The case for erasing someone's abortion debt this holiday season
Local abortion funds are running dry, and we need them more than ever right now.
In 2021, the heart of the covid pandemic, a wealthy woman named Merle Chambers found her own bank account thriving at a time when catastrophic debt was skyrocketing for lower income families. So she donated a big chunk of money to a debtors union called the Debt Collective, which fights to cancel a whole host of different kinds of debt for people: student debt, medical debt, probation debt, school lunch debt, ambulance debt, etc. As of this fall, the Debt Collective had just $50,000 left of Chambers’ gift to use toward helping some group of people get their heads above water, and they distributed it somewhere unexpected: among local grassroots abortion funds. As we know, abortion funds—not national giants like Planned Parenthood—are the best way to get money directly into the pockets of a woman who desperately needs an abortion, but can’t afford to travel hundreds of miles out of a state like Texas to access the procedure.
Astra Taylor, co-founder of the Debt Collective, told me in a phone interview today that the union has for the first time turned its attention to abortion debt, which has long existed but is becoming exponentially more urgent in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned. In addition to partnering with abortion funds to literally erase a few women’s debts, the group is trying to raise awareness of the fact that traveling out of state for an abortion procedure, as more and more people are having to do these days amid state bans, is already bankrupting people. “Abortions, especially late term abortions, are…I think the technical term is ‘fucking expensive,’” she said. “I was really shocked.”
Even before Roe was overturned, according to a new study, 42% of abortion seekers and 65% of those who sought out-of-state care took on catastrophic medical debt to obtain an abortion. The problem is not only red states forcing women to travel for care, but also the fact that dwindling access to abortion in large swaths of the country has driven up demand, which is forcing people to wait later into their pregnancies to be able to have the procedure. That’s when it gets really expensive: Per researchers at ANSIRH and Guttmacher, “The average cost for an abortion after the first trimester is over $2,000. Second trimester care can cost upwards of $10,000 or more. Third trimester abortion care can cost $20,000-30,000 or more. Half of abortion seekers live below the Federal Poverty Level ($13,590 for a single person and $27,750 for a family of four). And because of a federal ban on abortion funding, Medicaid does not cover abortion care.”
As we know, nobody waits until the second or third trimester on purpose to have an elective abortion. Usually, in those cases, the mother or the fetus is facing some severe health issue—like the Texas woman who had to travel to the East Coast for an abortion after finding out at the 11-week ultrasound that her fetus lacked a skull. The hell of having to leave the state for medical care in a situation like that is then compounded with the financial stress of not being able to afford it. “There are millions of people in the United States of America that don't have even 400 bucks to cover an emergency,” Taylor told me. “So even a cheap abortion is out of reach for a lot of people, let alone a more complicated, geographically distant procedure.”
Worsening the financial pressure is the fact that abortion providers often require payment up front, rather than take on debt that they’ll eventually have to sell to debt collectors. “Because of privacy concerns and the stigma around abortion, a lot of abortion clinics don't like to carry debt, unlike other healthcare entities,” Taylor said. This is where abortion funds are essential: They actually give the women money in advance to access care that they otherwise potentially couldn’t get at all.
“One point we always try to make is that abortion debt is medical debt,” Taylor said. “Your reproductive system is not separate from the rest of your body. This is very much medical debt, and it shows up in many of the same ways.”
Meanwhile, the crisis of dwindling abortion access in this country is getting worse by the day. Last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a New York abortion provider for allegedly prescribing abortion pills to a pregnant woman in Texas whose partner snitched on her—a case that’s certainly intended to have a chilling effect on interstate abortion provision. And now, ahead of Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. Postal Service has indicated that it may have to stop mailing abortion pills if the new administration decides to enforce the Comstock Act, a 150-year-old zombie law that Trump could revive instead of signing a national abortion ban to dramatically cut access.
So yes, it’s the holidays, and I am tired of writing about everything being so horrible right now without offering any specific action items people can take if, like me, you find yourself blind with rage over the current state of affairs. My recommendation for a charitable gift this season is any amount of dollars to an abortion fund. You can find your local one by typing in your zipcode here, or you can find one not near you that might need the money more. These funds have been running out of money since last year after the initial surge of rage donations post-Roe, and that makes me really sad, because my rage has not run out at all!
As a bonus, if you do this before December 31, you will instantly become Jezebel’s Person of the Year.