Abortion funds in the Northeast must strike a balance between supporting abortion seekers from their home states and helping the influx of folks traveling from states with more extreme bans.
Abortion funds are local nonprofits that provide abortion seekers with monetary, emotional and logistical support. While they are designed to pay for a patient’s abortion, funds also increasingly help with supplemental costs, like transportation or lodging. Because these organizations provide crucial financial aid and on-the-ground practical support, their role in the abortion access movement has increased since the Dobbs decision.
This piece, based on three funds in the Northeast, is the fourth in a series of articles spotlighting interviews with fund representatives across the U.S. While most states in this region, including New York and New Jersey, generally protect abortion rights, Pennsylvania has a 24-week ban in place.
- Pennsylvania requires patients to attend a counseling session 24 hours before their abortion.
- The state prohibits patients from using Medicaid funds to pay for abortion, except in limited circumstances.
- The state also requires minors to obtain parental consent (or a judicial bypass) before obtaining an abortion.
We interviewed representatives from the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF), New Jersey Abortion Access Fund (NJAAF) and Abortion Liberation Fund of Pennsylvania (ALF-PA). Activists at each of these funds noted the delicate balance between supporting abortion seekers from their home states and helping the influx of folks traveling to “blue states” for abortion care.
New York Abortion Access Fund
NYAAF, which was established in 2001, supports New Yorkers and abortion seekers traveling to New York with monetary aid, emotional support and referrals to other resources. We spoke with their executive director, Chelsea Williams-Diggs. In 2019, Chelsea was working in global gender policy and international sexual and reproductive health while clinic escorting in Queens. She discovered NYAAF through a listserv calling for volunteers.
Chelsea (NYAAF): I should probably be embarrassed that prior to 2019 I didn’t know abortion funds existed. Or maybe it should be the other way around, right? And abortion funds should be embarrassed. Knowing that abortion funds existed would have been very useful in my personal life growing up in a low-income community with mostly Black and Brown folks.
I remember feeling disconnected from the local fight for reproductive justice and thinking, ‘I’m spending all this time in my day job doing these things that are connected [to reproductive justice], and it feels like things are crumbling around me, and I’m not having a direct impact in the way that I would like.’
I became a volunteer case manager [at NYAAF], and then the following summer, August of 2020, I joined the Board of Directors, which was a very interesting time to join an organization because we were in the height of COVID, but also coming off of the [racial justice] protests. I remember feeling like I deeply needed political community. Two years later, September of 2022, after the ‘Dobbs’ decision, I was asked to join as our first full-time staff person.
At the time of the interview, NYAAF had one full-time staff person. It has since grown to a staff of five.
New Jersey Abortion Access Fund
NYAAF’s close neighbor and ally, NJAAF, is a volunteer run organization that supports abortion seekers in New Jersey. We interviewed Quadira Coles, the president of their board of directors. She was inspired to get involved after reading about a trigger law bill.
Quardira (NJAAF): Never in a million years did I think that they would actually challenge someone’s ability to decide their own fate. So when I saw the article, I was so enraged that I thought, ‘I need to get involved; I need to do something.’
I thought I should arrange a protest, but New Jersey is an access state, and I’m in New York, and access is pretty good here. I realized that wasn’t really going to make an impact and raise awareness around what other states were trying to do. So I went on a rant on Twitter, and my friend sent me an application to the NJAAF board. Summer of 2019, I had an interview and was immediately brought in to be a board member.
Abortion Liberation Fund of Pennsylvania
Founded in 1985, ALF-PA values abortion liberation, ensuring that abortion seekers “are free from shame, self-blame or stigma.” We spoke with the director of client services, Marah Lange and program manager, Joelle. In our interview, both Marah and Joelle discussed how their experiences as young people inspired their abortion access activism.
Marah (ALF-PA): I was raised by a single mom who was disabled, and we experienced poverty. Abortion access was the perfect axis between my personal feminism and economic justice. It felt like a great way to be part of my community doing work towards liberation. I am a social worker by training, so joining the team as someone working on our help line was exactly how I wanted to do this work, getting to directly talk with people who are accessing care.
