The Palmetto State Abortion Fund Fights for Economic and Healthcare Justice

This post is written by Emily Taylor, Associate Professor of English & Director of Women's & Gender Studies Program at Presbyterian College and author of Hot Feminism: Letters from South Carolina.

We have been living with an extreme abortion ban in South Carolina for almost a year. On August 23^rd 2023, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that the state’s abortion ban could go into effect, arguing that the state constitution did not protect a woman’s right to privacy in the case of abortion. The all-male court affirmed the patriarchal idea that the state’s interest in “protecting life” outweighed the rights of pregnant people.

Since then, people seeking abortions at one of the state’s three abortion clinics have to be six weeks pregnant or less, or qualify for very limited exceptions (be imminently at risk of death or substantial risk of a major bodily function, in cases of rape or incest (but only before twelve weeks), or if the fetus has a fatal anomaly). The ban has made it almost impossible to access abortion care, with recent data showing an 80% drop in abortions performed in the state.

But many people will still seek care either via abortion medication and telehealth (the new ban actually removed the language making self-managed abortions illegal, so people cannot be prosecuted for taking abortion medication), or by traveling to states where abortion is still legal. The cost of both of these options is often prohibitive for girls and women in South Carolina, a state that ranks in the bottom third for its share of women living in poverty.

The attacks on women’s reproductive healthcare prevent access through the law, but also by restricting the funding for abortion itself. In 1980, the Hyde Amendment (which is not a law but an annual budget rider that Congress approves every year) went into effect, prohibiting the use of federal funding for abortion coverage. This means that girls and women on Medicaid cannot use their insurance in South Carolina to cover abortion care, even those permitted under the current ban. Insurance plans through the ACA marketplace are also forbidden from covering abortions.

Thus many girls and women were forced to pay out of pocket for abortion care in South Carolina, even before Roe was overturned in 2022. Abortion funds have been assisting people with these expenses in the region, with two regional funds, ARC Southeast and the Carolina Abortion Fund, and the state’s only, all-volunteer fund, the Palmetto State Abortion Fund. Founded in 2021 by Deidre Griffin and Ashlyn Preaux, it is the only abortion fund that works directly with the Greenville Women’s Clinic.

Ashlyn Preaux (left) and Deidre Griffin (right), PSAF co-founders. 

Abortion funds are a type of mutual aid, and it is no surprise that Preaux and Griffin are themselves community organizers. Griffin, who had trouble getting the help she needed when she had her first abortion, initially thought about providing a private fund through an informal network of family and friends. No one in her network was interested in helping, until Griffin met Preaux at a Bernie Sanders event in 2019. Two years later, they launched the fund, initially helping people they knew and friends of friends access care. 

Six months later, Roe was overturned, and like many abortion funds, they saw an initial flood of donations and interest in volunteering. The donations have since fallen, as they have nationally, while funding to abortion seekers through national organizations like Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion Hotline have also dropped, from 50% to 30%. As bans throughout the Southeast take effect, people in South Carolina are forced to travel to Virginia or Washington, D.C. as the closest options for accessible care, driving prices into the thousands of dollars for most patients, accounting for lost wages, childcare, travel costs, and the procedure itself.

The all-volunteer staff at PSAF do patient intake, coordinate appointments, help with travel arrangements, and distribute funds to South Carolinians, while also providing emotional support to girls and women who are often deeply ashamed to be seeking abortion care. One of Griffin’s goals is to continue to normalize abortion and take away the stigma. “My family felt like I should be embarrassed that I had… abortions. I'm not ashamed… It is not a stain on my character. It doesn't make me a horrible person or a terrible mother because I did not want to keep two of the babies that I had. That's crazy. People need to not be ashamed or embarrassed. It is a medical procedure, and you have it for whatever reason you want. You don't have to have some noble reason to have an abortion. You can simply have an abortion. You don't want to have kids…Or you don't want to go through with the pregnancy. That's it.”

Because the staff is all-volunteer, Preaux explains that doing the work can often feel like being on call all the time. “I think one problem we have as an entirely volunteer-run fund is that we don't have working hours. Our working hours are every hour that we have a spare second. So we reply to messages as we have time and as they come in. And so we don't stop checking messages at 5:00 PM and so there's not such a separation that some folks might have if it was a job that they clock out of.” Preaux, who is the current director, hopes the fund can eventually raise enough money to have a paid director role so the work can be more sustainable and long-term.

While the fund has been awarded a number of grants, most of the grants require particular projects or objectives to be met and are often not able to fund staff positions. One grant has allowed the fund to develop their public service campaign, Access for All, to spread the word about reproductive injustice in the state (where many counties are maternal healthcare deserts). In South Carolina, there is no way to put abortion rights directly to the voters through ballot measures or petitions, and so in the absence of federal protections, the only way to protect rights in the state is to vote for candidates that support abortion access. The Access for All campaign helps to raise awareness of the issues, even while a majority of South Carolina’s support abortion rights in recent polls.