If the Foxhall Ambulatory Surgical Center did not provide abortions, there would be no reason for it ever to have been built. But the Daily Freeman reports that the clinic currently has no abortion provider, and is unable to find a replacement.
Foxhall was founded in 2009, after a forced merger between the Kingston and Benedictine hospitals eliminated the procedure from Kingston Hospital's healthcare offerings.
The Daily Freeman reports that the clinic has been without an abortion provider since a surgeon's retirement six months ago:
Donald Policastro said a new practitioner is being sought but that it’s not easy to find one.
“It is very difficult,” Policastro said. “We are working diligently to locate someone. There are few surgeons willing to do (pregnancy) terminations these days.”
Freeman reporter Paul Kirby writes that the center performed just 22 abortions last year, down from 34 in 2010.
A 2009 article in Women's eNews describes the founding of Foxhall, a long and difficult process that held up the Kingston/Benedictine merger for over a decade. An excerpt:
When construction on Foxhall began in August 2008, anti-choice activists picketed Kingston Hospital's parking lot and sidewalks. On Feb. 26, two anti-choice activists picketed the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
To defuse protest, planners diversified the center's services by including urology and podiatry. That way, protesters would not know which patients are coming and going for which services, making it more difficult to attack and intimidate women seeking abortions.
Jo Shuman is a nurse at a local men's prison and organizer for Health Care STAT, a Kingston-based community organization founded to protect women's health in light of the hospital mergers.
The group began almost 12 years ago, when a hospital merger was first being proposed among Benedictine and two smaller secular facilities, Kingston and Northern Dutchess.
"There were so many implications of the merger," Shuman said. "Many of us got involved because we realized during the women's movement that to really have power, we had to be in control of our bodies. And we were scared that we would lose reproductive health services in our community."
Along with the Margaretville Hospital and two residential care facilities in Margaretville in New Paltz, Kingston and Benedictine Hospital are now part of a group called the Health Alliance of the Hudson Valley. The opening of the Foxhall Ambulatory Surgery Center, which is funded by a separate state grant, was a prerequisite for forming the group.
MergerWatch, a group that advocates for patients' rights in hospital mergers, considers the founding of Foxhall a first in medical history:
This “hospital-beside-a-hospital” is the first separately-incorporated alternative provider of reproductive health care created in a New York State religious-secular hospital merger case.
