The young woman’s voice trembled over the phone. Sitting in her car in Alabama, where abortion is almost totally banned, the 26-year-old mother of two was grappling with an unintended pregnancy.
“I’m like ‘How in the world?’” she said, stifling a sob. “I already have two children, and I cannot. I can’t. I just can’t go through with it.”
She wanted an abortion, she said, but was afraid of getting caught and didn’t know what to expect from the process. “Growing up, I never really thought about actually doing something like this,” she said.
On the other end of the line, at home on a quiet residential street in Delaware, Debra Lynch, a nurse practitioner who runs a service prescribing abortion pills, spoke calmly.
“It’s completely valid to be scared,” she said from her desk in a home office filled with plants and shelves of medication. “And that’s why we want you to call us, even if you’re calling just to say: ‘I’m scared. I need to hear somebody tell me that what’s going on right now is normal, and it’s OK.’”
