Family Planning Clinics Getting Back on Line

The state’s family planning program, bolstered by the restoration of $20 million that Gov. George Deukmejian had cut from its budget last year, will soon be operating at full strength, a state health official said Wednesday.

Mary Griffin, deputy director of the Department of Health Services, said the 134 private agencies that contract with the state to provide birth control and other services at about 500 clinics will be given proportional shares of the restored money based on how much they would have received had the budget never been cut.

A portion of the money will be set aside to help reopen 40 closed clinics, 17 of them in the Los Angeles area, Griffin told a joint hearing of the Assembly and Senate health committees. She said that it will be a matter of weeks before the clinics reopen, but that she could not be more specific.

Norma Clevenger, Sacramento lobbyist for Planned Parenthood, confirmed that women who go to most family planning clinics that had remained open will find the services restored to virtually the same level they were a year ago.

“The state is really making an effort to have things go as smoothly and quickly as possible,” Clevenger said.

But Tom Kring, director of the Los Angeles Regional Family Planning Council, said that even those clinics that remained open during the funding fight were forced to lay off health workers and must now try to rehire or replace them.

“It is going to take a couple of months at least before we are completely geared up,” Kring said. He said he did not know when the clinics that had been closed will be able to reopen.

Deukmejian had cut $24 million from the $36-million family planning budget last July. But after months of negotiations, the governor last week allowed a bill to restore $20 million to the program to become law without his signature. The bill also placed into law restrictions prohibiting the clinics from using the money to provide abortion or related services.