Dr. Erin King, the executive director of the Hope Clinic for Women in Illinois, said her center was being inundated with calls from women seeking abortion care.

GRANITE CITY, ILLINOIS ― The phone did not stop ringing all day at Hope Clinic for Women, an abortion clinic in Illinois located just over the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri.

The callers wanted to know: Was abortion still legal? Could they please come in for an appointment? And how soon?

“People are frantic because they don’t understand what’s happening,” said Erin King, an OB-GYN and the executive director of Hope Clinic for Women. “They’re panicked. You can hear their stress level.”

In Missouri, the only remaining abortion clinic is expected to shutter its doors at the end of the week, handing the anti-abortion movement a victory of epic proportions. For the first time since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, Missouri will become the only state in the U.S. where women cannot access legal abortions.

And so Hope Clinic, positioned across state lines but just 10 minutes from downtown St. Louis, was bracing for an influx of patients.

Already, more than 50 percent of the women the clinic serves come from Missouri. Many travel to Illinois to circumvent Missouri’s onerous regulations, which can be both costly and emotionally taxing. In Missouri, a woman who wants an abortion must travel to the one remaining clinic, provide informed consent, wait 72 hours before her procedure, and undergo a pelvic exam even if she is having a medication abortion. That last requirement is at odds with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which says the decision should be left up to the provider.

In past years, as the number of abortions in Missouri has decreased, Illinois has provided more and more care to out-of-state patients. Now, King was trying to work out how they could accommodate an even larger volume.

“Obviously our first concern is the patients,” she said. “We are looking at having extra staff, expanding our clinic hours, and looking at our schedule to see what we can do.”

The news of the potential closure comes days after Missouri Gov. Mike Parson signed a bill that bans abortion at eight weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Similar bills have passed in Georgia, Ohio, Kentucky and Mississippi this year; Alabama went further, virtually outlawing abortion outright. On Wednesday, Louisiana sent a six-week abortion ban to the governor’s desk. None of the bills have gone into effect, and all are expected to face legal challenges.

Missouri’s eight-week ban blatantly violates past Supreme Court decisions that say abortion is legal until a fetus reaches viability. But it’s not the reason the last standing abortion clinic in the state, located in St. Louis, is poised to close.

Instead, it was plain old bureaucracy.



On Tuesday, Planned Parenthood announced that Missouri’s health department said it will not renew the clinic’s annual license because it is violating state regulations. Planned Parenthood says many of the regulations are arbitrary and medically unnecessary, and are being used to harass providers and make it nearly impossible to access abortion.

