Jocelyn opened her sonogram for a moment and then folded it back up. She knew that if she stopped taking birth control, she could get pregnant, but she didn’t really think it could happen so fast. She took a pregnancy test. And then a second one. Both were positive. Still she wasn’t sure she was really pregnant. The weeks passed. She started to call around to doctors’ offices, but had trouble getting an appointment, she said. One doctor had availability, but not for weeks.
So she went to Pregnancy Center East and discovered that she was sixteen weeks along. Jocelyn was not considering an abortion. At this point, she just wanted any information about her pregnancy and any material assistance. She had not paid much attention to the Supreme Court case, and did not know that Roe had fallen during her appointment.
“My sister actually told me about this place,” Jocelyn, twenty-nine, said as she sat down in a consultation room after her ultrasound. Her older sister, also pregnant, sat down next to her and smiled. “She’s like my firstborn,” she said of Jocelyn.
Jocelyn couldn’t get medical care at PCE, but she watched videos about topics like parenting and breastfeeding and got free diapers. “They took their time with me trying to understand my situation and if I wanted to continue with this pregnancy,” she said.
When they asked if she wanted an ultrasound, Jocelyn hesitated. But that was free too.
Like most antiabortion pregnancy centers, PCE’s goal was to stop women like Jocelyn from having abortions and then support them throughout their pregnancies. PCE provided a range of free services, including pregnancy testing, limited ultrasounds, and supplies like clothes or formula for infants. It led chastity classes in local schools, teaching students not to have sex outside of marriage, and parenting programs and mentorships for men. It promoted what many in the antiabortion movement called an “abortion pill reversal,” a procedure that purports to stop a medication abortion or Plan B, but is considered “unproven and unethical” by mainstream medical associations. PCE did not offer contraception or prenatal testing for birth defects or genetic conditions. If clinicians noticed an ectopic pregnancy, they directed the woman to the emergency room.
The clinic’s offerings were not unusual: in 2019, only 5 percent of centers offered prenatal care, and just 2 percent offered well-women exams, according to the Susan B. Anthony List’s own research arm. But in recent years, Laura Curran, the clinic director, had started a partnership with a midwifery program at TriHealth, one of the largest health care systems in the Cincinnati region, to help its patients get into the medical system.
Jocelyn was already in the queue at TriHealth, so the center’s new partnership didn’t move things faster for her, she said. Still, everything about the experience felt so welcoming, Jocelyn said. Here she did not need to worry about insurance or credit cards, or paying at all. Appointments at PCE could be as long as a client needs, fifteen minutes or three hours. The clinic had more than one hundred volunteers who answered a hotline, greeted walk-in clients, and sorted donations. After her first appointment, Jocelyn kept coming back.
“When you go into the doctor’s office, you are tense about the situation, because you know there is something as far as payment,” she said. When you are a new mother, you have to focus on new things, she said. “I have to manage my money way better now.”
About half of PCE’s clients were on Medicaid, Curran estimated. In 2021, about 25 percent of its clients came because they needed proof of pregnancy to apply for Medicaid or wanted to sign up for parenting classes where they could earn a free crib or car seat, she said.
The other 75 percent were what they called “abortion-vulnerable”—women they saw as likely to get an abortion. “We want the woman who feels like [abortion] is her only choice. We don’t shy away from that,” she explained.
They looked at factors that might make a woman choose abortion and then advertised to reach those women, on radio, on billboards, and online. Curran said that about three-quarters of those women, or about half of their total clients, decided to give birth.
The clients had so many needs. On this day, one woman said she got no maternity leave, just one week of paid vacation. Curran could not give them maternity leave, but she wanted to be there for those women.
As news spread that Roe had been overturned, it wasn’t just new clients making their way to the pregnancy center. Former clients arrived. One woman brought a bouquet of yellow roses.
As she walked out of her office into the hall, Curran bumped into Barbara Momper, one of the founders of Pregnancy Center East forty years ago. “I’ve just been crying all morning,” Momper said.
She had rushed over to the center after going to the 11:45 a.m. Mass at her Catholic parish. As news of the court’s decision trickled out, people had spontaneously come to the church to celebrate—including Katherine, she said, nodding to the woman walking toward them.
“She was one of my clients,” Momper said. “I got to cut the cord.”
Curran grabbed Momper’s arm. “You’re her Katherine?” she gasped, greeting the woman. “I remember you now.”
Katherine’s voice was low and strong as she told her story.
It was ten years ago, and she was a young woman from Pennsylvania who had come to Cincinnati at age eighteen to attend art school. “I was very terrified,” she said. “Because I was all by myself.”
Momper had brought Katherine into a room, and they talked by the light of a small lamp. The father didn’t want the child, Katherine said. When she finally found him to tell him she was pregnant, he was in jail, and when he got out of jail, he lost his job. He told her to just have an abortion, she said. Momper had listened and asked her what she wanted to do.
Katherine put her hands over her heart and pressed in. “I knew that I couldn’t kill my child. I just couldn’t,” she remembered. “I have to carry that burden, that sin, of, I killed my baby.”
Her own mother’s situation had been similar, she said. Katherine had found out who her father was only two years earlier. Her mother and grandmother raised her, but they were gone. No one in her mother’s family believed in abortion, she said.
“I don’t have an option but to have the child,” she said. “I had the fear of the Lord. And I had the fear of my grandmother.” She gave her new baby girl a name that reminded her of divine mercy. “I look back over my life, and I say, look at where I came from. I was just a little old eighteen-year-old,” she said. “Came down here with like three or four trash bags of clothes.”
Momper became her mentor, invited her to Thanksgiving dinner, took her to the grocery store, and made sure her daughter had clothes that fit, she said. But still, it was not easy. To get through college, she relied on government programs and day care services. She applied for WIC, the government’s supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children. Now, she had built a career in digital marketing and was pursuing a master’s degree. Over time, she moved from a studio to a one-bedroom apartment to a three-bedroom town house.
She pulled out a photograph of her daughter. “Nine years old, and she is thriving,” she said. “Straight-A student.”
She pointed to the lapel pin Momper was wearing on her jungle-green jacket—it was an image of the tiny soles of a fetus’s feet, a symbol for the antiabortion movement. “She wears it every day,” Katherine said.
It was already well past 1:00 p.m. when Curran closed up for the day. She had heard that an abortion-rights group called Jane’s Revenge had declared a coming “night of rage” in response to the Supreme Court decision.
“I have to call the police in a minute,” Curran said, “see if I’ve got security tonight.”
In the months ahead, Curran would get estimates for panic buttons and add more security cameras. The FBI would investigate arson and vandalism crimes against pregnancy centers in Colorado, Tennessee, Oregon, and elsewhere. She would also change the center’s name for the new era: Pregnancy Center Plus.
Curran believed that no woman really wanted to have an abortion. “It’s not because she has the choice,” she said. “It’s because she feels like she doesn’t have a choice that leads her to abortion.”
Curran saw this in many other clients over the years, women like Jocelyn and Katherine. But outside her walls, there was a rising backlash. Women were angry. Many seemed to hate centers like hers, and Curran couldn’t understand why.
Her center would stay safe. But that first night, two men Curran knew volunteered to keep watch. They set out lawn chairs in front. As the hours passed, one prayed the rosary, rolling the beads between his fingers.
Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,
our life, our sweetness, and our hope.
To you do we cry,
poor banished children of Eve.
To you do we send up our sighs,
mourning and weeping in this valley of tears
Turn then, most gracious advocate,
your eyes of mercy toward us,
and after this exile
show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb,
Jesus.