Tara Culp-Ressler and Erica Hellerstein at ThinkProgress
have written an excellent comprehensive look—complete with interactive maps—at how new abortion laws have boosted the price of the procedure across the nation:
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.
“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.
This situation isn't wholly new, of course. The attack on women's reproductive rights has always included a major component of class warfare. For nearly 40 years the Hyde Amendment has made it tough on women in most states by barring Medicaid from paying for abortions except in cases of rape and incest. But the record number of anti-abortion laws passed since 2011 has jacked up costs.
The most affluent women have always been able to obtain abortions even when they had to leave the country to obtain one. But for many women seeking to terminate their pregnancies—often single and working for low wages—coming up with the money can mean delaying the procedure, which makes it cost even more and, of course, heightens risks. A study by the Guttmacher Instititute, which advocates for women's reproductive rights, found that 42 percent of women seeking abortions lived below the poverty line.
One of the ways the prices have been driven up is by forcing women to make two trips to an abortion provider, one for face-to-face "counseling," which often is just propaganda brimful of bogus information designed to persuade a woman not to have an abortion. She must then return the following day for the procedure. These waiting periods are, obviously, medically unnecessary, but health is not what the purveyors of this and other barriers have in mind. For a woman who lives a long distance from the steadily dwindling number of clinics providing abortions, this two-step process can mean an overnight stay in a hotel, transportation and food money as well as the cost of the procedure itself.
Culp-Ressler and Hellerstein cite U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the matter: Abortion has become “inaccessible to poor women” she said, calling it a “crying shame.” It certainly is that. But more to the point, it's an infuriating tactic by ideologues determined to roll back the clock on reproductive rights to the days when women were regularly cut up by unskilled practitioners forced to carry out abortions in the shadows. The good old days, according to the forced-birthers.