Abortion offered via telemedicine at Kansas Planned Parenthoods
A Planned Parenthood affiliate this week began providing abortion-inducing pills using telemedicine to help increase the number of patients treated in mostly rural clinics.
A Kansas judge in November blocked a law disallowing abortions via telemedicine visits. Three weeks after the ruling, Kansas clinics within the Planned Parenthood Great Plains offered abortion care using telemedicine. That relieves an overstressed medical ecosystem that provides more than just abortions.
Kansas certainly isn’t the first or only state to offer abortion care using telemedicine, but Kansas is a crucial hub for anyone in the Plains seeking abortion. Kansas is nearly surrounded by states that have banned the practice, and Planned Parenthood’s decision to provide these services comes as the country as a whole grapples with the fallout of a Supreme Court ruling that removed long-standing federal abortion protection.
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Planned Parenthood Great Plains President and CEO Emily Wales said they are starting small, with just three patients seen via telemedicine Monday. She said there’s no hard benchmark for success because they need all the capacity they can get.
“We have such overwhelming need. We are not able to see the majority of people who are calling us right now,” Wales said. “And that hurts to say out loud.”
She said they see patients from all over their region, but people also travel from as far away as South Texas and Louisiana.
“Kansas is pretty critical for abortion access in the country,” said Elizabeth Nash, a state policy analyst with the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights research group. “If you could relieve pressure on capacity via telehealth, that’s incredibly important.”
Wales said a lack of consistent staffing means the clinic in Wichita only provides abortions two or three days a week. The clinics around Kansas City offer more consistent care, but it’s not enough for a state that people throughout the region depend on for abortion.
Wales said she hasn’t interviewed one prospective abortion provider who hasn’t asked her about security. That’s especially poignant in Kansas. In 2009, an antiabortion extremist killed physician George Tiller, who ran an abortion clinic in Wichita and was one of the only doctors in the country to perform late-term abortions.
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Kansans for Life, a politically influential antiabortion group, called the move this week by Planned Parenthood a “dark announcement” just days before Christmas.
“This time, abortionists are heartlessly pursuing their goal to perform larger numbers of abortions by withholding direct and needed physical care of an onsite physician,” wrote Danielle Underwood, the group’s director of communications, in a news release.
A fact check from the Associated Press found that abortion pills are safe.
An investigation by The Washington Post explored how — after June, when the nation’s highest court removed long-standing federal abortion protections — tens of thousands of people without access to legal abortions were accessing a covert network to get abortion pills from Mexico.
Nash, the analyst, said there are 17 states that allow abortion and have a ban on administering the procedure via telemedicine — including Kansas’ neighboring states of Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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