Abortion Seekers on Parole or Probation Face Dire Obstacles to Care

Two years after the Dobbs decision, a majority of the 800,000 women on parole or probation in the U.S. now live in a state with some form of an abortion ban and have travel restrictions as part of their community supervision, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, a research and advocacy organization focused on mass incarceration. Whether a woman who needs abortion care gets approval for travel “most of the time comes down to the discretion of the individual [parole or probation] officer, and they don’t have to respond super quickly to requests,” said Wanda Bertram, communications strategist at the Prison Policy Initiative. Each state with travel restrictions has a different process for obtaining approval, and in some places that means going back to the original trial judge.

Parole and probation officers might make decision based on their own beliefs, leaving abortion seekers potentially with no options. “What happens in those states to women who are already caught up in a system of surveillance and then have to disclose?” said Bertram. “Probation and parole departments are very intrusive into people’s lives, and there are places where judges can say that a condition of your probation is don’t get pregnant. They have all sorts of control already, in many places, over people’s bodies — who knows how that’s going to play out, whether simply the act of asking, ‘Can I travel out of state for abortion care?’ could get someone punished. What we do feel pretty sure about is that the mere possibility that it could lead to punishment is probably enough to deter a lot of people from seeking permission.”

People on parole or probation who live in a county or state with travel restrictions and find themselves needing to travel, even for non–health care reasons, such as a funeral, face “the problem that the process for seeking permission can be very unstructured,” in most instances, said Jamila Johnson, senior counsel at the Lawyering Project, a legal advocacy organization focused on reproductive health care and abortion access. “In my experience, there is not a structured list of things that can be approved or not approved, and courts have allowed this to be an unstructured space because the way they think of it is that it’s with grace that you’re not incarcerated, so this is a privilege and with this privilege, there’s just less process around all of it.” Johnson has worked with people who didn’t even know how to make a travel request. The confusion is compounded by the fact that parole and probation officers themselves don’t necessarily know the process.

People on parole and probation are often no longer in regular contact with their attorney, said Johnson. “The attorney helps them through the space of sentencing, but there is a significant dearth in this country of legal professionals who can help answer questions about the conditions of one’s parole or probation and help navigate people through those circumstances afterwards.”

Another hurdle is the cost: People on parole or probation tend to be low-income, with about two-thirds of women having annual incomes under $20,000, “so this concern about ‘Am I going to get permission?’ may be secondary to the question of ‘How am I going to pay for this?’” said Bertram.

In the 12 states with near total abortion bans, travel outside the state is often the only option for abortion care. This includes Texas, which has more than 100,000 women on parole or probation, more than any other state, yet a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice told The Dallas Morning News in August that their parole division had not received any travel requests for abortion care. “This is not a reflection that women don’t need or want this type of medical care,” said Jennifer Toon, executive director of Lioness Justice Impacted Women’s Alliance, a Texas-based organization led by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women, girls, and gender-expansive people. “It means they’re terrified to ask, and [they] haven’t done a good job as an agency to even have a policy in place for women that do ask.”

SB 8, the Texas abortion ban, criminalizes anyone aiding an abortion, so a parole officer might “report me for even asking [to travel to get an abortion], out of fear” for themselves, said Toon. There is also a lack of comprehensive sex and reproductive health education being offered inside correctional facilities, as well as in public schools, so when women are released, they might not be aware of all their options if they are contending with an unwanted pregnancy. “The education about pregnancy and the idea that maybe you choose not to have it, that discussion is nowhere in the system at all,” said Toon, who was also a peer health educator during her incarceration. She said that during her incarceration she received “a constant stream of information about the evils of abortion, so a lot of women coming out [might not be] at a place mentally or emotionally that [an abortion] is an option they would have available to them after all the shame and guilting [they’ve had]. Whatever is happening to girls and women and gender-expansive people in the broader ‘free society,’ that is 10 times as oppressive for women that are under the state’s authority in supervision or incarceration.”

The decision to end a pregnancy can be difficult enough, said Andrea James, founder and executive director of the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. Someone “might be going through already an incredible emotional ordeal to make the decision to exercise her right to choose. This could be a difficult, arduous decision. Now in addition to that, there is the layer of not being able to make that decision your own. You have to get up the courage and strength to not be humiliated because too often [officers] don’t hold back on weighing in on their opinion. Most [parole and probation officers] are men and not emotionally intelligent themselves. The PO is not going to put themselves in legal jeopardy to give permission to a woman to travel to another state to have an abortion because their state has outlawed it. They’re an operative of the state.”

Even in states where abortion is legal, abortion seekers might still need to travel to access care. Although California has a constitutional right to abortion, “we also have 58 counties and probation is supervised by the counties, and there’s not abortion services available in all 58 counties, so depending on [the individual’s] restrictions, they’re in the same boat to some extent as people in banned states,” said Corene Kendrick, deputy director at the ACLU National Prison Project. “Incarcerated people are repeatedly and incessantly sent the message that they have zero rights at all. Even when they’re out, they are being constantly tracked and monitored and under state surveillance. Holding aside if they even know that [abortion] is an option, they [might not] think to ask or call a hotline or that sort of thing.”

This is a population that advocates have been concerned about since the Dobbs decision because they are among the most vulnerable abortion seekers. “People who don’t have state involvement in their lives don’t realize how violent it can be and how much it seeps into your everyday life and everyday decisions,” said Noran Elzarka, helpline counsel at the Repro Legal Helpline of If/When/How, which provides legal services and information about accessing abortion, self-managed abortion, and birth justice issues. “The most marginalized communities are always the communities that aren’t able to access the health care that they need in ways that feel autonomous and honorable and are left out of the conversations even though it’s impacting them the most.”