Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 1, 1992 TAG: 9202280020
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The first came in 1974, when Planned Parenthood's federal dollars ran out and City Council came through with an $8,000 emergency grant to keep it going.
The second came 10 years later, when a group of protesters said Planned Parenthood was too controversial for public support. They claimed it encouraged unwed mothers to get abortions and distributed obscene sex-education materials. Council, in turn, rescinded its funding.
Looking back, Kathy Haynie grins triumphantly.
She recalls the telephone call she got from an Alexandria pay phone a few nights after the council vote. An anonymous woman who'd read about the action in The Washington Post wanted to know if Haynie would send her a copy of Planned Parenthood's bylaws, along with proof of the organization's non-profit status.
The staff at the Roanoke clinic wondered if the call was a prank, but finally Haynie, the executive director, nodded: Send the papers.
A week later, Planned Parenthood was $25,000 richer. And that was just the start of it.
"It brought people out of the woodwork," Haynie recalls of council's funding reversal. The next year, supporters had chipped in $300,000 - enough to move Planned Parenthood to its present clinic on Liberty Road.
"All along, the more they've attacked us, the higher our favorability ratings have climbed," Haynie says of the abortion opponents. "We represent what mainstream people think is important; they count on us. Every time I start feeling tired or beleaguered, I just look at our donor list."
The tougher things get for Planned Parenthood, the more it seems to thrive. Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, the local organization is counting on those survival instincts now more than ever.
By 1987, enough money had been raised to open a second clinic in Blacksburg. By 1990, a third center opened in Charlottesville - making Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge the largest of the three Virginia affiliates.
And with last year's addition of full-time public affairs director David Nova, it's the most politically active in the state, too. Haynie herself is a dogged lobbyist, showing up in Richmond frequently for General Assembly sessions and calling on high-profile community leaders to pressure legislators to vote against abortion restrictions.
Still, most of what Planned Parenthood does has nothing to do with politics or abortion. The family-planning center provides gynecological services for women on a sliding-fee scale. Birth-control supplies there cost less than half the price at a regular pharmacy.
Educational programs are also run from two of the affiliate's three centers, providing sex-ed training to church leaders, family-life teachers in public schools and the teens who man the Trust hot-line, to name a few. And Planned Parenthood has been a force behind Better Beginnings, the valley coalition formed to tackle teen pregnancy.
Recessionary 1991 was not only the Roanoke-based Planned Parenthood's best fund-raising year ever - its budget is now $1.3 million - it was its busiest, too. More than 7,900 women visited its three centers.
And its next hurdles are already in place - including the expected overturn of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.
Haynie is ready to fight. After all, Planned Parenthood Federation of America has been in the thick of controversy since 1916, when Margaret Sanger first challenged national laws by insisting that women should have access to birth control - and then by giving it to them.
"We've always been on the cutting edge," Haynie says. "We've always had to take a deep breath and keep on going."
`A model to emulate'
Retired social worker Liz Stone recalls the beginnings of the local Planned Parenthood. In 1967, Stone secured a $28,000 federal grant through the Office of Economic Opportunity for family planning.
Working out of donated office space, Stone tried to get the word out about the available methods of birth control: condoms, the IUD and the then-new birth-control pill.
She'd drive into housing projects and set up impromptu workshops on how the pill works and where to get it. She'd drive into rural areas to give women rides to the health department, the only place where poor women could get birth control.
"We weren't controversial then or even well-known," Stone recalls. "The only thing I remember was that birth control was something people were very embarrassed to speak about."
Gradually, word spread through the Richmond Planned Parenthood about where abortions were performed, and the local office became part of an underground network that helped women find access to abortion in other states where the procedure was legal.
"It's always been easy for women with money and connections to get abortions," Stone says. "In the '60s, women with money always knew of a sympathetic doctor in the community who would do it, or they could simply fly to another state where it was legal."
Abortion first became legal in Virginia in the early '70s - for women who had the OK of a psychiatrist; mental stress of the pregnancy had to be proven.
