In August 2022, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall made a guest appearance on a local conservative talk radio show. It was two months after the US Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, and abortion was now illegal in Alabama. And Marshall addressed rumors that he planned to prosecute anyone helping people get abortions out of state.
“If someone was promoting themselves out as a funder of abortion out of state,” Marshall explained to the host, “then that is potentially criminally actionable for us.”
This particular threat launched an epic legal battle with implications for some of the most basic American rights: the right to travel, the right to free speech, the right to give and receive help.
This week on Reveal, reporter Nina Martin spends time with abortion rights groups in Alabama, following how they’ve adapted to one of the nation’s strictest anti-abortion policies—and evolved their definition of help.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in May 2025.
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Dig Deeper
Read: Forced Parenthood and Failing Safety Nets: This Is Life in Post-Roe America (Mother Jones)
Read: A Win for Repro Rights: Alabama Can’t Charge Activists Helping Patients Get Out-of-State Abortions (Mother Jones)
Listen: Blue State Barriers and the Messy Map of Abortion Access (Reveal)
Credits
Reporter: Nina Martin | Producer: Anayansi Diaz-Cortes | Additional production: Steven Rascón and Michael I Schiller | Editor: Jenny Casas | Additional editing: Marianne Szegedy-Maszak | Fact checkers: Sarah Szilagy and Ruth Murai | Production manager: Zulema Cobb | Digital producer: Artis Curiskis | Score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda, with help from Claire Mullen | Legal review: Victoria Baranetsky | Episode executive producer: Kate Howard | Deputy executive producer: Taki Telonidis | Executive producer: Brett Myers | Host: Al Letson
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, and by Reveal listeners.
Transcript
Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting in PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Robin Marty was on national television when Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022. |
| Robin Marty: | It was Friday, and I was asked to do a live segment with CNN Headline News. |
| CNN anchor: | You want to bring in Robin Marty? She’s director of operations of West Alabama’s Women’s Center. Robin, good morning. So you are in Alabama. If this happens, if Roe versus Wade is overturned, how does that impact your facility there today? |
| Robin Marty: | Right, so… |
| Al Letson: | At the time, Robin was running an abortion clinic in Tuscaloosa, the West Alabama Women’s Center. Abortions were already extremely restricted in the state and the clinic was performing almost 40% of them. Robin is calling in from her home office, but CNN has her on a split screen with the protesters gathered outside of the Supreme Court. |
| Robin Marty: | So in Alabama, we have a law that is on the books that states that all abortion is illegal, and our understanding is that that means that the moment that the court says Roe v. Wade is gone, we will immediately stop all services in order to… |
| Al Letson: | The Alabama law that would go into effect if and when Roe fell, would make abortion illegal in virtually all circumstances. Under the law, anyone performing an abortion could face up to life in prison. |
| Robin Marty: | My biggest fear was that there was going to be a ruling and I wouldn’t know right away. And so I wouldn’t stop the staff, and everybody would get in trouble. |
| Audio: | Sorry, I’m distracted by Twitter because I’m watching for updates. |
| Robin Marty: | So one of the lawyers I was working with promised me that she would text me as soon as a ruling came down. And so here I was talking to CNN and I could feel my phone going off. |
| Audio: | If they have already taken the pill, they’re fine. If they’re in the waiting room waiting to receive the pill, we will not be able to give it to them. |
| Robin Marty: | And then I felt it go off again and I’m literally still talking to CNN as I flip my phone over and see it’s two texts. The first one is… And the second one is stop. Because she told me that she was going to text stop at me when I needed to stop. |
| Audio: | It comes down and I actually have to go because the Supreme Court just overturned Roe v. Wade, and I need to tell my staff. |
| CNN anchor: | Okay, we are still working to confirm this, but we do know the Supreme Court has issued a major abortion ruling. We are getting information that the Supreme Court indeed has overturned Roe versus wade. |
| Robin Marty: | It was chaos after that. Everything was pure chaos. |
| Al Letson: | Almost immediately, Robin and her staff shift their focus to getting their patients out of Alabama. |
| Robin Marty: | We had reached out to a clinic in Atlanta and already had prearranged that we were providing traveling money for the patients that would have to go. |
| Al Letson: | But that same day, Robin gets a call from a state lawmaker who tells her that has to stop too. |
| Robin Marty: | He’s like, “Robin, if you try to get those patients somewhere else, they’re going to come after you. They’re going to come after you for criminal conspiracy.” |
| Al Letson: | This lawmaker was warning Robin about an Alabama criminal conspiracy law from 1896. It says, “If something’s illegal in Alabama, you can’t help someone do it in another state.” He warned that the state’s Attorney General Steve Marshall could use that law to prosecute anyone for helping someone leave Alabama for an abortion, even giving information could be considered help. |
| Robin Marty: | And what this means is that if we have a patient who comes in who is pregnant and they say, “I want to get an abortion, I know that you can’t do that here, where can I go?” We can’t tell them because according to the Attorney General that would be the start of a criminal conspiracy. |
| Al Letson: | Marshall’s threats against ‘abortion helpers’ sparked an epic legal battle with implications for some of the most basic American rights: the right to travel, the right to free speech, the right to give and receive help. Today we’re bringing back a story from Reveal’s Nina Martin. For more than three years, she’s been following how Alabama abortion advocates have adapted to one of the strictest anti-abortion policies in the country. Nina picks up the story with the hard decisions Robin’s clinic had to make in the days after the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case. |
