Laura Morehouse knows firsthand just how difficult it can be. When she sought an abortion about 10 years ago, she struggled to find a clinic that would do surgical abortions, and that could provide the service at a rate she could afford.
"My abortion was going to cost me around $1,000," Morehouse said. "I made minimum wage at the time. I worked part time as a cashier. So that was terrifying, absolutely terrifying.”
Morehouse now works as an assistant at Women's Health Specialists in Chico. The clinic, with three locations in California, provides abortions, and Morehouse says she deeply relates to patients who face even greater challenges than she once did.
"These are single parents. These are young people. These are people who have minimum-wage jobs," Morehouse said. "They can't afford to take time off. They can't afford additional child care. They can't afford the gas. These are people who have to travel two, three hours one way."
In a 2017 study, the Guttmacher Institute, an abortion-rights advocacy and policy organization, found that some 40% of mostly rural counties in California — home to hundreds of thousands of women in the state — had no clinics that provided abortions. That means even in a state with some of the nation's most progressive abortion laws, many must travel over 100 miles to find a provider.
Like it was for Morehouse, the cost of an abortion, which rises sharply as a pregnancy progresses, also continues to be a major barrier for many lower-income pregnant people, including those with insurance. A medical abortion in California, in which pills are used to terminate a pregnancy, costs an average of $306 out of pocket, according to an analysis by the California Health Benefits Review Program, but can't be done after 10 weeks. The only option after that, a surgical abortion, costs an average of over $1,000 out of pocket, when factoring all associated expenses.
In some more conservative-leaning areas of the state, where anti-abortion sentiment is strong, safety also can be a concern — both to those seeking procedures and those running the clinics that provide them.
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December 01, 2021 at 09:00PM
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For Many Rural and Lower-Income Californians, Abortion Access Remains Limited - KQED
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