The building that housed Mississippi’s last abortion clinic, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, was sold to a new owner this month after it closed its doors for good. Jackson Women’s Health was the abortion clinic at the center of the Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey last month.
Diane Derzis, the clinic’s owner, the The Associated Press on Monday that all the furniture and equipment inside the facility has been moved. The clinic will set up shop in New Mexico, as Townhall covered, since a Mississippi trigger law took effect after Roe was overturned.
Derzis told AP that people phoned her to inquire about buying the building “within minutes” of the Supreme Court’s ruling. She added that she does not think the building will be used as a medical facility.
“I didn’t ask because I really didn’t care,” Derzis said, adding that “it’s a great building.”
JWHO stopped offering abortions – medication and surgical – earlier this month, according to AP.
Townhall covered how JWHO tried in a last-ditch effort to remain open after Roe fell.
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch (R) announced June 27 that she had certified the state’s trigger law protecting the unborn. It had ten days before it took effect, which began the countdown to when JWHO would close. The clinic promptly filed a lawsuit to block the trigger law from taking effect, which a judge denied.
Fitch played a role in the Supreme Court overturning Roe. The abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization led to the historic overturn of Roe and Casey. Dobbs involved a 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi. The court ruled 6-3 to uphold Mississippi’s law and 5-4 to overturn Roe.
In the Supreme Court’s majority opinion, the justices wrote that the U.S. Constitution does not protect the right to abortion and determined that Roe and Casey were wrongly decided.
“The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” the opinion stated.
“Like the infamous decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, Roe was also egregiously wrong and on a collision course with the Constitution from the day it was decided. Casey perpetuated its errors, calling both sides of the national controversy to resolve their debate, but in doing so, Casey necessarily declared a winning side. Those on the losing side—those who sought to advance the State’s interest in fetal life—could no longer seek to persuade their elected representatives to adopt policies consistent with their views. The Court short-circuited the democratic process by closing it to the large number of Americans who disagreed with Roe.”
The language in the opinion is similar to an amicus brief filed by Fitch last summer, which Townhall covered. In her brief, Fitch urged the Supreme Court to strike down Roe and Casey.
“Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong. The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no basis in text, structure, history, or tradition,” Fitch said in the brief. “So the question becomes whether this Court should overrule those decisions. It should.”
“The Constitution does not protect a right to abortion. The Constitution’s text says nothing about abortion. Nothing in the Constitution’s structure implies a right to abortion or prohibits States from restricting it,” Fitch continued in the brief. “Casey repeats Roe’s flaws by failing to tie a right to abortion to anything in the Constitution. And abortion is fundamentally different from any right this Court has ever endorsed. No other right involves, as abortion does, ‘the purposeful termination of a potential life.’”
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