Courtesy of Dr. Colleen McNicholas and Planned Parenthood
“Having done this for a decade, I can tell you that white women have abortions, black women have abortions, rich women and poor women and Christian women and Muslim women and atheists,” says Dr. Colleen McNicholas, a doctor at Planned Parenthood Reproductive Health Services in the Central West End, the last clinic in the state to provide the service—and its future is in question.
Missouri is at the front lines of the abortion debate. In May, Gov. Mike Parson signed into law House Bill 126, which outlaws abortions in Missouri after eight weeks of gestation with no exceptions for rape or incest.
In June, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services announced that it was denying the clinic’s license renewal application, which would halt abortion care but would not require Planned Parenthood to close altogether. It cited “unprecedented lack of cooperation, failure to meet basic standards of patient care, and refusal to comply with state law and regulations protecting women’s health and safety.” Planned Parenthood has characterized the agency’s inquiries as “inappropriate interrogation, bordering on harassment.” DHSS director Dr. Randall Williams says the agency is simply attempting to maintain its standards of care and that the licensure decision was unrelated to the state’s new law, which goes into effect August 28.
Planned Parenthood filed suit against the DHSS, and a judge issued an order that said the clinic could continue performing abortions until Friday, when the Missouri Administrative Hearing Commission would look at the case.
On Friday, the Missouri Administrative Hearing Commission said that Planned Parenthood can keep performing abortions until Commissioner Sreenivasa Rao Dandamudi hears its case, which will begin August 1.
SLM asked McNicholas what it’s like to be one of the state’s last abortion providers.
What’s the larger significance of Missouri’s new regulations? I think what pregnant people hear is, “My state is abdicating its responsibility to actually care for me.” The broader repercussion is that we continue to hold people in this place of perpetual poverty. Abortion doesn’t exist in a silo. It exists in the context of gender and racial pay inequity. It exists in the context of childcare costing more than what you bring home if you make minimum wage. It exists in the context of Missouri having huge swaths of the state without a single obstetric provider and with Missouri being one of the worst with maternal mortality rates. In taking away that right to abortion, the state is also saying that it doesn’t understand the intersection of all of these spaces and why abortion is important for racial equity and pay equity and environmental justice and immigrant justice.
What should more people understand about your job? It is incredibly easy to demonize something that you are 100 percent disassociated with, that you have boiled down to a single political ideology. Medicine is the exact opposite of that. It is sitting with people across the spectrum of grays… I think there are attempts to simplify the work that I do to being right or wrong or this or that. But it is an honor to sit with patients in a time that can be life-altering and then to step back and see that the thing that drives that interaction is empathy.
