Supporting Abortions for Everyone – SAFE – is a new group that exists to support the grassroots activists helping people get abortions across Europe. These small, underfunded groups ensure true reproductive justice by helping some of the most marginalized and oppressed people get abortions when the state fails them. While they do the frontline work, SAFE underpins their efforts with admin, fundraising, knowledge curation, training and more.
SAFE co-conspirators Mara and Kasia are long-time frontline abortion activists. Over the past few years, they’ve spoken to sibling abortion activists and worked with them to determine what the biggest challenges to the movement are. SAFE exists to address those challenges by providing the work identified as required to underpin the work of existing and emerging abortion support groups. SAFE will not help people get abortions. They will support the grassroots groups doing this work. Mara is the founder of the first abortion fund in Europe (Abortion Support Network) and helper of groups that have been set up since. Kasia is one of the co-founders of Abortion Network Amsterdam and creator or some of the best practices for helping people get second trimester abortions in Europe. Both are founding members of the Abortion Without Borders initiative. The SAFE board and volunteers include people with a mix of experience in social media, inclusivity, tech, fundraising, DEI, abortion access and more, with ages ranging from 20 to over 60, people based in or from more than 10 countries, and from a range of backgrounds.
The systemic injustice is that abortion access is patchy across Europe, with the most oppressed and marginalized people facing the largest number of obstacles. The long-term desired outcome is, of course, a Europe where anyone who wants an abortion can get one regardless of age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, country of origin, country of residence, spoken language, religion or belief, partnership status, disability, spoken language or immigration status.
The people who need abortions RIGHT NOW can’t wait for this. The right to access safe abortion as an essential part of health care is currently structurally denied, and the people who need abortions RIGHT NOW cannot rely on the state to support them. In the meantime, abortion access in some countries only happens due to the work of overworked underfunded activists. SAFE’s co-founders were two of these activists and SAFE will ensure that these activists will have everything they need in terms of infrastructure and support to do this work sustainably. They will work not only with existing groups, but also offer support to and strengthen the European abortion movement with emerging ones – both groups they’ve identified and with those they expect will crop up as more countries place more restrictions on abortion access.
The Guerrilla Grant
Our funding covers the core/operational costs of SAFE so that the team can focus on:
- providing requested infrastructure for existing and emerging European abortion activists.
- building and maintaining abortion funds and help people access abortions.
- providing trainings and fiscal sponsorship critical for grassroots abortion activists.
SAFE will help the people and groups who are helping people across Europe get abortions. Rather than have a helpline providing direct support to women and pregnant people, SAFE will help those helping abortion seekers, with funding, information gathering, and pathway creation and protection. SAFE helps the helpers. The Guerrilla grant helps cover salary costs for SAFE’s co-founders so they can direct their efforts to the above projects.
First up is the completion of the knowledge sharing platform. This is a secure online space where the information required to help people access second and third trimester abortions, as well as proven best practices of how to set up and maintain abortion funds and practical support organizations is held, updated and shared. Via this resource and supplementary trainings, SAFE will provide information on how to do this work in a way that is – as the name suggests – “SAFE” for both the activists and the people who need abortions. Collecting and maintaining this information in a secure location will allow more people to do this work, will enable a faster response to the next abortion crisis in Europe, and will help existing organizations onboard new volunteers more quickly.
Building this resource will ensure sustainability and longevity of the EU abortion funds movement. SAFE has some funding committed for the platform itself, but Guerrilla support would enable SAFE to commit itself entirely to building the platform to go live by the end of 2024.
SAFE will achieve impact by ensuring that our current and future sibling activists can find the most up-to-date information needed to help people get abortions; learn how to set up a new group, or how to strengthen an existing group. They are creative and agile problem solvers and want to ensure that collective knowledge is gathered, maintained, and shared. Doing this work will increase the sustainability of the movement, improve capacity of existing organizations by taking this task from their workload, reduce burnout rates, and ensure that any emerging organizations do not have to start from scratch.
SAFE was created after much consultation with grassroots activists on the ground, who help people access abortions. SAFE was created to address the issues that these activists raised as the biggest threats to the survival and sustainability of the abortion support / abortion funds movement. Their entire mission statement is a plan to ensure the long-term sustainability of the grassroots activism movement that will continue to ensure that anyone in Europe unable to access a safe abortion where they live is supported in being able to do so. Funding will also ensure they are able to achieve their goal of translating the resource into, to start with, Italian, Croatian, French, Spanish, Polish, Ukrainian, Hungarian and Romanian.
