Jennifer Gerson, The 19th

Originally published by The 19th

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Judy Blume is having a moment. A staple of backpacks of elementary, middle grade and young adult readers since the 1970s, Blume, 85, is about to see her stories on the big screen. The new documentary “Judy Blume Forever” debuts on Amazon Prime on Friday after premiering to rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival in January. And on April 28, the first-ever film adaptation of Blume’s 1970 classic “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” releases in theaters, bringing “We must! We must! We must increase our bust!” to a whole new generation.

Blume’s work is beloved by children and teens — and the adults they one day become — for its frank depictions of the day-to-day realities of growing up. They grapple with puberty, masturbation and sex on top of the emotional journey, subjects glossed over or ignored in many sex ed classes in schools.

This recognition of Blume’s legacy and work comes as book bans in schools have increased over the past year. A report from PEN America found that in the 2021-2022 school year, over 2,500 individual books were stripped from school library shelves. Blume’s titles are constants on the American Library Association’s list of frequently banned books for children and young adults. For experts who study literary education and young adult literature — who are in the trenches of the work to fight school book bans — the celebration of Blume is a recognition of that there is value in depicting the messy parts of growing up that some adults won’t acknowledge. Those kinds of subjects are often epitomized by the books at the top of the most-banned lists.

Chris Finan, the executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), is no stranger to book bans or Blume, who has worked with the organization since she found herself at the center of the first significant national effort to ban books from schools in the 1980s.

“There’s always book banning going on in America,” Finan said. “This is not a new and novel phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination.”

In a typical year, there are anywhere from 300 to 500 challenges to individual titles in libraries, he said. These numbers began to spike upwards in the 1980s, when religious groups made pro-decency and anti-pornography campaigns the centerpiece of their political work.

Many of Blume’s books became targets. “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” openly discusses periods and centers a middle school girl trying to figure out her own relationship to God; “Blubber” includes mention of masturbation; “Forever” depicts two high school seniors making the choice to engage in their first sexual experience together. Many school districts removed Blume’s titles from their shelves in the wake of these bans — and the pushback to her books hasn’t slowed down. “Forever” was just banned from one Florida school district again last month.

As a result of these attacks against her books, Blume joined the board of the NCAC, becoming one of the foremost voices in the neverending fight against censorship that targets books for younger readers.

Due to the onslaught of attacks on books in the 1980s that were seen by censorship advocates as indecent — with Blume’s titles often at the center, Finan said — systems were eventually established for reviewing challenged books. Most books that are challenged in a typical year are ultimately kept in libraries because of this review process, Finan said.

What has changed with this most recent push for bans is that many challenged books — often written by LGBTQ+ people or people of color — are pulled from shelves before they can be reviewed. Ultimately, this has yielded a situation that Finan describes as one where “millions of kids have lost access to really important books.”

“This is the most we’ve seen of book challenges and book bans since the 1980s, which was around the satanic panic,” said Emily Knox, an associate professor of information studies at Rutgers. “We’re just in a really reactionary time.”

There are common threads in the books that are often pulled from shelves, Knox noted: Books centering race, LGBTQ+ issues or mental health are often targeted.

“Because these are voices that are usually marginalized and there has been a push to decenter White heterosexual male voices in the canon, this is the reaction today and we shouldn’t have been very surprised about it. Because this is what is always the reaction to messing with the status quo,” she said.

The work of Blume, who is White, shares commonalities with the modern books that are frequently banned today, Knox said.

“She centers people who are not necessarily White, who are often Jewish, people who are not usually who we think about as the universal subjects for literature,” Knox said.

Blume’s books are still considered trailblazing for the way they talked about burgeoning sexuality without judgment, and the everyday lives of young people as complicated, difficult and worthy of attention, experts said. The same could be said of so many of the books routinely censored today. The book ban surge in school districts across the country “can be depressing on any given day,” Finan said. Which is why, he stressed, Blume matters so much right now.

“It should give people some reassurance that what happened when Judy Blume was attacked and they tried to purge their libraries of her titles, Judy Blume did not give into that pressure,” he said. “She didn’t stop writing books. She didn’t stop writing about the issues that she wanted to write about. She fought back and was joined by teachers and librarians and parents and students who protested the censorship.”

Kelly Fremon Craig, the director of the forthcoming “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” film adaptation, said she started reading Blume when she was 11 and fell in love. “She was writing about what it was really like to be a girl at that age. She was telling the truth and including all the embarrassing details,” Fremon Craig said, saying Blume was why she wanted to become a writer and filmmaker.

