Amid escalating attacks on reproductive rights, Georgia clinics are centering community care, education and maternal health to protect patients far beyond abortion access.
This summer, the Trump administration launched a full-on offensive on abortion rights and reproductive freedom. Signed into law on Independence Day, Trump’s stunning domestic policy bill slashed Medicaid in exchange for billionaire tax cuts and included a provision aiming to relinquish Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood. That action has since been approved by a federal appeals court as legal battles continue. For context, nearly half of Planned Parenthood’s 2.08 million patients patients, according to their last annual report, rely on Medicaid to get care.
A White House representative claimed that the bill’s provision was “ending the forced use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion.” However, when Planned Parenthood sued the bill’s provision—saying the cut would cut off 200 clinics in 24 states, resulting in 1 million patients losing care—they emphasized that the scope of this cut would go far beyond abortion.
“This case is about making sure that patients who use Medicaid as their insurance to get birth control, cancer screenings and STI testing and treatment can continue to do so at their local Planned Parenthood health center,” the nonprofit’s president and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson said in court.
Amidst the federal attacks on Planned Parenthood, there are many independent clinics—especially those in southern states facing heightened restrictions—fighting to provide expanded care, beyond abortion access.
“One of the things lawmakers don’t understand about reproductive justice,” said Kwajelyn Jackson, the executive director of The Feminist Center Georgia Initiative, “is that we are just as interested and focused on people having healthy, safe, joyous birth outcomes as we are on people’s ability to have safe terminations of pregnancy.”
The Feminist Center Georgia Initiative is a primarily abortion-rights organization that has since expanded to a variety of initiatives ensuring that individuals have access to holistic reproductive and healthcare. The organization’s primary legal goal has been passing the Reproductive Freedom Act in the Georgia legislature, which on the most basic level attempts to combat the multiple gestational bans in the state (but primarily the six-week ban). Beyond abortion access, the act is also heavily interested in growing the scope of reproductive health practitioners, such as expanding the licensure of midwives in Georgia in order to combat oppressive issues of maternal health and mortality.
“I think that there’s such a focus on controlling and gatekeeping that decision to be pregnant or not,” said Allison Coffman, the executive director at Amplify Georgia Collective, “and such little focus on the support that’s needed holistically.”
The focus on restricting abortion neglects women’s reproductive autonomy, while also failing to acknowledge women’s needs when they decide to have a baby.
- According to a report from the Georgia Department of Public Health, between 2020-2022, there were 141 pregnancy-related deaths—one of the highest in the U.S.—and 87 percent of those deaths were preventable.
- Across the United States, Black women in particular face higher degrees of maternal mortality: In 2023, Black women had 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, as compared to 14.5 for white women, according to the CDC.
When talking about maternal mortality and overall maternal health, the story of Adriana Smith comes to mind, in which Smith, an expecting mother, suffered from blood clots and was later declared braindead. She was ultimately kept alive and forced to deliver her baby without the consent of her partner or family because of the six-week abortion ban.
Smith’s story raised much alarm over the impacts of post-Dobbs abortion restrictions; however, Coffman observed a broader issue within general maternal care at play.
“Something that I don’t feel like enough people have talked about with the Adriana Smith case, is that Adriana Smith should never have died, right? She went to seek care, and her pain was not taken seriously,” she asserted.
Indeed, Smith received more critical care when she was braindead in the efforts to deliver the fetus (an already risk-heavy endeavor), than when she initially sought help for her own health.
While antiabortion activists emphasize the successful delivery and well-being of the fetus, very little care is given to the mother’s birthing experience. Postpartum care in the U.S., for example, is failing women. If a woman dies in pregnancy, it is over 50 percent likely to occur postpartum. Despite it being such a high risk period—with a myriad of issues such as blood pressure issues, urinary incontinence, excessive bleeding and pelvic floor pain—according to a Time magazine article titled “The Sorry State of Postpartum Care in America,” most women will visit her OB-GYN 10-15 times before giving birth … and only once afterwards (often because insurance only covers one postpartum visit).
