From Roe to Dobbs and Beyond: The last clinic in Mississippi

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health is seen on June 24, 2022 in Washington, DC. The court’s decision, which ended federal abortion rights protections, also ended a years-long legal battle between the state of Mississippi and the clinic in Jackson Missisippi, owned by Diane Derzis. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Diane Derzis had worked in abortion care in Birmingham in the 1980s and 1990s. She had lobbied the Alabama Legislature for abortion rights

Not a single employee of the New Woman All Women Clinic in Birmingham quit after it was bombed in 1998.

It would always be the abortion clinic that got bombed — the place where security guard and police officer Robert Sanderson died, and head nurse Emily Lyons was severely injured.

Those facts weren’t ever going to change.

But owner Diane Derzis kept the clinic functioning, and a new normal quickly developed, she said.

Photos were hung up inside the clinic that showed what it looked like following the attack. The images served as a reminder for everyone — patients and employees alike — of the lengths that someone in the anti-abortion community went to in order to try to stop women from having access to a safe abortion.

Still, the doors were open. Patients came in. Abortions were done. It would stay like this for years.

Then, in early 2012, the state of Alabama came for the clinic’s license.

In a news release dated April 30 of that year, the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) “proposed to revoke the license of New Woman All Women Health Care in Birmingham due to multiple and serious violations of State Board of Health rules.”

Derzis denied that claim. She said the issue was documentation-related and that no one was hurt. Still, she agreed to turn in the clinic’s operating license.

ADPH said in the same release that “a consent agreement allowed the opportunity for another entity or individual being ‘independent from and not affiliated with New Woman or its officers and directors’ to seek a license to operate the center.”

When New Woman All Women Health Care Clinic closed, Derzis owned three other clinics. One of them was in Columbus, Georgia. Another was in Richmond, Virginia. And the third was in Jackson, Mississippi.

At one point, Jackson had five abortion clinics. But by 2010, Jackson Women’s Health Organization was the last one in the entire state.

The clinic didn’t have an owner after its previous owner — a friend of Derzis’ — died of breast cancer.

Originally, the area Jackson Women’s Health Organization called home was blighted and impoverished. But by the time Derzis toured the clinic in 2010 to check it out, the neighborhood had gentrified and transformed into the Fondren District, a place where people came to shop and eat.

The clinic had potential, she thought. It just needed a little love and care. The building needed work. As Derzis made her way through the clinic, a trashcan sat underneath a leak in the roof in the lab. Anti-abortion brochures floated in the pooling water.

What really stood out to her when she visited was who was there.

She started talking with patients as they waited for their appointments. Some were older and already had kids. They didn’t want more. Others were barely teenagers and there with their mothers, who were determined that their daughters would have a better future and chance of success.

“To this day, I love Jackson, Mississippi,” Derzis said.

Owning Jackson Women’s Health Organization created a new kind of responsibility. Up until then, she had never been part of an abortion clinic that was the only one in an entire state.

Access to abortion services varied widely by region, even before the recent radical shift, according to a 2022 study by The University of California San Francisco Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) program.

According to the study, in 2021 there was roughly one abortion clinic for every 94,000 women in the United States. But in the South, the ratio was roughly one facility for roughly every 158,000 women. Mississippi — with its sole clinic — had a ratio of one facility for roughly 675,000 women of reproductive age.

Derzis was cognizant of that. But it didn’t faze her. She bought the clinic with two business partners. The three of them also bought the clinic’s building. Not long after, she got to work putting her stamp on both the clinic and building.

And it wasn’t just fixing the roof. Derzis wanted to make sure Jackson Women’s Health Organization felt like a private clinic where patients would be taken care of.  And she wanted employees to be happy working there.

She forked over the money to repair the roof and overhaul the interior aesthetic. Stuff got painted. Orange. Yellow. Fuchsia. Women-related artwork from a local artist got installed. Red leather furniture showed up.

She wasn’t done. When Derzis first visited, Jackson Women’s Health Organization was known locally as “The Pink House.” A couple years after buying the clinic, Derzis thought to herself that the exterior of the building kind of looked pinkish in color. In no time at all, she decided to act. The outside of the clinic’s art deco home was given a Pepto-Bismol pink paint job. The building blended in with others there in the Fondren District, which had buildings painted in purple or yellow.

