When Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas opened its health center in Lubbock in 2020, it was the culmination of a years-long effort to reestablish an abortion clinic in west Texas, a region that had become, by some metrics, the country’s most notable abortion desert. In 2013, Lubbock’s old Planned Parenthood clinic had been forced to close after Republicans in the state legislature passed budget cuts and anti-abortion restrictions sharply curtailing clinics’ ability to operate. Until this spring, when the new clinic began offering medication abortions, people living in the area were forced to drive hundreds of miles, often to New Mexico or Oklahoma, to find the closest abortion clinic. The result of this additional burden was both predictable and dire—according to Texas state statistics, Lubbock County residents had just over half as many abortions in 2019 as in 2012.
The return of an abortion clinic to the region immediately drew the attention and ire of anti-abortion activists, including Mark Lee Dickson, the relatively young head of Right to Life of East Texas and the lead proponent of a campaign to get towns and cities in the state to adopt local ordinances banning abortion, turning them into what Dickson called “sanctuary cities for the unborn.” At the heart of these ordinances was a provision that turned over enforcement of these bans from the state to private citizens, allowing Texas residents to sue for damages from both abortion providers and anyone who “aided and abetted” an abortion seeker. Lubbock was now in Dickson’s crosshairs, and in May of this year, the city’s voters approved a version of his ordinance. At the end of that month, the Planned Parenthood clinic in Lubbock stopped offering abortions to comply with the ordinance. Planned Parenthood had sued the city, but in early June, a federal judge dismissed its complaint, citing lack of jurisdiction.
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