‘Our act of defiance’: Why Planned Parenthood is launching its 1st mobile clinic – By Gabrielle Hays (PBS Newshour) / Jan 31, 2023
ST. LOUIS – In some parts of the Midwest, access to abortion can come down to which side of a state’s border you live on. While the procedure is now banned in Missouri, it’s legal across the Mississippi River in Illinois and across its western border in Kansas. And in all three states, health care providers are trying to ensure that all those who need care can get it.
In a first for Planned Parenthood, the national health provider will open a mobile clinic at the southern Illinois border later this year. The decision to launch the expansion was based on data that projected up to 14,000 patients, including from out of state, would seek care in their service area the first year after Roe fell, a number that Planned Parenthood says they are on track to reach. It was a possibility for which they had long been preparing.
“The mobile clinic didn’t just magically exist overnight – we had been planning for a post-Roe reality for many years, to be honest,” said Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, vice president of strategy and communications at Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri.
Lee-Gilmore told the PBS NewsHour that the new mobile clinic will “roam the southern Illinois border to bring abortion care just a little bit closer to patients who were traveling further.” When it finally opens, it will start by providing medication abortion care first before later adding procedural abortion care as well.
