Rural communities are becoming abortion battlegrounds

Anti-abortion activists are seeking local bans on the procedure, especially in rural towns "by borders between states that have restricted abortion and states where laws preserve access," Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez reports for KFF Health News. "They are crossroads where abortion advocates and providers have looked to establish clinics to serve people traveling from the large swaths of the U.S. where states have banned or severely restricted abortions."

Rodriguez's object example is Wendover, Nevada, a town of 4,500 on the Utah border, just over and hour and a half from Salt Lake City and two and a half hours from Twin Falls, Idaho. Mark Lee Dickson, director of Right to Life of East Texas "and founder of another organization that has spent the last few years traveling the United States trying to convince local governments to pass abortion bans," asked the City Council in April to restrict abortion in Wendover, saying “Sixty-five cities and two counties across the United States” have passed similar restrictions. Most are in Texas, "but recent successes in other states have buoyed Dickson and his group."

Dickson made his pitch after the council "voted against issuing a building permit to California-based Planned Parenthood Mar Monte in March," Rodriguez reports. "Mayor Jasie Holm vetoed the council’s decision, leaving the request for the permit in limbo." Dickson's proposal "has drawn support from the town’s more conservative residents, but brothers Fernando and Marcos Cerros have challenged the anti-abortion efforts. In addition to wanting to protect and expand access to abortion, they both saw the primary care clinic that Planned Parenthood Mar Monte was seeking to establish as a potential victory in their rural community, which is designated a medically underserved area by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration."