Neeta Satam for M Le magazine du Monde
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ReportageDriven by the election of Trump, the anti-abortion groups are stepping up their offensives. Surrounded by conservative states, Illinois is building up a legislative arsenal aimed at securing access to abortion.
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Of course, the Mississippi is a very wide river. A thick muddy ribbon spanned by a string of bridges. From the oldest to the most recent, they link here the city of Saint-Louis (Missouri) to Granite City (Illinois), a little further north and much more modest. But, in this corner of the conservative Midwest, the border river doesn’t just separate two states. “Every time I cross the Mississippi to come to work, I really go from one world to another”, assures Erin King without exaggeration.
Blue blouse required, the obstetrician-gynecologist took a break from her schedule ” crazy “. These days abortion is stirring spirits on both sides of the border and Dr. King is on the front lines. Faced with all-out attacks from activists opposed to voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion), never has Illinois so deserved its reputation as a “safe haven” for women wishing to have an abortion.
As the head of the Hope Clinic for Women for three years, a center specializing in abortions located in the middle of an ugly industrial estate in Granite City, the energetic forty-something still lives in Missouri. Each day, her twenty-minute drive takes her from one of America’s most restrictive abortion rights states to one of the most liberal.
Even his family life is punctuated by this growing gap between two Americas. Her husband, a “gyn-obs” like her, fights to keep open the last clinic practicing abortions in Missouri, in St. Louis. And everyone, on both sides of the river, can see the tensions and irreconcilable positions of the two camps.
That day, in Saint-Louis, in front of the Planned Parenthood clinic threatened with closure by the authorities for reasons of “Health security”, a handful of young anti-abortion people wave a sign with the strange slogan: “Abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women”. In the parking lot, an older man in a rainbow logo vest « clinic escort » stands ready to welcome patients. A role-playing game now classic in the country.
Fortress clinic
The fate of the clinic had been in the hands of the courts for a few days: if it had closed the establishment, Missouri would have become the first American state without access to abortion. An untenable situation in the light of federal case law – Roe v. Wade of the Supreme Court in 1973 enshrined the right to abortion throughout the United States. The objective of the anti is precisely to bring the subject again before the Supreme Court, the highest court in the country. It won’t be this time. The Planned Parenthood clinic, which welcomes thousands of women every year, can continue to operate. The fact remains that with a single establishment for a state of more than six million inhabitants, many women are forced to cross the border to join the ranks of Erin King’s patients.
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