The Pink House Defenders were surprised by how calm the day was turning out to be. There was no shouting over their walls. Not even a sidewalk sermon. Just one lone protester, an older man in a camping chair outside the entry gate.
“This is not normal,” said Derenda Hancock, who led the group of activists who guarded this abortion clinic. “It’s strange as crud.”
In court filings and newspaper stories, the low-slung, bubble-gum-pink building with the lime-green roof was known as Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the only abortion clinic in Mississippi. Hancock called it the Pink House. They all did.
Every day the clinic was open, the Defenders put on their rainbow-striped traffic vests, blasted their ’90s alt-rock, and maneuvered patients’ cars around the protesters, through the metal gates covered in black tarps, and into the twelve parking spots. Hancock waited tables a couple of days a week, but her main job—her mission—was guarding this small stretch of pavement. “Somebody needs to be out here,” she said. “Patients shouldn’t have to deal with all this with no one out here to help them.”
It wasn’t easy for Hancock and her team, standing for seven hours in the sweltering sun, fighting the street preachers, the religious homeschoolers with their packs of children, and the abortion abolitionists. This morning, suffocating heat blanketed Jackson, shimmering off the asphalt in radiating waves, as they helped the women enter for their appointments. After that, there was nothing much for the escorts to do but sit in the shade of their portable tarp, light a cigarette, and talk. The topic today—and every day—was the case aimed at shutting them down.
“Oh, honey, this isn’t about abortion,” said Kim Gibson, a former paralegal. “This is low-hanging fruit they’ve been working on. This is the wedge that’s going to open the door for the rest of it.”
Gibson had come to the Pink House every week for the past five years. But she saw herself as fighting an organized movement far greater than just their handful of regular protesters.
“Christian nationalism. That’s their goal,” she told the group, leaning back in her camping chair. “These are religious laws that are passed, but ‘it’s for the welfare of the mother.’ The fuck it is.”
She paused. The song “Better Man”—Pearl Jam’s requiem to abused women—boomed from the speaker, floating across the asphalt. “I’m on a rant today, y’all,” said Gibson. Hancock chuckled. “But it’s the truth.”
The truth was that Gibson was furious. She was enraged by the churchwomen holding their signs outside and the guys on the ladders who screamed damnation over the gates. But she was also angry at the people who were supposed to be fighting for her: the Democrats, national reproductive rights organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL, even some of their local activists. They had all failed to save them, she believed.
“It’s all been ‘We’ll do it in the courts,’” she said. “That was a total failure for years, and they just kept buying and kept doing it, kept on. There’s this avalanche of loss since 2010.”
The “antis,” as they called the antiabortion activists, had a plan. “And we can’t get our shit together for anything,” she said. “They did the work we didn’t do.”
Hancock and Gibson knew the end was near. They saw the flood of women from Texas and Louisiana, states where abortion had become functionally illegal with bans after six weeks of pregnancy, coming to the Pink House. They maneuvered around the crush of media in their parking lot, getting in the way with their cameras and microphones. And on top of everything else, they heard the gloating of the protesters, already crowing about the Supreme Court decision that would effectively ban abortion in Mississippi and beyond. “They offer us, every day, post-Roe grief counseling,” Hancock said bitterly. “They’re just swimming in their victory.”
Sitting in the shade of the tarp, Hancock suddenly glanced up from her phone. The court just added tomorrow as a decision day, she announced to the group. “You know what’s gonna happen, right? Everyone’s throat is going to be cut. The axe is going to drop,” she said.
“The shoe is going to fall,” added Gibson.
“In the meantime…” Hancock trailed off. Gibson picked up. “We keep going.”
Inside the doors of the Pink House, Dr. Cheryl Hamlin met with groups of women to give them mifepristone—or, as she called it, “mify”—the packet of pills that would end their pregnancies. She had delivered these instructions so many times in this small room with salmon and lavender walls that she had lost count.
“The pill you are taking today has no side effects,” she began. But once you swallow it, a nurse warned the women, there’s no reversing: if you don’t complete the process with the second set of pills, you will either lose the fetus anyhow or keep the pregnancy and could have an abnormal baby.
It’s with that second set of pills, Dr. Hamlin explained, that they would start to feel their abortion begin. After about three to four hours, there would be bleeding and cramping. “You’ll pass clots the size of a lemon,” she said. “At some point, you’re just going to be sitting on a towel or on the toilet. It’s going to be more than bothering with a pad.” The blood will decrease dramatically after two hours. After two weeks, it should stop completely. You can start your birth control as soon as you stop passing tissue, she said.
If it doesn’t happen that way—maybe there’s only a little spotting or no bleeding at all—don’t wait the suggested two weeks for the follow-up visit, she urged. “Pretty good sign it didn’t work,” Dr. Hamlin said. Give the clinic a call right away. “It probably means you’re still pregnant,” she told the group.
