BRISTOL, Va. — When Wes Adams’ youngest son was little, he’d generally toddle over to the TV, pop in a cassette, and watch himself being born. It was a house video, filmed by his older brother. There was his mom, her stomach anesthetized however her head very a lot awake, asking the medical doctors to maintain the incision small, please. There was his dad’s medical associate, making the minimize for the C-section. And there was his dad, an OB-GYN, serving to to maneuver him, slick and bawling, out into the world.
It took a number of tries. He wasn’t head down, the best way he’d ideally have been for a vaginal supply. As an alternative, he was horizontal, again to the ground, as if mendacity in a hammock. That meant delivering the legs collectively, so one didn’t get caught. “You need to attain up, get each toes. However we attain up, get a leg and an arm,” Adams recalled. “Put ‘em again, attain up, and get a leg and an arm.” Lastly, they obtained the fitting maintain. “He grew up about two inches as we have been pulling him out, simply ‘trigger he’s obtained an enormous head like me.”
Adams was telling this story within the abortion clinic he co-founded final 12 months. He knew it appeared unorthodox, to assist ship your individual child whereas your older son movies over your shoulder. However what was placing was how regular it sounded — each the scene itself, everybody laughing, joking about ridiculous child names, and his narration of it, as if it have been simply one other dinner-table anecdote. That’s virtually an article of religion: Regardless of how prudish and bizarre and puritanical persons are about it, to Adams, reproductive well being care is essentially regular. It’s un-shameful, unawkward, undeserving of squeamishness, judgment, authorized restriction, or sermonizing. Folks have infants, get Pap smears, require gonorrhea testing. They’ve ache throughout intercourse and wish cysts eliminated. They search hormone photographs to deal with the recent flashes and vaginal itchiness of menopause.
“We did all the pieces,” he mentioned of his longtime apply. “We have been a gynecologist’s workplace and we delivered infants. And we simply occurred to do abortions.” It was simply one other a part of offering care, as routine as doing hysterectomies and prescribing contraception.
That places him at odds with a few of his neighbors. Since 1978, Adams has lived in Bristol, a group that straddles the Tennessee-Virginia state line — unapologetically Trump nation, unequivocally a part of the Bible belt. His perception that sexual well being care is regular has meant that his life is something however. You would possibly say that he’s the face of abortion in Bristol if it weren’t for the truth that he doesn’t really need folks to know what he appears to be like like. He’ll do the occasional interview, however no photographs or movies. “Nothing to achieve, all the pieces to lose,” he explains. Any time he brags about his children’ grasp’s levels or army service, the main points are off-the-record. He is aware of the tales of friends who’ve been murdered; it’s not possible to work within the subject and never know them.
To be a doctor who performs abortions in a small southern city is to be in a state of rational hypervigilance, a whisper of fear pervading the on a regular basis. That has persevered even after Adams was cornered into retirement final summer time — itself one other reminder of the not-normal-ness of his life. He’s his personal safety element: That day, he had one gun in his pocket, one other in his jacket, and a 3rd in his automobile. At a city assembly earlier this 12 months, some locals in contrast his work to the Holocaust, whereas an elected official talked about him by identify, known as him a serial killer, and talked about how straightforward it was to search for the tax data for his house.
His spouse, he mentioned, has been known as a “blonde Botox baby-killing f—cking whore” whereas out round city. Different disagreeable incidents, which he chalks as much as plain previous jerks or simply unhealthy luck, have precipitated folks in his circle to take a position about “the antis.” He’s needed to be in near-constant contact with a small military of attorneys. After Roe fell, he ordered himself a customized bumper sticker. “ABORT SCOTUS,” it mentioned, in all-caps, pink on black. He checked along with his legal professionals earlier than sticking it on his truck.
That morning, he’d pushed by his previous medical workplace to seek out that the signal along with his identify had been taken down. It was one of many final issues to go. It was late January 2023. In a number of weeks, a brand new OB-GYN can be in right here, seeing sufferers, a few of whom he’d referred after seeing them for 40 years. “Theoretically, it’s nonetheless mine,” he mentioned, gesturing via the slosh of the windshield wipers. “However I’m not imagined to go in there now, since we’re leasing it out.”
