Last year, lawmakers nationwide defied legal precedent by passing blatantly unconstitutional abortion bans—the state of Louisiana was no exception. State legislators handed a near-total abortion ban off to their Democratic governor, John Bel Edwards, who signed it into law.

SB 184, which prohibits abortions around six weeks of pregnancy before most people even know they are expecting, is currently held up in court. But the message state officials sent to abortion care providers was clear: We want the services you provide to end.

So abortion care providers weren’t shocked when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and anti-choice legislators ramped up their attacks on reproductive health care. As Rewire.News has reported, pregnant people in the hardest-hit states are risking exposure to the virus to get the care they desperately need. But less discussed is how abortion care providers are putting their own bodies on the line to provide what is undeniably an essential, time-sensitive health-care service. What’s particularly dangerous at this moment is that these health-care professionals are not being treated as such by local, state, and federal officials.

As AJ Haynes, a longtime patient advocate at the Hope Medical Group in Shreveport, Louisiana, explained in an interview this week, “we’re putting ourselves at the same risk as [health-care professionals] in hospitals—if not even more—because we’re seeing patients coming in from other states, other cities. We’re just as vulnerable, and we’re not receiving the same amount of support that they are.”