Supreme court decision opens up conversation about state healthcare
RI state employees do not have abortions covered under the University’s healthcare plan. Illustration by: Maddie Bataille | Photo Editor
Faculty and staff at the University of Rhode Island and their dependents do not have abortion coverage as part of their University healthcare plan.
This is true not only for University professors— all state workers in the state of Rhode Island do not have abortion care as a part of their health insurance plans with Blue Cross Blue Sheild of Rhode Island.
State workers are still allowed to receive abortions according to state law; however, they would have to pay for it themselves instead of having it covered by their insurance. In addition, people on Medicaid are not covered to receive an abortion from anywhere in Rhode Island.
Jody Lisberger, an emerita associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University, shared her thoughts on this. According to Lisberger, data shows that Medicaid is used primarily by people who are lower-income. Something else to note is that most of those people are people of color.
Lisberger said that a lot of people in Rhode Island believe that women should have the right to choose, and claimed many female politicians in the statehouse don’t bring this issue up, with the concern that their male colleagues wouldn’t support them.
“We know in terms of the Black Lives Matter movement, and probably this was partly sparked by COVID awareness of who the larger percentage of people of color who were dying partly because they work the jobs that expose them more, they have less health care, all of these things right,” Lisberger said. “That would look at data across the board, the health and the health care and the way people of color are treated in the larger healthcare system is detrimental to their health.”
Jocelyn Foye serves as the executive director of the Womxn Project, which is a state organization that formed following the election of Donald Trump in order to investigate many different laws that targeted women. She mentioned that members of the group weren’t originally Rhode Islanders, and this group would ask questions like what laws would be in danger with Trump as President.
She shared her experience about coming to the URI campus to hear a presentation about this topic in Lisberger’s class before she retired. Foye and the Womxn Project then conducted their own educational campaign on campus to find out how many people this affects.
“Right now in Rhode Island, we have something like 80,000 people of childbearing age who are on Medicaid, and there’s something around 33,000 people who are state workers, who this law affects and so what that means then is we are pushing from a couple different areas,” Foye said.
Foye went on to discuss the two different types of unions. The teacher’s union includes professors at the University and the faculty union includes all other University workers who aren’t instructors.
According to Foye, there are only two clinics in Rhode Island that provide abortions. In addition, due to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it’s harder for Rhode Island natives to go to another state and get an abortion.
In short, according to Foye, a large number of people are going to need abortions, and they’re going to have a harder time getting them because of the lack of clinics in Rhode Island.
“So if normally, if people called and they’re like, I need to have this now or I need to go out of state because I’m so far along, because of a complication that happened and I’m not gonna be able to carry this baby because I could die in the process, there are going to be certain places normally people were being sent out of state to get the procedure, that now it’s harder because some of those states it’s become illegal,” Foye said.
Foye said that she plans on coming to the URI community and talking to the President Marc Parlange to talk about this issue for the faculty and staff and create some possible solutions.