When Roe fell, it created an absurdity in the twin city of Bristol: Abortion remained legal on the Virginia side but not on the Tennessee side. This abortion clinic quickly moved a mile up the road. More on the abortion battle on Virginia’s border:
between mandatory patient counseling and an abortion, which burdened patients traveling from farther away. The legislature also mandated that any tissue from surgical abortions be cremated or buried by a funeral home, ballooning the procedure’s cost. Such laws went into and out of effect as they wound through the courts, but to Adams, the endgame seemed clear: “To make abortion illegal in Tennessee. That’s where all this was going.
Clinic owner Diane Derzis rush-ordered her retort to a proposed antiabortion ordinance from Bristol’s all-male city council. Around that time, a Long Island housewife named Ellen McCormack launched a pro-life presidential bid. “There were fetuses all over the TV,” Derzis recalls, “and I was just energized. I was aggravated. Actually, I was incensed.” When an abortion clinic opened in Birmingham a year or so later, Derzis “bugged them to death” until they hired her as a counselor. “Then I met the women and saw those different situations they were in and I was captivated. I’d found my calling. That was it.
After the zoning news broke, Derzis called the clinic and Rosenwinge answered. “Me and her were talking, and I was like, ‘Well, doesn’t that mean we’re kinda like Bristol’s only abortion clinic?’ ” Rosenwinge says, joking that by restricting other clinics, the city council was backhandedly blessing theirs. She says she could “hear the wheels turning” before Derzis replied, “Yeah, we’re kind of officially designated.
Bristol Women’s Health also offers these pills—in fact, the clinic mostly provides medication abortions, for pregnancies up to 11 weeks. It’s a two-dose regimen, and patients take their first one inside a conference room with eggshell walls and dark wood trim, surrounded by posters of female anatomy.
“Thirty years ago, I might have done it anyway,” Adams says of practicing at Bristol Women’s Health. “But at this stage of my life, it’s just not worth the risk.” He calls his quasi-forced retirement “devastating.” “I don’t like to be told what to do by somebody that doesn’t even know anything about it. I totally resent it. It’s all religion and power.”
Whenever there’s downtime at the clinic—when patients aren’t there and paperwork is sorted—the staff sits at a cluster of desks behind the reception window, drinking mini-Sprites and talking over one another.
When she got out of the army, Rosenwinge drifted through the years: jobs at truck stops, drug addiction, spans of unemployment. “I felt so untethered to this world,” she says, “because I had these strong beliefs, but no way to vent this energy that I had about my frustration with being a woman and my frustration with being told that I was only as valuable as one punch for my husband.” It felt heaviest around her young daughter. “You see this child, this innocent little girl.
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