All I knew about my patient before I walked into the exam room to meet her was she was 18 years old and several months pregnant. I started asking her a few basic questions to get to know her better. I asked her how far she traveled to get to the clinic, expecting the typical “a couple hours drive” answer. Instead she answered, “I flew in yesterday from North Dakota.”

She was a high school senior who learned of her pregnancy late. She was then stuck without access to an abortion provider due to where she lived, and needed to spend the next month scraping together every penny she could find to afford a flight to Portland and the out-of-pocket cost of her abortion. If she had had access to Medicaid funding and a local provider, she could have had her procedure months earlier and wouldn’t have had to spend all the money she had been saving for college.