Can it be more obvious?
The state’s largest abortion rights advocates — Planned Parenthood of California and NARAL Pro-Choice California — have been doing more than preparing legislatively for potentially tens of thousands of patients to come to California. Planned Parenthood is expanding clinics, hiring and training more staff and beefing up its abortion funds, which provide money to people seeking care.
So is Access Reproductive Justice, a statewide organization that provides funds to patients to access abortion care in California.
“We have the infrastructure in place already,” said Jessica Pinckney, executive director of Access Reproductive Justice. “We know how to get people the support they need. We know how to get people on planes, we know how to get them in hotel rooms.”
But a challenge awaits: It’s difficult to prepare for what happens next when the scale of the potential influx is unknown.
The Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that researches reproductive health, said in a recent report that the number of out-of-state women of childbearing age who would find their nearest clinic in California if Roe were overturned would increase from 46,000 now to 1.4 million.
The report, however, doesn’t predict how many of those people would come to California. Or where they might go instead. Or how they would get there. Nearby Arizona conducts around 13,000 abortions a year. Would those patients come to California? It is a question that few can answer.
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