Latest news with #WestAlabamaWomen'sCenter
Yomiuri Shimbun
28-04-2025
- General
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Once an Abortion Clinic, It Now Offers Midwives, Formula and Housing Help
Charity Rachelle/For The Washington Post Tuscaloosa residents and visitors look for clothing at a giveaway organized by the West Alabama Women's Center in late March. TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – 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.' Under towering pines, the front lawn of the West Alabama Women's Center turns into a rummage bonanza – with baby formula, children's clothes and shoes, toys and other donations spread out on blankets. 'It's hard to live paycheck to paycheck,' said Keilani Camara, a mother of three from rural Knoxville, as she perused the offerings at the most recent giveaway. Camara works at a trucking company; her husband is unemployed. 'We can't afford to buy all our kids' clothes at Wal-Mart. Diapers, wipes, food: The economy of it! It's so expensive to afford children.' In the post-Roe world, the clinic has become an unlikely safety-net provider in one of the reddest states – which has some of the country's lowest rankings for maternal and infant health. With billions of federal dollars for Medicaid and related programs threatened in Washington, staff are bracing for a cascade of cuts that would make their work even more challenging. 'What happens when we have a government that decides it doesn't need to take care of its poor?' Director Robin Marty said as she sat in the heart of the clinic, where donated baby dolls from a recently closed maternity home were stacked. 'We are a great net and we are very strong, but we can only hold so much.' 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. In Tuscaloosa, Marty committed to remaining open and serving the most vulnerable female and LGBTQ+ patients, slowly rehiring and expanding services to meet their needs. 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. Many of the 150 patients seen monthly have multiple needs, and the staff test for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, counsel on substance abuse and even fund care for dental needs, a leading cause of miscarriages. They also keep gas cards on hand, since transportation issues often mean patients miss appointments, and help find emergency housing for those in need. A makeshift food pantry started in January is filled with boxes of macaroni and cheese, canned goods and baby food. 'We get a lot of unhoused population who come through here. How are you going to raise a child if you don't have stable housing?' Marty said. 'You can't take a baby home from a hospital if you don't have a car seat. What are you going to do? That's one of the reasons we make sure everybody has car seats.' Outside Alabama's major cities, low-income women have relatively few options. Local health departments often have small staffs, and the wait for basic care can last months. Tuscaloosa is home to a federally qualified health center, with satellite locations serving parts of western Alabama. Another FQHC serves central Alabama. The state's only Planned Parenthood clinic is nearly an hour away in Birmingham. Across much of the South, in fact, reproductive health care has contracted. 'The whole region is strained,' said Usha Ranji, associate director of women's health policy at the research nonprofit KFF. Marty and her staff regularly hold pop-up events offering blood pressure checks, ultrasounds and pregnancy tests to outlying rural towns such as Aliceville, Gainesville and Moundville. Depending on the season, they hand out holiday hams and turkeys. They appear at local health fairs and visit colleges, bringing emergency contraception where allowed. Last month, some clinic staffers were at the main campus of the University of Alabama, which is minutes away. While the schools have their own health services, 'we recognize that not every student is an affluent student who can afford all of that,' Marty said. Plus, with birth control, 'there are a lot of students who do not want to use the health center because that notification will go back to their parents.' Since its start more than three decades ago, the clinic has been tucked away in a sprawling, brown-brick office park. Inside, the waiting room for patients features a life-size cardboard cutout of a Black couple, with the reassurance that 'Breastfeeding is normal.' On another wall hangs a rainbow-colored painting of a woman's profile, captioned: 'To the world, you are a mother, but to your family, you are the world.' 