Why It's So Hard To Run An Abortion Clinic

Why it's so hard to open an abortion clinic - and why so many are closing.

- Meaghan Winter

Hoping to publicize her new nonprofit, last fall Julie Burkhart called her local NPR affiliate, KMUW in Wichita, about buying a day of sponsorship for $480. Station manager Debra Fraser decided immediately that KMUW wouldn’t allow it. “I didn’t want to upset the apple cart,” Fraser says.

The response wasn’t new to Burkhart. In April 2013 she had reopened and renamed Women’s Health Care Services, where her former employer and mentor, Dr. George Tiller, provided abortions from the 1970s until 2009, when he was shot in the head and killed while ushering at his church. Today, South Wind Women’s Center offers abortion and OB-GYN services as well as transgender care such as hormone therapy. Burkhart hopes to install a birthing center. In the basement, Trust Women, the center’s umbrella nonprofit, runs a political action committee, continuing the advocacy Tiller began in the 1980s.

“We are only asking to be treated like any other business that provides health care,” Burkhart wrote in a letter to KMUW appealing the station’s rejection. She says a man in the development office told her that if the station accepted South Wind’s sponsorship, it would have to accept sponsorship from anti-abortion organizations, too. “The fundraiser in me thought, What’s the problem with that?” Burkhart says with a laugh. But she was taken aback, she recalls, when he asked if she thought KMUW should also take donations from the Ku Klux Klan. About that, Fraser says: “I certainly would hope that no one on my staff would say that. That doesn’t represent what I said to Julie.”