I once represented a veteran who was raped during her military service. She was no longer on active duty by the time she realized she was pregnant. Her health care thus fell under the purview of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
It was 2005, and at the time, the V.A. didn’t offer abortions. My client did not have health insurance or the means to pay for an abortion. She told me she carried the pregnancy to term and then quietly put the child up for adoption.
The experience of giving birth to the product of her rape shattered her. She barely remembers where she gave birth. She just hoped the baby was safe.
The trauma derailed her. I represented her, 14 years later, as she sought to obtain legally mandated disability benefits from the V.A. We won. These days, she’s back on her feet and rebuilding her life. (I still get a “merry Christmas” text from her every year.) But I’ve never forgotten the anger that I felt when she told me that she wasn’t able to get an abortion when she needed one.
The V.A. is one of the largest health care providers in America, and women are the fastest-growing population of veterans. Still, abortion was excluded from the V.A.’s health services until just three years ago. Now the Trump administration is attempting to reverse course on that long-overdue expansion of women’s care — at a time when abortion is less available than it had been in decades nationally because of the fall of Roe v. Wade. If the administration is successful, many more women who have served our country will suffer as my client suffered. Some may die.
Before 2022, any discussion of abortion at a V.A. facility was a nonstarter; veterans could not receive information from their trusted doctors on where to receive a safe and legal abortion. Still, many female veterans could make do without V.A. abortion funding because, at the time, there were far more clinics around the country where they could get the procedure. That said, they had to be able to afford the hundreds of dollars an abortion can cost, plus any travel-related expenses, if needed.
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