The Real Estate of Women’s Health
By Ann Friedman

In the politics of providing reproductive health care to women, opponents are using three important things as weapons: location, location, location. Which is why health-care providers scored a major victory this month with the opening of a sparkling new $7.5 million clinic this week in Aurora, Illinois.

Abortion may be legal in America, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s available to all American women. For years, right-wing activists have used property law and building codes to make the provision of women’s reproductive care prohibitively burdensome. They’ve successfully passed laws in a number of states that target abortion providers, requiring expensive interior renovations to change air-circulation methods, heighten ceilings, and widen halls and doorways.

Some who oppose abortion have made a practice of buying up the property leased by women’s health clinics, then installing a so-called crisis pregnancy center – where right-wing activists try to guilt women out of having abortions – on the premises. These property grabs are typically made by a third party whose name is unfamiliar to clinic directors, as was famously done in Wichita, Kansas, by Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue. But when Planned Parenthood went to open its new Aurora clinic, opponents cried foul because the reproductive health-care provider built its facility and obtained building permits through a subsidiary, Gemini Office Development, LLC.

Planned Parenthood officials said they used the subsidiary as the builder in order to avert the kinds of protests that have kept other new abortion clinics from opening, like when a contractor backed out of building a new Planned Parenthood facility in Austin in 2003. Gemini Office Development disclosed to the planning and zoning board that the building would be occupied by a medical office, but did not specify it would be an abortion provider.

After opponents of reproductive rights discovered that the new medical office building in Aurora was to be a reproductive health clinic, they successfully pressured the city to deny Planned Parenthood’s occupancy permit. At a hearing last month, the Aurora city attorney argued that the case is about land use and permit regulations – not about restricting abortion access. Planned Parenthood lawyers responded, “We wouldn’t be here if this was a foot care clinic.”

Which explains why, in some areas, the one women’s health care clinic within hundreds of miles may look at bit tattered at the edges. Take for example, the clinic run by Dr. LeRoy Carhart, one of the most prominent abortion providers in the country, thanks to the two Supreme Court cases (Stenberg v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Carhart) that bear his name. The financial wear-and-tear of fighting dozens of courtroom battles over the past decade is visible in the rundown facade of his women’s health clinic in Bellevue, Nebraska, a small town south of Omaha.

In 2000, a state senator and vocal abortion-rights opponent purchased, with two business partners, the building that houses Carhart’s clinic. Almost immediately thereafter, Carhart received notices that his lease on the lower portion of the building and the parking lot would be terminated in 30 days and that his lease on the rest of the building would end in six months. As the partnership’s lead investor, Bill Rotert, said at the time, “If it’s possible, I’m going to close it down. I’m already pricing chain.”

A judge eventually ruled the eviction notices were not valid. Three years later, Carhart scraped together the money to buy the property himself. No doubt the massive legal fees (and resulting debt) incurred after court battles like this one have contributed to Carhart’s inability to renovate the exterior of his clinic. The bottom line is that, unlike the provision of misinformation done in crisis-pregnancy centers, it’s very expensive to provide actual medical care.

The Aurora clinic represents the best of both worlds: The shiny façade of professionalism that you get with a crisis-pregnancy center with real medical care for women on the inside. Planned Parenthood’s decision to complete the permit paperwork using the name of a subsidiary is a major reason this was possible. But even the most well-funded reproductive-health provider in the country, using this stealth tactic, ended up wrangling in court with right-wing activists.

One Aurora alderman – before he was aware the facility was an abortion clinic – commented as he approved the occupancy permit, “Yeah, it’s a nice looking building. I like the way it’s laid out.” Another alderman echoed, “It’s beautiful. I second.” It is indeed a beautiful thing that, at least in Aurora, women now have the option of going to a reproductive health clinic that looks as professional on the outside as it is on the inside.

Ann Friedman is Web editor of The American Prospect Online, www.prospect.org, where a version of this article originally appeared.