Join the Fight
Real change comes from everyday people — not the government, the courts, the media, or celebrities. The freedoms we have now were won by movements of people organizing and fighting for change.
The pledge to #AidAndAbetAbortion was started by National Women’s Liberation (NWL) to get people off the sidelines and into the movement — bringing new fire to the fight for our liberation. [1]
National Women's Liberation organizes for*:
• Easy access to the abortion pill: get rid of the restriction imposed by the FDA requiring unnecessary additional certifications for healthcare providers and pharmacies
• Reproductive freedom, full access, no coercion
• Abortion and birth control free through a system of national health care
• Childcare, free like the public schools, and paid family leave
*Drawn from Women Strike, January 20-21, 2017. womenstrike.org
Learn from History
Eugene Gordon, Women’s Strike for Equality, New York City, 1970. New York Historical Society Library
Women’s Liberation Movement
The history of the Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s shows that “it was the radical strategies of (1) opposition to reform and demand for repeal, led by Lucinda Cisler, [2] (2) mass consciousness-raising on abortion with women testifying to their ‘criminal’ acts in public and in courts, and (3) the development of the feminist self-help clinic ideas and their promotion of simpler, new abortion techniques that led to the nationwide [abortion law] reform…,” which paved the way for Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision protecting the right to abortion in the United States. [3]
Fight for the Morning-After Pill
In 2004, feminists in NWL started the Morning-After Pill Conspiracy, a campaign to make the Morning-After Pill (MAP, also known as “emergency contraception”) available to all, without prescriptions or restrictions.
It was this grassroots feminist pressure that forced the Food and Drug Administration to make one brand of MAP available over the counter in 2013.
This is why we believe in grassroots organizing – because it has been the most effective strategy, historically, to create change and win more freedom.
[1] Adapted from NWL’s “What We Want, What We Believe,” the formulation of which was borrowed from "What We Want, What We Believe” from the Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party (1966).
[2] Cisler also raised the movement's consciousness by pointing out that the requirement being written into the new "reform" laws stipulating that only physicians perform abortions, or that they only be done in hospitals, was an unnecessary restriction — keeping abortions much more expensive than they had to be. Cisler argued that abortion should simply fall under the general medical codes, not under any special ones. Nurses and midwives were already delivering babies under the general codes, a procedure statistically ten times more dangerous than abortion. Lucinda Cisler, “Abortion Law Repeal (sort of): A Warning to Women,” 1970.
[3] Katie Sarachild, “The Power of History,” page 20, Feminist Revolution (1975).
National Women’s Liberation
National Women’s Liberation (NWL) is a multiracial feminist group that fights back against male supremacy, white supremacy, and capitalism. NWL membership is open to all women and trans people who do not benefit from male supremacy, because we believe that we should lead the fight for our freedom.
Periodically, women of color meet separately from white women in Women of Color Caucus (WoCC) meetings to examine their experiences with white supremacy and how it intersects with male supremacy and other forms of oppression to oppress women of color.
NWL has chapters working in NYC and Gainesville, FL, and holds virtual meetings and events open to activists across the country.
Find a Grassroots Organization
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SisterSong
SisterSong is a Southern based, national membership organization whose purpose is to build an effective network of individuals and organizations to improve institutional policies and systems that impact the reproductive lives of marginalized communities.
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Shout Your Abortion
Shout Your Abortion is a movement working to normalize abortion through art, media, and community events all over the country.
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Find A Grassroots Group Near You