Abortion Provider Deployed Leaves Area Without Services
Anti-choice zealots bill abortion as a lucrative industry, but this article tells the real tale. There aren’t huge profits in abortion as the lack of providers clearly demonstrates.
According to Guttmacher, 87 percent of counties in the United States have no abortion providers. But for the other 13 percent, many are facing a serious lack of available providers, too. Many exurban and more rural areas are too far away from the larger cities to have a clinic that has a regular provider, and often clinics share providers, with one doctor traveling to multiple sites, or sometimes even multiple states, a few times a month in order to provide services to women seeking to terminate a pregnancy.
How critical has the shortage of abortion providers become? As Missouri shows us, the loss of one provider could mean the suspension of abortion services all together.
The Columbia, Missouri Planned Parenthood clinic has announced that they will no longer be able to provide abortions to the women in the area, due to the military deployment of their practitioner, who previously came to the clinic two to three times a month. Without a provider, the clinic will now have to refer women to other clinics further away, increasing the expense associated with an abortion as well as how early the abortion can be performed.
As each provider retires, is called away from his or her area, or for some other reason stops performing abortions, without newer providers to step in, the wait time for an abortion grows while schedules fill even faster, in some cases causing women to miss their ability to have a legal, early abortion all together.