The Defense Department will pay for travel costs of service members and their dependents who want abortions but who are in states that limit those procedures.
The decision comes in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June that sent abortion laws back to the states. Some states have since curtailed the the procedure in varying degrees.
Military members can ask for an administrative absence from their duty station for abortions, which means the granted leave will be in addition to their normal leave, according to the memo from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
The memo, “Ensuring Access to Reproductive Health Care,” says the Supreme Court decision “has impacted access to reproductive health care, with readiness, recruiting and retention implications for the force.”
According to a recent study, 450,000 service members now live in states where abortion is restricted. Some 17% of the military are women, and it’s a growing percentage.
Under federal law, Department of Defense funds and facilities may only be used to perform abortions where the life of the mother would be endangered if the child en utero was carried to term, or in a case in which the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest. The most recent statistics show that between 2016 and 2021, a total of 91 abortions were performed in military medical treatment facilities.
