AUSTIN, Texas – Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinic in Austin, Texas, is just off a freeway between a Wendy’s hamburger restaurant and a Brake Check. Visitors enter via a driveway and a parking lot designed to offer no mustering points for anti-abortion picketers.

A corridor into the building, known as the Robbie and Tom Ausley Clinic, channels visitors past plaques honoring individuals and businesses that fund the multimillion-dollar operation – which has seen a steady flow of women step through its doors over the years.

But on Friday more than one staffer at the clinic was in tears after spending a day phoning scores of patients to cancel appointments, and even turning one distraught woman away at the door.

The clinic, which is one of only six centers in Texas that provides abortions past 16 weeks of pregnancy, is now facing disaster. As a result of an emergency ruling by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that was issued late on Thursday evening, they can no longer legally provide abortions to women at any stage in their pregnancies.

That is because Planned Parenthood’s Austin clinic has only one abortion-providing physician on staff. A proviso of Texas’ new law, which a District Judge blocked as unconstitutional but which was allowed to stand last night by the Fifth Circuit, requires abortion-providing doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Planned Parenthood’s physician, who asked not to be named, has been unable to gain admitting privileges at any hospitals despite more than two months of effort.

Since clinic staff received the news that the abortion privileges requirement had gone into effect late Thursday night, they have called about 100 patients to cancel their appointments. Sarah Wheat, Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas’ spokeswoman, told Al Jazeera that patients had responded with either silence or panic. One woman had not received the message in time and was turned away in tears from the clinic this morning.

Staff are now rerouting women to one of three abortion clinics still operating in Austin, to Planned Parenthood’s surgical center in Dallas, to Houston or even out of state to New Mexico if they need an abortion past 16 weeks of pregnancy.

This has been the case across Texas after the ruling. Amy Hagstrom Miller, chief executive of abortion provider Whole Woman’s Health, said that three of her five clinics in the state had cancelled 45 appointments this morning. Fourteen patients arrived at her Fort Worth clinic today, she said, and were devastated to discover that they had no nearby options because the other two abortion providers in the city had also been unable to gain admitting privileges.