Lately, he’d been mumbling about retiring quickly. He’d stop delivering infants in 1992, when he began feeling too previous to get up in any respect hours. His longtime associate retired in 2015, for well being causes. Adams was nearing 75, a grandfather. However then, final 12 months, he heard that the Supreme Courtroom was about to overturn Roe. It infuriated him. He thought the justices needs to be impeached. He couldn’t retire now. Nor may he maintain offering complete care right here, on the Tennessee facet of city. Abortion can be banned earlier than the summer time was out.
The particular person he known as was his previous good friend Diane Derzis. She had a popularity for being a savvy businesswoman, and customarily unfazable, responding to hassle with fun — half mirth, half cigarette smoke. They’d first heard about one another within the ’70s, at an abortion clinic in Alabama the place she was an worker and he was a fly-in physician. Since then, she’d gone on to run clinics everywhere in the South and Southwest. One ended up being bombed. One other was on the heart of the case that overturned Roe. “The Abortion Queen,” folks known as her. She preferred the title sufficient to begin utilizing it herself.
What did the Queen of Abortion assume, Adams requested, about opening a clinic with him on the Virginia facet of Bristol?
Quickly, she was staying in his guestroom, using round in his automobile, auditioning industrial leases for a task as one of the vital strategically-placed medical facilities within the south.
“We checked out this constructing — that’s an previous financial institution — however it’s half-Tennessee, half-Virginia,” mentioned Adams, pointing towards a enterprise with a drive-thru. The sunshine turned inexperienced and he roared via, over the state line, right into a jurisdiction the place the Senate was managed by Democrats and so abortion was sure to stay authorized till a minimum of January 2025.
In some ways, Adams and Derzis have been comparable, each heat-packing Southerners who’d persevered within the subject via protests and threats and authorized snarls. However there was a distinction of their strategy. Adams had terminated pregnancies as a part of a wider gynecologic apply. It didn’t maintain away demonstrators, however it made his work extra palatable to some folks. His nurse wouldn’t have labored there if he have been doing abortions and nothing else.
Philosophically, Derzis agreed: Abortion is a standard a part of medication, and needs to be handled that method. It isn’t, although. It will get separated out, distanced from “regular” care, as if in ethical quarantine. States regulate clinics all the way down to the width of their halls. Tissue that’s practically similar to surgical waste tossed out by hospitals as an alternative has to go to funeral properties. Suppliers must fill out particular paperwork to prescribe abortion tablets, although they’re safer than Tylenol. The stigma creates an imbalance: In 2016 and 2017, 72% of OB-GYNS encountered sufferers in search of abortions, however solely 24% carried out them — and that was whereas Roe was nonetheless legislation.
Derzis says she needed to ship solely the care that’s arduous to seek out elsewhere, to zero in on the determined, unmet demand. “I used to be actual clear: That is an abortion clinic. I’ve no drawback saying that. I’m proud to say that.”
Right here it was: an extended brick constructing, blinds drawn, with a No Trespassing signal. They’d thought of renting solely half, however realized that would permit “the antis” to grow to be co-tenants and protest within the halls. There was sufficient bother because it was. “The landlords are suing us,” Adams introduced, pulling right into a parking spot. Then he began rummaging via his truck for the important thing.
The incontrovertible fact that Adams appeared each unperturbed and offended by the lawsuit wasn’t all that stunning. It’s the kind of incongruity he usually inhabits. To spend time with Adams is to have your expectations scrambled, as if he comprises inside him a complete colourful solid of unusual bedfellows. He retains a low profile in some methods and zippers round in a jade-colored Mustang, gearshift topped with a cue-ball. He’s deeply conservative and deeply dedicated to abortion rights. He’s courtly one second and cursing the following. He extols the virtues of Bristol, the place a few of his neighbors consider his medical apply because the work of the satan.
He grew up in Winder, Georgia, an previous mill city exterior of Athens, “the pants capital of the world.” His mother was a trainer, his father an insurance coverage salesman. Little Wes went to Methodist church camp. Teenaged Wes labored within the transport room of a pants manufacturing facility for $1.40 an hour. Typically, his aunts would take him to the household farm in North Georgia, the place they sat studying books and selecting muscadines from overhead tendrils. Scuppernongs, they known as them. They did their laundry in an enormous black pot.
He was raised with an old style kind of politesse. After touring, his aunt would at all times write a letter to the bus firm, thanking Greyhound for essentially the most fantastic journey, noting that so-and-so had been such a courteous driver. She instilled in him an ear for grammar. He nonetheless cringes when he hears a poorly conjugated verb.
