Reproductive justice advocates warn of health care crisis in Louisiana following Planned Parenthood shutdown
3rd October 2025 · 0 Comments
By Madhri Yehiya
Contributing Writer
(Veritenews.org) — Planned Parenthood’s health centers in New Orleans and Baton Rouge will shut down indefinitely at the end of this month, leaving residents throughout the state worried about how the closures will impact access to reproductive health care and other services the company has provided for over 40 years.
The company announced in early August that it would be shutting down its Louisiana clinics amid a wave of closures across the United States. Abby Ledoux, vice president of communications and marketing for Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, told Verite News the organization cannot sustainably continue its operations in a political climate of constant litigation, funding cuts and the rising costs of delivering care. Reproductive health care advocates, physicians and patients who have used the clinic said that the closures will impact marginalized Louisianians who face challenges accessing many of the services that Planned Parenthood offers.
Sixty percent of patients served at Planned Parenthood’s Louisiana clinics are Medicaid insurance users and 71 percent are people of color. In the last five years the New Orleans and Baton Rouge clinics have seen close to 46,000 patients, according to the company. PPGC also includes six clinics in Houston, two of which will close on Sept. 30. The rest will continue to operate under Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas.
The most commonly accessed services include STI testing and treatment, birth control and HIV prevention. The health centers also provide cervical cancer screenings and hormone replacement therapy for transgender patients.
Victoria Coy, executive director for the Louisiana Coalition for Reproductive Freedom (LCRF), a collection of over a hundred statewide reproductive rights organizations, said the closure will “affect Louisiana for generations.”
“This will affect someone you love,” she said. “This is breast cancer, this is ovarian cancer, this is wanted pregnancy. All of those things will now result in greater rates of death, harm and maiming.”
Planned Parenthood has never been able to provide abortions in Louisiana. PPGC first applied for an abortion license in 2016, eventually suing the state two years later for refusing to act on the application. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Louisiana’s subsequent near-total abortion ban made the issue moot.
“This is not a decision we wanted to make,” PPGC President and CEO Melaney Linton said in a statement. “It is one we were forced into by political warfare.”
Linton referred to recent nationwide efforts by lawmakers to defund Planned Parenthood and “dismantle public health infrastructure.” In July, the Republican-backed federal budget known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” included a provision that proposed banning Medicaid coverage at large nonprofits that provide abortions for one year. The provision was struck down by a federal judge weeks later for its potential to disrupt access to critical patient care.
The bill would have left more than 200 health centers in 24 states at risk of closure, according to Planned Parenthood. Despite the temporary win, the company announced it was closing its Louisiana clinics just days later.
Gov. Jeff Landry called the announced closure a “major win for the pro-life movement” in a statement on X on Aug. 5.
“I have fought hard as Attorney General and now as Governor to rid our state of this failed organization. Abortion should NEVER be considered healthcare,” he wrote.
More than abortion
Louisiana consistently has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the country, with a third of parishes lacking a single OB-GYN, according to a 2022 March of Dimes analysis.
Dr. Neelima Sukhavasi, a consulting physician at the Baton Rouge clinic, described the upcoming closure as a “huge loss to the population of our state.”
“We all know that Louisiana leads the way in negative outcomes when it comes to sexual and reproductive health,” she said. “There was maybe one day where, yes, there were protesters outside the clinic, and I just wanted to tell them, ‘All I’m doing here is preventing cervical cancer.’”
Sukhavasi added she is concerned about how former patients will find comparable care in terms of the low costs and short appointment wait times Planned Parenthood is known for.
“Where will these patients go that have sought care at Planned Parenthood?” she asked. “There are other federally qualified health centers that do take Medicaid, however, we don’t know what their capacity is to absorb this patient volume base.”
Louisiana Right to Life, a major anti-abortion advocacy organization in the state, did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication. In a July press release, executive director Benjamin Clapper called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s defunding of Planned Parenthood “a huge win for life and families.”
Divya Kikkeri serves as president of Medical Students for Choice, a Tulane University organization for students interested in the intersection between reproductive rights and health care. She called Planned Parenthood a “safe haven” for college students.
“It’s a pretty recognizable name for anyone who’s going through something,” she said. “Students are definitely going to feel that loss.”
