They call her, desperate, scared and often penniless. Some are victims of rape and domestic violence. Others are recent mothers who are still breastfeeding children. Another pregnancy so soon, they say, is something they just can’t handle.
“It’s distressing,” said Angela Huntington, who works for Planned Parenthood in Missouri as a coordinator for patients who want to terminate their pregnancy. Huntington helps women who call her reschedule canceled abortion appointments, sometimes hundreds of miles from where they live following the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The Supreme Court ruling has sparked a flurry of travel across the country as more and more states restrict termination of pregnancy. Clinic operators are moving, there are more donations to nonprofits, and one group is sending vans to dispense abortion pills. Some cities, like Kansas City and St. Louis, are also developing plans to help with travel logistics.
Huntington has been preparing for this moment for months. Even before the Supreme Court issued its ruling last week that ended constitutional protections for abortion, termination of pregnancy had become almost impossible to obtain in states such as Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri.
Basically, they were already “living in a post-Roe era,” Huntington said.
Now, a new batch of laws are coming into force. Staff at a Nashville clinic were fielding calls from patients trying to understand the new legal landscape as a federal court on Tuesday authorized the state’s ban on abortions following six weeks to go into effect.
In Arkansas, some patients had already traveled to a Planned Parenthood clinic in Little Rock to terminate their pregnancies with medication when the Supreme Court ruled. When they arrived they were sent back home.
“I can’t believe this is happening today,” Huntington was told. Or they also expressed sarcastically: “Of course it is happening today.”
Huntington and others like her are trying to shift appointments to clinics in Kansas, Illinois and even Colorado. If a patient has no money but has access to a reliable vehicle, Huntington can offer them gas cards. She also works with non-profit organizations to book commercial flights and lodging. In recent weeks, she said, a group called Elevated Access has recruited volunteer plane pilots to ferry patients to their abortion appointments, sometimes taking off from small rural runways.
“It’s been hell,” said Dr. Jeanne Corwin, a gynecologist at a clinic in Dayton, Ohio, where most patients are turned away as new state regulations go into effect that ban abortions when a heartbeat can be detected. embryo heart. Many are sent to the neighboring state of Indiana, and to the sister clinic in Indianapolis for which Corwin also works.
The doctor said the patients are desperate, including one in her mid-30s who was diagnosed with advanced melanoma and is in her first trimester of pregnancy.
“She has to terminate her pregnancy” so she can start chemotherapy and is on her way to Indiana, Corwin said.
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Hollingsworth reported from Kansas City, Missouri, and Tanner from Chicago. Emily Wagster Pettus, in Jackson, Miss.; Colleen Slevin in Denver and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania contributed to this report.