“To me, a health care provider was the hometown man you noticed at church — got here in late, stethoscope hanging out,” Adams mentioned. “Standing exterior afterward, writing prescriptions.”
That wasn’t so removed from the small-town doctor he turned. His Bristol apply was constructed on word-of-mouth. He bumped into his sufferers at events, requested in regards to the children he’d introduced into the world. Ronan King, a longtime affected person and good friend, thinks she would possibly’ve met him first via her then-fiancé’s menswear retailer, or maybe at a cocktail occasion held in Adams’ honor when he arrived on the town — a health care provider’s debutante ball.
At her first appointment, she was so nervous her palms shook. He set her comfortable chatting about school soccer. She imagines she threw off his total schedule — however it was like that each time, for 40 years, Adams speaking together with her as if he had on a regular basis on the earth. “I knew that I may name him at 2 within the morning and he would see me at 2:15 if I wanted it,” she mentioned.
He’d come to city for a job beneath three older OB-GYNs. They have been conservative, however that didn’t essentially imply anti-abortion. Two of them have been desirous to study. He taught them how one can angle the dilators, how one can dose the anesthetic.
He hadn’t deliberate to grow to be an evangelist for reproductive selection. He simply occurred to be in medical faculty in 1973, when Roe turned legislation. He’d lined bits of his tuition with odd jobs — drawing blood, babysitting — and after he’d realized to terminate pregnancies as a resident, he’d began doing that, too, spending his weekends in Montgomery or Birmingham. He believed ladies ought to have management over their very own our bodies. He wanted work. It was neither mercenary nor radical. It was simply one of many issues he’d been educated to do.
He saved moonlighting elsewhere within the South as soon as he moved to Bristol. After a 12 months, although, his bosses insisted he cease touring to clinics out of city. They needed him to spend his weekends house, making a genteel impression in Bristol. However he was nonetheless paying off pupil debt, and just like the Reaganite he was, he had a robust sense of particular person liberty. What he did along with his day off was none of their enterprise. In 1980, he and his associate went out on their very own. Finally, they opened clinics in Charleston, S.C., and Nashville. There, too, they did abortions, Pap smears, check-ups. They printed out ultrasounds for folks’s child books.
It’s straightforward to overlook that abortion was as soon as a non-partisan problem. However when Roe was determined, many Southern Baptists have been for, and a younger Democratic senator named Joe Biden was towards. “You could possibly be a Republican and help abortion rights. That was not a misnomer,” mentioned Elizabeth Nash, of the Guttmacher Institute.
Our historical past is stuffed with such reversals. Ben Franklin revealed an abortifacient recipe in 1748. Abortion was not solely authorized however broadly accepted till quickening, a primary flutter of motion felt round 16 to twenty weeks. Solely within the mid-1800s did the American Medical Affiliation begin a campaign to criminalize abortion, to wrest management over being pregnant from midwives and to bolster the Anglo-Protestant beginning price within the face of immigration. The Vatican banned abortion solely in 1869.
Quick ahead 100 years, and hospitals had complete wards for ladies affected by sepsis after unlawful terminations. That was one purpose state legislatures started to legalize the process. There have been politicians for and towards in every occasion. There have been evangelicals who noticed it as objectionable however essential — a type of hurt discount in an imperfect world. The loudest anti-abortion voices have been Catholic, and Catholics tended to lean Democrat, in a pro-labor kind of method.
After Roe, that began to shift. “You started to have politicians, particularly Ronald Reagan, believing that leaning on abortion would really assist Republicans peel away socially conservative Democrats,” mentioned Mary Ziegler, professor on the College of California, Davis.
It was a political calculus — one component in a technique to construct a broad coalition. As Gillian Frank, a historian and visiting fellow at Princeton, factors out, “Reagan had quite a lot of simultaneous messaging happening.” You would possibly maintain your nostril at his anti-abortion speak and vote for his small-government beliefs.
Adams is a working example. He trusted that with Roe in place, abortion entry was protected, and so voted for the candidates who spoke to him, irrespective of their occasion. He voted for Reagan, each Clintons, each Bushes. Now, on many points, he has bootstrap Republican leanings. He’s “pro-gun and anti-illegal immigrant.” About some issues, he even agrees with the court docket his bumper sticker proposes to abort. He opposes affirmative motion and pupil debt aid. He doesn’t see why his taxes ought to go to serving to with loans when he spent years paying off his personal.
