Abortion access has become more complicated since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, pushing patients from states with bans to seek care in New York. On Tuesday, March 24, reproductive justice advocates discussed how they navigate this new landscape at a panel hosted by Colgate’s Center for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Kayele Arnold, organizing coordinator for Planned Parenthood of Greater New York Action Fund (PPGNY), and Katrina Fuller, a patient navigator for Clinical Health Network (CHN), a company working to expand access to abortion care, joined Colgate senior Richa Vaid on the panel, who co-leads Colgate’s Planned Parenthood Generation Action chapter. The panel was moderated by senior and Planned Parenthood co-leader Saylor Hark, and junior Kameil Lewis.
In a brief introduction, the three panelists discussed their professional and experiential capacities regarding abortion services. Arnold’s work covers the social and political dimensions of reproductive care, while Vaid and PPGA educate Colgate students about reproductive health and connect them with relevant resources. Fuller helps patients from states where abortions are banned travel to New York to obtain one.
The discussion began with a question about the effect of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson to overturn the right to an abortion granted by Roe v. Wade on the panelists’ respective careers. For one, Arnold and Fuller said that the total abortion bans instituted in 13 states following Dobbs have pushed an increasing number of out-of-state patients looking for abortions into New York, and thus into their scope.
“[The Dobbs decision] has definitely increased the volume of patients that we are assisting,” Fuller said. “But we’re still here. We’re still happy to do the work.”
Arnold and Vaid both noted that the nature of their work has also become increasingly proactive, now that abortion protections are subject to change on the state legislative level. Vaid said that, last year, the PPGA held a “phone banking” event encouraging voters to vote “yes” to Proposition 1, which enshrined the right to an abortion in the New York Constitution.
The panelists added that the change in federal abortion policy has encouraged focus on educating people about their rights regarding reproductive health and what threats those rights are subject to.
“There’s a lot of moving parts and a lot of attacks, many avenues of attacks that are happening,” Arnold said. “People need to be met where they are to really understand these attacks and how they affect their lives and their communities.”
One of the most urgent attacks on abortion protections, according to Arnold, is the federal government’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which moves to defund Planned Parenthood and other organizations that provide abortions by making their services ineligible for Medicaid support.
The discussion also covered the primacy of New York in providing abortion services, especially for non-residents. In her work at CHN, Fuller connects patients living in states where abortion is banned with resources in New York. The lengths to which patient navigators must go to find treatment for out-of-state patients include registering patients at hotels under aliases and appropriating private planes.
“We work with an organization called Elevated Access that can help folks fly,” Fuller said. “It’s personal pilots who have their own little planes that will literally fly folks to a different state to access the care that they’re wanting.”
Fuller added that the fear of criminalization in states where abortion is banned has sometimes driven contact between patients and navigators onto “secure” or otherwise preferred platforms like Signal and WhatsApp.
The post-Roe political environment was also discussed in terms of college campuses, especially the Colgate campus, considering that students who attend Colgate from other states — even ones where there are more stringent limits on reproductive care — are eligible for abortions in New York. Vaid said that for these and other students, PPGA has focused on community building and educating Colgate students about reproductive health resources available to them. PPGA maintains an anonymous Google Form where students can send questions and even request direct support.
“That form is basically about anything … One of the things we’ve said is that if you need a ride to a clinic or somewhere, you can say that in the Google Form. It’s anonymous,” Vaid said.
Arnold noted that college students face disproportionate barriers to access abortions and other forms of reproductive healthcare, especially medication abortions. For students attending rural colleges like Colgate, they said, barriers are particularly distinct.
“If their health center does not offer it, or if they have to go through a referral process, it puts that additional burden on traveling off campus — the financial aspect to that,” Arnold said. “[Abortions] being potentially time sensitive, it is not the most conducive for these kinds of situations.”
According to Vaid, the most that Colgate Student Health Services (SHS) can offer a student seeking treatment is counseling and a referral to an outside organization, like the Planned Parenthood clinics in Syracuse or Utica. Though they offer emergency contraceptives, SHS cannot distribute abortion pills like Mifepristone.
Fuller said that students seeking abortions can either schedule in-person or, if eligible, telehealth appointments at nearby clinics, and either walk out with abortion medication or receive it in the mail. They can also obtain medication by mail through New York-based organizations, some of which accept insurance or use “pay-what-you-can” scales.
At Colgate, according to Vaid, PPGA serves as an intermediary between the administration and the student body regarding access to reproductive care, meeting regularly with Kristin Tooker, one of SHS’s nurse practitioners. She added that, although Colgate’s location presents challenges, it also presents opportunities for collaboration and support.
“I think it presents a lot of opportunities for Student Health to kind of step up and bring the resources to students so that they don’t have to go looking for them,” Vaid said.
Arnold said that Colgate — being a small campus — might benefit from the sort of community building that has become more prevalent in his line of work following the Dobbs decision. They said that a small student body provides more opportunities to connect with mission-aligned classmates and makes mobilizing more salient.
“Showing up in greater numbers with that community can be really powerful for your administration,” Arnold said. “For instance, if they see a petition that is saying students want emergency contraception on campus, here are the hundreds of people who have signed onto this petition.”
