60 MOTHER JONES |^ SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019
hallway widths or expensive medical
equipment unnecessary to abortion.
Low-income women suffer the most in
the state’s abortion desert, making Roberts’
job all the more crucial. According to 2017
data from the Kaiser Family Foundation,
more than 1 in 10 women in Mississippi
receive health care coverage through Med-
icaid and likely can’t afford to pay for an abor-
tion or nonemergency contraception on
their own. In 2016, the state health depart-
ment closed nine clinics; the following year,
two-thirds of the department’s regional of-
fices were shuttered due to a series of budget
cuts. According to Roberts, some women she
knows who rely on Medicaid have had to
wait up to six months to get birth control.
The state has a single Planned Parenthood,
in Hattiesburg, that distributes birth control
but does not provide abortion care—which,
according to Barbara Ann Luttrell, director
of communications for Planned Parenthood
Southeast, “is because the state of Mississippi
intentionally has made it next to impossible
to be an abortion provider.” Planned Parent-
hood Southeast is also one of the most
under-resourced affiliates in the country.
“I don’t think [outsiders] understand that
the structural barriers are at every turn of
care, that it starts before people even have
sex,” Roberts says.
Roberts wishes her fund could overcome
some of these obstacles by helping women
like Kate manage their own abortions at
home, in peace—largely with medication
abortion. She sees misoprostol and mife-
pristone as equalizers for anyone seeking
an abortion, particularly rural women who
live hundreds of miles from a clinic. But in
Mississippi and 33 other states, it is a crime
to use medication to induce an abortion
if that medication is not administered by
a licensed clinician. Mississippi also bans
the use of telemedicine, in which doctors
see a patient remotely, despite a 2017 study
finding that telemedicine is as safe as an in-
person doctor visit for medication abortion.
Above all, Roberts fears what seems like
the next big battle in the war on abortion:
criminalizing women by giving fetuses the
same rights as people. This is already hap-
pening, most frequently when pregnant
women use drugs. While Mississippi doesn’t
have a law that criminalizes drug use while
pregnant, prosecutors in at least one county,
Jones County, have fashioned a loophole
through which approximately 20 womenhave been charged under a “felonious child
abuse statute”—reasoning that if a woman
uses drugs, she is poisoning the fetus, and
therefore is criminally liable. Roberts has
put up bail for one woman who was jailed
under the statute. “I knew Jones County was
bad when we called the bail bondswoman
to get her out, and the bail bondsperson
told me, ‘I’m so glad y’all are helping her,
because I have so many women that I bail
out every year in her same situation and
it’s horrible, it’s ridiculous, and someone
needs to stop it,’” Roberts says, laughing
darkly. “Bail bondspeople aren’t usually on
the side of the people they’re bailing out.”
Roberts also got involved in a widely pub-
licized case in Alabama, in which a black
woman named Marshae Jones was charged
with manslaughter when she was shot in
the stomach while pregnant. Though the
charges were ultimately dropped, Roberts
helped a local abortion fund raise money to
pay Jones’ bail and hire a lawyer.
Despite this excruciating landscape, Rob-
erts is proud that Mississippi is where she
came into her own—it’s where she fled her
abusive partner when she was 27; it’s where
she went to college; it’s where she raised her
kids. It’s where she grew into a hellraising ac-
tivist, surrounded by other activists, many of
whom had a history in the civil rights move-
ment. It was the first place in her life where
she found herself in a majority-black space.
“I generally talk about Mississippi being the
Broadway of activism,” she tells me. “If you
can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”kate spends most of the journey home
from Little Rock curled up on the floor of the
van. She hadn’t been sleeping much since she
found out she was pregnant a few monthsago, and last night was no better. After lunch,
Sarah and Aolani stop at a Walmart for a
thin foam mattress pad and a cheap tie-dye
blanket to make a bed for Kate. As the van
hurtles down the interstate, Roberts’ part-
ner behind the wheel chugs energy drinks,
slinging expletives out the window every so
often at other motorists. Air roars through
the open windows, and a vent in the top
of the van clatters, making it impossible to
talk much. Kate quietly lies there, occasion-
ally picking up her phone only to set it back
down. Sweat has pasted her two-sizes-too-
big T-shirt to her back, and the folds of the
blanket have left creases on her legs. Sarah
passes her phone around every so often
to share an amusing Tumblr meme. Kate
humors Sarah, but her smile hardens into
more of a grimace.
“I can’t believe I have to do this all over
again in a week,” Kate mumbles as we wait
to use the restroom in a grimy gas station
near the Tennessee state line. She is eager to
see her dog, who has been her devoted com-
panion throughout this ordeal, sleeping in
the bathtub on nights when Kate was too
sick to move from the toilet. When we pull
into her apartment’s parking lot, she tries
to quickly exit the van but has to wait for
a nosy neighbor to go inside. “Let us know
if you need to talk,” Sarah calls after Kate.
As I watch Kate hurry away, I wonder if
she’ll be able to steel herself to repeat the
trip. I would have understood if she couldn’t;
she had pushed through a series of grueling
obstacles only to be met with still more. But
less than a week later, on a rainy Thursday
morning, the group began the process all
over again. This time, Kate got her abortion.
If she had waited even a few days longer, she
would have been rendered ineligible for the
procedure, which would have meant a jour-
ney to Florida or Colorado. What’s more, if
she had started this arduous process just a
few weeks later, she might not have been eli-
gible for an abortion in Arkansas at 20 weeks.
This year, legislators passed a law banning
abortions past 18 weeks there, shaving four
more weeks off the window for the proce-
dure, but its opponents have sued the state
and are hopeful it will be blocked.
When we speak a few days after the
abortion, Kate sounds lighter. She says she
finally feels calm and ready to move for-
ward. She’s considering a couple of intern-
ship options, one of which would take her
out of Mississippi altogether. “When I got
into my apartment, I literally just laid
down with [my dog], and finally, I felt like
I had a sense of control again.” QWHERE ROE DOESN’T REACH
(continued from page 29)91%
of women in
Mississippi live in
counties without
an abortion clinic.47%
of women in
Mississippi who
get abortions
travel out of state
for them.