Before we get started, heads up that this episode contains some explicit language and also discusses pregnancy loss.

We're forced to be put into places of being like the abortion gatekeepers or the food pantry gatekeeper or the diaper gatekeeper because there's this scarcity of resources that's a fake scarcity. There is no scarcity. There's just people hoarding shit.

This is Death, Sex, and Money. The show from WNYC about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more. I'm Anna Sain.

It was a year ago this month that in the United States, the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, totally remaking the policy landscape for abortion.

Last summer, I talked to Lori Bertram Roberts, who runs the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund in Jackson, Mississippi.

Jackson, a city whose abortion clinic was at the center of the DOBS case that overturned the constitutional right to an abortion and where that clinic is now closed.

Roe is a single parent of seven kids and disabled and they've lived in Mississippi most of their adult life working on abortion access.

But a year ago, Lori emphasized how they see their work is much broader than that.

I became a reproductive justice activist because my life has been full of reproductive injustice. Not just my reproductive health life because reproductive justice is broader than that.

But in just my right to parent, my kids, and be recognized as a full, you know, responsible, adequate human being as not just a teen parent, but as a teen black parent, and just as a black parent, single parent at all.

Lori also told me a year ago about working in the abortion rights movement in Mississippi, about the frustrations that have come with that over the years, feeling dismissed, talked down to, and generally unsupported by a lot of the national activists and big donors.

Do you ever get a phone call where they say, Lori, what do you need? Tell us, tell us what you need, and we'll give you the money to do it.

No, that was a moment I have not forgotten. You can listen back to that whole conversation from last year. There's a link in our show notes.

We got back in touch with Lori a few weeks ago. Hey Lori. Hey, how's it up to you to hear how the work of funding abortion access has changed?

The need is higher, right? It takes more to access abortion care so people who would have been able to access abortion care without our assistance are now calling us.

What's the cost driver there? Why is it costing more money?

So the most common places to get an abortion if you lived in Mississippi would be Little Rock, Arkansas, Memphis, Tennessee, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Jackson, Mississippi, right?

All of those places were within like five or six hours of most people in Mississippi. Now the closest place for someone to go get their procedure is carbon-dale Illinois.

Well, that's the closest. Yeah.

So you're talking about day drives just to go for an appointment at seven weeks pregnant, eight weeks pregnant, plus the cost of, you know, your 700 dollar appointment or whatever.

So someone who might have been able to afford a 700 dollar appointment plus, you know, a hundred dollars a gas. Now can't afford that.

Yeah. And I'm imagining if I drive 10 hours, the next day I have an appointment for an abortion.

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