For many Brooklynites, it might soon become more difficult to get treated for an STI, access birth control, or receive family planning counseling. This is because one of the largest public health nonprofits serving the city is closing its sexual and reproductive health (SRH) centers. The two sites, which provide free or low-cost care, are in Fort Greene and Brownsville. They will begin scaling back services until they stop operating by April 6, 2025.
“Our Brooklyn SRH Centers have been a cornerstone of care for underserved communities for decades, and this decision was not made lightly,” said Lisa David, President and CEO of Public Health Solutions (PHS), in a statement.
PHS leadership listed longtime staffing shortages, rising costs, and flat funding or declines in government grants as key factors. For years, PHS had released local and state-wide calls for funding in order to save the sites, but those efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.
Last Wednesday, Jan. 22, PHS hosted a town hall to address community concerns and plans to support people impacted by the closures. It was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark case that recognized the right to abortion. When Trump-picked Supreme Court justices overturned it in 2022, operational issues like staffing got worse for reproductive health clinics already struggling financially, according to public health experts. New York State has recently closed down four other reproductive health care clinics, including one in Staten Island.
Who will be most affected?
Apart from reproductive health care, low-cost and free sexual health care services have shrunk in New York City. Two of the 10 city-run sexual health clinics — the Crown Heights and Riverside sites — are closed, according to the NYC health department. This comes nearly five years after more of these clinics were shut down and repurposed during the pandemic. Black New Yorkers, other people of color and low-income people are most affected by reduced access to sexual health care.
Public Health Solutions’ sexual and reproductive health centers largely serve people from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Crown Heights, East New York, Flatbush and Fort Greene. Among the services they offer are family planning, contraceptive and sexual health services, health education, medication abortion, and connection to resources like doula services, nutrition programs, and housing.
In its statement, PHS reported that the share of its patients who were uninsured grew from 15% before the pandemic to nearly 30% afterward. Low-income people and those with insurance coverage instability are often the most affected by closures of these kinds of community health sites, advocates say. Centers based in the same neighborhoods as the people they serve reduce barriers to health care access, like transportation and lost work time.
With women’s health in particular, they also provide culturally competent care for Black women and girls and other historically underserved communities, as Epicenter has reported. For instance, health counseling around abortions geared towards certain adolescent groups might be missing in other health care settings, according to Diana Romero, PhD, a public health researcher and professor of community health at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.
“It’s just the simple math that, even wanting to see more patients or wanting to take on some of that new patient load because other clinical areas have closed, just might not be feasible,” said Romero, whose work focuses on maternal, child, reproductive and sexual health.
Seeds of financial woes from Trump’s first presidency
While PHS announced the decision to close its sexual and reproductive health centers only this month, much of its impetus can be traced back to President Donald Trump’s first administration. Trump gave clinics like PHS an ultimatum: stop referring patients for abortion, or lose funds from Title X, the country’s only federally funded national family planning program. PHS leadership, deeming the rule an “unacceptable” limitation to the quality of care and information they could give patients, refused.
The Biden administration later reversed the policy, and PHS regained Title X funding in 2022. But PHS had already gone without those funds since 2019, and Title X funds have not kept up with inflation.
The state funding PHS received in recent years has also stayed stagnant, according to audited financial reports. Medicaid reimbursements haven’t changed much either. This is despite the rising costs of laboratory services, medications, equipment, and general operations, PHS reports.
Last Friday, amid a flurry of executive actions including reversals of Biden’s efforts to protect reproductive-care access, Trump reinstated the Hyde Amendment. This provision prohibits using federal programs like Medicaid to pay for abortions, though it’s unclear what the executive order might mean for funding at reproductive health care centers.
A trend in New York and beyond
The fate of Public Health Solutions is part of a broader national trend faced by sexual and reproductive health care facilities.
Nationally, the number of brick-and-mortar abortion clinics has dropped by 5%, a decline that started even before the overturn of Roe v. Wade: from 807 clinics in 2020 to 765 in March 2024. In that same period, New York, like many states that either didn’t ban or fully ban abortion, saw increases in the number of abortion clinics.
