The Pilot Flying Women Across the Country for Reproductive Care

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, 13 states across the country have had total abortion bans in place. An additional 28 have bans after a certain point in pregnancy, some as early as six weeks, with few exceptions for rape or incest. In 2025 alone, 142,000 people traveled out of state for abortion care. Many, however, can’t afford to travel, which can result in life-threatening complications or even death. That’s where Elevated Access comes in.

Pilots at Elevated Access receive a first name, phone number, pickup airport, and destination. They are not informed of the exact reason why someone is traveling. Some passengers, who arrive via referrals from partner organizations like the Midwest Access Coalition and Yellowhammer Fund, tell them anyway. Before every flight, Bonanza’s team remains on full alert to see if anyone might be following a passenger to the airport.

The view outside of Bonanza’s plane.

During this specific flight, Bonanza will fly the woman, her partner, and her daughter to their destination in Illinois, and another pilot from Elevated Access will fly her back. Driving the distance across state lines would have taken the family around four hours, but they didn’t have a car. This flight will take less than an hour. Bonanza, aware of the woman’s nerves, makes a deal with her: Let’s take off in the plane, circle the airport, land, and see how she feels. If she’s comfortable and still wants to go, they will. If not, they can bag the trip altogether.

They take off and do a loop around the little airport. Bonanza checks in with his passenger once they land. The woman says that the turning makes her nervous, and Bonanza agrees to soften them. She decides she’s ready. The four of them take off again, and the plane ascends through the clouds. The woman asks Bonanza to check on her after 30 minutes. When he turns around to do so, she’s asleep.

A FEW WEEKS after the flight, I talk to Bonanza over Zoom. He’s warm and genuine—the comforting type you’d want in a moment of need. He’s also guarded (literally): He has extra security cameras at his Illinois home. He owns a shotgun. When he traveled out of the country recently, he didn’t bring his personal devices to avoid risking their confiscation if he got stopped at the border. He carries his attorney’s phone number with him.

The threat of violence and legal persecution around abortion is ever-present. He says everything Elevated Access does is legal and has been since he started the organization in 2022, yet states have made attempts to persecute those who “aid or abet abortion.” The company’s pilots have received threats on social media.

His last name is not his. Bonanza is a pseudonym he uses partly for safety, and partly, he admits, as “the most extreme check I can put on myself” against ever making this about him. He almost didn’t take this interview for the same reason, until he thought about the reader: “Where are all the men?” Not many in his life, even his parents, know what Bonanza, who is now a salaried employee at Elevated Access, does for a living. He tells people he does security-sensitive work in aviation (“people immediately assume that’s drone strikes,” he says).

Bonanza came to this work the way men often come to reproductive rights activism: through someone else’s pain. During the Me Too movement, he helped a female colleague navigate a sexual harassment incident. As a white dude, he realized he had the power many others don’t have to help change systems. “We probably all have some capacity to do something bigger,” he says.

He learned about reproductive justice (“the right to have children, the right not to, and the right to raise them in safe and healthy environments,” as he describes it) in an anti-racism workshop he took in 2020. Before then, he understood the basics around the topic—namely that Roe v. Wade theoretically protected abortion rights and that some states had variations around what was legal and what wasn’t.

Just because abortion is legal, though, doesn’t mean it’s accessible. If you don’t have a way to get yourself from A to B, can’t afford to travel, can’t take time off work, or don’t have health insurance, the care you need is simply out of reach. As a licensed pilot, he began to wonder: Were there groups providing transportation to abortion care? That’s how he could help.

In the fall of 2021, Texas Senate Bill 8—a state law that effectively banned most abortions in the state after six weeks of pregnancy—passed. Bonanza contacted the non-profit Midwest Access Coalition, which helps people travel for abortions but hadn’t yet utilized small planes. He offered his services as a pilot and flew his tiny airplane to a rural airport with two executives from the group to show them what was possible.

“They were blown away by how convenient it was,” he recalls. “There’s no TSA or ticketing, nobody asked us who we were, where we were going, or why we were going. The little old man at the little rural airport just asked if we needed fuel.”

