After the 2013 Spark event, Njoku started travelling to other reproductive-justice gatherings, including the annual summit held by the National Network of Abortion Funds, where people talked about intersectionality and abortion access. She briefly dated a trans man, a human-rights defender from Uganda, who was seeking asylum and trying to bring his children to the United States; she realized that trans men also had trouble exercising their reproductive rights. She began to ask people for their gender pronouns.

In February, 2014, Njoku got a job taking patients’ information and making appointments at the Atlanta Women’s Center, an abortion clinic near the wealthy enclave of North Buckhead. As of that year, legislatures in Georgia and twenty-five other states had enacted laws restricting the coverage of abortion in the Affordable Care Act health-insurance marketplaces. Women who contacted the clinic were often struggling to come up with the money for their abortions, which became more expensive as their pregnancies progressed.

Njoku regularly directed such women to call the National Abortion Federation, which, in 2014, donated to more than a hundred thousand women based on their needs, with the expectation that the women would raise as much as they could themselves. Its hotline was often busy for hours on end. When Njoku looked for regional sources of assistance, she discovered only one in Georgia: the Magnolia Fund, which helped women pay for abortions performed at the Feminist Women’s Health Center. (Magnolia closed last year.)

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In May, 2014, Njoku and two colleagues decided to set up their own abortion fund to help women in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. “I was, like, We gotta do right by our people,” she recalled. “There’s no reason that our folks should be calling multiple numbers and waiting on hold forever to try and get in touch with someone for basic health care.” Kwajelyn Jackson, of the Feminist Women’s Health Center, called abortion funds “the conduit through which people are going to be able to get connected with care in the long run.” That November, Njoku took a job at Summit Medical Associates, assisting in the operating room and caring for women in post-abortion recovery. Meanwhile, she approached the National Network of Abortion Funds for advice. Njoku and her colleagues worked from coffee shops and buffet restaurants, applying for grants and organizing fund-raisers, including a fish fry. Their fund, Access Reproductive Care-Southeast, began operating in May, 2015. Its first grant paid for a headquarters, in an airy arts center in downtown Atlanta. By January, 2016, Njoku was working there full time.

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The following spring, Njoku went on a tour of the Deep South, hoping to form relationships with employees at independent clinics, which, in that part of the country, are more numerous than Planned Parenthood centers. At each one, she made note of the affordable hotels nearby, the schedules for intakes and procedures, waiting lists and patient backlogs, and whether there were translators on hand. The fund set up a hotline in July, 2016. As it received more calls, she needed more volunteers to take women to and from appointments. (Clinics require that women receiving sedation have someone with them to take them home.)

That year, ARC-Southeast gave funding and assistance to about fifty women each month; it now serves more than three hundred a month. The average cost of an abortion is around five hundred dollars, with later-term abortions sometimes in the thousands of dollars. ARC-Southeast gives most women between seventy-five and a hundred dollars. The fund now employs a staff of seven, who are mostly black and queer, and has more than a hundred volunteers. They provide a kind of care that might be considered familial, booking travel and hotel rooms, taking women out for meals, and even putting them up for a night or two in their own homes. “We try to lead with love,” Njoku said. In 2017, Njoku’s sister Dirichi, who goes by Chi Chi, joined the organization to run the hotline. A former nurse, Chi Chi had little knowledge of reproductive justice, but she felt a connection to the fund’s mission. When she was nineteen, she got pregnant after being raped by a friend and had an abortion, an experience she often shares with callers.

ARC-Southeast has found rooms for homeless women who would otherwise have spent the night outside the clinic, and counselled mothers and daughters who needed abortions at the same time. Not long ago, the fund referred an undocumented Honduran woman living in Atlanta with her two children, whose husband had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to the National Abortion Federation, which agreed to pay for her procedure. The woman was twenty-six weeks pregnant, six weeks past the limit for abortions in Georgia. She could have taken a bus to a state where the gestational limit was higher, but she’d heard that immigration raids on buses were common. Njoku decided that the fund’s hotline operator, Crystal Zaragoza, who had previously run a clinic for queer migrants in Phoenix, should drive the woman in a rental car to a clinic in Bethesda, Maryland. Zaragoza and the woman stayed in an Airbnb for four days. The fund paid more than a thousand dollars for the car, the accommodation, the woman’s medication, and care for her children while she was away.

Abortion in Georgia is legal up to the twentieth week of pregnancy, and fourteen of the state’s seventeen clinics are in the Atlanta area. Calls come in to the fund from all over the Deep South; for some women, the clinics near them have closed, or offer only limited services. In South Carolina, there are just three abortion clinics. In 1995, the state put into place regulations requiring that all clinics terminating second-trimester pregnancies meet the same design and construction standards as “ambulatory surgical facilities.” Ostensibly meant to insure women’s safety, the regulations dictated, in overwhelming detail, specifications including the width of the corridors, the number and size of procedure rooms, and the size of the janitor’s closet. Pro-choice organizations and physicians agreed that the regulations were politically motivated; the necessary changes would be too costly for most clinics to make, and, ultimately, they would do little to improve patients’ care. More than half of the South Carolina women who had abortions in 2017 travelled outside the state for their procedures.

Spring is the fund’s busiest season. (As Chi Chi put it, “People get it on in the winter.”) In April, 2018, ARC-Southeast assisted a hundred and eighty-two women. This past April, it helped three hundred and ninety-seven callers, and Njoku spent much of her time in her car. One morning, she woke up early to pick up a woman from her home in south Atlanta and took her to the Atlanta Women’s Center, in the northeast of the city. There, she met up with another woman, who was accompanied by her partner and their child, and gave her cash for food and a hotel. Then she took the first woman home and headed back to the office. In the parking lot, she received a call from Chi Chi about Naomi (a pseudonym), a woman who was waiting at Summit Medical Associates, four miles away, in need of an escort. Naomi had driven more than two hundred miles that morning, from Columbia, South Carolina, for her appointment. She believed that she was fourteen weeks pregnant. Twenty minutes after the call, Njoku arrived at the clinic and signed Naomi in. The process for second-trimester abortions, known as “dilation and evacuation,” usually takes place over two days. After the first appointment, Njoku gave Naomi a ride to her motel and learned that she and her partner were not speaking, that her best friend had wanted her to have the baby, and that she hadn’t told her parents she was pregnant, because she was too ashamed. Naomi knew that she needed an escort, but another friend, who had agreed to accompany her, had cancelled at the last minute. She had hoped to persuade the clinic to make an exception.