IL Planned Parenthood Mobile Clinic To Offer Abortion In Red States

FAIRVIEW HEIGHTS, IL — A Planned Parenthood clinic in southern Illinois is opening the agency’s first mobile clinic to provide abortion access to women and girls who live in states that have banned the procedure in all or nearly all cases.

“Our goal is to reduce the hundreds of miles that people are having to travel in order to access care … and meet them where they are,” Yamelsie Rodriguez, the president of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, told NPR.

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June and sent abortion back to the states to decide, resulting in a patchwork of laws. The procedure remains legal and the law is unchanged in Illinois, but its neighbors have some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The procedure is illegal in Missouri and Kentucky, and laws in Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin have placed extensive restrictions. Indiana has banned abortion, but the law there is being challenged on the basis of religious freedom.

The mobile clinic, which will be set up inside an RV and have exam rooms, a lab and a waiting area, will become operational this year. It will remain in Illinois, but travel close to the borders of states with restrictive abortion laws.

By the end of the year, the clinic will begin offering consultations and medication abortions to end pregnancies of up to 11 weeks gestation. Surgical abortions could be available early next year. The same protocol for medication abortions — a two-dose regimen of mifepristone and misoprostal — will be observed whether in a brick-and-mortar or mobile clinic setting.

The bricks-and-mortar Fairview Heights Planned Parenthood clinic is located just across the state line from St. Louis, Missouri. It opened in 2019 as Missouri began narrowing abortion options. The state had one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country before the Supreme Court’s decision this summer in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Women and girls in Missouri can also get abortion services at Hope Clinic for Women in Granite City, Illinois, also located just across the state line from St. Louis.

Planned Parenthood, which expects about 14,000 out-of-state patients a year will visit its mobile clinic once it is in operation, could offer more mobile units in the future, depending on the success of the concept.

Nationwide, abortion rights activists are mobilizing to overcome laws in about half of U.S. states that either outright ban or make it nearly impossible for women and girls to get abortions.

“We are all trying to work together to meet the exponential increase in the number of patients that are traveling from banned states to what we’re calling ‘haven states’ for abortion care,” Rodriguez told NPR. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment.”

Another organization, Just the Pill, headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, where abortion laws remain unchanged after the Dobbs decision, also plans to offer mobile clinic-based services to patients in Midwest and Western states.

Just the Pill is considering a range of options to offer mobile abortion services, Dr. Julie Amaon, a family practitioner who works with the organization, told Ms. Magazine.

Among the questions the organization has posed is whether a riverboat launched from a legal state such as Minnesota or Illinois could go to the federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico to open access in Southern states.

“We’re trying to think of all the things that we can do to open up access for people,” Amaon told Ms.