The license was awarded to Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri, for a Kansas City-area clinic, the largest in the state. The other two providers, which previously said they were unable to meet the requirements, will be in federal court on Friday to seek an injunction to keep the law from taking effect.
“Notwithstanding that the regulations are burdensome and unnecessary, the findings of the inspection indicate what we have known and said throughout this process: Planned Parenthood operates with the highest standards of patient care and has rigorous safety procedures in place,” Peter B. Brownlie, president of the organization, said in a statement.
Part of a sweeping set of abortion limits approved this year, the regulations dictate the size of rooms, the stocking of emergency equipment, medication and blood supplies, and ties to nearby hospitals. They were formally issued in June and approved Thursday, allowing little time for the clinics to meet requirements they described as unnecessarily onerous.
Abortion opponents argued that the limits were necessary to ensure that basic medical standards were met for the safety of women. “The government has a right to demand a certain amount of protection for patients, so I have every confidence that these laws will be upheld,” said David Gittrich, development director for Kansans for Life, which lobbied for the regulations.
Though leaders at Planned Parenthood had maintained that they could meet the regulations, the license was denied earlier in the week by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. That decision was reversed after another inspection on Thursday, after the clinic secured additional equipment and made procedural changes required under the rules. A lawsuit the organization filed challenging the denial will be withdrawn, Mr. Brownlie said.
If the other two Kansas City-area clinics close, Kansas will join two other states, South Dakota and Mississippi, that have just one abortion provider, according to a spokeswoman for the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion statistics. “It will be very difficult for us to accommodate the volume of people they’re seeing,” Mr. Brownlie said.
In another challenge, a federal judge in South Dakota granted a preliminary injunction on Thursday to keep a new abortion law from taking effect. The judge ruled that the law’s requirements that a woman must first seek counseling at an anti-abortion pregnancy help center and then wait three days after an initial consultation before having an abortion appeared to constitute an undue burden on a woman’s right to the procedure.
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