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The first 30 miles on the 2 1/2-hour haul from her dad’s hometown in Grundy to Roanoke is on the most winding, twisty stretch of U.S. 460 — and Tarina Keene keeps thinking of that when she thinks of how hard is still for some Virginians to get abortions.
Unlike the nine states — including Kentucky, a dozen miles up the road from Grundy — that have already banned abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade and its protection of the right — or the other dozen states, including nearby West Virginia and Tennessee likely to follow suit shortly, Virginia still allows abortions.
But the state’s 22 clinics and hospitals that perform abortions were stretched to capacity serving Virginians — and the state is already seeing hundreds of women from Texas, which moved last year to ban abortions after six weeks, said Keene, director of REPRO Rising, a statewide abortion rights group.
As someone who’s made the trek from Grundy to Roanoke plenty of times, she believes that just because abortion is legal doesn’t mean it is accessible. Roanoke, for instance, is about as far south and west in Virginia as a woman can get an abortion.
But a woman who is more than 14 weeks pregnant or who learns that the Roanoke facility is fully booked needs to travel an additional two to three hours to get to a clinic. For a woman without her own car that can mean abortion is simply out of reach.
“Pregnancy is a very time-sensitive condition,” Keene said. “It’s restricted by laws, but it’s not something that you can wait on it.”
So as Keene focuses on political efforts to include a right to abortion in the state constitution — an effort that would take years even on the fastest possible track — she’s been thinking about practical ways to boost access.
One initiative is a network of volunteers to drive women to clinics.
Word of mouth of the effort, which started as a pilot last year, has already recruited about 100 volunteers. Another group, once vetted with driving record criminal background checks, begins training next month.
Training includes thinking of ways to be supportive and not judgmental in what’s often an difficult time for a woman; the volunteers stand ready, if asked, to hold a woman’s hand while undergoing the procedure.
“We’re struggling to provide for thousands of our citizens, and we’re about to get hundreds more from other states,” Keene said.
Dr. David Peters, medical director at Norfolk’s A Tidewater Women’s Health Clinic, said even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe last week, he provided abortion care to women from states as far away as Texas. Since the Dobbs decision, though, the clinic’s phone has been ringing off the hook.
”We’ve been getting a ton of phone calls,” Peters said. “Even our on-call phone service received a ton of phone calls over the weekend.”
On Monday, he saw women from three different states.
Virginia’s abortion laws are more lenient that those of its neighbors.
The General Assembly in 2020 repealed laws requiring a 24-hour waiting period and an ultrasound, intended to discourage women from proceeding with an abortion. The legislature also repealed laws requiring abortion clinics to meet hospitals’ physical standards and voted to let nurse practitioners and certified nurse midwives perform abortions during the first trimester.
Abortion numbers statewide rose from 15,688 in 2020 to 16,251 in 2021, according to the Virginia Department of Health, but they are well below the more than 20,000 a year the state used to see a decade ago. The numbers in Hampton Roads are down: the six civilian facilities that perform abortions did 5,269 last year, down from 5,675 in 2020.
Some of the long term decline is probably because insurance coverage for birth control is now required by federal and state health insurance laws, Keene said. Some is due to more recent availability of medication to induce abortions. Defending Virginia’s current stance allowing telemedicine providers to prescribe this medication is another priority for abortion rights advocates, Keene said.
Groups like Whole Woman’s Health, with nine clinics in five states, offer such services and raise travel funds for those seeking abortions in states with more restrictive laws on the procedure, according to Amy Hagstrom Miller, president and CEO.
“This program is ready to help any and all callers to get the abortion that they need,” she said in a Friday news conference.
Groups that raise funds for patients to travel play an important role in ensuring there is still a path open for pregnant American women to get an abortion, no matter the state they live in, according to RaeAnn Pickett, communications director for Planned Parenthood League for Virginia.
VLPP is anticipating an increased demand for services in Virginia and an increased need for travel funds, so affiliates are ramping up coordination and outreach, according to Pickett.
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”In Virginia, we do not have a trigger law,” Pickett said. “That is not true for many other states around us, especially folks in states like Kentucky and Ohio. I say around us, because when you do not have access to money or funds or child care, you may be driving 10 hours to go to your appointment and come back. What we have seen in Texas ... we can deduce that those things — increased access to those neighboring states — could be the same.”
Some of these fundraising groups include the Richmond Reproductive Freedom Project, the Blue Ridge Abortion Fund and Hampton Roads Reproductive Justice League, she said. The funds are able to support patients who need to go to providers, which also frees up providers to focus on procedures and keeping pace with changing legislation and other moving parts of the abortion landscape, according to Pickett.
“The funds exist as long as there are providers to provide care,” she said.
On the political and legislative front, Keene said she’s also focusing on legislation like a new law in California that protects its residents from civil liability for providing, aiding or receiving abortion care in the state. That measure came in a response to a proposal in Missouri to allow private citizens to sue Missouri residents who have an abortion out of state, as well as their providers and anyone who assists them in seeking an abortion.
Abortion rights advocates are also trying to convince more providers to prescribe abortion-inducing medication and to perform procedures when medication is not appropriate, Keene said
And they also plan an outreach effort for the 2023 legislative elections, believing that abortion rights will likely be the dominate issue for the House of Delegates and state Senate.
This year, Republican efforts to reinstate the waiting period and ultrasound requirements, along with a proposal to ban abortions after 20 weeks, died in the Senate’s education and health committee, before even reaching the full Senate, where Democrats have a 21-19 edge.