‘The Person I Think I Ought to Be’: Meet the Doctor Fighting to Save Mississippi’s Last Abortion Clinic
Mississippi may soon become the first and only state in the nation without a single abortion provider. The Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the lone clinic left in the state — has been offering abortion care and reproductive health services to the women of Mississippi for decades, but it’s never been easy. The health provider has long been the target of an avalanche of regulations and restrictions passed by a deeply conservative state legislature that has only gotten savvier and in recent years. The latest and most dangerous threat to the clinic couldn’t come in a more innocuous package — a measure requiring the physicians who perform abortions at the facility to obtain admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.
But the clinic has never backed down in the face of a threat, and Jackson Women’s Health is staffed by fighters. Dr. Willie Parker is one of them.
Twice a month, Parker leaves his home in Chicago and heads to Mississippi to work at the clinic and ensure women have access to the medical care that they need. When he arrives, protesters are there to greet him. But he endures the harassment, the intimidation and the constant legal threats because there’s far too much at stake if the clinic folds. Women’s lives are on the line, and he knows it.