Fighting for Choice: The Resilience of Reproductive Rights Activists in the South
At one point, the Pink House was many things: As Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, it was a symbol of defiance and dignity — a bright pink reminder that women deserve access to state-sanctioned safe healthcare — which also made it a rallying point for anti-choice protestors.
On Sundays, when the clinic would perform abortions, a mob would storm the fences around the parking lot, waving signs and hurling insults, trying to intimidate people out of getting their constitutionally protected right, which reflected the most important thing the Pink House was: a medical office. For thousands of Mississippians, it was the only place within driving distance that provided the reproductive care they needed.
Provided. Past tense. Because the Pink House isn’t any of that anymore — not a medical office, a protest area, or a symbol of defiance.
It isn’t even pink.
The Pink House’s official name was the Jackson Women’s Health Organization — as Jackson Women’s Health Organization v. Dobbs, the Supreme Court case that struck down Roe v. Wade in June. The ruling sent a painful shockwave through the country.
At least that’s what it felt like to me.
I started caring about reproductive rights because of my mom — Melinda French Gates, the philanthropist. I remember, as a kid, watching as she’d travel around the world — to places like India and Senegal — advocating for women’s rights. She’d come home and tell me about the women she met, girls as young as 14 who couldn’t get abortions in their countries; about grown women who couldn’t get a prescription for birth control because their doctors demanded to talk to their husbands first — and their husbands controlled their lives.
When Dobbs happened, I looked at the composition of the Supreme Court majority that had decided the case, and I worried that’s where America was heading, too. A nation where women were second-class citizens in the eyes of the law.
It wasn’t just that Dobbs would end abortion in about a dozen states. That was obviously going to happen. I worried that decision would stifle all energy and activism surrounding reproductive justice, which would make it impossible to ever win back the right to choose. So, six months after the Dobbs ruling, I decided to go see for myself.
In January, I visited to Jackson, Mississippi, and at first, it seemed at first that my fears had come true: The Pink House had been sold to a new owner, who had plans to turn the building into a high-end consignment shop. Handymen had been hired to whitewash over its famous paintjob.
An abandoned abortion clinic being painted white, an overwhelming metaphor for the state’s ability to strip away women’s fundamental rights.
But then I met Derenda.
Before Dobbs shut down the clinic, Derenda had been the head of the “Pink House Defenders.” She had come to activism later in her life. For 32 years, Derenda had worked a corporate job, opening restaurants in eight states, before the Occupy Wall Street movement compelled her to rethink her career. She decided she wanted to do something to help the most vulnerable people in Jackson, which led her to the Pink House.
Derenda’s duty as head of the Pink House Defenders was to brave the crowds of protestors and guide patients safely inside. She was a woman of unwavering conviction and fierce determination, and she told me that nothing — not even the ruling of six individual — would dissuade her from championing reproductive rights.
She wasn’t alone in her conviction.
As I traveled through Mississippi and Louisiana, I heard this sentiment echoed over and over. I met with dozens of medical students, doctors, lawyers, and political organizers — all of whom were devoted to the cause of reproductive freedom.
Dobbs v. The Jackson Women’s Health Organization served as a reminder of the ruthless reality of the world, where the political system can be weaponized to deny the most marginalized populations of their most fundamental American right: choice. But it had not dampened their spirits. Rather, Dobbs had ignited a fire within them.
As we remember the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, these activists help me remember that the fight for reproductive rights is not just a fight for the past — but for the future.
“What else do we have to lose?” Tyler Harden, Mississippi State Director at Planned Parenthood, told me, “Let’s get imaginative.”
Tyler and other young organizers are building the long-term infrastructure needed to win back abortion rights. Each weekend, dozens of canvassers fan out across Southern cities like Jackson, registering voters and knitting the case for abortion rights into a broader platform for basic human rights, including clean water. In Jackson, the taps have been running dry or dirty for months, and Tyler knows it’s impossible to convince voters you can protect their bodily autonomy if you can’t first protect their basic right to a water supply.
Medical students are taking action, too. In Louisiana, 70% of the state’s doctors are trained at Louisiana State University, where professors are prohibited from teaching future doctors how to perform abortions, even those necessary to save a patient’s life.
I had the opportunity to meet a fourth-year student named Alexis. She had been tirelessly working to expand the campus chapter of Med Students for Choice, an organization advocating for LSU to provide its students with the reproductive clinical training they need to put their patients’ lives first.
After Roe fell, my hope was that the backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision would spawn a whole new generation of young people devoted to constitutionalizing the right to safe, legal abortion for good.
But what I found in Louisiana and Mississippi far exceeded my expectations. I left the South amazed at the ferocity and strength of their response.
As I reflected on my conversation with Derenda, her words stuck with me. “In the end,” she had said, her voice faltering, “we couldn’t save the Pink House.” She paused, “I never wanted to say it was ‘the end’.”
But make no mistake, this is not the end. Far from it.
The Pink House may be gone. But Derenda — and thousands of brave, committed fighters– are just getting started.
