Every few minutes, a volunteer walked a patient to the mirrored facade of the clinic, waiting a few moments before being buzzed inside. The clinic’s director, Shannon Brewer, worked in an office to the right of its waiting room. A grid of business cards was taped to the wall behind her desk, many of them for staff members at the Mississippi State Department of Health; protesters often called in fake complaints, she said, that had to be investigated. She gestured at the other cards behind her — F.B.I. agents, federal marshals, local police officers. Brewer talks to them about once a month to keep tabs on the protesters, who she says enlist a nationwide network of activists to harass the clinic’s doctors. “They call their homes” — all of which are out of state — “they put stuff in their mailbox, the neighbors’ mailboxes, put up signs saying, ‘Do you know a murderer lives on this street?’ ” she told me. (Pro-Life Mississippi, which helps to organize many of the clinic protests, denied that anyone from the group would try to intimidate an abortion provider.) They also call the clinic on Monday mornings pretending to be patients scheduling appointments, to figure out when to come stand outside. In a city with fewer than 170,000 residents, seeing a familiar face protesting outside the clinic where you’re trying to receive an abortion is not outside the realm of possibility. “We’ve had patients pull up in the parking lot,” Brewer said, “and they’ll call us and they’ll be like, ‘I can’t come in. Someone I know is standing out there.’ ”

Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi often says he wants to “end abortion in Mississippi.” Local Democratic politicians are not especially aggressive about abortion rights, though Jackson’s leftist mayor, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, says: “As a man, I have no place to tell a woman what to do with her body.” Abortion rights activists depend, to some extent, on one another, and the relationship between Roberts and JWHO is a fraught one. Last year, two anonymous blog posts raised concerns over the resources “the only ‘abortion fund’ in Mississippi” was spending on what the post termed “nebulous, less verifiable assistance” than paying for abortions. The posts did not name names, but Diane Derzis, the majority owner of JWHO and the majority or sole owner of two other clinics in the South, readily did when I called her: “It’s about Laurie, specifically.” She told me she takes particular issue with some of Roberts’s children sitting on the M.R.F.F. board and occasionally joining her at conferences, despite the periods when the fund cannot afford to cover clients. “I called the I.R.S. I reported it. I feel like a — what’s that called? A whistle-blower,” she said. “I want to know — where’s the accountability?”

Roberts says she is accountable to her board members (five of whom are not relatives), that her travel is mostly sponsored by other organizations and that “I am never going to apologize for how we do our work.” Hernandez, the N.N.A.F. executive director, told me her organization has no issue with Roberts’s methods of operation and considers M.R.F.F. a “visionary” member of the network: “She really situates abortion within a fuller picture of reproductive health, and she is an example of someone who is impacted by these issues taking leadership.” N.N.A.F. has offered to sponsor mediation between Derzis and Roberts.

Roberts lets donors make requests about how she uses their money, but she says most don’t. J., a donor who grew up in the South and is distrustful of “people who don’t understand the region trying to come in and do something,” told me this is one reason to donate to M.R.F.F., rather than a less grass-roots group. (Fearing professional consequences, J. asked not to use a full name.) “People look at us and think, I don’t know what that [expletive] is that they’re doing over in Mississippi, why they’re not just funding abortions,” Roberts acknowledges. “But I cannot come into the black community” — which has endured centuries of coerced sterilization and other forms of reproductive control — “and say, ‘We’re just going to pay for your abortion.’ We would not be seen as credible. I would not see it as credible.”