Yamelsie Rodriguez, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, has announced she will step down from her position at the end of this month.
Rodriguez has led the regional organization since 2019 and has guided its efforts as access to abortion dwindled and then ended in Missouri.
“We have endured countless attacks — on health care, Planned Parenthood, democracy, and our patients, Rodriguez said in a statement. “While I know any CEO departure conjures feelings of uncertainty and instability, rest assured in knowing that I have absolute confidence in the senior leadership team to continue to lead the organization. I would not have made the decision to leave were that not true."
Rodriguez did not give a reason for her departure. The organization’s general counsel, Richard Muniz, will serve as CEO until Planned Parenthood chooses a permanent replacement.
“We are incredibly thankful to have had Yamelsie’s leadership over the last five years,” board President Sheila Greenbaum said in a press release. “Under her leadership, we’ve grown stronger than ever, with more patients and supporters than ever before in our history. We are poised to move from strength to strength.”
During Rodriguez’s tenure, Planned Parenthood completed the organization’s new facility in Fairview Heights. Leaders built the Metro East clinic to serve more patients, including those seeking abortions, as Missouri's lawmakers further restricted abortion rights in the state.
Missouri banned the procedure after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 struck down Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that legalized abortion for more than a half-century. Since the decision, demand for procedures at the Metro East clinic has increased, and Planned Parenthood extended its hours to accommodate the surge in patients coming from Missouri and other states that outlawed abortions.
Under Rodriguez, the organization also created programs to offer health care to transgender patients and opened a new clinic in Rolla.
Rodriguez did not say what she planned to do next but said in statement that she is “not going far.”
Her departure comes as abortion rights advocates in Missouri push for a ballot initiative to restore access to the procedure.
One such effort backed by the group Missourians for Constitutional Freedom would allow access to abortions up to the point of fetal viability, or when a fetus can survive outside the body. Experts usually place this point at 20 to 24 weeks.
Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri publicly supports the initiative. The organization’s leaders have in the past been critical of measures that restrict access to abortion based on viability limits, calling viability a political construct instead of a medical definition.
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