Abortion opponents have embarked on an almost mythic quest to completely eliminate all legal abortion clinics in certain states over the last two decades, and recently the movement has come within a finger-length of success.
At this point, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Kentucky and Mississippi all have just one abortion provider within their respective borders. And Arkansas is just one medical abortion clinic away from making the list, too. Most of these states have been hovering at the edge for years — often with court intervention keeping their final clinics open, despite legislative attempts to regulate them out of existence.
But Kentucky, which only recently became a one-clinic state, is the newest — and now it could be the first to end up completely abortion-free.
Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin has made ending abortion access a priority since his 2014 off-year election win. In the two years since he was sworn into office, Bevin has used his far-right administration to stop a new Planned Parenthood clinic from offering medical abortions in the state. He also closed the doors of the Lexington, Kentucky abortion provider by stating that it wasn’t properly licensed as an abortion clinic — despite years of operation in the same space with the same services.
To top off these actions, Bevin signed into law bans on abortion after 20 weeks, as well as a mandatory 24-hour waiting period after an ultrasound.
Still, the ultimate goal of no elective abortion in the state seemed like it would be unreachable — until March, when the governor quietly ordered the state to close EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Louisville, the only clinic left in the state.
“The state’s announcement in a March 13 letter that it is revoking the license makes the EMW clinic the latest enforcement target of the administration of Bevin, an anti-abortion Republican who has called himself an ‘unapologetically pro-life individual,'” the Courier-Journal reported on March 29. “The…