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The clinic is set to begin offering consultations and dispensing abortion pills later this year.
Planned Parenthood will soon open its first mobile abortion clinic, making it easier for people living in states where abortion is largely banned to travel to get the procedure.
"Our goal is to reduce the hundreds of miles that people are having to travel now in order to access care … and meet them where they are," Yamelsie Rodriguez, president of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, told NPR. "It gives us a lot of flexibility about where to be."
The clinic will open in southern Illinois and is set to begin offering consultations and dispensing abortion pills later this year. Many people from the South and the Midwest seeking an abortion have been going to Illinois since the Supreme Court earlier this year struck down Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision that established a constitutional right to an abortion.
The court's decision leaves it to individual states to determine the legality of abortion within their borders.
"One hundred days post-Roe we stand in defiance to say: we are not backing down," Rodriguez said in a statement. "Abortion bans, 'defunding' Planned Parenthood, and attacks on reproductive freedoms writ large are deeply unpopular. We're standing in the gap created by politicians and ensuring all people can access the health care they deserve, no matter where they live."
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