A hearing is underway in Missouri over the fate of the state’s lone abortion clinic, pitting Planned Parenthood against state officials who have refused to renew the clinic’s license.
The hearing began Monday morning and could make Missouri the only state in the country without a legal abortion clinic if health officials prevail.
The licensing issue at the embattled Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region has created so much tension, Missouri officials asked St. Louis police for added security ahead of the start of the hearing, the Associated Press reported.
The hearing, which is taking place at a state office building in downtown St. Louis and is being led by a state arbiter, is expected to last for five days, although a ruling is not anticipated until February at the earliest.
Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.
It’s the latest development in a protracted legal battle over the clinic’s potential closure. At the heart of the hearing is whether Planned Parenthood can maintain its abortion license at the St. Louis clinic after the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services declined to renew it.
The health department first decided not to issue a renewal as of June 1 after an inspection in March found problems, including “at least one incident in which patient safety was gravely compromised,” “failed surgical abortions in which women remained pregnant,” and an alleged failure to obtain “informed consent.”
Planned Parenthood has said it addressed those concerns months ago and argues the licensing battle is part of a broader anti-abortion push by the state’s administration. In May, Missouri’s Republican Gov. Mike Parson signed a bill banning abortions on or beyond the eighth week of pregnancy without exceptions in cases of rape or incest — one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bills.
Commissioner Sreenivasa Rao Dandamudi of the state’s Administrative Hearing Commission is presiding over this week’s hearing, and will act as an “independent trial judge,” a commission official told the AP.
Planned Parenthood initially challenged the case in a St. Louis Circuit Court, where a judge sided with the clinic but kicked the legal battle to the Administrative Hearing Commission. The commission granted a stay that allowed the clinic to continue providing abortions until the hearing.
During the hearing, the state will call three physician witnesses, which Planned Parenthood Advocates in Missouri referred to in a statement as “experts in anti-abortion advocacy dressed up as misleading medical jargon.”
“The State is calling them because they support the coordinated effort to ban safe, legal abortion in Missouri,” it said ahead of the hearing.
Missouri is one of six states that has only one abortion clinic. The other five states are Kentucky, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota and West Virginia, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights.
The licensing fight comes amid a slew of recent anti-abortion legislation across the country, including a near-total ban on abortions in Alabama. Organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union are suing to block the bans, which they say are unconstitutional under the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision that federally legalized abortion.