"You'd get a friendly psychiatrist - you knew who they were - and for $25, they'd talk with the woman and say she'd have a terrible mental problem if the pregnancy was carried to term," recalls Nancy Eddy, another early Planned Parenthood worker. "It was a farce, but it was done."
When Roe legalized abortion in 1973, the local office began referring women requesting abortions to a few local OB/GYNs. In 1975, a Richmond doctor opened the Roanoke Medical Center for Women, still the only clinic where abortions are performed in Southwest Virginia.
It wasn't until 1977 that Planned Parenthood became more than a referral agency. Services such as pap smears and birth-control distribution were initially offered one night a month through the Free Clinic of the Roanoke Valley.
By 1978, Planned Parenthood had a small place of its own where weekly clinics were held. Within four more years, the Roanoke office operated five days a week, providing services on a sliding-fee scale basis.
Haynie, a former probation officer and childbirth educator, decided then to more aggressively court the business community as a source of revenue and political influence. Fund-raisers were launched, and her board of directors became a Who's Who of Roanoke.
But she didn't get her first real taste of politics until 1984, when Roanoke City Council dropped Planned Parenthood funding.
"Maybe I was naive, but I just couldn't believe that politicians could lose their courage like that," she recalls.
Not much has slipped by her since. Haynie works both politics and the fund-raising circuit from the inside out. She keeps files on the key players and never forgets a name or face.
At arts events, she makes mental notes on donors listed in the programs, then works the crowd at intermission. Given an introduction to a potential donor, Haynie is thorough, concise and downright zealous in her ability to preach her cause.
Politics and fund raising are chess games, she says. And tirelessly, Haynie keeps a detailed score on both counts. With her two kids now grown - her daughter studies nursing, her son is in public relations - the 46-year-old works 70 hours a week, minimum.
Although there are no ongoing protests against the local Planned Parenthood, Haynie does sometimes debate Andrea Sexton, spokesperson for Roanoke members of the Virginia Society for Human Life. While the two find no middle ground at all in the abortion debate, Sexton stops short of commenting on Haynie's methods or the services Planned Parenthood provides.
"They try to distance themselves from abortion - because they don't provide them locally," Sexton says. "But in my opinion, the blood is still on their hands because of their advocacy and their unwillingness to compromise on the issue whatsoever.
"I think this Planned Parenthood is just an offshoot of the national group - the largest abortion provider and promoter nationwide."
Sexton concedes, however, that Haynie makes her job tough. Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge, she says, is the most aggressive and vocal of the Virginia abortion-rights groups - and one of a dwindling number nationally that receives United Way funding.
Planned Parenthood's success is a direct result of Haynie's "personal imprint on the organization," says Bob Kulinski, director of the United Way of the Roanoke Valley, of which Planned Parenthood is a partner agency.
"It's a model we all try to emulate," Kulinski says of Haynie's relationship with her volunteers, donors and board members. "She's able to achieve a balance of community viewpoints and excite them about the mission of the agency."
Funded by United Way since 1971, Planned Parenthood received $57,000 this year earmarked for education programs. Kulinski says the controversial organization both hurts and helps United Way in its funding appeals.
Of the 40,000 donors who give to the United Way, 300 opt to omit Planned Parenthood from their contribution, Kulinski says. However, $28,700 of the total Planned Parenthood gets comes from people who designate their money specifically for Planned Parenthood.
"The point is that they're among the top five or six agencies in terms of designations received," Kulinski says. "Teen-age pregnancy has been one of our community's most serious issues, and the education programs we fund at Planned Parenthood seem to be very much what the community wants."
Roanoke is among 35 communities in the nation that receive United Way funding for Planned Parenthoods, according to United Way of America. Nationwide, there are 2,100 United Way chapters and 170 Planned Parenthood affiliates. In Virginia, the Southeastern affiliate also receives United Way funding; the Richmond branch doesn't.
`A game of influence'
Spend seven hours in the car with Kathy Haynie on a trip to Richmond, and you learn even more about the way she works.
