The Post-Roe Abortion Underground

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.

Better Reproductive Health, Better Communities Project is a partnership between nonprofits and medical providers working to increase awareness about unintended pregnancies and unsafe abortions, while also ensuring women have better access to high-quality post-abortion care. The project has focused on providing family planning and emergency contraception to women in low-income urban areas. Volunteer peer educators and social media has helped reach over 4,000 women, spreading information about sexual and reproductive health services and connecting women to quality abortion care.

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.

Just The Pill operates a mobile clinic along the Colorado border to distribute abortion medications to patients from states that restrict abortion access after an initial telehealth consultation.

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.

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.

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.

A Buffalo, New York clinic provides a space for both abortions and natural births. In looking at the experiences as a continuum, rather than as juxtaposing sides, the hope is to change how people think about the birth experiences.

Despite significant increases in funding and advances in biomedical research, the rates of new treatments and drugs for illnesses that reach the market every year have plummeted. A group called the Myelin Repair Foundation, along with several other foundations, uses an intensely goal-directed and collaborative method to tackle the bottleneck.