| Nina Martin: | I meet Robin a couple of days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration. We’re in a cluttered back office at the West Alabama Women’s Center. In those first weeks after Roe fell, the clinic basically went dark. |
| Robin Marty: | The staff had to keep the lights off. I actually ended up sending them home to make calls from home because there were people coming to the doors. |
| Nina Martin: | Robin’s clinic had been targeted before. Back in 2020, West Alabama Women’s Center had hired a new abortion doctor and the state medical board immediately came after her license. For almost seven months, the doctor couldn’t offer abortions or any medical care at all. So Robin was taking the criminal conspiracy threat seriously. It was crushing for her and her team, but it was much worse for their patients. |
| Robin Marty: | I remember I was sitting at that desk back over there and one of our medical assistants came in sobbing. She was on the phone with somebody who was asking for an abortion, and the patient was like, “Where do I go? Tell me where to go.” And she was like, “We can’t do that because of Alabama law.” And the patient apparently said, “Well then I guess I’m just going to get in a car and wrap it around a tree then,” and hung up. |
| Nina Martin: | The criminal conspiracy threat added a new level of paranoia to every interaction with a patient, even if all the patient said they wanted was information. Because what if the patient was actually an antiabortion activist? |
| Robin Marty: | We can’t trust a patient. We can’t assume that the patient who is talking to us is really in crisis, really needs this information because it could always be an anti who is just trying to get us on the record so that they can file something against us. |
| On the other hand, this is also making it so that patients can’t trust their doctors. Because we’ve seen the people who are not able to find out where they can go when they need an abortion for medical reasons, this has destroyed the doctor-patient relationship. | |
| Nina Martin: | The center reopened after a few weeks, but in a way that wouldn’t risk anyone going to jail. The staff now offered all kinds of reproductive care, prenatal visits, some gender-affirming care, everything except abortions, and no specific information on how to get one. |
| Meanwhile, Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, was making it clear his office really would go after abortion helpers. | |
| Jeff Poor: | Welcome back Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. (singing) |
| Welcome back to the Jeff Poor Show on FM Talk 1065. Thank you very much for staying with us on this Thursday morning. | |
| Nina Martin: | In August of 2022, Marshall made an appearance on the Jeff Poor Show, a conservative talk radio show out of Mobile. |
| Jeff Poor: | Always badgering on my next guest. Very kind to come on, Attorney General Steve Marshall joins us. General, good morning, how are you? |
| Steve Marshall: | Good morning, Jeff. Good to be with you. Good to be down on the coast. |
| Nina Martin: | Jeff Poor digs into the recent Dobbs decision and the rumors that Marshall will use the criminal conspiracy law to prosecute people helping abortion patients get out of state. |
| Jeff Poor: | Is that really something that is on your radar that needs to be cleaned up or that it really is part of the law? We keep losing him here. Anyway so… |
| Nina Martin: | Jeff Poor asks a version of this question about three separate times, but Marshall’s phone connection keeps dropping. |
| Jeff Poor: | So we got you again there in, General. |
| Steve Marshall: | Yeah, Jeff, and I think I understand your question. Let me see if I can sort of approach a little bit. |
| Nina Martin: | Marshall makes clear he’s not planning to go after abortion patients. |
| Steve Marshall: | There’s nothing about that law that restricts any individual from driving across state lines and taking an abortion in another place. However- |
| Nina Martin: | He would use the conspiracy law against people helping them go out of state. |
| Steve Marshall: | … if someone was promoting themselves out as a funder of abortions out of state, then that is potentially criminally actionable for us. And so, one thing that we will do in working with local law enforcement and prosecutors is making sure that we fully implement this law. |
| Nina Martin: | And gets specific, singling out groups in Tuscaloosa. That’s where Robin Marty’s clinic is, and that’s where the clinic’s former owner was based, the Yellowhammer Abortion Fund. |
| Steve Marshall: | There’s groups and we’ve seen groups out of Tuscaloosa for example, that at one point in time and talked about it. I don’t know if they’re doing it now, but if they’re promoting this as part of their services, we clearly will be taking a look at that. |
| Jenice Fountain: | He got on a radio station and said, “Well, we’re also looking at that group out of Tuscaloosa that helps people get out of state.” We’re from Tuscaloosa. |
| Nina Martin: | Jenice Fountain is the executive director of Yellowhammer. The first time I talked to her was the summer of 2024. |
| Jenice Fountain: | I’m sorry, I’m also summertime. My kids are home. When in summer, I’m not- |
| Nina Martin: | Totally understand. |
| Jenice Fountain: | … They’re supposed to be taking a nap. |
| Nina Martin: | Yellowhammer was founded to help people figure out where to get abortion care and to help them pay for it, anything from travel costs to child care to the abortion itself. They’re the only abortion fund in Alabama. And before Dobbs, they were getting up to a hundred calls a week. Then when it became clear that the Supreme Court was going to overturn Roe, abortion funds around the country began planning to send more and more women out of state. Yellowhammer had already been doing that for years. |
| Jenice Fountain: | So we’re expecting to have to ramp-up what we did in terms of getting people out of state. But with the threat from the attorney general of criminal conspiracy, we got legal advice that said, “Hey, don’t do anything around abortion at all.” And we were like, “You just completely stop us from what we set out to do.” |
