ABERDEEN, N.C. — After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, some abortion rights supporters fear the next battle will be over abortion pills. It's a big concern for women in rural parts of the United States, including in North Carolina.
Laura McNeill-Hoel, a registered nurse, wants to guarantee a woman’s right to an abortion.
McNeill-Hoel says she wanted to be a mom since she was in kindergarten. Her three children were conceived using in vitro fertilization, or IVF.
“People find it odd that as a woman who went through injections and egg retrieval, that I would be willing to be for women’s abortion rights and pro-choice,” McNeill-Hoel said. “And I think the thing there is that it goes back to that choice. I chose to be a mother. And it was a clear choice and pathway for me.”
She gained three stepchildren with her second marriage.
She comes from a rural part of North Carolina. Moore County doesn’t have an abortion clinic. In fact, 91% of the counties in the state don’t have one, according to a grassroots abortion rights group, Pro-Choice North Carolina.
Today, with legal abortion in North Carolina, someone in Moore County would have to drive 30 miles to get care.
With Roe being overturned, McNeill-Hoel sees what she calls a reproductive rights desert, “where we have these pockets of the country where women don’t have any access to birth control, morning after pills, abortions; where we end up creating places where, and if you look at the statistics, typically are in of pockets of poverty.”
Most of her career was spent in a pediatric ICU, taking care of newborns. She wants women to be able to decide with their partners and physicians what to do about an unintended pregnancy or pregnancy complications. She worries the Supreme Court’s ruling is a slippery slope.
“How far do we go? There’s talk of cross-state travel and interstate travel to receive an abortion. If we make abortion illegal in North Carolina, where do we send women? I can tell you, it’s not going to be Tennessee because they’re going to do the same thing. It’s not going to be South Carolina because they’re going to do the same thing, maybe you could go to Virginia, but what do you do? You are in a job where you make minimum wage, you need to now lose a day, now two days of work to travel, to do that.”
Anti-abortion activists say they want to stop cross-border trips, telehealth consultations and abortion pill deliveries — restrictions that would hit rural women the hardest.
McNeill-Hoel also worries about privacy issues in a post-Roe world.
“But now you could get in trouble. Who’s going to tell? Do you talk to your OB about this decision? And then are they going to all of a sudden become mandated reporters? If you don’t know, what HIPAA does is it protects the privacy between the patient and the physician and those patients’ medical records. If we get rid of Plan B or the morning after pill in North Carolina, if a woman orders it on the internet, what’s going to happen? She going to get flagged? Is that going to come back to the North Carolina attorney general and all of a sudden there are police officers at her door because she broke the law? And if that doesn’t scare you, I don’t really know what’s going to.”
More than half of U.S. abortions are done now with pills, or what’s called “medication abortion,” according to the Guttmacher Institute, a leading research group that supports abortion rights.
McNeill-Hoel believes overturning Roe puts the U.S. back not 50 years, but 200 years. And she worries about how to explain it to her daughters because she believes it is their right and the right of any woman to get an abortion.