decision a year earlier. When the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would take up the"We knew immediately that meant we would lose abortion access in Tennessee in the next 12 months, and so we began to plan," Pepper says."It has been a wild ride."
Rebecca Tong, the co-executive director, describes the area as a"healthcare desert." Tong says the organization looked at what the community needed and tried to adjust accordingly.Jennifer Pepper, the CEO of CHOICES in Memphis, Tenn., leads a morning staff meeting June 27, 2022, shortly after the announcement of the"We're committed to staying in Oklahoma City, providing care for the same patient population - and an expanded patient population," she says.
"We're seeing patients twice as many days as we had in the past. The level of staffing that we're at, we've never had this many staff," Tong says."All of this is new." "We are just doing abortions; we are strictly abortion clinics now. That's all we have time to do," Derzis says.