In the Eye of the Storm
By midmorning on an early October day in 2021, the parking lot is full at the Trust Women clinic in Wichita, Kansas. Cars have been pulling in steadily for hours under a slate sky, droplets from the unpredictable autumn showers pimpling their shiny surfaces. Some parked cars hold men, waiting, the glow of a phone casting their faces in a blueish light.
A tall wooden fence surrounds the clinic to protect patients from hostile gazes. Black iron gates frame the entrance to the lot. Protesters pace back and forth, pleading with entering cars to stop and writing down license plates when they refuse. A plastic baby doll that has clearly seen better days rests in a weather-worn bouncer, its purpose to prompt a deep sense of maternal responsibility and guilt. A yellow-and-white box truck also looms, engine off, across the street. It belongs to the Kansas Coalition for Life, and it is splashed with gruesome images of torn, fragmented fetuses and a proclamation: “EVERY Abortion is an Act of Violence! Violence is NOT the Answer.” Next door to the abortion clinic is a crisis pregnancy center, simply called Choices Medical Clinic.
Black-and-white Texas license plates flash in the sun as they turn in to the Trust Women lot. For the past month, Texans had lived under an abortion ban that made the procedure illegal after roughly six weeks’ gestation. In Texas, for all intents and purposes, Roe was already dead, and this Wichita clinic, along with others in the Midwest and the Southeast, had been feeling the strain of an influx of patients. When the Texas ban went into effect, Trust Women saw 51 patients from the Lone Star State within that same month, compared with just one the month before. Trust Women’s sister clinic, in Oklahoma City, saw more, too; it added a procedure day. The Texas law encourages citizens to report anyone who may have done anything to “aid or abet” an abortion; physicians who provided abortion care risk a lawsuit and minimum fine of $10,000. One patient who called to make an appointment at Trust Women said she was less than six weeks pregnant but because cardiac activity was detected during her ultrasound, a clinic in Texas had turned her away. More Texas patients coming to Trust Women meant patients from other states were facing lengthy waitlists because of increased demand.
In less than a year, the Supreme Court will overturn , and more neighboring states, including Oklahoma, will clamor to become as hostile as possible to abortion, putting even more pressure on the Wichita clinic. But Trust Women is familiar with working under pressure. From 1975 to 2009, Trust Women was called Women’s Health Care Services, and it was helmed by Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors in the nation who offered abortion care in the third trimester. That clinic closed down when Tiller was murdered by an anti-abortion extremist. Today, friends and acquaintances of the man who killed Dr. Tiller still linger outside his former clinic. States have put large monetary bounties on the heads of those who can be proved to have “aided and abetted” abortion. It begs the question: How much longer
