China Daily, June 2022
Women who already face economic hardship and lower access to healthcare, particularly those from minority groups, could end up bearing the brunt of the Supreme Court’s recent abortion ruling, according to some experts. “Women living in states that ban abortion will have to travel out of state in order to get their procedure,” Cynthia Sanchez, clinical assistant professor of nursing at the University of Southern California, told China Daily. In its historic decision on Friday, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, officially ending the federal constitutional right to abortion, which was upheld for nearly 50 years. Many women who come from low-income backgrounds are also women of color, she said. For them, going out of state “may be prohibitively expensive”.
These women may have to save up for the costs of traveling out of state, which would in turn lead to a later-term abortion that is both more expensive and riskier, Sanchez said, citing a 2019 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study, which estimated that 92.7 percent of abortions were performed within 13 weeks of pregnancy. Women who carry unwanted pregnancies also face financial barriers in the long term, due to the obstacles they must overcome to get the abortion.
