KLIMAWIRE | ASHEVILLE, North Carolina – The only abortion provider west of Charlotte, North Carolina has been closed since Hurricane Helene due to lack of potable water.
The month-long closing of Asheville Planned Parenthood has forced patients to walk hours for care. It has also squeezed other abortion clinics in North Carolina, which have seen a surge in appointments over the past two years as neighboring states have restricted or banned the procedures. Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court.
“This loss of access is extremely damaging to patients in North Carolina as well as surrounding states and counties,” said Julia Walker, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. “But this would not have been such a damaging and impactful storm if we had laws that allowed people more access to care.”
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When Helene swept through Asheville last month, she knocked out the city’s water supply lines. Water has recently been restored in most of the city, but even now the water is not safe to drink or wash hands.
“We need potable water for our health operations,” Walker said of the clinic, which previously performed “about a hundred” abortions each month.
Other health care facilities in Asheville have brought in tanker trucks of water to continue their operations, but Planned Parenthood is still working to apply for an emergency water supply from the state.
Meanwhile, the organization has moved many of its operations online, using telehealth appointments to prescribe birth control and gender transition medications. The facility cannot offer other services, such as prescribing abortion pills, due to restrictions in North Carolina law.
When the state banned abortions after 12 weeks in 2023, patients were required to receive counseling and information from their provider 72 hours before an abortion. The law requires that the first appointment must be personalized.
“None of our abortion services can be telehealth,” Walker said.
It’s unclear when the Asheville clinic will reopen. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood has tried to move appointments to its locations in Charlotte and Winston-Salem, more than two hours away. Some employees who are usually based in Asheville have been sent to work in these locations.
North Carolina’s 14 abortion clinics have seen huge increases in patients since the Supreme Court ruled that states could ban the procedure in 2022.
Almost immediately after the judge’s decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health OrganizationSouthern states enacted abortion restrictions or bans. These include Tennessee, which bans abortion in almost all cases, and South Carolina, which bans it after six weeks of pregnancy.
Many patients in those states had abortions in North Carolina, according to data kept by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health organization that tracks abortions.
In 2020, North Carolina clinics provided abortions to 5,500 patients from other states. In 2023, that number was 16,000.
“We’re talking about a big increase in travel to North Carolina,” said data scientist Isaac Maddow-Zimet Guttmacher.
Although data for the past month is not yet available, Maddow-Zimet said the closing of the Asheville clinic could have “major impacts” because the system is already so strained.
“When people are trying to navigate this landscape, they’re doing it under a 12-week clock, so delays in planning travel or rescheduling appointments can have an impact,” Zimet said.
Helene is not the first storm to induce abortion attention. That exam He looked into calls about an abortion in Texas After Hurricane Harvey in 2017, eight women cited the storm as a reason they needed financial assistance.
One woman in the study said she was raped in a hurricane shelter and wanted to terminate her pregnancy. An abortion clinic in Houston, where she lived, was closed due to the storm, and she needed money to travel 10 hours to El Paso.
The Mountain Area Abortion Doula Collective in North Carolina has also seen an increase in the number of patients seeking help since the storm, said group member Maren Hurley. They include patients from Tennessee who originally sought care in Asheville, but were cut off from reaching the city because Helen washed out portions of Interstate 40 that connects the two states.
The doula collective collects money to pay for medical help for women, or to pay for transportation and overnight stays related to abortions. Since the storm, Hurley said, the team has been helping patients explore options for rescheduling care.
Hurley noted that it’s not uncommon for people seeking abortions to rely on friends and neighbors to get them to appointments or care for their children while they have the procedure. But many of those people are focused on their own recovery after the storm, he said.
“We’ve heard of people who just had their cars taken away,” Hurley said. “People who were able to afford the cost of care before Helen now have no income, no home and no immediate plan to meet their basic needs.”
One patient Helen transferred had to have a second-trimester abortion because she had a genetic condition that would have prevented her fetus from surviving outside the womb and put the mother’s life at risk, Hurley said. The patient had originally moved to live with his family in Florida before being forced to evacuate again when Hurricane Milton hit two weeks ago. She settled in North Carolina and received an abortion with the help of the doula collective, which gave her $7,000 to pay for the procedure.
“Every logistical obstacle to seeking an abortion has been exacerbated by the storm,” Hurley said.
Reprinted E&E News Courtesy of POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environmental professionals.