| Nina Martin: | And as Jenice points out, a lot of things are illegal in Alabama. Casino-style gambling, recreational marijuana, selling sex toys, but the only targets Marshall was talking about for this conspiracy law were abortion helpers. |
| Jenice Fountain: | People go smoke weed in Cali, and it’s not like, “Oh, did you go smoke weed in a different state?” But as soon as we all assist people get out of state then it’s like, “Well, maybe you should go to prison for that.” |
| Nina Martin: | Like with Robin Marty’s clinic, Yellowhammer’s abortion-related work had to stop. |
| Jenice Fountain: | And then we landed on having to provide personal and protective information in a really third-person way. |
| Nina Martin: | All Yellowhammer was allowed to do was give people links to news articles, or to websites that talked about abortion in abstract ways. |
| Jenice Fountain: | But never just like explicitly, this is what you need to do to advocate for yourself in this moment, and this is how we can help. |
| Nina Martin: | But the reality is that people just stopped calling. They were afraid of getting prosecuted for asking for help. And if anyone did call Yellowhammer, this is what they heard. |
| Automated voice: | Thank you for calling the Yellowhammer Fund. Due to changes in state law that took effect on June 24th, 2022, we have temporarily suspended our abortion funding program. |
| Nina Martin: | Eventually abortion advocates decide they’ve had enough. Yellowhammer and the West Alabama Women’s Center decide to take the attorney general to court. |
| Al Letson: | Up next. |
| Jenice Fountain: | Like, “Hey, do y’all want to sue for that?” And we were like, “Yes, yes we do. Please, where do we sign our names?” |
| Al Letson: | And Nina follows how abortion activists in Alabama are adjusting to the changing legal landscape. You’re listening to Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Today, we’re re-airing an episode about Alabama’s strict anti-abortion laws. Two months after the Dobbs decision that ended the federal right to an abortion, Jamila Johnson found herself on a long train trip through the South and Midwest. |
| Jamila Johnson: | I took a ride with Black activists from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee on the Amtrak to Chicago. With 40 hours, you don’t have a lot to do but to think. |
| Al Letson: | Jamila is a civil rights attorney, and the trip was a part of something called the Black August Freedom Rides. It was meant to trace the journey that people from southern states with abortion bans would have to take to get abortion care. For many, the nearest accessible clinics were in Illinois. |
| Jamila Johnson: | And I thought about how hard travel was and how hard that was going to be for people who’d never left the states that they’d lived in, who didn’t have a car in their household that they could take for a journey like this. In some ways, that radicalized me. |
| Al Letson: | In no place were the hurdles to care greater than in Alabama. Not only was abortion illegal, but the state’s Attorney General, Steve Marshall, was threatening to prosecute anyone helping people get abortions out of state. |
| Jamila Johnson: | I was going to do anything that I could to stop the law from making it harder for these people who needed to take these journeys. So by the time I left on my Amtrak ride home, I had an interview at Lawyering Project and I started in December. |
| Al Letson: | The Lawyering Project is a law firm focused on reproductive justice issues, and when she started there, one of Jamila’s first cases was the Yellowhammer Abortion Fund lawsuit against Steve Marshall. |
| Jamila Johnson: | What we saw in Alabama was something we hadn’t seen in other states, which was an immediate effort to get on the airwaves and tell people that the helpers would be prosecuted. No other state did that happen in in this way, and as quickly and as forcefully as happened in Alabama, and the lawsuit is the result of that. |
| Al Letson: | The lawsuit asked the court to block prosecutors from going after groups like Yellowhammer if they help people get abortions out of state. Marshall argues that an 1890s era conspiracy law makes that help a criminal offense. Jamila and her colleagues argue that this kind of abortion help is protected by the First Amendment and the fundamental right to travel. No abortion helper had been charged yet with criminal conspiracy, and the goal was to make sure that never happened. |
| Jamila Johnson: | I mean by the Attorney General’s Logic, the Attorney General could extend it to friends, family, neighbors. The chill and the threats are all meant to stop people from calling, not just the Yellowhammer Fund, but calling their mother. |
| Al Letson: | Alabama’s laws and policies often start out seeming extreme compared to the rest of the country, but they end up being bellwethers. As Reveal’s Nina Martin explains, Steve Marshall’s threats against help are part of that same pattern and they’re happening in a place where help is often in short supply. |
| Nina Martin: | The thing about Alabama is what starts in Alabama doesn’t stay in Alabama. A good example is the state’s near total abortion ban. When it first passed in 2019, it was the most restrictive abortion law in the country since Roe v. Wade. Today, 11 other states have similar laws on the books. Another example is fetal personhood, which is now a major part of the national conservative playbook. Alabama’s Supreme Court was the first to embrace the idea that fetuses, or even embryos, should have the same legal rights as anyone else. When I started reporting in the state more than 10 years ago, I went to investigate yet another policy that, at the time, was far out on the legal fringes, and one of the people I spoke with was a district attorney in northern Alabama, a younger, more media friendly Steve Marshall. |
| Okay, great. We should be good to go. I would love to just have you take me through to the extent that you have patience for that- | |
| Steve Marshall: | Yeah, no, no, no, no. |
| Nina Martin: | Kind of start with- |
| Steve Marshall: | This is an issue that’s very important to me, so that’s not a problem. |
| Nina Martin: | At the time, I was covering sex and gender issues for ProPublica. I spoke with Marshall for almost two hours. That’s a really big difference from today when he hasn’t given me an interview or even acknowledged my calls and emails. Back then, Marshall was approachable and excited to talk to me about how he was trying to solve what he saw as a major problem in his jurisdiction, Marshall County. |
