‘Feels horrible to say no’: abortion funds run out of money as US demand surges
Laurie Bertram Roberts never expected Americans to keep forking over money to pay for other people’s abortions. But the abortion fund director didn’t think it would get this dire.
When the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year, people donated tens of thousands of dollars to Roberts’ organization, the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, which is dedicated to helping people afford abortions and the many costs that come with it. But, in August, Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund had to stop funding abortions. It’s now closed until January 2024.
“We just don’t have the money,” said Roberts, who co-founded the fund a decade ago. “It’s a strategic decision, to focus on fundraising for the next couple months, so that when we reopen, we’ll have money.”
For now, the fund – which has historically also helped people with other costs of living and parenting – is only offering access to its pantry of food and household supplies. This will be the longest the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund has ever been shut down.
“I didn’t think the emergency funding was gonna stay the same,” Roberts saidin reference to the post-Roedonation spike. “But I didn’t expect for our funding to dip by 35 to 40% from last year.”
When the US supreme court overturned Roe, Americans rushed to ragedonate millions to abortion funds and clinics scattered across the United States.
Now, with the first year of postRoe life in the rearview mirror, much of that money has been spentand the flow of donations has dried up for many organizations. And yet, as states continue to enact new bans and restrictions, the demand for help – and the cost of providing that help – has only grown.
The Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund isn’t the only abortion fund that’s had to turn its lights off recently. In mid-June, just three days before the anniversary of Roe’s overturning, Indigenous
Women Rising announced that its abortion fund had hit its monthly budget and would cease operations until July. The Mountain Access Brigade, which serves people in Appalachia, closed its support hotline for 10 days in July to save money. By mid-July, the Utah Abortion Fund announced that it had already exceeded its monthly budget and would close until late August.
“You have increasing costs and decreasing donations,” said Hayley McMahon, who sits on the board of the Appalachian abortion fund Holler Health Justice and studies barriers to abortion at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. “Those two things combined are a perfect storm for just absolutely wiping out abortion funds.”
Much of the south and midwest have now banned or significantly limited abortion, forcing people in those states who want abortions to travel farther. Over the summer, Indiana, North Carolina and South Carolina all implemented significant new restrictions, which put even more pressure on abortion funds. In July, the Abortion Fund of Ohio helped 355 people. In August, the same month that neighboring Indiana outlawed almost all abortions, that number surged to 562.
Lexi Dotson-Dufault, the Abortion Fund of Ohio’s patient navigation program manager, said that the money trickling into the fund is simply not enough to meet the demand. With three months left to go in 2023, the Abortion Fund of Ohio has already offered assistance to roughly 2,400 people. That’s 700 more than it helped in 2022, and almost three times as many people as it helped in 2021.
“We don’t want to have to set limits as to what we can give people,” Dotson-Dufault said. “I think if the money doesn’t come in the way we need to, we will start to have to.”
Three-quarters of US abortion patients have incomes below the federal poverty line. The cost of an abortion, meanwhile, has perhaps never been higher: more and more people have to travel for the procedure, buying flights and gas, booking hotel rooms, taking time off work. More than 60% of people who have had abortions have already given birth before, so they may also need to secure childcare.
Although the vast majority of US abortions take place in the first trimester of pregnancy, abortion fund callers are more often in their second trimester, according to a study of callers to the National Network of Abortion Funds between 2010 and 2015. Post-Roe, people who work at abortion funds told the Guardian that they are now seeing even more people who are later on in their pregnancies – which becomes a problem both for abortion seekers and the funds, because abortion becomes more expensive later in pregnancy. It also becomes harder to find – not every clinic will perform abortions into the second trimester – so people often have to travel even further.
From July 2021 through June 2022, the Missouri Abortion Fund spent about $235,000 helping people get abortions. Between July 2022 and June 2023, they spent over $1m – but they only helped 300 more people than the previous year, said Jess Lambrecht, the fund’s executive director. The typical client used to cost less than $1,000; now, they frequently cost multiple thousands of dollars.
“Basically, our budget tripled, but so has our cost,” Lambrecht said.
The Nevada-based Silver State Hope Fund has already been forced to become “very, very frugal” when giving out money, said Erin Bilbray-Kohn, the fund’s vice-president and acting executive. Within three days of Roe’s demise, Bilbray-Kohn raised $50,000 for the fund. But now, the fund’s finances have become so strained that it’s using the money it had once set aside to pay for next spring.
Before Roe’s demise, the fund spent about $10,000 each year. Now, it’s spending $16,000 each month. So many people are desperate for help: the woman who got pregnant by her abusive partner, the woman with Type I diabetes whose pregnancy threatened her life, the girl whose college scholarship would have been jeopardized if she had a baby.
“I wake up in the morning worried we’re not going to have enough funds,” said Bilbray-Kohn, who started to cry as she shared her clients’ stories. “I’m working really aggressively to try to raise that money so that we can fill up those coffers and be OK in the spring.”
The Silver State Hope Fund is also currently suing, aided by the ACLU, to abolish a Nevada law that blocks people from using Medicaid to pay for abortions. Roughly 80% of the people calling the Silver State Hope Fund are Medicaid-eligible, BilbrayKohn estimated. If the fund wins its lawsuit, many of its current callers could rely on Medicaid instead and the fund could free up money to pay for other callers.
Abortion funds aren’t the only abortion rights organizations that are now scrambling for money. The clinics left behind in states that have now banned the procedure are also struggling to stay open, as they pivot to offering more broad reproductive healthcare services.
When the supreme court overturned Roe, the West Alabama Women’s Center had to stopperforming abortions and send its patients out of state. Within 48 hours, it raised $180,000 for patients’ travel, recalled Robin Marty, the clinic’s executive director. “Now I go and I try to ask for any sort of funding online, and we can get maybe $50 to $100 every time I do it,” Marty said.
As of late August, though, Marty estimated that she had enough money in the bank to pay her staff’s salaries through October.
For now, the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund’s phone line is still open; the organization is redirecting people towards other, open abortion funds. But the phone line will be shut down entirely for the month of December.
“I know we are making the right decision, but it feels horrible to tell people no,” Roberts said. But, Roberts added, “If we’re not making strategic plans to make sure that we’re sustaining ourselves and sustaining fundraising, we’re not gonna make it. We won’t be here next year and we won’t be here the year after that and I want to make sure we’re still here. There’s not less of a fight to fight. It’s just getting more intense.”