A women’s healthcare center in Tuscaloosa is getting an international shout out from Melinda French Gates, The philanthropist is spotlighting the West Alabama Women’s center as a model of providing community healthcare that other states and nations should learn from. Gates founded the group Pivotal which provided over two hundred million dollars in grants for women’s healthcare this month. Renee Widdemeyer is Vice President of Program Strategy at Pivotal. She says the West Alabama Women’s Center’s is a model other states should follow…
“I think is what WAWC is why it's so special, because of the trust that they've created in the community, because they have policy angles, they expanded their work as a training hub for other providers.”
APR listeners have heard about the West Alabama Women’s Center in past coverage. Until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe Versus Wade in 2022, the Tuscaloosa clinic was considered the largest provider of abortion services in the state, with patients coming from Mississippi and Tennessee for treatment. WAWC received a five million dollar grant from Pivotal, which enabled the clinic to quadruple in size.
Abortion remains illegal in Alabama. However, the Tuscaloosa center now has on-site medical labs and has expanded to provide women’s mental health treatment. That’s in addition to basic health checks and pregnancy care. Widdemeyer says WAWC is just one example of how Melinda French Gates is funding and advocating for women’s health worldwide.
“I just think that what's unique and interesting about Pivotal to me is that we have many levers in our toolkit to advance social progress. It's not just one thing, and, and by being able to do that, you can kind of holistically look at an issue like women's health,” she said,
Pivotal featured a video about Tuscaloosa’s WAWC on its website, as the group issued over two hundred million dollars in international grants this month for women’s healthcare. That’s on top of six hundred million dollars Melinda French Gates has invested in women’s healthcare over the past two years as a way to bolster women’s power worldwide. This support now includes midlife and menopause as well as women’s reproductive years. The groups that Pivotal is investing in, like WAWC, are meant to showcase healthcare services that should be supported on the local, state, and national levels.
