On the eve of the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, federal public officials and local health care providers returned to St. Louis reflecting on the ways that decision has changed America in the past year.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis County, and representatives from Planned Parenthood of St. Louis and other clinics that provide abortions in Illinois gathered in the same conference room where they first learned of the Dobbs decision.
“I remember vividly that moment as we were wrapping up our roundtable and the room got incredibly quiet. Everybody started looking down at their phones, and we knew that the worst-case scenario had become our new reality,” said Yamelsie Rodríguez, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri.
Becerra reflected on the havoc the court’s ruling has wreaked on people across the country, emphasizing the physical, emotional and mental stress many have endured.
“It has turned health care for women fundamentally upside down,” he said. “Sometimes you wonder if the nine people sitting in judgment up in Washington, D.C., in that hallowed building where they write all these decisions, are thinking about the trauma that Americans go through.”
In one year, the Dobbs decision has had a tangible effect on health care for people across the country, said Adm. Rachel Levine of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.
“The political and legal environment of the state that you live in is now a social determinant of health,” she said. “For reproductive rights, it’s a social determinant of health for women, as well as for other issues such as gender-affirming care.”
For clinics in the Metro East, where abortion is protected by Illinois state law, the court’s decision has meant many more people from farther away seeking care, said Dr. Colleen McNicholas, chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri.
She said the clinic in Fairview Heights has logged a 700% increase in patients from beyond the bistate, even a recent patient from the U.S. Virgin Islands.
“It really speaks to the ripple effect that abortion bans have,” she said. “We saw that coming into the Dobbs decision when Texas eliminated abortion.”
McNicholas explained how Texas’ six-week abortion ban preceding the Dobbs decision meant many people from Oklahoma as well as Texas started traveling to the Metro East clinics.
“We’ve seen folks in the last year from 29 states,” she said. “Lots of states that still have access because with fewer people to provide care, there’s longer waiting times and they’re being pushed to later parts in pregnancy.”
A few women at this year’s roundtable shared their experiences with how the end of Roe v. Wade has affected them personally. The Rev. Love Holt, a community engagement manager with Pro-Choice Missouri, detailed her own experience with a medication abortion in January.
“Earlier that month my cycle was late, and I was thrusted into panic mode,” she said, “because I know a post-Roe world means that abortions are illegal and harder to access where I live.”
Holt explained that she needed a procedure to remove tissue from inside her uterus after the medication caused major bleeding. The workers at the Catholic hospital she went to kept their faces covered and hardly shared any information with her, she said.
“It was very sketchy because of the laws and all of the fear around what could happen at their hospital, especially a Catholic hospital,” she said. “They hurried me out soon after the procedure. I could have died that day.”
Maggie Olivia, another woman at the roundtable, shared how anti-abortion protesters have become more hostile to those seeking abortion care. She said she’s more prepared than most for that kind of harassment, given the nature of her work as a policy manager at Pro-Choice Missouri, but it’s still jarring.
“There is no preparing the way that it feels to be personally targeted like that,” Olivia said. “I still very much remember the things those protesters said to me that morning.”
Afterward, Olivia said she was denied a refill on her mental health medications because there was a note in her medical chart that she had a positive pregnancy test earlier in the year.
To Bush, the stories highlighted how decisions around pregnancy are deeply personal. And now, she said, people across the country are living in fear about their own bodies.
“The thing that really pisses me off about that is that nobody else has to deal with it,” Bush said. “There is no other person that has to feel what that person feels in their own body.”
Bush was emphatic when she said decisions about pregnancy should not be decided by anyone other than the person who is pregnant.
“Shame on Missouri, shame on our former attorney general,” she said. “Because he has never had to get up and wonder if he was pregnant and what he would have to do with that child.”
Along with the harsh reality of a year without Roe v. Wade, there was also hope about the future. Becerra emphasized how the court did not shake his resolve to push for that kind of health care.
“It’s a fight that’s been going on for a long time. It preceded 1973 (when Roe v. Wade was first decided),” Becerra said. “Thank you for letting us come here to St. Louis, to not just remember, but to reenergize, because we have so much to do.”
Bush agrees.
“All they did was ignite us on fire. All they did was give us more fuel,” she said.
