Inside the plan to create an abortion refuge for a post-Roe era

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Politics

Inside the plan to create an abortion refuge for a post-Roe era

Abortion providers in blue-state Illinois are laying the groundwork for an influx of patients from states poised to ban abortion if the Supreme Court overturns its landmark precedent

By Caroline Kitchener
Yesterday at 5:00 a.m. EDT

FAIRVIEW HEIGHTS, Ill. — When the woman called Planned Parenthood to schedule her abortion, Alexandria Ball picked up the phone and explained exactly what would happen next. ... Ball and her colleagues would book her bus ticket to Illinois. ... They would put her up in a hotel. ... They would help find funding for her abortion. ... And they would pay for her 15-year-old son to come along. ... “Is this a dream?” asked the pregnant mother from western Missouri.

Attached to an abortion clinic on the Missouri-Illinois border, this first-of-its-kind call center offers a window into the splintered future of abortion care in the United States if the Supreme Court decides this summer to roll back Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that established a constitutional right to abortion. Since the call center opened in December, Ball and her colleagues have been laying the groundwork to turn their operation into a blue-state abortion refuge for patients from across the South and Midwest, whose more conservative home states are poised to restrict abortion access if Roe falls.

The emerging red-blue abortion map has prompted a new level of tactical maneuvering — with abortion providers envisioning a proliferation of clinics a stone’s throw from red-state territory and conservative lawmakers exploring measures to prevent abortion patients from crossing state lines for care.

States likely to ban abortion in the absence of Roe
These states have laws in place that will ban or severely weaken abortion access, or legislators ready to introduce other bans.

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Nowhere is this dynamic more pronounced than southern Illinois, where Planned Parenthood and the Hope Clinic for Women, each located just over the Mississippi River a few miles from the Missouri state line, have been serving thousands of out-of-state patients for years as Missouri residents have sought to avoid the more restrictive laws enacted by their conservative state legislature.

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By Caroline Kitchener
Caroline Kitchener is a national political reporter, covering abortion, at The Washington Post. She is the author of "Post Grad: Five Women and Their First Year Out of College." Twitter https://twitter.com/CAKitchener