by Camille Kumar

‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing’– Arundhati Roy 

At ASN we work hard to hold on to that.  

Unlike other areas of healthcare, abortion care is mired in dense legislation, political and moral wrangling, patchwork provision, profit-making and endless bureaucracy. Abortion funds are the antidote to that. Abortion funds imagine into existence another world. Abortion funds choose to centre care, uphold bodily autonomy, and address economic and social inequity in the most direct way possible -to ask those who have more than enough to give to those who have less than enough to obtain the abortion care they need.  

Sixteen years ago, ASN was brought into being to support women and pregnant people in Ireland to access abortion care in England. At the time, abortion care in Ireland was virtually non-existent and every year more than 5000 pregnant people were forced to travel to England to access care. For those with money, an inconvenience. For those without, dangerous sacrifices. Inspired by the work of abortion funds in the US, ASN started the radical work of bridge building. Bridging borders, bridging taboos and bridging socio-economic divides to bring people closer to their reproductive freedom.  

Laws change, provisions change, minds change. In some countries minds and bodies are freed; in other countries, restrictions tighten. Even where some ground is won, the struggle for reproductive freedom, and the need for abortion funds, remains. While Ireland liberalised its abortion laws in 2019, we still hear from 150-200 people in Ireland every year who need to travel. And while we’ve always heard from people across Europe, these numbers have grown significantly as laws change and our radical community grows.  In addition to clients in Ireland, we now work with clients from Poland, France, Belgium, Germany, Malta and Hungary. In fact, we will work with anyone in Europe who needs to travel for abortion care. ASN, and our sibling abortion funds in Abortion Without Borders, are life-rafts. Since funding our first abortion in 2009, ASN has funded 2750 abortions, given advice on how to legally access safe abortion to over 10,000 people, and we have spent over £1.5 million funding abortions. If you have ever given to ASN, this is your money. This is your act of radical empathy. This is your investment in revolution.  

When I tally up the individual giving donations coming into ASN each month, I think about Audre Lorde talking about self-care as political warfare. And I think about our supporters. Who come to ‘self-care’ in the collective, knowing that when they give, we receive and when we receive, we are all enriched.  

We live in trying times- the rising far right, spiralling cost of living, violent border fixation, sweeping conservatism, anti-feminist backlash, and our weeping planet. In our corner of the struggle, we are constantly trying to turn the volume down on provocateurs like JD Vance rallying anti-abortion activists in the UK, Trump sending a wrecking ball through the international aid system, and Farage spewing anti-abortion rhetoric. We know that marginalised communities suffer hardest from the state perpetrated violence of abortion restriction. In these times it can be hard to imagine freedom, let alone rehearse it. But the ancestors remind us of what they overcame, those on whose shoulders we stand, and I don’t know that any generation found their time anything other than trying. Poor, working class, Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, migrant, and disabled leaders have always been at the forefront of liberatory movements. Together we will overcome.  

My colleague Abbie wrote eloquently here about hope last week. It fed me and led me to think more on how we rehearse reproductive freedom. On what we learn about freedom when a volunteer chooses to come home after a full day of paid work, turn on their laptop and start booking clinic appointments for a client in the Netherlands. Or a volunteer carves two hours out of a busy day parenting to collate content for ASN social media platforms. Or a volunteer goes the extra mile to ensure a client who has never flown before has all the support they need to book, check in, and to reassure them they are not alone. 

I think about what it teaches us about freedom to understand abortion as life changing, in a positive sense.  From the teenager who can finish school, the mum who can focus on the wellbeing of her children, the parents who can grieve a wanted but unviable pregnancy with dignity, the family that stayed just above the poverty line by not having another child, or the person whose abortion kept them safe from their abusive partner. I am struck by how these positive life changing abortion stories contrast with the popular abortion discourse of grief, regret and suffering that our society ensconces abortion in. I think about what the work of liberating our minds from abortion stigma and reproductive control really looks like. And how fragile any abortion rights are until that work, of liberating minds and bodies, is held by each of us.  

As I look to the future I am emboldened by the past. By successful grassroots-led movement building that has rehearsed reproductive freedom- from the repeal campaign in Ireland, to Indigenous communities seeking reparations for stolen generations in Australia to Bangladeshi feminists resisting violent colonial narratives of population control. The power and clarity of these movements led by ordinary people seeking freedom is what those in power find most threatening. It is from that lineage that we move. Angela Davis says we live in the dreams of our grandmothers’ grandmothers’. And through my work with the remarkable ordinary people of ASN, I know that to be true.