NICHOLAS BROWN
BBC News, Jackson, Mississippi
CNN and other news networks have been scrambling to visit the last abortion clinic in Mississippi. It is in a former funeral home. It is called Pearl Pines. But the clinic is the clinic for Mississippi. It has been here for the past couple of years but was forced to relocate in the autumn because the governor had ordered the police to arrest the doctors who used to operate here and had been receiving “all help possible”. The clinic has moved to another city and as you make your way inside the clinic you realise that it is almost lifeless. Many staff work in the halls, it is dark, not helped at all by mouldy floors, high heating and hot water pipes hanging in the air. Staff wear scrubs and their operation is all you can see. A pharmacist explains that the facility has the same drugs that the doctors use in an abortion but the equipment is not the same and we all shake our heads sadly. The same drugs
For the moment it is just another doctor’s office, desks and beds. It is hard to see the point of having a clinic here in the state that outlaws abortion – and just as hard to find a new one here in the city that was once its home. Only one woman is using the clinic now but that is still pretty unsettling
This is not my first trip to Mississippi. I was not there when they were trying to shut down the clinic and I was not there when the state senator who has helped to bring this about was arrested and hospitalised in an apparent suicide attempt. The only other woman I speak to is Gabrielle Norman who has been using the clinic for nearly three years but is pregnant and worried that she will lose her government health benefits if she comes back to the clinic for another abortion. She says she is upset about the “absurd law” that would ban abortions in Mississippi “after 15 weeks of pregnancy”. “If they passed the abortion ban after that and if the baby was born then he would have every right to live and he would have parents too. He would have a little life,” she says. When we ask her why she came to use the clinic in the first place she says she was “caught by the stars”. The stakes are high for doctors here
It was before she had come to visit the clinic that she was finally offered the life-saving abortion, which she had feared that the Mississippi law could bar. Now the stakes are high for doctors here. Their business is facing a major threat that no abortion clinic has faced before. I hope the clinic will be open for business again very soon but this place doesn’t look like it will. It is a series of steps in a small room like a strip shopping centre. The last minutes of a pregnancy of many months could be documented in this small room with a small TV set. Our escort has about 20 minutes, almost two hours, to get us out of there. Outside, there is probably nothing that would make me want to stay longer but I have the thought I will. I had made the trip back to Mississippi because I have spent much of my life as a journalist travelling into some of the most conservative, religious places in the world – from Baghdad to Beijing and from the Philippines to Gaza. I have been there and photographed stories about abortion, stem cell research and gay rights. I am not a hero. But what’s happening here scares me because it is not going to stop soon. Like Egypt it wants to dominate the region so it is not shy about telling people to pay attention. And just because it wants to look tough, does not mean it is going to stop being soft on issues that put people off.
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