This article was originally published at The 19th.

Columbia, Missouri — Celeste Athon had played softball from the day she was old enough to sign up for a local youth league. She’d never felt like this before.

Athon, a second base player for the local Stephens College, found herself tired much faster. Even sprinting just a few feet left her short of breath. She didn’t know what was happening — why her performance was suddenly slipping in this sport that she loved, that she’d spent her whole life playing. It didn’t make sense.

Until she missed her period.

Even as she watched the pregnancy test turn positive, Athon knew she couldn’t keep the pregnancy; the 20-year-old college student works at a nearby department store to support herself. Staying pregnant would mean moving back in with her parents — her hometown, two hours away and home to fewer than 500 people, made this college town seem like a metropolis — and giving up on her team and on her degree. She was too young to have a kid, she thought.

Athon heard that abortion was legal in Missouri now. But until a teammate told her, she hadn’t realized she could get an abortion right here, in Columbia — she’d believed she would have to head to Kansas City or St. Louis. As of March, instead of traveling two hours each way — a distance that would require missing school, missing practice, possibly spending the night at a hotel in another city — she could drive all of seven minutes. Instead of a multi-day affair, her abortion could be done in a matter of hours.

So on a Monday in March, Athon played three hours of softball, a double-header against another local school. She hit a triple — her first of the season — before scoring one of her team’s six runs. The following morning — the one day a week she didn’t have practice — she woke up to a series of good-luck texts from her friends. She put on the bracelet her sister had mailed her, part of a care package that included bath bombs, fuzzy socks and a candle.

Her boyfriend, who had come into town the night before from St. Louis, drove her to the clinic, where he paid the $775 fee. There, she learned she was 5 weeks and 5 days pregnant.

And, then, after a short procedure, she wasn’t.

“It was a lot easier than I expected to get help and support,” she said. “I was really scared I was gonna have to go through a million different steps. But they made it really easy here.”

Athon was one of the first dozen people to have received an abortion in Missouri since the November election, when voters backed a proposal to add abortion rights protections to the state constitution. Missouri, one of the quickest states to outlaw abortion after the fall of Roe v. Wade, was the first where voters overturned a near-total ban. Almost all of those initial patients were seen in Columbia.

But Missouri is now on the frontlines of the anti-abortion movement’s growing effort to reverse abortion rights state by state, trying to undo the ballot measures voters approved to enshrine abortion rights. Those efforts brewing in the capitol, Jefferson City — not even 50 miles from Columbia — have added another layer to the challenges abortion providers in the state, who are building infrastructure from scratch to provide care for people like Athon.

Well before Roe’s fall, abortion here was difficult to access, the result of a years-long project by the state’s Republican-run legislature to regulate providers out of business. In 2021, the last year before Roe’s overturn, only one clinic — a Planned Parenthood in St. Louis — offered abortions; the state only recorded 150 abortion procedures that year. Most people seeking care traveled to Illinois or Kansas. Or they simply stayed pregnant.

Last November’s election results could flip that dynamic, making experiences like Athon’s the norm rather than the exception. The past few months have been a scramble for Missouri’s reproductive health clinics: recruiting physicians, training employees in clinics and, critically, trying their best to spread the word to residents that they don’t need to leave their home state for abortions.

Most employees at Columbia’s Planned Parenthood have never worked at a clinic that offers abortion. They are learning what kind of medical supplies to order, shadowing colleagues across the border in Kansas. Nurses........

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