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Pro-Choice Group Says New Columbus Clinic Isn't an Abortion Clinic yet

photo of Your Choice Healthcare Clinic Columbus
JO INGLES
/
STATEHOUSE NEWS BUREAU
NARAL Pro Choice Ohio's Kellie Copeland says the clinic doesn't provide surgical services.

A new clinic on Columbus’s north side is providing women’s health services, including medication that causes abortions. Some, including anti-abortion advocates, are calling it an abortion clinic. The organization that lobbies on behalf of abortion providers says it isn’t.

NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio’s Kellie Copeland says the new Your Choice Healthcare clinic on Columbus’s north side provides health screenings and offers drugs to cause early stage abortions but doesn’t provide surgical services. And that, she said, is why it’s not considered by her organization to be an actual abortion clinic.

“When we talk about the count of the number of abortion clinics in Ohio, we are talking about the clinics that have to be licensed by the Ohio Department of Health and provide the full spectrum of abortion care,”  Copeland said.

But she said the new clinic will try to get a license to do surgical abortions and already has ties with a full-service provider in Columbus that is temporarily closed.

Copeland said there are eight full-service abortion clinics in Ohio today, down from 16 in 2011.

Jo Ingles is a professional journalist who covers politics and Ohio government for the Ohio Public Radio and Television for the Ohio Public Radio and Television Statehouse News Bureau. She reports on issues of importance to Ohioans including education, legislation, politics, and life and death issues such as capital punishment. Jo started her career in Louisville, Kentucky in the mid 80’s when she helped produce a televised presidential debate for ABC News, worked for a creative services company and served as a general assignment report for a commercial radio station. In 1989, she returned back to her native Ohio to work at the WOSU Stations in Columbus where she began a long resume in public radio.