Abortion And Privilege
Before Roe v. Wade, back in the days of botched back-alley abortions that killed alarming numbers of women, a woman’s reproductive autonomy was inextricably linked to her privilege. By the early 1970s, abortion was legal in a handful of states — so if a woman was lucky enough to be born into wealth, she had the resources to travel to one of those areas of the country. If not, she likely resorted to seeking out an illegal abortion. And since women of color were far more likely to be economically disadvantaged at that time, they were also far more likely to lack access to safe abortion. Consider two telling statistics from 1969. That year, 75 percent of the women who died from abortions were women of color. On the other hand, white patients received 90 percent of the legal abortions performed during the same time period.
Four decades later, many of the same dynamics are still at play. Women who can scrape together the money to travel to areas with more permissive abortion laws, women like Marni, are still crossing state lines. Poorer women — particularly low-income women of color, who have less access to affordable planning services and higher rates of unintended pregnancy — aren’t always so lucky.
The Hyde Amendment, the federal policy that prohibits taxpayer dollars from funding abortion services, was enacted just three years after Roe. Abortion access may be a theoretical “right” for every U.S. women — but thanks to Hyde, that right can often only be realized for the women who have money in their bank account. Since poor women’s public insurance coverage won’t cover abortion care, they’re forced to pay for the procedure out of pocket, an expense that can range anywhere between $300 and $3,000 dollars. And, of course, the actual cost of an abortion is much more than that. It also includes the lost wages for the time off work, the potential child care arrangements, the transportation to get to a clinic, and — depending how far a woman has to travel — lodging for the night. Again, this economic reality disproportionately impacts women of color, who are more likely to rely on Medicaid for their health care.