Over the past few years, many abortion clinics on the High Plains have shut down. In fact, the High Plains now has zero abortion clinics, which means women on the High Plains must sometimes travel hundreds of miles to access abortion services.
A new studypublished in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology reveals how shutting down abortion clinics results in a heavy taxpayer burden in rural areas. That’s because low-income women are more likely to go to their local emergency room for any follow-up care, rather than traveling the far distance to return to the women’s clinic.
And those emergency visits end up costing rural High Plains communities far more money than if the women were able to access a nearby clinic.
The study found that costs at emergency rooms average almost twice as much as at the original clinic.