Beth Vial only learned she was pregnant toward the end of her second trimester. For Vial, who had her abortion at 26 weeks, the surgical procedure came with a $10,500 price tag. Additional medical expenses, airfare and lodging added another $3,550.
This was astonishing news: A few years before she began her freshman year of college in 2017, Vial, now 27, of Portland, Ore., had been diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome and irritable bowel syndrome. A doctor told her she wouldn’t be able to get pregnant without medical intervention, and said she would need to go on birth control to balance her hormones.
“Mississippi’s law, if upheld, brings us much closer to where we ought to be,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, said in prepared remarks Wednesday outside of the Supreme Court. “This is America’s chance to step back from the brink of madness after all these long years. To turn the page on Roe’s onerous chapter and begin a more humane era — one where every child and every mother is safe under the mantle of the law.
But the journey wasn’t easy. Even though Vial resided in Oregon — a state whose policy has been supportive of abortion rights — she sought an abortion before the state’s 2017 Reproductive Health Equity Act, which expanded access by requiring private insurers to cover abortion care at no out-of-pocket cost, went into effect. The fact that abortions later in pregnancy are still controversial and stigmatized added to the difficulty.
But abortion costs also vary across states, providers and other factors, and can increase significantly as a pregnancy progresses. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive-health think tank that supports abortion rights, an abortion at 20 weeks’ gestation can cost almost 2.5 times as much as an abortion at 10 weeks.
Restrictive abortion policies can be costly for the economy too, research suggests: The Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit, estimates that state-level abortion restrictions cost the country $105 billion a year by decreasing labor-force participation and earnings among women ages 15 to 44, and increasing time off and turnover. In Mississippi, that means about $1 billion in annual economic loss.
“At 20 years old, I didn’t want to be a parent. I was fairly new here and didn’t know how abortions worked,” Aziz said. “I was naive and thought it would be easier — I didn’t think I would have to travel to Colorado Springs.” “I found out that I was nine weeks [pregnant] and I got out of there,” Aziz said. “I had a complete meltdown and started crying because I needed to go somewhere to have a medication abortion.”
The consequences of being denied an abortion The economic costs of restrictive abortion policies are not limited to women who have to travel for abortion care. Women who are denied a wanted abortion also face greater odds of their financial well-being being negatively affected.