photo credit: Operation Rescue |
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.”