For example, a woman who found out her birth control was far more expensive than usual:
On Wednesday, Jessica DeLong walked into the Planned Parenthood in Minneapolis for birth control and was told she’d have to pay $200 instead of her usual $30 sliding scale fee. She didn’t have it, and told the clinic she’d come back next week after she got paid.
In Cleveland, a collaboration of Planned Parenthood and the Cleveland Health Department birthed a program in which an RV doubles as a mobile health unit, dispatched to the city’s poorest neighborhoods and providing free pregnancy testing, STD testing, HIV testing, and condoms. Its nine-year run may soon come to an end:
Destiny Woodson, an 18-year-old high school student who works part-time at Dunkin’, asked for some condoms.
When Woodson found out the HealthMobile might end its run because of the funding loss — its coordinator had already been made part-time last week — she was indignant.
“That’s not right, that’s not right at all,” she said.
Woodson’s friend, Ashanti Zeigler, 20, shifted her 1-year-old son Josiah in her arms as she lamented the lost funding. “I don’t like it,” Zeigler said. “Why take away something from people who can’t afford it? And why should Trump be able to tell women what we can do with our bodies?”
And then there’s this anecdote from Vienna, West Virginia, in which a woman is saving up for an IUD now that she can no longer rely on Planned Parenthood for her birth control:
[25-year-old Madeline] Gray, who is uninsured, has relied on Planned Parenthood since she was a teenager for annual exams, testing, and birth control. She had come in to get a vaginal ring used for birth control replaced, as she has done every month.
“I signed in, and they said, ‘We don’t have it. We just lost our Title X funding,’ ” she said. “And I knew that, but I thought that was going to be a slower process. I am putting my savings into an IUD instead.”
Planned Parenthood is doing what it can to smooth out this chaotic process. The Washington Post reports that in addition to increased fundraising attempts, they’re training employees to get eligible patients to sign up for Medicaid, figuring out financing plans, or referring them to other clinics. Ultimately, Planned Parenthood would have been unable to provide the quality of care they assure their patients if they abided by the Title X gag rule. But while this turmoil lands squarely on the Trump administration’s regressive shoulders, it’s dismaying that the most vulnerable are always the ones who must pay the highest consequence, even for the greater good. All the reliables lines of defense are crumbling, and the crisis-center vultures are ready (and Title X funded) to take advantage of it.