| Steve Marshall: | And I did not change my name to be the same as the county. That is completely fortuitous. |
| Nina Martin: | Local doctors were calling his office reporting numerous cases of premature babies. They believed the babies were being born that way because their mothers were using illegal drugs during pregnancy, at that point, mainly meth. |
| Steve Marshall: | So we kind of had a powwow with our hospital staff, with OBGYNs, with pediatricians to say, from a public health standpoint, a law enforcement standpoint, are there ways that we can discourage and deter this behavior? |
| Nina Martin: | Marshall found his answer in an existing law nicknamed the Meth Lab Law. Passed in 2006 during the height of the state’s meth epidemic, the law made it a form of child abuse to expose kids to places where controlled substances were made or distributed, like meth labs. The punishment was up to 10 years behind bars and up to life in prison if a child died. Steve Marshall’s innovation was to use this law to prosecute new mothers whose babies tested positive for illegal drugs. The argument was, in Alabama, a fetus is considered a child. So a womb with drugs in it is basically the same as a meth lab. |
| Steve Marshall: | Typically, if baby’s positive, mama is going from hospital once she’s stabilized to jail with a jail-to-treatment order, |
| Nina Martin: | So new mothers would be sent from jail to a drug treatment program and the baby would go to a relative or foster care. The goal after treatment was to drop the criminal charges and return kids to their moms, but this process could take years and it didn’t always work out. |
| Steve Marshall: | We wanted to find the mechanism through both the criminal justice system and social services to get mama clean, get kids safe, and hopefully encourage a reunification of that family. |
| Nina Martin: | Back then, and still, Alabama was by far the most punitive state in the country towards pregnant women who used drugs. Steve Marshall was by no means the most aggressive district attorney in Alabama on these cases. When I spoke to Marshall, he seemed proud to be one of the first prosecutors in the state to use the law this way, and what I most remember from my interview with him was his suggestion that punishment could be a form of help. |
| Steve Marshall: | The term of art is coercive treatment, if you will. |
| Nina Martin: | Did you say coercive treatment? |
| Steve Marshall: | I think coerced treatment, and that’s kind what drug court is, is coerced treatment in that you’ve kind of got this carrot-and-stick approach. |
| Nina Martin: | His argument was that by throwing women in jail, separating them from their newborns, threatening them with prison, you were helping them because you were forcing them to get treatment for their drug problems. |
| Steve Marshall: | I think we feel pretty comfortable about what we’re doing and we feel very much that we are treating people fairly. |
| Nina Martin: | After I talked to Marshall, I spoke with a lot of women around the state about this idea of help, including some who’d been arrested under the Meth Lab Law. What they told me was Alabama was all stick and no carrot. Mostly these women told me about the enormous barriers to basics like health insurance, child care, food, and housing. It was the first time I had thought about help as a reproductive justice issue. But that idea has animated Yellowhammer Fund’s executive director, Jenice Fountain, from the very beginning. |
| Jenice Fountain: | I don’t think the state wants its constituents to have agency or autonomy. I think folks that are too tired, too worn down, can’t fight back, and then they don’t organize as much and they don’t realize where the state is screwing them over. |
| Nina Martin: | Like Steve Marshall, Jenice was born in rural Alabama, in her case, a very small town outside Tuscaloosa. After her biological mother lost custody of her and her siblings, she was mostly raised by her aunt and ended up in Birmingham for college. She’s 34 now with kids of her own and a lifetime of experience has led her to believe that the state can’t ever be counted on. |
| Jenice Fountain: | I think my entrance to reproductive justice work was through my own struggle. I was actually incredibly angry when I came into the work, maybe even traumatized. |
| Nina Martin: | In her mid-20s, Jenice was juggling multiple jobs at once, as a cashier at Whole Foods as a manager of a pizza restaurant, and of course as a mom. |
| Jenice Fountain: | I was working at least 50 hours a week and I had my son, my oldest son, and I just could not float. I could not feed myself. I was only feeding him. I was borderline homeless and eventually sleeping on someone’s floor, and I thought, “Man.” The general thought, right, is that you just have to work and then you have what you need. But here I am working and not able to sustain myself, but also not able to get state assistance because I was earning too much money. |
| Nina Martin: | Jenice needed food stamps but didn’t qualify. In Alabama, you have to be far, far below the poverty line to be eligible for programs like Welfare. Around the same time, Jenice was trying to leave her marriage, and then she discovered she was pregnant. |
| Jenice Fountain: | And I knew if I carry out another pregnancy, because he and I already have four between us, I’m going to stay. There’s going to be another newborn in the house. I’m going to make sense of it in my head, I’m going to say it’s easier, and I’m going to stay in the household. |
| Nina Martin: | Jenice reached out to Yellowhammer. She was asking for something she never really expected to get, help paying for an abortion retroactively. |
| Jenice Fountain: | And I was like, “Hey, I need abortion care, and I waited too late to have y’all pay for it. Can y’all assist me, just make up for the money that I lost?” And they were like, “Actually, yeah, that’s fine.” I was like, “Wait, really?” That was definitely pivotal for me to be able to leave, because if I would’ve carried another pregnancy, I would’ve still been there. |
| Nina Martin: | This whole traumatic period really underscored something that Jenice has thought about a lot in her reproductive justice work. Getting an abortion didn’t solve all the other problems she and her family were going through. For that, she relied on a tight group of friends. |
