Abortion services are expected to return soon to midtown Kansas City.
Planned Parenthood Great Plains is booking appointments for nonsurgical abortions at its Patty Brous Health Center at 1001 Emanuel Cleaver II Blvd., the Pitch reports. Services are expected to resume in about a week.
“We are thrilled to announce that Missouri women can now access safe and legal abortion services at our midtown health center,” said Aaron Samulcek, interim president and CEO of the local Planned Parenthood chapter.
Planned Parenthood stopped offering abortions at the clinic about five years ago.
While Missouri lawmakers were in special session in June and July debating new abortion restrictions, the state Department of Health and Senior Services was working under a federal court order directing it to issue licenses promptly for clinics in Columbia, Kansas City, Springfield and Joplin, the Columbia Daily Tribune reports.
Planned Parenthood Great Plains submitted the applications for Columbia and Kansas City last year.
In late August, the department licensed Planned Parenthood Great Plains to operate an abortion clinic in Kansas City.
“While we wait for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services to issue Planned Parenthood Great Plains’ abortion license in Columbia, we mark a hard-fought victory for Missourians who now have one more place to access safe, legal abortion in Midtown Kansas City,” Samulcek said in a statement.
Planned Parenthood organizations that operate in Missouri said in April that they would expand abortion services to four more locations after a judge halted a state law restricting the practice.
The Missouri law required hospital admitting privileges for doctors who perform abortions and required clinics that provide abortions to meet the same standards as outpatient surgical centers. The law was similar to one in Texas that the U.S. Supreme Court struck down last June, after it sharply reduced the number of abortion providers there.
News that new abortion clinics soon will be in operation is disappointing but expected, Sam Lee, director of Campaign Life Missouri, said in the Daily Tribune report.
“The department has to comply with the court order and the attorney general worked very hard to get a stay while they were appealing the case,” Lee said. “I think the department’s hands are tied. They are sworn to uphold the law.”
Abortion - Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information 
September 13, 2017 at 6:22 pm
Boy, Kansas seems to finally be rebounding from the yahoo/teabagger element that has obtained since the 1990’s (read Thomas Franks’ “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”). The mindset that produces the so-called “pro-lifer” also produces elected officials who simply don’t know how to govern well and an electorate that doesn’t understand what good government is about.
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