Some Mountaineers are free — but that doesn't apply to everyone
The West Virginia Senate voted to ban hormone treatment for children diagnosed with gender dysphoria on March 6, 2025. The bill has moved to the House of Delegates for consideration. (Will Price | West Virginia Legislative Photography)
The freedom to make your own choices is part of being an American. West Virginians take this seriously. We believe in individual freedoms and self-reliance. It's baked into our state motto: Mountaineers are always free.
In practice, freedom in our state doesn't apply to everyone. For years, the leaders in our state government have sent a clear message: Some Mountaineers are free — they have the freedom to live their lives the way they see fit. Others have to play by our rules.
If you have decided to have an abortion, you can't do that here. If you have decided to help your kid get the health care they need to be themselves, you can't do that here, either. And with persistently high poverty, falling investments in public education, and a crisis in affordable child care, too many Mountaineers are trapped in generational hardship, working multiple jobs to scrape by.
Every year, our Legislature gets just eight weeks to address the concerns of hardworking West Virginians. But too often, these sessions are dominated by political agendas that create more problems than solutions for our most vulnerable, and just as often, any attempt to resolve structural challenges to our communities is pushed to the side by culture wars that just cause more harm.
A clear example of these twisted priorities is abortion. Abortion is completely banned for nearly every person who lives in West Virginia. The Legislature made sure of that by enacting a near-total ban three years ago. And yet lawmakers continue to attack this care, advancing a bill this year that targets out-of-state providers of abortion care by threatening them with a prison sentence.
They've also kept up their attacks on gender-affirming health care. This year, lawmakers are working to eliminate an essential, life-saving mental health exception to the current ban on this care — an exception used by only a handful of young people who live here.
The thing is, these politicians are counting on us to sit on the sidelines. They would prefer that their constituents stay home and let them make all the decisions, no matter the cost. And if we let them get away with that, then we have truly lost our way as Mountaineers — as people who fight for our right to live without the government telling us what we can and cannot do.
New bills are introduced week by week that seek to strip us of what little reproductive rights remain, and if we allow our lawmakers to act unchecked, they will just continue to take them from us and ignore the real issues that affect us. Our resistance is essential.
That's why, this Friday, April 4, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic is hosting a Reproductive Resistance Advocacy Day at the state legislature to provide Mountaineers from across the state an opportunity to show up, speak their mind, learn more about the state of their rights, and find community amongst life-minded advocates in this fight for accessible reproductive care.
I'm a lifelong West Virginian and proud to be. I cherish my neighbors, my community, and, regardless of our differences, all of my fellow Mountaineers. We take care of one another. But it's time we hold our lawmakers to that same principle and apply that care to our reproductive health as well. We can't afford inaction or ignorance — our futures depend on it.
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