| Jenice Fountain: | We had a group chat at some point where we were literally passing $20. I’d be like, “Well, I’m going to make it to next week. Here’s the $20,” and Shakila would be like, “Oh, I already sent that to Vanessa for next week.” We were literally passing it around. |
| Nina Martin: | Jenice can’t exactly explain how this thing she was doing with a handful of friends morphed into an actual nonprofit, but expanding beyond her small circle seemed really important. She named it Margins: Women Helping Black Women. |
| Jenice Fountain: | People don’t care about Black women, they just don’t. It’s just like, well, who’s coming? No one’s coming. I feel that if we don’t create what we need, it won’t exist. And I think some of it is almost understandable because I don’t think people in the state that don’t have our lived experience can properly advocate for us, but there’s just the reality that they also don’t want to. |
| Nina Martin: | At first, it was just Jenice and some volunteers operating out of the back of her Nissan Pathfinder, doing things like pop-up pantries and diaper giveaways. Regardless of how they discovered a need in their community, they would try to find a way to help no strings attached. |
| Jenice Fountain: | My son, my oldest, was like, “Mom, somebody stole my backpack,” and I’m like, “What?” And he was like, “Well, they took the contents out, but they took the backpack.” I was like, “Oh, so they really just needed a backpack?” And he was like, “Yeah, but they stole my backpack.” And so I was like, “Well, we just need to just give out backpacks then if that’s what folks need.” |
| Nina Martin: | So they started a backpack drive, crowdfunding on Facebook. Margins has kept doing them for six or seven years now. |
| Jenice Fountain: | I just wanted to affirm, especially for my son at the time, I was just like, “Yeah, we could be upset, but what use is it? You have someone at school that needed a thing. Let’s just figure that out.” |
| Nina Martin: | The more Jenice and her friends kept doing this, the more they realized they could do it on a bigger and bigger scale. Early in the pandemic, when the Birmingham schools went remote and the buses stopped, thousands of kids couldn’t get their free school lunches, and for a lot of them, those lunches were their only full meal of the day. So Jenice called together some friends, they started making lunches out of her kitchen and delivering them around the city. She got very good at going on Facebook and guilting people into donating. She says she raised tens of thousands of dollars this way. |
| Jenice Fountain: | And my kids help with lunches sometimes. They’re like, “Oh, this is what we’re supposed to do?” I’m like, “Yes, this is how life is supposed to be.” And now they’re like give away everything out of my house every chance they get. They’re like, “We have to feed the neighborhood.” I’m like, “Not today, please.” And I literally see my son taking full groceries outside. I’m like, “Wait, at least let me go back to the grocery store.” He’s like, “No, they need to eat.” |
| Nina Martin: | This idea of helping each other in a very direct, roll up your sleeves kind of way became familiar to a lot of people during the pandemic, mutual aid. Jenice had a different term, Family Justice. |
| Jenice Fountain: | I think people view some of the facets of Family Justice work as just like, “Okay, that’s not my work,” or, “That’s not the same,” or, “It’s not reproductive justice work,” but it is. |
| Nina Martin: | Reproductive justice includes the right to make choices. To have or not have children, and if you do have them to raise those children in safe and supportive environments. Family Justice is about giving people the support they need to do that. For Jenice and Margins, that meant giving rides, buying groceries, paying rent and utility bills. And Jenice was running all this programming, still raising money on Facebook, holding down various jobs, and taking care of her kids. It was a lot. |
| Jenice Fountain: | Oh my God, I was organizing so frantically. It was so unhealthy. I ended up in hospital twice from really bad stress and anxiety. You ever like, “Everything’s fine, everything’s fine,” and then you have an IV and you’re like, “I went too far.” |
| Nina Martin: | Then at some point in 2020, she was offered a job as Yellowhammer’s first ever Family Justice coordinator. |
| Jenice Fountain: | Yellowhammer Fund eventually was like, “Hey, we see you doing all that work. Do you want to get paid for it?” And I was like, “No way.” Because I was working at a pizza place and it was like 12 bucks. I was like, “No way.” |
| Nina Martin: | They wanted her to scale what she’d been doing at Margins, but now for all of Yellowhammer’s clients. |
| Well, when you started doing Family Justice with Yellowhammer, did it feel really different from what other abortion funds were doing as far as you could tell? | |
| Jenice Fountain: | Oh, absolutely. And even with well-meaning people, I think trying to meet more needs than just an abortion, because that could be rough too, I think it’s an inconvenience for folks, and I think people would rather just do what feels like they can just keep churning them out. People got the abortion, next, next, next. |
| Nina Martin: | But at Yellowhammer, they began offering wraparound services, the kind of extra support Jenice knew from experience that people needed. |
| Jenice Fountain: | I know we had one person seeking an abortion that was sleeping in their car, but they were so content because they got their care. They were like, “Oh, back to my car,” and we were like, “Wait, what? Do you want a room?” And they were like, “Oh, well, I was going to be fine because at least I got my abortion.” |
| Nina Martin: | For a while, they’re doing it all. Helping people get abortions, figuring out what other support they need, and then giving it to them. That is until June 2022. Roe is overturned and Steve Marshall is threatening to prosecute them. Suddenly Yellowhammer’s abortion work has to stop. The organization has to reinvent itself. They need a new leader to steer them through the vast changes ahead, and Yellowhammer’s Board asks Jenice. |