Kikkeri noted that students often prefer seeing an outside provider instead of going to a university health center to avoid the risk of their parents seeing treatment information or receiving an unexpected medical bill.
“They just feel more comfortable going to a provider that’s specifically designed for reproductive health needs, and some people have had bad experiences with the [Tulane] health center,” she said.
Medical Students for Choice had been planning to partner with Planned Parenthood’s New Orleans clinic to host a sexual health preventative care talk, Kikkeri said. The event will no longer be held.
Lilli Sims, president of the reproductive rights student organization Feminists in Action at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, agreed that college students will be especially affected by the upcoming closure.
“Especially for those who are coming from out of state who may be familiar with Planned Parenthood services and know all the resources that they provide, they just may be more comfortable with their services,” she said.
Sims said LSU’s student health center only provides emergency contraception, commonly known as Plan B, for patients who say they have been the victim of sexual assault, which must then be reported to the university’s Title IX office. She noted the health center also does not provide gender affirming care, such as hormone replacement therapy (HRT).
Neither emergency contraception or HRT are listed as offerings on the student health center’s website. LSU did not respond to multiple email and phone requests for comment.
Planned Parenthood’s Baton Rouge clinic has provided trans health care and emergency contraception whether or not assault was involved. PPGC also offers a number of community education programs, especially for women of color, such as peer mentoring and Spanish-language workshops on sexual health and wellbeing.
“It is one of the very few affordable sexual health organizations in South Louisiana that I know of,” Sims said.
Planned Parenthood is one of few major health care providers in the state that offers post-abortion and miscarriage care. Since Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban passed in August 2022, there have been increasing reports of hospitals and OB-GYNs delaying providing critical prenatal care until the twelfth week of pregnancy – after which miscarriage is less common – and hesitation to diagnose miscarriages for fear of investigation by the Louisiana Department of Health or state law enforcement agencies.
“The next era of reproductive health care in Louisiana is going to look foreign to Americans,” she said. “What we’re seeing emerge are random community members with no training and no medical background who want to help and who can’t sit by while mothers die in childbirth.”
LCRF launched a community health worker program called Legacy Trust last year to train volunteers on providing basic women’s health care on a door-to-door basis. Coy said she hopes to grow the program next year in light of the Planned Parenthood closures.
Alternative options
For former Planned Parenthood patients looking for alternatives, Southeast Louisiana is home to a number of smaller clinics that provide similar services.
CrescentCare is a community health clinic based in New Orleans, offering services ranging from primary care to gender-affirming care to sexual health. The city’s two clinics accept all major forms of insurance, including Medicaid and Medicare. For patients who are uninsured, CrescentCare uses a sliding fee scale to keep services affordable.
“We actually provide pretty much all of the same services that Planned Parenthood provides,” said CrescentCare CEO Alice Riener. “We are looking at how we can step up and provide these services to a broader population and help fill in the gap.”
Riener said CrescentCare is prepared to meet a potential increase in demand for services following PPGC’s closure at the end of the month.
The Louisiana Department of Health also runs more than 60 clinics statewide as part of a reproductive health program that offers many of the same services Planned Parenthood provides.
Woman’s New Life Clinic – a crisis pregnancy center located right next door to Planned Parenthood’s New Orleans location – markets itself as a reproductive health care clinic, but does not provide hormonal contraception or abortion referral services. The clinic does offer prenatal care, gynecology, STI testing and treatment and abortion pill reversal medication – considered an “unproven and unethical” treatment by the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecologists.
In a statement to Verite News, Woman’s New Life Clinic’s executive director Allison Daigle cited the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ supportive stance on abortion pill reversal.
For patients looking for gender-affirming health care, the Trans Income Project, based in New Orleans, pays for hormone replacement therapy for Medicaid-eligible adults through a new partnership with CrescentCare. In Baton Rouge, the HAART Clinic offers a range of LGBTQIA+ health care services.
Still, the Planned Parenthood clinic closures will come as a great loss to the fight for bodily autonomy in the state, said Coy, who described PPGC as a founding member of LCRF in 1989 and perhaps the biggest supporter of access to reproductive health care in Louisiana.
“Planned Parenthood has been behind the scenes at every turn in the reproductive justice and advocacy space in Louisiana,” she said. “Getting rid of them threatens the entire ecosystem.”
This article originally published in the September 29, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