“For many people, a postpartum visit is an incision check if they had a cesarean, and a worksheet or some sort of questionnaire around postpartum depression, and that is it,” Jackson explained. “So very little attention is paid to blood pressure and other sort of vital statistics that might come up after pregnancy.”
Though postpartum depression is of the more common issues women deal with after giving birth (approximately one in eight U.S. women will experience it), Jackson said it’s often misdiagnosed and mistreated. “If your postpartum depression symptoms don’t align with the specifics in this questionnaire, you’re then dismissed—and not followed up with to figure out if there’s other alternative support that you could use,” she said.
It’s been normalized, institutionally, for women to only focus on their health with the sole goal of delivering a baby. Meanwhile, reproductive rights organizations are actively working to support women beyond their due date.
For Jackson, one of the Feminist Center’s greatest victories this past year was Georgia’s expanding Medicaid coverage to patients up to a year postpartum. “We don’t have a birth center, so we’re not necessarily a place where people can deliver, but being able to have comprehensive care that’s available to folks again within that year postpartum is really necessary—a combination of in clinic telehealth and home visits in order to support new parents.”
Abortion access is critical, but experts emphasize it is only one part of a larger effort to strengthen women’s reproductive autonomy. Advocates note that ensuring people can make their own decisions about pregnancy also means guaranteeing access to high-quality pre- and postpartum care, expanding the reproductive health workforce, and improving maternal health outcomes. Framing abortion within this broader context, they argue, underscores that the issue is not only about terminating a pregnancy but about supporting women’s health and well-being throughout their reproductive lives—a goal that could draw wide support, even among those who may disagree on abortion itself.
When asked how they go about operating in more conservative states with seemingly staunch opposition, both Jackson and Coffman suggested that voters are less close-minded than one would assume. According to Amplify’s research, four in five Georgians are against the government interfering with reproductive decisions, and based on polling from 2024, the majority of Georgians support abortion access in most, if not all, cases.
“One of our core focuses is on decriminalization and ensuring that cities and counties are not like are basically not cooperating any more than they are mandated to by the state law—including not participating in surveillance or like data collection and then resourcing for abortion access,” Coffman detailed.
Amplify often works with what they call “abortion moderates,” not to flip their entire belief system around, but rather, to educate and assure them that Amplify’s work actually does align with their values. “Even folks that considered themselves informed about abortion didn’t know our [Georgia’s] laws, and they actually were very supportive of the majority of things,” Coffman said. “Some of the hang ups were more around misinformation about how people access abortion and young people accessing abortion.” “Once we were able to kind of educate them that, like, you know, it’s less than 1 percent of abortions that happen later in pregnancy—I think there’s like, so much more space for us to work together,” she assured.
Jackson echoed this message of bridging the gap with those opposing abortion in the South. “One of the things is helping people to build up that empathy muscle to say this [abortion] can, will, maybe already has affected somebody that you love,” Jackson emphasized. One in four U.S. women is expected to have an abortion in their lifetime, according to 2024 data from the Guttmacher Policy Institute. “What I tell people often is, like, if you can’t recall who in your life that you love has had an abortion, that just means that you weren’t a safe enough person for them to tell.”
Both Amplify and The Feminist Center work closely with local Georgians, centering their efforts on building educated, empathetic communities that can support themselves when others won’t. “In these times where there’s less opportunity to rely on infrastructure and systems and agencies to work on our behalf,” Jackson said, “we are imagining communities that are interdependent on each other, that where there’s shared resources, where there’s community care, where people have the opportunity to learn from and with each other.”
The Feminist Center has a variety of community oriented programs, notably the “Lifting Latinx Voices Initiative,” which empowers members of Latinx Georgia communities with knowledge on abortion, contraceptives, consent, intimate partner violence and breast and cervical cancer—allowing those members to become resources for their communities and continue the cycle of education.
At Amplify, the organization is driven by community-oriented work, insisting on the power that local communities have right now despite the looming threats of the federal government. “Local governments actually have a role to play in ensuring access to abortion care, through resourcing, through public education and through preventing criminalization,” Coffman insisted. “[So] at the local level, if you and your friends show up at a city council meeting or at a county admission meeting, if you have 10, that’s a crowd—you can actually get attention.”
Great Job Alex Lalli & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
