Senate testimony: Illinois abortion clinic sees surge in patients after Missouri ban

Testifying before a U.S. Senate committee Tuesday, a top Planned Parenthood official said the organization’s abortion clinic in southern Illinois has seen its number of appointments triple in the wake of Missouri’s ban on abortion.

“Since ceasing abortion care at our health center in St. Louis, which was the last remaining abortion clinic in Missouri, our health center in Illinois just across the Mississippi River has cared for patients who have traveled as far as 1,000 miles each way,” Colleen P. McNicholas, the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Each one of those patients has told me they had no choice but to travel hours and hours for care. Almost overnight, our Illinois clinic has seen appointments triple and that’s already on top of a double booked schedule we were sustaining in the wake of Texas and Oklahoma’s abortion bans,” McNicholas said during a hearing about the consequences of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

McNicholas, who practices at clinics in St. Louis and Fairview Heights, Illinois, attributed the surge of new patients at the southern Illinois clinic to the Supreme Court ruling and the enactment of Missouri’s trigger ban.

“I practice in Missouri and Illinois, two states where people are living such vastly different realities that it should be considered by each one of you to be un-American,” she told the committee.

McNicholas criticized Missouri’s abortion ban, which bans the procedure in nearly all circumstances except for a medical emergency. She painted the emergency exemption as an unnecessary hurdle for medical providers. It will force doctors to wait for permission from lawyers before providing an abortion that will save a woman’s life, she said.

“Doctors must now contemplate how sick is sick enough before providing life-saving abortion care,” she said. “In some circumstances, the abortion care will come too late. Not only is this agenda unpopular, it is deeply anti-life.”

Missouri’s abortion ban offers two scenarios where an abortion is considered legal: a patient’s imminent death, or the destruction of a “major bodily function” by letting the pregnancy continue. Under the law, a doctor who provides an abortion considered illegal could be subject to a class B felony, as well as the suspension or revocation of their professional license. A class B felony is punishable by 5 to 15 years in prison.

“The Supreme Court’s decision has already pushed people, the people each one of you represents, into extreme and sometimes dangerous circumstances.”

Sen. Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who chairs committee, said the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade made women “second class citizens.” The goal of the hearing was to examine the consequences of the court’s decision, he said.

“In overturning Roe, the Supreme Court has unleashed a health care crisis across America,” he said. “Make no mistake, women’s health, and in some cases their lives, are at risk.”

During the hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, asked each person who testified whether they condemned threats against Supreme Court justices and acts of violence against anti-abortion organizations in the wake of the ruling.

McNicholas, in response, read aloud names of doctors and other abortion providers who have been killed. She said she would “absolutely condemn violence against everyone, including abortion providers.”

The other witnesses who testified at the hearing were Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton; Khiara Bridges, a law professor at The University of California, Berkeley, School of Law; Denise Harle, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom in Florida; and Heidi Matzke, executive director of Alternatives Pregnancy Center in California.

McNicholas said that banning abortion without passing policies that address childcare costs, paid family leave or formula shortages will cost lives. She said the state’s abortion ban will hurt Black women and pointed to July 2021 report that Black women living in Missouri were four times more likely to die within one year of pregnancy than white women.

“Senators, I come before you tired, frustrated and angry,” she said. “We deserve better. We need action and we need it now. We’re out of time.”