Kim Gibson, left, and another advocate hold signs Friday outside the only abortion clinic in Mississippi.Rogelio V. Solis (AP)
The Jackson Women's Health Organization clinic is known in the Mississippi capital as the Pink House.
Her fame reached new heights this Friday with her entry into the history books, when the case that pitted her against her state for a law that set the limit for terminating pregnancy at 15 weeks served the Supreme Court to bury, by six conservative votes against three,
Roe against Wade
, the sentence that in 1973 legalized abortion in the United States and that set that limit at 23 weeks.
After hearing the news, which, as long-awaited as it was, fell like a bomb, its owner, Diane Derzis, 68, announced, dressed in green and in front of the clinic, that she does not intend to give up.
“Women have always had abortions.
It has been an honor and a privilege to be here”, she said before revealing her plans: “to continue operating for 10 more days” and “to open a center soon in Las Cruces, New Mexico”, 1,600 kilometers from Jackson.
In it, this veteran of the cause, who has been providing reproductive health services to women for 46 years, intends to continue serving Mississippi patients.
Not long ago, this State was considered a refuge State for those who wanted to abort.
It is now one of 13 (with Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, the two Dakotas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Texas, Tennessee, Idaho and Utah) that has a trigger law ready to go into effect in the next few days.
Until now, it was allowed to carry out an intervention until the fifteenth week, except if the pregnancy was the result of rape or if the life of the mother was at risk.
After the end of
Roe
, it is expected that one of the most restrictive laws in the country will come into force here.
“A lot of people don't know what's going on.
They do not know that this judicial decision is an abuse of a fundamental right,” activist Kim Gibson, co-founder of Pink House Defenders, said this week in Jackson, a group of escorts for patients who arrive at the Casa Rosa, which since 2004 has been the the only clinic of its kind in a State with high levels of poverty among its three million inhabitants.
Along with a dozen other people, she is in charge of confronting the religious fanatics who come to the doors with grotesque posters of bloody fetuses and seek to humiliate the patients.
Gibson has been doing it since 2017.
—”Do not put the most beautiful gift that our savior gave you in murderous hands.
Repent!” a large man in a camouflage cap yelled at a woman this week.
―”If you really believe that murders are being committed in there, why don't you call 911 and tell the police?” one of the escorts from the clinic questioned him.
The Pink House is located in Fondren, a progressive neighborhood in Jackson.
In the 1980s, Mississippi grew to have more than a dozen clinics.
Today only this one remains, located on a corner, on a small hill, on a street where the usual businesses, such as a shoe store and a locksmith, coexist with modern businesses such as a vinyl store, tiki cocktail bars and a neighborhood cinema. .
The private clinic treats about 300 patients a week.
Many are poor and receive support from foundations and organizations to pay for the intervention.
The number of women who attend has grown since Texas last December prohibited the intervention from six weeks of gestation, almost a total veto of abortion that will become even harsher 30 days after the sentence.
This has pushed many to the road, forced to travel hundreds of kilometers to abort.
The activists make a shorter, but also difficult path with the patients, the one that separates their cars from the interior of the center.
They carry wireless speakers blasting music to drown out the prayers of fans.
Derenda Hancock, another of the defenders' group founders, is armed with pepper spray.
This Friday, after the ruling, tempers heated up at the gates of the Casa Rosa.
“Everyone who kills babies deserves to die.
You're lucky that murderers are spared in this country, Kim," Gabe Oliva, 30, yelled at Gibson from across the sidewalk.
The South of the United States, especially the region known as the Bible Belt, registers an active presence of radical movements in defense of life.
One of the first activists to flock to the doors of Jackson Woman's Health Clinic when it opened in 1995 was Roy McMillan, who terrorized doctors, nurses and patients alike.
"I don't think it's a sin to kill someone who manages to exterminate children," he said then.
A judge prevented her from coming within 15 meters of any abortion clinic.
One of his fellow
crusaders
, the priest Paul Hill, had killed a doctor and his escort with a shotgun a year earlier, in 1994, in the State of Florida.
He was sentenced to death, and executed by lethal injection in 2016.
The bullying continues.
On Thursday, a man was holding a sign with the name of one of the gynecologists who works in Jackson.
“Bruce Norman kills babies here,” the message read.
Things like this, together with very strict local legislation, have made the administrators of the clinic decide to bring the medical team that performs the abortions once a week from other states.
They house them in safe houses.
"People don't want to work where they live," explains Derenda Hancock, who says some radicals followed doctors and nurses home.
"They just won't leave them alone."
Diane Derzis, owner of the Jackson Women's Health Organization clinic.Rogelio V. Solis (AP)
The doctors faced several barriers imposed by the local government, of the Republican Party, which in 2011 submitted to a plebiscite giving fetuses the same rights as people.
The initiative failed, but in the following decade, and thanks to ultra-conservative Governor Phil Bryant, new barriers to abortion were approved.
For example, patients have to receive state-facilitated counseling designed to change their minds.
After the session, they must wait 24 hours, forcing them to make two trips to the clinic.
Parents of minors must give permission for the intervention.
The clinic is required to perform ultrasounds on patients and offer them the option of viewing the image.
“This does not end with abortion.
Now they go for birth control.
And then for in vitro fertilization, although it will cost them more to ban it because it is a method used by the rich.
It is the return to a theocratic state, ”said Hancock after the defeat.
Derzis, the owner, usually says that she had an abortion at 12 weeks of her pregnancy.
She was a college student and married.
She has no regrets even though she describes it as an unpleasant experience.
She later divorced and has no children.
He opened his first clinic in the 1970s. One of his centers, in Birminghman, Alabama, where he lives, a three and a half hour drive from Jackson, was the target of a bomb attack in 1998. The main suspect in that attack was the terrorist Eric Rudolph, who was later identified by the FBI as responsible for the explosions at the Atlanta '96 Games.
The clinic was rebuilt, but it was forced to close in 2012, because it incurred several violations of health regulations.
That year she also brought another lawsuit against the laws of Mississippi,
In 2018, he returned to court to sue the State again, in a case that the Supreme Court definitively closed last Friday.
Now, the clinic will be taken even further, to New Mexico.
The old Pink House ends
Roe
's legacy .
The new one will open its doors at the dawn of the
Dobbs era.
