When Laurie Bertram Roberts was 17, she was sent home from hospital and almost bled to death. Pregnant and experiencing bleeding, she had gone to the emergency department of her nearest hospital in Indiana twice, and was told she was miscarrying, but, because a scan showed the foetus still had a heartbeat, she was also told there was nothing they could do. What she needed, in order to end a pregnancy that was ending anyway, was an abortion – but she says the Catholic hospital would not provide one. “They had the power to end my pregnancy right there, when I was already bleeding fairly heavily, in a tremendous amount of pain. Instead, they sent my scared 17-year-old self, a mother of two already, home.”

Ah, straight to emotional appeal and one sided testimony, the strongest of evidence!

She had twins already, having got pregnant and married at 16 (though the marriage didn’t last). By the time she was 25, Bertram Roberts, now 44, had seven children. She had wanted to terminate one of these pregnancies – her health was suffering so soon after her previous birth, and she was a single parent living in poverty. It seemed impossible to have another baby, but when she arrived at the clinic, she found she couldn’t afford the abortion. “I got turned away, and then I ended up being too far along. The trauma of that, even though I love my child … I came to terms with having to stay pregnant, but not everybody does. I was fortunate – I had my mom and my grandmother to help me. That’s the only reason I made it through. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if I didn’t have that.” Both these events – needing or wanting an abortion, but not being able to have one – crystallised Bertram Roberts’s belief in reproductive rights, and set her on a course as an activist.

Where is this not a massive lack of self responsibility on the subjects end?

She has always been an activist – when she was about 11, she started a petition at school to get a janitor, who had been bullying children, fired. In her 20s, she went to a community college, and excelled, despite having her last two children during her time there. At 27, she got a scholarship to Jackson State University in Mississippi, leaving her children with her mother while she studied for a political science degree. She would call them every evening, and spend every night marking their homework. In her third year, they were allowed to come and live with her on campus.

Ah such a caring mom that openly wanted to kill two of her children and then took off.

Bertram Roberts, who identifies as a non-binary femme, is executive director of the Yellowhammer Fund, an organisation based in Alabama that provides abortion care and campaigns for reproductive justice. When we speak over Zoom, Bertram Roberts – warm, funny, just the person you’d want to get you out of a difficult situation – is at home in Tuscaloosa, with a Wonder Woman poster just behind her. The previous organisation she founded and is still involved with, the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund (MRFF), is now run by two of her daughters.

So she’s mentally deranged and her wanted abortions are now carrying her torch!

Bertram Roberts was raised a fundamentalist Christian and grew up believing abortion was evil. As a child, she would go on “plenty of anti-choice events. I got told that I was a survivor of the ‘post-Roe holocaust’.” A grim smile. “And they would specifically say to me I should be very grateful that my white mother decided to have me because she was pregnant with a black man’s baby.” Then, she says, “life happened, and I became a teenage mom and wife. I got pregnant again and again and again, and you just learned that no issue is as black and white as anti-abortion activists try to make it seem.”

Yeahhh, if only there was a way for a young catholic to not get pregnant….