Abortion Providers Face Unsustainable Patient Crunch Post Dobbs

By Tina Vásquez, Prism

In mid-July, Alison Dreith said she felt like she was going to have “a breakdown.” It’d been a few weeks since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, and the Midwest Access Coalition, where Dreith is director of strategic partnerships, was drowning in phone calls from people who needed help accessing abortion. Before June 24, Dreith, a crew of four staffers, and volunteers at the abortion fund assisted about 30 clients a week. As of July 15, they were serving over 200 calls.

“We are at capacity every single day,” Dreith said. “We really pride ourselves in helping people access abortion and in knowing what the laws are, but everything is changing so rapidly we can’t really keep up. Right after the [Supreme Court] decision, we had to shut down our hotline number for the first time because we had hundreds of overnight messages to respond to.”

The calls come in from far and wide, including Louisiana, where an ongoing legal battle has forced clinics to shut down and reopen several times to the great confusion of patients. Dreith relayed a story about a recent client from the southern tip of Arkansas, right at the Louisiana border. In the before times, she would have been able to access abortion care in nearby Shreveport, Louisiana. Not anymore.