21 million women live in a reproductive health desert
The map of basic healthcare access in the United States is looking increasingly like a game of hopscotch where most squares are missing.
Twenty-one million women are currently living in counties where finding birth control is essentially a scavenger hunt. And that's just the official data, which is already lagging behind the actual, bleaker reality.
It turns out that geography is now the biggest factor in reproductive agency. In vast swaths of the country, the lack of providers has turned a standard medical visit into a cross-county road trip, assuming you even have a car or the time to take off work.
The system is effectively creating tiered access based on zip codes rather than medical needs. It is quite the strategy to claim healthcare is a private choice while simultaneously making the logistics of that choice look like an endurance sport.
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