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It was once the stuff of dystopian fiction. In a post-Roe America, it's reality
Pilots Are Airlifting Patients Out of Red States to Get Abortions
The patient’s first two appointments were canceled. When Oklahoma’s governor signed the nation’s strictest abortion ban into law on May 26, her third was moved from a Planned Parenthood in Oklahoma City to the closest clinic with an appointment roughly a 10-hour round trip drive away, in Kansas. (The local chapter, Planned Parenthood Great Plains, covers four states — Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas — and books patients across all four.) “It was a goddamn mess,” says Alison Dreith, director of strategic partnerships at Midwest Access Coalition, a Chicago-based abortion fund.
...
Midwest Access Coalition was ready to reimburse the patient for a second rental car so she could make the return trip to Kansas, but then her companion bailed. The patient, old enough in the state’s eyes to be forced to carry her unwanted pregnancy to term, was not old enough to rent a car. “She could not get a rental car, so she was freaking out,” Dreith recalls.That’s when Drieth turned to Mike, a volunteer with Midwest Access Coalition who’d been quietly preparing for a moment like this one for several months.
A soft-spoken Midwesterner, Mike (whom Rolling Stone has agreed to only identify by his first name to protect his identity) has been an amateur pilot for more than a decade. It’s an expensive pastime; pilots like himself, he says “sometimes do what we call the $100 hamburger, where we’ll fly from our home airport to a nearby airport that has a restaurant” just to have lunch. After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Mike started thinking about how he could put his pilot’s license to better use. Last fall, around the time Texas’ abortion snitch law went into effect, he floated the idea of airlifting patients out of abortion deserts to his colleagues at MAC. “I’ve been in this work for about 15 years,” Drieth says, “and it’s one of the few really innovative solutions I’ve heard of.”
Small propeller planes offer several advantages to a patient seeking abortion care in post-Roe America: They can pick you up at any of the regional airports found in virtually every county in America, ferry you across state lines, and return you home within a few hours. In an era in which zealous state legislatures are contemplating laws that would criminalize helping patients travel to recieve abortion care, flying private has another advantage: no flight manifests. “There’s no TSA security,” Mike says. “Nobody’s asking you who you are, why you’re there at the airport. It’s as private as you can get, about as safe as you can get without having to sit down on an airplane with a whole bunch of people.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/elevated-access-volunteer-pilots-abortion-1375732/
The patient’s first two appointments were canceled. When Oklahoma’s governor signed the nation’s strictest abortion ban into law on May 26, her third was moved from a Planned Parenthood in Oklahoma City to the closest clinic with an appointment roughly a 10-hour round trip drive away, in Kansas. (The local chapter, Planned Parenthood Great Plains, covers four states — Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas — and books patients across all four.) “It was a goddamn mess,” says Alison Dreith, director of strategic partnerships at Midwest Access Coalition, a Chicago-based abortion fund.
...
Midwest Access Coalition was ready to reimburse the patient for a second rental car so she could make the return trip to Kansas, but then her companion bailed. The patient, old enough in the state’s eyes to be forced to carry her unwanted pregnancy to term, was not old enough to rent a car. “She could not get a rental car, so she was freaking out,” Dreith recalls.That’s when Drieth turned to Mike, a volunteer with Midwest Access Coalition who’d been quietly preparing for a moment like this one for several months.
A soft-spoken Midwesterner, Mike (whom Rolling Stone has agreed to only identify by his first name to protect his identity) has been an amateur pilot for more than a decade. It’s an expensive pastime; pilots like himself, he says “sometimes do what we call the $100 hamburger, where we’ll fly from our home airport to a nearby airport that has a restaurant” just to have lunch. After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Mike started thinking about how he could put his pilot’s license to better use. Last fall, around the time Texas’ abortion snitch law went into effect, he floated the idea of airlifting patients out of abortion deserts to his colleagues at MAC. “I’ve been in this work for about 15 years,” Drieth says, “and it’s one of the few really innovative solutions I’ve heard of.”
Small propeller planes offer several advantages to a patient seeking abortion care in post-Roe America: They can pick you up at any of the regional airports found in virtually every county in America, ferry you across state lines, and return you home within a few hours. In an era in which zealous state legislatures are contemplating laws that would criminalize helping patients travel to recieve abortion care, flying private has another advantage: no flight manifests. “There’s no TSA security,” Mike says. “Nobody’s asking you who you are, why you’re there at the airport. It’s as private as you can get, about as safe as you can get without having to sit down on an airplane with a whole bunch of people.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/elevated-access-volunteer-pilots-abortion-1375732/
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