The only remaining women’s clinic in Cincinnati that provides abortions will stay open, for now at least.
A federal judge today issued an injunction allowing Planned Parenthood’s Elizabeth Campbell Medical Center, a women’s clinic that provides abortions in Mount Auburn, to stay open until next year as it fights Ohio’s abortion laws and appeals a decision by the Ohio Department of Health declining to renew its license.
Planned Parenthood is fighting a federal court case over restrictive new laws in Ohio that have pushed the clinic, and another in Dayton, to the brink of closure. A federal judge ruled that the clinics have a good chance of winning their case, and thus forbade Ohio from forcing them to close.
Today’s ruling extends a temporary stay on the clinics’ closure a federal judge handed down late last month. That stay was set to expire today. The clinic was denied a license last month after new rules passed in Ohio’s budget legislation this summer mandated a clinic close if the Ohio Department of Health did not issue a license within 60 days of receiving an application. In the past, the Mount Auburn clinic waited more than a year to receive license renewals.
“Today, the court ruled in favor of Ohio women, ensuring access to safe and legal abortion,” said Jerry Lawson, CEO of Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio in a statement. “This sends an important message to Ohio politicians that their unconstitutional attempts to restrict access to abortion will not stand. Patient safety is our top priority. We will continue to stand up for Ohio women who rely on Planned Parenthood for the care they need.”
The clinic, and another facility called Women’s Med Clinic in Dayton, found themselves facing imminent closure due to increasingly strict Ohio laws around abortion. Ohio law requires clinics to have transfer agreements with local hospitals in case patients need emergency care. But in 2013, the state passed a law forbidding state-funded hospitals from entering into those transfer agreements, ending a partnership between the Mount Auburn clinic and UC Medical Center. No private hospital in the city will enter into an agreement with an abortion clinic, but clinics who have physicians with individual admitting privileges at local hospitals can apply for a variance to the laws. The Planned Parenthood facility in Mount Auburn had been operating under a license obtained with those variances until the new laws were passed this summer.
Conservative lawmakers say the laws exist to ensure the safety of women using the clinics, though some also acknowledge they’re designed to cut down the number of abortions in the the state. Ohio has gone from 14 clinics to just nine since the new, more restrictive laws are passed, and pending the results of the federal case Planned Parenthood is currently fighting against the new laws, Cincinnati and Dayton’s clinics could also close. The elimination of the Mount Auburn clinic would make Cincinnati the largest metropolitan area in the country without direct access to abortion.
This article appears in Oct 7-13, 2015.