Court changes fuel moves to protect abortion access
A vast swath of West Texas has been without an abortion clinic for more than six years. Planned Parenthood plans to change that with a health center it opened recently in Lubbock.
It’s a vivid example of how abortion rights groups are striving to preserve nationwide access to the procedure even as a reconfigured Supreme Court — with the addition of conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett— may be open to new restrictions.
Planned Parenthood has made recent moves to serve more women in Missouri and Kentucky, and other groups are preparing to help women in other Republicancontrolled states access abortion if bans are imposed.
“Abortion access in these states now faces its gravest ever threat,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood’s president. She said the new health center in Lubbock “is an example of our commitment to our patients to meet them where they are.”
The clinic opened on Oct. 23 in a one-story building that had been a medical office and was renovated after Planned Parenthood purchased it. To avoid protests and boycotts that have beset some previous expansion efforts, Planned Parenthood kept details, including the clinic’s location, secret until the opening was announced.
Planned Parenthood says the health center will start providing abortions — via surgery and medication — sometime next year. Meanwhile, it is offering other services, including cancer screenings, birth control and testing for sexually transmitted infections.
Planned Parenthood closed its previous clinic in Lubbock, a city of 255,000 people, in 2013 after the Texas Legislature slashed funding for family planning services and imposed tough restrictions on abortion clinics.
That law led to the closure of more than half the state’s 41 abor-tion clinics before the Supreme Court struck down key provisions in 2016. There were no clinics left providing abortion in a region of more than 1 million people stretching from Amarillo in the Panhandle south to Lubbock and the oil patch cities of Odessa and Midland.
Women in Lubbock faced a 310mile drive to the nearest abortion clinic in Fort Worth.
Anti-abortion activists have been mobilizing to prevent the return of abortion services to Lubbock — and are not giving up even with the new clinic’s opening.
“Lubbock must not surrender to the abortion industry,” said Kimberlyn Schwartz, a West Texas native who is now communications director for Texas Right to Life.
Her organization has backed a petition drive trying to persuade the City Council top as san ordinance declaring Lubbock a“sanctuary city for the unborn .” Abortion opponents hope that designation would lead to either enforcement efforts or lawsuits seeking to block abortion services.
Thus far, the City Council has declined to adopt the ordinance, but activists say they have enough signatures to place it on the ballot in a local referendum.
Texas is one of several red states where Planned Parenthood has sought to expand abortion access. Earlier this year, its health center in Louisville, Ky., began providing abortions after obtaining a license from the newly installed administration of Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear.