have ACLU we have TKO which is a the Knights and Orchid Society, which is black trans youth organizing urge we have all of these groups and

But nobody is supporting us here because we have to do it ourselves. And so I know that when it comes to trying to make progressive change, that eventually people are going to realize that Alabama and Mississippi are states that can be invested in. I hope that they realize it before it gets too late, because even just the tiniest bit of money, of attention, of any sort of activism for us can

can make such a huge change simply because we are such a low resource state that having that power would really change everything. Absolutely. Thank you for that. And thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. This was wonderful. Access is produced by me, Garnet Henderson. Our logo is by Kate Ryan and our theme music is by Lily Sloan. This show is a completely independent production. There's no big media company giving us money.

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