Inside the small waiting room of All Families Healthcare in Whitefish, Montana, beside the reception desk, there’s a side door covered from top to bottom in a paper trail of gratitude. There are homemade or store-bought “thank-you” cards. There are long and detailed letters, handwriting cramped to fit limited space. There’s also humor: “Keep your filthy laws off my silky drawers.”
All Families Healthcare is one of only five clinics providing abortion services in the entire state. It is a cozy property that looks more like a house than a medical facility, although the anti-abortion protesters who regularly congregate on the sidewalk outside are an easy giveaway of its function. For owner Helen Weems, the clinic’s mission has become ever more critical in the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
Montana’s abortion laws have remained unchanged since that seismic Dobbs ruling: Despite repeated efforts by the Republican-controlled legislature to limit access, the state Supreme Court has upheld the right to obtain an abortion through fetal viability, around 24 weeks of pregnancy. But Montana is surrounded by states that have restricted or outright banned the procedure since Dobbs, making it a haven for abortion access in the upper Mountain West.
Nonetheless, Montana itself could still be considered hostile territory for abortion providers. Whitefish is a small, Democratic-leaning city in the otherwise red Flathead County in northwest Montana. The original All Families Healthcare clinic in nearby Kalispell was destroyed by arson in the 1990s. It was rebuilt, but owner and founder Susan Cahill closed it down after it was broken into and vandalized in 2014. When Weems, a nurse practitioner, moved to the area in 2016, she asked Cahill to come out of retirement and act as a mentor, so that she could reopen the clinic. Cahill acquiesced, and the new All Families opened in 2018.
“It’s a new clinic, it’s a new site, it’s my business. It’s a new All Families. But it’s a little bit of a ‘phoenix rising’ kind of thing,” Weems told me in an interview in the clinic in........