But the 21% increase seen in New York since 2020 has most recently changed due to a decline in sexual and reproductive health centers, which overlap with abortion clinics in some of the services they offer.
Last August, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York (PPGNY) announced they would close health centers in Goshen, Amsterdam, Cobleskill, and Staten Island. They would shift these services to larger, more centrally located sites or offer them, when possible, via telehealth. PPGNY also paused deep sedation services. This limited their ability to offer abortion in larger-stage pregnancies, which represented some of the most vulnerable of the patients they served, according to PPGNY.
The factors they cited were all too familiar: growing operating expenses, an insufficient state budget, and inadequate Medicaid and other insurer reimbursements. A “hostile political landscape” is another.
Romero says that, at least nationally, there has been a “chilling effect” in reproductive health care as a specialty. In interviews with physicians in states with abortion trigger bans or highly restricted postdoc programs, she has heard that fewer medical students or residents are choosing to specialize in OB-GYN and related areas like maternal-fetal medicine.
“Even in New York, … it’s probably still having an impact on some fraction of health care providers in terms of deciding whether they want to specialize in this area,” Romero said, noting that recent closures of local SRH centers also had to do with staffing issues.
Where to go if you’re impacted by these closures
If you’re affected by these SRH center closures and have trouble accessing another brick-and-mortar site, you can visit Planned Parenthood’s Virtual Health Center. It offers telehealth services for New Yorkers with or without insurance and in multiple languages. You can schedule virtual appointments online or by calling (212) 965-7000.
Public Health Solutions is referring patients and working with other providers in Brooklyn to help transfer patients currently receiving care.
PHS referrals to facilities include:
- For patients in urgent need of sexual health services (like STI testing and treatment):
The Fort Greene Sexual Health Clinic at 295 Flatbush Avenue Extension, Second Floor, in Brooklyn. It’s open Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. The clinic may close early once capacity is reached. (Yes, it’s located in the same building as the PHS Fort Greene center that’s closing.)
- These are recommended family planning centers that provide sexual health and contraception services to Medicaid recipients and people without insurance:
- Planned Parenthood: Joan Malin Brooklyn Health Center
44 Court St.
Brooklyn, NY 11201
(212) 965-7125
- Gotham Health: Cumberland Health Center
100 North Portland Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11205
(212) 238-7244 - CHN, Williamsburg Health Center
94 Manhattan Ave,
Brooklyn, NY 11206
(718) 388-0390 - CHN, Crown Heights Health Center
1167 Nostrand Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11225
(718) 778-0198 - Sun River Health: Church Ave Health Center
2412 Church Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11226
(855) 681-8700 - Kings County Hospital
451 Clarkson Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11203 - CHN, East New York Health Hub
2581 Atlantic Ave., 1st Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11207
(718) 495-6700
- NYC Health + Hospitals/Woodhull
760 Broadway, 8th Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11206
(718) 963-8000 - Bedford-Stuyvesant Family Health Center
1413 Fulton St.
Brooklyn, NY 11216
(718) 636-4500 - BMS Family Health and Wellness Centers
592 Rockaway Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11212
(718) 345-5000 - Brookdale Medical Center
1 Brookdale Plaza
Brooklyn, NY 11212
(718) 240-5219 - Gotham Health: East New York Health Center
2094 Pitkin Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11207
(212) 238-7244 - CHN, East New York Health Center
999 Blake Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11208
(718) 245-3325
- These are other recommended health care centers offering similar services and serving some of the same communities as PHS:
- NYC Health + Hospitals/Woodhull
760 Broadway, 8th Floor
Brooklyn, NY 11206
(718) 963-8000 - Bedford-Stuyvesant Family Health Center
1413 Fulton St.
Brooklyn, NY 11216
(718) 636-4500 - BMS Family Health and Wellness Centers
592 Rockaway Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11212
(718) 345-5000 - Brookdale Medical Center
1 Brookdale Plaza
Brooklyn, NY 11212
(718) 240-5219
5. Morris Heights Health Center
1095 Flatbush Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11226
(929) 512-3900
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Good info