Pentagon abortion policy Tuberville objects to would cost only $1M a year, study says

The Department of Defense policy offering paid leave and travel reimbursement to service members for reproductive health care, including abortions, would cost less than $1 million annually, according to a new analysis published Friday.

The travel reimbursement policy is at the center of Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville's continued blockade of military nominees.

Tuberville objects to the policy as a whole, not the cost, saying that it amounts to taxpayer-funded abortion. The Defense Department is forbidden by law from directly providing abortion care, but the Justice Department has said that the travel policy is legal.

The new analysis, published in the journal JAMA, found a significant shift in service members' ability to access reproductive health care after the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, which turned power to make laws about abortion over to the states. The Defense Department announced the leave and travel policies in the wake of that ruling.

Before the Dobbs decision, the estimated average travel time by train or car for military personnel to the nearest abortion facility in states that would go on to ban abortion was around 40 minutes. After the decision, it was around 227 minutes, or just under four hours, the study says.

In Texas, which has 15 military bases, average travel time to abortion facilities went from around 40 minutes to around eight hours, the analysis found.

"Our research reveals that since Dobbs, members of the military have encountered growing challenges in accessing reproductive care within the United States," said study author Benjamin Rader, a computational epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital and former U.S. Army Reserves Officer, in a statement. "Acknowledging that service members are often stationed in locations not of their choosing, it is crucial to understand the diverse obstacles they may face in accessing and paying for care."

The study estimated that around 63,000 active duty servicewomen of reproductive age live in states with abortion bans or do not have access to local abortion facilities. Based on general population abortion rates, it estimated that between around 700 and 900 of those servicewomen might travel more than 50 minutes for an abortion each year.

Total travel reimbursement for that amount of travel would at most be just under $1 million, the analysis found. The Military Health System 2023 budget is over $50 billion.

However, the costs for abortion-related travel are likely an overestimate, the research team said, as military personnel tend to have lower rates of abortions than civilian populations.

And according to Politico, very few military personnel have made use of the travel reimbursement policy since it was enacted in February 2023.

Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder told Politico that regardless of the number of people making use of the policy, reproductive care is "just something that we can't compromise on."