NEW YORK — Planned Parenthood announced this week that its only Manhattan clinic would stop performing abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, a significant shift in a state that has maintained and even expanded access to abortion in the two years since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to the procedure.

Can No Longer Afford ‘Deep Sedation’

The clinic, Planned Parenthood’s Manhattan Health Center, can no longer afford the “deep sedation” required to perform abortions beyond the 20-week mark, Wendy Stark, the president of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, said in an interview.

The move was the latest sign of financial struggles for Planned Parenthood’s New York chapter, which also plans to close four clinics around the state, including its sole clinic on Staten Island, Stark said. The chapter has already instituted executive pay cuts and consolidated job functions.

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Stark confirmed that the Manhattan clinic plans to stop providing abortions past 20 weeks of pregnancy Sept. 3, a change that was first reported by The City. Abortion is legal in New York state through the 24th week of pregnancy, and later in cases where a fetus is not viable or a woman’s life or health is at risk.

The Manhattan Health Center, located downtown on Bleecker Street, is the only Planned Parenthood clinic in New York that performs abortions after 20 weeks. Less than 2% of all of the abortions performed at the chapter’s clinics occur after that bench mark, according to a spokesperson, Senti Sojwal.

While other abortion providers in New York will still offer the procedure after 20 weeks, the decision by Planned Parenthood was worrisome news to those tracking abortion access across the country.

“Certainly, it’s a concern when any clinic or health care provider has to stop providing any type of abortion care,” said Rachel K. Jones, a researcher for the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights. “It’s usually not a good sign, right?”

People Traveling for Abortions

Travel across state lines for abortions — trips for both procedural abortions and to obtain abortion pills — more than doubled in 2023 compared with 2019, according to a New York Times analysis, and made up nearly a fifth of recorded abortions in the country.

Jones said that while New York has not been the primary destination for people who travel to other states to end pregnancies, abortions have steadily increased in New York since 2017, contributing to rising costs.

New York received at least 6,000 abortion patients from out of state last year, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute. Roughly 10,000 abortions are performed in the state each month, the group said.

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A significant share of abortions in New York take place at Planned Parenthood clinics, which logged 30,000 abortion visits statewide last year, Sojwal said.

Abortions performed at later stages of pregnancy are the most politically contentious in the national debate over the procedure and are quite rare.

In 2021, the latest year for which data is available, more than 93% of abortions in the United States were performed before 13 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and less than 1% took place after 21 weeks.

Abortions after that point are usually performed because the fetus has a fatal condition that could not be detected sooner or because the mother’s life is in danger.

Dennis Poust, executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference, said in a statement that the group welcomed Planned Parenthood’s decision to stop performing abortions after 20 weeks at its Manhattan clinic.

“To the extent that this economic decision by Planned Parenthood limits these incidents, we rejoice,” he said.

Stark said the Manhattan clinic would work to provide deep sedation in-house, rather than by hiring outside specialists as it currently does. Such a shift could enable it to again offer abortions after 20 weeks.

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The Financial Crunch on Planned Parenthood

The financial crunch at Planned Parenthood, Stark said, is the result of a widening gap between the cost of providing reproductive health care and the reimbursement offered by both private and public insurance companies.

Most significantly, she said, Medicaid reimbursements do not cover the cost of care, and as a result, “our financial health has been stretched to its limit.”

The situation is dire enough that the chapter also plans to close clinics in three towns upstate, Goshen, Amsterdam and Cobleskill, as well as its Staten Island clinic.

“We think this is a big opportunity for New York state to step up to the plate and increase reimbursement for reproductive health services in this moment when our abortion ecosystem across the state is faltering,” Stark said.

A spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul pushed back against that characterization in a statement, maintaining that “abortion remains legal and accessible to anyone in New York.” The governor, a Democrat, noted that she had allocated $35 million to an Abortion Provider Support Fund designed to expand access to abortion across the state.

“We will continue working with advocates and our partners in government to ensure abortion access is always protected in New York,” she said.

According to Amy Paulin, a Democratic state legislator who chairs the Assembly’s committee on health, 50% of abortions at Planned Parenthood in New York are covered by Medicaid.

Planned Parenthood had asked the New York Legislature for $13 million in funding to be included in the state’s budget, Paulin said in an interview.

The Assembly and the Senate included the funding in their budget proposals, she said, but it was not included in the final $237 billion budget.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Claire Fahy/Caitlin Ochs
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