Only one Planned Parenthood open in Albuquerque and the 'demand is not being met'

The Planned Parenthood clinic on San Mateo in Albuquerque closed last December and reopened into a larger facility farther away from the locals who may need it most, according to officials with the organization.

With patients crossing the border from Texas into New Mexico for care, the demand is increasing as only one Planned Parenthood clinic remains open in the Albuquerque area.

Across the state, there are four Planned Parenthood clinics actively operational — in Farmington, Santa Fe, Albuquerque and Las Cruces.

While there are other providers for family planning and abortion care, “across the country, demand is not being met,” said Rachael Lorenzo, the executive director of Indigenous Women Rising, an abortion fund that provides stipends to Native people to break down the financial barrier to care.

New clinics are incoming, such as the Valley Abortion Group, which plans to open next month in Albuquerque and the state-funded clinic that broke ground last week in Las Cruces, but in the meantime, patients are turning to other states for care, Lorenzo said.

Nearly 500 New Mexicans traveled to Colorado seeking an abortion in 2023, a study by the Guttmacher Institute shows. According to Lorenzo, some New Mexicans are leaving the state because of a scarcity of appointments. Securing an appointment in Albuquerque can be especially hard, Lorenzo said, and it forces patients to delay care until later in pregnancy, when it can be even harder to find a clinic.

The San Mateo closure is just the most recent in a string of closures that began in 2017, when both the Nob Hill and Rio Rancho locations closed their doors.

The closures in 2017 were due to financial stress, said the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, Adrienne Mansanares.

After those closures, other locations felt the pressure of too many patients in too little space.

“The San Mateo Health Center is beloved, but quite small and had limited capacity for us to see more patients,” Mansanares said. “So especially with national abortion rights being just gutted in the Supreme Court, with the Dobbs decision, we have so many more patients now traveling from Texas, and then after the pandemic, there’s so much more local patient need in Albuquerque as well that we knew we needed to open a new health center that was larger and really designed with those patients in mind.”

In 2021, lawmakers in New Mexico repealed an unenforced 1969 statute that made most abortion procedures illegal in preparation for a potential overturn of federal abortion rights. After the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court two years ago, states were left to decide the legal status of abortion, leading some states to tighten restrictions or ban the procedure altogether.

More than 14,200 patients from Texas, where abortion has been banned with very little exception, came to New Mexico seeking the service in 2023, according to the study. That’s only a few hundred patients less than the amount of Texan patients that Kansas, Colorado and California have received collectively.

New Mexico also receives patients from Arizona and Oklahoma, according to the study, though in much lesser numbers at a total of a little over 400 patients.

Some 71% of all abortions performed in New Mexico are for patients traveling from other states, which is a nearly 200% increase since 2020, the study found. At Planned Parenthood in particular, more than half of their abortion care patients are from Texas, according to PPRM spokesperson, Fawn Bolak.

The Eubank location is three times the size of the shuttered San Mateo clinic, but that doesn’t mean that it will be as accessible for low-income locals. The San Mateo location was walking distance from Central and served the community in the International District.

Mansanares recognized that people from this low-income community may face barriers in accessing the new clinic, whether that be a lack of reliable transportation or inability to pay for their care. According to Mansanares, PPRM is working to secure funding to someday reopen a clinic in the area of Nob Hill. When or if that clinic will open is unclear.

Beyond location accessibility, Planned Parenthood faces a staffing shortage like many other health care organizations, Mansanares said.

“I do think that if we can fully staff our health centers, and we have enough financial support to help patients in need — that could cover the demand in partnership with everyone else across the state,” Mansanares said.