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Abortion Services In Nashville Double In One Week

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Grace Carr Reporter
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Women seeking abortions in the Nashville area will have double the options they previously did after a new abortion clinic opened Friday and another will resume performing abortions.

Carafem Health Center opened in Mount Juliet Friday, according to a report from The Tennessean. The non-profit, carafem, decided to open a clinic in the Nashville area after noticing that roughly five percent of patients at its Atlanta location had traveled to the clinic from Tennessee.

“Instead of waiting for our clients to come to us, we decided to go to them,” carafem CEO Melissa Grant said, according to the Tennessean.

The Mount Juliet clinic offers abortions up to 10 weeks in pregnancy. It’s tagline reads, “Abortion. Yeah, we do that.”

Carafem also operates abortion clinics in the District of Columbia and Chicago, the Tennessean reported.

Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi will resume providing abortions after a nearly three-month long hiatus. The clinic suspended abortion services in December 2018, leaving Nashville with zero remaining abortion facilities. Planned Parenthood officials credited the cease in abortions to a shortage of physicians able and willing to perform the service, The Tennessean reported Monday.

As of December, the Nashville clinic was the largest provider of abortions in Tennessee, according to USA Today. Since the clinic ceased abortions, women seeking to abort were forced to travel roughly 200 miles to clinics in Memphis and Knoxville. (RELATED: We Talked To Former Planned Parenthood Workers. Their Stories Are Chilling)

A pro-choice activist holds a Planned Parenthood sign while awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion access in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, DC on June 27, 2016. Shutterstock/Rena Schild

The jump in abortion providers comes after The Women’s Center closed in August, 2018 after a near 30-year stretch of operations in Tennessee. Starting in 1990, the facility offered surgical abortions for women seven to 15 weeks pregnant, and medical abortions for those 69 days or less along in their pregnancies.

More than 9,700 women had abortions in 2016, according to a 2016 report by the Tennessee Department of Health.

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