That is the irony of the landlords’ lawsuit. Adams is an abortion supplier some conservatives may get behind. Even the landlords, in Adams’ telling, had a constructive phrase to say about a few of his work once they met in June 2022. As Adams sees it, they have been making an attempt to flatter him, to forge an allegiance with him so he’d flip towards Derzis, however nonetheless. They have been sitting within the new clinic, which might finally be embellished with cartoonish personifications of abortion tablets — misoprostol winking, mifepristone in cowboy boots — within the hope of ousting the enterprise. When Derzis left the room, they instructed Adams they’d heard good issues about him, that he helped put infants up for adoption. This was true: He’d saved an inventory of sufferers who have been unhappily childless, whom he’d name if somebody determined to hold to time period, however couldn’t elevate the child.
He’s additionally by no means carried out abortions previous 13 weeks and 6 days. He didn’t assume they need to be unlawful, he simply didn’t present them himself. If sufferers expressed any hesitation in any respect earlier than an abortion, he insisted they wait 24 hours. Which may sound to some like paternalism, however to him, it’s simply what he was snug with for himself.
None of that stopped the 2 landlords, who respectively declined or didn’t reply to interview requests, from suing for fraud. Earlier than the lease was signed, paperwork specified the constructing can be a “medical clinic,” however nobody had mentioned something about abortion at that time. Adams says he completely would have instructed them in the event that they’d requested.
What appeared to ruffle him most was the accusation of duplicity — that, and the truth that they’d “mentioned uncomplimentary issues about Diane.” He’d instructed them a couple of 10-year-old he’d handled, who’d grow to be pregnant after being raped, that he did the work free of charge, as a result of he believed in it. One landlord responded he was sorry that the lady was raped, however that was God’s child, God had a plan for that child, that child ought to have been born.
You could possibly hear the seen-it-all skepticism in Adams’ voice as he talked about it: After the landlords came upon the place would carry out abortions, they waited six months, accepted one other $10,000 in hire, and solely then went to court docket to kick the tenants out. It wasn’t so totally different from the kind of habits that had soured him on the Republican occasion. There was Scott DesJarlais, a present U.S congressman, who’s described himself as 100% towards abortion and was caught on tape pressuring his mistress to have one, in keeping with HuffPost. There was Adams’ neighbor, state Senator Jon Lundberg, who’d come over when he was first in search of signatures to run for workplace — “drank my bourbon, sat on my sofa,” Adams recalled — and mentioned he wasn’t personally towards abortion however that it could be political self-sabotage to say so overtly. He went on to help payments that will make the process a felony.
“That account just isn’t factual,” Lundberg wrote in an electronic mail. He remembers that go to, however insists he’s “at all times been pro-life (publicly and privately).” He says he considers abortion homicide and had no drawback along with his doctor-neighbor eager to signal his petition.
“Hello, stranger,” got here a voice from down the corridor.
It was Olivia Nickels, the then-director of the brand new clinic. On the previous medical apply, she’d completed all the pieces from aiding Adams within the working room to serving to him grasp his smartphone. They considered one another as household. He preferred to step out from behind doorways to shock her, she mentioned. He usually emailed her cat movies.
“Howdy, I’m right here.” He was standing close to the brink, trying round. “Appears like I haven’t been right here in ceaselessly.”
If all had gone in keeping with plan, this is able to’ve been his office, too. He would possibly’ve began right here as early as August 2022. However not lengthy after the signing of the lease, considered one of his many legal professionals despatched him a grim evaluation. The district lawyer within the county the place he lived was able to prosecute abortion suppliers to the total extent that Tennessee legislation allowed. Even remaining part-owner, the lawyer mentioned, appeared dangerous.
Across the identical time, in June, he’d known as his longtime malpractice insurer — “simply out of courtesy; to be, as my aunt would say, mannerly” — and mentioned that he deliberate to take his workers over to Virginia to carry out 10 to twenty medicine abortions on Mondays. The particular person on the cellphone mentioned that was positive.
However then, his insurers known as him again. “They mentioned, ‘We’re not going to cowl you for that.’ I mentioned, ‘Why?’ ‘Nicely, we’re not.’”
It was nonetheless OK for him to supply abortions in Tennessee so long as it remained authorized?