Joelle (ALF-PA): While I wasn’t plugged into the reproductive justice world, I had been involved in birth work and birth photography, and I’ve worked with midwives. Although I was new to reproductive justice work, I was well aware of the history of reproductive oppression and harm. Abortion and reproductive health were not stigmatized in my family. Both the women and the men in my family thought people had the right to choose.
Protecting Abortion Access Post-Roe
Although most states in the Northeast protected abortion access after the fall of Roe, abortion funders in this region felt ill prepared to deal with the significant influx of abortion seekers from other states.
Chelsea (NYAAF): We have been completely failed. Our world crumbled, and the world of repro crumbled. There was no lifeboat. We’re just out here, a bunch of volunteers and a couple staff moving millions of dollars to get people basic healthcare. If that’s not radicalizing, I don’t know what is. I don’t believe our movement was ready [for the fall of Roe)], and I would say NYAAF wasn’t ready.
Many abortion funds are all or mostly volunteer. It’s hard to prepare for the collapse of a constitutional right with a bunch of volunteers. The mental capacity, foresight, and strategy that this takes [is immense.] Reproductive justice leaders have been warning the broader movement for years. Even when Amy Coney Barrett replaced [Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court] in 2020, I don’t think we were strategically planning as much as we should have been. Were other folks planning? Maybe. But were they centering or including abortion funds? I don’t know. From our end, we were not necessarily in those spaces.
Our world crumbled, and the world of repro crumbled. There was no lifeboat. We’re just out here, a bunch of volunteers and a couple staff moving millions of dollars to get people basic healthcare. If that’s not radicalizing, I don’t know what is.
Chelsea (NYAAF)
With the leak, everything changed. That’s when [NYAAF] started getting invited to coalition calls and different spaces, particularly with New York repro [groups]. We were never invited to those places before. After the leak and the subsequent decision, we saw more mobilization.The fact that we weren’t plugged in before is telling, and the sudden surge of invitations after the leak was an interesting shift.
Marah (ALF-PA): Our organization was founded in the ‘80s, and the people that created our fund never thought that we would still exist now. When the Hyde Amendment was first passed in 1976, and Pennsylvania determined that we would not use state money to pay for abortion care, then pretty much overnight people organized in Philly and made our fund. They knew their neighbors needed help paying for abortions, and they never thought that we would have to exist almost 40 years later.
Honestly, the day that Roe fell, I would have thought by now there would be a clear plan forward. It feels naive now, two years later. But on that day, as deeply sad and distressing as it was, I thought we would have some kind of clear plan by now. And I don’t think there is one. I don’t know what it looks like to climb out of this, and I don’t know what it looks like to restore anything close to Roe; that’s what scares me. I don’t know what the plan ahead is because we work in the day-to-day of making sure abortions can happen tomorrow. I don’t know what it looks like to figure out the strategy moving forward because we know the systems that got us here aren’t going to be the ones that liberate us.
Sustaining Abortion Funds
Funds, many of which have been supporting abortion access for years or even decades, were sometimes forced to compete for donations against newly created organizations in the months following the Dobbs decision.
Quadira (NJAAF): We already have the infrastructure and the analysis, we know how the landscape operates, and we have everything in place. What we need is the financial resources to support more [abortion seekers]. I think [these new organizations] that emerged as a reaction to the Dobbs decision took away from the resources that could have come to us. Where are they now? We don’t hear from them anymore. People just gave up because they realize it is a huge undertaking to start and run and sustain the fund.
Learning from Reproductive Justice
Fund activists believe that it is vitally important to treat their callers holistically, as human beings worthy of dignity and privacy. They often take their cues from Black feminist and reproductive justice activism.
Joelle (ALF-PA): I’m really proud of the work that we’re doing, and that’s connected to our Black feminist political framework. Our organizing team created that [groundwork] that shows up in our intake process. We’re not asking questions that are harmful to people, and we’re only using the information that we need to fund people. It’s really a privilege for me to be able to walk somebody safely through their process. People can receive help without us asking them a million questions because we trust that our callers know what they need and that they are telling us the truth.
