The clinic cancelled abortions scheduled for Wednesday
There will be more of this, until they are all shut down and women will have to go to Canada or self-abort (which is often fatal). Missouri now has one (1) abortion clinic.
Missouri is down to one clinic providing abortions Wednesday, after the only other clinic in the state that performs the procedure failed to adhere to new state requirements.
Federal appeals court judges ruled last month that Missouri can enforce a requirement that doctors must have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals before they can perform abortions. The judges issued a mandate Monday for that rule to officially take effect.
The Columbia Planned Parenthood clinic was unable to secure physician privileges to comply with the requirement, so it cancelled abortions scheduled for Wednesday, which would have been the first since the mandate was issued, Planned Parenthood Great Plains spokeswoman Emily Miller said.
Columbia is where the University of Missouri is.
Women seeking abortions can go to Planned Parenthood’s St. Louis clinic — which is now the only facility in Missouri where abortions can be performed — or travel to neighboring states, she said.
St. Louis is all the way on the eastern edge of the state, and Missouri is an average-large state – it’s not massive like Montana or Texas but it’s not Delaware, either. Women in Missouri (and other states too) are in the situation Irish women were in before the referendum – having to make a long expensive trip to get an abortion. Worse, in fact, because Missouri is more than twice as large as Ireland: 69,715 square miles versus 32,595 square miles (but you have to add the Irish Sea). Early abortions are simple procedures which should be available in all general medical facilities, but they’re not, because so many people cannot abide seeing women in charge of their own bodies.
I live in the area. For some additional context-Columbia is the destination for public health for central, rural Missouri. We have multiple hospitals (including Women & Children’s Hospital) and a massive series of well-funded clinics under the MU health system. The fact that OBs who perform abortions cannot keep their practice going even in a city with substantial health infrastructure really demonstrates how insidious and burdensome these TRAP laws are-not that it’s a surprise to readers here.
Then when that happens, as it did all too frequently before abortion was legalised, the whole political issue will get replayed all over again; like some B-grade movie on late-night TV, except re-cast.
Thank you for the additional context, Studebaker. It’s infuriating.
Omar it’s already happening, and has been for years. Abortion is wholly unavailable in huge swathes of the US, not just because of laws but because being a doctor who provides abortions has become so stigmatized and dangerous.
And of course we now have Brett Kavanaugh going to be on the Supreme Court – he will have no qualms about overturning Roe v. Wade, and if we’re not careful, we might see the current Congress outlawing abortion in the entire US, not just state by state. We must vote out all the Republicans, from dog catcher (no digs at dog catchers, but seriously, Republicans and dogs? A bad mix) all the way to POTUS.
OK, I really have to ask, and my apologies if this is a stupid question but….is elected dog-catcher really a thing in the U.S.? By which I mean, do the people – the general electorate – genuinely get to vote on who gets the position of dog-catcher?
AoS – no. It’s a standard joke. I have no idea how it started, or when, or where, because it was in place before I was born.
Thank you, iknklast. I assumed it was a joke but have heard it so often that I did begin to wonder.