CLOSED:
• Center for Women’s Health in Cleveland was closed by its owner in fall 2013, and anti-abortion activists credited effects of a relatively new law limiting access to abortion if a fetus could survive outside the womb, saying the measure had cut into the facility’s business.
• Center for Choice in Toledo closed in summer 2013 because it had trouble getting a patient transfer agreement with a local hospital as required by the state.
• Capital Care Network in Lima, which offered non-surgical abortions, closed in 2013, The Lima News reported.
• A Capital Care Network facility in Columbus closed in summer 2012, when a spokeswoman told The Columbus Dispatch that Capital Care was taking over management of the Founder’s Women’s Health Center.
CURTAILED ABORTION SERVICES:
• Lebanon Road Surgery Center, in the Cincinnati suburb of Sharonville, offers drug-induced abortions but stopped providing surgical abortions in August after the state revoked its license and questioned whether it properly followed rules on providing backup care for patients.
• Complete Healthcare for Women, in Columbus, also known as the Cleveland Avenue Professional Center, stopped offering surgical abortions in August in what appeared to be a voluntary change, and a worker told The Columbus Dispatch the office would continue providing other services.
• Northeast Ohio Women’s Center, which offers abortion-inducing drugs at the site of the now-closed Capital Care Network in Cuyahoga Falls. Before it was shuttered in 2013 due to a number of staffing, safety and sanitary violations discovered by state inspectors, Capital Care offered full abortion services. Northeast Ohio Women’s Center is currently seeking to add a surgical facility license to its pill-only offerings.
REMAIN OPEN:
• Akron Women’s Medical Group
• Planned Parenthood’s Bedford Heights Health Center
• Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region in Cincinnati
• Preterm in Cleveland
• Founder’s Women’s Health Center in Columbus
• Planned Parenthood East Columbus Health Center
• Women’s Med Center of Dayton
• Capital Care Network of Toledo, which is in a legal battle with the state over its patient transfer agreement with a Michigan hospital.
• Cleveland Women’s Medical Group in Shaker Heights, a drug-induced abortion provider that operated as Cleveland Surgi-Center at a different address in Cleveland until summer 2014, when its director says it was forced to move after a change in building ownership.
Sources: Ohio Department of Health, NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, Ohio Right to Life, AP research.
The number of abortion providers in Ohio has shrunk by half amid a flurry of restrictive new laws over the past four years, and the number of the procedures also is declining, according to a review of records by The Associated Press.
Both sides agree the added limits and hurdles placed on Ohio abortions have played a role in facility closures reaching to every corner of the nation’s 7th most populous state. What is less clear is whether the downward trajectory in procedures is a cause or an effect of some of the most significantly reduced abortion access in the nation.
Seven of 16 Ohio abortion providers have either closed since 2011 or curtailed abortion offerings, while an eighth, in Toledo, is operating under the cloud of pending litigation, according to AP interviews and examinations of state licensing and business records.
The plunge places Ohio second in closures nationally, behind Texas, where 17 of 40 providers have stopped operating since 2011. The recent shuttering of two of 20 abortion providers in Virginia is widely considered the third most significant example, since one of the facilities was the state’s busiest. Both states also have tightened abortion laws.
Ohio saw induced abortions fall from 25,473 in 2012 to 23,216 in 2013 — a period when 5 of the 7 affected providers closed or curtailed services — state figures show. That was the lowest level recorded since the state began tracking the data in 1976, and part of a general downward trend that began in the late 1990s.
Locally, women here have less access to facilities that provide surgical abortions in recent months.
Lebanon Road Surgery Center, also known as Women’s Med Center, in Sharonville put a stop to surgical abortions in August. The decision to halt the surgeries followed a lengthy court battle with the state. The state had ordered the clinic to shut down because it didn’t have an emergency patient transfer agreement with a local hospital.
“The reason for this decision is to allow Women’s Med Center and it’s doctors to focus on medical care for it’s patients, not litigation,” Dorothea Langsam, an attorney representing the clinic, told reporters at a news conference last summer.
Months later, Planned Parenthood - Southwest Ohio Region, seemed fated to a similar end when the Ohio Department of Health’s director warned the center it was at risk for closure over the patient transfer agreement issue. The clinic countered with a lawsuit and officials agreed to allow the clinic to continue surgical abortions in November.
The Dayton area’s only abortion clinic, Women’s Med Center in Kettering, is also operating without a patient transfer agreement but remains active, according to the state’s website.
Abortion foes call the decisions of Ohio facilities to curtail their services a victory to their strategy, which has increasingly used sophisticated outreach and incremental legislative proposals.
Ohio Right to Life President Mike Gonidakis says expanded access to health care for the poor and to crisis pregnancy counseling is also helping push abortions down.
“Our society’s changing,” he said. “More and more women are choosing life.”
Abortion rights advocates, however, say Ohio has passed so many limits on the procedure that many people who want an abortion can’t get one.
NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio executive director Kellie Copeland says her organization has collected many stories of Ohio women must drive long distances or leave the state to get abortions. After a clinic in Lima closed, for example, residents there would have to drive about an hour to Toledo or Dayton or make a trek to neighboring Indiana to find an open clinic.
Ohio’s reputation as a politically purple state doesn’t apply to abortion, said Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues associate for the abortion-rights nonprofit Guttmacher Institute.
“It’s one of the states people look to, to see what the next restriction is going to look like,” she said.
Since 2011, when Republicans reclaimed both chambers of the Legislature and GOP Gov. John Kasich succeeded a Democrat, laws have passed banning all abortions after a fetus is deemed viable outside the womb; requiring women to undergo an ultrasound and listen to the fetal heartbeat before an abortion; and making it difficult or impossible to get the hospital transfer agreement required to operate a legal abortion clinic.
Ohio Right to Life and its allies have announced plans to introduce additional restrictions. A twice-defeated “heartbeat bill” backed by a separate group, which would effectively ban abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy, also has been reintroduced.
Tamara Mann, of Columbus, learned at 13 weeks that her fetus wasn’t viable. It was a wanted pregnancy for the woman in her 30s, she says.
Mann said Ohio’s restrictive climate added hurdles to the already heartbreaking process of undergoing a D&C, or dilation and curettage, which she undertook after consultation with multiple doctors and three rabbis.
“I had a fetal heartbeat and it was very, very hard to get medical attention in Ohio,” she said. “Everyone agreed that I should have the D&C, but my insurance companies treated it as an optional abortion until I fought against it, and the state forced me through this entire informed consent issue, which was very challenging.”
Mann describes her experience as “a complicated miscarriage” — saying the stigma and pre-conceived notions attached to abortion hinder productive debate.
Copeland rejects the suggestion that a reduced demand for abortions is prompting the supply of Ohio abortion facilities to shrink.
“These laws have all been about creating these false hurdles for clinics to have to jump through in order to provide safe, legal abortion care to their patients,” she said.
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