March 19, 2021

As St. Louis Planned Parenthood Resumes Abortions, Facility Hospitalizes 77th Patient

photo credit: Operation Rescue
Shortly after it began offering abortions again, Operation Rescue documented the 77th time the St. Louis Planned Parenthood hospitalized one of its patients.

A new video recording obtained by Operation Rescue shows a woman covered with a sheet lying on a gurney as she is loaded into a St. Louis Fire Department ambulance parked near the Planned Parenthood facility’s front door. This incident occurred on March 15, 2021.


In January, Operation Rescue published a report noting that Missouri was an abortion-free state. The Reproductive Health Services (RHS) Planned Parenthood facility in St. Louis is the only abortion clinic in Missouri, but at the time it was not offering abortion to patients. Instead, the facility was presumably referring patients to the Planned Parenthood "mega-clinic" in Fairview Heights, Illinois. In response to that report, the St. Louis clinic resumed abortions on a limited basis.

RHS Planned Parenthood faced the threat of closure in 2019 after an investigation by the Missouri Department of Health and Human Services moved to revoke its license. That investigation found that four women who had botched abortions at RHS Planned Parenthood suffered life-threatening injuries. In May 2020, however, Missouri Administrative Court Commissioner Sreenivasa Rao Dandamudi issued a ruling that allowed the facility to stay open despite its clear record of harming women.

“There is no reason to allow the dangerous St. Louis Planned Parenthood to continue harming women. It should have been shut down in 2019 when the state found it was too dangerous to operate. That Planned Parenthood is no better than a back-alley chop shop,” said Operation Rescue President Troy Newman. “If future performance can be predicted on past behavior, I guarantee this will not be the last woman harmed by RHS Planned Parenthood, as long as the state allows it to stay open, and that poses an unacceptable danger to the public.”