Abortion Funds: ‘Out Loud and Proud About Aiding and Abetting Abortions’

Since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion last June, abortion funds have been inundated with calls for help from around the country. The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision shed a spotlight on abortion funds’ crucial role in making it possible for marginalized people to access abortion care. “Abortion providers big and small have long relied on abortion funds and practical support networks because of the deep knowledge about the communities we serve,” said Stephanie Loraine Pineiro, executive director of the Florida Access Network, the only statewide abortion fund in Florida.

Abortion funds have worked for decades to help make access to a safe abortion a possibility for everyone, no matter their financial situation. “Long before the end of Roe, abortion funds have shown up to help relieve the burden for people impacted by economic barriers to care,” said Oriaku Njoku, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF), an organization of nearly 100 abortion funds throughout the country. This work “includes financial assistance to help pay for the procedure and practical support for things like transportation, child care, and other logistics folks need to get to their appointments.”

Even before the Dobbs decision, numerous factors made getting an abortion out of reach financially for low-income people. These included abortion restrictions already in place and the cost not only of the procedure itself, which isn’t covered by Medicaid, Medicare, or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, but also of travel, child care, and lost wages. Additionally, 50% of abortion patients have incomes below the federal poverty threshold, according to Inequity in US Abortion Rights and Access: The End of Roe Is Deepening Existing Divides, a January report from the Guttmacher Institute.

“There has always been the struggle for marginalized communities to have access to abortion care, and since Dobbs that has been amplified and just blown out of the water,” said Sylvia Ghazarian, executive director of the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project, a national abortion fund. In 2022, 69% of their clients were receiving public assistance and more than half were unemployed. State abortion bans and restrictions, including provisions that require a woman to prove her life is in danger, the need to travel to another state to get an abortion, and the increase in crisis pregnancy centers or fake abortion clinics have meant even more delays — and delays can increase the cost. All of this “interferes with medical best practices and puts patients in danger,” said Ghazarian. “Any delays in abortion care mean that someone who might reach out to us at 10 weeks may not get an abortion until 12 weeks.”

The number of people reaching out to abortion funds has been increasing, even before the Dobbsdecision; from July 2020 to June 2021, funds within the NNAF network received more than 80,000 calls and dispersed over $11 million in direct abortion funding, said Njoku. Although they don’t have results from their survey since Dobbs, “abortion funds across our network have reported an increase in need and callers,” said Njoku. “Immediately following the decision, abortion funds saw an outpouring of donations from individuals across the country, and we are very grateful for the support that people have and are showing abortion funds at this time. Even with these donations, long-term investment is needed.”

The Dobbsdecision created a “public health crisis [and] has been a wake-up call for many people, so we’ve been able to meet the increased need and number of abortion seekers reaching out to us because people have responded so generously,” said Joan Lamunyon Sanford, executive director of the New Mexico Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.

However, many abortion funds have had to quickly pivot to comply with new bans and restrictions in their state as well as increasing their capacity and their fundraising to meet this new demand. “In 2022, we doubled the number of clients, and this year that trend is continuing,” said Alison Dreith, director of strategic partnerships at the Midwest Access Coalition, an abortion fund primarily serving people in the Midwest. “But pre-Dobbs, we could support everyone who reached out, and now we have staffing capacity limits.”

Some abortion funds have had to adjust to serving patients who reach out from locations in other states. Since Dobbs, “we have had to regroup — we are a small board and our mission statement says that we help low-income and no-income people in Oklahoma, but that’s expanded because now there are so many women needing help from all over the South,” said Susan Braselton, board member of the Roe Fund, an abortion fund based in Oklahoma.

Another issue for abortion funds has been an increase in ad hoc organizations, as well as individuals, that are trying to replicate the work they are already doing, but without the long-term knowledge, proper training, and “community building,” said Braselton. “There is a lot of re-inventing the wheel.”

“Abortion funds have built trust over decades and operate more like mutual aid organizations than traditional nonprofits, having done the work in terms of antiracist training and vetting volunteers, etc.,” said Rachael Lorenzo, co-founder and executive director of Indigenous Women Rising, an abortion fund for all Native and Indigenous people in the United States and Canada.

