Saving Lives through Safe and Post Abortion Care amongst Urban Young Women

By working with a nonprofit, Las Libres, in Guanajuato, Mexico, volunteers are helping women access medication for abortions for free. Las Libres organizes the supply chain to get the medication to those in need in abortion-ban states in the United States.

The nonprofit Las Libres in Guanajuato, Mexico, helps women access medication for abortions for free. By working with volunteers like the Old Hippies of San Miguel de Allende, the organization delivers the medication to distributors in abortion-ban states in the United States.

Nègès Mawon works to empower women to fight back against violence and oppression through education and advocacy and focuses on access to safe abortion care. Through the organization’s sponsorship program, women who are also survivors of gender-based violence are partnering together to rise above the patriarchal system and advocate for themselves. Since last May, Nègès Mawon has supported more than 300 survivors of gender-based violence through the sponsorship program.

In Colombia – where having an abortion can be stigmatizing, in some cases illegal, and now even more difficult due to the coronavirus pandemic – a clinic has set up a national hotline to help women who are up to 10 weeks pregnant aaccess to safe abortions at home. So far, the clinic has connected with 700 women.

Hacey Health Initiative and Alabiyamo Maternal and Child Healthcare Foundation are improving maternal and newborn health in rural communities. The groups have provided more than 50,000 birthing kits containing sterilized tools and other essentials and handed out over 100,000 long-lasting treated nets to prevent malaria. Women and infants can get medications and important vaccinations, along with clothes and baby food. The care is free and the groups work with community gatekeepers, like leaders in local markets, midwives, and other traditional birthing assistants, whose buy in is important to build trust.

In Chicago, the disparity in mortality rates between white and black women who contracted breast cancer was once disturbingly high, one of the worst in the nation . But ten years of fostering partnerships between the city and groups like the Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Task Force has helped make Chicago a leader in creating more equal access to services like mammograms, support groups, and assistance with open enrollment for health care.

Young women and girls in Africa face difficult stigmas when menstruating, as well as prohibitive costs to hygiene items and other resources, leading many of them to miss critical days at school and otherwise be left behind in society. Various non-profits and government organizations are working to change this and give girls an equal footing by providing sanitary pads to girls for free, in tandem with sex education and initiatives to debunk social taboos against periods.

In remote areas of Kenya, health care is hard to access and medical professionals and technology have been hard to come by. A new partnership between the government, Phillips, and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has resulted in a new health care centre with state of the art technology, health care training systems, and more personnel to better serve women and children.

Fabella Hospital in Manila is overrun with women in labor or recovering, it exemplifies the overpopulation of the area due to a lack of contraception and family planning access. The Philippines’ Reproductive Health Bill hopes to change this by allowing contraception to be available at public health places and allowing family planning services at these facilities.

In Kern County, where pregnancy-related mortality rates are more than double the California average and Black mothers face life-threatening complications at nearly three times the rate of white women, community doulas are working to bridge the gap between patients and the medical system. Since California expanded Medi-Cal coverage to include doula services in January 2023, more than 1,400 doulas have enrolled statewide, with active training pipelines building the workforce locally.