This Story About an Alabama Abortion Clinic is Supposed to Be Sad

Yesterday the Washington Post published a story about a Tuscaloosa, Alabama abortion clinic that isn’t an abortion clinic any longer. I think we’re supposed to feel bad about this.

Once, it was the sole abortion clinic in this half of the state. Then Roe v. Wade fell, the legislature’s near-total ban on the procedure took effect, and the protesters who would mass in the parking lot vanished. Nowadays, the crowd that gathers when word goes out follows the handwritten signs for “FREE STUFF.”…

Abortion clinics in the Deep South were once bastions of resistance and reproductive health care, especially in smaller cities like Tuscaloosa. The West Alabama Women’s Center opened in 1992, hired 16 staff members and planned to become a full-service operation, Marty recounted. “But there was so much need for abortion that we were never able to really expand.”

When the U.S. Supreme Court ended a constitutional right to abortion in 2022, the several hundred patients whom the clinic scheduled monthly evaporated overnight and staffing was cut to just a few positions. Other abortion clinics went further. Reproductive Health Services of Montgomery, the longest-standing abortion facility in Alabama, shut its doors. Whole Woman’s Health closed all of its Texas locations. A clinic in Jackson, Mississippi, was sold, while a few elsewhere relocated to blue states such as Illinois and New Mexico.

Unlike the others, this clinic didn’t close but it can’t do abortions anymore. In fact, soon it will have midwives to help women give birth. Does this sound like a negative outcome to you?

The clinic employs eight people, including a community outreach coordinator, a mental health counselor, doulas and midwives — who later this year will be able to deliver babies in a birthing center converted from what was once an abortion recovery room…

The only vestige of the past is a small sticker on the front-desk window: “Need to be unpregnant?”

“We can’t get it off,” [Director Robin] Marty said.

That sounds like a win to me. And if they need to get a sticker off a window, try a razor.

Marty says the clinic is struggling because Medicaid rules require them to have a doctor with hospital privileges in order to seek a reimbursement. But no one wants to work with this particular clinic.

…doctors and hospitals in the area refuse to work with it.

“We’re still being punished for providing abortion services,” she added.

When you make your living from abortion, some people may have a negative feeling about that. Clearly a lot of people in Tuscaloosa do. That’s the beauty of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe. Different states get to regulate this differently instead of being forced to pretend abortion is a constitutional right.