Post-'Roe' Postcard (Page 3)

Jackson

Because of the intensely hostile climate toward abortion, 60 percent of Mississippi women who want to end their pregnancies go out of state to do it, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Some others may even resort to illegal abortions. In the Delta, the poorest region in the state, parts of which are four hours from Mississippi's one clinic, "lay midwives" minister to unwanted pregnancies, according to several sources. Many others want the procedure but simply cannot afford to pay for it.

Betty Thompson hears from these women regularly. Thompson, who worked as counselor and then director of the Jackson Women's Health Organization for years and is now a consultant to the clinic, says women often call saying they want abortions but don't have the money to pay for them, and delay the procedure because they lack the funds. (The clinic charges from $380 to $615 for an abortion, depending on the stage of pregnancy.) About once or twice a week, she says, the clinic gets calls from women who, while trying to gather money or arrange to travel to Jackson, have passed the sixteen-week gestation point, beyond which the clinic can't provide abortions. "There's nothing we can do then," she says.

Thompson, a stately grandmother who had her first child when she was 16, says the National Women's Health Foundation used to provide money to help women who couldn't afford abortions at the clinic. But since the funds dried up last year, she often finds herself encouraging resourcefulness among women desperate for abortions. "I have to play the social worker," she explains. But hers is an unusual sort of social work. "I say to them, have you tried to borrow money from everyone you could? Have you tried to sell your jewelry yet?"

Mississippi forbids facilities that receive public money from performing abortions and bans Medicaid funding for them. Though the law officially makes exceptions for cases of rape, incest, fetal anomaly and danger to the woman's life, clinic staff say they have not once succeeded in collecting Medicaid reimbursement in these cases. "We've filed for it and we've never been paid for them, and so we don't even file anymore," says Susan Hill, the Jackson Women's Health Organization's president. Hill, who was a social worker before Roe, says, "Mississippi is like the rest of the country was before 1973." Women who arrive at her clinic "have that same look in the eye now," she explains. "They have to go through the same kind of struggles."

Some, for instance, end up spending the night in their cars after driving to the Jackson clinic. Mississippi requires that everyone seeking an abortion wait at least twenty-four hours after an informational session before having the procedure. Because 98 percent of women here live in a county without an abortion provider and some live several hours away, getting an abortion can turn into a two-day ordeal, and many patients struggle to find childcare and a place to stay while they're away.

The mandatory delay has also lowered the number of abortions and caused many to be performed later in pregnancy. The abortion rate in the state declined from 11.3 percent to 9.9 percent in the six years after the law was enacted in 1992, according to a study published in Family Planning Perspectives in 2000. (Another study compared Mississippi's abortion rates to those of South Carolina and Georgia during the same period and found the drop to be specific to the state, suggesting that the policy change was responsible.) The study also showed that after the law went into effect, the proportion of second-trimester abortions increased by 53 percent among women whose closest provider was in Mississippi.

In case the waiting period and the cost aren't enough to discourage teens from ending unwanted pregnancies, Mississippi also has a well-enforced requirement that minors get the permission of both parents before having an abortion. The only way a girl can get around the law--one of only two in the country--is to go before a judge and explain why she wants an abortion and can't tell her parents. One attorney, who has represented minors in such judicial reviews and did not want to be identified, said her clients, who have included an 11-year-old whose mother was a crack addict, were "scared to death" by the process. "It's a huge deterrent," she said.

Doctors who perform abortions, meanwhile, bear the brunt of the organized antichoice movement's wrath. Consider what happened to Donald Whitaker, a young doctor who until January 2004 was part of an Ob-Gyn practice in Hattiesburg and also provided abortions on a volunteer basis at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Mobile, Alabama. Last winter, protesters in Mobile identified the doctor, tracked down the address of his Hattiesburg office and began protesting in front of it--even though neither Whitaker nor his colleagues performed abortions there. The protests were led by antiabortion activist Father Edward Markley, who spent time in federal prison after attacking clinic employees and taking a sledgehammer to a clinic in Alabama. Weeks after these protests began, the doctor resigned from his job and left the state.

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