NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts recently released new research showing that the availability of abortion care in the Commonwealth has declined dramatically since the early part of the decade.
The study found that Massachusetts – like the rest of the nation – has witnessed an overall decrease in the number of health care providers offering abortion services. They are also increasingly concentrated in the Metro-Boston area – leaving women in the Southeast, Central, and Western regions with the least access to these medical services.
Massachusetts prides itself on being a leader in improving access to health care, but we’re heading in the opposite direction when it comes to meeting the needs of women as they make personal, private decisions about their pregnancies. Without providers, the right to choose could become but a hollow promise.
Moreover, while Massachusetts is recognized for its role in training many future physicians, there are gaps in what medical residents learn here. A review of the six ob/gyn and five family practice residency programs found that nearly half (4 family practice, 1 ob/gyn) did not offer training in abortion care. Of the remaining six that do, all but one is located in Boston.
Clearly, even in Massachusetts, women face significant barriers to abortion care. Our elected officials have an opportunity this session to show their support for women’s private medical decisions – and the courageous physicians who care for them – by repealing the last vestiges of our anti-choice history.
NARAL Pro-Choice Massachusetts is calling on legislators to pass An Act Updating the Public Health Laws. Sponsored by Sen. Chandler and Rep. Story, the bill would revoke three, archaic and unconstitutional statutes that could jeopardize women’s health and well-being if they were ever enforced again, including a pre-Roe v. Wade ban on all abortions and a medically unjustified mandate that pregnancy terminations after twelve weeks take place in a hospital.
Learn more about the availability of abortion care in Massachusetts.
Why is this an issue? Is there really not a sufficient number of hospitals throughout the state? Also, I’ve always assumed that significant medical procedures that carry risk factors would/should be performed in a hospital. Why should abortion be any different?
Indeed, having an abortion is far safer than childbirth and are now most often done in freestanding outpatient settings. In the olden days, if you will, abortions were routinely done in hospitals under a coded mental health diagnosis so that insurance companies would pay. (Outpatient “day” surgery was still a few years away.) Insurance companies, however, eventually decided they weren’t going to pay for abortions even when coded with a mental health ICD-9-CM code for “acute situational anxiety.” Hospital admissions decreased precipitously and the procedure, in general, moved, along with a lot of other minor surgical procedures and diagnostics, to a more appropriate and lower cost outpatient setting.
<
p>
According to the map, Shrewsbury is one of the towns that lost a clinic since 2002. I’m not sure what the exact reasons for the closure are or who ran that particular clinic, but I used to pass it every day going to work. The building looked like a bunker, though, a cinder-block construction without much in the way of windows or signage. Not exactly a facade that suggests good clinical care.
<
p>Given the proximity of the PP clinic in Worcester, Shrewsbury didn’t really need a facility, anyway, so I suspect that might have been part of the calculus in its closure.
Given the violence that characterizes the conservative-fundamentalist anti-abortion nexus, it’s probably a smart idea to perform abortions in a “bunker-like structure”.
but I wonder what the point is of proposing repeal of statutes that are not and cannot be enforced, if the goal is to increase access to abortion providers.
<
p>TedF
I mean you really can’t force more clinics to open or people to perform this procedure. I would rather we focus on ultimately reducing the need. For the record I am pretty firmly in the “safe, legal, and rare” camp.