Planned Parenthood mobile clinic will take abortion to red-state borders
Updated October 3, 202210:32 AM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
Sarah McCammon
With a growing number of patients in states that now prohibit abortion traveling for the procedure, Planned Parenthood says it will soon open its first mobile abortion clinic in the country, in southern Illinois.
A rendering from Planned Parenthood shows the design for a new mobile clinic expected to begin providing abortion pills in Illinois by the end of the year.
Credit: Planned Parenthood "Our goal is to reduce the hundreds of miles that people are having to travel now in order to access care...and meet them where they are," said Yamelsie Rodriguez, President of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, said in an interview with NPR.
The mobile clinic will begin offering consultations and dispensing abortion pills later this year. It will operate within Illinois, where abortion remains legal, but will be able to travel closer to neighboring states' borders, reducing the distance many patients travel for the procedure.
"It gives us a lot of flexibility about where to be," Rodriguez said.
Illinois has become a hub for people from other parts of the Midwest and South who've become unable to get abortions in their home states as a result of this summer's U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.
Anticipating that possibility, Planned Parenthood opened a large clinic in 2019 in Fairview Heights, Illinois, just across the state line from St. Louis. Missouri had some of the nation's strictest abortion laws even before the court released the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, and state officials moved almost immediately to implement abortion bans in response to it.
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https://www.npr.org/2022/10/03/1125797779/planned-parenthood-mobile-clinic-will-take-abortion-to-red-state-borders
