Toni Bond Leonard, who runs the Illinois Reproductive Justice Fund, which helps women pay for abortions, says more women are looking for help, while the fund’s donors are having to cut back on their support. When women call the Chicago-based fund, Leonard says, they are asked whether they can pay some of the cost. Callers used to say they could contribute $50 to $100. A first-trimester abortion costs $365, on average, in the Chicago area, Leonard says.

“Now women call and they have nothing,” she says. The fund typically asks a woman to try to raise some money on her own, and then call back, Leonard adds. “Women aren’t calling back because they just can’t raise anything.”

While hard numbers are difficult to come by (the most recent U.S. data on abortion rates are from 2005), the Boston-based National Network of Abortion Funds says most of its 102 member funds reported a 50% to 100% increase in call volume over the past several months. Call volume to the National Network’s offices, which refer women to local funds and the network’s national case manager, has tripled.

“In the Network offices, since the first of the year, the increased desperation has been notable,” the NNAF said in a March press release. “It is now common for staff to pick up the phone to hear sobbing and gasping women who have tried everything they can think of to raise enough money for an abortion, are still coming up short, and are at the breaking point emotionally.”

Will the poor economy lead to a “baby bust”?
The rates of reproduction have fluctuated with the economy in the past, according to the Population Reference Bureau. In fact, senior demographer Carl Haub writes on the Population Reference Bureau’s blog that the U.S. has seen two big “baby busts”: once during the Great Depression, and a second time in the recession-ridden, oil embargo–plagued 1970s.

The total fertility rate, or the average number of children born to a woman during her lifetime, fell to 2.1 by 1936, and declined to an “all-time low” of 1.7 in the 1970s, according to statistics from the bureau. Total fertility eventually rebounded and has held steady at 2.0 to 2.1 for the past several years, Haub writes, but it’s too early to tell what the impact of the current slowdown may have on birth rates.

Meanwhile, Diana Adam and her husband are planning to hold off on adding to their family until he lines up some steady work. It doesn’t have to be full-time, Adam says, but it does need to be dependable. Last year the family could plan on him teaching a couple of classes each semester, and one during the summer session. “We knew what we could expect; now it’s more about, ‘Let’s see,’” Adam says. “It’s all a last-minute decision, and you can’t plan anything on this.”

Adam says she hopes the wait won’t be too long, because having a baby closer to 40 “gets me nervous a little bit.”

“I don’t want to delay too much,” she says. “You never know how long it actually takes sometimes to get pregnant.”

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