Set on Charleston’s West Side, the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia — the state’s lone abortion provider — has weathered challenges before, but none like the storm looming in Washington.
A Supreme Court decision expected in the summer could overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that made abortion a constitutional right and barred states from banning the procedure before fetal viability.
If Roe is upended, the question of whether abortions are legal will be returned to the states. West Virginia already has laws on the books that could essentially end abortion here. A pre-Roe ban is unenforceable, but still in code. In 2018, voters backed a constitutional amendment stipulating that abortion is not a right.
Women’s Health Center Executive Director Katie Quinonez is braced after tangles with what she describes as “an extremely hostile Legislature.”
“The responsibility is on us, as the only abortion provider here, to hold the line in terms of abortion access and fight for what we do have,” Quinonez said. “Our communities need us, and we need our communities to support us. What we do is health care — abortion access is health care — and threats to abortion aren’t the end of this.”
Most of the clinic’s patients are low-income, and many are uninsured. Such people would be the most affected by a weakened or overturned Roe, said Erin Grant, deputy director of the national Abortion Care Network.
“What we’ve seen in West Virginia and what we’ve seen in Texas is that when care is not available, we have a tightening around who is impacted, who shows up needing care, where they show up and what happens when there is not care,” Grant said. “That impact is heavily focused on minorities, people with low-income, people who are already disenfranchised.”
West Virginia’s health care infrastructure is already fractured. Specialty and other services are badly strained and widely spread.
“West Virginia is faced with being a state that has a broad diversity of needs when it comes to health care. The idea that any level of health care access should be limited there is quite honestly irrational,” Grant said. “There is a medical need, a human need for health care that is based in science and deeply researched. That includes, wholly, abortion access and reproductive health.”
Planned Parenthood West Virginia is readying for a post-Roe world. The organization operates a location in Vienna and supports legal abortion but does not perform the procedures there.
“We are preparing, throughout our entire affiliate, to take on patients,” said Alisa Clements, director of Public Affairs for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. “We have Virginia and North Carolina as our two states that can take abortion patients should we have a total ban on abortion in West Virginia.”
Abortion foes are preparing, too. The decision on legalization should be left to elected state lawmakers, not appointed judges and justices, said Wanda Franz, director of West Virginians For Life, an anti-abortion group.
“They don’t speak for us, but our legislators, our lawmakers, we need to put this back in the legislative arena where the people’s representatives are making those decisions in consultation with the people they represent,” Franz said. “The people have an obligation to make sure their value systems are reflected in law. Right now, that is not the case.”
West Virginians for Life, which has worked successfully to limit abortion access here, is calling in resources from elsewhere to help educate people on anti-abortion stances, Franz said. More than 30 crisis pregnancy centers — frequently anti-abortion and religiously affiliated — are scattered across the state, Franz said.
Such a center operates next door to the Women’s Health Center.
“The entire purpose is talking you out of having an abortion,” Quinonez said. “When people go there — often at very vulnerable points — they’re being indoctrinated into this religion to receive care.”
Franz said the centers offer counseling and can help women navigate other choices, such as adoption.
Jamie Miller, an escort at the Women’s Health Center, said she underwent an abortion there when she was 16 after being sexually assaulted at a party. She said she took a pregnancy test in a bathroom stall at the mall and wept when she saw the results. A voice from the next stall comforted her.
“A woman — I never saw her face, I don’t know her but I owe her so much — she said it was going to be OK, I wasn’t alone. She gave me the information for the Women’s Health Center so I called and made an appointment,” Miller said. “I scrambled to get the money together, but I have never, not once, regretted that choice.”
She recalled a sense of relief afterward. “I had my life back,” she said.
“I wouldn’t be who I am today, where I am today, without that access, without that service,” Miller said. “It’s as easy as that. I wasn’t ready — I couldn’t have been a mom then, not the way I should have been. I was 16, dirt poor, making $4.50 an hour. I was scared.”
She recognizes the looks of fear in the faces of the women she escorts into the clinic as protesters across the street shout and clutch signs displaying images of unborn fetuses.
“I’m grateful I can be there for them in that moment, that they’re not alone and they get to see smiling, supportive faces when they get to the clinic,” Miller said. “So many women have gone through this alone, and we refuse to let that happen again.”
Whatever the high court decides, Quinonez said, her clinic will be there.
“We’re going to help people get the abortion care they need no matter what,” Quinonez said, hearkening to an era of back-alley procedures. “We won’t subject women, anyone, to that again.”
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