Kaniya was right in the middle of spring finals at college last year when she found out she was pregnant. “I didn’t have the resources to support a child,” said Kaniya, who asked to use only her first name to protect her privacy. “I wasn’t making enough money financially.
I was working multiple jobs. I didn’t have the capacity to care for a child.” The now-21-year-old made a difficult decision to have an abortion.
Her first choice was to do it near her family so she would have their support and care. But they lived in Kentucky, a state that implemented a near-total abortion ban after the Dobbs decision two years ago. Kaniya tried to make an appointment near her Maryland home.
But every clinic she called was booked for weeks, she said. The wait time was likely the result of an influx of women from states with strict bans, according to the Guttmacher Institute , a research group that supports access to abortions. “You had to wait at least a month,” she told NBC News.
“I even thought about traveling an hour away and still couldn’t get an appointment.” After connecting with advocacy groups for help, she made the decision to have an abortion without a doctor or clinic visit, a process known as a self-managed abortion. Most commonly, women use the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol.
“Someone got the pills for me from one of the organizations that I connected with,” she said. “I didn’t have to pay for anything. Even though I was working multi.