BY: GRACE HILLS
Kansas Reflector
PITTSBURG — A new Planned Parenthood clinic in southeast Kansas will be the closest abortion access point for many people in the South and will provide easier access to reproductive health care for southeast Kansans who previously had to travel to Overland Park.
The center, which opens Monday in Pittsburg, expects to have patients from six states in its first five days — Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana.
Kansas saw a 369% increase in abortions in 2023, with 69% of patients coming from out of state, according to the Guttmacher Institute. For the Trust Women Clinic in Wichita, which was previously the closest city for abortion access for Southern states, 81% of patients were from out of state, with Texas the most common homestate, followed by Oklahoma.
Texas and Oklahoma have total abortion bans, with few exceptions. Southern states have six-week abortion bans. On average, pregnant people know they are pregnant after 5.2 weeks for intendent pregnancies and 7.2 weeks for unintended pregnancies, the National Library of Medicine found.
The Pittsburg clinic will offer medication abortions for up to 11 weeks of pregnancy, and surgical abortions for 14-15 weeks of pregnancy.
But, there will be a delay before the clinic offers surgical care.
“We have excellent trained staff to offer this care,” said Planned Parenthood Great Plains president and CEO Emily Wales. “But we also know it’s a transition for the community and for us to launch a new center here, so it’ll probably be a little bit of time before we’re offering procedural care.”
Why Pittsburg?
Wales said a key factor in the Pittsburg location was access to Southern states.
And she pointed out that Kansas already is well versed in providing abortion care to people from Missouri and other states. Pittsburg is about five miles from the Missouri border.
A 2018 law in Missouri banned abortion after 15 weeks, meaning Kansas had been absorbing Missouri patients for four years before the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.
The 2022 Dobbs decision felt like “dominos falling,” Wales said.
“We are doing everything we can to meet the need,” Wales said. “But we’re also not trying to hide the fact that there are far more people calling than we can actually get in.”
Wales also said there was a need for the services Planned Parenthood offers — which go beyond abortion care — in southeast Kansas. Patients from the Pittsburg area were traveling roughly two hours to Overland Park to receive care.
While more than 60% of Crawford County voters in 2020 supported Donald Trump, the president who packed the Supreme Court with anti-abortion justices, they voted against the proposed constitutional amendment that would have removed the right to terminate a pregnancy in Kansas.
Logan Rink, a Pittsburg native and the health care manager of the Pittsburg clinic, said she has heard positive feedback from the community. She said Planned Parenthood will meet needs that weren’t being met, and that the community views it as a great resource.
Anti-abortion protesters frequent the other Planned Parenthood locations in Kansas, attempting to stop patients from receiving an abortion.
Wales said Planned Parenthood typically sees protests when it opens a new location, but they “die down after a while.”
Members of Lighthouse church, a nondenominational anti-abortion Christian church in Pittsburg spoke in opposition of the clinic at the May 28 city commission meeting.
“I know this is a major issue in our culture, abortion, but the reality is there’s no safe abortions because you start out with two lives and you end with one life,” said Pittsburg resident Shawn Osbeen.
Another resident, Susan Powers, also opposed the clinic, but she said this “may be a wakeup call” for the church and community to provide more support for pregnant people.
The commissioners stayed neutral on the opening of the clinic.
In 2009 in Wichita, George Tiller, one of only a few doctors in the nation who performed late-term abortions, was murdered in the foyer of his church. Planned Parenthood has a rigid security protocol in place, with security officers on site, but the shadow of Tiller’s death remains.
“The time it comes up the most, really, is when we are talking to potential providers or physicians who might be interested in staff roles,” Wales said. “They have questions about what the communities are like, what the protesters are like. We are fortunate to have not had that kind of violence at our health centers.”
Patients from the South
The National Library of Medicine found that people from a lower socioeconomic status are more likely to receive an abortion, and extra time away from work adds up. For patients traveling from the South, the Pittsburg clinic will be more than two hours closer than clinics in Wichita.
“If we can cut off two hours one way, then two hours coming home, that’s a tremendous difference for a lot of our patients,” Wales said.
Planned Parenthood provides assistance to patients who need it. Before Dobbs, 80% of its patients didn’t need assistance, and 20% did. Now, Wales said, the percentages have flipped and the assistance they provide looks “entirely different.”
“So many people now have to go so far from home,” Wales said. “People could maybe get two hours from home, but telling patients it’s going to be 10 or 12 hours is impossible for a lot of people.”
Wales sees a perception that patients believe they can’t travel or talk about abortion. She says they worry about what would happen to their kids, their partners, and their careers.
Issues to watch
Vice President Kamala Harris has made abortion access a cornerstone of her presidential campaign, and if elected she has promised to codify Roe v. Wade, which would legalize abortion nationally.
Missourians will vote on their abortion rights in November. Each time abortion rights are placed on local ballots, the right to choose an abortion has won.
But, even if the movement to secure abortion rights prevails in November, access for every American would take decades, Wales said.
There are multiple lawsuits and legislation in Kansas attempting to restrict abortion access, despite Kansans rejecting the proposed constitutional amendment to eliminate abortion rights in 2022. Planned Parenthood has fought back on these attempts.
“Kansans are saying we want medical care to be private, and not in the hands of the Legislature,” Wales said. “The state passed additional requirements this year where we would have to ask patients invasive and shaming questions that have nothing to do with why they get care or how we deliver care. And so we are challenging that on behalf of our patients.”