Abortion funds, non-profit organizations that provide financial and logistical assistance to patients seeking an abortion, are facing increased demand and rising costs in 2026.
“Abortion funds are moving mountains to support people in accessing abortions, but the terrain continues to roughen,” said Poonam Dreyfus-Pai, Interim Executive Director at the National Network of Abortion Funds. “Since the Dobbs decision, abortion funds have nearly doubled the number of callers they support annually, from about 82,000 people in 2022 to more than 158,000 in 2025. At the same time, the need for abortion funding has also doubled since Dobbs, from around 117,000 requests received in 2022 to around 234,000 in 2025. That tells us two things. The need for abortions support continues to grow nationwide, and abortion funds are scaling up in extraordinary ways to meet that need. But the cost of supporting people to get abortions is also skyrocketing.”
State-level bans and restrictions on abortion are one of the factors contributing to rising costs for abortion funds. “In 2021, before Roe was overturned and before Texas’ Senate Bill 8 ban, Cobalt Abortion Fund spent just over $200,000 supporting people in accessing abortions,” said Melisa Hidalgo-Cuellar, director of the Cobalt Abortion Fund. “In 2025, we spent more than $2.4 million. That’s a more than 1,000% increase in just five years. In 2025, Cobalt Abortion Fund provided support to people traveling from 32 different states and six different counties.”
Colorado’s legislative and constitutional protections for abortion have made it a destination for patients seeking abortion. “Colorado has become a critical point for abortion access in the post-Dobbs landscape, being a state that receives some of the highest numbers of folks traveling for their abortion care,” said Hidalgo-Cuellar. “We’ve worked hard to build protections for abortion access here, through state legislation and through Amendment 79, but policy victories alone do not guarantee access. People still need support with the cost of procedures.”
Cobalt provides funding to both out-of-state and in-state patients, and is seeing an increase in both demand and costs. “Increasingly, the people we support are traveling from states where abortion has been devastated by bans, and are therefore forced to travel to access their healthcare,” said Hidalgo-Cuellar. “The majority of our clients need transportation, lodging, child care, gas money, especially these days when gas prices are increasing daily and time off from work. Last year, around nine out of 10 clients receiving practical support from Cobalt Abortion Fund were from Texas. More than a third of clients receiving procedural funding were also Texas residents. At the same time, nearly half of those people that received procedural funding from our fund were Colorado residents, reminding us that even in states with legal protections, cost remains a barrier to care. We also saw an 84% increase in procedural funding from 2024 to 2025 alone due to increased client volume and inflation. Demand is growing rapidly, and abortion funds like us are stretching every dollar, every staff hour, and every community resource to keep up.”
Last month, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Food and Drug Administration to temporarily reimpose in-person requirements for medication abortion. This banned the use of telehealth appointments for medication abortion, and the mailing of one of the drugs used in medication abortion, mifepristone. The practice of telehealth appointments and the ability to receive medication via mail have reduced the burden of travel and appointments for some abortion patients. On May 14, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the order restricting the nationwide distribution of Mifepristone. The Supreme Court left current FDA rules in place, so medication remains accessible via telehealth and can be dispensed by mail or at retail pharmacies while litigation continues.
“The news that came out of the Supreme Court case really did instill fear and chaos,” said Hidalgo-Cuellar. “We saw it on our line with clients who were reaching out to us for funding support who may have had a telehealth appointment scheduled originally and then changed their care to in-person care due to fear around this. I think it’s really important that abortion funds that are here to support access continue to spread information about what is available, how people can access this care, that we are still here to help support people regardless of what happens.”
