SPRING 2017 UPDATE: Abortion funds respond to political moment

Every day, abortion funds hear directly from the people bearing the brunt of the new administration’s devastating agenda. Abortion fund callers are parents who fear their children’s schools being dismantled; they are immigrants fearful of their ability to travel freely; they are people of color experiencing heightened hate crimes in their communities.

Following the election, we convened abortion fund leadership from across the network to assess the new landscape, strategize together, and build out an agenda of resistance. Our staff and fund members across 30 states shared their experiences of conditions across the country and had collaborative discussions about their needs, ideas, concerns, and plans for the next several years. We developed response plans for emerging physical and digital security threats facing our communities, drawing inspiration from our partners in the immigrant justice and transgender justice movements to learn tactics in community safety. We also learned from cybersecurity experts about ways to keep ourselves and our data protected.

Donald Trump and Mike Pence have promised to make abortion less accessible. Although no mandate exists, they are committed to increasing barriers at the risk of our collective safety and autonomy. These tactics have already been deployed across the nation’s Southern states, where a web of restrictions have made it increasingly difficult for patients to access care. In direct response, we created the Southern Funds Cohort last year to better connect callers to funding, safety, transportation, and other local resources, while serving as a regional hub for organizing. Following conversations at our post-election convenings, we’re ready to scale that model up, working with our membership to develop region-specific strategies to build a more coordinated support network to help get patients to their appointments, especially when they have to travel across state lines and stay overnight.

With your support, the National Network of Abortion Funds will continue to invest deeply in our membership—building the leadership of abortion funds, growing into an organizing powerhouse, and making sure that people get the care they need. At our annual Summit in June, we’ll launch an intensive leadership program for 25 fund members called Movement Makers. We’ll lift up abortion storytellers through We Testify. We’ll expand our base of individual members, creating new opportunities to engage in the fight for abortion access and mobilizing this network’s 20,000 donors and 100,000 callers to take collective action with their time, energy, money, and voices.

Read the Spring 2017 Newsletter