CARBONDALE, Ill. – The 26-year-old had never heard of the distant southern Illinois town, but it had become the closest option.
They parked outside a single-story office building, across from a Kroger, at the Choices Center for Reproductive Health. She walked in past a security guard to a waiting room, donning a green wristband.A security guard stands inside Choices Center for Reproductive Health in Carbondale, Illinois. April 2023.
And as more states in the Midwest and the South put restrictions in place, abortion providers set their sights on Carbondale. A year ago, the story of how Carbondale would grapple with its new place on the fault-lines of America’s post-Roe landscape was just beginning to unfold. Republican lawmakers in her state and others nearby such as Kentucky and Missouri had for years been passing more and more restrictions, regulations and measures to squeeze access.
Pepper looked at a map, seeing clinics across the river from St. Louis, set up to maintain access amid growing restrictions in Missouri, that were already getting a crush of out-of-state patients.Pepper knew the area. She grew up in the Rust Belt Mississippi River town of Alton, Illinois. Her eyes quickly fell on Carbondale, founded as a railroad junction in the 1850s.
That could make it a key outpost for abortion rights in a part of the country where an “abortion desert” was about to spread. In January, she brought her executive staff to town. “It was like the exit row of an airplane,” she said. “I made everybody look me in the eye and said, ‘We're going to do this.’”
Sitting in a Mexican restaurant, near the railroad tracks that shoot through on their way from New Orleans to Chicago, Loos noted that polls showed a majority of Americans favored some level of abortion access.Outside the city? That was another story.The rumors had begun to spread over kitchen tables, across church pews and through campus offices.
"A lot of us shop here. A lot of us have family here. Anything that happens here in Carbondale is going to affect the respective communities," a woman who said she worked as a nurse told the council. "I’m going to boycott Carbondale if you guys bring an abortion clinic here."
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