Pricing American Women Out Of Abortion, One Restriction At A Time
Pricing American Women Out Of Abortion, One Restriction At A Time | ThinkProgress
BY TARA CULP-RESSLER & ERICA HELLERSTEIN
Last summer, when arguing in court in favor of Senate Bill 206, a harsh law that would force at least one of Wisconsin’s abortion clinics to close its doors, a state official compared ending a pregnancy to buying a fancy car.
“If I decided I’m going to buy a Mercedes-Benz but I cannot get financing for that car and I don’t have the funds to buy it, am I prevented from buying a Mercedes-Benz?” Assistant Attorney General Clayton Kawski asked an expert witness during the hearing.
Reproductive rights proponents retorted that basic women’s health care is hardly a luxury good. But for many of the pregnant women who struggle to navigate a maze of state laws that make it increasingly burdensome and expensive to get an abortion, it might as well be.
Across the country, state legislatures have passed hundreds of different measures intended to choke off access to abortion. Although those laws are typically framed in terms of legal restrictions, they also drive up the price tag of the procedure for low-income women in significant ways.
A ThinkProgress examination of the potential fees that could be accrued by two archetypal Wisconsin women found that the process of obtaining an abortion could total up to $1,380 for a low-income single mother saddled with charges related to gas, a hotel stay, childcare, and taking time off work. For a middle-income woman living comfortably in a city with no children and public transit options to the clinic, meanwhile, those fees dropped to $593.
And that doesn’t account for the fees that accumulate as a result of the legislative barriers to the procedure, which end up disproportionately burdening women of limited resources and economic means. For instance, abortion is routinely excluded from Americans’ insurance plans, leaving many patients to shoulder the entire cost of an unexpected health event on their own.
“Any time we see these restrictions, it means that people who are low-income who face other barriers in trying to access health care will always be the ones who are affected by it,” said Lindsay Rodriguez, the communications manager at the National Network of Abortion Funds, which is comprised of dozens of state-level organizations that help women pay for their abortions.
The mounting fees can quickly become prohibitive. According to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, more than 4,000 women were denied abortions in 2008 because they were past the gestational limit — largely because it took them too long to try to save up the money for it. Nearly six in ten participants said they couldn’t get an abortion earlier because of travel and procedure costs.
Much more:
http://app.mx3.americanprogressaction.org/e/er?s=785&lid=166163&elq=79e33888198344bb94e6cc2d7daec69f
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Further evidence of heartless nature on anti-choicers. They are nearly all also conservatives against the social safety nets, such as CHIP & SNAP. Yet as abortion is increasingly a 'luxury' expense, those safety nets are needed more and more.
It's even worse, in a way, than before Roe. Then, a 'D&C' could be used as cover. While the procedure was more available f/ those w/ money, it wasn't always out of reach f/ less monied. Though hangers & butchers were still in easier reach because f/ D&C, one would probably already have an ob-gyn, out of reach f/ those w/o insurance.
The complete hypocracy and illogical tenets illustrate the tenuous hold on reality by these religious zealots.
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