As funding dries up, private abortion clinics across the US are closing
Source: The Guardian
Wed 11 Dec 2024 12.00 EST
Providing abortions rarely paid the bills for Kwajelyn Jackson in 2024. As the executive director of Feminist Women’s Health Center, an abortion clinic in Atlanta, Georgia, Jackson spent the year navigating Georgia's six-week abortion ban, dwindling financial support for abortion patients and soaring inflation. The clinic spent more money than it brought in from providing abortions, especially as Jackson strove to pay her staffers a decent wage and the clinic often subsidized the abortions of patients who could not afford to pay.
“Essentially, we are charging about half of what it costs to provide the care,” Jackson said. “Our ability to maintain payroll and our operating expenses on an ongoing basis was really strained for a portion of 2024. We were sort of living paycheck to paycheck.”
Feminist Women’s Health Center is still open, but it’s one of the lucky ones. Over the last year, 11 independent abortion clinics closed, bringing the nationwide total of brick-and-mortar indie clinics in the US to 363, according to a report released on Tuesday morning by the Abortion Care Network (ACN), a network of independent providers. That’s down from more than 500 in 2012.
In the US, “independent” abortion clinics are those not linked to a hospital or run by Planned Parenthood. Their closures can have an outsize impact on abortion access, since independent clinics provide almost 60% of all US abortions, according to the ACN report.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/11/abortion-clinics-closing
Link to Abortion Care Network (ACN) REPORT (PDF) - https://abortioncarenetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/CommunitiesNeedClinics2024_WEB-FINAL.pdf
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