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,' Marty said. Midwife Nancy Megginson began working here last fall after seeking permission from the elders of her evangelical church. 'Is it in line with our values?' they asked. Yes, she told them. 'Would you be providing any abortions?' No, she assured them. Megginson, who had just had her fourth child, ended maternity leave a month early to join the clinic and at first brought her infant son with her. She relishes 'being able to problem-solve and address people being underserved.' A quarter of pregnant women in Alabama receive no prenatal care. As a former labor and delivery nurse, Megginson is well aware of the complications that can result. 'This job meant so much, to meet a greater need,' she said. One patient that day had come two hours from her home in rural Thomasville. 'There's nowhere else for me to go,' said Tawney Thurston, 28, and three months pregnant, as she sat in an exam room after getting an ultrasound. 'If this place wasn't open, I probably wouldn't have had an appointment.' Thurston, who will be a single mother, is living with her sister's family and supporting herself with a new retail job. She hadn't yet qualified for private insurance so was relying on Medicaid. Yet, what if federal cuts to the program affect her prenatal care? 'I am terrified. What am I going to do if I lose my insurance?' she said. Clinic staff are also bracing themselves for the future. Medicaid is the primary funder of women's reproductive health care nationwide, and a sharp decrease in Medicaid resources – as advocacy groups worry lies ahead during the Trump administration – would take a big toll on already overwhelmed county health departments. Food banks and other safety-net groups could face steep losses, too. In Tuscaloosa, all of it could send more patients to the West Alabama Women's Center, taxing its nearly $1.2 million annual budget. Twenty percent of its funding comes from services, according to its director, with the rest from private donors and grants. 'If there are cuts, that does have a domino effect on other providers and that can lead to more demand for a clinic like this,' Ranji of KFF noted. With every Medicaid patient it sees, the clinic takes a hit. Federal regulations require a facility seeking reimbursement for services through the program to have a physician with admitting privileges at a Medicaid-covered hospital. The clinic does not – because, Marty says, doctors and hospitals in the area refuse to work with it. 'We're still being punished for providing abortion services,' she added. Doula Crystina Hughes, who had brought friends to the clinic for abortions before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, is now its community outreach director. She started organizing mothers groups and food giveaways after one patient mentioned having nothing to eat but her children's leftovers. 'I'm creating all these events so people don't feel shame and come and get help,' Hughes said. 'If we're doing a visit and you're like, 'My lights might get cut off this month' or 'I don't have food to feed my kids,' those needs have to get met first.' The latest rummage event was a success, she thought. It drew several dozen people, most of them women of color. There were Black women – one was eight months pregnant – but also migrants from Guatemala and Mexico, some documented, some not. In the wake of federal immigration raids across the country, many said they had almost been afraid to come. But they heard clinic staff were trustworthy. Mariana Maldonado, 32, and four months pregnant, was at the event to look for items for her daughters, who are 11 and 14, and her 6-year-old son. 'We need clothes,' said Maldonado, a legal resident from Mexico who works as a house cleaner in Tuscaloosa. Her husband works in construction, but as she put it in Spanish, 'There's not a lot of work right now.' It's been hard finding nearby clinics that will accept her Medicaid coverage and have Spanish-speaking staff, she said. She worries about federal lawmakers cutting Medicaid. Her only alternative if they do? 'Work more.'