“She was the first person to do that profound thing that writers have done to me for years which is to tell me in some way that I’m not alone. … Some writers have become lifelines to me, and Judy Blume was absolutely the first one.”

After her film “The Edge of Seventeen” debuted to critical acclaim for its embrace of the difficulties of being a teen girl, Fremon Craig said she felt “an enormous amount of pressure” to figure out what her next project would be. She started to compile a list of the authors who had influenced her most in her career, prompting her to reread “Margaret” for the first time since childhood. Fremon Craig was struck by the way Blume depicted her protagonist’s journey through puberty and existential feelings of spiritual searching.

When Blume gave her the green light to adapt “Margaret,” Fremon Craig started to reckon with the consistent place the title holds on banned book lists — and why people get so concerned when kids speak honestly about their bodies and interior lives. The way that “Margaret” is frequently banned because of its frank, and central, discussion of menstruation was always top of mind for Fremon Craig.

She pointed to the scene in her movie in which Margaret buys a box of maxi pads before even getting her own period, then puts a pad in her underwear, trying on the physical element of the pad and the thrill of adulthood as she parades around her room. While shooting that scene, Fremon Craig remembered doing the same thing herself as a girl.

“There was something so emotional about it, because by showing it we were saying, ‘This is normal. We all do this. It’s okay. You don’t have to be embarrassed about it and you don’t have to hide it,’” she said.

Ahead of the film’s release, she’s also thinking about the proposed Florida law that would ban any discussion of menstruation in schools until the sixth grade and what happens to the young people who may get their periods — or read “Margaret” — before then.

“It’s the absurdity that’s so hard for me to wrap my head around,” Fremon Craig said. “I have been really asking myself — why, why can’t we talk about something that half the population goes through?”

Fremon Craig recalled talking to a room full of men agents and film executives about the project, having to regularly say the words “period” and “maxi pads” in front of them and finding herself feeling embarrassed at first.

“Then I thought to myself, ‘That is wrong that I feel embarrassed to say this. It is wrong that as an adult woman I have purchased tampons and tried to avoid eye contact, find a female cashier, whoever looks the friendliest. What is that about?’”

Fremon Craig found her answer in the process of getting to work so intensely with one of Blume’s most beloved texts: The very thing that continues to make so many people uncomfortable are the very subjects in need of attention, tenderness and a lack of shame.

“The thing Judy Blume does so beautifully is she writes with absolute freedom and honesty. She tells the truth. She tells it like it is. And oddly enough, sometimes the truth feels like it’s in short supply,” Fremon Craig said. “There’s been a lot of glossing over because the truth is messy and complicated and she, for decades, has been willing to say it all and have no shame about any of it. I hope that continues and that it continues to provoke more work like that where more people say, ‘Here is my honest experience.’”

It’s that honesty that has separated Blume from her peers, said E. Sybil Durand, an associate professor of young adult literature at the University of Arizona.

“She’s one of the early writers who really captured a young person’s voice and really focused on their experience and not an idealized version of childhood that adults think about or like to talk about, but the real shame and challenges that children are concerned about,” Durand said.

Children’s literature before Blume focused on “what adults wanted and expected out of young girls and boys,” Durand said. “They were very didactic.” What Blume did that was so revolutionary was resist the notions of how adults perceive children.

Blume’s books have in a way modeled the primary underlying symptom of book bans today, Durand said, which is “that childhood is socially constructed, and that the community is the one that sets the rules for what it means. There’s a gap between how children actually experience life and how adults imagine childhood should be.”

Davina Pardo, one of the co-directors of the documentary “Judy Blume Forever,” said Blume’s concern with disrupting the notion of the ideal childhood came up a lot during filming.

“One of the things that Judy very often says is that both banning and censorship come from a place of fear, of wanting to control children, and to hurt — which is of course so counter to the work she’s been doing her entire life, which is all about trusting children,” Pardo said.

The American Library Association maintains lists of the most challenged books each calendar year; the most recent list from 2021 is dominated by titles that have “LGBTQIA+ content” and are “considered to be sexually explicit.” Topping the list is the autobiographical graphic novel “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, in which the author tries to explain to their family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual.

Many challenged books also often tackle racism, as in “The Hate U Give,” Angie Thomas’ debut novel inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, tells the story of a 16-year-old girl who witnesses the shooting of her childhood best friend by a police officer.

