CLIMATE FEED | ASHEVILLE, N.C. — North Carolina’s only abortion provider west of Charlotte has been closed since Hurricane Helene because it lacks clean drinking water.

The month-long closure of Asheville Planned Parenthood forced patients to travel hours for treatment. It has also put a strain on other abortion clinics in North Carolina, which have seen appointment numbers increase over the past two years as neighboring states limited or banned procedures following the cancellation of the law. Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court.

“This is a very harmful loss of access for patients in North Carolina and surrounding states and regions,” said Julia Walker, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic. “But it wouldn’t have been such a damaging and impactful storm if we had laws allowing better access to care for people. »

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When Helene passed through Asheville last month, the city’s water supply lines were destroyed. Water supply has only recently been restored to most of the city, but even today the water is not safe for drinking or hand washing.

“We need clean water for our health care operations,” Walker said of the clinic, which previously performed “a few hundred” abortions a month.

Other health care facilities in Asheville have brought in tanker trucks with water to continue operations, but Planned Parenthood is still working to request an emergency water supply from the state.

In the meantime, the organization has moved much of its operations online, using telehealth appointments to prescribe birth control medications and gender transition medications. The facility cannot offer other services, such as prescribing abortion-inducing pills, due to restrictions under 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 having an abortion. The law requires that the first meeting be in person.

“None of our abortion services can be telehealth,” Walker said.

It is unclear when the Asheville clinic will reopen. In the meantime, Planned Parenthood has tried to move 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 these locations.

North Carolina’s 14 abortion clinics have seen a massive increase in patients since the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that states can ban the procedure.

Almost immediately after the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health OrganizationSouthern states instituted limits or bans on abortion. This includes Tennessee, which bans abortions in almost all cases, and South Carolina, which bans them after six weeks of pregnancy.

Many patients from those states have 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 performed abortions on approximately 5,500 patients from other states. In 2023, that number was 16,000.

“We’re talking about a really big increase in travel to North Carolina,” said Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a data scientist at Guttmacher.

Although no data is yet available for the past month, Maddow-Zimet said the closure of the Asheville clinic could have “big impacts because the system is already very strained.”

“When people are trying to navigate this landscape, they’re doing it within a 12-week window, so any delays in arranging travel or rescheduling appointments can have an impact,” Zimet said.

Helene is not the first storm to impact abortion care. A study of calls for an abortion fund in Texas after Hurricane Harvey in 2017 found that eight women cited the storm as a reason they needed financial assistance.

One woman in the study said she was raped in a hurricane shelter and wanted to terminate her pregnancy. An abortion clinic in Houston, where she lived, was closed because of the storm and she needed money to travel 10 hours to El Paso.

The Mountain Area Abortion Doula Collective of North Carolina has also seen an increase in patients seeking help since the storm, said Maren Hurley, a member of the group. These include patients from Tennessee who initially sought care in Asheville but were prevented from reaching the city because Helene washed out portions of Interstate 40, which connects the two states.

The doula collective raises funds to help women pay for medical care, transportation and overnight stays associated with abortions. Since the storm, Hurley said, the group has been helping patients think through their options for rescheduling care.

Hurley noted that it’s not uncommon for people seeking abortions to rely on friends and neighbors to get to their appointments or to watch their children while they undergo the procedure. But many of those people are focused on their own recovery from the storm, she said.

“We’ve heard from people whose cars were just washed away,” Hurley said. “People who could have covered 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 Helen had to have a second-trimester abortion because her fetus suffered from a genetic disorder that would have prevented survival outside the uterus 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 was able to have an abortion thanks to financial assistance from the doula collective, which gave her $7,000 to help pay for the procedure.

“Every logistical obstacle to seeking an abortion was magnified by the storm,” Hurley said.

Reprinted from E&E News courtesy of POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2024. E&E News provides essential information for energy and environmental professionals.