Marah (ALF-PA): For many people, abortion is a moment in time amongst a lot of other things that they’re juggling. So we also provide referrals for a lot of other needs. We talk to people who are experiencing crises related to housing, people who need legal support for accessing public benefits, people navigating interpersonal violence, [often at] the same moment that they need abortion care.
Chelsea (NYAAF): We support 100 percent of callers by either directly paying for their abortion or connecting them to another resource that would help them access abortion.
We might get a call from someone who’s Medicaid-eligible and connect them to a clinic where they can do on-site enrollment or apply online or over the phone. New York City has three new sexual health centers that provide free medication abortion. Our policy is that anyone seeking a medication abortion in New York City should be referred to one of these free clinics. We still fund medication abortions outside of New York City, and we are always down to make exceptions for special cases, but 99 percent of the people we inform about the sexual health clinics are like, “Cool, I can go there.”
We try our best to meet pretty large gaps by working in collaboration with other regional funds, especially if folks are traveling from out of state. We don’t have caps. We take it on a case by case basis, looking at our budget. We are able to pledge pretty high numbers for folks–our average pledge per caller is $1,000 but can go much higher.
People can receive help without us asking them a million questions because we trust that our callers know what they need and that they are telling us the truth.
Joelle (ALF-PA)
White women founded many of the earliest abortion funds, and some have struggled to center the needs of marginalized populations in their policies and practices. The adoption of a reproductive justice-inspired approach to abortion access has also ushered in changes to these organizations’ staff, board and leadership.
Quadira (NJAAF): When I joined, I was around 25, and I was the first young Black person on the board. The board wanted to “diversify” because initially they were a lot of middle-aged, upper-middle-class white women. They wanted to bring more folks in to get new and fresh perspectives. We created a plan to make our board operations more modern because we felt like we operated in such an old school way, and we weren’t really visible or connected to marginalized community members or folks who face the biggest barriers [to abortion access].
Chelsea (NYAAF): Many funds have legacies of white supremacy and white feminism. I mean, we just gotta be honest with our history here, right? I’m not about to pretend that every abortion fund is some radical mutual aid organization, you know? There are a lot of beautiful ways that we can uplift the leadership, particularly of Black, also Native, Indigenous and other folks of color in the fund landscape that have really brought us to this new phase. But in order to do that, we also have to be honest with our history, right?
Operating as Volunteer Organizations
While funds around the nation increasingly have full-time staff, others operate primarily as volunteer organizations.
Quadira (NJAAF): We all have full-time jobs outside of the work we’re doing at NJAAF. We have a full comm[unication]s team and huge social media presence now. We are more engaged in more frequent fundraising. We have a member who now sits on the Thrive Coalition, which is an advocacy group in New Jersey that works on abortion access across the state. We do emergency contraception distribution. We have someone who writes grants and someone who does our newsletters every month. We function like a fully fleshed out organization, but we’re still all volunteers.
Chelsea (NYAAF): We spent 1.8 million dollars on abortions in 2023. That is not standard [for abortion funds]. Yes, there are a few funds who spend more. And there are other funds who are around that same line, and often, they have staff, and they had staff before Dobbs. We didn’t. In 2023, we had just one staff person. So it’s been really, really difficult.
Accommodating Abortion Travelers
Many have been stretched to capacity in the post-Roe landscape, particularly as funds in “blue states” see a flood of abortion seekers from other parts of the nation.
Chelsea (NYAAF): The New York City government placed billboards and ads in Texas and Georgia and Florida [advertising] their Abortion Access Hub and these offerings where NYAAF is listed. [These ads encouraged abortion seekers to] come to New York for help. Since the Dobbs decision, we’ve supported callers from 38 states (including NY), Washington, D.C., the U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as 21 countries. And perhaps that sounds surprising until you think about how many New Yorkers have connections to [people living in] places where abortion is completely banned or is very restricted. New York is one of the most diverse and populous states in the country. For example, the Dominican Republic [has a complete abortion ban]. New York City has a high population of people of Dominican descent. We have people come from Canada and Europe to get care. People get shocked [to hear] Canada. Yes, people have come from Canada particularly to get care later in pregnancy.”
