Like so many individuals I’ll go on to satisfy on the bottom in Louisiana, Dr. Freehill by no means anticipated to struggle for reproductive rights so publicly. Horrified and spurred into motion by her personal experiences treating her sufferers, she has testified on the ground of the Louisiana State Legislature and given interview after interview—changing into one of many few physicians in a state that has banned abortion who’s keen to publicly converse out concerning the actuality of what’s occurring in her apply, and the implications of abortion bans on well being care professionals.
“For there to be all these penalties and the potential for shedding my medical license, being a felon…it’s simply flabbergasting and simply so arduous to wrap my head across the lack of belief within the medical neighborhood on the whole and, particularly, ob-gyns,” she says.
On this present day, Dr. Freehill is talking to me as a part of her involvement in a challenge known as Abortion in America, headed up by longtime advocate and the previous president of Planned Parenthood Cecile Richards. Doctors, spiritual leaders, abortion sufferers—they’ve all come collectively over the course of 4 days to share their experiences, their rage, their fears. The objective is easy: to bear witness to what’s occurring in Louisiana and attempt to get the remainder of the nation to concentrate. They hope that by gathering collectively and shouting their trauma with one voice, they will make a change.
Dr. Freehill has held it collectively all through our interview, however when she begins to debate why she retains talking out, regardless of her fears that she or her household could also be focused for her activism, she turns into emotional.
“How a lot worse is it going to get?” she says. “Where are we going? I’m doing my greatest to struggle issues getting worse, however I don’t know if that’s going to occur.”
Louisiana now has the excellence of being some of the restrictive states within the nation for abortion. After the Supreme Court dominated in Dobbs v. Jackson that there is no such thing as a constitutional proper to abortion, successfully handing the choice again to the states, Louisiana’s “set off regulation” went into impact. It is now one of 14 states the place abortion is totally banned with restricted exceptions.
The solely circumstances below which a pregnant person can get an abortion within the state are if their life is in danger, if their bodily well being is at severe danger, or if the fetus just isn’t anticipated to outlive the being pregnant.
A bill allowing for abortion within the case of rape or incest, put ahead by Democratic State Representative Delisha Boyd, failed this yr. Before the invoice went to a vote, Boyd shared, publicly for the first time, her personal story of being conceived when her teenage mom was the sufferer of a statutory rape. She hoped it would sway some lawmakers and the state’s governor, Jeff Landry, to comply with put rape and incest exceptions into state regulation (it didn’t). She’s nonetheless making an attempt, as a result of she’s seen the depravity to which Republican lawmakers will topic their ladies constituents.
“We,” she tells me, which means ladies, “have to start out voting like our lives rely upon it. I can’t converse for the remainder of the United States, however in Louisiana now we have turn out to be an endangered species.”
For Boyd and all the different storytellers who got here and shared throughout the four-day occasion, the struggle feels existential.
“Our state, as we see each single day, is continually displaying us that they don’t care about ladies and so they don’t care about ladies’s well being care,” says Kaitlyn Joshua, a neighborhood organizer who turned a nationally acknowledged reproductive rights advocate, together with as a 2024 Glamour Woman of the Year, following her personal expertise post-Dobbs. “So I’m energized to advocate on behalf of us and make it possible for we’re a minimum of sounding the alarm on this in order that we’re saving extra lives and never simply taking it simply because they’re dishing it out.”
