Due to a lack of patients seeking family planning services from the nation’s biggest abortion business, Planned Parenthood officials in Reno, Nevada have decided to close one of the two centers it operates in the state’s second biggest city.
The announcement about the closing comes on the heels of Las Vegas abortion practitioner Frank Silver facing eviction from one of the two abortion centers in operates in Las Vegas and follows on the heels of closings of other Planned Parenthood centers in other states.
Alison Gaulden, spokesperson for Northern Nevada Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, told the Reno Gazette Journal today that Reno’s two Planned Parenthood centers experienced a drop of 20 percent, or 7,000, fewer patients in 2010. As a result, abortion business executives have decided to close the Peckham Health Center and, although it does not do abortions, it refers women for them.
“We used to serve 25,000 patients and we’re down to 18,000 (rounded numbers),” Gaulden said. “Because of rising costs and fewer patients, we’ve made the very difficult decision to close a facility.”
The center, according to the newspaper, will close on June 15 and Gaulden said Planned Parenthood will encourage people to visit the other center it operates.
“We are going to do our best to encourage our patients to come to the consolidated services (on Fifth Street),” she said.
Although the abortion business is closing one of its centers, women in Reno have plenty of options for family planning or legitimate health care, including the Health Access Washoe County, which receives almost $2 million in federal funds and provides the kind of health care Planned Parenthood can’t.
“We anticipate that we have capacity for an additional 300 to 500 well woman exams per month,” Dr. Antoine Bou Doumit told the Reno newspaper, saying 66 women per month already get exams from HAWC.
Also, pregnant women looking for help and support can contact the Crisis Pregnancy Center on 853 Haskell St at 775-826-5144 for medical support and other services.
As LifeNews reported yesterday, Las Vegas abortion practitioner Silver was evicted from his office on North Buffalo in Las Vegas on December 10, but local pro-life advocates only recently discovered that had happened. That left six abortion clinics left in Nevada — with five of them operating in Las Vegas and one in Reno. Since 1991, over two-thirds of all surgical abortion clinics have closed across the country.
News of Silver’s eviction comes after news that the Planned Parenthood abortion business closed one of its northern California centers.
That closing comes after Planned Parenthood of Central Texas announced last month it would close two of its centers that make abortion referrals to its main location. The affiliate of the national abortion business did not give any reasons for closing the locations in Groesbeck and Marlin, Texas.
The closings follow the permanent closure of a Planned Parenthood abortion referral center in Ohio. Planned Parenthood of Northeast Ohio will be closing one of its centers north of Columbus, in Galion, because it says it is has come up on financial difficulties that make it necessary to consolidate.
A March report from the organization STOPP International shows that, for the fifth straight year, the number of Planned Parenthood centers has declined. In 2010, the Parenthood Federation of America opened 18 new clinics and closed 49, bringing its total clinic number down to 785 – the lowest it has been since 1986. That indicates the Planned Parenthood abortion business is closing centers faster than it can open new ones and the total number of facilities it operates has hit a 25-year low.
The abortion business ended the year with a total of 321 abortion facilities with 165 doing surgical abortions and giving out the abortion drug mifepristone, and another 156 dispensing the abortion drug but not doing surgical abortions. This represents an increase of 5.5 percent from the 304 abortion facilities it operated at the end of 2009 and, although Planned Parenthood likes to talk about the low percentage of abortions it does compared to other “services,” more than 40 percent of its centers do some type of abortion.
The STOPP report also indicates Planned Parenthood appears to have abandoned the Express Clinic concept it began in 2003, whereby it would open small storefront operations in smaller cities and rural areas where a freestanding facility would prove too costly to operate. Although some facilities still carry the “Express” name, all have returned to offering the range of services and physical exams as is done at a standard PPFA clinic, the report says.
