This Alabama Health Clinic Is Under Threat. It Doesn't Provide Abortions.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Dan Savage Retweeted

So if I’m being totally honest, I’ve been sitting in my thoughts for hours now on this
@politico
article about our clinic, because I have never felt this hopeless about our future before.

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politico.com
This Alabama Health Clinic Is Under Threat. It Doesn’t Provide Abortions.
Former abortion clinics in red states are trying to pivot to other services after Dobbs. But they’re finding it’s not so easy.

MAGAZINE

LETTER FROM ALABAMA

This Alabama Health Clinic Is Under Threat. It Doesn’t Provide Abortions.

Former abortion clinics in red states are trying to pivot to other services after Dobbs. But they’re finding it’s not so easy.

By ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN

05/29/2023 04:30 AM EDT

Alice Miranda Ollstein is a health care reporter for POLITICO.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Patients arriving for an appointment at the West Alabama Women’s Center one year ago would brave a gauntlet of chanting protesters, skirt an idling police car, take seats in a crowded waiting room and wait for one of the clinic’s dozen busy staff members to help them terminate a pregnancy. Over the clinic’s nearly 30-year history, visits also included the risk of being shot, bombed or rammed by a vehicle. ... But when Abigail arrived on a Tuesday morning in April, nearly 11 months after the fall of Roe v. Wade, the parking lot was so quiet you could hear the clinic’s windchime tinkling faintly in the hot breeze.

Accompanied by a friend for moral support as she came to get an IUD, the University of Alabama freshman walked unimpeded up to the clinic’s unlocked door, past a sign driven into the small patch of grass surrounding the low-slung brown building insisting that it is “Still Open for Non-Abortion Services.” ... Abigail, who declined to share her last name out of fear of retribution from her family, was ushered into the exam room right away by the clinic’s sole remaining physician. ... “If my mom knew this used to be an abortion place, she would not let it go. She would die,” Abigail said after the doctor inserted the long-acting contraceptive device. “But I think it shouldn’t matter what they used to do. They’re just as good.”

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. 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. 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. Googling around led to her the West Alabama Women’s Center, which offered her a next-day appointment.

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The clinic is struggling financially, too. 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. ... Facing these challenges, the clinic and others like it in other red states across the country are barely holding on. If they disappear, women who already live in dangerous maternal care deserts could lose a lifeline.

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Rep. Anthony Daniels, the Democratic Minority Leader in the Alabama legislature, counts 17 hospital closures over the last 12 years throughout the state, and said industry groups have warned him several more are at risk of shutting their doors. The Alabama Hospital Association revealed earlier this year that half the state’s remaining hospitals are “operating in the red,” and as Covid-era federal funds dry up, the care network is “likely on a collision course with disaster.”

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