Calla Hales has endured bomb threats and harassment in her mission to offer care to women in the South who need an abortion. The 36-year-old is the CEO of A Preferred Women’s Health Centers, which provide abortion care in Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina, and Augusta and Atlanta, Georgia.
Since 1973, 11 abortion providers and clinic staff have been murdered in the US and Canada, and another 26 have been wounded by gunshots, nail bombs, and arson attacks. Snipers have targeted physicians in their homes and in churches. One doctor and his wife were kidnapped and held hostage for a week in 1982. Despite all of this, Hales has persisted.
Here, she tells special correspondent Bonnie Fuller why she refuses to back down.
Calla Hales’ story
I had some serious complications during both of my pregnancies.
I suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum, which causes severe nausea and vomiting. I threw up every day. It was so bad that I had to be attached to an IV at times (for fluid infusions).
After I gave birth the first time by C-section, I had internal bleeding. By the time it was discovered a week later, I had a liter of free-flowing blood in my uterus and had to be readmitted to the hospital.
At the time, the COVID-19 pandemic was ongoing and there was a blood shortage. Usually, if your blood hemoglobin (the protein in red blood cells) is too low, you would get a blood transfusion.
But because of the blood shortage, the doctors wouldn’t do it. I had to naturally reabsorb this blood, and it was horrifically difficult. It took about six months, and I was anemic the whole time.
I wouldn’t wish it on other people.
But I chose to have my pregnancies, and especially for the second, I knew that it would be difficult. Despite that, I chose that suffering.
However, the complications that I experienced made me even more pro-choice. No one ever tells you how dangerous childbirth is.
Editor’s note: The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among high-income countries, with more than 22 women per 100,000 dying, including more than 49 Black women per 100,000 live births. The next highest country is Chile, with 14.3 deaths per 100,000 live births.
Getting your wisdom teeth removed or having a colonoscopy are statistically more dangerous than having an abortion (there are 0.7 abortion-related deaths per 100,000 in the US).
No one should be forced into a pregnancy that they don’t want. Nevertheless, while I was pregnant with my second child, the US Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. Now a lot of people don’t get to have that choice, and it’s not fair.
When I went to college, I didn’t plan on one day becoming the CEO of a group of four abortion clinics—A Preferred Women’s Health Centers (APWHC).
We have two clinics in North Carolina—one in Charlotte and one in Raleigh—and two in Georgia—one in the Atlanta area and one in Augusta.
I went to Hofstra University in Long Island, New York. I wanted to work in behind-the-scenes sports operations. Sports—especially hockey—was my first love, and it still is.
I spent several of my college years doing game operations for the New York Islanders hockey team and also spent a year doing operations for the New York Cosmos soccer team.
But New York is an expensive place to live, and introductory sports salaries are not very high. So after I graduated, I asked my parents if I could work for their clinics.
A family legacy of abortion care
My parents opened their first abortion clinic in 1998 in Raleigh. I was just 8 years old at the time. They were highly motivated to do this after my mother’s close friend had been unable to get an abortion in South Carolina after being sexually assaulted.
She was so distraught that she died by suicide.
My dad was a surgeon, and he had always been very interested in medicine that helps the community and treats patients as whole people. So he took up the practice of abortion care.
I’m the youngest of four daughters. We have a blended family, and I’m close to all my parents, who are all very pro-choice. It was actually my biological mother and stepfather who started the clinics, but I call both moms “mom” and both dads “dad.”
As a child growing up, I was very aware that my parents, who owned the clinics, took certain security precautions, but I didn’t realize until middle or high school how unusual that was.
I was never allowed to answer the phone. I learned to never sit with my back to a door so I would always be able to see who was coming in.
I also never had friends over to our house. I would always go to their homes, and we would have birthday parties in public places.
I started to have a little more freedom in high school, but not many of my classmates knew what my parents did. I would tell people that my mother was a musician because she had been a concert pianist.
I’d just say that my dad was a doctor because you never knew what your friends’ parents believed.
When I went north to New York for university, I met someone new and they asked, “What do your parents do?” For the first time, I decided to test out telling them that my parents were abortion providers.
I was expecting that I’d be met with silence and they’d just say, “Nice talking to you,” and go running away.
But instead they were like, “Cool.”
I thought I had found the holy grail by going north. That was really the first time that I’d recognized how closed off we are to certain topics and how stigmatized abortion is in the South.
When I got home from college, I started doing administrative work at the Raleigh clinic, and I really liked it.
Being at the clinic gave me a sense of purpose and a sense of self.
A lot of people talk about wanting to make a difference in the world. I found that I was in an amazing and unique position to do that in a very tangible way, and that the work gets amplified. Every patient has a family and a community that is impacted by their presence.
Being able to have that ripple effect is very powerful.
But being at the clinics, and then taking over as CEO of the company after 10 years, has also really humbled me in many ways. The first six months were extremely challenging.
It was uncomfortable realizing how privileged I was not to have had to struggle financially, though we were by no means rich.
At the clinic, I would watch patients struggling to pay for their appointments, going through their cars to find change.
I saw patients in the parking lot calling friends to see if someone could pick them up after an appointment because their spouse or partner had left them there.
