Saturday will mark one year since the Supreme Court overturned the landmark case Roe v. Wade, removing federal abortion protections and returning the decision to the states on whether to allow abortions.
In the 12 months since the case was overturned, many states in the South have pushed for laws that would outlaw abortions altogether or severely restrict them.
Seeing the restriction of abortion access across the country, Bay Area abortion rights supporters saw an opportunity to provide abortions to a vast swath of the country. One of those opportunities included the use of a floating offshore clinic where state laws wouldn’t apply.
KCBS Radio’s Raquel Maria Dillon spoke with the physician behind the idea, Dr. Meg Autry, the director of obstetrics and gynecology at UCSF Fresno, who shared that her floating abortion clinic operates in federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico.
“We actually went and saw a boat last week,” Autry said. “A scaled-down boat that would be much cheaper but have less volume.”
While Autry says that abortion access in the Central Valley is difficult, she can’t fathom the struggles that pregnant people in the Gulf are having.
In the region, Autry says that pregnant people have to travel hundreds of miles to get abortion care, with all the costs and time away from work and family that entails. This is the main reason why – even though the logistics sound complicated – it might be easier to take a helicopter or boat from a coastal city to a ship.
“We had unprecedented volunteers – legal, maritime, medical,” Autry said. “We had a lot of small donor support. So we got a quarter of a million dollars in, within 3 months I would say.”
And those donations are continuing to roll in for the clinic, but no one is doing abortions on the waves yet, as those donations aren’t nearly enough for a boat.
“So we need a big donor to give us money. Foundations don’t want projects that are not sustainable. They don’t want to do brick and mortar,” Autry said.
Autry told herself and her team that she’d give the project at least a year. But she’s still going for one reason: a court case that could take the abortion drug mifepristone off pharmacy shelves.
The removal of the drug would be detrimental to abortion care, as Autry shared that more than half of abortions are done by oral medication these days.
“With this case out there, we feel obligated,” Autry said. “If it really does restrict medication abortion access. Then I think the boat becomes more relevant. People may get even more distressed, like the public and funders. And maybe this will become a more realistic goal.”
Autry remains optimistic that the mifepristone case will be decided in favor of abortion rights, but she continues to write letters and raise money for the abortion ship, just in case.
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