A majority of abortion funds are run by unpaid staff. “75% of abortion funds are volunteer-led,” said Pineiro, who only began receiving a salary after July 2020, even though she has been with the Florida Access Network in different capacities since 2015.

Between 2015 and 2019, only two percent of foundation funding for reproductive rights issues went to abortion funds. While some states do have funding available for abortion funds, the application and reporting process for these grants is difficult and time-consuming, especially for funds that are already stretched. Because of this, abortion funds are especially in need of people who will commit to making more than just a one-off donation. “We are very grateful that people have stepped up and are making donations, but we need long-term, sustainable donors to invest in us,” said Lorenzo. Any amount is helpful, she explained. “The majority of our long-term supporters are lower-income donors, and our average monthly donation is two dollars. The influx of financial support post-Dobbs has also come with some challenges, as it has meant we have to build the organization faster than we anticipated. Also, some of the new funders are unfamiliar with abortion funds and how they work, which has required additional labor from us. We hope that people who are interested in funding us and other abortion funds will continue to do so without strings attached.”

Kelsea McLain, deputy director of the Yellowhammer Fund, which is based in Alabama, said that her organization has found itself ineligible for some grants and funding from foundations “because we can’t safely provide information about our clients to them — we had to wipe our database to protect our clients.”

Meanwhile, the work of abortion funds is further complicated by the constantly changing legal landscape. “Managing the constant legal changes and court decisions is emotionally exhausting because we’ve had instances where a client is in an Uber to a clinic that suddenly has to stop providing abortions,” said Dreith, of the Midwest Access Coalition. “And some clients give up altogether when it just gets too logistically difficult. But we are out loud and proud about aiding and abetting people getting abortions.”

In states where abortion is banned, abortion funds have had to change which services they are allowed to provide. Since Alabama has made it illegal to “aid or abet” anyone seeking an abortion, “most of our work is directing people to organizations in other states that can help them and educating people here in Alabama,” said McLain. “Some of our post-Dobbs work is around safer sex education; Alabama doesn’t have comprehensive sex education, and what there is here is faith-based and harmful. We are leaning into fighting the barriers to reproductive health care and reproductive justice that already existed here in Alabama before Dobbs. Abortion is just one part of that. We have an epidemic of child removals here as well.”

The complex legal terrain can even affect funds’ ability to fully staff services. Braselton, of the Roe Fund, said that in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs, the fund was getting “a flurry of volunteer applications, but we were still trying to figure out what we could still legally do, so we couldn’t use them.”

Some of the people who work at abortion funds in states with many abortion restrictions or total bans worry that resources are mostly being directed toward the states where abortion remains legal and for travel expenses to these states, and that they are left to fend for themselves. “The story of Dobbs doesn’t begin and end with people having to travel out of state to get abortions; it’s about people being forced to have babies,” said Laurie Bertram Roberts, co-founder of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. “It seems like we are giving all the resources to all the places where people have to travel to. And those of us [here] in the South — we still need support. It feels like we’re being treated the way electoral politics are treated, and people have just given up on us. This is hard work and if this is really your cause, then don’t forget about us here in the South.”

With resources in such short supply, “it’s critical for all of us to work together,” said Leah Vanden Bosch, development and outreach director for the Iowa Abortion Access Fund. “There is a large spectrum where we all fit, but if we are really going to protect and increase access, it’s going to take all of us working together. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation.”

Abortion funds are ideally suited to mobilize in this current moment where the struggle to provide comprehensive reproductive health care is in crisis. “Anti-abortion legislators are stacking as many obstacles to abortion as possible to make it difficult or impossible to get abortions,” said Njoku. However, “abortion seekers and abortion funds are resilient and resourceful in the face of escalating hurdles. Abortion funds [are] uniquely positioned to lead in this post-Dobbs moment, as they hold some of the closest ties to people who are having abortions right now and as they are navigating unjust bans and restrictions in real time.”