Bay Area Planned Parenthood readies facilities for post-Roe influx
SAN FRANCISCO -- Abortion providers like Planned Parenthood in California say they were already increasing their resources to accommodate the growing demand from patients out of state before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday.
Officials say the decision will definitely create more of a challenge for their clinics.
"Whether we can handle that capacity no matter what we do, yeah, we're worried about that," said Stacy Cross, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte.
Planned Parenthood Mar Monte serves patients in California and Nevada, including Oakland, the South Bay, and the Peninsula. It is the largest affiliate of Planned Parenthood in the country based on patients and one of seven in California.
Cross says they are already able to take on an additional 250 to 500 patients a week. They say the need went up last fall after a law in Texas restricted abortions.
Researchers have told Planned Parenthood they could see an additional 1.4 million patients come to California after the Supreme Court ruling.
"I'm so grateful that we live in a reproductive freedom state but I also know that we can't take that for granted and there's more work to be done to fortify California," said Planned Parenthood Northern California CEO Gilda Gonzales, which includes San Francisco and Contra Costa County. "We're monitoring very, very closely the uptick of patients, we have a plan to scale up as needed."
One challenge they are already seeing is that other states that allow abortions are overwhelmed so patients traveling from farther away end up in California because locations closer to them cannot accommodate them in time. Bay Area leaders with the group say this could affect those in need of an abortion locally.
Both Gonzales and Cross say this decision only heightens the need for a constitutional amendment in California that could go before the voters this fall.
"I really hope people get activated by this because this is very, very dark day in America," said Cross.