Puerto Rico Is an Abortion Haven — Just Not for Locals

It was raining despite the sun — the type of weather Boricuas make superstitious jokes about — on a recent Tuesday at Women’s Medical Pavilion, an abortion clinic in Puerto Rico. The eight patients seated around me in the waiting room looked at their phones in silence as a midday entertainment program played on a small TV. Nurses called them to the front desk one by one, referring to them as “mi amor” and “corazón” as they gave an overview of the 15-minute procedure. An abortion seeker to my right took a call and told the person on the other end of the line that she was hungry — it was nearly 1 p.m. — because the clinic had instructed her not to eat anything for two hours before her visit. Plus, she said, she couldn’t afford to spend money on a meal — not even from the fast-food joint across the street from the clinic’s pink entrance.

The cost of a medication abortion in Puerto Rico is $350, while a surgical abortion starts at around $250 and increases with gestational stage. That price tag is hefty for the 40 percent of the population living below the poverty line, especially given that insurance plans currently offered in the archipelago don’t cover abortion. “We see patients who have pawned jewelry in order to cover the cost,” Dr. Yari Vale Moreno, an OB/GYN and abortion provider at Darlington Medical Associates, another of Puerto Rico’s clinics, tells me. “I have no doubt some people have stopped buying groceries for one or two weeks in order to afford the procedure.”

Thank goodness Twitter hasn’t totally bitten the dust, or we wouldn’t get all of the amazing White Lotus season-finale discourse. Maine’s version of SantaCon sounds so much better than New York City’s bacchanal. Homelessness is first and foremost a housing issue. Richmond, Virginia, has removed its last public statue commemorating a Confederate general. It’s a sad day in the media. So sex and cohabitation before marriage are now illegal in Bali … unless you support the tourism economy? And Jennifer Lopez has done the unthinkable, making Ben Affleck cheat (on Dunkin’).

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