Poor receive substandard abortion care, says clinic worker

Clinic worker Jenny Higgins says that wealthy women get better abortion care than poor women do. She says:

 “… We almost never service wealthier women at the clinics where I worked. In the southeastern clinic, which was in an urban area, the majority of the clients were African-American….. [Wealthy women] are more likely to have access to higher quality, private abortion care, either due to their insurance plans or because they can afford to pay out-of-pocket for such services.”

….

“Even though I prided myself on providing attentive and empathic care to the patients with whom I worked, the clinic infrastructure and patient overload prohibited the kind of service that members of the middle and upper classes have come to expect – or the kind of care I had received at relatively posh student health centers or private gynecologist offices.”

Jenny Higgins “Sex, Unintended Pregnancy, and Poverty: One Woman’s Evolution from “Choice” to “Reproductive Justice” in Krista Jacob. Abortion under Attack: Women on the Challenges Facing Choice (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006) 37-38