Reuters
01-04-2025
- Health
- Reuters
Alabama cannot prosecute those who help travel for abortion, judge rules
April 1 (Reuters) - Alabama cannot prosecute people and organizations who help residents of the state travel elsewhere to get abortions, a federal judge has ruled, in one of the first decisions over the right to travel for abortion. U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson in Montgomery, Alabama found on Monday, opens new tab that the state cannot interfere with the basic constitutional right to travel, and that prosecuting doctors or organizations for helping patients would violate their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The ruling is a victory for healthcare provider West Alabama Women's Center and doctor Yashica Robinson, as well as for the Yellowhammer Fund, a group that helps people raise money to access abortion. They had sued Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall to block him from prosecuting them after he said in a 2022 radio interview that those who help state residents travel for abortion could be prosecuted as accomplices to a crime. "The court's decision today should send a strong message to any and all anti-abortion politicians who are considering similar efforts to muzzle health care providers or penalize those who assist others in crossing state lines to obtain legal abortion: such attacks on free speech and the fundamental right to travel fly in the face of the Constitution and cannot stand," Meagan Burrows of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents West Alabama Women's Center, said in a statement. Marshall's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Marshall had argued in court that the state had an interest in preventing its residents from aiding in conduct that it has criminalized. But Thompson, who was appointed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter, said that if that argument were upheld, Marshall "would have within his reach the authority to prosecute Alabamians planning a Las Vegas bachelor party, complete with casinos and gambling, since casino-style gambling is outlawed in Alabama." Americans' right to travel to other states for abortion, and to help others do so, has come into question since the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned its landmark Roe v. Wade precedent on abortion rights, allowing states to criminalize the procedure. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights research group, found that travel for abortion more than doubled in the first half of 2023 compared with the first half of 2020. Thompson noted in Monday's decision that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, an appointee of Republican President Donald Trump, wrote in a concurrence to the high court's opinion reversing Roe that the Constitution protects the right to travel. The issue could ultimately end up before the Supreme Court. In another case, a federal appeals court largely allowed Idaho to enforce a law against "trafficking" minors to other states for abortion without their parents' consent, but blocked a part of the law that prohibits "recruiting" minors to get abortions on First Amendment grounds. Some local governments in Texas have also passed laws aiming to curb out-of-state travel for abortion, which do not yet appear to have been tested in court. The case is Yellowhammer Fund v. Marshall, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, No. 2:23-cv-00450. For West Alabama Women's Center: Meagan Burrows of the American Civil Liberties Union, Alison Mollman of ACLU of Alabama and others For Yellowhammer: Jamila Johnson of The Lawyering Project, Krista Dolan of Southern Poverty Law Center and others For the Attorney General: Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Seiss
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Federal judge blocks Alabama from prosecuting those aiding out-of-state abortion travel
A shot of cards on a table at West Alabama Women's Center in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Friday, Feb. 10, 2023. U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson ruled Alabama's AG cannot punish residents for aiding out-of-state abortion care. (Vasha Hunt for Alabama Reflector) A federal judge Monday ruled that Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall cannot prosecute people who assist individuals seeking to leave the state to obtain abortion care. U.S. District Judge Myron H. Thompson Monday ruled in a 131-page opinion that the AG's threatened enforcement of the state's criminal laws to prosecute those who assist individuals seeking to leave the state for abortion care violates both the First Amendment and the right to travel. 'At its core, this case is simply about whether a state may prevent people within its borders from going to another state, and from assisting others in going to another state, to engage in lawful conduct there,' Thompson repeated from his ruling in May denying the AG's motion to dismiss and added, 'The court now answers no, a state cannot.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX The lawsuit was filed by Yellowhammer Fund; WAWC, formerly the West Alabama Women's Center; Alabama Women's Center (AWC) in Huntsville and Dr. Yashica Robinson, after Marshall in 2022 publicly threatened to criminally prosecute those who assist women seeking to travel out-of-state to get an abortion under Alabama's near-total abortion ban. Marshall's office later defended his power to do so in a court filing in August 2023. 'An elective abortion performed in Alabama would be a criminal offense; thus, a conspiracy formed in the State to have that same act performed outside the State is illegal,' the filing stated. Amanda Priest, a spokesperson for the Attorney General's office, wrote in an email that 'the office is reviewing the decision to determine the state's options.' Alabama has had an effective ban on abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down federal abortion rights protections in 2022. Thompson ruled that the attorney general's threats violated the plaintiffs' clients' right to travel. He said in the ruling that the right to travel includes the right both to move physically between states and to do what is lawful in those states, and prosecuting those who facilitate lawful out-of-state abortions would violate that right. The court also found that the attorney general's threatened enforcement of Alabama's criminal laws imposes a content- and viewpoint-based restriction on speech, which violates the First Amendment. 