A Student Parent’s Perspective on California’s AB 2540

By Michelle Buenrostro

Governor Newsom recently signed AB 2540, which requires California community colleges with health centers to dispense abortion pills or refer students to somewhere that does. It also requires University of California and California State University campuses to advertise the service more aggressively to students. As a student parent attending Riverside City College, I feel frustrated over my state’s eager support for only one pregnancy outcome. 

One in eight undergraduate students are parents in California, with the ratio increasing to one in five at our community colleges. This means that between 298,990 and 425,688 students are balancing parenthood with classes. Despite our numbers, we have to plead for resources while simultaneously seeing dwindling help.

The Student Parent Club at Riverside City College has spent years trying to establish a Student Parent Engagement Center. We already have similar engagement centers for LGBTQ students, veterans, and foster youth. These centers typically offer resources, support, and a place to study. A Student Parent Engagement Center would give us a safe place on campus to be with our children and find the help that we need to stay enrolled. I often see parents walking around campus with their children; I myself occasionally bring my daughter to class when she’s on a school break. But it’s difficult to take young children to an environment where they must be silent for an extended period of time. 

We have tried to advocate for more accessible childcare hours. Limited hours mean that parents who rely on on-campus childcare are restricted in their class selections. Some majors require courses that are only available in the evenings. Even at UCLA, parents learned in August that they are losing access to childcare. The lack of support means that fewer parenting students will see graduation, since 37 percent of caregivers cite childcare as their top reason for considering withdrawal according to a Gallup survey.

Supporters praise AB 2540 as meeting a gap that is urgently needed. There are already 180 brick-and-mortar abortion clinics in the state. We have legal pharmacy dispensing of medication abortion as well as mail order abortion pills through telehealth services. California is one of the most permissive and accessible states when it comes to abortion access in the US. 

The bill does not address the underlying challenges that pregnant students face. Women seek abortions because they face financial concerns, pressure from partners or parents, lack of housing, or unreliable childcare. Instead of spending funds to address these problems, the state is presenting abortion as the default response to unexpected pregnancy. As abortion access increases, so too does the pressure to abort. About 24% of women who had abortions report that their abortion was unwanted or coerced.  

We can learn from California Senate Bill 24, which, starting in 2023, required UC and CSU campuses to provide abortion at student health centers. Some campuses reported spending as much as $725,350 in cumulative “readiness expenses” to comply with the bill. For the return on investment, CSU Bakersfield performed only two abortions in the entire fiscal year of 2024-2025. CSU Monterey Bay and CSU San Marcos each performed one abortion. Out of 424,000 female students across the UC and CSU system, only 646 obtained the abortion pill on campus in a single year. The numbers of on-campus abortions are significantly lower than what was anticipated. 

Converting California community college campus health centers into abortion clinics will cost millions of dollars according to the legislature’s own appropriations analysis. Funding has not been sourced, so will taxpayers have to foot the bill?

Newsom and the politicians in Sacramento claim to be champions of choice, but they continuously sidestep those of us who chose to have our children. Instead of using funds to help address the real problems that hundreds of thousands of our students face, the state is spending millions of dollars toward an unnecessary expansion of a service that is already widely available.