Planned Parenthood announces closure of 2 clinics in Ohio

Two Planned Parenthood clinics in Cincinnati, Ohio, are closing as a result of surmounting pressure from various regulations on abortion providers and reproductive health care, officials from the organization said.

This announcement comes less than a month after Planned Parenthood announced that they would be dropping out of the federal program called Title X over new gag restrictions put in place by the Trump administration.

The new rules prohibited participating clinics from providing abortion referrals and dictates a “clear financial and physical separation” between family planning services and abortion services.

The two Cincinnati locations that will be closing are in Springdale and Western Hills, and the last day for services will be on Sept. 20, a Planned Parenthood spokesperson told ABC News. The two locations that will be closing do not provide abortion care, a second Planned Parenthood official told ABC News.

There are currently seven Planned Parenthood locations in the greater Cincinnati and Miami Valley regions, so the closures would leave five clinics open and operational.

Kersha Deibel, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio Region, pointed to the spate of state-level regulations added in recent years as well as Planned Parenthood’s Title X withdrawal in an announcement about the latest closures.

Brooke Lavalley/AP

“These closures are the result of years attacks on our ability to provide reproductive health care. Ohio politicians have passed 22 anti-reproductive health measures in recent years, including a defunding bill that went into effect earlier this year. Then came the changes to the Title X program, from an administration that has made it clear that it wants to force out trusted health centers that provide evidence-based, comprehensive reproductive health care,” Deibel said in a statement to ABC News.

“These layered attacks in a hostile environment forced us to make some really tough decisions,” she said in the statement.

Ohio is one of several states that passed a so-called heartbeat abortion ban this year, which, if implemented, would stop anyone from seeking an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can happen as early as six weeks into a pregnancy when a woman might not know that she is pregnant.

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill into law in April but, just as is the case in the other states where similar bills have been adopted, the law has been held up in legal challenges and is not currently in place.