Centering Access and Community Care: Guest Post from Just the Pill

This is a guest blog post from our friends Brooke and Julie at Just the Pill, Minnesota’s first mobile abortion clinic. 

Across Minnesota, there are huge swaths of land where people are making choices about sex, pregnancy, and parenting without reliable access to abortion. If you live in rural Minnesota and want to get an abortion, you’ve probably got – quite literally – a long road ahead of you. 

First, you have to try to schedule an appointment at a clinic and likely face at least a two-week delay on top of scheduling a window to listen to a state-mandated, medically irrelevant script. Then you have to figure out how you’re going to make the three, four, or even five hour drive across the state to get to the clinic and where you’re going to stay if you’re getting a later abortion that requires a two-day procedure. You’ve got to figure out how to get time off work and what excuse you’re going to give your boss. Most people seeking abortions already have one child, so you probably have to find childcare, too. Then you have to find a way to pay for all of this - the $600 average cost of an abortion, gas money, childcare, a night in a hotel, and missed time off work. 

We founded Just the Pill, Minnesota’s first mobile abortion clinic, because we believe It shouldn’t be this hard to access abortion. Like our friends at Our Justice, we believe that abortion access is an essential piece of the bodily autonomy that everyone deserves. Our missions are deeply intertwined as we work to expand abortion access and fight back against structural barriers that include finances, logistics, stigma and shame, and restrictive laws intended to make it as hard as possible for people to access abortion. 

These laws and restrictions are an ever-present backdrop for our work. We can’t ever separate the personal from the political. Case in point: Before the pandemic, the federal government had singled out medication abortion for targeted restrictions that required patients to come into a clinic for an in-person visit to receive mifepristone, the first pill in a medication abortion. There is no medically necessary reason for this in-person requirement because patients, it’s just another step intended to make it even more inconvenient to get an abortion. In the early months of the pandemic, the federal government briefly lifted these requirements to lower the risks of COVID-19 transmission, allowing us to mail medication abortion across the state and meet the needs of people in rural Minnesota who had previously never had access to abortion. 

In January 2021, the Supreme Court reversed that action and reinstated the medically unnecessary in-person requirements, creating confusion for patients and sending us on a state-wide road trip in our mobile clinic as we pulled 12-hour days driving across Minnesota to meet patients and dispense medication abortion. Then, the FDA lifted in-person requirements again, allowing us to mail medication abortion again but creating still more confusion for providers and patients. 

Getting essential health care doesn’t have to be this hard, and it’s clear that people in power chose for it to be this way. We’re working to change that by making abortion more accessible for rural Minnesotans, driven by values of bodily autonomy, accessibility, and community care. We’ve already reached patients who have never had access to abortion care before, and 30% of patients surveyed said they would have had to delay their abortion significantly more than 2 weeks or continued their pregnancy if they did not have access to Just the Pill’s services. 

There is a need for abortion access in our community, and we should always be working to meet that need in the most accessible ways possible. 

As the folks at Our Justice know, abortion access is a radical form of community care. We want our patients to know that they are a part of a community that believes they should have access to a full range of reproductive health care. If you need an abortion, we want you to know that you have options for how to access it, people who will help you pay for it, and community partners who will help provide aftercare kits. We also want you to know that you’re part of a community working to make it easier to access abortion by making the changes to in-person requirements permanent and repealing state-level abortion restrictions.

Abortion is a part of the whole fabric of someone’s life as they exercise their bodily autonomy and make decisions to care for themselves and their families. At Our Justice and Just the Pill, we’re working to make sure that autonomy belongs to everyone. 

For more information on Just the Pill’s services, visit their website. As always, if you need help paying for an abortion, visit Our Justice’s abortion assistance fund form here.