I saw situations that are daily realities for many Americans that I had never considered before.
I didn’t realize that abortion wasn’t covered by health insurance for many people, or that some people didn’t have health insurance at all.
Today, we can connect patients with funds that help cover travel and accommodation expenses, since many are coming from across Southern states that have abortion bans—often from conception.
Then there was the secrecy around abortion. I grew up in a very sex-positive, choice-positive household, but I see many patients even now who ask, “Do I have to put down an emergency contact? No one knows I’m here.”
We need them to do so, but we show them the box on our intake form that asks whether their contact knows about their decision, so we keep that in mind and rarely have to use it.
It’s been incredibly gratifying to know that you are genuinely helping empower someone to take control of their life. We want to be helpful whether a patient wants an abortion or not. If that means connecting you to a place we trust for adoption services, we have those connections too.
‘People wanted to know: Were we going to be open tomorrow?’
When the US Supreme Court decision overturning Roe was leaked, I was on a plane coming back from a National Abortion Federation conference. When we landed, my phone started buzzing nonstop.
I was really angry because people had told me I was overreacting when I said Roe could be overturned. That wasn’t something I wanted to be right about.
Then when the Dobbs decision was released, I was in a parking lot after shopping and my phone started buzzing again.
People wanted to know: Were we going to be open tomorrow?
There wasn’t an immediate abortion ban in North Carolina, but we had to pivot very quickly in Georgia when a six-week abortion ban was implemented (on July 20, 2022, about a month after the Dobbs decision).
Editor’s Note: The two APWHC in Georgia remain open and can provide medication abortions up to six weeks of pregnancy. In North Carolina, a 12-week abortion ban was implemented in 2023, including a 72-hour waiting period between an initial appointment—which includes counseling and a legally required ultrasound—and the procedure. The North Carolina clinics provide both medication and surgical abortions.
Abortion providers are a very strong and unusual group. There have been major shifts in this work in recent years, and I don’t think many other fields could have withstood it.
But we’re used to nothing being certain anymore.
After Roe was overturned and Southern states began passing abortion bans, we saw a surge of patients coming from Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee.
Before COVID-19, we had already dealt with groups of up to 5,000 anti-abortion protesters outside the clinic, organized by a group called “Love Life.”
They would hold parade days in front of the Charlotte clinic and block roads so people couldn’t get in. Police had to get involved.
On regular weekends, we would have 200 to 400 protesters on Saturdays, but now it’s about 150 to 200.
This is one of those moments where I recognize how accustomed I’ve become to it, because I think, “It’s not so bad anymore.” But we’ve dealt with this for so many years that we’ve figured out what works and what doesn’t for our volunteer clinic “defenders” and “escorts,” all of whom help get patients safely inside.
We’ve been working with a separate organization called Charlotte for Choice, and they’ve helped with volunteer training, which is always done at the clinic. We can always use more volunteers, especially on weekdays.
They also helped me develop clear, bold messages in English and Spanish on signs that our defenders can hold outside the clinic so patients can see them clearly despite anti-abortion protesters trying to stop their cars to talk to them.
Hearing anti-abortion protesters talk about the sanctity of having a child and how it’s a blessing is one thing in theory. It’s easy to have opinions about something that doesn’t exist yet.
But I don’t see many organizations actively trying to raise money for foster care and placements. More often, we hear about efforts to cut food assistance programs.
I have serious concerns about this.
‘It’s a job with no off switch’
On some level, I do worry about my own safety doing this work. I’m very mindful in every environment I’m in.
I’m cautious about meeting strangers. If I attend any type of political event, I bring a friend. I never answer calls or texts from numbers I don’t recognize.
There’s another family that owns abortion clinics in Michigan, and the mother said she wouldn’t close the blinds in her house because she wanted to give a sniper a clear shot of her rather than one of her children.
That has stayed with me. It has influenced how I move through the world.
My husband is very supportive, but I think he’s also tired of seeing how much I put into this job. Friends have told me I need better boundaries.
But this is a second-generation family business. It is my life and my livelihood. It’s a job with no off switch. I can’t really put my phone down or take a day off. Most 36-year-olds don’t have the title of CEO.
It can be lonely. But it’s also been meaningful in other ways, like being able to connect directly with patients. If someone tells me they’re scared, I can sit with them.
If a patient needs a $50 discount, I can make that decision myself without bureaucracy.
Being the CEO of APWHC has brought many meaningful experiences into my life. I’ve met activists and community members I never would have encountered otherwise.
I’ve been inspired by people in Charlotte organizing to raise money, collect prom dresses for students, and protect their communities.
We recently had ICE activity in the area, and both patients and staff were stopped. One staff member, a person of color, was detained on her way to work for four hours until she could prove her citizenship.
Experiences like this humble me. As a white woman, I can move through the world without being stopped, and it makes me more aware of others’ experiences and more committed to this work.
I can’t control what North Carolina lawmakers will do regarding abortion laws. I can only learn and adapt. My guiding principle has always been to do what I can live with.
I have to try everything to stay open and be here for patients. That’s what I can live with.
