NC advocates react to Alabama abortion ruling

Local advocates around the Triangle chimed in on the abortion measure in Alabama.

"It seemed like time with everything politically happening," said Shannon Dingle of Raleigh. "When I woke up this morning, I did not think this was going to be a story at all today and now it very much is so."

She wrote an opinion piece in USA Today entitled, "I was 12-Years-Old and Pregnant. Alabama's Abortion Ban Bill Would Punish Girls like Me."

"I'm tired of this being treated as a debate that doesn't involve people," she said. "What these folks are trying to do is to get a law to the Supreme Court and have Roe v. Wade overturned."

Dingle said she was raped when she was 12 years old. She was living in Tampa at the time.

She said she eventually lost the child in a miscarriage.

"I know that there are other 12-year-old girls and I'm the mother to two 12-year-olds," said Dingle, who has six total kids. "I would've loved for someone--be it here in Wake County or in the county I was in Florida--to have cared about what was going on with me when it was happening and when I was 12."

She graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and has lived in Raleigh with her husband since the mid-2000s.

"The reality with a lot of these laws is that they just restrict people without means from being able to access abortion," she said.

Tami Fitzgerald is the Executive Director of the NC Values Coalition--a local advocacy group.

"What you're seeing across the country right now is a backlash in conservative states like Alabama where people are largely pro-life they want Roe v. Wade gone," Fitzgerald said. "I think it will embolden other states to pass pro-life laws because there are states out there like North Carolina where the majority of people are pro-life."