Since the Dobbs decision, many advocates have looked for ways to make a difference for reproductive health and rights. For four DC-area friends, a party for Provide was a simple way to bring their peer group together to talk about the state of healthcare and what they could do to make a difference for people seeking abortion in a hostile landscape. 

Lois A. Wessel, DNP, FNP-BC, is a community health practitioner in Takoma Park, MD and an associate professor of nursing at Georgetown University. Together with three friends—midwife Annie Rohlin, nurse practitioner Laura Worby, and nurse administrator Becky Smith—she hosted Provide leadership for a conversation about the importance of abortion access, particularly given the high stakes of the upcoming election.

“I don’t want to say we took abortion access for granted, but the overturning of Roe was a wakeup call,” Lois said. “I spent years living in Nicaragua where abortion was illegal and people were dying from unsafe practices, and I don’t want that to happen here. We must keep talking about abortion and reproductive rights.”

Lois’ passion for abortion access was shaped by her work both in Latin America and here in the United States, where she works in a federally qualified health center (FQHC) that serves large immigrant and refugee populations who regularly must navigate language barriers, financial barriers, and other inequities when seeking care.

“The people who are most affected by limited access to abortion, frankly, are not me and my friends and our children. The reality is with the right amount of money and the right connections, many of the people that I know will have access to safe abortions regardless. But that’s not true for most of my patients,” Lois said. 

Gathering her friends was a way of using her platform and privilege to advocate for greater equity—and there was no better occasion than Becky’s 60th birthday to host a house party for Provide.

“We’re a group that is engaged in big issues nationally, but also a lot of local and community work, and we’ve all been involved in reproductive health work our whole careers,” Lois explained. “Annie is a midwife. Becky and her husband are foster parents. Laura was really involved in getting the D.C. government to pass a resolution stating that racism was a public health crisis. Everybody’s engaged in different interconnected things.”

Thanks to the collective efforts of this tenacious group of friends, Provide connected with more than a dozen new supporters—many of whom are also leveraging their roles as healthcare providers to transform the system from within. 

“I want people to feel like the healthcare that I provide is meeting their needs. I really believe in giving people all the education in the world and letting them make their own decisions—and abortion should just be part of that primary care,” Lois said. “Abortion access should be for everybody, not just for those who have money to make it happen.”