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Posted: 2022-06-08T09:45:05Z | Updated: 2022-06-24T14:56:37Z

If you want an abortion in the U.S., one of your first steps might be figuring out whether your insurance will cover the service.

And even though 11 states restrict insurance coverage of abortion in all private insurance plans, many employer-based insurances do cover abortion.

This may come as a surprise to people who recently saw well-known companies like Amazon , Microsoft and Lyft announce abortion coverage for employees after the leak of a Supreme Court draft overturning Roe v. Wade and the passing of other restrictive laws in states like Texas and Oklahoma . Before the Supreme Court officially overturned Roe , more than a dozen employers announced plans to support staffers seeking abortions, mainly through expanding healthcare benefits and reimbursing any out-of-state travel expenses associated with an abortion service.

But two separate studies by the Guttmacher Institute and the Kaiser Family Foundation indicate that most Americans with employer-based insurance currently do have coverage for abortion, including scenarios beyond limited circumstances like rape or incest.

Many people just dont know this unless their company is open about it, or they dig up the information themselves.

California-based reproductive rights organizer Larada Lee-Wallace, for instance, learned that she could use her current employers insurance for her abortion because her company explicitly told her the services were covered when she signed up for an insurance plan.

Its basic human rights, but Im very glad that I was able to receive the knowledge that I needed because a lot of people dont, she said.

Proactively sharing that abortion is covered as part of their corporate benefits is something more companies should be doing, said Ushma D. Upadhyay, a public health social scientist and associate professor at University of California San Franciscos School of Medicine.

Upadhyay co-authored a survey of 639 women getting abortions in different U.S. healthcare facilities and found that the most common reason people said they were not using private insurance to cover their abortion was either because it wasnt covered (46%) or because they were unsure if it was covered (29%).

They just assume their insurance did not cover it or they also didnt want to go through the hassle of trying to figure it out, Upadhyay said.