A restoration room sits empty at Alamo Girls’s Reproductive Providers, in San Antonio, Texas. The clinic closed its doorways following the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
Callaghan O’hare/Reuters
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Callaghan O’hare/Reuters
A restoration room sits empty at Alamo Girls’s Reproductive Providers, in San Antonio, Texas. The clinic closed its doorways following the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
Callaghan O’hare/Reuters
Within the 100 days for the reason that Supreme Court docket reversed Roe v. Wade, 66 clinics within the U.S. stopped offering abortion. That is in line with a new analysis printed Thursday by the Guttmacher Institute, assessing abortion entry within the 15 states that have banned or severely restricted entry to abortion.
“Previous to Roe being overturned, these 15 states had 79 clinics that offered abortion care,” says Rachel Jones, a principal analysis scientist at Guttmacher. “We discovered that 100 days later, this was right down to 13.”
All the 13 clinics nonetheless offering abortions are in Georgia, the place abortion is banned at six weeks earlier than many ladies know they’re pregnant.
Dr. Nisha Verma, an OB-GYN who practices in Georgia, mentioned she has needed to flip many sufferers away in current months.
“I’ve had youngsters with continual medical circumstances that make their being pregnant very excessive threat and ladies with extremely desired pregnancies who obtain a horrible prognosis of a fetal anomaly cry once they study that they can not obtain their abortion in our state and beg me to assist them,” she informed President Biden and members of the White Home Job Power on Reproductive Healthcare Entry this week.
“Think about trying somebody within the eye and saying, ‘I’ve all the abilities and the instruments that will help you, however our state’s politicians have informed me I am unable to,’ ” she added.
Almost 22 million – or 29% – of ladies of reproductive age reside in a state the place abortion is banned or restricted to 6 weeks gestational age, in line with the report.
Whereas 40 of the clinics in these states are nonetheless open for different companies, the Guttmacher evaluation discovered 26 clinics had utterly closed down, which implies they may by no means reopen.
“These clinics do not have employees anymore, they in all probability moved their medical provides to different amenities,” Jones explains. “So it is not like they may open their doorways tomorrow if these bans have been lifted.”
The report additionally notes that the halting of abortion companies at these clinics has a ripple impact by means of the well being care system. As sufferers journey to the states the place abortion remains to be authorized for these companies, clinics in these states are experiencing bigger affected person hundreds and sufferers face longer wait instances.
Having to journey out of state can even complicate care. This has already occurred to sufferers Dr. Sadia Haider handled in Illinois, a state surrounded by states that ban or prohibit abortion.
“I lately noticed a affected person from a Southern state with a really critical obstetric situation, an irregular placenta, [which] may cause extreme hemorrhage and morbidity if not handled appropriately,” she defined in the course of the White Home occasion this week. The affected person had already tried to get care in her personal state and elsewhere earlier than coming to Illinois.
“We have been in a position to present the care required for this affected person, which was sadly extra advanced than it wanted to be as a result of there have been a number of weeks that ensued earlier than the affected person sought care and ultimately noticed us,” Haider mentioned.
Jones and her colleagues on the Guttmacher Institute anticipate the numbers of clinic closures to develop as extra states go abortion restrictions. “[Our] estimate is that finally there’s 26 states which are going to ban abortion, and once more, we have solely received 15 at this level,” she says.
She says the subsequent states to look at – the place bans have already been applied however the place abortions are nonetheless accessible for now – are Ohio, Indiana and South Carolina.
