Help Eliminate Barriers to Abortion Care this #GivingTuesday
Tomorrow is #GivingTuesday! If you don’t know what that is, it’s a social media driven fundraising day for non-profits and charities. It leverages the upcoming holiday season and the fact that many companies recently had sales on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. This time of year lots of people are inclined to give to charities that are important to them and we think that giving to the CIHC Abortion Access Fund is the best option if you care about abortion access.
“Donate to CIHC today”
One thing that is often forgotten or misunderstood about abortion in Canada is that as much as we talk about the right to an abortion, the procedure itself is only covered by OHIP when clients are eligible for OHIP. Yet, there are roughly 500,000 people making Ontario their home right now who don’t have access to OHIP because they don’t meet the eligibility. This includes refugees feeling violence whose application has been denied, new residents whose immigration sponsor has fallen through, anyone who misses their appointment with Citizen and Immigration Canada (usually because they had to work or were ill), temporary foreign workers without insurance, permanent residents in the ‘3 month waiting period’ or any Canadian who left Canada for more than 212 days is ineligible for OHIP for the first 3 months they are back in Ontario. Any of those folks can have an unwanted pregnancy, and for all of them there is zero financial support.
“Support uninsured pregnant people, donate today”
Many non-insured folks are also in difficult financial positions or have precarious immigration status making seeking timely abortion care that much more difficult. But as we all know, when you are pregnant and you don’t want to be, time is a luxury you don’t have. At CIHC we have worked really hard to ensure that non-insured clients can get the abortions they need. We've developed relationships with specific organizations that work with non-insured people to cover nearly all the costs of surgical abortions. Unfortunately, there is a shortfall of $114/non-insured person seeking care at our clinic. This #GivingTuesday give the gift of choice and help eliminate financial barriers to abortion care. Give to the Choice in Health Clinic Access fund today.