With help from Sophie Gardner Hello rulers! I’m filling in today. Saturday will mark one year since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling came down, overturning the constitutional right to abortion and sending shockwaves through the country’s political landscape. A year later, abortion clinics across the country continue to grapple with a post-Roe world. Tammi Kromenaker, 51, an abortion clinic director in Moorhead, Minn., had a “God is pro-life” bumper sticker in her college dorm room. She grew up Catholic, and the issue seemed simple: Abortion was wrong. Then a close friend got pregnant. She put $100 in an envelope and mailed it to her friend so she could get an abortion. “It was just an immediate flip of the switch,” Kromenaker said. She wanted to learn more. So she signed up for a women’s studies course. The professor became a close mentor, and as Kromenaker was set to graduate with a degree in social work, she recommended 21-year-old Kromenaker for a job at Fargo Women’s Health Organization in North Dakota. She started as a part-time patient educator, but rose through the ranks. When the owner parted ways with the clinic and opened Red River Women’s Clinic in downtown Fargo in 1998, Kromenaker was hired as the director. She went on to purchase Red River in 2016. Like many others across the country, Red River was rocked by the Dobbs decision. Kromenaker packed up her clinic in North Dakota and moved across the state line to Moorhead, Minn — located two miles away. I talked with Kromenaker about the whirlwind that was last year. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. So you still own the clinic’s old building in Fargo, which a group is using as an artist collective and venue space. Was it hard going back to the old space this year? It was so weird to be in a building that I’d gone into nearly every day for the last 24 years. I know every nook and cranny, so there’s a lot of feelings there. I know that they really want to honor the building. They have a placard inside the front door that says that this building has always been owned by a woman — that this building has helped a lot of people. Even reading that aloud got me teary. The other event I went to for a little bit was like a birthday party for trans folks, so that they could all celebrate the birth of their new person. That’s what’s happening in that building — it’s a safe space for people in North Dakota who are getting their rights taken away. So I feel really proud of what’s happening in that space. And your new building is just a few minutes down the road? Yes, we’re now in a one story building. Patients literally had to walk a gauntlet to get into the front door at the old building. In Moorhead, we have a parking lot, and the protesters are relegated to the sidewalk. Patients’ demeanors are so different now. They don’t come in all adrenaline pumping, freaked out, crying, scared, asking, “Are those people going to be there when I leave?” We also are seeing more patients come back to us for their check-ups. I would sit with a patient and say, “Did you want to come back and have a free check-up for their medication abortion?” They would say, “No, I can’t walk through those people again.” We had eight check-ups last week. Take me back to last year, when the Dobbs draft opinion was published. We actually started looking for a building in fall 2021. Some legislators had expressed an S.B. 8 [the Texas bill, now law, that banned abortions as early as six weeks] copycat idea, and we knew the 2023 state legislature was going to have a greater conservative majority. We also knew SCOTUS had taken on Dobbs. We knew we could not survive, so we found a realtor and started looking. I originally dismissed the new building as too big, too much square footage and too much money. But flash forward to May 2, I’m actually flying back from a National Abortion Federation Conference. I walk through my back door, and my husband says, “There’s been a leak. They’re gonna do it.” I said, “We’ve got to buy that building.” We got a loan — we didn’t even have a downpayment. But we were just like, “We’ve got to do this.” We actually closed on the building at 3 p.m. on June 23. Wow, the day before the ruling came down on June 24. Yeah, the next morning I remember sitting there, and someone said “We have Dobbs.” My husband called me. I was freaking out. He was like, “We got this. We have the building.” And, you know, on June 23, I can see myself walking into the building. A person called me and asked to set up a GoFundMe — knowing that we were trying to buy this building and that the Roe decision was coming. It was set up with an initial $20,000 goal. It’s at $1,013,000. I think that people had a tangible thing they could jump on to. When did you actually move? So on Saturday, Aug. 6, we had 30 people, escorts, staff, partners show up at Fargo at 10 a.m. In broad daylight, we just up and did it. Nobody saw it. It felt secretive, but it wasn’t. Then on Tuesday, Aug. 9, 7 a.m., we had a couple of decoy escorts at the old building to make it look normal and also in case any patients went to the wrong place. And as I was driving, I saw a protester, Nick, walking to Fargo. We saw our first patient on Aug. 10. No gap in service, 47 days from when we bought the building. And then my dad died. I’m so sorry. Have you processed all of this? I think finally now as I am approaching the one-year anniversary, I finally can. Because I have the staff. I have more help. We’re starting to live out some of our dreams, like we just signed up for a telehealth program. In North Dakota, you couldn’t do that. We’re going to hopefully get to the point where we can do no-touch medication abortion. So we finally have the time, almost a year later, to take a step back, breathe. We’ve never been able to dream. It’s always been lawsuit, lawsuit, lawsuit, restriction, pushback, fight, advocacy. What still keeps you up at night? Can we sustain the cushion of money that we have? I want to pay my staff well. I want to take care of them. And the minute that Dobbs happened, the biggest funder, National Abortion Federation Hotline went to covering 50 percent of people’s abortions. Is that sustainable? And at the very beginning, I had some survivor’s guilt. It was not easy, but from the outside, it looked easy. “Oh, you’re just five minutes away.” We just transported stuff in our vehicles. We got this million dollars. I felt like a jerk to a lot of my colleagues. I’ve had some say, “It is OK. You do not have to have survivor’s guilt.” But I’ve seen colleagues pour just as much of their blood, sweat and tears into this, and they might have to close their clinics. There is no border. There is no place they can go. (Make sure you check out POLITICO magazine’s photo essay of the clinic here.)
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