In time, the clinic’s nickname would be known nationally. Internationally, too.

• • •

On March 19, 2018, a 15-week abortion ban became law in Mississippi. It was the strictest ban in the country. Named the Gestational Age Act, it only had two exceptions: medical emergency and severe fetal abnormality.

At the signing ceremony for that piece of legislation that day, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, dressed in a dark suit with a patterned blue tie and a white dress shirt, sat behind a large brown desk. He was flanked by well-dressed men and women.

“You know, I love when Mississippi leads the nation saving the unborn, protecting religious freedoms,” Bryant said, a pen in his right hand, according to a video posted to his Twitter account. “And they always go around and go, ‘Yeah, but y’all are in last, like, in eating enough apples or something,’” he quipped.

The crowd chuckled.

“But we are saving more of the unborn than any state in America, and what better thing we could do?”

Putting pen to paper moments later, Bryant signed the bill.

“And we’ll probably be sued here in about half-hour,” he said.

Heartier laughs filled the room.

“That will be fine with me,” he said. “It is worth fighting over.”

It wasn’t half an hour. But Bryant wasn’t far off. Before the end of the day, the international human-rights organization Center for Reproductive Rights — composed of lawyers and advocates — filed a legal complaint. It also asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi’s Northern Division to issue a temporary restraining order that would block the new abortion ban.

Derzis had talked to the Center about working together when the Gestational Age Act was working its way through Mississippi’s state Legislature. The two had worked together in the past. She didn’t see any option other than suing in regard to the Gestational Age Act.

The temporary restraining order was granted the next day. Eight months later, a federal judge permanently blocked the Mississippi law.

“The court’s frustration, in part, is that other states have already unsuccessfully litigated the same sort of ban that is before this court and the state is aware that this type of litigation costs the taxpayers a tremendous amount of money,” U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves wrote in his Nov. 20, 2018 opinion. “No, the real reason we are here is simple. The state chose to pass a law it knew was unconstitutional to endorse a decades-long campaign, fueled by national interest groups, to ask the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.”

Mississippi officials appealed to the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The Fifth Circuit shot it down on Dec. 13, 2019.

That ruling made Derzis think the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, was done for good.

“To have a win there was unheard of,” she said. “That’s why we were so encouraged, because this is one of the worst courts in the land.”

But a small part of her wasn’t dancing for joy just yet. She’s cynical, she said. And Mississippi wasn’t finished.

In June of the following year, the state petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review Dobbs.

Three months after that, on Sept. 18, 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died from complications of metastatic pancreas cancer at age 87.

“Then I knew we were up s*** creek,” Derzis said.

Eight days after Ginsburg’s death, then-President Donald Trump named his pick to replace Ginsburg: Amy Coney Barrett. She was confirmed to a lifetime appointment on Oct. 26, 2020.

The Supreme Court announced the following year it was going to hear Mississippi’s appeal of Dobbs. Oral arguments took place on Dec. 1, 2021.

Out in Pecos, New Mexico, Derizis listened live. She felt she could hear contempt in some of the justices’ voices. Questions she heard from justices made her think abortion rights were in big trouble — questions about fetuses and babies, instead of women.

Derzis was livid after she stopped listening. People had thought she was an alarmist, that her belief that the Dobbs Supreme Court case would result in Roe getting overturned was silly.

Fueled by that fury, Derzis kept fighting to provide abortion care. She needed to find a new home for Mississippi’s only abortion clinic.

Six months came and went. Derzis and Shannon Brewer — Jackson Women’s Health Organization’s administrator and her long-time right-hand woman — were walking through the airport in Atlanta. It was the evening of May 2, 2022. After attending a national abortion conference in Florida, the two were headed home.

The conference disappointed Derzis. It was lackluster and didn’t address the immediate issue at hand: Dobbs and what might happen to reproductive rights.

As they made their way through the airport, she caught wind that a copy of the Supreme Court’s draft decision for Dobbs had been leaked to Politico. If unchanged and finalized, the draft decision would indeed knock out the rights ensured by the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.

