“Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the concept of “choice” is an ephemeral one for low-income women who live in states that pass laws limiting access to abortion, as they may not be able to afford to travel to a state with less onerous restrictions.
The lack of reproductive freedom is a remaining barrier to gender parity, the justice said at a Duke Law event Wednesday evening. Advocacy organizations and groups that fund abortions have pushed the idea that being “pro-choice” includes fighting to end the decades-old Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funds from going toward Medicaid coverage for abortion except in limited circumstances. One in four women on Medicaid who would have abortions if the Hyde Amendment didn’t exist instead carry an unwanted pregnancy to term because of the prohibitive cost of the procedure, the Guttmacher Institute notes.
The justice alluded to this new reality as Mississippi’s last clinic fights to remain open and providers battle restrictions that could close all but nine or 10 clinics in Texas:
“There’s a sorry situation in the United States, which is essentially that poor women don’t have choice. Women of means do. They will, always. Let’s assume Roe v. Wade were overruled and we were going back to each state for itself, well, any woman who could travel from her home state to a state that provides access to abortion, and those states never go back to old ways … So if you can afford a plane ticket, a train ticket or even a bus ticket you can control your own destiny but if you’re locked into your native state then maybe you can’t. That we have one law for women of means and another for poor women is not a satisfactory situation.”
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