In West Wendover, Nevada, Anything Goes—Except Planned Parenthood – By Stephanie Mencimer (Mother Jones) / July 18, 2023
This purple border town is a microcosm of abortion politics in the West.
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West Wendover, Nevada, has long played a special role for residents of my home state of Utah: It’s where they go to sin. Just 122 miles from Salt Lake City, the tiny border outpost offers cheap booze, big casinos, and more recently, legal weed—all the things you can’t find in the land of Zion. But for the casinos, the seven square miles in the middle of nowhere that constitute West Wendover would not exist except as a pit stop in the vast empty space between Salt Lake and Reno. Instead, its population of 4,500, more than triples on weekends when party buses from Salt Lake and Ogden deposit thousands of mostly senior citizens into the lobbies of its five casinos.
So last year, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade with its decision in the Dobbs case, thus triggering a state law that would immediately ban abortion in Utah, I figured it was only a matter of time before someone opened a reproductive health clinic in West Wendover. I wasn’t alone in seeing the potential.
Since 2021, Planned Parenthood Mar Monte had been anticipating the end of the constitutionally protected right to an abortion. With 34 health centers already operating in California, the group saw Nevada—where the procedure is legal up to 24 weeks and beyond if medically necessary—as another safe haven for people from the other states that would inevitably ban abortion when Roe fell. Nevada’s laws are so liberal that minors can obtain the procedure without parental consent. As a result, even before the Dobbs decision leaked in the spring of 2022, PPMM had started preparing by expanding its services in places like Reno, where it already had one clinic.
West Wendover’s location on the border of a state that was likely to ban abortion made it a natural expansion site. And yet, in March, the West Wendover City Council voted 4 to 1 against giving PPMM a permit to open a clinic, a decision that baffled many longtime residents and Utah observers alike. “I was so angry I cried,” says Kathy Durham, a former West Wendover city council member and high school teacher. “I could not believe that they shut this down.”
