A Yukon woman is raising the alarm about the cost and difficulty of accessing abortion medication in the territory.
Jane Doe says she had to seek an abortion through the emergency room, because the Opal clinic — the territory’s only dedicated abortion services provider — is only open one day a week, for four hours.
By the time Doe had received a prescription for the abortion pill Mifegymiso, the hospital pharmacy had closed. She had to get back to work the next day, so she went to a different pharmacy downtown. She says the pharmacist told her the abortion pill cost $300.
“I broke down,” said Doe. “I only had $250 in my bank account and I still needed to buy food and gas to get home.”
Cabinet communications said the Yukon government offers Mifegymiso to Yukoners at no cost.
But the government acknowledges free pills are only available through the Whitehorse hospital.
If the system is functioning correctly, provincial and territorial taxes are collected from everyone in the province or territory and the services they fund are disbursed where they are the most helpful, not to the people who paid the most in. Sometimes that means that money flows from a larger population to a smaller one, if the smaller population’s needs are greater.
I take it you’ve never lived in a rural or remote community. They tend to be disproportionately underfunded and impoverished (and in the Territories, many of the people living in those places are from Indigenous or mixed-race backgrounds, whice opens a whole other can of worms).
Not that couriering a few pills up to sit on a shelf along with the painkillers and disinfectants requires a lot of funds—I’d guess less than $100/community/year, and it would have to be a pretty sad place if the inhabitants aren’t paying even that in taxes. We are not talking about surgical abortions here. We are talking about a few bloody pills that can be prescribed as necessary via pre-existing telemedecine setups if no one on site is qualified, and disbursed by the nurse running the clinic.
(Edit: I admit that I’m assuming the Territories use a similar model to remote Ontario communities like Kashechewan, where the government will fund nursing stations for communities of a couple of thousand that are largely inaccessible by land.)
Do some simple math and tell me how much tax money less than 45,000 people generate a year. (Fun fact: The total population includes people who do not pay any taxes!)
Medicine expires, abortions are not regular daily procedures that would use the paid for and shipped medication regularly enough to justify the cost when a fraction of about half of any population would ever use the medicine, nurses still need to be paid for, and telecommunications are incredibly unreliable in rural areas to begin with.
I take it you are a virtue signalling pseudo intellectual who doesn’t know that total tax money is equal to the total tax paying population, so you need to pretend like you know anything about me so you can attack it.
Responding to me further will only waste your own time.