New, restrictive state laws add to existing hurdles: a decades-old ban on most abortions at clinics and hospitals run by the federal Indian Health Service, fewer nearby health centers offering abortions, vast rural expanses for many to travel, and poverty.
A few months after South Dakota banned abortion last year, April Matson drove more than nine hours to take a friend to a Colorado clinic to get the procedure.
“That’s a lot of barriers,” said Matson, who lives in Sioux Falls and is Sicangu Lakota. “We’re already an oppressed community, and then we have this oppression on top of that oppression.” Experts say the issue should be seen within the larger context of the tortured history between Indigenous people and white society that began with the taking of Native lands and includesof Native women lasting into the 1970s.
While IHS staff can refer people to places that provide abortions, federal funds can only be used for “Hyde-permitted” procedures and related patient travel, agency officials said in a statement. And aAlso, there are often no abortion providers nearby. One reason? The proportion of Catholic health systems, which generally prohibit abortion, has grown significantly. A 2020 report by Community Catalyst, a nonprofit health advocacy organization, found that 1 in 6 acute care hospital beds in the U.
Other activist efforts panned out. D’Arlyn Bell, a doctoral student at the University of Kansas and another member of the Cherokee Nation, joined with other Native activists to help defeat a proposed amendment to the Kansas state constitution that would have cleared the way for tougher abortion restrictions.
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