CLIMATEWIRE | ASHEVILLE, North Carolina — North Carolina’s only abortion provider west of Charlotte has been closed since Hurricane Helene because it lacks potable water.
The monthlong closure of the Asheville Planned Parenthood has forced patients to travel hours for care. It has also strained other abortion clinics in North Carolina, which have seen increases in appointments over the last two years as neighboring states have limited or banned procedures following the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court.
“This is a very harmful loss of access for patients in North Carolina and also surrounding states and region,” said Julia Walker, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. “But this would not have been such a harmful and impactful storm if we had laws that allowed more access for people to obtain care.”
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When Helene barreled through Asheville last month, it took out the city’s water supply lines. Water delivery has only recently been restored to most of the city, but even now the water is not safe for drinking and hand washing.
“We need potable water for our health care operations,” Walker said of the clinic, which previously performed “a couple hundred” abortions per month.
Other health care facilities in Asheville have brought in tanker trucks with water to continue their operations, but Planned Parenthood is still working on requesting emergency water supplies from the state.
In the meantime, the organization has moved a lot of its operations online, using telehealth appointments to prescribe birth control and gender transition medications. The facility can’t offer other services, such as prescribing pills that induce abortions, because of restrictions in North Carolina law.
When the state banned abortions after 12 weeks in 2023, it also required that patients receive counseling and information from their provider 72 hours before getting an abortion. The law requires that the first appointment must be in person.
“None of our abortion services can be telehealth,” Walker said.
It’s unclear when the Asheville clinic will reopen. In the meantime, Planned Parenthood has tried to shift appointments to its locations in Charlotte and Winston-Salem — more than two hours away. Some staff members who are normally based in Asheville have been sent to work in those locations.
North Carolina’s 14 abortion clinics have seen massive increases in patients since the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that states could ban the procedure.
Almost immediately following the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, states across the South instituted limits or bans on abortion. That includes Tennessee, which bans abortions in nearly all cases, and South Carolina, which bans them after six weeks of pregnancy.
Many patients in those states sought 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 roughly 5,500 patients from other states. In 2023, that number was 16,000.
“We are talking about a really big increase in travel into North Carolina,” said Guttmacher data scientist Isaac Maddow-Zimet.
Though no data is yet available for the past month, Maddow-Zimet said the Asheville clinic’s closure could be causing “big impacts because the system is already so strained.”
“When people are trying to navigate this landscape, they are doing it under a ticking 12-week clock, so any delay in arranging travel or rescheduling appointments can have an impact,” Zimet said.
Helene isn’t the first storm to impact abortion care. A study that looked at calls into a Texas abortion fund following Hurricane Harvey in 2017 found that eight women mentioned the storm as a reason they needed financial assistance.
One woman in the study said she had been raped in a hurricane shelter and wanted to terminate the 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.
North Carolina’s Mountain Area Abortion Doula Collective has also seen an uptick in patients seeking help since the storm, said Maren Hurley, a member of the group. They include patients in Tennessee who initially sought care in Asheville, but were cut off from reaching the city because Helene washed away parts of Interstate 40, which connects the two states.
The doula collective raises money to help women pay for medical care, or transportation and overnight stays associated with abortions. Since the storm, Hurley said, the group has been helping patients consider their options for rescheduling care.
Hurley noted that it is not uncommon for people seeking abortions to rely on friends and neighbors for rides to appointments or to watch their children while they undergo the procedure. But many of those people are focused on their own recovery following the storm, she said.
“We have heard from people whose cars were simply swept away,” Hurley said. “People who may have been able to cover the cost of their care before Helene now have no income, no housing and no immediate plan to meet their basic needs.”
One patient who was displaced by Helene needed a second-trimester abortion because her fetus had a genetic condition that would have prevented survival outside the womb and endangered the mother’s life, Hurley said. The patient initially went to live with family in Florida, before having to evacuate again when Hurricane Milton struck two weeks ago. She resettled in North Carolina and received the abortion with financial help from the doula collective, which gave her $7,000 to help pay for the procedure.
“Every single logistical hurdle to seeking abortion has been amplified by the storm,” Hurley said.
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
