Opinion | When Reproductive Choice Is a Family Value

Calla Hales said she wore her bulletproof vest to work on Saturday for the first time in a long time. Hales is the executive director of A Preferred Women’s Health Center, a clinic that provides abortion care in Charlotte, N.C., and has branches in Raleigh, N.C.; Augusta, Ga.; and Atlanta. She’s always worried about her safety, because of the endless stream of threats that abortion providers get. But when I talked to her last week, Hales was dubious about how useful the vest is: It doesn’t cover her entire body so she knows it won’t necessarily save her life.

Still, her loved ones were texting and calling her to make sure she had it on. Friday, the day that Roe v. Wade fell, was her first full day back in the office after recovering from a nasty case of Covid. Hales is pregnant with her second child and said “I got hit hard,” adding, “I was in the E.R. and I thought I was miscarrying.” It turned out, she said, that she had been coughing with enough intensity that she gave herself a subchorionic hematoma, which is bleeding beneath the membranes that surround the embryo in the uterus.

When we spoke, she said she was coming off a 12-hour workday, and was exhausted. It was the first time since she returned to work that she had a few moments to reflect on what had just happened. Though she was well aware that Roe was going to be overturned from the leaked draft in May of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Hales said that nothing could have prepared her for the post-Roe reality.

“A lot of folks are calling and double-checking that their appointments are still valid,” she said — and they are in North Carolina, where abortion remains legal.

But “a heartbreaking amount of people from Louisiana and Kentucky are calling” from the parking lots of abortion clinics, she said. Those states had trigger laws where abortion was banned immediately with no exceptions for rape or incest after Roe fell. (Since Hales and I spoke Saturday, judges in Louisiana and Utah have temporarily blocked their states’ abortion bans, and one Louisiana clinic said it would start performing abortions again this week, NPR reported Monday.)

“In some cases yes, we can help them, but we have a 72-hour counseling rule, and it becomes a whole logistical nightmare,” Hales said, referring to the North Carolina law that requires providers to give information meant to discourage abortion, and then wait 72 hours before providing care. North Carolina is one of the few states in the Southeast where abortion remains relatively unrestricted.

For now.

Hales’s parents started the network of clinics that she runs more than 20 years ago, and I asked her how she thinks about her role in carrying on what they began. She feels that providing access to abortion is absolutely a family value: “Most abortion providers have families of their own, and they are going out of their way to make sure other people have the families they want as well. But we’re constantly demonized,” she said. Hales pointed out that the majority of people who get abortions are parents already — as my colleagues at The Upshot explained in December, 60 percent of women who get abortions have at least one child.

She added that running an abortion clinic is “not only a family value for us, it’s also a religious choice.” Hales, who is Jewish, told me, “I have been really able to embrace Judaism as an adult and an abortion provider.” She finds the antisemitism she has faced from some of the protesters outside her clinic particularly hard to bear, because “in our minds and religion and values,” reproductive choice is “not just a moral good, it’s a religious law.”

In a Times Opinion guest essay from November, Sarah Seltzer explained that Jewish sacred texts “consistently prioritize the ultimate well-being of the pregnant person over that of the fetus.” Though not all Jews agree, “the Talmud, where much of Jewish law is interpreted and where practice is hashed out, defines life as beginning when the baby’s head emerges from the mother’s body,” Seltzer wrote. In Florida, a progressive synagogue, Congregation L’Dor Va-Dor, has challenged the state’s 15-week abortion ban, arguing that it violates freedom of religion. As Eliza Fawcett reported this month for The Times, the suit argues that in Jewish law “abortion is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman.”

Protesters are an occupational hazard that Hales has been dealing with for years. I first spoke to her in 2020, for an article about the changing tactics of pro-choice clinic defenders. Back then, Hales told me that the number of anti-abortion protesters had exploded since 2015, and described large weekly prayer walks outside her clinics.

She said that since the leak of the Dobbs decision, protesters have become more emboldened. There have been more of them, as well as “an increase in hostilities,” with “more virulent language,” including antisemitic and racist remarks, and a greater willingness to trespass. Hales worries that since legal abortion is gone in several nearby states, protesters will start traveling to her clinic in greater numbers from afar.

Though abortion remains legal in North Carolina, it is among the states where experts feel the future is uncertain. Per The Times, “The state has an abortion ban enacted before Roe, but it was modified in 1973 to bar the procedure after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The 20-week ban is not in effect, but abortion opponents may seek its enforcement.” The state has a Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, and Republicans don’t have enough seats in the state legislature to override his veto, according to The Charlotte Observer — though they’re close to gaining that supermajority. The public affairs director for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic in North Carolina described abortion access in the state as “hanging by a thread.”

Hales is “cautiously optimistic” that the thread won’t break. And as long as abortion remains legal in her state, she says she’ll get up in the morning, put on her vest and go back to the clinic, because she has a job to do.

Want More?

• NPR’s Leila Fadel spoke to physicians in Kentucky who are afraid of being prosecuted for helping women end pregnancies, even when their patients’ lives are at stake. The laws banning abortion in Kentucky may be confusing to interpret, even though there are theoretically exceptions for the life of the mother. One doctor specifically mentioned treating ectopic pregnancies, when a fertilized egg grows outside the uterus and can be fatal if not treated. “Many of us are put in this hard position of having to choose between doing what we think is right and necessary and having to worry about possible criminal consequences,” he said.

• In The Times, Richard Fausset reported on the final days of Mississippi’s last abortion clinic, in Jackson.

• For a sobering assessment of what may be our dystopic near future, read “We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse,” by The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino.