RALEIGH -- In an outgrowth of national political turmoil over health care, Wake County will no longer pay for elective abortions for employees, the board of commissioners chairman said Thursday.
Top county officials cited a 29-year-old state Supreme Court ruling that they say makes it illegal to use tax dollars to pay for the practice. The plaintiff in that case was state Rep. Paul Stam, an Apex Republican, House minority leader and for decades a dogged opponent of abortion.
Stam and allies have also succeeded in recent weeks in having the procedure removed as an elective option for women who work for the town of Apex. Other counties that pay for the service could be sued over it, Stam said.
"During the debate over health care, the Obamacare bill, this question came up repeatedly," Stam said. "In early December, we discovered our own town and county was doing it."
Opponents of the move said the local governments had exceeded the scope of the N.C. Supreme Court ruling, noting that the original lawsuit dealt with funding "medically unnecessary" abortions for indigent women.
Melissa Reed, vice president of public policy for Planned Parenthood of North Carolina, criticized Stam for playing politics with employees' benefits.
"I think that our county employees deserve to have comprehensive health coverage," Reed said. "It shouldn't be taken away because of somebody's political agenda."
Stam said he called fellow Republican Tony Gurley, chairman of the board of commissioners, to make sure he knew that Wake County's insurance covered elective abortions and to remind him of the court precedent.
"I promised him that someone would bring legal action against counties that didn't stop it," Stam said.
Wake County has covered elective abortions for employees since at least 1999; County Manager David Cooke changed the self-insurance plan Wednesday. The plan will continue to pay for abortions in cases of incest, rape or danger to the life of the mother, the same exceptions allowed under federal employees' insurance.
An agenda item for Monday's Wake County Board of Commissioners meeting will address the change, but only to note the administrative action, not to ask permission, Gurley said Thursday.
"We don't pay for that any more," Gurley said. "As soon as we were made aware it was illegal, we stopped doing it."
County Attorney Scott Warren said the change was based on the 1981 decision in the case Stam brought. "By no stretch of the imagination can we consider medically unnecessary abortions as 'essential to the health and welfare' of the recipients," the justices said in the 1981 opinion.
Warren said that while the circumstances are different, the language of the ruling is strong enough that county officials felt they had no choice.
Warren said Wake County's action was not based on moral judgments: "The county is not saying you can't have an abortion, and the county is saying you can have medically necessary abortion."
Stam's legislative assistant Keith Weatherly, who is also mayor of Apex, began pushing the issue late last year. Weatherly put the issue before the town council on Jan.19, and the body voted to end abortion coverage.
"I didn't suggest it, but I was very happy about it," Stam said.
Groups oppose change
Both Planned Parenthood of North Carolina and the American Civil Liberties Union oppose ending abortion coverage.
"North Carolina statutes give broad authority to both cities and counties to provide whatever health insurance and other benefits the city council or county commissioners deem appropriate," the ACLU wrote in a recent analysis of the Supreme Court precedent.
Monday's Wake County agenda item, which won't get a separate vote unless a member requests it, notes that state insurance department guidelines do not mandate coverage of abortions. Commissioner Stan Norwalk, who initially criticized Gurley's resolution as "political football," said Thursday he didn't think the issue requires a vote.
"I think the whole thing should have been handled as an administrative action," said Norwalk, a Democrat. "Whether I like the law or not, which I don't, I am sworn to uphold it."
Staff writers Anne Blythe and Ray Martin and news researcher Peggy Neal contributed to this article.
