Safe zones for life

Residents of Lynchburg, Va., packed the City Council chambers earlier this month to give testimony about a proposal to regulate abortion in the city. After hours of public comments from dozens of speakers on Feb. 12, the council voted 4-2 in favor of a zoning ordinance that significantly restricts where abortion facilities can open within city limits.

“We had somewhere around 70 public speakers, and out of those public speakers I think less than 10 were in opposition,” said City Council member Martin Misjuns. “I can’t imagine what it would look like if an abortion clinic petitioned to come into Lynchburg. The number of people that would show up to speak out against it would be exponential.”

Lynchburg does not currently have any abortion facilities in city limits. Before the new ordinance, six zoning districts allowed abortion centers. Now, the facilities can only open in three districts and must obtain a conditional use permit that also requires a public hearing. The regulation blocks abortion facilities from opening within 1,000 feet of schools, churches, and neighborhoods.

Lynchburg is not the only municipality in Virginia that is eyeing zoning changes as a way to regulate abortion facilities. Other cities and counties are also looking to protect their communities from a wave of abortion businesses that pro-lifers warn could flood the state if voters pass a pro-abortion constitutional amendment in November. But some pro-lifers argue the zoning ordinances are just a speed bump for abortion groups and do not go far enough to protect unborn babies.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and pro-life laws took effect in states like Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky, thousands of women have traveled to Virginia to get abortions. Currently, Virginia does not protect unborn babies until after the second trimester of pregnancy. Even then, a baby may still be killed if three doctors determine the mother’s physical or mental health is at risk.

This November, a proposed constitutional amendment threatens to strip away the few remaining protections in the state. If approved, the amendment would make it harder for state legislators to enact future pro-life laws, allow abortionists to perform late-term abortions without getting opinions from other healthcare providers, and remove a parental consent requirement for girls under age 18 to undergo the procedure.

Misjuns said the amendment and a growing number of abortion facilities in Virginia prompted the city of Lynchburg to take action. “A lot of this stemmed from what happened down in Vinton,” he said.

In 2024, Summit Medical Centers submitted paperwork to open an abortion facility in the city of Vinton in western Virginia. Once residents caught wind of the plan, they pushed back. The Town Council approved an ordinance to require a special use permit for abortion facilities, but it was too late to stop Summit. The facility opened as the third abortion business in Roanoke County, which is located about 50 miles southeast of the state line with West Virginia, where babies are protected in nearly all cases.

“They caught them by surprise,” Misjuns said. “That’s what’s happening in Virginia right now. These out-of-state providers are targeting Virginia cities.”

After witnessing what happened in Vinton and reading about Lynchburg’s ordinance, vice chairman of the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors David Radford backed a plan to introduce the same zoning change to the county.

Earlier this month, Radford and the rest of the board of supervisors directed the county’s planning commission to evaluate the change. Radford said he does not want abortion facilities next to churches, libraries, schools, public parks, daycare centers, motels, hotels, or in retail centers. “Our hope is to basically put them out of sight, out of mind. We don’t really want them to be visible in the community.”

While the ordinance does not ban abortion outright, Radford and Misjuns agreed that the change is the most legally defensible way to control where facilities operate. Virginia is a Dillon’s Rule state, which means local governments only have powers that the state legislature explicitly granted to them. That includes zoning.

“It looks like Virginia could be the capital of abortion on the East Coast,” Radford said. “Our basic ability at this point is we want to identify and call it out and give the public a chance to oppose it.”

Though Virginia voters have consistently backed pro-abortion candidates and measures in recent years, many parts of the state have strong pro-life communities. Josh Hetzler, legal counsel from the Founding Freedoms Law Center, said the push to use zoning as a way to guard against an influx of abortion facilities began in one such community.

In the wake of the Dobbs decision in 2022, a pro-life trigger law took effect in Tennessee. That prompted an abortion facility in Bristol, Tenn.—a town that straddles the state border—to hop state lines and resume operations in Virginia. After the facility reopened, the Family Foundation, a Virginia pro-life and religious group, helped the town of Bristol draft an amendment to the zoning code to prevent other abortion businesses from opening. (The Founding Freedoms Law Center is the legal division of the Family Foundation.) While that amendment has not taken effect, the surrounding Washington County approved a similar ordinance in 2023.

“What we believe is most effective and most legally defensible is zoning because zoning law is so well established,” said Hetzler. “If we’re going to do something it should have teeth.”

But some pro-lifers say that zoning does not really protect unborn babies. In Lynchburg, council member Chris Faraldi voted against the ordinance because he claimed the ordinance’s language exempting family planning services from the regulations could open a door for groups like Planned Parenthood to bypass City Council. None of the other council members joined his request to edit the language.

Under standard zoning codes, abortion facilities fall under family planning services. But Misjuns said that part of Lynchburg’s new ordinance created a subcategory that separates abortions as a different land use than other family planning and pregnancy services. City zoning officials added the exemption to allow other businesses like pregnancy resource centers and clinics to continue operating freely in the city. “When the code is clear that the more specific function is what governs, then I’m not concerned about any loophole,” Misjuns said.

Mark Lee Dickson is the founder of the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn initiative and believes abortion should be outlawed in the same way prostitution is banned. “We do not say that it is OK for women to prostitute themselves on this street corner but not that street corner. We do complete bans across the board,” he said.

More than 100 cities and counties across the country have introduced safe haven ordinances outlawing abortion and abortion trafficking within their jurisdictions. The initiative began in Texas and spread to New Mexico in 2022 when pro-life laws in Texas prompted abortion facilities to search for new places to operate. While the New Mexico Supreme Court later ruled against those ordinances, Dickson said they should hold up because they are based on the federal Comstock Act, which prohibits mailing drugs or tools used to perform abortions.

“[The ordinance] says that abortion industries would be prohibited from the city for violating federal law,” Dickson said. He and his team have not pursued zoning ordinances because they believe municipalities should ban abortion centers as criminal organizations, instead of zoning them. “We shouldn’t even entertain organizations coming into our cities, coming into our counties, saying that they want to end the life of innocent children made in the image of God,” he said.

While dozens of localities have successfully introduced sanctuary ordinances, Hetzler with the Founding Freedoms Law Center is not certain those laws would hold up under a constitutional amendment like the one facing Virginia voters. “I wouldn’t hang my hat on the Comstock Act,” he said, noting that the measure could easily be changed by Congress and is difficult to enforce. “If Virginia law says generally there’s an absolute fundamental right to abortion, I don’t think the local government is going to be able to say otherwise,” he said.

Hetzler acknowledges that a zoning ordinance won’t protect all unborn babies, but he still sees the tactic as a win. “I think it’s better to have something that we can legally defend or else in the end we’ll get nothing,” Hetzler said. “There may be a way that is more perfect and we should continue to strive for that. But it’s not a compromise to move the ball forward.”