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This Map Will Show You Just How Hard It Is to Get an Abortion in Your State
Placing a cursor over Texas on ThinkProgress’ interactive map makes the Lone Star state look like a minefield of regulations meant to obstruct women’s reproductive rights. (Screen Shot/ThinkProgress)
Women’s reproductive health care is increasingly being restricted by measures all over the United States. And it can be hard to know how regulations restricting access to abortion differ from state to state. Thankfully, ThinkProgress came up with an interactive map to help readers understand what the barrier for abortions are wherever they live. To take a look at the map, click here.
For those of you who live in California or Illinois, thank your lucky stars you don’t live in Mississippi or Texas, where restrictions seem to abound.
ThinkProgress:
Across the country, state legislatures have passed hundreds of different measures intended to choke off access to abortion. Although those laws are typically framed in terms of legal restrictions, they also drive up the price tag of the procedure for low-income women in significant ways.
A ThinkProgress examination of the potential fees that could be accrued by two archetypal Wisconsin women found that the process of obtaining an abortion could total up to $1,380 for a low-income single mother saddled with charges related to gas, a hotel stay, childcare, and taking time off work. For a middle-income woman living comfortably in a city with no children and public transit options to the clinic, meanwhile, those fees dropped to $593.
Like all medical procedures, the cost of an abortion varies widely depending on the clinic and the state. Prices also change depending on the gestation of the pregnancy and the type of anesthesia a patient may require. While there is no standard fee on a state or national level, out-of-pocket costs for an abortion can range anywhere from $375 in the first trimester to $6,531 at 22 weeks, according to national data collected by ThinkProgress…The mounting fees can quickly become prohibitive. According to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, more than 4,000 women were denied abortions in 2008 because they were past the gestational limit — largely because it took them too long to try to save up the money for it. Nearly six in ten participants said they couldn’t get an abortion earlier because of travel and procedure costs.
These restrictions, the researchers concluded, “present an undue burden because many women do not realize they are pregnant until later in pregnancy and cannot travel to other states for abortion care. Additionally, women who raise children born from unintended pregnancies have higher rates of economic and educational disadvantages.”
Read More.
—Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata
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Source: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/this_map_will_show_you_just_how_hard_it_is_to_get_abortion_state_20150228/
