Clinic escorts wearing rainbow-striped vests directed patients’ cars into a parking lot and walked with the women from their vehicles into the building. Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, recently doubled its hours to treat women from Texas, where a law took effect in early September banning most abortions at about six weeks, and from Louisiana, where clinics are filling with Texas patients.Īs patients arrived Wednesday, some protesters tried to stop them to talk. Gipson, now the state’s agriculture commissioner, said he wants people decades from now to remember Mississippi was not afraid to “take a stand for life.” “Each and every state is different, and we need to recognize that Mississippi has been trampled on by other states and other beliefs,” said Omarr Peters, with Students for Life, which helped organize the event.Īndy Gipson, a Republican who co-sponsored the Mississippi abortion legislation, said lawmakers sensed their bill was historic, and he had the same feeling during the court’s arguments. Her office co-sponsored a gathering at an agriculture museum in Jackson for people to listen to the court arguments. The office of Mississippi’s Republican attorney general, Lynn Fitch, asked the court - remade with three conservative justices nominated by former President Donald Trump - to use the case to overturn the 1973 ruling.
But the court’s conservative majority signaled it would uphold the Mississippi law and may overturn a nationwide right to abortion that has existed for nearly 50 years under the court’s Roe v. The Supreme Court has never allowed states to ban abortion before viability, the point at roughly 24 weeks when a fetus can survive outside the womb. Supreme Court Wednesday as the justices heard nearly two hours of arguments about a 2018 Mississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Hundreds of demonstrators also gathered outside the U.S. “I don’t want to go back 50 years to those days - thinking about it makes me shudder.” “I don’t want us to have to go back to those days,” Ice said. She said she couldn’t tell friends or family because they would have been upset.
Ice said she went home after the abortion terrified she would have complications. Ice said her boyfriend found a woman in Detroit who claimed to be a nurse and said she would do the procedure for $350. “The boyfriend wasn’t so committed to me or the relationship,” Ice said. Abortion-rights supporters surrounded the preachers and held signs above their heads.ĭuring the rally, Mississippi resident Patricia Ice spoke about receiving an illegal abortion in Michigan when she was a teenager in the late 1960s. Hours later, more than a 100 people attended an abortion rights rally at a Jackson park near the Governor’s Mansion, some holding signs reading “Abortion Heals” and “SCOTUS Can’t Control Our Destiny - We Do.”Ī group of preachers walked into the crowd waving red Bibles and shouting scripture as they tried to drown out speakers. “What crime has your child committed to deserve to have its arms and its legs pulled off of its body and its head crushed in the womb?” Gabriel Olivier said over a microphone as he paced outside the fence of the clinic in Jackson. Some protesters carried graphic posters depicting aborted fetuses. Outside Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, men took turns on a loudspeaker urging women to repent of their sins and keep their pregnancies. Supreme Court case that could end a nationwide right to abortion.
(AP) - Supporters and opponents of abortion rights rallied, blared music and shouted taunts Wednesday during protests in Mississippi’s capital as the state took center stage in a pivotal U.S.