By Carli Whitwell, published on Refinery29
It's about to be more difficult to get an abortion in New Brunswick. The province's sole abortion clinic, Clinic 554 in Fredericton, is shutting down, with staff saying it can no longer afford to operate without provincial funding.
New Brunswick is the only Canadian province that doesn’t cover the cost of abortion outside of a hospital (just three hospitals across the province perform abortions; none of them are in Fredericton). That means that Clinic 554’s patients would either have to pay the $800 or so for the procedure, or the clinic would try to cover it. “It has never been financially sustainable to provide barrier-free abortions at Clinic 554 without Medicare reimbursement from the province,” said the clinic’s medical director Dr. Adrian Edgar in a news release. “We remained open all these years through sheer perseverance and due to the charity of individuals from all across Canada.”