KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Approximately 4,500 patients have sought abortion care this year at the Trust Women clinic in Wichita.
Most of those patients — roughly 3,645 people, or 81% — have come from outside the state seeking abortion services, according to Trust Women Communications Director Zack Gingrich-Gaylord.
He said the 4,500 patients represent a "significant increase — at least three times as many as we would have seen before Roe fell and before Texas' original ban on abortion in 2021."
Gingrich-Gaylord said there are three abortion providers in Wichita, all of which are dealing with unprecedented demand.
"I think as this continues to go on, the real danger is that people get used to this way of of seeking health care," Gingrich-Gaylord said. "They think this is a very natural thing — to travel hundreds of miles across several states to receive a very basic and essential form of health care."
The Trust Women clinic currently sees approximately 300 to 400 abortion patients a month. The vast majority come from out of state and of those, 54% are Texas residents and around 21% are Oklahoma residents.
Gingrich-Gaylord said the clinic sees patients from "basically any state that has an abortion ban." Fourteen U.S. states currently have a complete ban on abortion.
Residents from 25 states — not including Kansas — received abortions in the state in 2022.
There were 12,317 abortions in Kansas last year — 3,842 provided to Kansans and 8,475 provided to out-of-state residents, according to data from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment
Behind Kansans, Texas residents received the most abortions — 2,978 — in Kansas last year, a trend that has continued in 2023.
"The significant majority of the patients that we see in our Wichita, Kansas, clinic right now are actually from Texas, which is very unusual," Gingrich-Gaylord said.
The reality for patients from Texas and other states with severely restricted abortion access gained national attention this week as Kate Cox, a mother of two from the Dallas area, left the state to seek an abortion after it was determined her fetus has trisomy 18, a condition that is likely fatal for fetuses.
Cox was granted permission by a judge last week to receive an abortion, but the Texas Supreme Court put that ruling on hold, according to the Associated Press.
Gingrich-Gaylord calls the Cox case "heartbreaking" and "unbelievable."
"People in Houston should be able to access care in Houston, people in Dallas should be able to access care in Dallas, and the same for people in Kansas as well," he said. "These abortion bans are are impacting our ability to provide care for our communities right here and, while we are very proud of the work that our staff has done to be able to increase capacity and be able to see people who are desperately seeking this care from out of state, I don't think that you can look at the situation and say that this is actually the ideal form of health care. This is a tragedy and ongoing crisis."
With a complete ban on abortion in Missouri, unless a mother's life is deemed at-risk, Missourians received the third most abortions — 2,883 — in Kansas in 2022.
"Kansas has always had a really high number of out-of-state patients coming to seek abortion care, and it's primarily due to the fact that Missouri's access has been so terrible for so long," Gingrich-Gaylord said.
He highlighted the fact that before the Dobbs decision — and, therefore, before Missouri's trigger law went into effect — Missouri's only abortion clinic was in St. Louis.
Now, with the complete ban, the closest abortion providers for Missouri's two biggest metropolitan areas — St. Louis and Kansas City — are in the border states of Kansas and Illinois.
Outside Kansas' metropolitan areas, like Kansas City and Wichita, abortion services are practically nonexistent.
"There are three abortion providers in Wichita and there are, I believe, four or five in Kansas City, but that's it as far as Kansas access to abortion," Gingrich-Gaylord said. "It is strictly in those major metropolitan areas. People living in the far western region of the state will likely go to Colorado."
With approximately 3,000 to 4,000 incoming calls a day to Wichita's Trust Women clinic, Gingrich-Gaylord said the clinic isn't "actively" turning patients away but that some callers cannot even get through on their phone lines, let alone reserve an appointment.
The clinic has about 50 appointments available per day.
"This type of demand is really unprecedented for this region and it is solely due to this manufactured health care crisis," Gingrich-Gaylord said.
The news isn't all bad news for abortion providers in Kansas.
Abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood Great Plains, sued the state of Kansas in June over a law that was enacted this year and was set to go into effect on July 1. The law would require providers to tell patients who utilized medication abortion that the abortion can possibly be reversed after ingesting the pill by using an unproven regimen.
The lawsuit also challenged preexisting restrictions on abortions in Kansas, such as a 24-hour waiting period when scheduling appointments and a 30-minute wait period during appointments after patients receive an ultrasound and state-mandated consult.
All three restrictions have been put on hold until next summer, when the judge will continue the case.
"These are all arbitrary restrictions," Gingrich-Gaylord said. "They are not medically relevant to the practice of this type of health care and they're just meant to get in the way of patients and their providers. So, that is very good news that, for now, patients are no longer forced to go through either arbitrary waiting periods or hear dangerous misinformation during the course of their appointment."
While the Trust Women clinic in Wichita has expanded its capacity to serve more abortion patients, the clinic had to eliminate its other reproductive health care services — such as providing birth control as well as HIV testing and treatment — but it hopes to resume those services soon.
"As we continue to expand our capacity and continue to figure out better ways to meet the needs of more people across the region, that's something that we're looking at for next year, is bringing back those services for Wichita and for Kansas," Gingrich-Gaylord said.
KSHB 41 News reached out to the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts — whose executive director, Susan Biles, is listed as a defendant in the lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood Great Plains and other providers. Biles said the board has "no comment."
KSHB 41 News also reached out to Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who is also a defendant in the lawsuit, and the Catholic Diocese of Wichita, who recently planned a demonstration at the Trust Women clinic. Neither party responded in time of this publication.
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