From Roe to Dobbs and Beyond: Diane Derzis’ lifetime in abortion care

Portrait of Diane Derzis in her home Friday, May 10, 2024, in Birmingham, Alabama. (Photo by Stew Milne/Alabama Reflector)

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Eight o’clock had rolled in. It was the morning of Dec. 1, 2021. Dressed casually in jeans and a top, Diane Derzis was hanging out in a bedroom at her guesthouse on the property she owned in Pecos, New Mexico, about 30 minutes southeast of Santa Fe.

The bedroom’s décor was Southwestern. Native American art and abstract works — all local, all found by Derzis — hung on the walls.

She was on her phone but not to make a call. Instead, she was listening to oral arguments in United States Supreme Court case 19-1392: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Three years earlier, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi, filed a lawsuit challenging a near-total 15-week abortion ban in the state. Derzis was one of the clinic’s co-owners. The clinic racked up victory after victory in the lower courts. But with each win came a new appeal from the state.

“Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court,” Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart said, beginning his opening remarks. “Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey haunt our country.”

The Santa Fe area had always been a place where Derzis, then 67, found serenity. But that was before that morning.

“They have no basis in the Constitution,” Stewart continued. “They have no home in our history or traditions. They’ve damaged the democratic process. They’ve poisoned the law. They’ve choked off compromise.”

Derzis held her phone up to hear as she listened. She didn’t have headphones. And even if she did, she wouldn’t have known how to use them. Technology wasn’t her thing.

“For 50 years, they’ve kept this court at the center of a political battle that it can never resolve,” Stewart told the justices. “And 50 years on, they stand alone. Nowhere else does this court recognize a right to end a human life.”

After a while, Derzis took off. She had to get out of the house and blow off some energy. Greeted by the chill in the air, she walked around her sprawling property. She kept listening, though.

Hearing oral arguments play out that morning was hell. The case was lost, Derzis felt. She was depressed. And angry. Angry that the U.S. elected Donald Trump president.

Derzis’s mind is a whirlwind, routinely multitasking. But as she listened to the oral arguments, her brain found another gear. It whizzed a mile a second, going in a handful of different directions as that morning’s proceeding played out at the nation’s high court. She thought about the excitement within the anti-abortion community. As well as the horror of those supporting abortion rights.

Another thought: Did she have the energy to do what needed to be done? She was in uncharted waters and didn’t know what that was.

Yet another: How far back would overturning Roe put women? And how long until birth control would get taken away?

There was stuff regarding her clinic in Mississippi that she needed to take care of.

Eventually, Derzis bailed on the livestream. She just couldn’t take it anymore.

• • •

Derzis lives in Birmingham with 10 dogs and two parrots. There’s a Southern twang to her voice. Her laughs are hearty. She is 70 years old and stands 5 feet, 4 inches tall, with very short, curly hair — light brown with highlights — to go along with brown eyes. You might catch her in jeans with a big top and a big diamond ring. She describes her look as eccentric. And she has fun with it.

Derzis is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of person. Not pretentious. A thinker and multitasker. Always on the move.

When it comes to politics, Derzis is a Yellow Dog Democrat. She’s fiscally conservative but socially progressive.

It wasn’t always this way. Derzis used to be a Republican. Richard Nixon got her vote. At least in part, she flipped because she hated Ronald Reagan, his Hollywood background, and his opposition to abortion.

The oldest of three, Derzis was born on Feb. 24, 1954. She grew up in McGaheysville, Virginia, a small town a little more than an hour or so northwest of Charlottesville. She estimates that maybe 500 or 600 people lived there. It had a post office, a gas station, and a country store.

She calls her life there simple, happy, and middle-class. Her father worked as an insurance agent. Her mother, Derzis’s role model, worked a variety of jobs. She was very strong. She encouraged Derzis to develop skills that would ensure Derzis could always find work. She required her daughter to take a typing class in high school.

“The message was you can do anything,” Derzis said. But as she got older, her mother told her not only what she was capable of but what wasn’t needed.

“It was, ‘You don’t need a man. You don’t need a man. You can do anything yourself,’” she remembered. “And that was, in retrospect, exceedingly important.”

After graduating from high school, Derzis enrolled at Madison College — now James Madison University — in the fall of 1972. A little over a year later at age 19, she was married. By then, Derzis had dropped out of college.

Derzis and her then-husband moved to Alabama in 1974. That year, she got pregnant. The pregnancy horrified her.

“There were so many things I wanted to do,” she explains. “I wanted to finish school, and I knew that I had a life and it did not consist of being poor and having a child and a husband.”