As she looks at book bans across the country, Pardo thinks of something that Jason Reynolds, a Black author of bestselling and frequently challenged young adult books, says in the documentary: “If you want to understand what conversations are happening in this country when tensions are bubbling to the surface, look at the banned books list. It’s such a reflection of what anxieties are happening right now.”

Balancing the celebration of Blume’s work with the fact that it has been so challenged is a central thread of the documentary from Pardo and co-director Leah Wolchok.

“When the right-wing forces that were pushing back against Judy were afraid, it was post-Roe, a reaction to post-feminism and books that were honoring female sexuality were scary. That was the pushback that Judy experienced,” Pardo said. “I think some of those same forces are today pushing back on what’s now considered scary or hasn’t been accepted by a segment of our population and that’s racism and it’s that people are talking about gender in a new way.”

Knox said that increasingly, the conversation surrounding book bans today focuses on parental rights and whether children have the right to read things that would expose them to “the difficulties of life” or whether those conversations should happen only at the choice of a parent. So much of this sentiment can be summarized by why people have bristled at Blume’s books.

The way people talked about Blume’s books about periods and masturbation in the past is incredibly similar to the way that transgender kids identities, lives, and agency are being talked about in statehouses and school board meetings nationwide today — especially when it comes to limiting access to books that validate and reflect their own lived experiences.

“The point is really to not allow people to be able to discuss how they feel about themselves, to not give them the words to communicate, ‘I am uncomfortable in my body’ and I think that’s why a lot of these books are so important,” Knox said. “These are books being written in the same naturalistic style that Judy Blume was writing in also.”

“What is most important about her work today is what continues to be important about these books, which is that you have to give kids autonomy and vocabulary to be able to talk about themselves and what they are going through,” she continued. “If you can’t describe your life, you have no agency and that is actually part of the point”

But as Durand pointed out, even as Blume received pushback, she still pushed forward writing on the very things that she knew existed in young people’s lives. Even if some adults didn’t want to see her write about the realities of childhood, they still existed. Durand sees that today in book bans targeting works centering race or LGBTQ+ issues.

Wendy Jean Glenn, a former classroom teacher and a professor of literacy at the University of Colorado-Boulder, stressed that Blume’s books are tools for teaching empathy within the context of interpersonal relationships that feels especially pertinent today.

“There’s something really powerful about learning how to understand the perspectives of someone else in your classroom, to feel empathetic when somebody might be hurting. If we think about the sometimes complicated realities of relationships in schools, I think Judy Blume stories provide opportunities to invite real conversation around how it could look to stand up and advocate for a friend or even somebody you don’t know very well when you see something not right happening. I think that those seeds are timeless.”

That empathy is crucial in the continued fight back against censorship and understanding that even if the books focusing on LGBTQ+ youth and youth of color are banned, it won’t stop the people they are trying to center from existing.

“These young people are still there,” Durand said. “They’re in schools. They’re alive. They have their identities.”

Insisting on the importance of access to the words that describe young people’s actual experiences is why Blume’s work continues to matter to readers, and why her triumphs against decades-worth of censors does too, Finan said.

“I think a lot of people look up to her and admire her and recognize that they have to do what she has done and that they have to speak up. And they are speaking up. We see authors defending not only their own books but the other books that have been challenged,” Finan said. It’s why he describes Blume as “incredibly important not only as a person but as a symbol of resistance. She’s a great symbol that the truth will always prevail.”

He concluded, “People aren’t going to back down from these challenges and the fact that now she’s one of the most celebrated people of the year? She’s got the documentary, she’s got the film — she’s won. She took on the censors and she won.”

Originally published by The 19th

The man charged with breaking into the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and assaulting her husband was reportedly yelling, “Where is Nancy?” echoing some of those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

That question — and the suspected targeting of one of the most powerful women in American politics — points to a form of violent misogyny that is part and parcel of larger threats to American democracy, say experts who study and track gendered political violence.

Pelosi, who is second in line to the presidency, has long been the focus of negative political ads and campaign rhetoric. But the attacks have become more layered with threats of violence and misogyny, and social media has allowed them to spread more easily. It’s both dangerous to Pelosi and other women in positions of power and discouraging to women who might otherwise run for office, experts say.

“Certainly Nancy Pelosi has long been a very obvious public figure and has long been a target for those on the right — partly because of her positions, but certainly because of her gender, which has played a role in the way she is talked about and how much vitriol is directed her way,” Jean Sinzdak, an associate director of the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) told The 19th.

