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Planned Parenthood expands abortion services in Missouri

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Missouri will soon have more than one facility that provides abortion services, Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri announced as calls from Republican lawmakers grow to investigate the reproductive healthcare provider.

Beginning on August 1, the Planned Parenthood facility in Columbia will resume providing pharmaceutically induced abortions and, in January, will resume surgical abortions. Since 2011, only the St. Louis Planned Parenthood location offered abortion services, because the Columbia facility has been without a provider.

“The big win here is for Missouri women,” said Laura McQuade, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri. “The 72-hour waiting period was just another hurdle and this is a safe, legal, critical element of women’s healthcare.”

Schaefer
Schaefer

The announcement comes following a week of calls from Republican lawmakers to investigate Planned Parenthood after a video went viral that appears to show Deborah Nucatola, a senior director of medical research for Planned Parenthood, explain that the organization sometimes ships fetal tissue to various medical facilities for research in exchange for a fee.

The Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion advocacy group, made and released the hidden-camera video, which Planned Parenthood officials say is heavily edited and deceptive. Planned Parenthood clarified that the fee sometimes charged to medical labs for fetal tissue strictly covers the appropriate shipping costs, nothing more.

Sen. Kurt Schaefer, a Columbia Republican and candidate for attorney general, penned a letter last week to Attorney General Chris Koster, a Democrat, asking Koster to immediately begin an investigation to determine whether or not any of the “felonious activity” detailed in the video was taking place in Missouri.

“Watching the callous way in which [Nucatola] explains that practice, to me, is in no way different than watching the video tapped confession I’ve seen of murderers,” Schaefer said. “There is a level of disconnect between what they are saying and how they are saying it and what they are describing.”

Schaefer called the Columbia announcement “odd” given that it came so close to the national story and Republican backlash. He also said he didn’t believe the issue as a partisan one, and said that politicians on both sides should be outraged when any organization is caught admitting illegal behavior.

McQuade agreed, but with a twist. While she referred any specific questions about Planned Parenthood’s practices or potential investigations to their Washington D.C. office, McQuade said that conservative lawmakers were “looking in the wrong direction” for illegal behavior.

“If a legislator wants to look into anything, it should be the illegal activity of this long scam,” McQuade said. “This was long in the making. It ran afoul of any number of laws in the process. I’m so confident that there is no wrongdoing here, this is another misuse and waste of Missouri taxpayer dollars in search of a political agenda.”