A Missouri judge has ruled that the state’s last remaining abortion clinic in St. Louis can remain open until at least Tuesday. The clinic’s state operating license was set to expire tonight at midnight, and health authorities doing an annual audit were giving the clinic’s staff a hard time, threatening not to renew the license because of alleged “deficient practices.” Planned Parenthood, which operates the clinic, says those authorities haven’t fully explained what those deficiencies are. The state wants to interview seven doctors at the clinic regarding three allegedly “failed surgical abortions,” one of which required a transfer to a hospital. Only two doctors agreed to this, and they have already been interviewed.
If the clinic closes, it would be the first time in 45 years that there has been a state without an abortion clinic:
Gov. Mike Parson has said that the clinic, Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region, needs to clear up what he described as “a number of serious health concerns” as part of a state audit. The audit must be completed, the state has said, before the clinic’s license can be renewed.
Leaders of the clinic say the state is making unreasonable requests and is bent on closing the clinic for political reasons. They filed suit this week arguing that the state was abusing its regulatory authority.
Without the clinic, the only choice for Missouri women seeking to terminate their pregnancies would be a do-it-yourself RU486 pill abortion, a dangerous homemade option, or an out-of-state trip. The best choice for the last would be to travel across the river into Granite City, Illinois, where abortions are much less difficult to obtain, or to Kansas City, Kansas, a state with strict abortion laws in force, but not as strict as Missouri’s. Once an abortion clinic is shuttered, it’s extremely difficult for it to reopen even if it gains the legal okay to do so.
Existing abortion laws in Missouri are extremely stringent, which is the reason four abortion clinics have folded in the state in the past decade. It would get worse if the courts were to okay a law the governor recently signed that bans abortions after eight weeks gestation, with no exceptions for instances of rape or incest.
Most reproductive rights activists think the Missouri law, like similar ones passed in several other states, will be squelched by the lower federal courts because they are in direct conflict with Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide. But that conflict is being directly sought by members of a wing of the forced-birther movement in hopes that litigation on one or more of those laws will land the issue back in the hands of a Supreme Court whose current majority might overturn Roe.