Alabama Just Touched Off a Nationwide Fight Over Abortion. Student Activists Are Headed to the Front Lines.

Last year, when Alabama voters approved an amendment declaring that the state Constitution does not support the right to an abortion, Helmi Henkin cried for two days. She had recently graduated from the University of Alabama and had stayed in Tuscaloosa in part to continue to advocate for women’s reproductive rights on the campus. To her, the passage of Amendment 2 was a huge blow.

But after Alabama’s Senate on Tuesday passed the country’s most restrictive abortion ban, Henkin said she was filled with joy and gratitude.

It’s not because of what’s in the bill — which would ban abortion in all cases, except when the mother’s health is at stake, and would imprison doctors who perform abortions. She was happy because of the nationwide outpouring of support that the organizations she works with had received in the 24 hours following the Senate’s vote.

“We saw it coming,” Henkin said of the bill. And no matter what happens — the state’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey, signed the bill into law on Wednesday — she said she and the other activists were not going away.

Henkin is one of several people, active on campuses in Alabama, who said the bill’s passage had not come as a surprise. They see it as part of a larger effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal nationwide. Despite increasing restrictions on abortions in places like Alabama, the activists are preparing to fight that bigger fight.

As a student, Henkin was a founding board member of Alabama’s only statewide abortion fund, the Yellowhammer Fund, of which she is now a vice president. The fund has been receiving donations from all over the country in the past day, Henkin said. Democratic presidential candidates, including Sen. Cory Booker and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, promoted it on Twitter.

On Wednesday another group she works with, Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity, or URGE, which supports student activists, flew a banner behind an airplane over the governor’s mansion that said, “Abortion is Ok.”

She also works as an escort for one of the state’s three abortion clinics, helping women walk past anti-abortion protesters. In the past two years, since the Trump administration took office, she said, it’s gotten easier to recruit students to advocate for reproductive rights.

“These sorts of things wake people up,” she said.

Henkin and other abortion-rights student activists have their work cut out for them. The American Civil Liberties Union has vowed to challenge the Alabama law. But supporters of the legislation want more than just a victory in one state. They hope to take advantage of the more conservative Supreme Court and challenge Roe v. Wade.

Alabama’s law follows the passage of similar, though slightly less restrictive laws in Georgia and Ohio. Several other states have “trigger laws” that would ban abortion automatically if Roe v. Wade were overturned.

“This is a chipping away of abortion access and autonomy across the country,” said Danielle Hurd-Wilson, a field organizer in Alabama with URGE. “It’s not just young people in Alabama, in Georgia, and in Ohio.”

URGE, which works with college students across the country, has chapters in Alabama, where student activists have been lobbying at the Capitol, in Montgomery.

“Young people are often the most impacted and often the least consulted with,” Hurd-Wilson said. “Of course we would be protesting.”

Difficult Access to Clinics

It already can be difficult for young people in Alabama to gain access to abortion care, said Kari White, an associate professor of health-care organization and policy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

With only three facilities that provide abortion services in the state, the nearest facility for some students is at least an hour away, and possibly several hours away, in a bordering state, White said. Alabama and three adjacent states — Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee — all have some version of mandatory waiting periods, she said. That means a student who wants an abortion must take multiple trips, spending at least several days out of class.

Even if a student lives near an in-state facility, those clinics get busy, and it may take several hours to do the mandatory consultation visit, White said.

What’s more, the procedures cost several hundred dollars. If the in-state facilities are closed, the cost of going outside Alabama “may likely be insurmountable,” she said.

The law allows abortion if it’s necessary to prevent a “serious health risk” to a pregnant woman. But “what does serious mean?” White said. “Is serious in the eye of the beholder?” That uncertainty, and the threat of criminalization, could “compromise the training” of doctors in Alabama, she said.

White has conducted research on restrictive abortion laws in Texas. Some women who wanted abortion services, she found, couldn’t overcome the logistical difficulties and ended up carrying their pregnancies to term. Alabama, she said, could see something similar.

“This is going to have a real impact on women’s lives and their abilities to pursue their educational opportunities, their career opportunities, and their abilities to take care of the families that they already have,” White said.

Abba Mellon, a rising senior who is president of the URGE chapter at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, said she wasn’t surprised by the bill’s passage but had not expected the legislation to be so restrictive. The campus has cleared out for the summer now, but she will plan an event in the fall.

“I really don’t know what we’re going to do,” Mellon said. She worried that her friends and fellow activists would leave Alabama for places like New York or California, where they would find more peers with similar political views.

“So many people treat Alabama like a lost cause,” she said. She thought she, too, might leave for a little while after graduating, but felt certain that she would return — and that she would keep fighting for women’s right to have an abortion.

“We might be descending into a valley right now,” Mellon said. “But that just means we have to keep working to get us to the next peak, I guess.”

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com. Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.