Bree Wallace sits down at the desk in her spare bedroom in the outskirts of Tampa, Florida, at 9 a.m. on July 9 with an iced coffee and burrito. Nine requests have come in overnight to the Tampa Bay Abortion Fund (TBAF), where she works as a case manager.
First up, an easy one by her standards: Someone needs a medication abortion at Bread & Roses Health Center, a local clinic. It will cost $700 out of pocket. The person’s health insurance won’t cover an abortion (virtually no health insurance in Florida will), but the National Abortion Federation (NAF) will chip in 30 percent, bringing it down to $490. The emailer has $150; that leaves a $340 gap. That’s high for TBAF, but Wallace sends the clinic an email pledging to pay the bill at the end of the month. She texts the client saying she’s taken care of it. “Thank you,” they reply.
An hour into the day and she’s already burned through $1,500.
The next case is similar: another Bread & Roses patient, but they only have $100. TBAF will cover $390. Wallace marks both cases as closed.
Minutes later, an email arrives from Tampa Woman’s Health Center: Someone came in whose sonogram put her at six and a half weeks, a hair over Florida’s new six-week abortion ban. Before the ban, when the state permitted abortions up until 15 weeks, TBAF often helped people from across the South travel to Florida. Now those people — and all Floridians past week six — have to go somewhere else, typically much further away. TBAF helps them get there, and lately, there have been “quite a lot” of those requests, Wallace says. She makes a note to come back to the request.
Then she replies to an overnight request from a person outside of TBAF’s coverage area, asking where they live so she can direct them to the right fund. It’s not uncommon to get requests from outside the county: “People are obviously a little bit stressed out; they want this done ASAP,” she notes, so they cast a wide net. Almost immediately, the person texts back that they live in Tallahassee, so Wallace sends them information for Florida Access Network, a statewide fund. She then lets the people at the fund know the person will be coming. “I try not to just push them off and say I can’t help,” Wallace says. “I try to make sure that at least I know the next steps for them.”
Wallace’s phone rings. A woman on her way to her first appointment tells her that NAF will cover most of her abortion, but she needs help with transportation to her second appointment. (Florida requires people who need abortions to go to a clinic twice at least 24 hours apart.) Wallace sends her Lyft credits.
Around 10 a.m., the room goes quiet as Wallace texts information on booking an abortion appointment to someone who is five weeks pregnant; they had checked a box on TBAF’s online form saying not to call. Only the faint sounds of a TV show in the background are audible — Wallace likes to have something on “so I don’t go crazy with the quietness in here.” Wallace, whose wavy brown bangs hang in two wings over her round purple glasses and whose black tattoos creep up both arms, is TBAF’s only employee handling requests from the 300 callers and emailers the fund receives each month. Before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, TBAF relied on volunteers, including Wallace; after the decision, volume increased so much that the fund had to hire her. And requests have only increased since Florida instituted the six-week ban in April, the biggest reduction in abortion access since Dobbs.
About 10 minutes later, someone with an appointment at Bread & Roses texts to say their balance is $490, and they don’t have any money to contribute. Wallace sends an email to Bread & Roses pledging to cover it. An hour into the day and she’s already burned through $1,500.
There is money being spent on the cause of abortion, but most of it isn’t going toward helping people actually get them.
Wallace turns to an overnight inquiry from a woman who is six weeks pregnant and has an appointment in about a week in New York. Wallace has to ask her to call NAF’s hotline to see if she is eligible for their help first — though she knows NAF’s income limits mean that someone who makes as little as $15 an hour can be denied, and the hotline is currently in such demand that callers sometimes wait as long as an hour.
Then she texts the referral from Tampa Woman’s Health Center to see if she wants to handle travel logistics over text or by phone. She requests a call, and Wallace hops on the phone. Does she know anybody out of state she could stay with? No. Wallace tells her TBAF works with clinics in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., and promises to text her a list of clinics in order of which are most likely to see people the fastest. She’ll need to make the appointment herself. She’ll also have to try NAF.