The organization advised him to start a service that did just this. Right before the Dobbs draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade leaked (about two months before Roe was officially overturned in June 2022), Bonanza created a website for Elevated Access offering flight services for people in need of abortion care. By the end of June, he had over 500 pilots clamoring to volunteer and donors reaching out to fund the work.

He’s done about one flight a month since then because, well, that’s what he can afford. While Bonanza is on staff as executive director, when he flies folks, he’s on his own dime. All of Elevated Access’s pilots pay for their own expenses like fuel and parking. “Flying is not a cheap thing to do,” he says. “It costs me about $1.50 per mile to fly an airplane.” The average one-way trip is about 300 miles, so a round-trip flight can easily clock in around $1,000.

For flights over 500 miles, Elevated Access books commercial airlines for passengers—it’s faster and cheaper than flying a small plane at that distance. This year, the organization has a budget of around $500k just for those tickets. The rest of the donations cover a staff of flight coordinators and partner liaisons that keep the whole operation running. “I didn’t even have a donate button on the website [when we launched],” Bonanza says. “I just thought I would do this in my free time with my own money until I retired.”

ELEVATED ACCESS, WHICH also flies those seeking gender-affirming care, has completed over 2,700 flights in the four years since it launched. Bonanza recalls one woman, a single mom with four kids, who needed an abortion so she could keep taking care of the children she already had. Another made clear to Bonanza that she had become pregnant after an assault. She’d had no idea abortion was illegal in her state until she needed one. “It just made me so angry,” Bonanza says. “Not at her…at the fact that people have to know these things in order to navigate them.”

He doesn’t tend to keep in touch with past passengers, but he tells me multiple stories of lingering connections and care, like the nervous passenger from Kentucky—the one he reminded was in control of her decision. She called him crying before her return flight with a different pilot. Her toddler refused to sit in the seat and she was overwhelmed. Bonanza just so happened to be at a community event with a social worker who, through her own connections, arranged for someone to meet the woman at the airport to provide emotional support. Elevated Access now has a social worker on staff.

After seeing this all up close, Bonanza encourages guys to stop scrolling past abortion-related news and bring those conversations to the bar or the gym, just as they would any other news. “That’s your ‘hey, did you see this?’” he says, often reminding those around him that abortion access isn’t just a women’s issue. “We, as men, want to protect the people we love. We want them to be safe. We want them to be happy. That stuff is scary for folks out there who can get pregnant.”

He often asks his buddies the last time someone questioned their right to make a decision about their own body. “If a woman in her thirties says she doesn’t want children and asks to get her tubes tied, some doctors will argue with her and tell her she might change her mind and she still has childbearing potential,” he explains. “If a man wants a vasectomy, they tell you the risks, you say yes, and that’s it.”

Bonanza believes everyone has some sort of skill that advocacy movements can benefit from, and donations to Elevated Access are always welcome. But he doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. Sure, he feels accomplished after dropping off a passenger, but what comes next? Does he keep doing this forever?

He says the earliest he’d consider stepping down from his executive director position is 2029 because after the next election it will “hopefully be a different environment, and it’ll be a good opportunity to bring somebody new in with fresh energy and fresh ideas.” But even if he does officially leave his executive director role, he won’t give up the volunteer work of flying people to get the care they need. “I still plan to fly for as long as I can.”

Describe your job in three words.

Every flight helps.

Favorite medical show?

ER (I’m in the middle of rewatching the whole series).

Best career advice you’ve ever received?

You can never turn a weakness into a strength. Spend your energy on making your strengths even better.

Cassie Shortsleeve is a skilled freelance journalist with more than a decade of experience reporting for some of the nation’s largest print and digital publications, including Women’s Health, Parents, What to Expect, The Washington Post, and others. She is also the founder of the digital motherhood support platform Dear Sunday Motherhood and a co-founder of the newsletter Two Truths Motherhood and the maternal rights non-profit Chamber of Mothers. She is a mom to three daughters and lives in the Boston suburbs.