A new practical support tool for patients traveling to New Mexico and Colorado for an abortion launched as a pilot project connected to Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains last week.  Organizers launched a new nonprofit organization called Gloria. It connects abortion patients traveling long distances to Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Denver to a short-term […]

A new practical support tool for patients traveling to New Mexico and Colorado for an abortion launched as a pilot project connected to Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains last week. 

Organizers launched a new nonprofit organization called Gloria. It connects abortion patients traveling long distances to Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Denver to a short-term rental host with a vacation rental vacancy. The platform is the first of its kind by coordinating short-term rental properties with abortion patients.

Toshiko Langford, who is the director of impact and analytics for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, founded Gloria. She told NM Political Report that after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, there was an outpouring of financial support but now, two years later, donor fatigue has led to a tapering off of donations. 

Adrienne Mansanares, president and chief executive officer of PPRM, told NM Political Report that PPRM saw considerable donations after the Texas six-week gestational ban in 2021 and then a “huge surge” in donations after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade. But donors’ sense of urgency in providing funding for travel costs for those traveling long distances for an abortion has tapered off, she said.

Mansanares said grass roots organizations who help with abortion patient traveling are the ones who have experienced the decrease in funding the most. Mansanares said contributions to PPRM are stable, but Planned Parenthood has a decades-long, national brand and a robust development program. 

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But, even as donor fatigue has set in, New Mexico has, within the Rocky Mountain region, by far the greatest influx of abortion patients coming from out of state, Langford said. In 2023, 14,000 patients traveled from Texas to New Mexico for abortion care. Langford said a large proportion of those 14,000 needed lodging because of how far they are traveling.

Mansanares said PPRM has expanded its services and hours so that a local patient can expect to get the appointment they need without long waits. But still more than half of PPRM abortion care patients are traveling from out of state, so it’s a continuing crisis, Mansanares said. 

She said an additional crisis PPRM is battling now is a spike in delayed abortion care, which can lead to more challenges for the patient but it’s also harder on the providers.

“It’s better to get healthcare when the patient wants and needs it and not delay that care,” Mansanares said. 

Gloria is also a response to a phenomenon Langford saw on social media platforms shortly after Roe fell. Individuals were offering rides and places to stay but, while it was “a beautiful outpouring of support,” it wasn’t usable by patients, Langford said. 

Langford said it became very clear to her there needed to be a way to coordinate that in-kind support so both sides could be vetted to ensure safety for everyone involved. 

Langford said Gloria can also help alleviate the decrease in donor funding by providing in-kind donations from short-term rental hosts. She said she’s seen patients forgoing car payments in order to come up with the travel funds necessary but, even then, the patient often doesn’t have the additional resources to pay for lodging. 

Langford said she’s seen patients drive 17 hours across the state of Texas and a part of New Mexico to arrive in Albuquerque for an abortion appointment and then turn around and drive those same 17 hours back across the two states to return home.

“So many patients are forgoing basic needs in order to finance their travel as well as the procedure and they’re doing pretty drastic things. We just want to support them,” Langford said. 

She said there’s a “huge community” who have resources which have not been tapped into to help patients. Langford said it was in her role at PPRM that she first realized the gap between short-term rental hosts who were offering to lend a night or two stay in a vacant rental property but that there was no infrastructure in place to coordinate the hosts to the patients. 

Langford said the host and the patient are connected through a secure app and no personal information is shared. The hosts and the patient do not meet in order to ensure privacy and security. The patient and their families have the entire rental property to themselves during the stay, also to ensure privacy and security, Langford said.

Mansanares said the houses are lovely vacation homes.

The patient is able to stay in a home and that can be helpful, especially when a patient is traveling with small children or other family members. It can also be helpful if the patient has a flight out after a procedural abortion and wants to return to the rental house to relax instead of waiting long hours at the airport for the flight.

Langford called the current roll out a pilot project and said that, so far, there are six hosts on Gloria. The platform is limited to patients who seek services at PPRM clinics in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Denver. But, she said, the goal is to expand not just across the region but nationally. She also hopes to expand so that other abortion clinics can rely on Gloria to direct patients who need lodging when traveling for an abortion. She hopes to begin scaling up the project by October. 

Mansanares said another benefit from the creation of Gloria is that its work helps to destigmatize abortion care. 

“People in the community have something to give, they want to pitch in but they may not have the funds to donate or they have the funds, but they want to do more. This seeks a solution that’s outside of traditional systems,” she said.