The portable clinic — which is set up inside of a RV — arrived in southern Illinois this week ahead of its upcoming launch, hoping to significantly chop down the travel time for patients.
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“The biggest necessities that we are seeing is the fact that they have to travel such a long ways to get the care that they need,” LaQuetta Cooper, health care operations chief for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, told NPR. “This will be useful so they don’t have to travel three to five hours.”
The RV is furnished with two examination rooms, including small exam tables and ultrasound machines, and is supposed to be going before the year’s over.
It will offer abortion pills to patients and the organization has shared additional plans for the unit to be prepared for surgical first-trimester abortions early one year from now. Last month, Planned Parenthood originally announced that it would send off the portable clinic in southern Illinois because of the growing number of patients within states that have carried out abortion bans.
The organization’s Fairview Levels clinic saw a 340 percent increase in patients after Roe v. Wade was toppled. “Our goal is to diminish the many miles that individuals are having to travel currently in request to access care… and meet them where they are,” Yamelsie Rodriguez, leader of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, told NPR at the time.
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The clinic will be operating in Illinois — where abortion remains legal — and travel along the lines of neighboring states that disallow or limit abortion administrations.
Rodriguez added that it “provides us with a ton of adaptability about where to be.”
Preparation for the portable clinic comes similarly as a new report revealed that one in three ladies of conceptive age in the US presently live north of an hour away from an abortion clinic.
On Tuesday, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a companion explored study analyzing statistics data from nearly 64 million ladies between ages 15 and 44 in the US, excluding Alaska and Hawaii. Researchers found that ladies seeking abortion administrations had to travel over 100 minutes to reach a legal clinic.
Preceding the finish of Roe, the average travel time to the nearest abortion clinic was allegedly under 30 minutes.
