Four Ways to Find Abortion Care Despite COVID-19 and Political Opportunism

For black people, poor people, young people and people living in rural areas, accessing abortion care was difficult long before a global pandemic overwhelmed our health care system and threatened economic ruin. And now that the United States leads the world in number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, Republicans intent on curtailing the constitutionally protected right to abortion care are using an ostensible concern for health care workers to sidestep the Supreme Court and ban abortion outright.

GOP governors in Iowa, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma and Texas recently designated abortions “non-essential health care,” ordering clinics that provide those services to cease operations. Kentucky is poised to follow suit. And while many clinics in these states continue to operate—vowing to provide essential care despite these blatantly unconstitutional directives—others, facing fines and even jail time, have shut down, leaving people seeking abortion services scrambling to find an alternative.

“I’m scared to go outside. I called the clinic and it’s just too expensive,” a pregnant person living in an impacted state in the South, who asked to remain anonymous, tells PLAYBOY. “I’m with my family in my house and trying to keep this a secret. I don’t know what to do.”

In this country, 89 percent of counties don’t have clinics that provide abortion services, federal funds are blocked from financing abortion for low-income people and 65 percent of abortion patients must travel more than 25 miles one way to access the care they need. And now that businesses are shut down, schools are closed, day care services are no longer available and 3.3 million people have filed for unemployment as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, abortion services are becoming even more difficult to obtain.

They’re also needed now more than ever. Studies have shown that when a person is denied a wanted abortion, they’re more likely to experience pregnancy complications and financial hardship, and the children they already have suffer.

But those who fight to offer compassionate abortion care day in and day out remain committed to the cause, even in the middle of an unprecedented public health crisis. If you’re looking for abortion care, you still have options.

Here are four ways to get help in the age of COVID-19.

We’ll leave you with Lloyd’s take on the availability and importance of widely available abortion services in the midst of global unrest.

“I want people seeking abortion care to know that they are supported and loved by a community larger than they could ever imagine,” they say. “Millions of people across this country have had abortions—people of different genders, people of different sexual orientations, different races, different ethnic backgrounds, different religions. There’s a community that is there for you and supports your right to choose.”

Editor’s note: Some names have been changed for the sake of anonymity and safety.