Back in 2016, Amanda Reyes and some friends were active in Tuscaloosa as escorts at the West Alabama Women’s Center, one of the Cotton State’s three remaining clinics providing abortions. They had tossed around the idea of starting a fund to provide financial assistance to people who cannot afford abortions, but that meant a big commitment. When Donald Trump got elected, they decided to move ahead with the idea.
They were off to a slow start. As Marissa Endicott wrote last year, unlike Planned Parenthood, which provides a broad range of reproductive health services, the Yellowhammer Fund, like dozens of other such funds part of the National Network of Abortion Funds, only provides assistance related to abortion, including travel costs and logistics. That had made it harder to get donors even though Alabama is one of the nation’s poorest states, with the impacts of economics and laws restricting abortion falling most heavily on Black and other people of color.
But thanks to the legislature’s draconian 2019 Alabama Human Life Protection Act to outlaw abortion altogether—with 99-year sentences for convicted providers—the trickle of money coming to the Yellowhammer Fund became a river, allowing it to provide assistance to three times as many women last year as in its first year of operation in 2018. The Alabama law has been blocked by a federal court because it collides head-on with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 law legalizing abortion nationwide.
Since then, donations have continued coming in at a higher rate, prompting the Yellowhammer team to take a very big step: buying the Tuscaloosa clinic. It announced May 15: ”West Alabama Women’s Center has been a hub for abortion access for nearly three decades, and we want to be sure it remains so for as long as abortion is legal in the state. That is why we have acquired the clinic ourselves, allowing the founder, Gloria Gray, to finally retire without any concerns that the clinic will fall into the hands of abortion opponents or otherwise be closed.”
Reyes, executive director of the fund, told Tina Vasquez at Prism last month: “We focus on what we can control. We can use our collective resources and networks to make sure people in our community get the care they need. When you prioritize getting care for your community, that’s a radical perspective.”
The 31-year-old Reyes is a former member of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health’s Latina Action Network and teaches in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama. Senior Staff Writer Meteor Blades and Campaign Director Sarah Hogg asked Reyes five questions via email.
Meteor Blades and Sarah Hogg: A key consideration behind Yellowhammer's decision to buy the West Alabama Women's Center is to improve the capacity to navigate around forced-birther laws like the Louisiana one the Supreme Court majority just overturned. Amanda, do you expect that ruling will affect how the fund moves forward at the center?
Amanda Reyes: One thing we are always aware of is that there is always going to be another threat to abortion access. We’re definitely happy that the Supreme Court didn’t overturn its own precedent, but we know that it’s just a matter of time before another case makes it in front of them. But for us, none of that matters. What we want to do is improve access for Alabamians and those in the surrounding area, and this clinic is the way to make it happen. Lost in all of the discussion of abortion access being threatened is that even if you take away the state laws, the legal cases, all of that, a clinic still only operates as long as there is someone who wants to run it. What happens as other clinic owners want to retire, or wish to move, or want to go into a different line of business? The current reality under Roe is that abortion is only legal when it is done via approved channels—a doctor providing the medication, a clinic offering procedural care. Take away a clinic, and access to a legal abortion is gone. This is what our focus is on, rather than the courts.
MB/SH: Buying a clinic in hostile territory is a seriously major commitment. Had the fund's leaders been thinking about this for a long time, or was the idea sparked by the influx of additional donations you received after the attempted Alabama abortion ban last year?
Reyes: When I first got involved in abortion funding, one of my end goals was to see a fund eventually purchase and run a clinic. Abortion funds are inherently patient-centered in a way that clinics themselves don’t have the ability—or maybe the desire—to be, because we are inherently focused on meeting the wide variety of needs of the person who contacts us. We have the ability and honestly the responsibility to help a person navigate the variety of hurdles facing them when they are trying to access a procedure, and not all of them are financial, either. The idea of bringing that sort of holistic approach to patients at a clinic—being able to provide an abortion but also meet other needs such as birth control, sex-ed information, well-health screenings, referrals for doula services or adoption services, whatever a person might need at whatever point that person might need it—was always a dream, especially since so many of those things are just unavailable in Alabama in one location. The donations that poured in last year just helped us get there much more quickly.
MB/SH: It has been about six weeks since the announcement. What has the overall community response been like, inside and outside Alabama?
Reyes: Unsurprisingly, the response has been exactly what you would expect depending on where people fall on the abortion spectrum. Local and national abortion opponents are upset because they had hoped once the former owner retired the clinic would shut down. Abortion rights activists have been very supportive. We’ve been especially happy about all of the press attention and support from our abortion fund and reproductive justice allies. But probably the best support has come from the people who donated to us during the ban—they’ve been very responsive to the news when we shared it in May.
MB/SH: In the purchase announcement, you said that within a year, you hope the center will not only provide abortion care, but also a full range of reproductive health services as well, including transgender health care. As you put it, the idea is to make the center “a model for what health care in this country should look like.” That’s an impressively high bar. It's early days, of course, so this question is obviously premature, but we'll ask anyway: What would you advise reproductive rights activists in other states to take into account if they are thinking of adopting Yellowhammer's approach?
Reyes: What we are doing isn’t unprecedented at all, to be clear. There are more abortion providers beginning to offer trans health services, or doing birth work as well as abortion care. CHOICES in Tennessee is a great model of a full spectrum reproductive healthcare clinic providing both birth and abortion services, and Trust Women in Wichita has offered hormones and other trans health services for a few years now. We don’t see ourselves as setting any sort of bar, but only integrating all of the services that always should be in one place rather than siloed into various offices. But we also know that any clinic that wants to do the same has to primarily be certain of bringing in staff willing to offer all of these aspects of care. Needless to say, in the South that can be a lot harder because of both stigma and the fact that the South already often doesn’t have community abortion providers, and will need to fly in doctors rather than have a permanent one on site. We are very lucky to have found a medical director willing to relocate in order to be a part of this new iteration of the clinic, and we can’t wait to announce that later this month.
MB/SH: The potential inherent in operating a full-spectrum clinic that serves as an ever-evolving blueprint seems immense. One clear advantage of fund ownership is having new blood in charge, ownership with built-in institutional support. Do you see other innovative approaches that Yellowhammer and reproductive rights and fund activists might adopt in pushing back against ever-dwindling lack of access and anti-abortion extremism?
Reyes: As you can see from our example, keeping a clinic open is hard. Opening a new clinic is virtually impossible these days. And yet, all of our battles recently are about maintaining clinics. We’ve seen two separate cases now in four years at the Supreme Court about whether clinics should be allowed to stay open. We have multiple states with one clinic. As long as our organizing around access is clinic focused, we will always be chasing our own tails. We will never move forward until abortion is completely decriminalized and a person is able to have one when and where they chose—in a clinic or at home with medication, regardless how that medication was obtained. That’s the battle we have to commit to, in red states and in blue ones.