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Friend,
Even before Alauni took an at-home pregnancy test just four weeks after a single instance of unplanned sexual activity, she knew it would be positive.
The 24-year-old Texas college student – a single, working mother of three children under the age of 6, one of whom is autistic – immediately felt the familiar signs of her pregnancies. She had intended to buy the Plan B “morning after” pill, but was in the process of moving to another city and hadn’t yet secured new housing.
Amid all her pressing concerns last December, Alauni – who is Black and whose name has been changed in this story to protect her identity – forgot to go to the pharmacy. By the time she remembered, it was too late. When she took an at-home test at four weeks – two weeks before the detectable fetal “flutter” – her fear was confirmed.
“My first thought was, I need to be able to self-manage an abortion,” Alauni said. “I stressed if I would be able to get the medication. I worried that I would be having another child at a time in my life that wasn’t right. … I didn’t want my family to know. I didn’t go to a doctor. I was scared because nowadays if you go to a doctor and you later aren’t pregnant, it’s suspicious. They can report you. I was most scared of the people in my city.”
So began Alauni’s frantic scramble to obtain an abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court on June 24, 2022, ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that a woman has no constitutional right to abortion. The ruling overturned the court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 and overnight brought sheer panic and a sense of desperation to economically vulnerable Southerners needing an abortion.
Texas, where Alauni lives, is one of 15 states, mostly in the South, with laws that ban or highly restrict abortion in most or all cases unless the patient’s life is at risk from or related to the pregnancy. Some of the states have no exceptions for rape or incest, and anyone obtaining an in-state abortion after six weeks of pregnancy can be criminally charged.
While legislators in some conservative states – including South Carolina and Nebraska – have rejected bills prohibiting the procedure, Dobbs gives states the power to decide whether a woman can or cannot legally have an abortion.
“The Dobbs decision has had a crippling effect on women in Mississippi,” said Waikinya Clanton, the Mississippi state office director for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The plaintiff in the Dobbs case was the last abortion clinic in Mississippi. It closed because of the decision.
“The decision relegates women to a second-class citizenry and undermines our ability to make the appropriate decisions when it comes to our health and our wealth,” Clanton said.
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Sincerely,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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