'Heartbreaking': Trump cuts shutter clinic — force students to travel 50 miles for care

With the closure of a nearby Planned Parenthood clinic at the beginning of May, students from Utah State University in Logan, Utah, face a “scary” situation in terms of accessing health care, prompting the creation of a carpool to drive patients on two-hour round trips to a clinic 50 miles away, community members told Raw Story.

Bridget Ackroyd, a USU senior, said Logan was “secluded” and “in its own little bubble,” with no public transit to reach Ogden, the closest Planned Parenthood clinic that remains open.

The loss of the Logan clinic hurts students who "might be in family situations where they are not able to charge something like an STI test to their health insurance, but they still want to make sure that they're healthy and safe," Ackroyd said.

The Logan clinic is one of two Planned Parenthood health centers in Utah — among at least a dozen across the U.S., according to Raw Story analysis — to shutter since President Donald Trump took office and froze federal funds for family planning services.

“It's just heartbreaking that now we know that those folks who relied on us either have to travel, defer care or figure out other ways to access the kind of health care they've depended on,” Shireen Ghorbani, interim president of the Planned Parenthood Association of Utah, told Raw Story.

“It's a big blow to these communities.”

A late-March freeze on Title X grants — federal funds which support family planning services from contraception to cancer screenings and testing for sexually transmitted infections — is just the start of funding challenges for Planned Parenthood health centers across the U.S., with more than 300 of its nearly 600 clinics across the country utilizing Title X funds.

Proposed cuts to Medicaid as part of a Republican megabill that advanced out of the House Budget Committee late Sunday but is still being negotiated between GOP factions would hit Planned Parenthood centers which also receive reimbursement from patients paying for services with Medicaid.

“The dismantling of health care in this country is happening before our very eyes,” Ghorbani said, “and now in this new budget … removing Title X, reductions in Medicaid, all of this is really spiraling us into a very, very bleak future when it comes to access to health care, especially for folks living on the margins in this country.”

Planned Parenthood has lost more than $20 million in Title X grants and $6 million for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program, said Laurel Sakai, national director of public policy and government affairs at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

“We fully anticipate that we are kind of just the tip of the iceberg and that Title X funding may fully go away under this administration,” Ghorbani said.

‘Dismantling access’

The Planned Parenthood Association of Utah decided to shutter its Logan and St. George clinics on May 2, after the Trump administration froze $2.8 million in Title X funds.

In 2024, the clinic in Logan served 1,650 patients, and the St. George clinic served nearly 3,000, according to Ghorbani, who said 18 staff members lost their jobs.

Ackroyd, the USU senior, told Raw Story the closure of the Logan clinic was a “loss” for students who used a sliding-scale payment option instead of billing their parents’ insurance.

“If they're getting something like a birth control prescription or an STI exam, and they have parents that might have a very negative reaction if they see that charge, it puts into question the safety of those students that want to be able to access that health care without necessarily notifying parents,” Ackroyd said.

Alternative health care options in Logan are Intermountain Health and the campus health center but both rely on using insurance, Ackroyd said. Plus, she said, patients are likely to be stuck “waiting for sometimes hours and hours.”

Ackroyd said that at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Logan, she was able to get a next-day appointment for an intrauterine device.

“The Trump administration is dismantling access to … critical health care, by restricting these funds,” Ghorbani said. “It means that care goes away. People's jobs go away, and those decisions were made because of the actions of the Trump administration.”

‘Fundamental misunderstanding’

According to health policy nonprofit KFF, Planned Parenthood receives a third of its revenue from state and federal government funds.

But because of the Hyde Amendment, a federal measure passed in 1977, Planned Parenthood health centers do not receive any federal funds to provide abortions — which according to KFF make up just 4 percent of services performed at Planned Parenthood clinics.

In its newly released 2023-2024 annual report, Planned Parenthood confirmed that of more than 9.45 million services performed, 402,230 were abortions, while 34 percent of its revenue came from government health services reimbursements and grants.

Regardless, in late April, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced that defunding “big abortion” was among Trump’s policy priorities.

Sakai said attacks on Planned Parenthood are “not terribly surprising considering they went after us during the first Trump administration.”

But, “Planned Parenthood is not a line item in the budget,” Sakai said. “Patients choose to go to Planned Parenthood in order to get their health care that they need, and they're trying to take away that right and that choice of people.”

Cara Schumann, deputy director of federal strategies at abortion justice organization, All* Above All, said one in 11 women, particularly those on Medicaid, get reproductive health care from Planned Parenthood clinics.

That means cuts to Medicaid as well as federal grants like Title X and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention program would be a “double whammy” for Planned Parenthood, she said.

“This is them attempting to defund Planned Parenthood clinics for reproductive health care they provide, so cancer screenings, STI screenings, basic contraceptives,” Schumann told Raw Story.

“What it seems is just like a fundamental misunderstanding of what Planned Parenthood does, what health care is, what services people need.”

Sakai said Planned Parenthood was gearing up to work with “champions in Congress” to “fight back against [the cuts] with any tools they have, to show that this isn't really about the budget or about any of their concerns they're pretending to raise about waste, fraud and abuse of the Medicaid program.”

“We know their goal is to shut down health centers, and we know that our clinics are doing everything possible to keep care in their communities.”

EXCLUSIVE:Breastfeeding mom of US citizen sues Kristi Noem after being grabbed by ICE