  After the repeal of Roe vs. Wade in June 2022, women face long-distance
travel across state lines to access abortion care. For women who also face
socioeconomic hardship, travel for abortion care is a significant burden. To
ease this burden, abortion access nonprofits are funding and/or supplying
transportation to abortion clinics. However, due to the uneven distribution of
demand and supply for abortions, these nonprofits do not have efficient
logistical operations. As a result, low-income, underserved women may not have
access to adequate reproductive healthcare, thus widening healthcare inequity
gaps. Nonprofits may also risk not serving the needs of vulnerable women
without access to adequate reproductive healthcare, and in doing so, waste
resources, money, and volunteer hours. To address these challenges, we create
an interactive, web-based planning tool, the Reproductive Healthcare Equity
Algorithm (RHEA), to guide nonprofits in strategically allocating resources and
serving demand. RHEA leverages an optimization model to determine the maximum
flow and minimum transportation cost to route women across a network of
counties and abortion clinics, subject to transportation supply, budget, and
time constraints for one day of operations for a nonprofit. In doing so, we
collaborate with abortion access nonprofits to cater our model design and
interface development to their needs and considerations. Ultimately, we seek to
optimize resource allocation for nonprofits providing abortion care logistics
and improve abortion access for low-income, underserved women.