You learn all you'd ever want to know about House Bill 958, the parental notification bill that's to be heard before the Senate Education and Health Committee that day. Haynie was up late the night before, conferring with Planned Parenthood's Richmond lobbyist and Roanoke politicos, including Dominion Bank head Warner Dalhouse - anything to exert some influence on freshman Sen. Brandon Bell, R-Roanoke, a committee member.
Committee Chairman Elliot Schewel, D-Lynchburg, "told me that Brandon thinks Warner walks on water, so I called Warner last night to get him to call Brandon," she explains. "It's all a game of influence."
Haynie plays the game equally well in Richmond, and she looks the part. Of the Richmond anti-abortion contingent, she says, "There's one who always wears a bun and looks so severe. I just want to tell her, `If you were smart you'd put a little make-up on and a bright dress.' After all, these guys are a bunch of good old boys."
The 3 1/2-hour trip to Richmond in a snowstorm - all to lobby for Bell's vote against the bill - culminates in one 45-second conversation in the stairwell.
As Bell walks down to the committee meeting from his office, Haynie is one step behind him, summarizing her argument with sound-bite succinctness: "The judicial bypass proceedings would cost $1.5 million to implement. . . . Think about the teen-agers who don't come from functional families. . . . Brandon, you can't say you're pro-choice and vote for this bill."
From Bell's tone, it's obvious his position has changed since the first time he voted against a similar notification bill. Haynie is miffed.
"Benedetti got to him," a National Organization for Women lobbyist says, referring to Sen. Joseph Benedetti, R-Richmond.
Indeed, Bell does change his vote - though it doesn't keep the committee from killing the bill 10-5.
An hour later at a restaurant, Haynie goes to the restroom and then disappears. There in the back of the room are Bell and his aide - and Haynie, letting them know just how disappointed she is . . . for a half-hour.
Later at his office, she leaves him an apology note because he didn't get to finish his lunch. She also asks him to reconsider his stance.
"We have a lot of work yet to do on Brandon," she says.
Bell says he does side with Planned Parenthood on basic abortion-rights issues, but he believes parents should be involved in minors' abortion decisions. "My job is to be as objective as I can and to weigh both sides," he says.
And the conflict with Haynie? "I'll say that's not the type of thing you look forward to, but these things come up."
Expanding to Lynchburg?
Haynie was talking recently to her father, a retired Canadian military general, about the likely overturn of Roe. He asked what she'll do when the laws revert to a patchwork quilt - with abortion legal in some states, illegal in others.
"Whatever it takes to make sure all women have reproductive choice," Haynie said, to which her father responded only half-kidding: "Anarchist!"
Seriously, Haynie has some big challenges ahead, the abortion issue notwithstanding. By 1994, she predicts:
Expansion into Lynchburg - A grass-roots group of 225 formed there last year to advocate the opening of a fourth center in Lynchburg.
Prenatal clinical services at the Roanoke center for low-risk women who are Medicaid-eligible or uninsured.
AIDS testing and counseling, a midlife program for menopausal women and infertility testing.
And Haynie worries that the doctors at Roanoke Medical Center for Women may be growing tired of flying into Roanoke two days a week to perform abortions. Nationwide, the number of abortion providers is dwindling because of harassment and legal restrictions.
"Ideally the abortion provider should live in this area anyway," she says. Should Roanoke Medical Center pull out, Planned Parenthood would have no choice but to provide the service, she adds.
That, of course, is contingent upon Virginia remaining an abortion-rights state when the Supreme Court overturns Roe. If it doesn't, Planned Parenthood will do the same thing it did before Roe: "If we have to get women to other states or other countries where it's legal, we'll do it," Haynie says.
She's hoping that supporters will come out of the woodwork even more than in 1984, when city council backed out on Planned Parenthood.
"People who've always counted on Planned Parenthood not to buckle under, I am convinced they will support us," she says.
And Haynie, as always, will be out there leading the charge.
by CNB