The Utah Abortion fund has distributed thousands of dollars to help Utahns get abortions wherever they need to obtain them.
, “we were having conversations with our friends at clinics, and they were just like, ‘Well, we’re just gonna keep doing this s---t until someone literally comes in and shuts the door.” “None of us really come from a business background — I think that we kind of stumbled into this position,” one of the fund’s co-founders said. “We started out being people who are very passionate about abortion access and reproductive justice, and mutual aid — all of these things. And then through that, we also found ourselves running this organization that is able to redistribute a fair amount of money.
Knowing the barriers that already exist for patients to access abortion care in Utah — such as completing the state’s required abortion module, obtaining face-to-face informed consent for the procedure, and the state’s mandated 72-hour waiting period — the fund uses a “bare-bones” intake process to distribute its resources to callers.
The first monthly budget the organization operated with was about $5,000. It’s now a “flexible” $15,000, a co-founder said. But with the cheapest procedure costing around $450, and the average caller traveling about 110 miles, costs add up quickly.