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THE PRIVATE PILOTS FLYING ABORTION SEEKERS ACROSS THE MIDWEST  
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Lucas Frisancho
September 9, 2024
Next City
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_ Organizers and private pilots in the Midwest are working together
to address economic barriers to reproductive freedom. _

, Maria Teneva / Unsplash

 

In the fall of 2022, Mike climbed into the pilot’s seat with an
idea.

For the past few months, the private pilot had been volunteering with
the Illinois-based Midwest Access Coalition
[[link removed]], an abortion support fund
that he’d come across in his post-George Floyd anti-racism journey.

“I thought, there’s gotta be people out there helping people
travel for abortions, because it’s not like every medical facility
you go to provide abortion care,” says Mike. Next City has agreed to
use Mike’s first name only to protect his safety and privacy as he
engages in this sensitive work. “So I reached out to say, hey, I
want to volunteer for anything you might need – driving, hosting,
whatever.”

But he also wanted to share a proposal: What if recreational pilots
like himself could volunteer their skills to get abortion seekers the
care they needed?

For over a decade, the Midwest Access Coalition has worked to provide
financial and logistical support for abortion seekers in the region,
which includes Indiana, Missouri, Iowa and other states with the
country’s most restrictive abortion bans.

MAC coordinates a unique plan for each client — most of whom are
traveling to Illinois for an abortion — coordinating the logistics
of hotels and transportation while also navigating the constellation
of different laws governing the right to abortion.

Well before the overturning of Roe v. Wade two years ago, thousands of
Americans were already facing economic barriers that put abortion out
of reach. But the fall of Roe exacerbated these issues even in states
where abortion remains legal, forcing them to shoulder an increasing
burden.

To help meet the growing need, the Midwest Access Coalition has had to
get increasingly creative. That’s meant collaboration with other
practical support funds across the nation – and working with Mike to
build a network of volunteer pilots to offer low-cost air travel that
could take MAC’s work to new heights.

Meet Elevated Access

In 2021, Mike took two MAC board members on a demo flight to pitch his
idea. The demonstration immediately won over the organization: Ground
transportation sometimes isn’t fast enough for MAC’s clients to
receive the urgent care they need, and commercial air travel can be
prohibitively expensive. Plus, traveling by private plane means
there’s no need to purchase tickets or go through TSA.

So in 2022, just days before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was
leaked, Mike founded the nonprofit Elevated Access
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When MAC requests a flight for one of its clients, Elevated Access
sends out a hobby pilot to make the trip, who covers the costs
associated with the flight.

Less than three years later, Elevated Access now has a network of over
400 vetted pilots, has flown abortion seekers in and out of more than
40 states, and is partnered with about 80 abortion and other practical
support funds, including numerous organizations working to expand
gender-affirming care access.

Mike credits much of his nonprofit’s early growth to a TikTok post
by a friend with a small, social justice-oriented account
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followers. A month after the post promoting Elevated Access went
viral, more than 500 pilots had reached out to the organization. And
before the official Dobbs decision was released, Elevated Access had
flown its first abortion seeker.

“I never expected it to grow that quickly,” Mike says. “I
expected it to be something in my free time until I retired.” But
the rush of interest from both volunteer pilots and abortion support
funds shows the depth of the need.

To craft solutions to the growing challenges facing abortion seekers,
nonprofits and practical support funds frequently collaborate across
the region and the country. Many of these connections are built
through Apiary [[link removed]], a national hub for abortion
and other funds.

“We’re constantly supporting each other, working cases and coming
up with ideas to best support our clients,” says Patti Daschbach,
who serves on the board of Elevated Access and as the co-director of
client services at MAC.

In one case, a MAC client couldn’t afford a baby seat to travel with
her child on an Elevated Access flight. Daschbach connected with a
third group, a local practical support fund, to pay for that baby
seat.

Unfortunately, the need for these solutions will likely be ongoing, he
says.

“These problems are systemic problems that predate Dobbs and
[abortion rights] always be under attack in a lot of different
ways,” Mike says. “Just because we may get legalization a year
from now doesn’t mean we can wipe our hands and call it done. There
will still be a lot of work to do.”

Abortion Care In A Post-Dobbs Midwest

Despite their inventive solutions, practical support funds like MAC
still struggle under the increasing demand for reproductive
healthcare.

Prior to the Dobbs decision, the majority of MAC clients were coming
from Indiana or within Illinois. In recent years, MAC says nearly
one-third of abortion seekers are traveling from Texas.

“With so many more people from out of state traveling to states that
still have abortion, it’s pushing those wait times out for people
who live here,” says Dreith. One resident of Wichita, Kansas, was
forced to travel to Minnesota to receive treatment and avoid a
three-week wait for an appointment in-state. MAC helped her cover the
travel, lodging and other incidental costs from the unexpected detour.

For some clients, wait times at nearby clinics would push them past
the legal time limit for an abortion. Many of these abortion seekers
would also face the crushing financial pressure—often impossible to
shoulder—of taking multiple days off work and paying for all of
their travel expenses.

For clients cornered by these obstacles to their bodily autonomy, MAC
is quite literally a lifeline. If forced into childbirth, they face
both the risk of health complications and the crippling financial
pressure of raising a child.

“This is a matter of life and death in some cases,” Dreith says.
These challenges are most intense for low-income, working-class
abortion seekers who are the least likely to have the disposable
income necessary to cover excess costs.

Though there is a rising wave of hope for some organizers with Vice
President Kamala Harris’s promise to restore the Roe v. Wade
protections if elected president, this struggle did not begin with the
fall of Roe. Nor would it end with the federal legalization of
abortion.

“This was a problem even before Roe was ended with the Dobbs
decision,” says Alison Dreith, MAC’s Director of Strategic
Partnerships. “There are many obstacles abortion seekers have always
had to face because abortion care has been outside of traditional
medicine.”

The Need For Government Funding

During the summer of 2022, the fall of Roe prompted a surge of
attention to abortion advocacy work and brought in a large influx of
donations. Since then, media coverage has slowed. And funding has
slowed with it.

“The money is not sustainable,” says Dreith. “The travel is not
sustainable. There is just no way we can continue, as an abortion
movement, to shoulder all of this burden.”

There has been some movement in the right direction. Dreith points to
the Illinois Department of Public Health, which in January pledged
[[link removed]] $2 million in
grants for health departments and non-profits to fund reproductive
healthcare training among qualified providers.

Still, funding is scarce nationwide, with many states
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only providing patients assistance under Medicaid when certain
pregnancy requirements are met and only covering the cost of the
procedure itself.

To alleviate pressure, she calls for local governments to expand the
breadth and depth of programs to make reproductive healthcare open and
accessible for all. “We are going to need government to step up.”

But public awareness of existing abortion funds and government
assistance is just as important.

“People don’t think about abortion until they need one,”
Daschbach says. “They have so many questions, and like, where do
they even start?”

Like other abortion funds, MAC runs a hotline
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seeking assistance. Many calls come from clients who’ve been
referred to MAC by a partner clinic after making an appointment.

But in her experience, healthcare providers are often unaware of the
many abortion funds that exist and can help their patients in need.
The more patients that healthcare professionals can refer to a local
abortion fund, the more abortion seekers can receive the care they
need.

“We’re here, and we want to help your patient get to the
clinic,” Daschbach says.

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* Abortion Access; Abortion Transportation; Abortion Rights;
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