In January 1975, Derzis visited an OB-GYN who had a doctor’s office in Homewood, outside Birmingham. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade had legalized abortion nationwide two years earlier. However, Alabama didn’t have any dedicated abortion clinics at the time. In the waiting room at the doctor’s office, a thought struck her.

Jesus, God, look at all these people here.

They were all there for the same reason she was. There were young people. Middle-aged. Old. One couple waiting was from Tennessee, the woman in a long dress and old shoes, the man in overalls.

Her abortion cost $125. She paid in cash. It was the only method of payment allowed.

A day later, Derzis saw a political advertisement on TV. A woman running for office was discussing her anti-abortion views. The ad had fetuses.

“The anger started then of, ‘How dare you try to tell me that I just killed a baby?’” Derzis recalls. “That’s how it started.”

• • •

Derzis returned to college later that year, enrolling at the University of Montevallo, where she studied psychology and sociology. She graduated in 1978.

After starting her studies, an abortion clinic opened in Birmingham. For months, Derzis hounded the clinic for a job. She wasn’t picky. She just wanted to work there.

Finally, a job offer came. It was early 1976, and she made $5 an hour as a counselor.

As a counselor, Derzis explained the procedure to potential patients and how they’d feel during the operation as well as after it. And it was her job to create a rapport and establish trust with the potential patients, so that they’d feel comfortable asking questions. Derzis also wanted to make sure potential patients wanted to go forward with their abortion.

She eventually left the clinic and spent some time selling cars. One day, a golden ticket showed up in the form of a guy from Boca Raton, Florida. He owned multiple abortion clinics and was opening a new one in Birmingham. And he wanted Derzis to run it.

The clinic became Summit Medical Center. Running that clinic was when Derzis grew into a businesswoman. She ran the new clinic as if it was her own.

She started lobbying the state Legislature on behalf of Summit Medical Center. According to the Birmingham Post-Herald, legislators nicknamed her the “Abortion Queen.” She wore the nickname as a badge of honor.

The Summit years were when Derzis got her first real taste of anti-abortion protesters. Protesting is a right she backs. She draws the line, though, when protesting infringes upon someone else’s rights. That line, she said, was crossed during her years running Summit Medical Center. Repeatedly.

Patients coming and going would get harassed. The clinic’s front entrance would get glued shut with an adhesive. The first time the entrance got glued shut, it temporarily shut the clinic down for a couple hours. From then on, Summit Medical Center didn’t miss a beat when its glass front doors were sealed.

The clinic adapted. The staff figured out new ways to get people in and out. As a result of protests outside the clinic occasionally escalating, Derzis hired an off-duty police officer to work as a guard.

Summit Medical Center got a fax at least every other week from an organization called the Feminist Majority, which routinely sent abortion clinics information about dangerous protesters. Photos. Where they had been. Their police records.

Sometimes, during bigger protests, protesters would surround Summit and chain themselves to the clinic’s metal fence. Derzis remembers one time when staff and patients at the clinic were trapped.

“It was scary. I mean, you could see the hatred, you could feel the tension and the hatred and vitriol,” Derzis said. “To this day, I was so surprised there were not patients killed, or their persons that brought them.”

There were multiple bomb threats, too. It got to the point that the staff just ignored them. People at the clinic were told how to open mail and when to not open it at all.

“There was nothing that was not a problem or a potential problem,” Derzis said. “It was crisis, crisis, crisis mode. And, to be honest with you, we thrived.”

Early on at Summit, Derzis hired a doctor. Right around the time he was about to start working at the clinic, though, he backed out. The reason: Someone had broken into his garage and left a note on the windshield of the car inside. It said the doctor had two children to lose.

“The message was, ‘We can get to you anytime we want to,’” Derzis explained.

One day, Derzis noticed someone had removed four Yucca plants at her house. Each was 5- or 6-feet tall. Removing the poisonous plants opened up a direct shot for a sniper, she realized. That’s just how her brain was wired.

Derzis believes the target was a doctor from out of the area who occasionally worked at Summit Medical Center. That doctor stayed at Derzis’s house.

Threats to her life were always in the back of Derzis’s mind. She looked in her rearview mirror when she would go home. She carried pepper spray, a taser, and a Smith & Wesson gun. But that worry never reached the tipping point that would have made her want to quit working at the clinic.

Still, she was burned out.

“I didn’t know who Diane was anymore outside of the abortion-clinic woman because that was all-consuming — and that was no one’s fault but my own,” she said.

Derzis started going to a therapist. One day, the therapist told her that she knew the answers and had known them since the day she walked into the therapist’s office. The question the therapist posed was: What was she going to do about it?

She had to change her life. The Abortion Queen had to hang up her crown.

“It was terrifying,” she said.

Next: Derzis gets back into abortion clinic management and comes face-to-face with violence.

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