Sure.
However they wouldn’t insure him in Virginia?
No.
Why not?
They only wouldn’t. After Roe, it was controversial.
The backwards and forwards went on in maddening, logic-defying loops. He’d heard the corporate was masking Tennessee medical residents as they traveled to Virginia to study abortion care. However they wouldn’t cowl him after 40 years of performing them in three states. (The State Volunteer Mutual Insurance coverage Firm mentioned that it doesn’t present details about purchasers’ insurance coverage protection.)
He may’ve discovered a method to maintain going. He may’ve been the take a look at case for the district lawyer’s threats. As an alternative, he known as up Derzis, his voice quiet, and instructed her he needed to get out.
The brand new clinic opened with out him in late July 2022. For some time, a health care provider was coming into city from Richmond. Then, she left, and for a number of months that fall, there was no physician. If, like a lot of the clinic’s sufferers, you have been actually early in your being pregnant, you have been positive. You could possibly are available, see a clinician over Zoom, and take abortion-inducing tablets. Nonetheless, a number of folks got here in regardless of the receptionist’s warnings, just for the ultrasound machine to learn them as too far alongside for tablets. They needed to be turned away. “That is perhaps one other 5 hours they must drive,” mentioned Nickels.
That meant extra sufferers have been making an attempt to e-book appointments in Roanoke, two hours away, however that clinic solely had a health care provider current on Wednesdays. As Sophie Drew, of the New River Abortion Entry Fund, put it, “Somebody retiring or shifting away — or even when one supplier is on trip — that may change the kind of care that’s accessible for weeks or months.”
“One extra good story,” Adams mentioned. He was on the wheel once more, whizzing previous the place the hospital was and the highschool the place his spouse nonetheless held the document for the 100-yard-dash. Right here was the NASCAR racetrack, a monument to American velocity, Bristol’s reply to the Roman colosseum. There was the lake, rippling with so many trout he’d given up fishing; it was too straightforward.
Final June, somebody known as wanting to provide cash for the brand new clinic. He’d left his electronic mail, and Adams despatched alongside the clinic’s GoFundMe web page.
Crowdfunding had been his spouse’s concept. Adams was skeptical, however donations began trickling in, $25 right here, $100 there, finally including as much as greater than $100,000. One lady gave $1,000 and wrote, “Dr. Adams delivered me 40 years in the past. Thanks for all the pieces you do for the ladies of Appalachia.”
However this new stranger didn’t need a GoFundMe hyperlink. He needed to provide critical money — and he wasn’t glad by Adams’ response.
“A doctor who’s been harassed by folks exterior his clinic for many years. That’s not a simple life. You need to develop armor plating.”
Managing director, the Secular Society
“He didn’t say ‘Wow, isn’t that good!’ No, it was like he was sitting on {a partially} inflated whoopie cushion,” the potential donor mentioned not too long ago. Then once more, he understood Adams’ distrust. “A doctor who’s been harassed by folks exterior his clinic for many years. That’s not a simple life,” he mentioned. “You need to develop armor plating.”
The person turned out to be the managing director of The Secular Society, a Virginia-based nonprofit. He didn’t need his identify used. “It’s not about me, I’m not on the market to be eulogized, it’s in regards to the concept of The Secular Society,” he mentioned. The group started along with his grandfather shopping for a sq. mile of mineral rights in West Texas. There was a primary gush of earnings from uncooked oil, collected by the person’s father — after which, one era later, the land started spewing proceeds from fracking and different actions.
The Society was shaped to funnel that cash into good deeds and named for Thomas Jefferson’s concept of separating church and state. It has paid over 23,000 folks’s medical debt, endowed a chair for a feminine cellist on the New York Philharmonic, funded journalists’ jobs at two information retailers in Virginia, and bankrolled ladies’s schooling in East Africa, amongst different issues.
Now, the board had chosen Adams’ brainchild. The donor mentioned he was leaving for Kenya and Madagascar within the morning, would $25,000 be sufficient to tide the brand new clinic over till he obtained again?
