Loans and pawned belongings: abortion patients are increasingly going into debt

Source: The Guardian

Sun 22 Dec 2024 10.00 EST


Early this fall, a woman desperate for an abortion messaged the Wild West Access Fund, an abortion fund in Nevada, asking for support. She guessed she was nearly 20 weeks pregnant and didn’t have even a few hundred dollars to spend on the procedure. She wanted to prove she was doing everything she could to raise the money, and said she was trying to pawn her vehicle.

Over the next few weeks she bounced from clinic to clinic, trying to put the money together as the price of the abortion she sought continued to increase. The cost of a first trimester abortion is about $500, around $2,000 in the second, and a third trimester abortion can range from a few thousand dollars to around $25,000. Since the US supreme court eliminated federal protections for abortion, more than a dozen states banned the procedure completely, while others set gestational limits, increasing travel costs for pregnant people in those states.

The woman eventually stopped replying to messages, and the fund workers don’t know if she ever received her abortion. Macy Haverda, executive director of the Wild West Access Fund, told me that even for a $600 procedure, “we have had a lot of clients that talk about having to sell off their belongings.”

Abortion debt is increasingly part of the abortion landscape, whether in the form of pawning possessions, putting procedures on credit cards or taking out loans. I spoke with three different clinics, two abortion funds and several organizers – all of them have identified more debt burden falling on patients since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/22/abortion-patient-debt