One Less Clinic, PTL

The sole abortion clinic in Springfield, MO, has closed, leaving southwest Missouri without an abortion provider. The board of Springfield Healthcare Center voted Oct. 19 to cease operations, the Springfield News-Leader reported. Clinic administrator Michelle Turner-Collins denied the decision was based on a new state law restricting abortion or on threats, a poor safety record, or finances, according to the newspaper.

Turner-Collins told the News-Leader, however, “They’re saying that the environment here in Missouri is so hostile that it’s just so difficult to continue to jump through the hoops that they keep putting forward.”

A new Missouri law, which has been temporarily barred from enforcement, requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic, according to the News-Leader. The doctor at the Springfield clinic did not have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, the newspaper reported.

The clinic asked 10 to 15 doctors in Springfield, as well as some outside the city, to perform abortions, but all rejected the requests, Turner-Collins told the newspaper.

“Wow,” Dave Plemmons, chairman of the Springfield chapter of Missouri Right to Life, told the News-Leader when he learned of the clinic’s closing. “They’re tired of fighting. We’re really pleased. We consider this a big blessing, for whatever reason it occurred.”

The nearest abortion clinics for women in southwest Missouri now are in St. Louis; Columbia; Fayetteville, AR; Wichita, KN; and Overland Park, KN, a suburb of Kansas City.

The Springfield clinic’s closing continues a trend that has occurred for more than two decades. Since 1982, the number of sites providing abortions has been declining. As of 2000, there were 1,819 abortion providers, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute. In the same year, 87% of United States counties did not have an abortion provider, AGI reported.