O'FALLON, Mo. -- Missouri's only abortion clinic will be able to keep operating after a state government administrator decided Friday that the health department was wrong not to renew the license of the Planned Parenthood facility in St. Louis.
Missouri Administrative Hearing Commissioner Sreenivasa Rao Dandamudi's decision means Missouri will not become the first state without a functioning abortion clinic since 1974, the year after the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision.
"In over 4,000 abortions provided since 2018, the Department has only identified two causes to deny its license," Dandamudi wrote, adding that Planned Parenthood has "substantially complied" with state law.
"Therefore, Planned Parenthood is entitled to renewal of its abortion facility license," he wrote.
A Planned Parenthood spokeswoman said the decision will mean the St. Louis clinic's license is renewed through May 2021.
It wasn't immediately clear whether the state would appeal. A spokesman for the attorney general's office, which is defending the health department's decision in court, said the office was "reviewing the ruling and deciding on next steps."
An email message seeking comment from the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services was not immediately returned.
Yamelsie Rodriguez, president and CEO of Reproductive Health Services of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region, said in a statement that the ruling "is vindication for Planned Parenthood and our patients who rely on us." But she said Missouri's abortion laws continue to make it difficult for women seeking abortions.
"An abortion license, while critical to our ability to provide care, still cannot undo the harm that medically unnecessary policies in our state inflict on patients," Rodriguez said.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the national anti-abortion group the Susan B. Anthony List, slammed the decision.
"Unborn children and their mothers face dire health risks -- especially during a pandemic -- so long as the St. Louis Planned Parenthood is permitted to remain open," she said in a statement.
The state refused to renew the license for Planned Parenthood's St. Louis clinic in June 2019, after an investigation turned up four instances of what the state called "failed abortions." Planned Parenthood officials contend the state "cherry-picked" a handful of difficult cases out of thousands of procedures.
They have accused the state of using the licensing process as a tool to end abortions in Missouri, a conservative state with a pro-life governor in Republican Mike Parson.
Planned Parenthood's challenge led to an administrative hearing in October.
The wrangling over the license began after an investigator in March 2019 found that a woman had undergone an abortion that took five attempts to complete. William Koebel, director of the section of the health department responsible for abortion clinic licensing, testified that the clinic failed to provide a "complication report."
That led the health department to launch an investigation of other instances in which women underwent multiple procedures to complete an abortion, Koebel said.
As part of that investigation, the state obtained the medical records of women who had abortions at the clinic. It found four who required multiple procedures, including an instance in which the physician apparently missed that a woman was pregnant with twins. The woman underwent two procedures five weeks apart.
The Administrative Hearing Commission agreed with the health department that Planned Parenthood should have filed a complication report for one of the patients and should have documented what it did to address the physician who missed that a woman was pregnant with twins.
But Dandamudi wrote that those two cases were atypical: One woman's uterus was unusually shaped, and the woman with twins was "morbidly obese," which can make diagnosis difficult. He said those two violations "did not constitute a substantial failure."
"Planned Parenthood has demonstrated that it provides safe and legal abortion care," Dandamudi wrote.
A Section on 05/30/2020