| Jenice Fountain: | Hearing the board say like, “Well, you’re best suited to help us survive a pivot of this nature,” I was like, “Oh, yeah, no. No, absolutely. I don’t want to do that. It sounds terrible.” And they were like, “Jenice, come on.” I was like, “Well, I complain about this literally all day every day. Maybe I should.” So I got a therapist and then I said yes. |
| Nina Martin: | Now, Jenice’s Family Justice work isn’t just a piece of what Yellowhammer does, it’s at the center of everything they do. |
| Al Letson: | Up next, as Yellowhammer ramps up its Family Justice work, Jenice’s staff hits the road. |
| Kelsea McLain: | We have safer sex kits, and then we’ve got birth control. We’ve got formula as well as diapers. We’ve also got teddy bears for kids if you know any kids who would like a teddy. |
| Al Letson: | What Yellowhammer’s transformation looks like. Plus, a ruling in the lawsuit that changes their work all over again, you’re listening to Reveal. |
| Al Letson: | From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. On a cold morning this past January, Reveal’s Nina Martin went on a little road trip through rural West Alabama. |
| Nina Martin: | Hello. Hello. |
| Kelsea McLain: | Hello. |
| Nina Martin: | So nice to meet you in person. |
| Kelsea McLain: | So nice to meet you. Yeah. |
| Al Letson: | In the car is Yellowhammer Abortion Fund’s health care access director, Kelsea McLain. |
| Kelsea McLain: | We’re covering quite a bit of mileage today. |
| Al Letson: | And Shakeyla Sumlin, Yellowhammer’s family justice organizer. |
| Nina Martin: | Shakeyla is in the front seat signing a lot of postcards or flyers. |
| Shakeyla Sumlin: | Yes, these are the flyers we stick in the doors and let them know that we will be in their neighborhood and when. |
| Nina Martin: | Oh, cool. Okay. |
| Al Letson: | The flyers have a drawing of a bus with a turquoise roof and shocking pink rims. Big bright flowers are spray-painted along the sides. It’s the Repro Raven, Yellowhammer’s roving headquarters. It’s kind of an embassy for the family justice work that has become the center of the organization’s mission. |
| Shakeyla Sumlin: | We definitely like to build personal relationships with the communities that we serve, so we do go out and meet them pre-bus tour trip stop so we can make sure we’re addressing what they need. |
| Al Letson: | The week Nina visits, Yellowhammer is launching its first bus tour of 2025. The Repro Raven will return loaded with free supplies and information for getting even more free supplies for anyone that needs them. |
| Shakeyla Sumlin: | And we do a whole safe sex kit, which includes some condoms, some pregnancy tests, and some lube, and EC. |
| Al Letson: | EC is emergency contraception, the morning after pill. They also give out baby diapers, sizes one through six. |
| Shakeyla Sumlin: | We also have adult diapers on there. A lot of the communities we go to, there are elderly people living there as well. And food, everywhere we go, no matter where we pop up at, we bring food too. |
| Al Letson: | This canvassing, the bus, they’re all part of Yellowhammer’s transformation over the last few years. As the organization fights the state’s attorney general in court. They’re suing to protect the right to help people get out-of-state abortions. |
| But in the meantime, their other work can’t stop. Nina tagged along as Yellowhammer set out to visit almost 50 communities in 50 days to let them know help is still available. | |
| Nina Martin: | Kelsea McLain has been at Yellowhammer since 2019. When they could still offer abortion support, she made most of the travel and financial arrangements for Yellowhammer’s clients. |
| Kelsea McLain: | We’re headed to a few different public housing communities that are near Tuscaloosa or in that general region of the state. |
| Nina Martin: | Now she’s in charge of mapping out this whole outreach tour. First, she had to identify all the public housing in Alabama. |
| Kelsea McLain: | Which to be very clear, that was the hardest part of this whole thing. There’s no database you can just go to and put in your zip code and it tells you every possible section eight or public housing community option available to you and wait lists and all of that. |
| Nina Martin: | Kelsey estimates the tour will cover up to half of all the public housing communities in Alabama. Could you talk about the need to do the kind of canvassing in person that you’re doing? |
| Kelsea McLain: | Yeah. We know there’s areas of Alabama that straight up just don’t have broadband access, period. You have to know we exist to know to reach out to us. And we just want to make sure no matter how you find information out that you know how to find out about this. |
| Nina Martin: | Shakeyla Sumlin came to Yellowhammer through its executive director, Jenice Fountain. She’s one of the original group of friends who inspired Jenice to start her nonprofit, Margins. |
| Shakeyla Sumlin: | That was about eight years ago, and we were working at Whole Foods in Birmingham. We were both very dirt poor and so a lot of the things we needed, we weren’t getting. |
| And we passed around $20 back and forth for three and four weeks. You get the $20 this week, I’ll get the $20 next week. And we built it up from there. So that’s how we got started in the community. | |
| Nina Martin: | Shakeyla is a city girl and this part of West Alabama is pretty new to her. She says it’s even harder to be poor in these rural areas than in a place like Birmingham. What are the things that people don’t have? What kinds of help are they not getting from the government or even other organizations. |
| Shakeyla Sumlin: | Wow. I think the better question is what are they getting? It’s hard to get food. It’s hard to get childcare for you to even be able to go out and try to get your own resources. It’s just a lot that they’re not getting. |
| Nina Martin: | We drive past big stretches of farmland, lots of trees and churches, no grocery stores or pharmacies, no buses, nothing that looks like a doctor’s office or a clinic. |
| Kelsea McLain: | So we’re going to Phil Campbell, which I keep calling Phil Collins in my head. It’s like a town- |
| Nina Martin: | It’s a town, Phil Campbell. |
| Kelsea McLain: | … that’s called Phil Campbell. |
| Nina Martin: | After 90 minutes, we reach our first stop, Phil Campbell, a little town named after an 1880s railroad manager. Should we go ahead and park? Should we go ahead and- |
| Kelsea McLain: | We should. |
| Nina Martin: | … get out and do this thing? |
| Kelsea McLain: | Might as well. |
