Missouri Planned Parenthood Clinic Can Provide Abortions, For Now

ST. LOUIS, MO — A judge said Friday that Missouri's only remaining abortion clinic can continue operating for now, despite the objections of state health officials. The clinic in St. Louis was threatened with closure just days after Missouri Gov. Mike Parson signed one of the country’s most extreme abortion bans into law.

State regulators had declined to renew the St. Louis clinic’s annual license, despite the fact that the law banning abortions after eight weeks of pregnancy doesn't take effect until late August. With the clinic's license set to expire at midnight Friday, St. Louis Circuit Judge Michael Stelzer said the temporary restraining order was necessary to "prevent irreparable injury" to Planned Parenthood.

The decision gives abortion-rights advocates a courtroom victory after a string of setbacks in state legislatures around the United States.The license will remain in effect until a ruling is issued on Planned Parenthood's request for a permanent injunction.

A hearing is set for Tuesday morning. Read the ruling.

Without court intervention, Missouri would have become the first state without an abortion clinic since the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade made abortion a constitutional right. Missouri is currently one of six states with only one abortion clinic. Others are in Kentucky, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota and West Virginia.

Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region filed the request for an injunction Tuesday Circuit Court of St. Louis to keep the clinic open.

“This is not a drill. This is not a warning. This is a real public health crisis. This week, Missouri would be the first state in the country to go dark — without a health center that provides safe, legal abortion care,” Dr. Leana Wen, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement. “More than a million women of reproductive age in Missouri will no longer have access to a health center in the state they live in that provides abortion care.”

The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services told Planned Parenthood it was investigating “a large number of deficiencies” and wanted to interview seven physicians at the clinic, The Associated Press reported. The interviews were to take place Tuesday, but Planned Parenthood said only two staff physicians agreed to be interviewed.

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Planned Parenthood said the clinic “has maintained 100 percent compliance, as required by law, every year — a higher standard than is required by any other health center in the state.”

If the clinic is shuttered, the nearest clinics for Missouri women would be in a Kansas suburb of Kansas City and Granite City, Illinois.

Wen said Missouri has "illegally weaponized the licensing process."

“This is the world that the Trump administration and Republican public officials across the country have been pushing for — a world where abortion care is illegal and inaccessible in this country,” Wen said in the statement. “These politicians are passing law after law to intimidate women — including laws that would allow women to be investigated for miscarriages —and criminalize doctors — including the law just signed in Alabama that could impose a life sentence on doctors.”

Colleen McNicholas, an OB-GYN at the Planned Parenthood office in St. Louis, called it the "natural consequence of several decades of restriction after restriction."

"This is precisely what we've been warning of," McNicholas said.

Missouri Law Designed To Withstand Challenge

The newly signed Missouri Stands for the Unborn Act offers no exceptions for rape or incest. It carries a 15-year prison sentence for anyone convicted of performing an abortion after eight weeks, before many women know they’re pregnant. Similarly restrictive bills have been passed in Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Ohio, where lawmakers crafted legislation to trigger a Supreme Court challenge of Roe.

Missouri’s law is a bit different, and is intended to withstand court challenges instead of spark them. If the eight-week ban is struck down, the bill includes a ladder of less-restrictive time limits at 14, 18 or 20 weeks. The state already had some of the most restrictive abortion restrictions in the cuntry, including a requirement that doctors performing abortions have partnerships with nearby hospitals.

A total of 3,903 abortions occurred in Missouri in 2017, the last full year for which the state Department of Health and Senior Services has statistics online. Of those, 1,673 occurred at under nine weeks and 119 occurred at 20 weeks or later in a pregnancy.

Abortions declined to 2,910 in 2018 in Missouri, according to provisional data provided by state public health officials. That includes 433 abortions at eight weeks of pregnancy and 267 at six weeks or earlier.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri is seeking a statewide vote on Missouri's new abortion law. The ACLU said Tuesday that it has submitted a referendum petition to the secretary of state's office as a first step toward blocking and potentially repealing the law.

If the petition is approved for circulation, the ACLU would need to gather more than 100,000 signatures to block the law from taking effect on Aug. 28 and force a referendum in 2020.

A similar tactic was used in 2017, when opponents of a law limiting union powers submitted enough signatures to block it from taking effect. Missouri voters overwhelmingly rejected that law in 2018.

Supreme Court Sends Divided Message

More than 250 bills restricting abortions were filed in 41 states this year, according to the reproductive rights research and advocacy group the Guttmcher Institute. Abortion foes see their best chance in years to overturn Roe with President Trump’s appointment of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.

The Supreme Court sent a divided message on abortion in an Indiana case Tuesday, upholding a block on a law prohibiting abortions based solely by race, sex or disability, but allowing a section of the law that requires clinics to bury or cremate fetal remains to take effect.

The court’s decision not to take up the more controversial aspects of the law, passed in 2016 when Vice President Mike Pence was governor of Indiana, is an indication that even with the appointment of Gorsuch and Kavanugh, the court not interested in upending the two core precedents — Roe and a 1992 case, Casey v. Planned Parenthood. In the seminal Casey case, the court held that states have an interest in potential life and can impose regulations on abortions from the moment of conception.

The legislation only needed to be rationally related to the state's interest in the proper disposal of the remains and Indiana met that burden, the court said.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who supports overturning the Roe v. Wade decision, wrote a 20-page opinion that sought to link birth control and abortion to eugenics, the now-discredited movement to improve the human race through selective reproduction.

The Indiana provision promotes "a state's compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics," Thomas wrote.

"Although the court declines to wade into these issues today, we cannot avoid them forever," he wrote. No other justice joined Thomas' opinion.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.