One other verify appeared. Then one other. The donations totaled $75,000, with extra on the best way. The managing director visited Bristol. Adams took him to lunch on the on line casino. He requested if there have been any additional “ABORT SCOTUS” stickers. For as soon as, the not-normal-ness had swung within the different route, away from hypervigilance and authorized worries; for as soon as, a random occasion would make it simpler fairly than tougher to make sure entry to routine reproductive well being. It appeared becoming: a philanthropist who doesn’t like being known as a philanthropist utilizing the proceeds from fossil fuels that he acknowledged have been accountable for local weather change to help the abortion clinic dreamed up by a Republican-leaning physician.
Nevertheless it was to not be. A couple of weeks after Adams relayed this story in January 2023, the funding stopped. What the stranger had preferred was Adams’ strategy, of providing abortion as a standard component of complete gynecologic care. As soon as he realized that wasn’t how the brand new clinic labored, The Secular Society was out. The donor referred to Diane Derzis as “the enterprise girl” and to the clinic as “an abortion mill.”
He wasn’t the one particular person to boost considerations in regards to the new clinic, although the others had no points with Bristol Ladies’s Well being focusing in on abortion care. In the summertime of 2023, a 12 months after it opened, and about six months after the Secular Society stopped offering funding, numerous staff described leaving after disagreements with Derzis about her administration fashion. A few of them had been abortion advocates who’d volunteered exterior Adams’ workplace. The New River Abortion Entry Fund stopped funding companies at Bristol Ladies’s Well being as soon as staffers the group knew and trusted had left, in keeping with Sophie Drew, the fund’s interim govt director; the group had labored carefully with Adams’ apply for years.
Derzis acknowledged that there had been a disagreement, and mentioned the previous staff had needed to run the clinic their method, fairly than following her directives.
Adams mentioned he was flabbergasted by the entire thing, however didn’t know the main points, provided that he has had no involvement with the clinic for the reason that summer time of 2022. The final time he was there, in March, the volunteers who used to defend his apply all appeared glad. The subsequent factor he heard was that they’d all left, and there have been disputes. “I’m very dissatisfied that each one this is happening,” he mentioned.
Lunch on that day in January was regular. Quite, lunch was spectacular, in a really East Tennessee kind of method. It concerned hams that had reportedly been hickory-smoked for 9 hours, then spice-rubbed, chilled, and shaved so skinny the ensuing morsels have been virtually frilly. Then they have been griddled to a shawarma-like crispness earlier than the addition of a darkish sauce, the recipe of which is rumored to be so secret that it’s solely written down when one era must cross it on to the following, and as soon as memorized, the paper is burned. There have been candy, pork-flecked beans in clay pots. There have been fries that have been big and gnarled, like tree branches, which Adams couldn’t eat as a result of they have been cooked in the identical oil as rooster, however which he insisted anybody with no poultry allergy should strive.
Lunch was regular insofar as nobody accosted Adams to accuse him of being a serial killer, it engendered no new lawsuits, and there was no event to succeed in for any of his weapons. Nor did anybody seem out of the blue to supply him $75,000. He peeled the paper off his straw, used it to poke the juice out of a lemon wedge into his candy tea, after which put it apart and drank from the rim of the cup. He ate his pork sandwich with a fork and knife.
“This place is a minimum of 55 years previous,” he mentioned, sitting in view of the griddle and the deep-fryer, a couple of 25-minute drive out of city. “It was right here method earlier than I got here right here in ’78. Hasn’t modified.” He talked in regards to the stray cats he and his spouse cared for outdoor their home, feeding them, getting them mounted. He talked a couple of native dam that would’ve been repaired a lot sooner if the federal government hadn’t gotten concerned to guard “the black-eyed yellow-belted purple-striped something-worm.” He talked about his beloved Georgia Bulldogs.
He was nonetheless not sure about retirement. “Haven’t figured it out but. We’ve had a mess of little issues go unsuitable,” he mentioned. A couple of months after that lunch, the decide would take away him from the landlords’ lawsuit, so he was now not personally being sued.
For now, he was sitting exterior in his truck, parked close to the hickory pit, pulling up photographs and movies of his children and grandkids on his cellphone. There was the son who’d been filmed being born, a grown-up now. There was the son who’d been appearing as videographer, a guardian himself. There have been Adams’ grandkids, working alongside a seaside someplace, yelping with pleasure and pointing as a airplane handed low overhead. He watched the entire video, transfixed, as if nothing could possibly be extra pressing on the earth. Then he put his truck in gear and headed again towards Bristol.
This story is a part of ongoing protection of reproductive well being care supported by a grant from the Commonwealth Fund.