Healthcare Across Borders Creates Fund Supporting Telemedicine Abortion Pills to Banned States
Nationwide – Healthcare Across Borders (HCAB), an initiative devoted to promoting new models of reproductive, sexual, and gender-affirming care that serve all people in need, announced today the launch of its new Abortion Pill Sustainability Fund to support clinicians using telemedicine to provide abortions to people in states where abortion is banned.
In the past two years, extremist bans on essential reproductive, sexual, and gender-affirming care have exacerbated concurrent public health crises. In order to ensure people can access life-saving services regardless of zip code despite these bans, a small but growing number of clinicians are now working under shield laws passed in states like California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Washington, and Vermont to deliver abortion and gender-affirming care to patients in banned states.
With the dramatic decline in clinic-based abortion care across the country, for example, the use and popularity of abortion pills has skyrocketed, catalyzing a long overdue revolution in both the models and the costs of care based in part on the use of telemedicine. Sixteen shield law providers are now providing abortion pills to roughly 12,000 abortion patients in banned states each month, and those numbers are increasing rapidly. HCAB anticipates these clinicians will provide at least 100,000 or more abortions via telemedicine into states like Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas by the fall of 2024.
“Medical professionals using telemedicine to provide abortion pills into banned states are offering care at extremely low or no-cost to people in need, but are not yet supported with the kinds of subsidies and donations invested in more traditional forms of care,” said Jodi Jacobson, Founder and Executive Director of Healthcare Across Borders. “Our Abortion Pill Sustainability Fund is a critical step towards sustaining truly universal access to abortions for all those in need.”
Despite filling a critical gap in public health and medicine, and deploying critical harm reduction strategies, these clinicians are currently losing money on the services they provide in order to keep costs down and serve people in the poorest zip codes in the country. Even with growing demand, this is unsustainable.
HCAB has set up the Abortion Pill Sustainability Fund to reimburse telemedicine providers on a monthly basis for the care they provide to people in banned states. With $350,000 of seed money from two generous donors, the fund has begun the process of reimbursing the 16 providers now working under shield laws, and will be working aggressively to raise $8 million this year to sustain current and new telemedicine providers soon coming on line.
More information about the fund and how to support it can be found here.
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Healthcare Across Borders (HCAB) is an initiative to ensure everyone has full access to essential reproductive, sexual, and gender-affirming care regardless of zip code, and unencumbered by cost, discrimination, ideology, or stigma. HCAB works with doctors, lawyers, human rights advocates, and concerned citizens to promote universal access to essential care by 1) supporting new and rapidly evolving models of care that better meet the needs of all people, including de-medicalization of care where appropriate; 2) advocating for effective harm reduction strategies wherever necessary; and 3) conducting public education on the dangers of criminalizing healthcare.