“Okay, I’m going to pass out your pills,” Dr. Hamlin said. “You’re free to go, but I’ll stay here and sign your charts for a few minutes, if you have questions.”
The clinic made the women deposit their phones in a basket outside, a security precaution to protect their privacy. As they waited for the pills, the women discussed their miscarriages, pregnancies, and childbirths. They described the bleeds they’d had, whether their water broke or had to be broken. They talked about how much work they had missed and how much they expected to miss after they took the second dose. One woman mentioned her three sons. She had her first child at fifteen, and now he was about to graduate from high school. “They done wear me out,” she said. And for the past few weeks, she reminded everyone, there had been a baby formula shortage. “I ain’t going through that shit,” she declared, taking the packet.
Everyone swallowed their first pill. Dr. Hamlin and the nurses offered stern warnings: if they failed to take their second pill and had to come back to start again, they would be charged again. A woman who felt nauseous was urged to wait in the clinic after her dose. If she threw up the pill after she left, it would be another hundred dollars to restart the process, Dr. Hamlin explained. The woman had traveled three hours from Louisiana and it was the trip on the potholed roads that did her in, she said. “Yeah, you gonna rock and roll here in Mississippi,” a nurse said.
After they took their pills, some of the women asked Dr. Hamlin questions. “Can I still breastfeed while taking this?” wondered a woman with a four-month-old at home. “What about marijuana edibles”—her treatment for anxiety and depression—“is it safe to keep up the standard dosage?”
“Neither should be a problem,” she told them.
Dr. Hamlin had never been to Mississippi until deciding she wanted to help the Pink House after Trump won the 2016 election. Since then, once a month, Dr. Hamlin had made the 1,255-mile trip from her home in Boston to Jackson for her three-day shift. Over that period, she typically saw nearly one hundred women for counseling, medication abortions, and surgical abortions. At the clinics around Boston, she saw about fifteen patients on a busy day. There was no mandatory counseling. No speech that she was required to say by state law, informing women that having an abortion would increase their risk of breast cancer—an inaccuracy she immediately corrected every time she said it. No need to mark the official start of the required twenty-four-hour waiting period.
Recently, she had started telling the women in Mississippi about the coming Supreme Court decision, warning them that this clinic and almost every other one in the Midwest and South would likely close soon. Most didn’t know anything about the case. Dr. Hamlin urged them to vote and wished she could recommend some other steps to take. She knew there were none.
In an office down the hall, behind a desk piled with paperwork, Shannon Brewer, the clinic director, sorted through her papers. Her eyes darted, every few seconds, to check the monitor on her right—a video feed of eleven security cameras in and around the building. It was a habit developed over a lifetime in the Pink House, always watching and waiting for the next crisis to come.
Brewer had started part-time in 2000. Her aunt, Betty Thompson, was the director then and needed help. Brewer had six children and was barely making it. She had no furniture in her apartment, just a mattress from the Salvation Army that she shared with the kids. She had almost given up her fifth, a son, for adoption. But when the time came to hand over her new baby, she couldn’t do it. “If you have an abortion, you don’t even know who this would have been. So that’s totally two different things. That’s what people don’t get,” she said in a 2016 documentary about the clinic. “It’s harder to see your child and then just hand your child away to somebody else. I believe in abortion because no woman should have to feel the way that I felt.”
Brewer believed that working at the Pink House was what she was meant to do. She was there in 2004, when it became the last clinic in the state, and in 2010, when Susan Hill, the first owner, was dying of breast cancer and sold her business to a friend. When the new owner, Diane Derzis, decided to repaint the beige building that bubble-gum pink, Brewer was skeptical. She worried the color would make it even more of a target. After it happened, she realized that it didn’t matter; the clinic already stood out in the conservative Christian stronghold of Jackson.
The Pink House almost closed its doors after a 2012 state law required its doctors to have admitting privileges at a local hospital, a standard the clinic couldn’t meet because none of the hospitals would agree. A court eventually blocked the law, and they stayed open. Brewer kept working.
And in 2018, when state representative Becky Currie pushed the fifteen-week ban through the state legislature, Brewer wasn’t worried. The bill was a clear violation of Roe. Just like in 2012, she thought, their lawyer at the Center for Reproductive Rights would sue, and there would be a court ruling blocking the law. She never expected the Supreme Court would actually take up the case. But it did. And here she was, racing the clock to decision day. “It’s the waiting,” she said. “I feel like they are playing a game with me.”
Unlike Hancock and her escorts, Brewer thought the justices would wait until the final day of their term to release their ruling. But in the meantime, she was drowning. The clinic expanded its hours to accommodate the influx of patients from out of state. She thought the media requests would stop if she just did a round of interviews. It didn’t work. There were just more patients, more paperwork, more press, and an onslaught of need that felt never-ending.
“It’s not as shocking as people think it is,” she said with a sigh, her eyes flitting to the video screen as her hand signed another set of papers.
Everyone kept asking her how she was feeling. How Brewer was feeling was tired.