Border towns see abortion battles

Clinics hop state lines as bans go into effect

BRISTOL, Va. — The pastors smiled as they held the doors open, grabbing the hands of those who walked by and urging many to keep praying and to keep showing up. Some responded with a hug. A few grimaced as they squeezed past.

Shelley Koch, a longtime resident of southwest Virginia, had witnessed a similar scene many Sunday mornings after church services. On this day, however, it played out in a parking lot outside a modest government building in Bristol where officials had just advanced a proposal that threatens to tear apart the fabric of her community.

For months, residents of the town have battled over whether clinics limited by anti-abortion laws in neighboring Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia should be allowed to continue to hop over the border and operate there. The proposal on the table, submitted by anti-abortion activists, was that they shouldn’t. The local pastors were on hand to spread that message.

“We’re trying to figure out what we do at this point,” said Koch, who supports abortion rights. “We’re just on our heels all the time.”

The conflict is not unique to this border community, which boasts a spot where a person can stand in Virginia and Tennessee at the same time. Similar disputes have broken out across the country after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the landmark 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion.

As clinics have been forced to shutter in Republican-dominant states with abortion bans, some have relocated to cities and towns just over the border, in states with more liberal laws. The goal is to help women avoid traveling long distances. Yet that effort does not always go smoothly: The politics of border towns and cities don’t always align with those in their state capitals. They can be more socially conservative, with residents who object to abortion on moral grounds.

Anti-abortion activists have tapped into that sentiment — in Virginia and elsewhere — and are proposing changes to zoning and other local ordinance laws to stop the clinics from moving in. Since Roe was overturned, such local ordinances have been identified as a tool for officials to control where patients can get an abortion, advocates and legal experts say.

Perhaps no other place so encapsulates the issue as the twin cities of Bristol, Virginia, and Bristol, Tennessee. Before the Roe reversal, an abortion clinic had operated for decades in Bristol, Tennessee. After the reversal, which triggered the Volunteer State’s abortion law, the clinic hopped over the state line into Bristol, Virginia.

That’s when anti-abortion advocates began pushing back. At the request of some citizens, the socially conservative, faith-based Family Foundation of Virginia helped draft an amendment to the city’s zoning code that says, apart from where the existing clinic sits, land can’t be used to end a “pre-born human life.”

The amendment has stalled before the Planning Commission as the city’s attorney, the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia and others question its legality. Meanwhile, the board of supervisors in Washington County, which surrounds Bristol, passed a similar restrictive zoning ordinance on Feb. 14, and at least three counties have since adopted resolutions declaring their “pro-life stance,” according to the Family Foundation.

Earl Neikirk The Associated Press Anti-abortion signs are displayed Feb. 23 outside Bristol Women’s Health Clinic in Bristol, Va. The clinic used to operate over the state line in Bristol, Tenn.