California-based OB-GYN plans to take abortion care off the land and out to sea in the Gulf
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. One doctor is finding a way forward for safe reproductive health for folks living in Southern states. She’s planning to take health care off the land and out to sea with a medical vessel anchored in the Gulf Coast, in federal waters where it will be legal to offer abortion care.
Meg Autry has worked as an obstetrician and gynecologist (OB-GYN) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) for more than two decades. She’s a reproductive health advocate, and she was the residency director at UCSF for 15 years.
But Autry grew up in the South. She was born in South Carolina; went to high school in Atlanta, Georgia; attended college in Tennessee; and did her medical school in North Carolina. The idea of gambling boats able to float down the Mississippi River with legal immunity was the initial spark for Reproductive Rights of Women Endangered by State Statutes (PRROWESS), a floating health care clinic, which was an idea that came at least five years before the reversal of Roe v. Wade.
“So, I’m acutely aware of kind of the deterioration of both reproductive rights and also the deterioration in the number of people being trained to provide evidence-based complete OB-GYN care,” Autry tells Daily Kos.
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