The One Woman Screwing Up North Dakota’s Plan To End Abortion
The Article: The One Woman Screwing Up North Dakota’s Plan To End Abortion by Winston Ross in The Daily Beast.
The Text: An FBI agent sat quietly in the lobby of the Red River Women’s Clinic on Thursday morning, arms folded across his lap, waiting for the director of North Dakota’s only abortion provider to wrap up a local television interview, her umpteenth media appearance in the past few days. The agent asked to speak to Tammi Kromenaker privately, so she escorted him back to one of the few places in the small two-story building with a closed door, and they talked.
Just a courtesy call, the agent told Kromenaker; to let her know he was the person to contact should anyone decide to violate the federal law that prevents people from trying to stop women seeking an abortion from getting into a clinic, a law described in several bold-lettered signs at the clinic’s door, guarded by two security cameras that feed into the office. None of the protestors who have turned out to hurl invective and prayer at women on the one day each week Red River sees patients has ever actually tried to block someone from getting in the building.
At least, not physically. At the Capitol building in Bismarck, lawmakers are doing everything they can to make sure Red River’s three physicians aborts their last fetus by August 1, when a trio of America’s most restrictive anti-abortion laws just signed by Gov. Jack Dalyrmple will take effect, unless a court intervenes. The new laws have swept North Dakota, Fargo, and this tiny clinic into the eye of the country’s never-ending debate about a woman’s right to choose—40 years after the Supreme Court supposedly settled the issue in Roe v. Wade.