| Nina Martin: | The public housing in Phil Campbell is a collection of identical one-story brick apartments scattered across a dried grass lawn. |
| Shakeyla Sumlin: | So this does look like an older housing community too, from the people that I have noticed. It looks like there might not be a lot of kids out here. |
| Nina Martin: | Shhakeyla heads toward one of the few houses with toys on the front porch. |
| Shakeyla Sumlin: | Perfect. |
| Nina Martin: | Someone opens the door, catching her by surprise. |
| Shakeyla Sumlin: | I’m just going to leave a flyer in your door. I’m with a Yellowhammer fund and we’re going to be in your community on 1/23 with all these free things right here. If you know anybody else, let them know too. |
| Nina Martin: | It only takes a few minutes to hit all the houses and then we’re on our way to the next towns. By the end of the day, Yellowhammer has left flyers in dozens of screen doors. |
| A couple of days later, it’s time to return and hand out the supplies promised on the flyers. | |
| Kelsea McLain: | The party bus. |
| Shakeyla Sumlin: | The party bus. |
| Nina Martin: | The first stop is a public housing community outside of Tuscaloosa called Crescent East. The Repro Raven used to be a food truck that sold shaved ice. Now, inside it resembles the backroom of a small supermarket. |
| Kelsea and the Yellowhammer crew have already set up in front of a police substation near another official looking building. Both are locked and empty. In front of the bus, they’ve laid out the free food, coffee, hot chocolate, and donuts. | |
| Speaker 1: | [inaudible 00:06:53] free. |
| Nina Martin: | At first, it’s pretty slow, but soon people are coming in by twos and threes. Some teenage boys take safer sex kits and a few girls grab birth control pills. Diapers are the most popular item. |
| Kelsea McLain: | So we’ve got tampons and pads, we’ve got formula as well as one through six size diapers. We have safer sex kits that have a little of everything folks would need. And then we’ve got birth control for folks. It’s over the counter birth control, you can take daily. We’ve also got teddy bears for kids. If you know any kids who would like a teddy? |
| Speaker 2: | I want Pampers, pads… |
| Nina Martin: | Okay, about 40 minutes in supplies are running low. It’s time to start thinking about packing up. |
| Speaker 3: | If not, I’ll take a five in diapers for my little cousin. |
| Nina Martin: | Then a white van from the Tuscaloosa Housing Authority pulls up around the corner. A guy gets out and has a quick conversation with the Raven’s driver, Jake Sanford, and takes down his phone number. |
| The housing authority guy came. What is that? Is that just like a normal thing? Oh, I don’t know. Yeah, right. There is going. They’re calling to yell about what? | |
| Jake Sanford: | I’m not exactly sure. I guess the fact that they didn’t know we were coming and they’re about to call me and tell me to leave. I guess they’re upset that we’re here doing this. |
| Nina Martin: | Yellowhammer didn’t talk to anyone at the housing authority before their visit. In a lot of ways their policy is ask forgiveness, not permission. |
| Jake Sanford: | Hi, I just missed a call. This is Jake. |
| Speaker 4: | Jake, how are you? |
| Jake Sanford: | I’m good. How are you? |
| Nina Martin: | It’s someone with the Housing Authority of Tuscaloosa. |
| Speaker 4: | We’re trying to see what’s going on out there in Crescent East. |
| Jake Sanford: | We are just out here. We’ve got a bus and we’re just giving out some diapers and some coffee and some donuts for free. |
| Speaker 4: | And we don’t have a problem with that, but we definitely need to know what’s going on on our properties before it can actually take place. |
| Jake Sanford: | Okay. |
| Nina Martin: | Jake apologizes. She says it’s no problem. She appreciates what they’re doing. Jake says they’ll call before they come next time and everyone starts getting ready to leave, but soon after the call, a big black car slowly rolls past. Yep. There goes the police again going by just up and down, but they don’t stop. And the Repro Raven starts pulling away. Ready for the next town. |
| Jake Sanford: | We are going to Aliceville, Alabama, next. It’s about an hour from here. Oh, we got somebody. What’s up, brother? |
| Nina Martin: | It’s a preacher from a local church waving Jake down, hoping for some diapers for his grandkids. |
| Jake Sanford: | What size he need, four and seven. All right, I’ve just got the fours. Is that okay? |
| Nina Martin: | Jake leans out of the bus and passes a box through the preacher’s car window. |
| Preacher: | You all are a blessing. Keep doing what you’re doing if all possible and because it really helps the families and God bless you all. |
| Nina Martin: | Yellowhammer’s Repro Raven Tour goes on for eight weeks. Kelsea says, hardly anyone they meet asks about abortion and the Yellowhammer folks don’t bring it up. Pretty much everywhere they go, they get the same reception from residents. Curiosity followed by gratitude, but the authorities are a different story. |
| Kelsea says, a few times during the tour, local law enforcement showed up where the Repro Raven was parked. One of those incidents happened in Phil Campbell, the little town where Kelsea and Shakeyla canvassed at the start of the tour. Here’s Kelsey a few days later describing what happened. | |
| Kelsea McLain: | We pulled up pretty immediately. People started coming up to the bus. We had music going like we usually do. About 45 minutes in, two guys in a housing authority work truck came rolling by and said, y’all got to go. |
| Nina Martin: | So Kelsey heads over to the main office to talk to the person in charge, |
| Kelsea McLain: | and she kind of cut me off and said, well, we got complaints. It’s a disturbance. And I was like, oh, is it the music? Because we’ll just turn the music off. We just do it so people can find us. And she said, well, we don’t allow soliciting. And I said, well ma’am, we’re not soliciting anyone. We’re sitting here with a free resource and they are soliciting us for the resource. And she said, if you don’t leave now, I will call the police. |
| Nina Martin: | The Phil Campbell Housing Authority declined to comment for this story. The Yellowhammer crew drives to the nearest supermarket. The store manager lets them set up in the parking lot, but pretty soon a police officer shows up asking if they have permission to be there. He tells them the housing authority called. |