“It’s easy to be dismissive and say, ‘Oh well of course you get animosity directed your way because you’re in a leadership role.’ But there is a gender-based element that goes way further than that in someone breaking into her personal space and feeling entitled to be violent against her,” Sinzdak said.

While physical violence and the threat of it have long impacted people in power, it’s often heightened when it comes to women in office. In 2011, a man shot then-Rep. Gabby Giffords while she met with constituents at a grocery store; the Arizona Democrat survived the attack, but several people were killed and injured.

In 2020, several men were arrested on suspicion of plotting to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Three men were convicted in the case last week.

In 2021, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — one of several Democratic women of color in Congress who have spoken out about threats of violence — was the focus of vitriol after Republican Rep. Paul Gosar shared an anime-style video that depicted the congressman killing her.

“What we’re seeing in the tenor of some of the attacks against not just Pelosi but other women in public positions is this idea of, ‘Who are you that you think you can be in charge’ and ‘I will do what I can to undermine this,’” Sinzdak said.

Sarah Sobieraj, a sociology professor at Tufts University and author of “Credible Threat: Attacks Against Women Online and the Future of Democracy,” pointed to how extreme rhetoric has evolved over time and can surface as real-life attacks.

Sobieraj has studied the creation and rise of the “outrage industry” — a genre of political opinion content that spans cable news analysis, talk radio, podcasts, blogs and op-ed pieces, where people use extreme rhetoric as a dominant form of discourse to generate feelings like anger, moral indignation and disgust. Over the years, that industry has expanded to include politicians of all affiliations using the targeted outrage.

Sobieraj added that one of the core elements of outrage discourse involves an insistence that those with different political beliefs are not people with different interests or priorities, but fundamentally bad people. As she explained it, they are framed as inept, disingenuous, or evil. She called it a recipe for mistreatment of others, whether through online attacks, defamation or physical violence.

“This is a form of speech and rhetoric that is effective in producing ratings and dollars,” she said. “So people are using this rhetoric intentionally for political gain to change people's thoughts and behaviors.”

Social media has allowed for the rampant amplification of this rhetoric, as well, Sinzdak notes.

“You can spread something so much faster with a crowd online than in person,” she said. “You can find out where a public figure lives; there’s no distance there. Misogyny against women and sexism and violence are not a new phenomenon, but we’re seeing it all heightened so much because of the ability of people to interact on social media.”

Details are still emerging about the attack against the speaker’s 82-year-old husband, Paul Pelosi. The speaker’s office said he was “violently assaulted” Friday at a San Francisco home he shares with his wife, who was not at home during the attack. The office said Paul Pelosi has undergone “successful” surgery to repair a skull fracture and “serious” injuries to his right arm and hands. His doctors expect a “full recovery,” a statement added.

Police have arrested David DePape in connection with the attack. DePape, 42, faces charges that include attempted homicide, assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse and burglary. On Monday, the Department of Justice added charges of assault and attempted kidnapping.

Federal authorities say DePape struck Paul Pelosi with a hammer following a struggle in the home. Authorities say they observed a broken glass door to the home’s back porch. Among the items removed from the scene were tape, rope, an additional hammer, rubber and cloth gloves and zip ties.

The Los Angeles Times reported that DePape shared conspiracy theories online, including about QAnon and COVID-19.

Some Republicans condemned the attack within hours of initial reports. But other Republicans and right-wing media personalities mocked it over the weekend, sharing disinformation about the circumstances surrounding Pelosi’s injuries.

Mona Lena Krook is a political science professor at Rutgers University and the author of “Violence against Women in Politics.” She said she was alarmed by some commentators using forms of victim-blaming to imply that the speaker should have had more security at her home.

“The idea that you should just expect to receive this kind of violence. If you receive it, it's your own fault, right? So I think that that’s a really troubling part of the response,” Krook said.

Sobieraj said the attack on Pelosi’s spouse may have a ripple effect on the future participation of people who are willing to enter careers in elected office.

“Whether you are a left or right, it is a mistake not to take an attack like this seriously — not only because of the danger to the person attacked, but because of the danger to the health of our elections and our democracy more generally,” she said. “We absolutely need civil service to be a career that people can enter and engage in. You should not have to fear for your life to serve in public office.”

Krook said it’s important that people in positions of political power and others publicly call out threats of gendered violence to combat it. She said otherwise, its normalization will only worsen conditions for people who aren’t at the highest level of government.

“It’s women at all levels of American politics — governors, women in statehouses, women in local politics, mayors. We are seeing it with election administrators,” she said. “It’s really about women playing a whole wide range of political roles. We just see it more when it's somebody like Nancy Pelosi.”

