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Jenice Fountain could not believe what she was hearing.

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Alabama group continues fight to help women obtain reproductive care

Esther Schrader | Read the full story here

Friend,

Jenice Fountain could not believe what she was hearing.

Was that Steve Marshall, the attorney general of Alabama, on talk radio, threatening to go after her tiny organization, which is dedicated to supporting pregnant Alabamians seeking legal abortion care?

Indeed, it was the state’s top law enforcement official – on the airwaves less than two months after the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision to strike down Roe v. Wade – saying he would seek to criminally prosecute anyone who is helping people obtain lawful abortions out of state. He included “groups out of Tuscaloosa, for example, that … [at] one point in time have talked about it.”

That apparent jab at the Yellowhammer Fund put the small nonprofit organization on a frightening rollercoaster ride that continues to this day. The group, founded in Tuscaloosa in 2017 by volunteers, is now staffed by nine people who work from their homes advocating for reproductive justice. Like other such organizations across the country, it has been holding on for dear life, trying to preserve its ability to pursue its mission.

A groundbreaking Southern Poverty Law Center report that was released this week, Anti-Abortion Extremism: Inside the Movement Dismantling Our Reproductive Rights, examines the kinds of restrictions being placed on “helper” organizations like the Yellowhammer Fund; the often-violent history of anti-abortion militancy; the ways that history is inspiring the new anti-abortion movement; and how today’s political landscape is impacting clinics, providers and activists.

The report finds that anti-abortion politics – heavily concentrated in the South, a region with the country’s highest poverty rates and where more than half of Black Americans live – are wedded to far-right political movements in the U.S. and are a product of the male and white supremacist political project. People in the South are the most likely in the country to be either arrested for reasons related to their pregnancy or to have the terms of their bail, sentencing or probation heightened because they became pregnant after being charged with unrelated crimes.

“This isn’t just misogyny, it’s about subjugating and controlling women and everyone who can become pregnant – and that’s what shifts it into new territory,” said the report's primary author, Cassie Miller, senior research analyst team lead for the SPLC’s Intelligence Project.

“What we’ve seen a lot of, especially post-Dobbs, is that there is this very strong, very mobilized effort to use our legal system and to use state legislatures to push the government essentially to become more and more involved in denying reproductive care – and to do it in a very punishing way that can result in criminalization of a pregnancy or an abortion.”

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