Soon after the news broke, Laurie Bertram Roberts of the Yellowhammer Fund, an Alabama-based non-profit that offers support for women who have abortions, was
quoted by NBC as saying: "We've been planning for this possibility for several years...This isn't a new threat, but it's a larger threat."
Despite their sizes, the organizations these individuals represented played outsized roles in protecting democracy and human rights for us all, yet their effectiveness -- and ability to safeguard the hard-earned wins -- has been limited by a dire shortage in funding.
"Too many of our communities in the US have been existing in a pre-Roe reality. With few clinics and ever mounting bans and restrictions, abortion access is still legal yet out of reach."
Paris Hatcher, Founder and Director of Black Feminist Future
A report analyzing existing data, and published in 2021
by the Association for Women's Rights in Development found that "99% of development aid and foundation grants still do not directly reach women's rights and feminist organizations" and "despite new funding commitments made, women's rights organizations receive only 0.13% of the total Official Development Assistance and 0.4% of all gender-related aid."
And yet, grassroots feminist groups -- organizations, leaders and networks working together to challenge and change power structures that reinforce gender inequality -- have been credited with helping to
end the war in Liberia and bring progressives into government
in Slovenia. Amongst other victories, they've also succeeded in widening access to legalized abortion in countries from
Argentina to
Ireland.
These organizations do the hard work of creating the conditions for, and accelerating, much-needed social change, and data analysis shows that women's rights organizations in the Global South that do this essential work operate on shoestring budgets averaging
$30,000 a year.
On the other hand, according to a 2020 report by the Global Philanthropy Project, over a 10-year period, US organizations that oppose women's rights and those of LGBTQ+ communities, had an aggregate revenue of more than
$6 billion. They spend their money in the US but also
around the world, funding campaigns against our rights and
supporting court cases.
The reversal of Roe versus Wade will be the culmination of
decades-long attacks on abortion rights in the US. Feminist movements, especially led by Black women, and especially in the US South, have also been on the frontlines of responding to attacks that have included eroding reproductive rights at the
state level and dangerous so-called '
abortion reversal' methods.