Sinzdak said the violence should be seen in the context of challenges to democratic institutions, which have grown in tandem with representation of women and people of color.

“It’s not a coincidence that we’re seeing the rise of some of these antidemocratic movements at the same time as the rise of women in leadership and the rise of people of color in leadership. We’re seeing diversification of our government in more recent years,” Sinzdak said.

Though Pelosi isn’t a new face in American politics, she’s a face that, for many, represents the effort to make American politics more diverse. “This is about gender and race and seeing those groups who weren’t allowed to participate in our system in the earliest days in the same ways they are now facing a backlash to that participation happening,” Sinzdak said.

Sinzdak also tied the attack on Pelosi’s husband to broader efforts to curtail or question rights, including the Supreme Court’s June decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that ended a federal right to abortion.

“It’s part of the same concerted attacks on women’s rights that we’re seeing with Dobbs and so many other things,” Sinzdak concludes. “There are all of these efforts to curtail women’s rights and that is why we’re also seeing a rise in misogynistic attacks on women candidates and officeholders and why this is so deeply worrisome. It’s about people saying, ‘We want to keep women from getting to a position of power.’ And in the long term, it will have a deeply chilling effect.”

Originally published by The 19th

For the past two weeks, the veracity of a story of a 10-year-old girl who was raped and got an abortion has been debated in the media. But a document reviewed by The 19th shows that the Indiana physician who performed the abortion submitted record of it to the Indiana Department of Health and the Department of Child Services.

A terminated pregnancy report — a document all physicians providing abortions must submit to the state of Indiana — confirms details Dr. Caitlin Bernard gave to the Indianapolis Star in a July 1 story.

Bernard said she performed an abortion for a 10-year-old girl who was raped and had to travel from her home in Ohio to Indiana due to Ohio’s newly implemented six-week abortion ban. The document reviewed by The 19th confirms that Bernard reported an abortion for a 10-year-old who she indicated had been sexually abused. The 27-year old Guatemalan national accused of raping the 10-year old was arrested on Tuesday.

The story drew national attention. Some pointed at it to show the impact of abortion bans; others questioned its veracity, and Bernard faced public criticism, media scrutiny and even threats of investigation. In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announced he was investigating Bernard, claiming the abortion provider had a “history of failing to report” abortion services she had provided and that his office would be looking into whether proper documentation existed for this particular abortion. The document reviewed by The 19th confirms that Bernard did in fact file the required documentation by the state deadline.

In addition to being the subject of a state investigation, Bernard has also been doxxed and faced death threats by anti-abortion activists who claimed that Bernard had fabricated details. The story of the girl’s rape and abortion were referenced by President Joe Biden when he announced the signing of a new executive order meant to help protect abortion rights last week.

In a statement, Bernard’s attorney Kathleen DeLaney said, “My client, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, took every appropriate and proper action in accordance with the law and both her medical and ethical training as a physician. She followed all relevant policies, procedures, and regulations in this case, just as she does every day to provide the best possible care for her patients. She has not violated any law, including patient privacy laws, and she has not been disciplined by her employer. We are considering legal action against those who have smeared my client, including Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, and know that the facts will all come out in due time.”

Per the original Star report, the minor was allegedly raped on May 12 in Ohio. On June 22, the child’s mother reported the assault to child services in Ohio. On June 30, the girl then traveled to Indianapolis to obtain an abortion. She was six weeks and three days pregnant, and thus no longer eligible for an abortion in her home state as a result of the six-week ban. The document reviewed by The 19th corroborates this timeline.

The 2021 annual report produced by the state of Indiana based on the annual termination of pregnancy filings stated that last year, 8,414 abortions were performed in Indiana. Of those, 7,949 were obtained by state residents. Sixty-eight percent of abortions performed in Indiana in 2021 were performed before eight weeks gestational age, and 0.8 percent of all abortions were performed on minors under the age of 16.

Originally published by The 19th

When the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization came down on Friday morning, staff at Preterm, an abortion clinic in Cleveland, called patients with appointments scheduled for Saturday to let them know that despite the ruling, their appointments still stood. But events in Ohio quickly overtook them. Not even 12 hours after the Dobbs ruling came down, the Preterm staff was back on the phone canceling the same appointments they’d assured patients were safe.

