Abortions Dropped After Arson
Abortion makes cost of insurance too high for clinic
OLYMPIA, Washington -- When an arsonist torched their clinic nearly a year ago, Eastside Women’s Health Clinic owners Nancy Armstrong and Shelly Pacheco vowed not to let fear keep them from providing abortions.
But when they reopen the clinic Monday, after a year working out of a double-wide trailer in the parking lot, there will be no more abortions.
It wasn’t the arsonist who stopped them, but their insurance company.
After the Jan. 9 fire, which burned through the roof of the building and destroyed much of the interior, the clinic’s insurance company canceled its coverage. Other insurers quoted them rates more than 10 times what they had been paying.
“The insurance companies think, ‘Oh, you had an arson because you do abortions. We’re not going to insure you,’ ” Armstrong said. “Then the arsonist thinks, ‘Oh, it works.’”
To get a rate they could afford, clinic owners had to agree not to perform abortions.
Eastside Women’s Health had been one of three South Sound abortion providers.
The others, Planned Parenthood and Sound Choice Health Center, both in Olympia, have waiting lists for abortions because of the extra patient load.
Armstrong sometimes sends patients to Tacoma, the next-nearest place to get an abortion, if there’s more urgency than local clinics can meet. The abortion pill, RU486, for example, can only be taken in the very early stages of pregnancy.
Abortions made up less than 5 percent of the clinic’s business, and doctors there are still busy with the primary care and women’s health care they provide to 40 patients a day. They provided abortions to about 400 women a year.
The clinic is one of the only South Sound health care providers to accept insurance coverage from Medicare, Medicaid and the Department of Social and Health Services.
It was difficult for the owners to decide to stop offering abortion services, and difficult to acknowledge that the arsonists had won, Armstrong said.
“But they did win.”
Changes in store
The state constitution guarantees a woman’s right to reproductive choices, including abortion, and any infringement of that right — whether by arsonist or insurer — violates the constitution, some officials say.
“It would be something of an irony if abortion rights were to be taken
away not by courts, but by the actions of insurers responding to terrorists,” said State Rep. Brendan Williams, D-Olympia.
Williams, a member of the House Financial Institution and Insurance Committee, has plans he hopes to enact this session to prevent other clinics from suffering the same fate. His idea is to have the state underwrite an insurance risk pool that reproductive health clinics could join.
“One of my concerns is the issue could be larger than the Eastside Women’s Clinic. I could see this happening elsewhere in the state,” Williams said.
Especially now, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when insurance companies are being especially cautious about risks, abortion clinics could be lumped into a high-risk category that can’t get insurance even if they’ve never been the target of arson or other damage, Williams said.
“It’s appropriate that if the right to reproductive choice is going to be a meaningful one, the state needs to do its job by safeguarding that right,” Williams said.
The state Office of the Insurance Commissioner has also gotten involved with the clinic’s plight, getting the clinic owners an extension on their coverage when their insurer tried to drop them with no warning.
But it can’t force an insurance company to give coverage to something it considers a potential for profit loss.
“Insurance companies don’t have to sign on: If there’s a risk, they can refuse to underwrite that risk,” said John Hamje, deputy insurance commissioner. “My biggest concern about all of this is it may well be, because of that particular aspect of the industry, that somebody — a criminal, or as Rep. Williams has termed them, a terrorist — is able to achieve their criminal ends.”
Investigation continues
Agents from the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms determined in January that the fire was arson, but they haven’t caught the arsonist. They haven’t made any arrests so far. The case is still open and active, they said.
“It’s not uncommon to take years to solve arsons. Sometimes you have all but one piece of the puzzle. It could be anything,” special agent Julianne Marshall said. “Even though time has passed, people talk.”
The ATF is offering up to a $15,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest. The statute of limitations on arson is 10 years.
There’s no evidence that the arsonist was an anti-abortion activist, but it’s logical to suspect that, investigators have said.
Anti-abortion protesters have gathered outside the clinic to picket nearly every Thursday since it was founded in 1981. They still do, Armstrong said, even though she told them last month that there would be no more abortions.
Armstrong is outraged by the way the insurance companies have treated her. Abortion is a legal medical procedure; an insurer shouldn’t dictate whether she offers it, she said.
Pro-choice activists see the right to abortion being whittled away by recent limitations federal and state authorities have imposed. But trying to get insured may be the ultimate limiting factor, Armstrong fears.
“That really impedes access, that the insurance companies act that way,” she said. “These things don’t help.”
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Posted by Editor at November 28, 2005 07:40 AM
