[quote Twizbe]@5YearsLeft don't forget the women who are denied an abortion also have to pay to give birth. With insurance this might be around $5k without it could be in the hundreds of thousands.
[/quote]
Sigh. How could I forget? The average out of pocket cost for a woman WITH insurance is $3000. For a C-section, $5000. How many of us can afford that? And yes, that’s the average, meaning some pay a lot more, even though they have insurance (and some pay less, but that still means in the thousands).
amp.usatoday.com/amp/4452475002
Adding insult to injury, it doesn’t even include any of the medication she’ll need for pain or usually care for the baby, which is often a separate charge from the hospital and in the thousands as well.
And that’s just the beginning. How many times do we see “call your health visitor” on these threads? But there are no HVs in America. No system of midwives (in America, people can call themselves “midwives” if they just graduate from secondary school, have no formal medical training, and take some kind of short course that varies from state to state). Your care is almost always consultant led because as that’s all there usually is and always expensive as a result. There are some certified nurse midwives, which means they went through school to become a nurse and also learned about midwifery, but they don’t have whole units of them, and they’re often just in large cities, and they still cost as much as consultants from the UK, or more. More and more people choose home births with the type of US midwives that have no formal medical training at all because it’s cheaper and these “midwives” end up in situations where they can’t revive babies, they can’t determine the baby is in distress and the mother needs a hospital transfer and they wait too long, etc etc). Everything that might be wrong means a doctor’s appointment and every appointment means $$$ (even with insurance, $20 for every appointment is considered to be “good” - $50 to $100 is common). If the baby has tongue tie or CMPA, the thousands of dollars could just keep mounting. And what if the mother is birth injured? Then it’s doctor’s appointments that all cost money, prescriptions that all cost money, treatment that all costs money, surgeries that all cost money. And when the medical care has caused bankruptcy ( no surprise that medical bankruptcy is responsible for 66% of American bankruptcies when just giving birth to a child with insurance costs $5000, just imagine what fighting cancer costs)… what then? We all know exactly what.
“What then” is there are plenty of Americans who die every day because they can’t afford medical care. I’m sure with these new abortion laws, more and more of them will be reluctantly expectant mothers. It’s heartbreaking.