When New York legalized abortion in 1970 – three years before the Supreme Court ruled Rowe v. Wade – a shrewd entrepreneur named Martin Mitchell saw an opportunity. The 31-year-old from the Detroit area rented a small private jet and began advertising frequent flights from Michigan, where abortion was optional, to Niagara Falls, New York, where it was not. For $ 400, a woman received transportation, an abortion from a licensed doctor at a clinic near the airport, and lunch before being returned home the same day.
One of Mitchell’s clients, a 22-year-old secretary working full-time at a hospital, told a reporter at the time that she was too scared to seek illegal abortion in Michigan and that if she was unable to do so, she could New York, she would be forced to continue her pregnancy. She could only afford the charter service – which, adjusted for inflation, would cost about $ 2,900 today – because her parents lent her the money. Before the flight home, she burst with relief. “God, I feel great, good, just great,” she said.
It is no exaggeration to imagine that this is the future we may face soon, in which the possibility of terminating a pregnancy in the United States will largely depend on where you live and what financial resources you have. If the expired draft opinion of the Supreme Court to overturn Rowe v. Wade is accepted, approximately half of the US states are expected to quickly ban or severely restrict abortion. A constitutional right is no longer protected, abortion will become more like a privilege reserved for those who have the means to obtain one.
To be clear, this is already a living experience of poor and minority women in many parts of the country. In much of the South and Midwest, state legislatures have spent decades adopting abortion regulations with the explicit intention of suppressing access. Patients in these states are forced to spend more money, spend more time at work, and travel longer distances to reach an abortion clinic. Given that almost half of abortion patients in the United States live below the poverty line, and about another quarter are low-income, it follows that these barriers have proved insurmountable for some.
Calling abortion a privilege is incompatible with what it feels like to experience it. For women who are struggling to maintain bodily autonomy in an attempt to avoid forced birth, this is a basic human necessity. But in a post-Roe world, women who have and do not have access to this form of health care are likely to be severely divided by race and class.
Read: The future of abortion in America after Rowe
“Although abortion is right everywhere, for many people in the country, it is difficult to access,” said David Cohen, a professor at Drexel University School of Law. “But this is a world other than saying it’s illegal. If Roe is repealed, it will drastically change the situation for people in almost half of the states in the country. Some women will order abortion pills online, which could put them in a dubious legal situation, while others will cross state care borders if they can afford it, he predicted. “Travel is a privilege, and the privilege in this country is about people with money and people with white skin,” he said.
We already know the effect of driving patients to travel longer distances to terminate a pregnancy: some of them simply cannot travel. After Texas passed HB 2 in 2013, a restrictive abortion law that was later overturned by the Supreme Court, the abortion rate dropped in counties where the distance to the nearest facility increased by 100 miles or more.
This is exactly what is expected to happen on a larger scale if Roe is reversed. According to Caitlin Knowles Myers, a professor of economics at Middlebury College, about 54 percent of women of childbearing age in the United States would experience an increase in distance to the nearest abortion provider. In counties whose nearest abortion provider is expected to close, the average distance will increase from 33 miles to 282 miles.
Read: The right of movement has been attacked
Myers estimates that about three-quarters of women seeking abortion in these counties would still find an abortion provider – to cover the extra costs of long-distance travel, such as petrol, hotel stays and childcare. . But about a quarter of patients would not. In the first year after Rowe, she estimated, 100,000 women who wanted an abortion would not be able to reach a clinic. Some would naturally have miscarriages, while others would seek abortion pills to terminate their pregnancies at home. According to her model, about 75,000 women will eventually give birth against their will.
The main difference between women who will reach an abortion provider and those who do not? Money. “Basically, you’re looking at a situation where the poorest, the most financially constrained, and the most fragile in economic conditions are unable to make the long journey to have an abortion,” Myers told me. “It has always been the case that women with money will find a way to have an abortion. And that was true in the era before Rowe. “
Abortion care has changed significantly since the 1970s, when Mitchell’s private jet took women to Niagara Falls for a quick day trip. Today, abortion pills make up more than half of abortions in the United States. Medical abortion, as the two-pill regimen is called, can be done safely at home. Certainly some women will fly to other states to have access to a legal abortion at a clinic, but the more common scenario, if Roe is reversed, is likely to involve a woman trying to get abortion pills in the mail or at a nearby state. Anti-abortion lawmakers in some states are already trying to address these avenues.
“Who will test the district attorneys and the police to arrest and criminalize people for such things?” Said Lisa Fuentes, a senior researcher at the Gutmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. “People who are most likely to be persecuted are people who are already systematically seen as devalued, who are experiencing systemic racism and discrimination. Black and Spanish women have a higher rate of unwanted pregnancies and abortions than their white counterparts.
This does not mean that privileged women have nothing to worry about. As Rebecca Traister insists in a recent essay, the abolition of abortion rights ultimately affects everyone. “The choice that people, even people with resources, make about how to end pregnancy, will require calculations that rarely had to do before: on their own risks of prosecution and on state -imposed systems that are not there, to work on their behalf, but to limit and punish their choices, “she wrote.
But the difficult truth about this is that without Rowe, many poor women will not be able to have an abortion that they know is in their best interest. As a result, their lives will be irreversibly changed. The most common reason why women want to have an abortion is that they are not financially prepared to raise a child. And they are usually right.
Much of what we know about what happens to a woman who wants an abortion but can’t do so comes from the Turnaway study, a longitudinal study that began in 2008 and tracked more than 1,000 women seeking abortion in the United States. led by Diana Green. Foster, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences, the study compares women who have had an abortion with women who have been denied an abortion to see how their lives are affected over time. .
The two groups were quite similar in terms of financial well-being before seeking an abortion, Green Foster told me. But four years later, women who were rejected for abortion were more likely to live in poverty than those who had abortions. Those who were denied an abortion continued to have higher debt, an increased number of negative public financial records (such as bankruptcies and evictions), and a higher probability of a high-quality credit rating.
The financial consequences of refusing a sought-after abortion are only part of the picture. Women who have failed to terminate their pregnancies in the Green Foster study also report poorer health, are more likely to stay in touch with a partner who is abusive, and raise children in more volatile conditions than women who are sent an abortion. Refusing an abortion “changed key aspects of their lives, such as their ability to care for their existing children, their chance to have children later, the quality of their relationships, and the achievement of ambitious plans,” said Green Foster.
And for two women he killed them. Two women in the Turnaway study who were denied an abortion died shortly after giving birth. “Pregnancy is very risky and it’s a risk we’re willing to take when we want to have a baby,” said Green Foster.
Without Roe, many women will have no choice.
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