Known for decades as primarily an abortion provider, the West Alabama Women’s Center has struggled to get the word out that they’re now providing other care and worked to build a new patient population from scratch, mainly through word-of-mouth.įacing these challenges, the clinic and others like it in other red states across the country are barely holding on. The clinic is struggling financially, too. With the legality of such abortion-adjacent care still murky, the staffers are worried they could be shut down at any moment for providing it. The clinic often sees women who are trying to figure out how far along they are in their pregnancies so they can come up with a travel plan to obtain an abortion, and women who have already had the procedure elsewhere and need additional care. But patients are still terminating pregnancies by traveling to other states or ordering medication online. The procedure is illegal even in cases of rape and incest in Alabama, and as the state legislature weighs charging women who end a pregnancy with homicide, the state attorney general is also threatening to prosecute anyone who “aids and abets” abortion. We’d end up with a lot more pregnant women who don’t want their children, and the waiting lists would become even longer everywhere else.”īut staffers there are finding that providing comprehensive women’s health care services post- Roe is almost as difficult as providing abortion services before the state’s ban took hold. Without places like the clinic that offer low-cost and free services to people without insurance or afraid to use their parents’ or spouses’ insurance, “those girls would not have access to those things. “There are a lot of college girls here who don’t want to tell their mom when they need Plan B or even that they’re getting on birth control,” Abigail said as she perched on the exam table, hands buried in the pockets of her oversized tie-dye sorority sweatshirt. Googling around led to her the West Alabama Women’s Center, which offered her a next-day appointment. She then contacted the county health department - the sole recipient of federal family planning funding in the area - and learned it would be a four-month wait to see a male doctor and a six-month wait to see a woman. She first tried her student health center, but she was told it would be a three-month wait for an IUD and that they only had male doctors on staff, a deal breaker for her. The clinic’s history didn’t bother Abigail, who identifies as “kind of pro-choice,” but it was not her first pick of providers - mainly because she wasn’t aware it existed, despite its location a stone’s throw from campus.
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