ARTCREDIT^ TKPLAN C
laurie bertram roberts’ life is cha-
otic. A 41-year-old woman with seven
children, she lives below the pov-
erty line. Her family cobbles together
a modest life with the help of food
stamps, government assistance, and
the odd jobs they do to survive. Roberts
spends much of her time bedbound due
to painful fibromyalgia, but her phone
and laptop are never far, basically op-
erating as digital appendages. As a co-
founder and the executive director of
the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom
Fund, the only abortion fund in the
state, Roberts has run an organization
for the past six years that’s neither seam-
less nor neatly organized, but it is power-
ful. Its budget grew to $110,000 this year
and it helps at least 10 or so individuals
each month get abortions, sometimes
smuggling those in abusive relationships
out of their homes for the procedure.
The fund doesn’t just pay for abortions
and coordinate logistics. Roberts, a
woman of color, is a true believer in the
reproductive justice framework—a term
coined by a group of black women in the
’90s, detailing, as their organization now
puts it, the “human right to maintain per-
sonal bodily autonomy, have children, not
have children, and parent the children we
have in safe and sustainable communi-
ties.” The Mississippi Reproductive Free-
dom Fund helps women pay for health
care, diapers, food, contraception—wher-
ever there’s a need, the fund will fill it.
Roberts delightedly shows me several
boxes of Barbies, in every shape, size, and
color, that she purchased for a playroom
for her clients’ children. “No one comes
to us just needing one thing. Needing
abortion funding is usually one part of
their greater struggle of being a low-in-
come person,” she says.
When I visit the house in West Jackson
where Roberts lives and eventually plans
to host clients overnight, it is teeming
with activity. The one-story “fundshack,”
as she and her family call it, is modest,with a front porch framed by lacy white
iron posts, shot through with rust, and
bars clamped protectively over the
windows. Roberts’ daughters Kayla,
Sarah, and Aolani—who grew up with
social justice at the center of their lives
the way most kids here grow up with re-
ligion—drift in and out, as do local ac-
tivists from youth empowerment and
lgbtq organizations. An unexpected do-
nation of several mattresses is delivered,
while fund volunteers intermittently
pop into the room where Roberts sits in
bed, chatting with me, her lower half
wrapped in a blue sheet. Roofers work
in the hot sun to replace the worn-down
shingles. Roberts tells me it took her a
few tries to find a reliable crew who
didn’t mind working for a group that
funds abortion care and were willing to
work in a poor “black” part of town. She“I don’t think [outsiders] understand that the
structural barriers are at every turn of care,
that it starts before people even have sex.”Laurie Roberts (right)
spends much of her time
bedbound due to painful
fibromyalgia, but her
phone and laptop are
never far. Her daughter
Sarah (left), posing in
front of the “fundshack,”
is an abortion doula.