The violation notice is a warning shot from state officials and could set the stage for Planned Parenthood to enter a legal battle with Ohio health officials over the clinic’s ability to provide surgical abortions.
“Eventually, it could lead to that,” Rick Pender, the spokesman for the Planned Parenthood in Cincinnati, said on the possibility of the surgical clinic’s state-ordered closure. “It’s the first step to moving in that direction.”
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Controversial changes to the state law last summer have put all of the clinics in Cincinnati and Dayton in a bind and at risk for closure.
On the one hand, state law requires the clinics, and all outpatient surgery facilities, to have a written transfer agreement with a local hospital in case a patient needs emergency medical treatment during the procedure. But at the same time, state lawmakers last summer banned abortion clinics from having such agreements with hospitals that receive public funding.
“When state politicans prohibited public hospitals from having transfer agreements with abortion providers, it was yet another attempt to shut down health centers and leave women without care,” a statement released Friday from Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio read.
That forced Planned Parenthood in Cincinnati to end its longstanding agreement last September with University of Cincinnati Medical Center and unable to find a new partner. Since then, the clinic has been waiting for the state to respond to a variance request from the clinic.
Although state officials have not responded to that request, they did respond with their write-up on the clinic over the matter this month.
The state requires Planned Parenthood to respond with a plan to correct the issue noted in the inspection report or face license revocation of the clinic’s surgical abortion unit. Pender said Friday the clinic is working to respond to the state’s inspection report by next week.
But pro-life groups are hopeful the recent inspection ultimately leads to the closure of Cincinnati’s last-standing clinic, Mike Gonidakis, the president of Ohio Right to Life, said. He said the clinics in Cincinnati and Kettering are operating illegally.
“We hope this leads to the closing of that clinic and any other clinics that can’t operate legally in Ohio,” Gonidakis said.
Only two clinics — and both are at risk — remain in the Cincinnati-Dayton metropolitan area, home to roughly 3 million people.
Earlier this summer, the owners of Women’s Med Center in Sharonville decided to stop providing surgical abortions at the facility after fighting in the courts with state officials for most of the year. At issue was the clinic’s inability to secure a written transfer agreement with any local hospitals.
Ohio is now down to 8 abortion clinics; six have closed either voluntarily or under state orders since Gov. John Kasich took office in 2011.
State officials are closing in on clinics in Cincinnati, Dayton and Toledo, said Kellie Copeland, the director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio.
“I think those are the ones that are clearly being targeted by the Ohio Department of Health,” Copeland said.
Planned Parenthood in Cincinnati performed more than 2,600 abortion surgeries from June 2013 to June 2014.
Pender said said his office has seen an uptick in patients seeking surgical abortions since the Sharonville clinic stopped performing the procedure in August.
The state has made a habit of leaving abortion clinics in limbo during recent months, according to health department records. This newspaper’s exclusive investigation found nearly all of Ohio’s were operating unlicensed, because state officials had failed to renew the abortion clinics’ licenses or issue reports following inspections.The state took four months to respond to its most recent inspection of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Cincinnati.
The Women’s Med Center in Kettering, owned by the same doctor who ran the Sharonville clinic, has also been waiting for more than a year to get a state response to the clinic’s requested variance to the transfer agreement requirement.
The Kettering clinic has proposed using back-up doctors with admitting privileges to local hospitals as an alternative to the law. Women’s Med Center was also written up during a state inspection in April 2013 for not having a transfer agreement, according to state records,but the state did not immediately move to close the clinic.
An attorney for the Dayton clinic did not immediately return phone calls Friday.
Ohio Department of Health Spokeswoman Melanie Amato confirmed no decision had been made, as of Friday afternoon, on either clinic’s request for a variance to the law.
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