An anxious wait: How one of Louisiana's last abortion clinics is bracing for the Roe v. Wade ruling

To get an appointment at the only abortion clinic serving northern Louisiana, a patient needs to be prepared to wait. 

It can take more than a week to get a call back to schedule a consultation at the Hope Medical Group for Women clinic, located on the corner of a busy intersection in Shreveport. 

The city sits roughly 30 kilometres east of the Texas border; in the clinic's parking lot, there are several licence plates from the neighbouring state. 

Demand has surged since Texas passed abortion restrictions in September 2021, which significantly limit access to the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy.

This busy clinic — one of only three in the state — could be forced to shut down, with little notice, depending on what the Supreme Court decides later this month.

According to a leaked draft decision of a case involving a Mississippi law, the court is prepared to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, which has upheld federal abortion rights for nearly 50 years. Instead, abortion laws would be determined by elected lawmakers at the state level. 

"I vacillate between anger and then sadness," said Kathaleen Pittman, the clinic's lead administrator, who has spent decades working in this field.

If the final ruling remains the same as the leaked draft, Pittman said, her clinic will be forced to shut down — though she doesn't know how quickly that would happen. 

"Everybody asks me, you know, 'What plans have you made? Should we close?' I have made zero plans, because it's all I can do to get through day to day and take care of the patients that are already coming to us," she said.

WATCH | A look inside one of Louisiana's three abortion clinics:

Louisiana is one of 13 states with a so-called trigger law, which ban or severely restrict access to abortion in the event Roe v. Wade is overturned. And it's among the 26 states that are certain or likely to ban or severely restrict access to abortion should the Supreme Court go in that direction, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research organization.

Lawmakers in this state are some of the most conservative in the country when it comes to abortion legislation. In fact, Republican Representative Danny McCormick proposed prosecuting abortion patients for murder. 

"The act of abortion ends a life of a human being," McCormick said during a televised session of the state legislature in May. "The taking of a life is murder, and it is illegal."

The proposal did not go very far, as it was deemed too extreme by anti-abortion organizations in Louisiana.