The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services has notified Planned Parenthood of St. Louis that it is “refusing to renew” the clinic’s license to perform abortions. That move, set to take effect on Friday, would mean there is no longer a single clinic in the entire state of Missouri providing safe and legal abortions.
Missouri was one of several states that recently passed a bill that would make abortions illegal so early in pregnancy that many women would not even recognize that they were pregnant. As with similar laws in Alabama and Georgia, the bill would also impose criminal penalties on both doctors and clinics that practice abortion. However, that law has not gone into effect. In fact, it’s purposely designed so that it won’t go into effect until some other state’s law breaks significant portions of Roe v. Wade. But officials in the Republican-controlled state government are making it clear that they don’t need laws to force women to seek abortions that are not safe.
According to CBS News, the Missouri health department wrote to the state’s sole remaining Planned Parenthood clinic on May 20 to tell it that the license would be cancelled because of three issues. Two of those—adding an additional pelvic exam and changing who provides mandated counseling—the clinic addressed immediately. But the third issue, a claim of unspecified “deficient practices," is something the clinic can’t address, because it doesn’t know what the issue is. And the state isn’t telling.
The health department has demanded that all seven doctors who provide any kind of care at the St. Louis clinic submit to interviews, even though five of those doctors do not actually work for Planned Parenthood. The state says it must interview all the physicians and “complete its investigation” before it can consider renewing the license. But it won’t tell Planned Parenthood what “deficiencies” it believes exist, or respond to protests from the clinic that the doctors are not its employees. All of which makes it seem that Missouri is very likely to become the first state without a single legal abortion clinic before the end of the week because … unstated reasons.
That a state with over 6 million residents was served by a single clinic on one edge of the state, hundreds of miles from many of the women who need its help, was already a tragedy. But it can get worse.
Just as in Washington, there are supposed to be checks on the authority of the department of health’s actions. But that would require someone in the state attorney general’s office to care, and Republican Eric Schmitt profoundly does not. Neither does Republican Gov. Mike Parson.
In less than a generation, Missouri has gone from a purple state, where the legislature and state officers were often split between the two parties, to a ruby-red bastion of the worst kind of conservatism, where Republicans seem to be engaged in a race to remove the joke from those who rhyme the state’s name with “misery.” Now the idea of “legal” is only as good as its support in the state capital, where Republicans only think of St. Louis and Kansas City as blue spots staining their state.
That the final bastion of safe and legal abortion—the final outpost upholding a right that the law says belongs to every woman in the state—should be on the brink of falling to a kind of faceless bureaucratic intrusion that Republicans claim to hate has a sort of ugly irony. Those who are in office to uphold the law and human rights should be screaming. But in Jefferson City, the only sound is likely to be champagne corks.