Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) CEO Adrienne Mansanares is continuing to lament a supposed dearth of abortion facilities — particularly Planned Parenthood locations — in New Mexico, a year after giving media the same song and dance. The plan now, however, is to relocate a Planned Parenthood on San Mateo in Albuquerque to be a larger facility closer to the Texas border. The San Mateo location was easily accessible for low-income locals, but the money is at the state border now that Texas has a law protecting most preborn children from abortion.
“The San Mateo Health Center is beloved, but quite small and had limited capacity for us to see more [abortion] 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 the Albuquerque Journal, Gillian Barkhurs wrote that Planned Parenthood moved “farther away from the locals who may need it most.”
Not only has Planned Parenthood moved away from areas where it claimed to be helping low-income women with health care needs, Mansanares said the demand for abortion is so high that Planned Parenthood locations have limited their number of non-abortion appointments. And in fact, the locations were limiting these services even a year ago when Mansares spoke to the media.
“We are one of just a few organizations that do provide abortion care,” Mansanares said. “So there just aren’t enough providers that can help jump in, whereas they can for things like sexually transmitted infections [STIs] or birth control.”
READ: Planned Parenthood in New Mexico cuts health care to commit more abortions
There are four Planned Parenthood facilities currently operating in New Mexico, including in Farmington, Sante Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces. Non-Planned Parenthood affiliated abortion businesses are moving into the state as well, such as the Valley Abortion Group, and a state-funded $10 million facility that recently broke ground in Las Cruces; that facility, celebrated by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, will offer abortions, abortion training, and even space to do “research” on the bodies of aborted babies.
Now, Planned Parenthood is also attempting to figure out how to win back the nearly 500 New Mexican women, according to a Guttmacher study, who traveled outside of New Mexico (often to Colorado) for abortions in 2023 instead of using an in-state Planned Parenthood facility.
About 71% of abortions committed in New Mexico are carried out on women who have traveled there from other states, said Guttmacher — a 200% increase from 2020. New Mexico was an abortion haven long before the reversal of Roe v. Wade, and home to one of the most notorious late-term abortion practices, Southwestern Women’s Options, located in Albuquerque. The abortionists at that facility were responsible for the death of at least one woman, Keisha Atkins, who died as a result of a botched abortion at 24 weeks.
According to Mansanares, PPRM is planning to raise funds with the intent to potentially reopen an Albuquerque location in the area of Nob Hill, where a facility closed in 2017.
