As the only abortion provider in North Dakota, Red River Women’s Clinic has been the primary legal opposition to the state’s attempts to pass new restrictions on women’s health care.
On the morning of June 24th, Tammi Kromenaker sat before a desktop computer in her office at the Red River Women’s Clinic, in Fargo, North Dakota, refreshing the home page of SCOTUSblog, a Web site that provides news and commentary on the Supreme Court. Kromenaker’s clinic occupies a two-story, pale-brick building on a recently gentrified downtown street that is also home to a boutique hotel and a bar serving locally brewed beers. It is the only abortion provider in North Dakota.
Red River is a local institution. Anybody who has lived in the region for most of her life and got an abortion in the past twenty years likely got it there. Kromenaker, who turned fifty in January, grew up in a Minneapolis suburb, moving north to Moorhead to attend a branch of Minnesota State University. She opposed abortion when she arrived there; she pasted a bumper sticker in her dorm room that read “God is pro life.” A friend’s unwanted pregnancy changed her mind: “It was just an immediate shift for me,” she said.
Kromenaker would work the night shift at the Y.W.C.A., shower there, then go to her shift at the clinic. Sometimes she would cover for an assistant administrator. The clinic operated out of an old house that wasn’t well maintained; patients had to use a back entrance off the driveway. “Like going into the back alley, you know?” Kromenaker said. “It was really bad in Fargo,” she remembered; anti-abortion activists “thought it could be the first abortion-free state.
The clinic has a purple theme: its windowsills and file folders are purple, and the walls of its intake rooms are shades of lavender. Photographs of flowers in the same color family hang from the walls; floral adhesives cover the fluorescent lights in the rooms where procedures take place, to spare the patients some of the glare. A sign hangs in the bathroom: “Everyday, good women choose abortion. Everyday, we care for their bodies & hearts. When you come here, bring only love.
Kromenaker first met with a realtor about buying a building in Moorhead in September, 2021. The Supreme Court had announced that it would take up Dobbs, and Texas, which bans abortion at six weeks and authorizes citizens to enforce the law. It was time to figure out a backup plan, and Kromenaker knew that she didn’t want to rent. “My colleagues who own clinics say that’s a bad idea—the landlord will be relentlessly harassed, you’ll be kicked out,” she said. “You gotta own.
When I posted a request on the clinic’s Facebook page asking to speak with former patients, more than a dozen women responded, some from Fargo, others from Minot or Mandan. “Everybody in North Dakota kind of knows it’s there, and whenever the topic of abortion comes up it’s mentioned,” a woman in her early thirties from Bismarck, three hours away, told me. She had an abortion at the clinic in December, 2020, after her birth control failed.
The Red River clinic “is one of my favorite places in the world,” Destini Spaeth, a volunteer with the North Dakota Women in Need Abortion Access Fund, said.
Norge Siste Nytt, Norge Overskrifter
Similar News:Du kan også lese nyheter som ligner på denne som vi har samlet inn fra andre nyhetskilder.
Arizona Man Sues Clinic Over Abortion Given to His Ex-Wife Four Years AgoLegal experts fear similar lawsuits could be used to harass plaintiffs’ exes in future.
Les mer »
Drayer Physical Therapy Institute opens new clinic in Cumberland CountyThe new clinic opened this week.
Les mer »
Ozark, of All Things, Inspired a Plan for a Floating Gulf Coast Abortion Clinic“I began thinking of how it could be legal because of those casino ships on the Mississippi,” said Meg Autry, a San Francisco–based obstetrician and gynecologist
Les mer »
A Woman's Ex-Husband Is Suing the Clinic That Provided Her Abortion 4 Years AgoNearly four years after a woman ended an unwanted pregnancy through a clinic in Phoenix, her ex-husband is suing the clinic and its doctors.
Les mer »
As monkeypox cases climb, Bronx borough president wants health clinicWhile more monkeypox vaccination sites are on the way, the Bronx borough president tells CBS2's Alecia Reid a permanent sexual health clinic is needed in that borough.
Les mer »
As monkeypox cases grow, Bronx borough president calls for a permanent sexual health clinicThree pop-up mass monkeypox vaccination sites will open to the public in NYC on Sunday, but the demand for the vaccine is far greater than the supply. alecia__reid spoke with the Bronx borough president, who's calling for more to be done.
Les mer »