New York will provide abortion medicine free-of-charge at 4 city-run well being clinics, Mayor Eric Adams (D) introduced Tuesday as he laid out an agenda to restore well being care inequities for girls within the metropolis.
“For too lengthy, well being and well being care has been centered round males. If males had intervals, pap smears and menopause, they might get a paid trip. And if males may get pregnant, we wouldn’t see Congress making an attempt to move legal guidelines limiting abortion,” Adams mentioned in a sweeping tackle on girls’s well being.
“We’ve been standing on the sidelines of ladies’s well being for too lengthy, and I’ve personally seen firsthand how the well being system is letting our girls down,” he added.
Abortion drugs will probably be obtainable beginning Wednesday on the New York Metropolis Division of Well being and Psychological Hygiene clinic within the Bronx, and an extra three clinics in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens are additionally set to begin shelling out the medicine by the top of the yr, in accordance with the governor’s workplace.
The 4 websites collectively may disperse as much as 10,000 abortion drugs per yr, along with the drugs distributed by town’s hospital system, the place the medicine is already obtainable.
The transfer to supply the drugs at no cost on the city-funded clinics is meant to assist sufferers get round insurance coverage and financial hurdles that they may run up in opposition to within the hospitals.
“No different metropolis within the nation or on the planet has a public well being division that’s offering medicine abortion. We’re the primary,” Adams mentioned.
The transfer is a part of his “New York Metropolis Girls’s Well being Agenda,” which he introduced Tuesday at Metropolis Corridor alongside metropolis well being officers.
“It’s lengthy overdue that we break taboos and make New York Metropolis a mannequin for the way forward for girls’s well being care. We’re going to construct a metropolis that’s right here for all girls and women,” Adams mentioned.
The mayor’s wide-ranging plan contains efforts to make town and workplaces “extra girls’s well being care pleasant,” from lactation rooms for nursing moms to paid depart for most cancers screenings.
The agenda additionally houses in on addressing racial disparities in girls’s well being care, just like the maternal mortality fee amongst pregnant Black girls that’s over 9 instances the speed seen amongst pregnant white girls, town reviews.