Abortion clinics in embattled states face another challenge: Money

Many clinics must stop providing abortions or move. Either choice is costly.

By Max Zahn
August 15, 2022

When Katie Quinonez, the executive director of an abortion clinic in West Virginia, saw the Supreme Court decision that overturned the federal guarantee of the right to an abortion, the first word she uttered was an obscenity.

The nonprofit Women's Health Center of West Virginia, located in Charleston, faced the immediate risk of prosecution under a state abortion ban from 1882, so Quinonez and a coworker made 60 calls to patients canceling procedures scheduled for the ensuing three weeks, said Quinonez.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/abortion-clinics-embattled-states-face-challenge-money/story?id=87945089

USA – What It’s Like To Open An Abortion Clinic Right Now

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
JUN. 16, 2022

Late last year, Dr. Diane Horvath and Morgan
Nuzzo decided they wanted to take the plunge and start their own business. They
looked for funding from traditional and not-so-traditional sources, figured out
creative ways to cut costs and hired lawyers to help them navigate the world of
business leases, bank loans and incorporation documents.

It’s a journey familiar to entrepreneurs all over the country — but unlike
Horvath and Nuzzo, those entrepreneurs aren’t opening an all-trimester abortion
clinic.

This is the first entry in a series tracking what it’s like to open an
all-trimester abortion clinic in the U.S. as abortion rights are being
curtailed.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-its-like-to-open-an-abortion-clinic-right-now/

16.06.2022

Partners in Abortion Care

A Post-Roe America

We look at what abortion access would look like.

By David Leonhardt
June 6, 2022

If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, more than 20 states — home to roughly half the country’s population — are likely to outlaw nearly all abortions. For women living in Mississippi, the closest place to receive a legal abortion might then be Illinois.

Yet the number of abortions performed in the U.S. would fall by much less than half, experts predict. One widely cited analysis, from Caitlin Myers of Middlebury College, estimates that the decline in legal abortions will be about 13 percent. The number of all abortions — including illegal abortions, like those using medications sent by mail to places with bans — will probably decline by even less.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/briefing/roe-v-wade-abortion-access-america.html

Women who are denied abortions risk falling deeper into poverty. So do their kids

May 26, 2022
Jennifer Ludden

Like most women seeking an abortion, Brittany Mostiller already had children when she unexpectedly got pregnant again. "I had two young daughters both under the age of 5, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with my sister," she says. She'd also just been laid off from her overnight job as a greeter for Greyhound buses. Her unemployment benefits were less than her wages there, and nearly all of them went toward rent and utilities. "I'm not even sure I had a cellphone at that time," she says. "If I did, it was certainly on and off," to save money.

Continued:https://www.npr.org/2022/05/26/1100587366/banning-abortion-roe-economic-consequences

The Devastating Economic Impacts of an Abortion Ban

The overturning of Roe v. Wade would seriously hinder women’s education, employment, and earning prospects.

By Sheelah Kolhatkar
May 11, 2022

Last December, oral arguments were held before the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case leading to the leaked draft opinion last week that, if finalized, would overturn Roe v. Wade. During one especially illuminating moment, Chief Justice John Roberts attempted to draw Julie Rikelman—the litigation director of the Center for Reproductive Rights, who was arguing to have a ban on abortions after fifteen weeks in the state of Mississippi overturned—into a back-and-forth about the significance of the cutoff for having access to an abortion. Rikelman made a broader argument, that narrowing women’s access to the procedure could disproportionately harm low-income women or those experiencing personal crises. She turned to numbers to bolster her argument. “In fact,” Rikelman said, “the data has been very clear over the last fifty years that abortion has been critical to women’s equal participation in society. It’s been critical to their health, to their lives, their ability to pursue—”

“I’m sorry, what—what kind of data is that?” Roberts interrupted.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-devastating-economic-impacts-of-an-abortion-ban

The US Supreme Court is wrong to disregard evidence on the harm of banning abortion

Fifty years of research shows that abortion access is crucial for health care and important for equality.

Nature, Editorial
05 May 2022

Abortion could soon cease to be legal across
the United States, according to a leaked draft of a US Supreme Court opinion,
published by news outlet Politico on 2 May. The court’s chief justice, John
Roberts, confirmed that the 98-page document is authentic, but not necessarily
final. If the draft does represent the court’s final position, it will fly in
the face of an overwhelming body of evidence from economists and reproductive-
and public-health researchers who point to the dire, immediate and unequal
impact this ruling will have on hundreds of thousands of people.

Continued: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01249-2

05.05.2022

Center for Reproductive Rights

Julie Rikelman

overturning Roe v. Wade

USA – It Can Already Take Weeks To Get An Abortion

And the Supreme Court could soon make it take even longer.

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
Data Analysis by Holly Fuong
Charts by Elena Mejía
Published Apr. 18, 2022

Last week, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a law outlawing abortion in the state. If it isn’t blocked by the courts, the legislation — which has no exceptions for rape or incest — would be one of the harshest measures to become law at a time when anti-abortion lawmakers are all but competing with each other to pass new restrictions.

But in a sense, Oklahoma legislators who want to end
abortion don’t have much more to do in their state. New data exclusively
analyzed by FiveThirtyEight shows that it’s already very difficult to get an
abortion appointment in Oklahoma — and it has nothing to do with the state’s
new ban. Ever since the Supreme Court allowed a highly restrictive abortion law
to go into effect in Texas last September, Oklahoma’s four abortion clinics
have been overrun with demand from out-of-state patients. When a team of
academic researchers posed as pregnant people and called the Oklahoma clinics
at the beginning of March, all four told the callers they couldn’t schedule
them for an appointment.

Continued: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/it-can-already-take-weeks-to-get-an-abortion/

USA – How abortion bans widen the gender pay gap and diminish women’s economic power

Paul Constant, Business Insider
Feb 26, 2022

When the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in December for and against a Mississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Justice Amy Coney Barrett seemed confused why lawyers arguing for legal abortion, as she put it, "focus on the ways in which forced parenting, forced motherhood, would hinder women's access to the workplace and to equal opportunities."

Justice Barrett asked the lawyers, "Why don't the safe-haven laws [in which any mother can give up her new baby to the state for adoption, no questions asked] take care of that problem?"

Continued: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-legalizing-abortion-bans-could-impoverish-women-for-generations-2022-2

USA – How Abortion Has Changed Since 1973

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Anna Wiederkehr
Published Jan. 20, 2022

It’s been almost 49 years since the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973. And in the half-century since abortion became a constitutional right, a lot has changed. Clinics have closed, restrictions have mounted and abortion has become one of the most polarizing issues in American politics. At the same time, women are receiving far fewer abortions than they were in the past.

But something else has changed, too: the women who are seeking abortions.

Continued: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-abortion-has-changed-since-1973/

20.01.2022

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Being Denied an Abortion Has Lasting Impacts on Health and Finances

A landmark study of women seeking abortions shows the harms of being unable to end an unwanted pregnancy

By Mariana Lenharo, Scientific American
December 22, 2021

As the Supreme Court decides the future of abortion laws in the U.S., a key question to be considered is whether access to the procedure has positive or negative consequences for the people who get an abortion, and for society in general.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization concerns the constitutionality of a new Mississippi law that would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The case challenges the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, a precedent that protects abortion access before fetal viability—a point at around 24 weeks of gestation, when a fetus is considered able to survive outside the uterus.

Continued: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/being-denied-an-abortion-has-lasting-impacts-on-health-and-finances/