Jackson Women's Health Organization is a women's health clinic located in a bright pink building in Jackson, Mississippi's Fondren neighborhood. It has been the only abortion clinic in Mississippi since the only other one closed in 2006. The clinic provides multiple reproductive health services, including abortions, birth control and checkups. As of 2016, the clinic's owner was Diane Derzis. In March 2015, the clinic was severely vandalized, with security cameras destroyed and a generator severely damaged.
Legal challenges
Many Mississippi Republicans have attempted to close JWHO with TRAP laws since 2012, when Bryant signed a law requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. This was problematic for JWHO, because neither of its two doctors who performed abortions had such privileges. In response to the law, JWHO filed for a restraining order to allow them to remain open temporarily. On Sunday, July 1, 2012, a federal judge granted them this order, preventing the law from being enforced until at least July 11, 2012. In 2013, Derzis told ABC News that both of JWHO's doctors lived out-of-state and flew in every week to work there. In April 2013, Judge Daniel Porter Jordan III issued a ruling blocking part of the law that would have closed JWHO. In 2014, a divided panel of judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a decision blocking Mississippi from using the law to close JWHO. In a statement accompanying the ruling, Judge E. Grady Jolly wrote that, "Mississippi may not shift its obligation to respect the constitutional rights of its citizen to another state". In 2016, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to review the 2014 decision, thereby allowing it to stand. In March 2017, a U.S. federal court permanently blocked the state of Mississippi from closing JWHO for noncompliance with the law, while still allowing the law to move forward. Additional cases were filed in March 2018 and December 2019. In a 2018 lawsuit, the plaintiffs attempted to assert that there was a specific age at which the abortion would be wrongful. This was later blocked by United States District Judge Carlton W. Reeves.
