I wonder how many women keep a certain amount of money in their savings as their "emergency abortion fund"? I've had two friends mention that they do this, almost subconsciously, to the tune of $400 because they'd heard somewhere that that's how much it costs. That's not a bad estimate, for a first-trimester procedure, though prices vary wildly after that.
But with most people I know outside the field, the first thing they ask me when they find out what I do is "How much does an abortion cost?" (Most of the time they don't ask "How do you do an abortion?" right off the bat, I guess because they worry that they'll seem clueless. Which they are, but it's not really their fault.)
And of course, this doesn't even touch on the clients I've worked with in the field. Some of them knew how much it cost from a friend who went through this recently; some of them thought they knew how much it cost from a previous experience ten years ago, and are shocked that the figure hasn't stayed constant (abortion fees have risen less than general inflation, but they have still risen); others really had no idea. But no matter the expectation, for I'd guess at least half of them, the idea of several hundred dollars set aside for an abortion -- or for anything, really -- is laughable, or a nice dream maybe.
I wonder how many people reading this (arguably not a representative sample of the general population!) keep an emergency abortion fund? If you're out there, give us your two cents. I posted a poll to go along with this, but feel free to comment too.
0 comments:
Post a Comment