Ohio Is Trying To Use The Coronavirus Crisis To Stop Abortions [View all]

[riversedge]

Source: huffpost





03/21/2020 06:12 pm ET

The state’s attorney general is using concerns about limited supplies of protective medical gear to prevent women from ending pregnancies.


In an effort to ensure health care workers on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak have proper access to personal protective equipment, or PPE, authorities at both the state and federal level are asking doctors and patients to forego “nonessential” operations.

Ohio’s Department of Health, however, appears to be extending that order to what is widely considered essential health care: abortion.

Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican, sent letters dated Friday to three of the state’s abortion providers ordering them to stop providing surgical abortions effective immediately.

“[Y]ou and your facility are ordered to immediately stop performing non-essential and elective surgical abortions. Non-essential surgical abortions are those that can be delayed without undue risk to the current or future health of a patient,” Yost wrote in the letters, which were obtained by HuffPost. They were addressed separately to the Women’s Med Center in Dayton, Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio’s Cincinnati Surgery Center, and Preterm in Cleveland.

It remains unclear whether medication abortion is still allowed in Ohio, as “the pill” would not require PPE to complete but can require a physical exam.

Yost claimed he was enforcing an order from the Ohio Department of Health.

“If you or your facility do not immediately stop performing non-essential or elective surgical abortions in compliance with the attached order, the Department of Health will take all appropriate measures,” he warned the providers.

Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio, however, said in a statement that the Health Department’s order does not prohibit it from providing abortion care, including surgical abortion.

The department’s order, issued Tuesday, was a broad directive telling all the state’s health care providers to cancel all “non-essential surgeries and procedures” effective 5 p.m. Wednesday. It did not mention abortion or outline any specific procedures that were considered nonessential.
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Read more: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ohio-coronavirus-abortion_n_5e767333c5b6eab779494366