When an abortion clinic opens in a community, what are residents actually responding to? The clinic itself, or the protest activity that follows it? That question drives Zoned Out: Cancelling Abortion Through Space and Protest, a mixed methods study of community opposition to abortion clinics in Carbondale, Illinois, following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
Carbondale is a small college town in southern Illinois, a state that now accounts for nearly one in four out-of-state abortions nationally. That regional role makes the viability of Illinois clinics a matter of broader reproductive health infrastructure, not just local politics. Using city council transcripts, coded media coverage, and qualitative interviews with Carbondale residents, this study examines how opposition operated through procedural and spatial channels, governance disputes, protest disruption, and neighborhood character concerns, rather than through explicit anti-abortion argument.
Two original concepts structure the analysis. The disruption gap describes the distance between the clinic’s actual operational impact and the harms opponents predicted. The hindsight advantage describes how opponents drew on other communities’ experiences to shut down local deliberation before it could begin. Together, they reframe NIMBY opposition to abortion clinics as a governance problem as much as a moral one.
Findings will reach audiences in sociology, harm reduction, and family planning, carrying reproductive health scholarship into spaces where it is not yet centered. As more clinics open in protective states, communities and providers need frameworks for understanding what they are actually facing. This research is designed to provide that.