Carbondale had long been a blue-dot college town amid deep-red farm country. It had a history of activism dating back to Vietnam. But it had never planned on being the center of anybody’s abortion fight.
CARBONDALE, Ill. – The 26-year-old had never heard of the distant southern Illinois town, but it had become the closest option.
They parked outside a single-story office building, across from a Kroger, at the Choices Center for Reproductive Health. She walked in past a security guard to a waiting room, donning a green wristband.A security guard stands inside Choices Center for Reproductive Health in Carbondale, Illinois. April 2023.
And as more states in the Midwest and the South put restrictions in place, abortion providers set their sights on Carbondale. A year ago, the story of how Carbondale would grapple with its new place on the fault-lines of America’s post-Roe landscape was just beginning to unfold. Republican lawmakers in her state and others nearby such as Kentucky and Missouri had for years been passing more and more restrictions, regulations and measures to squeeze access.
Pepper looked at a map, seeing clinics across the river from St. Louis, set up to maintain access amid growing restrictions in Missouri, that were already getting a crush of out-of-state patients.Pepper knew the area. She grew up in the Rust Belt Mississippi River town of Alton, Illinois. Her eyes quickly fell on Carbondale, founded as a railroad junction in the 1850s.
That could make it a key outpost for abortion rights in a part of the country where an “abortion desert” was about to spread. In January, she brought her executive staff to town. “It was like the exit row of an airplane,” she said. “I made everybody look me in the eye and said, ‘We're going to do this.’”
Sitting in a Mexican restaurant, near the railroad tracks that shoot through on their way from New Orleans to Chicago, Loos noted that polls showed a majority of Americans favored some level of abortion access.Outside the city? That was another story.The rumors had begun to spread over kitchen tables, across church pews and through campus offices.
"A lot of us shop here. A lot of us have family here. Anything that happens here in Carbondale is going to affect the respective communities," a woman who said she worked as a nurse told the council. "I’m going to boycott Carbondale if you guys bring an abortion clinic here." Some clinic supporters believed most of the opponents were from out of town and had little right to demand that Carbondale block the clinics.
Some Carbondale-area abortion opponents, while happy that the leaked Supreme Court opinion appeared to signal a pending win in a 50-year fight to overturn Roe, were dismayed that the battle had wound up right on their doorstep. For one thing, Pepper wondered if she’d struggle to hire staff in a small town – one where a secret about where you work would be hard to keep.
“Initially we all had these worries: How will it be? How are the protesters going to react to us?” Unique said. “Will I see them on the corner at the clinic and then also later at the school picking up my children?” she said. “Will I see them at the grocery store?” Still, the clinics began to take shape. They hauled in equipment. Exam tables and copiers arrived. As opening days approached, misgivings began to fade.
Before the Dobbs ruling, there were no abortion clinics to protest in Carbondale. But once the clinics arrived, a group of pastors and others vowed to build up an opposition movement.
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