circleWith her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, a small gold cross around her neck and wearing teal scrubs emblazoned with a cartoon frog, Brenda Morgan was polite but firm as she gave instructions to the clinic’s staff.
Morgan advised the three staff members that they would have no choice but to leave a voicemail, since they rarely answer calls from unknown numbers. When you do leave a message, she added, never say you’re calling from Whole Woman’s Health. Instead, Morgan suggested using a vague phrase like, “This is Brenda from your clinic. Please call me back.”
The last thing they want is for the wrong person to listen to the voicemail and realize it’s a call from an abortion clinic.
Staff squinted at the phone on the desk. Patient privacy is a top priority, but there was little time to perfect the answering machine technology. Less than 24 hours later, the newest addition to Whole Woman Health’s network of abortion clinics would be welcoming its first patient.
Two years after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing nearly all abortion bans in more than a dozen states, more than 100 facilities have stopped providing abortions. New clinics are opening in states that still allow abortion, but they are far from replacing those that have closed. Many of these clinics are in heavily liberal northern states.
We opened this clinic because we knew how many people travel from this area.
Amy Hagstrom Miller, Founder, Whole Woman’s Health
By contrast, Whole Woman’s Health’s newest clinic, which opened quietly last week, is in Petersburg, Virginia, a state still governed by a Republican governor who denounced the Republican campaign to ban abortions after 15 weeks in the 2023 election. By opening in Petersburg, a small city perhaps best known as the site of the final battle of the American Civil War, Whole Woman’s Health is declaring the opening of a new front in a war that has once again divided America into North and South: the battle over abortion.
Virginia is likely the last Southern state where abortion providers can open new clinics, and the need for abortion clinics in the South or neighboring South has grown recently. On May 1, Florida banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, devastating the last bastion of abortion access in the South. Women in Florida and neighboring states must travel hundreds of miles to access abortions.
“We didn’t just open this clinic because it’s Florida,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder of Whole Woman’s Health, “we opened this clinic because we know how many people come from this region.”
“I should have given up sooner”
Whole Woman’s Health served as the face of abortion in Texas for many years, running several clinics there. In 2016, the group won a case at the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned several abortion restrictions in Texas. At the time, the decision seemed like a sign that the battle for abortion rights was turning in the group’s favor.
Eight years later, Roe was struck down, Texas banned nearly all abortions, Whole Woman’s Health closed its Texas clinic and another in Indiana, where abortion is also now illegal.
It was emotionally and financially devastating: It took Hagstrom Miller more than a year to sell the buildings in which it operated its clinics. (Anti-abortion groups have since bought one of the buildings.) It cost tens of thousands of dollars to get out of one lease, she says.
“The operational issues are real. They could take down one of the most stable independent health care organizations in the country. And they almost did,” said Hagstrom Miller, whose penchant for dressing is as flamboyant as her political beliefs. The day before the Petersburg clinic opened, she wore a lime green suit and a necklace that read “Abortion.” The backs of her silver hair had been dyed a scorching purple, the signature color of Whole Woman’s Health, whose walls are usually painted mauve.
Hagstrom Miller continued, “I had to spend my organization’s reserves to do all of that, which prevented me from opening something in Kansas or figuring out how to help the people of southern Illinois.”
I’m really scared that Trump will be reelected. We need to plan a nationwide abortion ban.
Amy Hagstrom Miller
Over the past few months, Whole Woman’s Health has tried to open several abortion clinics; one in New Mexico opened successfully; but Hagstrom Miller bought a building in Oklahoma just before the state banned abortions. “We still have that building,” Hagstrom Miller says. “We’ve had a foreclosure on that building for who knows how long.”
She also bought a clinic from an abortion provider in North Carolina, but spent a year fighting state regulations and was eventually forced to admit she couldn’t open the clinic.
“Maybe I should have given up sooner,” she said. “I’m not very good at it.”
A few weeks later, North Carolina banned abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy.
Morgan was part of the effort. For the past two years, she has been crisscrossing the country as Whole Woman’s Health’s director of growth and acquisitions, juggling clinic closings and reopenings. During a tour of the clinic, Morgan pointed out equipment reused from Whole Woman’s Health’s previous facilities, including the black chairs in the waiting room, the pale pink surgery trays and the chairs where patients get their blood drawn.
“If this thing could talk, it would tell a lot of stories,” Morgan said of the examination bed in San Antonio, Texas.
In the waiting room, a royal purple sign greets patients as they walk through the door, bearing Whole Woman’s Health’s “mission statement,” which reads, in part, “We honor women’s hopes, dreams and aspirations in all the care we provide.” Morgan runs her finger over the sign, noting where the purple paint has faded to reveal white underneath. The sign originally hung at a clinic in Texas.
“I like that this car has a few dents in it because it’s just like us,” Morgan says. “It’s endured a lot of years, but just like us, it has its little scratches and bruises.”
“We need to make a plan.”
On the clinic’s first day open, a woman flew in from Florida.
“She was so sweet and so grateful,” said Dr. Meera Shah, the clinic’s medical director, “and I was angry that she had to do that, that she had to leave Florida.”
In her other job as chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood in New York, Shah said she has treated many patients fleeing Southern abortion laws, including a Florida woman with an ectopic pregnancy, a non-viable pregnancy in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus. If left untreated, an ectopic pregnancy can cause a woman’s fallopian tube to rupture, leading to bleeding and death.
In theory, abortion bans should not apply to ectopic pregnancies, but Shah said the woman was turned away from a Florida emergency room because the doctor found the state’s abortion laws “confusing.”
“It could have blown up,” Shah said, “and the zip code you live in really dictates the type of health care you can get, but it shouldn’t be that way.”
By the weekend, the Petersburg clinic had assisted three more people, from Florida, Georgia and Alabama, with Morgan expecting the clinic to eventually be seeing about 30 to 50 patients a week.
But upcoming elections in 2024 could disrupt these plans, especially with abortion laws in the South still in flux. Floridians will vote on a ballot measure that could restore access to abortion, but it would require 60% of the vote to pass. In North Carolina, a Republican who has called abortion “genocide” and “murder” is currently running for governor. He has recently tried to soften his stance on abortion, but if elected, North Carolina’s state government could ban abortion altogether.
The same week the Petersburg clinic opened, Donald Trump pledged not to use 19th-century anti-abortion laws to ban abortion nationwide, while his running mate, J.D. Vance, said Trump would not sign a nationwide abortion ban. But Project 2025, the leading blueprint for a conservative presidential administration, is packed with anti-abortion proposals. It’s possible Trump will break his promise.
“I feel more engaged and hopeful than I’ve felt in a long time,” Hagstrom Miller said, “and I’m very fearful that Trump will be re-elected, and we have to prepare for that eventuality. We have to plan for a national abortion ban.”