ABSTRACT
Even in the context of legal, publicly funded abortion care offered through a health system widely available to all pregnant women, women in Catalunya reported encountering obstacles when they sought abortion care through this health system. Women and providers described delays and difficulties related to publicly funded care as specific to abortion-seeking, as opposed to what women encounter when in need of other types of medical care. In her earlier ethnographic study of low-income and immigrant women in Catalunya seeking funding assistance for private abortion care prior to the 2010 legal reforms, Maria Martinez Morant (n.d.a) found that:
immigrant women and Spanish and Catalan women referred to the problems and barriers they had to face to have access to reproductive and
sexual health services. These restrictions and setbacks affect immigrant women even more … they do not know how the health system works and how to use it.
