Dive Brief:
- On Monday, Planned Parenthood requested a court order to stop Florida health officials from using new and unpublished standards to define gestational periods during pregnancy.
- Last month,16 Florida Planned Parenthood locations were investigated and three were cited for allegedly illegally performing second-trimester abortions.
- Planned Parenthood claims that state officials arbitrarily changed the way gestational periods were being defined and the abortions in question were actually done during the first trimester.
Dive Insight:
On Monday, Dawn Laguens, the vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement that the allegation that it performed second-trimester abortions "is completely false." The organization claims that Florida's Agency for Healthcare Administration (AHCA) changed its standards for calculating first- and second-trimester abortions with no advance notification. It also noted that the citations were issued two days before the Republican presidential debate.
According to Planned Parenthood, the AHCA has long defined the first trimester as the first 12 weeks of pregnancy or the first 14 weeks following the last normal menstrual period.
"We have been doing things the same way for 10 years without incident," Barbara Zdravecky, chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Southwest and Central Florida, told Reuters. "We really are surprised by this."