| Kelsea McLain: | And the cop pulled off at that point. And then I see him drive by again about 10 minutes later. Real slow, eyeballing us the whole time. And so I go, y’all, we got to get out of here. This doesn’t feel safe anymore. This feels like we’re being surveilled. |
| Nina Martin: | Kelsey says, the police car follows the Repro Raven to the edge of town. Because of incidents like this, the Raven stops canvassing in advance. They start just showing up, hoping people find them. |
| Kelsea McLain: | It was such a good picture of what we’re fighting against. We do this work because the government won’t do it. And literally to see people panicking so aggressively about a group doing free resource distribution. And it has me thinking through a little bit more about how we really stay safe. Because what’s going to happen is we will not be back to Phil Campbell. |
| Nina Martin: | As the tour is winding down, the Yellowhammer staff is still waiting for a resolution to their biggest clash with authorities. Their lawsuit against Attorney General, Steve Marshall. It will determine whether or not they can return to their other mission, helping people get abortions. At the end of March, Yellowhammer, executive director Jenice Fountain, gets an email from their attorney. The ruling is in. |
| Jenice Fountain: | I was like, y’all, she sent this. She sent the order. You got to get on Zoom right now. Get on your Zoom. And I was like reading it as I was summoning everyone. I was like, wait. I was like, we won. We won. This is a win. Wait. I was like, where’s the gotcha? There’s no gotcha. We actually won. Wow. |
| Nina Martin: | In the ruling, the judge dissects Steve Marshall’s interview on that talk radio show when he singled out groups out of Tuscaloosa. Using Marshall’s logic, the judge says prosecutors could go after Alabama residents who organize bachelor parties in Las Vegas. The ruling says the right to travel to expressive conduct to help is all protected by the Constitution. It’s a clear victory for Yellowhammer, the West Alabama Women’s Center, and the other organizations in the case. |
| Kelsea McLain: | I remember initially when we got the news, I almost didn’t believe it. I was like, what? No, we won. This is wild. |
| Nina Martin: | Earlier that day, Kelsea had gotten an email about an abortion patient who urgently needed funding. Without a ruling in their favor, yellowhammer couldn’t risk it. |
| Kelsea McLain: | I needed the lawyer on the call to tell us everything was good. I really did. But Jameel was just like, yeah, no, you can do it. You can fund abortions. And I was like, no, wait. We’ve got someone literally that needs funding right now and can we do it? And when she said yes, that was when it hit me, hit me, hit me. I think it wasn’t going to be real until I had sent my first email saying like, yes, we can fund that abortion. And then that was real. |
| Nina Martin: | After the ruling, Marshall lays low. His office tells news outlets that he’s weighing his options, but they don’t file an appeal. Since winning the lawsuit, Yellowhammer has helped more than 325 patients, paying out more than $100,000 dollars for abortion care without fear of jail time. But Yellowhammer’s victory doesn’t mean the right to travel for an abortion is safe around the country. What started in Alabama has been spreading. |
| Idaho, and Tennessee have passed laws making it illegal … to help minors cross state lines for an abortion — though Tennessee’s law has been blocked. Lawmakers in several other states have tried to do the same thing. Missouri’s attorney general is suing a Planned Parenthood affiliate for allegedly helping minors there get abortions out of state. And the right to access abortion across state lines is under attack in other ways. Legal battles are raging over telehealth abortion care. Anti-abortion groups are fighting on multiple fronts to criminalize sending abortion pills through the mail. Interstate battles over abortion care have become one of the biggest reproductive rights issues of the post-Dobbs era, one that is sure to end up before the Supreme Court. | |
| So, even with the lawsuit victory, it’s clear the fights aren’t over — in Alabama or really anywhere around the country. And what Yellowhammer has been through has lessons for other abortion rights groups in other states. | |
| Kelsea McLain: | I think the biggest learning experience is just that we’ve got to, as an abortion rights movement, stop being just about abortion rights and it going no deeper than that. And I think that is why we ended up with the Dobbs decision, why we ended up with it being acceptable to legislate and restrict abortion into oblivion. |
| Nina Martin: | But for now, Yellowhammer is back to business. Including reactivating their abortion fund hotline. |
| Kelsea McLain: | Yeah, I’m still getting it worked out. Our call system is wild, but for sure when they call, they will hear a message saying… |
| Automated voice: | Thank you for calling the Yellowhammer Fund. Please listen carefully to the following options. As our menu has recently changed. |
| Nina Martin: | The updated voicemail makes clear, Yellowhammer isn’t cutting any of their services, just adding back abortion support. |
| Automated voice: | Press one for abortion funding or assistance with abortion funding. |
| Nina Martin: | And they’ve also added a new tagline, one that sums up their entire philosophy of help. |
| Automated voice: | Thank you for calling and remember, no one should need. |
| Al Letson: | You can read more of Nina Martin’s reproductive rights coverage at revealnews.org and motherjones.com. Our lead producer for this week’s show is an Anayansi Diaz-Cortes. She had help from Steven Rascón and Michael Schiller. Jenny Casas edited the show. Editorial guidance from Marianne Szegedy-Maszak. Sarah Szilagy and Ruth Murai are our fact checkers. Legal review by Victoria Baranetsky. |
| Our production manager is the great Zulema Cobb. Score and sound design by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs, and Fernando, my man, yo, Arruda. Then help from Claire C-note Mullen. Our executive producer for this week’s show is Kate Howard. Our theme music is by Comorado. Support for Reveal is provided by the Riva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson. And remember, there’s always more to the story. |