By Dave Andrusko
This headline will warm your heart: ‘Manhattan Planned Parenthood Will Stop Offering Abortions After 20 Weeks.” Making it better is the subhead: “The shift came as Planned Parenthood’s New York chapter revealed plans to close four clinics across the state, as financial issues mount.”
Claire Fahy’s opening paragraphs read
Planned Parenthood announced this week that its only Manhattan clinic would stop performing abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, a significant shift in a state that has maintained and even expanded access to abortion in the two years since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to the procedure.
The clinic, Planned Parenthood’s Manhattan Health Center, can no longer afford the “deep sedation” required to perform abortions beyond the 20-week mark, Wendy Stark, the president of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, said in an interview.
Is this something new? No!
“The move was the latest sign of financial struggles for Planned Parenthood’s New York chapter, which also plans to close four clinics around the state, including its sole clinic on Staten Island, Ms. [Wendy] Stark said. The chapter has already instituted executive pay cuts and consolidated job functions,” Fahy wrote.
Other abortion clinics will pick up the slack and will still offer abortion after 20 weeks, Fahy writes, but “[T]he decision by Planned Parenthood was worrisome news to those tracking abortion access across the country.
“Certainly, it’s a concern when any clinic or health care provider has to stop providing any type of abortion care,” said Rachel K. Jones, a researcher for the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights. “It’s usually not a good sign, right?”
Stark told Fahy that the financial crunch at Planned Parenthood “is the result of a widening gap between the cost of providing reproductive health care and the reimbursement offered by both private and public insurance companies.”
The story paints a picture of quarreling between Planned Parenthood and New York’s pro-abortion Gov. Kathy Hochul. “We think this is a big opportunity for New York State to step up to the plate and increase reimbursement for reproductive health services in this moment when our abortion ecosystem across the state is faltering,” Ms. Stark said.
That didn’t go over well with a spokesperson for the Governor who “pushed back against that characterization in a statement, maintaining that ‘abortion remains legal and accessible to anyone in New York.’ The governor, a Democrat, noted that she had allocated $35 million to an Abortion Provider Support Fund designed to expand access to abortion across the state.”
Planned Parenthood said they had asked the New York Legislature for $13 million in funding to be included in the state’s budget, Democrat Amy Paulin said in an interview.
The Assembly and the Senate included the funding in their budget proposals, she said, but it was not included in the final $237 billion budget.
Ms. Paulin said the legislature would have to address the Planned Parenthood funding issue when lawmakers returned to Albany in January. She said that all branches of the state government, including the governor, had actively worked to preserve abortion rights in New York.
“It’s not that we haven’t been generous and supportive,” Ms. Paulin said. “But there has been a shift that we need to now recognize.”