Topline:
LAist Investigates: The Unknown Mandate – Accessing Medication Abortion at California Universities, breaks down Senior Health Reporter Jackie Fortier and Higher Education Correspondent Adolfo Guzman-Lopez’s investigation into the lack of awareness of abortion access at California’s public universities.
About the podcast series: Imperfect Paradise is a weekly series about hidden worlds and messy realities here in Southern California and beyond.
About the episode: When LAist Senior Health Reporter Jackie Fortier met Deanna Gomez, Gomez was a full-time student in her senior year at Cal State San Bernardino close to graduating. She was also working two jobs to pay her way through school. When Gomez found out she was pregnant, her challenging search for an abortion upended her schedule and her life. Gomez would’ve saved hundreds of dollars, hours of driving across Southern California, and nearly a month of missed classes, if she had known that medication abortion access was free and accessible to her on her campus. She was exactly the kind of student who was supposed to benefit from a California law implemented in January 2023 to provide medication abortion access to all students at public California universities.
Why it matters: An LAist investigation found that a year after California became the first state to require its public universities to provide medication abortions, basic information and knowledge of where or how students can obtain abortion services is lacking, and in some cases, nonexistent. When you examine state data, there is a significant gap between the number of students who are seeking abortion access compared to those who utilize it on their campuses since California passed its law in January…
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