page_title: Abortion in Kentucky
section_title: Clinic history
hierarchical_section_title: Abortion in Kentucky / History / Clinic history
caption_attribution_description: English: Number of abortion clinics in Kentucky by year. Created using data linked on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LauraHale/Template:Abortion_by_US_state .
context_page_description: Abortion in Kentucky is legal. 57% of people in Kentucky said abortion should be “illegal in all or most cases.” There were laws in Kentucky about abortion by 1900, including ones with therapeutic exceptions. These laws were designed to protect women from people offering unsafe abortions. In 1998, the state passed legislation that required clinics to have an Abortion Clinic License if they wanted to operate. By the early 2010s, members of the state legislature were trying to ban abortion in almost all cases and had also introduced "fetal heartbeat" bans. Prior to 2019, Kentucky law prohibited abortions after week 22. This changed when the state legislature passed a law that moved the prohibition to week 6 in the early part of the year.
  The number of abortion clinics fell years ago and has remained steady since, with eleven abortion clinics in 1982, nine in 1992, and two since 2002 and dropped to one in 2017. There were 4,923 legal abortions in 2014, and 4,585 in 2015. There have been abortion rights activists active in the state, participating in the #StoptheBans movement in May 2019.
context_section_description: There were 3 or 4 abortion service providers in Louisville in 1981.  That year,  EMW Women’s Surgical Center opened in the city. In 1989, EMW Women’s Surgical Center opened a satellite clinic in Lexington. Both clinics were run by Dr. Sam Eubanks and Dr. Ernest Marshall. Eubanks died in 2013. Between 1982 and 1992, the number of abortion clinics in the state decreased by two, going from eleven in 1982 to nine in 1992.
  Since around 2002, the two EMW Women’s Surgical Centers were the only abortion providers in the state.  Other ones that had existed in the state had voluntarily closed. In 2014, there were two abortion clinics in the state. In 2014, 98% of the 120 counties in the state did not have an abortion clinic. That year, 74% of women in the state aged 15 – 44 lived in a county without an abortion clinic.
  In 2017, there were 2 Planned Parenthood clinics in a state with a population of 996,488 women aged 15 – 49 of which 0 offered abortion services. North Dakota, Wyoming, Mississippi, Louisiana and Kentucky were the only five states as of July 21, 2017, not to have a Planned Parenthood clinic that offered abortion services. In early 2017, EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Louisville was the only facility in the state of Kentucky that provided women with abortion services.  Another clinic in Lexington run by the same organization had closed in January that year because it could not meet new licensing requirements.  Kentucky’s Republican Governor, Matt Bevin, worked to try to close EMW Women’s Surgical Center in Louisville down.  In May 2019, the state was one of six states in the nation with only one abortion clinic.
caption: Number of abortion clinics in Kentucky by year
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