Brown, Caitlin Rose. Choosing between reproductive health and health from coronavirus: the COVID-19 pandemic and barriers to abortion access. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-fbjv-3b50
DescriptionThe COVID-19 pandemic in the United States brought to the forefront a new iteration of barriers to abortion access that continue a long history of regulations and restrictions on abortion procedures despite its constitutional protections. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, individual states following federal recommendations halted healthcare procedures deemed elective/non-essential in an effort to preserve supplies, staff, and space for essential services in an attempt to handle the increasing burden on the healthcare system. In some states, the designation of elective included abortion procedures which quickly brought about several lawsuits from the ACLU and abortion providers. This paper employs a reproductive justice framework to consider the impact of such policies including rhetorical ramifications of designating abortion procedures as elective healthcare and the risk and impact of suspending procedures on marginalized communities through the case study of Texas and Planned Parenthood v. Abbott. Also considered are the differential impacts along racial and class lines via barriers the FDA placed by the reinstatement of in-person dispensing requirements for mifepristone - the primary drug for medication abortion procedures - through the Supreme Court decision in the case of ACOG v. FDA. This paper argues for the rhetorical integration of abortion procedures into essential healthcare to minimize the impact of state restrictions on marginalized communities and suggests that an attention to administrative policies and the violence they enact may provide an avenue for tangible action in expanding access to abortion care via utilization of telemedicine technologies.