How St. Louis used federal money to help people who needed abortions travel

ST. LOUIS – An ordinance that includes federal funding to connect city residents to abortion services with logistical help as well as doula, postpartum and breastfeeding support was signed Thursday morning by Mayor Tishaura Jones.

“Today, St. Louis is taking an important step in showing our state and our entire country – we will not stop fighting to protect reproductive health care,” Jones said. “The Reproductive Equity Fund will empower St. Louisans to make the best health care decisions for themselves and their communities while addressing disparities exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis.”

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmidt filed suit against the city Thursday afternoon, saying the ordinance violates Missouri law.

Read more: In the last days of abortion care at the Memphis clinic

“My office today filed a lawsuit to stop Mayor Jones and the St. Louis Board of Aldermen from spending Missourians’ hard-earned tax dollars on out-of-state abortions,” Schmidt said.

Missouri banned nearly all abortions, including rape or consanguineous abortions, following the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Overruling Wade. Some Missourians protested, some celebrated, and others turned their attention to how helping people seeking reproductive health care could be prosecuted as a Class B felony.

That day, June 24, St. Louis Alderwoman Annie Rice introduced her bill to use funds from the American Rescue Plan Act to launch a reproductive equity fund in St. Louis, a step she called “a big and long overdue effort.” In his work” before the fall of Ro.

“Abortions in Missouri have been almost non-existent for a very long time now, and we at the St. Louis clinic only accepted medical abortions, and it’s the last abortion clinic standing in the state,” she told PBS NewsHour.

That clinic, Planned Parenthood in St. Louis’ Central West End, performed its last abortion a week before the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision.

Because the procedure can’t be performed in Missouri, the new fund will direct $1 million in ARPA money to provide logistical support for people seeking abortions, though the St. Louis City Health Department still has to create an allocation process. Another $500,000 will go toward increasing access to other reproductive services, such as doulas — which help pregnant women through labor, delivery and postpartum recovery — and breastfeeding support, which can help prevent maternal deaths or encourage successful breastfeeding. An additional $250,000 will be provided to evaluate and support the entire process. In total, the bill allocates $1.75 million in federal coronavirus funding. It also earmarked another $1.6 million in funding for covid-19 testing and vaccination incentives.

Read more: Missouri’s last abortion clinic finds itself in the middle of a bankruptcy.

“We don’t have the same restrictions on ARPA money that we have on other federal funds or state funding, so why not use it to get people the health care they need?” She said.

Federal law prohibits federal dollars from directly funding abortion, which the bill recognizes.

However, Rice’s proposed bill states that $1 million should be used to help people with logistical needs, such as child care and transportation.

However, the proposal has seen some pushback since its introduction. In early July, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmidt issued a statement saying, “The use of hard-earned taxpayer dollars, whether ARPA funds or any other form of revenue, to fund abortion is clearly illegal under Missouri law.” The city and county of St. Louis, and Kansas City, and others who try to license taxpayer-funded abortions face lawsuits from the Missouri attorney general’s office.

Rice told the Newshour that the board “thinks the federal money we’re using can’t be limited the way the attorney general thinks.”

The idea for the bill began with an outreach effort by Pro-Choice Missouri to learn more about the barriers facing people who might become pregnant, Rice said.

After conducting focus groups with local residents, the team established four main areas: logistical support for access to abortion care; Comprehensive doula care during pregnancy, abortion, pregnancy loss, childbirth and postpartum recovery; mental health care and resources; and breastfeeding support, or establishing breastfeeding and breastfeeding during the postpartum period.

“Board Bill 61, I’m proud to say, was created by local birth workers and pregnant and parenting St. Louisans, empowered to advocate for what our community needs and deserves,” said Dr. Love Holt, an organizer for Reproductive Freedom. At a press conference with Pro-Choice Missouri on the day the bill was signed. “Through the countless conversations I’ve had with people affected by abortion and the barriers to pregnancy care during the COVID-19 pandemic, I know this legislation will have a direct and meaningful impact.”

Megan Jayfo, executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund, said it’s critical to ensure funds are available for support in states where abortion is currently illegal. For her and her team, the past two weeks have been “very busy, very tiring.”

Roe said she sent her staff full of flowers on the Friday after her fall.

“It has touched us and it is painful to come face to face with all the systems that have been put in place to stop a person from having an abortion,” said Jayfo.

Many people are turning to various reproductive health care organizations in Illinois for help in obtaining an abortion safely. The Chicago Abortion Fund, which is supported by both grassroots efforts and foundation donations, has been inundated with questions in the weeks since Roe was overturned.

Aside from its direct services, the fund is also involved in research and advocacy, efforts that have taken off in the past few weeks. On average, they make 500 calls per month.

“The job is not new at all, the scale is new and the costs are going up, you know, especially because you have to support more people,” she said.

Although each person and their needs are different, Jayfo said someone seeking an abortion in another state “can easily spend $1,500” so they work to accommodate those needs regardless of their needs. We have no investigative process. Or eligibility criteria, we support what people say they need,” she says.

In the first three months of 2022, more than 80 percent of the fund’s callers came from outside Illinois. For all of these reasons, it’s important to support resources like local abortion funds or local government efforts, Jayfo said.

“We want to invest more at all levels of government to support people going to health care,” she added. “No one should have to travel for healthcare. No one should be criminalized for health care decisions, but that is the reality we are facing right now.

In Missouri, where abortion is expressly prohibited, abortion can be considered a Class B felony, except in situations where the person’s life is in danger. People convicted of crimes at this level can face five to 15 years in prison – a deterrent that Jayfo says is harmful and will only lead to bad outcomes.

“We’ve been having abortions for a long time; we’re not going to stop abortions. It’s going to be harder to get them and it’s going to be more dangerous to get them,” she said.

In recent months, a number of prosecutors across the country have vowed not to prosecute individuals who seek abortions, including St. Louis County District Attorney Wesley Bell, a Democrat, who signed a joint letter that reads: “Criminalizing and prosecuting individuals who seek or seek abortion care makes a travesty of justice; Prosecutors should not be part of that.

Although the last abortion clinic in Missouri is no longer able to perform those services, Dr. Colleen McNicholas, chief medical officer of St. Louis Regional Reproductive Health Services, said the building will still be open to allow people to stay. You can access the other services.

“It’s great to see smaller local governments and elected officials doing the work that the state level hasn’t done. That said, the city of St. Louis and Mayor Jones or the county are putting dollars behind that work,” she said. . “Basic access to health care must include everyone.”