Choices Memphis Center to bring women’s reproductive health clinic to Carbondale – The Southern

CARBONDALE CHOICES Memphis Center for Reproductive Health is opening a clinic in Carbondale starting August 1 as health care leaders brace for a potential overturn of Roe v. Wade.

CHOICES is an independent nonprofit community health clinic that provides full-spectrum reproductive and sexual health services from abortion to hormone replacement therapy and birth services, according to the group's website.

When the U.S. Supreme Court took up the Roe v. Wade case, Jennifer Pepper, president and CEO of CHOICES, and her team began to prepare for the potential overturning of the case, she said.

The group began looking for a location for the new clinic as Tennessee is one of 13 states that currently have trigger laws that would ban abortion immediately or shortly thereafter decide whether to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights.

Those are the dominoes we saw falling very early, Pepper said. We knew the protections that Illinois had put into place and with the Sexual and Reproductive Health Freedom Act and I was familiar with the area. It's three hours from Memphis by drive. It's also three hours from Nashville. Those are two major cities where people go to access abortion care right now. So we started visiting and meeting people in the community late last year. We had a very welcoming response from folks. Folks here understand that people need health care, and especially things that are typically considered stigmatized services like our abortion care or gender-affirming care. The folks of Carbondale have been great, we've really had a great reception and are very pleased to be coming in partnering with folks here.

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Illinois Sexual and Reproductive Health Freedom Act, which was signed in 2019, made Illinois the second state in the country to protect abortion rights should Roe v. Wade be overturned, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

This law mixed with the close proximity of Carbondale's Amtrak station makes it a great place for CHOICES' second clinic, Pepper said.

From her childhood through her adulthood, Pepper has seen firsthand how birth services and abortion services can drastically impact a persons life.

I was raised not far from Carbondale by a single mom who struggled significantly to take care of my brother and me, Pepper said. So, I understood at a very early age how family size really impacts a person's ability to move through life and to achieve certain things. Its complicated right now, it's gut-wrenching. I have worked with and provided services to people seeking abortion in various roles for over a decade now. I understand that for every person that needs to access abortion, there's a very individual reason why they need to access abortion, and those reasons are varied and complicated and messy. People have to be able to do that for themselves. They have to be able to make those decisions for themselves because of that mess and because of that complexity. I'm weeping for folks that are going to need to access abortion and won't be able to.

The official location of the clinic has not yet been announced nor have hours of operation been decided.

However, the clinic will be open five days a week and the schedule is going to work in conjunction with the Amtrak schedule, Pepper said.

CHOICES is also not yet aware of what insurances they will be able to accept immediately, Pepper said.

However, national funds are available to make the medical procedure more accessible such as the National Network of Abortion Funds at https://abortionfunds.org/need-abortion/.

A lack of funding for other services is another worry that Pepper has pending the U.S. Supreme Courts decision.

While she does have some hope the leaked documentation may spur people into action, she is mostly disheartened.

I'm worried about the other systems that are going to be called on to support the additional needs in the community, Pepper said. They don't get the proper funding or support that they need either. But I'm also hopeful that this galvanizes people in some way."

While the clinic will only offer HRT and medication abortions to start, they hope to have the clinic running at full-capacity with all of services being offered in five years.

We knew from the get-go, that if we opened a clinic, regardless of where it was that it was going to be a comprehensive center, Pepper said. That's who we are. That's what we do. So, we really sat back and said, 'We have to break these things into phases just from a practical standpoint.' What are things that can be implemented rather efficiently verse what things take some more time? For example, offering birth services just take some more time to figure out and so it is in the final phase of our approach. We really decided on gender-affirming care, because when we talk to folks in the community they told us there really wasn't a good place for those services or not ... There wasn't a lot of access for those services. So folks were having to go to St. Louis or Nashville.

Though the clinic does intend to cover a wide variety of services, abortion and HRT are among some of the most stigmatized and important to have available.

They are both highly stigmatized services, Pepper said. That means there are less providers available and they're harder to find. When those two things happen people that are poor, people of color and youth are disproportionately impacted, because they can't access transportation or they don't have the financial resources to get there. CHOICES has a long history of providing stigmatized health services because we know our community deserves it. People need access to health care. And so these all these things go together, because it is really about bodily autonomy and is about people being able to make the decisions for themselves, whether that is to carry a pregnancy to term or to terminate a pregnancy, whether that is to live in the gender you are assigned at birth or to make your own decision about your gender moving forward, whether that is to choose a long-acting type of birth control or a more short term. I mean, there are all kinds of decisions people have to make in their lives and so CHOICES, our model, is about being that healthcare provider for people, regardless of their decision, and helping support them in the best way we can.

To keep up-to-date on the project view CHOICES website at https://memphischoices.org/.

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Choices Memphis Center to bring women's reproductive health clinic to Carbondale - The Southern