The morning after the leak of a U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion on Roe v. Wade, Dr. Yashica Robinson woke up, opened her eyes and decided she wasn’t going to talk to any reporters that day.
Robinson, a board-certified OBGYN who also runs one of Alabama’s three clinics that provide abortions, just didn’t have it in her to give one more interview about what it would mean for her patients to have their right to an abortion stripped away. It didn’t feel like anybody was truly listening anymore.
When she got to her office, the calls started coming in. Her assistant at the front desk offered to reroute them to voicemail.
But Robinson’s highly visible role as one of a handful of abortion providers in a heavily pro-life state weighed on her. “I thought about other people who care about this issue who may not be getting calls, who may not have that platform to make a statement,” she told Reckon. “Then I felt like I have to speak, that it’s my responsibility to do it.”
That sense of responsibility has, in the past two years, driven Robinson toward a new battle.
In the middle of a national uproar over abortion rights, one of Alabama’s few abortion providers has also quietly been fighting for reproductive choice on a different front: She wants to open the state’s first midwife-staffed birth center.