New York City clinic dedication highlights city-wide effort to enhance access to high-quality abortion care

Ipas honors HHC as a Champion of Reproductive Health. From left to right: Dr. Benjamin Chu, Charlynn Goins, Dr. Van Dunn and Deborah Cates and, from Ipas, Rivka Gordon, Anu Kumar and Teresa McInerney.

Beginning October 12, women seeking care for first-trimester abortion at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn, New York, will be treated in a newly renovated facility entirely dedicated to the highest-quality abortion care. The new Women’s Options Suite is part of a city-wide initiative to improve abortion care and to address a nationwide shortage of abortion providers that disproportionately affects poor women.

“New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) and the 11 hospitals in the HHC system have shown vision and commitment to improving women’s health care,” said Rivka Gordon, U.S. Program Director for Ipas. For more than two years, Ipas has collaborated with the HHC and several other organizations to implement improvements in the quality of abortion care.

“Ipas’s ultimate goal is that American women of all backgrounds receive safer, quicker, simpler, and less expensive reproductive-health care,” Gordon said. “This is a very important first step, which we look forward to building on with our strong network of partners.”

Kings County hospital serves a predominantly low-income, minority population, many of whom are recent immigrants to the United States. Recent improvements that will help the Women’s Options Suite better meet the needs of the approximately 2,500 women who seek abortions there each year include:

• Training health-care providers to use manual vacuum aspiration and medication abortion for early uterine evacuation
• Offering treatment in an outpatient setting and increasing women’s options for methods and kinds of anesthesia, and
• Enhancing the physical facility to provide a more hospitable, caring and private environment for women.

At other health-care facilities, moving first-trimester abortion and miscarriage management out of the operating room has been shown to reduce costs to both the health system and patients, while also expediting provision of care.

The Women’s Options Suite at Kings County is the first of several planned state-of-the art facilities to be built in New York City’s public hospitals. The city-wide Women’s Options Initiative is the result of a directive issued by Mayor Michael Bloomberg soon after his election in January 2002, which called for all obstetrics and gynecology residents at New York City’s 11 public hospitals to be trained in the most up-to-date techniques for abortion care.

In addition to HHC and Ipas, organizations working together to implement the mayor’s mandate include NARAL Pro-Choice New York, the Kenneth J. Ryan Residency Program, Planned Parenthood of New York City, the American Medical Women’s Association and the National Abortion Federation.

Ipas’s Gordon said partners in the project are very pleased by how the city’s health-care professionals have responded to the initiative. For example, she said, most eligible residents have opted to undergo training in manual vacuum aspiration and medication abortion.

In addition to the Kings County facility, plans for renovation and training are underway to prepare the other hospitals in the municipal system to offer high-quality, state-of-the-art abortion care. Significant improvements have already taken place at several hospitals including Jacobi, Bellevue and Queens Community Hospitals.

“With the opening of the Women’s Options Suite, HHC has created a model for women’s ambulatory care services,” Gordon said. “Every time it is replicated, the women of New York City will stand a better chance of being able to access the high-quality abortion care they need and deserve.”

At the clinic dedication, Ipas honored HHC as a Champion of Reproductive Health, recognizing the HHC's vision and commitment to improving the quality of reproductive health care, including abortion, for New York City's women.

For more information, contact:
Kirsten Sherk
Senior Associate, Media Relations
e-mail: sherkk@ipas.org
phone: 919.960.5612
fax: 919.929.0258