Planned Parenthood to Open New Orleans Clinic: “It’s Really Important” for Women to Abort

State   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   May 26, 2016   |   10:39AM   |   New Orleans, Louisiana

Planned Parenthood is almost ready to open an abortion mega-clinic in New Orleans this summer, despite pro-life efforts to stop it.

The abortion business’s CEO Cecile Richards was in Louisiana on Wednesday to celebrate the finished new abortion facility, ABC affiliate KATC 3 reports.

Richards said she expects the state will not be able to stop them from receiving a license to do abortions, just as they failed to stop them from building the huge, new abortion center.

The facility is expected to accommodate 12,000 patients a year, double what the abortion business currently does in the city, Richards said. Planned Parenthood hopes to open next month, according to the report.

Abortion is “a legal medical service, not only in the country, but even in the state of Louisiana,” Richards said. “And it’s really important that women can get the full spectrum of reproductive health care services.”

The $4 million mega-clinic will be the first Planned Parenthood in Louisiana to do abortions, according to the report.

State lawmakers recently passed a bill that could thwart the abortion business’s efforts in other ways, however. The state Senate approved a bill on Tuesday to revoke taxpayer funding from Planned Parenthood and other groups that do abortions, LifeNews reported. The bill heads to Gov. John Bel Edwards’ desk where he is expected to sign it.

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Benjamin Clapper, Executive Director of Louisiana Right to Life, said previously, “Businesses that sell abortions, like Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast plans to do at the facility under construction in New Orleans, should never receive the tax dollars of American citizens.”

The New Orleans project appears to be part of a larger plan at Planned Parenthood to increase its revenues by expanding abortions. The abortion business’s annual reports show services like cancer screenings declining while its abortion numbers remain relatively steady, Randall O’Bannon, Ph.D., the director of education and research for the National Right to Life Committee, previously said.

“Though abortions are significantly down in the U.S. as a whole, business is booming at Planned Parenthood,” O’Bannon wrote in 2014 after the abortion chain announced plans to open a $9 million abortion clinic in New York City.

Planned Parenthood closed a number of facilities in the past few years, but many of them were low-revenue facilities that did not do abortions, O’Bannon said.

“But what is clear is either that most of the clinics that closed were not abortion performing clinics or that Planned Parenthood has made up for those abortion losses with giant new mega-clinics built to take their place. The new centers do not appear to have picked up the lost cancer screenings, but they do appear to have kept the lucrative abortion business steady” at a time when abortions are dropping across the U.S., O’Bannon said.

The abortion business currently is building another abortion mega-clinic in Washington, D.C. near an elementary and middle school, LifeNews reported.

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