NYC doctors, doulas, activists prep for a massive influx of abortion seekers

July 6, 2022 Samantha Maldonado, THE CITY

Activist Bleu Grano stands next to a mural she created in Bushwick with information about accessing abortion pills, June 26, 2022. Photo by Samantha Maldonado/THE CITY

Physical help

Officials and reproductive health advocates expect to see an influx of people seeking abortion coming to New York City from states where abortion procedures are banned or limited. Out-of-state residents accounted for 9.4% of abortions performed in New York City in 2019, according to CDC data.

Judith Plaskow, a retired professor who lives in Washington Heights, nearly a decade ago began volunteering with the Haven Coalition, an organization that pairs hosts with people who travel to the city for abortions. Before the pandemic, she offered her guests — who had driven down from upstate, taken a 22-hour bus from the Midwest and flown in from the South — an extra room and a meal. She plans to start up again soon.

Most of the time they haven’t been in New York that many times. It’s an overwhelming city,” Plaskow, 75, said. “It’s been a very positive experience to be able to give people a comfortable welcome, to point out some [iconic] New York sites as we walk out of the clinic so the abortion isn’t the only thing they’re experiencing.”

A nonprofit called Elevated Access has begun lining up volunteer pilots to transport for free people who live in restrictive states to states where they can access abortions and gender-affirming healthcare procedures. A pilot flew the first passenger through the program this past June. At least one pilot in New York state has signed up to fly patients so far, according to the nonprofit.

New York may also welcome doctors to train them to provide abortion care, as nearly half of obstetrics and gynecology residents in other states wouldn’t be able to learn abortion care.

Protesters took to the streets in Manhattan following the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, June 24, 2022.
Photo by Jason Scott Jones/THE CITY

Since the leak of the draft opinion, Dr. Antoinette Danvers, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and women’s health at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the director for complex family planning division at Montefiore Health System, has been having conversations with out-of-state institutions. They’re trying to figure out how they might be able to send medical residents and those who’ve completed their residencies to The Bronx for further training in abortion care.

“We’re trying to ensure that there is a future where we have clinicians who are still able to do this procedure,” Danvers said, warning against the “devastating long-term impact” on patients — especially women of color — that will result from a lack of training.

Offering training for doctors from out-of-state will mean figuring out several logistical complexities, like license and insurance requirements, developing partnerships with distant clinics — and ensuring efforts stay within legal bounds.

“We’re working through those different challenges and barriers, but we are very committed to finding a solution and working with a program,” said Danvers. “It’s really heartbreaking to think about the patients that are going to lose access to abortion care, and being in the clinical environment, we have a picture of what it looks like to take care of someone where pregnancy is harmful to their health, and needing a life-saving procedure that you can’t offer seems devastating.”

Recently, the doctor noted, a patient at Montefiore experienced a pregnancy complication and began bleeding. To stop the hemorrhaging, she needed an abortion, which helped prevent an even more tragic outcome.

Medical help

People in areas with limited access to legal procedures will have little choice but to increasingly rely on abortions induced by medications, experts say. Those accounted for more than half of abortions in the United States in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit which advocates for reproductive and sexual rights.

The pills, which are FDA-approved, can be sent via mail. People can take them alone or with the help of a provider. The pills induce an abortion that is indistinguishable from a spontaneous miscarriage — in fact, some people who miscarry must ensure the process completes through taking the same pills.

This summer, the New York City-based Doula Project, which supports outcomes ranging from birth to miscarriage or the elected end of a pregnancy, will launch a virtual program that will enable people to remotely receive doula care while self-managing abortions.

Jess Byrne, 44, who works as one of about 40 volunteer doulas on the project, said the virtual program was originally aimed to meet a need borne of the pandemic, when the doulas could not be present in clinics to chat with patients and make them more comfortable during and after procedures.

“Regardless of how people end up getting an abortion or getting access to medication, they still deserve care and support,” Byrne said.

Groups like NYC for Abortion Rights and Fund Abortion Not Police have and will continue to host workshops on how to get abortion pills delivered by mail, how they work, and how to inform others about what’s available — encouraging participants, for example, to speak in the third person, not in the second person, to avoid possible liability.

“Everyone needs to be prepared to make themselves a resource to other people,” said Bleu Grano, who started Fund Abortion Not Police to raise money for abortion funds. Grano also volunteers for a Spanish-language hotline based in Texas. “Because I’ve been volunteering in the south for all these years, I know how hard it is for people to get abortions. That has made me less susceptible to that giving-up mindset that I know a lot of people in safe states may be more inclined to.”

When there’s No Other Help

Some states have already been limiting — and will increasingly do so — people’s access to abortion pills, even attempting to bar seekers from crossing state lines, noted Terry McGovern, a lawyer and professor of population and family health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

“There’s a lot of questions about how the legality of any of this will play out,” McGovern said. “Before this particular SCOTUS [U.S. Supreme Court] majority, I would have said none of these things could be legal, you can’t prosecute people across state lines, and bounty hunt across state lines when they’re complying with the laws of another state, but it’s all crazy now.”

States like Idaho, Oklahoma and Texas passed laws that allows lawsuits against abortion providers or helpers. McGovern believes New Yorkers will be shielded from prosecution thanks to a package of laws Gov. Kathy Hochul signed to protect providers and people from out-of-state seeking abortions in New York.