Louisiana Abortion Provider Being Forced Out: ‘I Will Not Walk Away With a Whimper’

Hope Medical Group in Shreveport, Louisiana, is one of the state’s three remaining abortion clinics—all of which are being forced to leave the state now in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned. They don’t know yet where they’re going. But Kathaleen Pittman, the 65-year-old director of Hope Medical, told Jezebel she “absolutely refuses” to just shut the clinic’s doors and give up on trying to provide Louisiana women care.

“I will not walk away with a whimper,” says Pittman. “I don’t have it in me to quit at this point. I’m very close to retirement age, and I recognize that, but I think I have enough in me to get it started elsewhere.”

The tears have been flowing these past few weeks at Hope Medical. Volunteer clinic escort Debbie Hollis said she stopped by the abortion clinic this afternoon as staff was packing up boxes. “Everybody’s just tragically sad, not just because they are losing their jobs, but because of what’s going to happen in this state,” Hollis told Jezebel.

“It’s so emotional,” she continued. “A big part of everything that we’ve worked so hard on since the 1980s is just going to be gone. That source of help is going to disappear. We are all struggling to get used to the notion that we are somehow less than human under the law in the U.S.”

Hollis said she herself had an abortion at Hope in the late 1990s. “I just kind of took it for granted that this is an option available for me, and it saved my life,” she says. “So many of us have taken the right to safe abortion for granted. Maybe that’s part of what’s making this so hard to accept.”

In addition to being a volunteer escort, Hollis runs Basic Necessities, a diaper and period supply bank in Shreveport. She said she doesn’t know how the diaper bank is going to meet demand now that the abortion clinics are closed. “It was already tough before, now it’s going to be next to impossible.”

Pittman said that while she hasn’t decided where Hope Medical is going to relocate, she’s consulting her attorneys and looking at all of the options in nearby states where abortion is still legal. She wants to go to a place that could still serve all the pregnant people from Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Mississippi, who now live in abortion deserts. “I fear forcing people to continue pregnancies that are unwanted or they cannot afford, will drive them further into poverty,” she said. “I fear an increase in maternal mortality. I fear physicians will be forced to withhold care that is in the patients’ best interest due to the ambiguity in the wording of the ban.”

A representative for Louisiana’s other two remaining clinics in New Orleans and Baton Rouge told me that like Hope Medical, they are also figuring out where to go and are currently “in the process of finalizing agreements in two other states that respect and value women’s bodily autonomy so that we can again provide respectful, non-judgmental, quality abortion care services.”

Medical providers expect Louisiana’s new abortion ban, which has very narrow exceptions, to have a ripple effect on reproductive healthcare throughout the state. For example, many OB/GYN residents in the state trained at the embattled Shreveport clinic to learn about abortion procedures, which are also used to treat miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies.

Dr. Valerie Williams, the former director of the Ryan Program at LSU Health Sciences, wrote in an affidavit that, since the program started, “the quality of medical students applying to the LSU OB/GYN residency program has skyrocketed. Students from all over the country are attracted to LSU in part due to the quality of abortion training. Thus, if this training program is no longer provided, the residency program will suffer. Because physicians tend to practice where they do their residency, this will, in the long term, negatively affect the quality of OB/GYNs in Louisiana overall.”

More than a third of Louisiana’s parishes don’t have a practicing OB/GYN already. The state has the nation’s highest maternal mortality rate, with Black women dying at four times the rate of white women. And horror stories have already been pouring out of Louisiana in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. I asked Hollis if she’d heard about the woman who is going to have to travel across several states to Florida for abortion access, or be forced to carry a nonviable fetus without a skull to term. She gasped and said, “Where?!”

“Here. Louisiana,” I responded.

The phone went silent for a full two minutes. “We need to keep an eye on mental health and suicide rates,” said Hollis. “None of us is prepared for this.”