WEST WENDOVER, Nevada (LifeSiteNews) — A proposed abortion facility near the border of Nevada is in limbo as local leaders battle over whether to make their small town a magnet for abortion seekers from neighboring Utah.
Earlier this month, Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said he intends to sign a law requiring that abortions only be performed in hospitals rather than dedicated abortion clinics, licenses for which will no longer be issued or renewed. While far milder than the straightforward abortion bans of other states, abortion chain Planned Parenthood has expressed fear that the legislation could “functionally eliminate abortion.” (Utah also has a trigger law that would ban most abortions, but it remains blocked in court.)
The Salt Lake Tribune reports that regional PP affiliate Planned Parenthood Mar Monte (PPMM) intends to compensate for the new law by constructing a new abortion facility in West Wendover, Nevada, a border town far closer to Salt Lake City than the next-closest existing centers in Las Vegas or Glenwood Springs, Colorado. (The state PP affiliate, Planned Parenthood Association of Utah, is reportedly not officially involved in the plan.)
However, the plan has met with local resistance. Last week, the West Wendover City Council voted 4-1 against approving a permit for PPMM.
“If you destroy a rattlesnake egg, you can be prosecuted and spend time in jail because that is considered a rattlesnake,” Pastor Dennis Draves of the local Blessed Hope Church argued at the meeting. “I don’t understand in society why we’ve gotten to the point that [a fetus] is not a human being.”
Pro-abortion Mayor Jasie Holm vetoed the board’s rejection, declaring “we have been trying so hard to get the smallest bit of health care here.”
Holm’s veto does not clear a path for the new abortion mill; rather, it essentially resets the approval process back to the beginning, meaning that local government is at a stalemate on the question. In the meantime, PPMM cannot build its new facility.
The dispute highlights the lengths the abortion industry will pursue to preserve abortion “access” now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and states are once more free to directly prohibit abortion.
Planned Parenthood has suspended abortions and/or closed locations in reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling last summer, and pro-life attorneys general have declared their intentions to enforce their states’ duly enacted abortion prohibitions.
But leftists prosecutors in various localities have vowed not to enforce such laws, and pro-abortion activists have refocused efforts on interstate distribution of abortion pills, interstate travel for abortion, and enshrining “rights” to abortion in state constitutions, effectively insulating the practice from ordinary state legislation.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has called on Congress to codify a “right” to abortion in federal law, which would not only restore but expand the Roe status quo by making it illegal for states to pass virtually any pro-life laws. Democrats currently lack the votes to do so, but whether they get those votes is sure to be one of the major issues of the 2024 elections.