The woman calls back 20 minutes later, her voice tight with anxiety. She was able to make an appointment at a clinic in D.C. on July 17. The abortion will cost her $303, and she doesn’t have any money to contribute. She explains that she just spent her last $200 that day to get the ultrasound that deemed her over the state’s gestational limit — she already has three children and definitely doesn’t want another. This is one reason why Wallace prefers texting: On the phone, people often feel compelled to give her an explanation for why they need help, but that’s irrelevant to Wallace. “If you need assistance, you need assistance,” she says.
Wallace assures her the fund will cover the entire $303 plus travel. She hangs up and does a quick search: The flight from Tampa to D.C. clocks in around $500, and D.C. hotels are more expensive than normal, $230 a night. She texts the woman two flight options.
Two more requests come through TBAF’s online form: another Bread & Roses patient and someone going to a clinic in Jacksonville who needs help with the cost of the abortion, transportation, and child care. The latter is outside Wallace’s coverage area; she connects them with the Women’s Emergency Network fund.
At 11:30, Wallace gives the woman flying to D.C. a call. The woman tells her she’s been on the phone with her boss trying to get the days off. They go back and forth picking flight times — the woman has to make sure she can get her children “situated” while she’s gone — and Wallace explains that she will book everything. “Okay, thank you,” the woman says, crying. “Of course, of course,” Wallace replies. The flight ends up costing $637, but the hotel is cheaper than she thought, just $515 for both nights. She texts the woman an itinerary with instructions for flying, such as arriving two hours early and bringing one carry-on suitcase. She estimates at least half of the people she helps have never flown before.
“People are obviously a little bit stressed out; they want this done ASAP.”
By midday, Wallace has spent $4,200 at local clinics and nearly $1,200 in travel and logistics support. The fund’s goal is to spend no more than $50,000 each month so it doesn’t get too far out ahead of its budget, and only nine days into July, she is already over $36,000. If the rate of spending continues on that path, the fund will likely be forced to shut down for the month by the end of the week. It’s an enormous change from the heady post-Dobbs days when TBAF received $775,000 in donations and could spend $100,000 a month. Donations dropped to just $272,000 last year.
All abortion funds are facing the same challenging financial picture: Both need and costs continue to rise, but donors’ attention has moved elsewhere. Local funds rely heavily on NAF, but NAF and Planned Parenthood’s Justice Fund both cut their budgets at the start of July, going from covering half of people’s needs to 30 percent. NAF, too, is dealing with falling donations and just “can’t keep up with the demand,” NAF President Brittany Fonteno said in a statement to Lux. Without the cuts, it would have run out of funding before the end of the year.
Local funds got less than a month’s worth of warning about the cut. “It was a punch in the gut,” Wallace says. TBAF had begun giving the clinics it works with block grants in May, allowing them to offer patients help on the spot, saving precious time for those up against the six-week ban. But it’s had to stop doing that. It also reduced the number of clinics it works with and stopped covering flights for companions.
There is money being spent on the cause of abortion, but most of it isn’t going toward helping people actually get them. In June, a new coalition calling itself Abortion Access Now launched with a 10-year goal of restoring abortion rights through legislation and public support; they have amassed $100 million. In Florida, the Yes on 4 ballot campaign to permit abortion up until viability received over $20 million in the span of 11 weeks. TBAF would be lucky to have just $1 million in the bank, Wallace says.
The direct impact of abortion funds is undeniable. Close to 3 p.m., Wallace gets an email on behalf of a woman in South Florida who is 25 weeks pregnant and needs $6,500 to get her abortion in Illinois. TBAF and other Florida funds chip in to get the gap as close to zero as possible. An hour later, Tampa Woman’s Health emails, saying someone Wallace had pledged $290 for on Saturday is short $10. “Sometimes people literally just don’t have that on them,” Wallace says. She promises to cover the shortfall.
Bryce Covert is an independent journalist writing about the economy. She is a contributing writer at The Nation, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, Time Magazine, Wired, the New Republic, and others.
Opening image: Bree’s workspace at home with paraphernalia about abortion access, voting, and human rights. Courtesy of Bree Wallace.