More than 70 percent of people don't know where to get abortion care
Difficulty in finding right provider complicated by CPCs and cumbersome laws
A recent survey found that more than seventy percent of people did not know of a clinic or healthcare provider that they could go to for an abortion.
Power to Decide, an organization that studies and advocates for better pregnancy options and outcomes for women, surveyed on the topic. In addition to the lack of knowing where a clinic was, roughly 40 percent of people needed to learn how to find a clinic or healthcare provider.
The overwhelming number of crisis pregnancy centers has impacted those seeking abortions, according to Rachel Fey, vice president of policy and strategic partnerships.
“If you were to just Google, ‘Where can I get an abortion?”” Fey said. “You're likely to come up with a lot of clinics that actually don't provide abortion care and will actively try to dissuade you rather than support you in accessing the health care you need.”
The inability to find clinics complicates pregnancy care. When an excessive amount of time is spent on that, then the abortion is delayed later into pregnancy, potentially limiting options further depending on the state a woman lives in or pushing her into riskier medical situations.
Even before the Dobbs decision, there was a patchwork of antiabortion restrictions that hampered abortion care. Medicaid restrictions often prevented poorer women from getting abortions. Health insurance rules prevented others from doing it as well. Then, there were mandatory waiting periods and other cumbersome regulations known as TRAP laws, or targeted regulation of abortion providers, that were designed to make abortion medicine so costly to provide that it would put the doctors and administrators out of business.
It’s only gotten more challenging since the Supreme Court removed abortion rights from its list of constitutional protections.
“They have to fear whether or not they can even talk to their friends and family about their care and how they're going to get back care where they're going to go and quite frankly, deal with a system that is overloaded trying to provide care to those who no longer have access to it in their own state,” Fey said.
Power to Decide offers a valuable tool that can help women. AbortionFinder is a comprehensive directory of trusted, verified abortion providers and assistance resources in the United States. Since its launch, AbortionFinder has had 8.25M visits, of which 6.5M (over three-quarters) have accrued since the Dobbs decision.
AbortionFinder can also help women secure funds and learn more about practical support organizations that can help with the financing and logistics of getting people abortion care.
“That's not to say that no matter how many of these things we do, there's not an impact of abortion bans,” Fey said. “There are people who, when you put this many barriers in their way, just simply will not be able to access abortion care. And that's heartbreaking.”