But staff are finding that providing comprehensive women’s health care services afterRoe it is almost as difficult as providing abortion services before the state ban went into effect.
The procedure is illegal even in cases of rape and incest in Alabama, and as the state legislature considers charging women who terminate a pregnancy with murder, the state attorney general is also threatening to prosecute anyone who “aids and abets” abortion. But patients are still terminating pregnancies by traveling to other states or ordering medications online. The clinic often sees women who are trying to find out how far along in their pregnancies they are so they can come up with a travel plan to get an abortion, and women who have already had the procedure elsewhere and need extra care.
With the legality of such abortion-adjacent care still unclear, staff are concerned they could be shut down at any time for providing it.
The clinic is also struggling financially. Known for decades primarily as an abortion provider, the West Alabama Women’s Center has fought to get the word out that they now provide another type of care and worked to build a new patient population from scratch, primarily through the mouth to mouth
Facing these challenges, the clinic and others like it in other red states across the country are barely holding out. If they disappear, women already living in dangerous maternity deserts could lose a livelihood.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have even worse health outcomes for the people I represent” if the West Alabama Women’s Center closes, said Terri Sewell, the Democratic congresswoman from the clinic’s district since 2011. Sewell noted that many of her los Voters depend on the clinic for mammograms, birth control and STD tests, and they cannot afford to travel farther for care. “I mean, there are a lot of services that can go away because the abortion decision took that service away, and that service had a lot of resources with it that are no longer available.”
Robin Marty, the clinic’s director of operations, estimates there could be only a few months left before it has to close, even as patients continue to stream through its doors from 100, sometimes even 200 miles away.
“This is life or death for us,” he said. “I want us to be able to do abortions, obviously. But there’s so little care of any kind here—trans care, HIV care, basic preventive health care—that we still need to be here. There is as much lack of access for everything else as there was for abortion.”
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