‘I became the abortion lady of Mississippi’: the mother of seven who devoted her life to the pro-choice cause
When Laurie Bertram Roberts was 17, she was sent home from hospital and almost bled to death. Pregnant and experiencing bleeding, she had gone to the emergency department of her nearest hospital in Indiana twice, and was told she was miscarrying, but, because a scan showed the foetus still had a heartbeat, she was also told there was nothing they could do. What she needed, in order to end a pregnancy that was ending anyway, was an abortion – but she says the Catholic hospital would not provide one. “They had the power to end my pregnancy right there, when I was already bleeding fairly heavily, in a tremendous amount of pain. Instead, they sent my scared 17-year-old self, a mother of two already, home.”
There Bertram Roberts collapsed. She closes her eyes, visualising the scene. “I remember what it feels like to think you’re dying. Laying on the floor, in my mom’s kitchen, I passed out.” She was taken to hospital to have the emergency procedure that she could have had earlier.
She had twins already, having got pregnant and married at 16 (though the marriage didn’t last). By the time she was 25, Bertram Roberts, now 44, had seven children. She had wanted to terminate one of these pregnancies – her health was suffering so soon after her previous birth, and she was a single parent living in poverty. It seemed impossible to have another baby, but when she arrived at the clinic, she found she couldn’t afford the abortion. “I got turned away, and then I ended up being too far along. The trauma of that, even though I love my child … I came to terms with having to stay pregnant, but not everybody does. I was fortunate – I had my mom and my grandmother to help me. That’s the only reason I made it through. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I didn’t have that.” Both these events – needing or wanting an abortion, but not being able to have one – crystallised Bertram Roberts’s belief in reproductive rights, and set her on a course as an activist.
Bertram Roberts, who identifies as a non-binary femme, is executive director of the Yellowhammer Fund, an organisation based in Alabama that provides abortion care and campaigns for reproductive justice. When we speak over Zoom, Bertram Roberts – warm, funny, just the person you’d want to get you out of a difficult situation – is at home in Tuscaloosa, with a Wonder Woman poster just behind her. The previous organisation she founded and is still involved with, the Mississippi
Reproductive Freedom Fund (MRFF), is now run by two of her daughters.
Since the draft opinion overturning Roe v Wade, which had established a legal right to abortion, was leaked, Bertram Roberts says: “I haven’t been able to sleep, but before this, I was having trouble sleeping.” In the states she has lived and worked in, abortion access has always been fragile, and increasingly limited. Mississippi has a “trigger law”, which means that abortion will be banned if, as looks likely, Roe v Wade is overturned. It will almost certainly become illegal in Alabama, too, as well as neighbouring states, meaning options for women – even if they could afford to travel – will become extremely limited. It will disproportionately affect women of colour, who accounted for nearly 67% of abortions in Alabama in 2019, and those living below the poverty level, who will be more likely to self-manage abortion with pills at the risk of being caught, “and criminalisation is going to disproportionately fall on black and brown bodies, because it always does.” Forced birth, says Bertram Roberts, “is going to kill people. You can’t force people to stay pregnant and then not expect that people are going to die, when it’s more risky to give birth than to have an abortion. And that’s just in general, that’s not even specific to black women.”
Yellowhammer and MRFF have provided women with money to pay for not only the abortion itself (since 2020, Yellowhammer has had its own clinic, but both funds enable women to access clinics across state lines), but transport, childcare costs, and food. Bertram Roberts sees reproductive justice as all-encompassing – not just providing access to abortion and contraception, but supporting families to look after the children they already have. “We’re also doing work around self-managed abortion, making sure people know how to safely use pills.”
Bertram Roberts was raised a fundamentalist Christian and grew up believing abortion was evil. As a child, she would go on “plenty of anti-choice events. I got told that I was a survivor of the ‘post-Roe holocaust’.” A grim smile. “And they would specifically say to me I should be very grateful that my white mother decided to have me because she was pregnant with a black man’s baby.” Then, she says, “life happened, and I became a teenage mom and wife. I got pregnant again and again and again, and you just learned that no issue is as black and white as anti-abortion activists try to make it seem.”
She has always been an activist – when she was about 11, she started a petition at school to get a janitor, who had been bullying children, fired. In her 20s, she went to a community college, and excelled, despite having her last two children during her time there. At 27, she got a scholarship to Jackson State University in Mississippi, leaving her children with her mother while she studied for a political science degree. She would call them every evening, and spend every night marking their homework. In her third year, they were allowed to come and live with her on campus.