“We just left an abortion conference,” Derzis said. “We knew it was happening, and no one else wants to talk about it.”

Day-to-day operations at Jackson Women’s Health Organization was business as usual after the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision. The only change was an increase in interest in the clinic from journalists.

The Supreme Court’s final ruling came on June 24, 2022, two years ago this week. Roe was overturned.

Derzis had expected this to happen eventually. The hoops women had to jump through to get an abortion, and less-than-helpful experiences she had with law enforcement in dealing with out-of-hand protesters — those experiences convinced her.

But she hadn’t thought the Dobbs case would be the nail in Roe’s coffin. When the Center for Reproductive Rights filed its complaint against the Gestational Age Act in 2018, Derzis didn’t even think that the case would even make it to the Supreme Court.

“Or maybe I didn’t want to think this was the case,” she said.

• • •

The Supreme Court’s final ruling threw Jackson Women’s Health Organization into chaos the day it came out.

Patients packed the clinic. Staff tried to squeeze in as many people as possible.

Private security guards were there, an extreme rarity for the clinic. They were hired for the day because Jackson Women’s Health Organization thought there was a high probability that protesters would try to come into the clinic or take it over.

Hatred hung in the air there that day like a dense fog. You could’ve cut it with a knife. Some of it came from anti-abortion protesters. Jubilant, they basked in the win the Supreme Court just gave them that morning. They wanted Derzis’ clinic closed immediately. Abortion rights supporters expressed their anger at clinic’s protestors.

“If one person had crossed the line — I mean, even a little bit — it would have been ‘Johnny bar the door,’” Derzis explained.

She wore sunglasses to shield her a bit from the anti-abortion protesters. Plus, Derzis didn’t want to hold her hand up over her eyes to block the sun when she was dealing with journalists. Despite all the public speaking she had done over the years, addressing crowds still made her nervous.

She started the day in Birmingham. When the Supreme Court announced the Dobbs ruling, Derzis sprang into action. She hopped in her car and drove four hours to Jackson to hold a news conference at her clinic.

As she drove, she was on the phone. She talked with someone in Jackson about finalizing details for the news conference. She talked with Brewer. She talked with journalists. These conversations helped Derzis avoid dwelling on Roe being wiped out.

Now, here she was, standing in front of a collection of microphones, talking to reporters outside The Pink House. Her Pink House. It was mid-afternoon.

She and others who provided abortion care weren’t going to give up, weren’t going to stop, she told them. Derzis seemed calm and cool on the surface, but anger lurked underneath. Her tone and cadence gave it away.

Jackson Women’s Health Organization wasn’t going to close right away, she said during her remarks. She told the crowd there was paperwork that the state attorney general in Mississippi had to certify first for a 2007 state law that would ban all abortions in Mississippi without Roe.

After that, the clinic would have 10 days to remain open.

“Now, I would bet money that that certification was awaiting her office today when she got there,” Derzis said. “So that means we will be open for the next 10 days, and we’ll be seeing patients for the next 10 days, even if they have to do what they’ve done so often, and that’s come through this kind of terrorism.”

She was referencing the anti-abortion protesters there that day. During the news conference, Derzis didn’t see a police car in sight.

Afterward, she hugged patient escorts at the clinic.

The building that once housed the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, known locally as the Pink House, seen in Jackson, Mississippi in 2023. Following Dobbs. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 Supreme Court case striking down federal abortion protections, the building was sold to contractors who painted its exterior white and turned it into a consignment store. (Shalina Chatlani/States Newsroom)

Three days later, Lynn Fitch, the first woman to ever hold the post of Mississippi attorney general, certified the 2007 abortion ban. The only exceptions carved out in the law were for saving the life of the person who is pregnant, and if the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest. In the latter cases, the assault has to be reported to law enforcement.

Jackson Women’s Health Organization challenged that law in court. It was just a formality. The challenge didn’t really stand a chance.

On July 6, 2022, Jackson Women’s Health Organization closed.

Next: The resurrection of the Jackson clinic — in New Mexico.

The post From Roe to Dobbs and Beyond: The last clinic in Mississippi appeared first on Alabama Reflector.