Ohio had passed a law effectively banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy in 2019, but an injunction prevented it from taking effect. Hours after the Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed states to decide their level of abortion, a judge granted Ohio’s request to lift the injunction. Sri Thakkilapati, the executive director of Preterm, said she and her staff stayed at the clinic until after 11 that night making calls. Ninety to 95 percent of the 5,000 patients Preterm serves each year are past six weeks of pregnancy when they seek abortions.

“When we called people this morning, they cried with gratitude. They were so scared,” Thakkilapati said on Friday. That night was entirely different. “Some people were crying in panic,” she said.

By Wednesday morning, ACLU, the ACLU of Ohio, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the law firm WilmerHale had filed a lawsuit in the Ohio Supreme Court seeking to block the state’s six-week ban on abortion. The plaintiffs say the ban will disproportionately impact people of color, low-income people, rural residents, immigrants, people with disabilities and the LGBTQ+ community. Black women already face higher rates of maternal mortality in Ohio — a situation that stands to only worsen as a result of the newly enacted ban.

Through the rapidly shifting legal landscape in Ohio, clinics are still trying to provide care as best they can to their patients.

Thakkilapati told The 19th that while she had expected the state to file to have the injunction on the six-week ban lifted when Roe fell, she — and many of her peers in Ohio abortion clinics — thought they would have at least two weeks to prepare. Instead, they had to scramble.

Of the 40 patients scheduled for an abortion at Preterm on June 25, only two were able to be seen. Because of Ohio’s 24-hour mandatory waiting period for abortions, the clinic already knew which patients would no longer be able to be seen under the six-week ban.

On Saturday morning, Thakkilapati said Preterm was operating as a “skeletal clinic, with just a couple of people.” Still, the phone kept ringing as staff continued to make calls for patients already on the books for the next week to make sure they knew about the new law and its impact.

“It was really sad when we were calling people,” she said. We had people just crying in fear and utter dejection, in panic. People were enraged, some were in disbelief still.”

The staff members themselves also struggled. “We’re still processing,” Thakkilapati said.

Thakkilapati said the six-week ban taking effect is just the latest blow her staff has faced after an incredibly hard past few years. Three-quarters of their current employees are people who stayed with the clinic throughout the pandemic, even after the state tried to close abortion clinics during the days of “shelter in place.” Ultimately, abortion providers won their fight to keep their doors open.

“In the early days when we were all wiping down our groceries and worried we may die if we left the house, the staff still came in,” Thakkilapati said. “These are people dedicated to abortion access.”

It felt like all that struggle culminated when the six-week ban was allowed to go into effect.

“We thought we could give people a little hope when we called them Friday morning,” Thakkilapati said. “That even though Roe had been overturned, we could give them a little breathing room. It felt very hard to have worked so hard through COVID, all of this time to make sure people could have uninterrupted service. And now…” her voice broke off, leaving the sentence unfinished.

Preterm currently has patients scheduled through July 1. The clinic is attempting to see anyone who is under six weeks as quickly as possible.

“It’s been a race against the clock,” Thakkilapati said. “Our staff has been working 24/7.”

That includes working with Women Have Options, an Ohio-based abortion fund. The staff at Preterm were able to direct patients they could no longer see to the organization, which would be able to help provide funds for them to travel out of state.

“It helped ease people’s anxiety somewhat, but for some it was just too logistically hard, if not impossible, to go out of state,” Thakkilapati said. Still, she is concerned about what the cost of out-of-state travel will now do to these same patients.

“It’s very hard to afford to travel out of state, take a day out of work, lose that income, pay for someone to watch your children,” she said. “Two-thirds of the people we see have kids. Now they will have to figure out what to do with their kids if they need to travel out of state. It used to be hard enough to figure out what you’re going to do with your kids half a day if you’re traveling an hour to come to our clinic.”

With Preterm being in Cleveland, the majority of their patients are now needing to seek care in either Pittsburgh or Detroit. Both cities are approximately a 2.5-hour drive away.

Further complicating things is that with the injunction being lifted so quickly, abortion clinics in Ohio haven’t had the time to try to develop relationships with clinics in other states to help faciliate these referrals. “Developing that infrastructure and setting up referral networks — that’s not established. These clinics are now taking in a huge influx of patients from Ohio and they were also not expecting this influx so quickly.”

Thakkilapati said Preterm and other clinics in the state would continue to provide as much care as they possibly can under the current state laws. But she cannot stop thinking about the immediacy of Ohio’s six-week ban taking effect.

“This feels like an unnecessary cruelty, to have this imposed so quickly without notice,” she said. “We thought we would be able to give our patients some notice.”