The list of anti-abortion bills at the legislature grows almost daily it seems, but a pro-choice group says this has had the effect of providing financial support for abortions.

The board of Arkansas Abortion Support Network (AASN) would like to publicly thank Senator Jason Rapert (R-Conway) and Governor Asa Hutchinson for their help raising money to pay for abortions. AASN operates Arkansas’s only abortion fund. We raise money to help people pay for abortions and other associated costs.

AASN received more than $10,000 in donations specifically in response to SB6, now Act 309, Arkansas’s near total abortion ban. More than $7,000 of that came in after Governor Hutchinson signed SB6 into law.

With the money that Senator Rapert and Governor Hutchinson have helped us raise, we will be able to assist about 34 patients in need of abortion services. That’s 34 abortions that the senator and governor helped pay for!

Our average grant to patients is $289. We fund between 20-35 patients each month.

Ali Taylor, co-founder and president of AASN, said “The State’s attempt to ban abortion actually helped us quite a bit. Obviously, we’d rather not deal with cynical, cruel efforts to ban abortion. But if the legislature insists on trying to take us backwards, they should know that people from Arkansas, and around the country, are responding by donating to help us help people who need abortions.”

AASN is an all-volunteer nonprofit that works to reduce barriers to abortion access in Arkansas through abortion funding, clinic escorting, and community outreach and education. More information is available at www.arabortionsupport.org and on our Facebook page.

Just added to the list of abortion obstructions is SB 527, filed today, to require abortion providers to have contracts with hospitals willing to take patients with medical complications and with an ambulance service to transport them. Would so-called pro-life advocates really expect a hospital to deny emergency treatment, given federal law, or that an ambulance service would refuse transport of a woman in distress without a contract? The legislation is unnecessary, but in concert with many other pieces of anti-choice legislation opponents of women’s medical autonomy hope to create a de facto bar to abortion even after a federal court enjoins the new abortion ban law when it takes effect later this year.

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