An Abortion Doctor in Alabama
By 
What is it like to be an abortion doctor in Alabama when you can no longer practice? It’s very hard. Here’s a great profile of one from Irin Carmon.
A year ago, the patients in the waiting area at the Alabama Women’s Center on Sparkman Drive in Huntsville were separated into two rooms. In one, the staff put people whose abortion procedures had already begun through taking a dose of misoprostol. In the other were the ten or 15 who had come for their mandatory counseling or to start their abortions. These patients were unlucky by hours, because the Supreme Court had just ruled they had to stay pregnant, at least if the state of Alabama had anything to do with it.
Dr. Yashica Robinson, 47, doesn’t really want to talk about that day. Was she emotional? “I probably cried like a baby for ten minutes and then I cleaned my tears up and we came up with a plan,” she finally answers. By the end, she had been providing the majority of abortion procedures in the state, and most of the second-trimester ones, and in those last months, the clinic had been seeing people who were driving 12 hours — from Texas, from Mississippi — for their abortions. Robinson could tell by how their bodies sank which patients weren’t going to be able to get in their cars and keep driving to the closest state where abortion was still available.
And the ones who were left behind? Some of them remain Robinson’s patients in her OB/GYN office on Madison Street with the glass-brick façade, where we now sit on a Wednesday night in May. She took care of Alabamians — mostly pregnant ones — before Roe was overturned, and she’s still doing it, or as much as she can. She likes to say her patients are ages 9 to 99. In the 48 hours, give or take, I spend by her side, she sees 20 women for office visits — 11 of them pregnant, two for minor gynecological procedures, seven for routine gynecological or postpartum care — performs one endometrial surgery and a newborn circumcision, and attends three births, two of which she wasn’t even on call for, but she had promised she would be there. What she cannot do is end their pregnancies. Had the Supreme Court not ruled the way it did in Dobbs, a new report from the Society of Family Planning estimates, there would have been at least 6,000 abortions in Alabama alone between July 2022 and this past March. Staying pregnant in Alabama means you’re more than twice as likely to die compared to the national rate. Staying pregnant in Alabama when you’re Black means you’re twice as likely to die than your white neighbor.
Today, in Robinson’s office, I met the 26-year-old mother of a toddler. In March, she drove with her mother to North Carolina, a 14-hour round trip in a single day, for an abortion. Another woman, pregnant, tells Robinson, “Well, I’ve met you before, but at the other office.” Abortion charts were kept separate, just like the buildings, so it takes some checking to confirm that Robinson had seen her for two abortions. This pregnancy, Robinson notices, started after the 24th of June. Robinson is curious about whether she would have aborted if given a chance, but the patient is really far along in the pregnancy and Robinson doesn’t want her to think her doctor is second-guessing her, so she just asks her how she feels. The woman says, “Well, I’m comfortable with it now.”
Robinson tells me it’s just one of those things where you’re in a situation and you just figure it out. You do what you have to do to make it work.