Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo
Abortion rights demonstrators rally outside the Supreme Court in Washington, March 4, 2020.
This week, 33 abortion funds around the country will receive $50,000 from the Debt Collective, a union of debtors best known for its actions around student loans. The money is part of the Debt Collective’s Rolling Jubilee Fund, a project of canceling debt in almost all fields of American life, whether it be medical debt, probation debt, or student loan debt.
Abortion debt didn’t become a widespread phenomenon until after the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, Astra Taylor of the Debt Collective told me. As states’ policies on abortion diverged dramatically, pregnant people in red states where the practice was banned were forced to cross state lines for abortion care. The travel often costs thousands of dollars, including lost wages from taking time off work, child care expenses, transportation, hotels, and other necessities. And that’s before the medical bills hit.
“What was once a thousand-dollar procedure becomes a five-, ten-, twenty-thousand-dollar procedure,” Taylor explained.
In a rush of organizing energy post-Dobbs, local and regional abortion funds stepped in to provide funding for these patients. These funds relied on small donations from abortion rights supporters who were galvanized after the overturning of Roe. The problem? Anger fizzles out, and isn’t a sustainable funding model given the continued need.
Small abortion funds have found their budgets dwindling, and often have to cobble together resources to cover only part of one patient’s travel and medical expenses. Some small abortion funds, like the Kentucky Health Justice Network, have seen the costs faced by their communities grow by over 500 percent since Dobbs.
Abortion clinics, of course, never want to turn desperate patients away from the care they need and want. Taylor told me that clinics rarely used to bill patients who couldn’t afford their procedures. Clinics would either get funding from abortion access funds to cover the cost of uncompensated care, or would simply take on the debt themselves. Now, more than two years after the fall of Roe, those access funds are running low, and the federal government is poised to defund Planned Parenthood. While Planned Parenthood cannot use federal funding for abortion services, if the organization has funding challenges more generally, that could trickle down to abortion access and services.
These days, Taylor said, clinics are telling patients to take out payday loans or put the cost of a procedure on their credit cards. This makes abortion debt a complicated beast to tackle. It’s not located in just one place; it’s shared by patients, clinics, and abortion funds, and spread over credit cards, outstanding clinic bills, and loans. What’s more, debt garnered from reproductive health care carries a stigma with it, making it difficult or even impossible for patients to rely on family or community members to help alleviate debt.
The Debt Collective decided to direct their debt relief efforts at grassroots abortion funds, which have been assuming debt on behalf of both patients and clinics. Earlier this month, the Debt Collective sent $50,000 to the Wild West Access Fund of Nevada, which will work with dozens of funds across the country to allocate the money across them all. It will be the last of a set of funds that the Debt Collective received from a major donation in 2021.
While the donation will be a major boon to struggling abortion funds, it won’t last forever. These small local funds are thinking of structural ways to increase their funding in the years ahead, especially during the Trump administration, which is sure to create even more challenges to abortion access.
In an article in The Nation, 34 grassroots abortion funds from across the country argued that donor priorities should shift away from funding nationwide reproductive health advocacy organizations—Abortion Access Now, Planned Parenthood, and the like—and instead direct their money toward small funds that provide on-the-ground care to people seeking abortions. “Abortion funds created a bridge between the theoretical right to an abortion and the real-world ability to access that right for the most marginalized,” the authors write. “The vision of reproductive freedom must come from those most directly impacted rather than the same few out-of-touch legacy organizations with more wealth than all abortion funds combined.”
As the cost of abortions keeps rising, many of these national-level organizations aren’t keeping up with the change. Some are even cutting their financial assistance programs. The National Abortion Federation (NAF), for example, used to provide 50 percent of the cost of abortion care to those who qualified. Now, it will pay for just 30 percent.
The later in pregnancy an abortion is performed, the more expensive the procedure is. “We see clients with costs of like $15,000 on a daily basis now,” said Macy Haverda, an organizer with the Wild West Access Fund. Despite those exorbitant costs, NAF will make no exceptions to the 30 percent rule. Planned Parenthood similarly made cuts to its Justice Fund program.
According to Haverda, the number of patients seeking later-term care has risen steadily over the past two years. “What we’re finding is all of these people who cannot initially afford their appointment have to keep rescheduling and rescheduling because they’re trying to find more money,” she said. Once they finally make their appointments, the costs may have risen dramatically.
Destini Spaeth of the Prairie Abortion Fund in North Dakota also expressed exhaustion from trying to keep up momentum. “Unfortunately, what we’re asking of people is very unsexy and is inaccessible for other people, too. And that’s just: money,” said Spaeth. “I don’t have time to train a bunch more volunteers.”
Both funds are recipients of the Debt Collective’s grant. Spaeth and Haverda told the Prospect that they were offered the money over a cold email, and had trouble believing that it wasn’t a scam. “We’ve never had money just fall into our laps like that,” Spaeth told me.
Spaeth echoed what the other organizers who penned the piece in The Nation said about the difference between their work and the work of national advocacy groups: “We’re not running political campaigns, we’re not having a ten-year plan, like, I need to make sure this abortion takes place tomorrow for this person, and it’s very of the moment.”
With funding from the Debt Collective, Spaeth and Haverda hope that they can continue to do exactly that.
