United States: An element that is often overlooked in the abortion issue is the huge costs of transportation and medical bills for women who have to travel other states to access the service.
It has been almost a month since the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic, and a new study presents actual figures for those concerns, as reported by HealthDay.
Rising Costs for Women Seeking Abortion Care
It concludes that, prior to the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, 65% of women who traveled to another state to seek for an abortion received bills that they termed as catastrophic as they forced them to reduce on other basic needs.
Especially for women from poorer households, these expenses “can be devastating and long-lasting … triggering high levels of debt, financial insecurity, worsened health outcomes and increased impoverishment,” noted a team led by Ortal Wasser. She’s a researcher in the school of social work at New York University in New York City.
As Wasser’s team highlighted, earlier research indicates that women seeking the procedure are predominantly uninsured and belong to low income backgrounds.
The new study concerned data collected before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.
Before that 2022 ruling, restrictive laws in various states had forced women to travel to get an abortion.
Financial Strain on Low-Income Women
Researchers of Wasser’s group worked only with the data obtained in 2019, which the 675 women completed in questionnaires during their wait before an abortion in the clinics in California, Illinois, and New Mexico. Over two-thirds came for an abortion before or in the first trimester of pregnancy at 12 weeks.
Earlier studies have revealed that women travelling to access an abortion spend one-third of their monthly income in the process.
“Studies have also documented that, to pay for abortion care, individuals had to take out loans, sell personal belongings and forego essential household expenditures such as food, bills and rent,” the researchers noted.
Their new study supports all those stories of suffering.
In total, 42% of women who sought an abortion, either in-state or across state lines, paid for costs that are described as ‘affording basic needs,’ by the researchers.
This percentage went up higher; to 65%, when they included only those women who had to seek the procedure from another state.
The fact that women end up struggling to come up with money to pay bills or take loans in order to meet these needs puts a lot of pressure on the women. According to the data, having catastrophic costs increased women’s level of anxiety and depression accordingly.
Impact on Mental Health
“These financial and psychological burdens encountered by patients who seek abortion care are likely even worse in the post-Dobbs context when more people must travel longer distances and out of their state of residence to access care,” the team wrote.
A Call for Expanded Coverage
One solution, given current laws around abortion: According to the researchers, reform should increase Medicaid or private insurance funding of abortion services, as reported by HealthDay.
“The findings suggest a need to expand insurance coverage to ensure equitable access to abortion care, irrespective of people’s state of residence,” they wrote.