Poverty as a barrier to reproductive health care including abortion: The role of abortion Funds

Every year, tens of thousands of poor women and teens are forced to carry a pregnancy to term because they cannot afford to pay for an abortion. Many thousands more would be denied this fundamental human and constitutional right if not for the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF), an association of 104 grassroots, community-based funds in 43 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada that help women pay for abortions.

Bans on public funding of abortion, such as the federal Hyde Amendment which prohibits Medicaid funding in most cases, burden some of the most disadvantaged women in our society – those who rely on the government for health care. Women of color disproportionately depend on such coverage. Other obstacles to abortion access that burden poor women include mandatory waiting periods, parental involvement laws, and the shortage of abortion providers.

In this paper, Toni Bond Leonard will discuss the impact of these and other inequalities on women's reproductive lives and choices. She will describe the role of Network abortion Funds who raise and distribute over $2.6 million to over 23,000 women and girls in need each year. She will explain how efforts to repeal the Hyde Amendment and fight other abortion restrictions that affect poor women are a part of a larger movement for reproductive justice that connect abortion access to fairness, basic rights, economic and racial justice, and a wide range of other issues and that foreground the experiences of low-income women, women of color, immigrant women, and young women.