University – where she embraced racial justice and feminist campaigning – politicised her. As an older student, and mother of seven, young students sought her out if they were pregnant and wanted an abortion. “When folks needed to figure out how to get to a clinic or how to get the money, I was kind of that person.” She was also part of a group fighting to get the university to take the domestic violence she had witnessed on campus seriously (before university, she had survived domestic abuse). During this time, a fellow student, Latasha Norman, was killed by her boyfriend. “We could have been doing actual preventative work,” says Bertram Roberts. “One of the lessons that I learned from that is that we help us. It’s good to work on policy and within the system, but at the same time, we got us. That really influenced the work I do now.”
She became more involved in abortion rights around the time Mississippi was considering the “personhood amendment”, which, had it passed, would have defined life as the moment of conception, but was rejected by voters. Involved with the local branch of the National Organization for Women (NOW), she was the only person who would go on television to talk about the incendiary issue of abortion. “A lot of people had jobs to lose,” she says. Bertram Roberts was unable to work because of chronic health problems. “You can’t fire me from being disabled,” she says with a laugh. “What are you going to do? Fire me from being a caretaker to my kids?” Funny and forceful, she is a natural communicator, and didn’t go in for euphemisms such as “reproductive health”. “Abortion! Say the word, otherwise a lot of times people don’t even know what you’re talking about. So that became my job. I became the abortion lady of Mississippi.”
By 2013, she was escorting women to clinics. What was that like? She pauses. “I won’t say I wasn’t ready, because I knew what they [the anti-abortion protesters outside clinics] were going to be like, but I don’t think I expected them to be so personal. It was like they did research on me – they knew how many kids I had, they knew when I had them.” Her teenage daughters would go with her and Bertram Roberts remembers protesters calling them “jezebels”. “Like, who does that?” she says. “They would come up to [my daughter] and be like, ‘how many abortions have you had to be so eager to kill black children?’” Bertram Roberts wasn’t, she says with a wry smile, “ready for them to lecture me about black history. The audacity of these white people!” They would tell her that one day she would be on trial “just like Nazis. ‘OK, thank you, people who think The Handmaid’s Tale is a fanfic. Please get the fuck out of my way.’” She gets abusive emails now, including one this week that ended by saying her mother should have aborted her. She laughs and says, “there’s nothing like being so anti-abortion that you think I should be aborted.”
Bertram Roberts was meeting women who were sometimes a few dollars short, sometimes more, who couldn’t pay for their abortion, and so she would scramble to raise money. At first funding came through NOW, then in 2015 she established MRFF as a separate organisation. “It really came out of seeing people who didn’t have a taxi fare, who came hungry. The need is so great.” Sometimes accessing abortion would mean travelling for hours, and women would tell Bertram Roberts they had food for the trip, “but really, what they mean is they’re going to buy a box of cereal on their food stamps”.
The reputation of MRFF grew; at one point, she says, it was getting 100 calls a week. “There’s just no way to get back to that many people, and we were out of money.” It had to close down for a few months to cope with the backlog. Now the MRFF gets about 20 calls a week, “and we’re able to help about half of those”. (Yellowhammer receives 50 to 60 calls a week.)
The majority of women who access the services, she says, “are low-income or working class and already have kids. They understand the decision that they’re making. And some folks just don’t want to have kids.” They have included women whose sterilisation surgery has failed. “People who were using contraception and it failed, people who had their contraception sabotaged, young people who are preyed upon or assaulted, grandmas who thought they were in menopause. People who get abortions are the people you know. That’s what I’ve learned doing abortion care.” Abortion, she says, is simply part of wider reproductive healthcare. “You never know when a pregnancy that is going as planned will turn into a pregnancy where you need abortion care. The bravado that some people have to think, ‘It could never be me …’ I didn’t choose to need an abortion at 17. I was a fully pro-life, never-have-an-abortion person and then almost died because no one would give me one.”
Ultimately, she says, nobody should have to feel like a choice was made for them. “You should have support whether you choose to parent, or have an abortion.” She smiles, clearly frustrated by the fight but ready for it. “I don’t see what the issue is. What is so hard about this?”
Donate to to support reproductive justice in Alabama via the Yellowhammer Fund here
She has always been an activist – at 11, she started a petition at school to get a bullying janitor fired