'The attorney general has presented no other reason to deny the plaintiffs' First Amendment claim besides his attempt to invoke the Giboney exception, which, as stated, does not extend to speech in furtherance of lawful out-of-state conduct,' Thompson wrote. The Giboney exception would restrict speech that is directly part of or essential to committing a crime. 'Since the attorney general's threatened enforcement cannot meet strict scrutiny, the court will enter summary judgment in favor of the plaintiffs for this freedom-of-speech claim,' Thompson concluded. Thompson, in his conclusion, cautioned against the implications of the attorney general's threats, writing that it is 'one thing for Alabama to outlaw by statute what happens in its own backyard. It is another thing for the state to enforce its values and laws, as chosen by the attorney general, outside its boundaries by punishing its citizens and others who help.' 'If Alabama held the power its Attorney General asserts here, it is hard to envision a limiting principle besides what the Attorney General personally sees as permissible and impermissible,' he wrote. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Federal judge hears arguments in lawsuit over Alabama AG's threats to prosecute abortion aid
A sign outside the Frank M. Johnson Jr. Federal Building and United States Courthouse in Montgomery, Alabama seen on January 24, 2023. A federal judge heard arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit over Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall's threats to prosecute groups helping Alabamians obtain out-of-state abortions. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector) A federal judge on Wednesday heard oral arguments in a lawsuit seeking to stop Alabama officials from prosecuting groups and individuals who help residents travel out of state to obtain abortions. The lawsuit, filed by Yellowhammer Fund, West Alabama Women's Center and others, cites comments made by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall in 2023 suggesting that organizations aiding out-of-state abortions could face criminal conspiracy charges. The plaintiffs argue that such threats violate their constitutional rights to free speech, association and interstate travel. During the hearing, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson pressed both sides on the scope of the state's authority to enforce Alabama's abortion ban beyond its borders and constitutional protections for organizations that support abortion access. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Jamila Johnson, representing Yellowhammer Fund, said the organization's activities — including providing financial assistance, arranging transportation and accompanying patients — are forms of protected speech and association. 'That would include … accompanying someone to their appointment, making sure that someone has the ability to get to an appointment, providing them oral support and upholding their dignity to make their own decisions, and the funding of the abortion itself for those who are unable to afford to do so,' Johnson said. Johnson said that the organization also asserts its own First Amendment rights, not just those of its clients, but the organization itself. 'Yellowhammer, as a nonprofit, has the ability to assert a right to travel claim,' she said. 'One of the issues we have always had is that when we put specific staff members [forward], we end up targeting them in some manner, which we try to avoid doing when possible.' Attorneys for the state argued that logistical support like funding and transportation is not inherently expressive conduct and falls outside First Amendment protection. Alabama Attorney General doubles down on threats to prosecute out-of-state abortion care 'We certainly don't dispute the intent to convey a message,' said Dylan Baldwin, an attorney with the Alabama Attorney General's office, adding that those actions alone aren't speech, and without explanation, people wouldn't see them as a clear message Baldwin said that other entities, such as insurance companies or individuals, provide funds for abortions without that act itself being considered expressive. 'The messages become apparent only by them explaining that it's about a message of love and solidarity and support,' he said. Johnson pushed back, saying the conduct must be considered within its full context. 'The First Amendment has never said that speech has to go to 10 people or 20 people. You have a First Amendment right to speak to one person if you needed to,' she said. Thompson also questioned the state about its position on whether Alabama could prosecute individuals who help loved ones obtain out-of-state abortions. 'Would a husband who drove his wife to Georgia to get an abortion… could [he] be prosecuted under this?' Thompson asked lawyers for the state. Charles McKay, an attorney with the attorney general's office, said that the scenario is different because of three reasons: Alabama doesn't have a strong interest in prosecuting loved ones; the act is done in private versus in public and its scale. 'I think this case is quite different, because we do have organizations that are holding themselves up publicly as providing a whole manner of support for abortion,' McKay said. Thompson indicated he aims to issue a ruling soon and questioned whether, if he rules for the plaintiffs, a declaratory judgment would be sufficient or whether a permanent injunction is necessary. 'We think that a permanent injunction is appropriate in this case in addition to a declaration,' said Megan Burrows, an attorney representing WAWC, formerly known as the West Alabama Women's Center, adding that this case isn't about challenging the text of an Alabama law itself but specific threats from the attorney general to apply Alabama's criminal laws in ways they were not intended. Thompson asked both parties to submit additional filings on the question of remedies within the next two days. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