Marah (ALF-PA)- After the Dobbs decision, we have seen an incredible influx of people traveling here from much further states, so our funding has been really stretched trying to make sure that we’re prioritizing our community. Philadelphia is the largest most impoverished city in the country. We’ve been told that, amongst national funders of all places that need to utilize abortion funding, our Philadelphia area is the highest need and requires the most resources even from national funders of abortion care because we don’t have Medicaid coverage of abortion like New York and New Jersey. We are trying to prioritize our local community while also dealing with this influx of people. Since Dobbs, [we have funded patients from] over 27 states, plus Pennsylvania.”
Funds Working Together
Other funds step up to fill the gaps when local funds cannot keep up with the demand.
Chelsea (NYAAF): The New England funds have been lifesavers. From my understanding, many of them, especially right after Dobbs, received an influx of donations like we all did. But they didn’t see the same influx of callers as NYAAF. So they were like, ‘How can we use all of this money to make sure that people are still getting abortions, even if they’re not getting abortions in New Hampshire or Massachusetts?’ It’s been amazing.
Of course, all the funds across the country have been so supportive. At one point, when the Texas funds weren’t able to fund, other funds stepped up to make sure that Texans could get care. It’s really beautiful.
Quadira (NJAAF): We have a really good relationship with funds and clinics in our neighboring states. We work closely with the New York Abortion Access Fund. Chelsea and I have a great relationship and because New Jersey and New York are so close together, a good amount of people from New Jersey go to New York for their abortion. [That’s partly because] one of their clinics, Park Med, goes higher in gestational age for abortion care.
Abortion Funds Are Still Vital in Blue States
In spite of the protective legislation around abortion in many blue states and the steady stream of abortion seekers from elsewhere, activists in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania note that folks living in these states still face tremendous barriers (such as lost wages, transportation, lodging and childcare costs when they have to travel for abortions) to affordable abortion care. Funds remain vitally important to people seeking abortions even if they reside in blue states.
Chelsea (NYAAF): Sixty-eight percent of our callers remain resident New Yorkers. It’s so interesting to talk to elected officials or just regular people, [who often ask,] “Why are so many New Yorkers using an abortion fund? We have access here.” It’s really important to bust this myth that abortion is fully accessible anywhere, [including blue states]. I’m not going to romanticize New York or any [blue] state. That’s an injustice to the many people in those states who are struggling to access care, and it’s short-sighted. It lacks creativity. It lacks vision. Our vision for reproductive justice is much better than [even what exists in] a blue state in America.
In New York State, you can get an abortion up to about 26 weeks and later with doctor discretion, so it’s one of the few states where you can get care later in pregnancy. So we see people, even from surrounding blue states like Massachusetts or Connecticut coming into New York to access care later in pregnancy. The most expensive abortion I’ve seen, I believe, was $36,000. Many clinics don’t take certain types of insurance or Medicaid at all or after a certain gestation. So even if you have insurance that covers abortion, even if you have Medicaid, which by default means you’re low income, you can’t even use it in some cases.
Marah (ALF-PA): We continue to see people being pushed further into pregnancy, seeking care, and I feel like we’re at a breaking point as a whole movement, and certainly as a region. We’re trying to find the funding for care for people with really expensive appointments, and it’s like we’re trying to squeeze the last drop out of a stone. Our average pledge in the last couple of years has risen from $192 in 2020 to now, $246 this year. That might not sound like a huge jump, but we serve over 4,000 people a year. It makes a big difference and I am proud to be funding each person more, but it also is indicative of the fact that people are having a harder time making ends meet.
Finding Strength in the Abortion Access Movement
In spite of the taxing work, abortion fund activists find purpose, hope and joy in the work that they do and the people they work alongside.
Quadira (NJAAF): We have an abortion access movement that is so strong and unwavering, but we are currently experiencing some serious financial challenges. Abortion funds across the country are being forced to close their doors, temporarily pause operations or decrease funding because donations and fundraising outcomes have sharply declined, while the costs of providing care and the demand for care continue to rise. Some of us are struggling to meet the increasing needs of patients.
This gap between dwindling financial support and growing demand is threatening the sustainability of abortion access, leaving many in communities without the care they need and causing many challenges for our clinics. But we have no choice but to keep going. I am proud of the impact NJAAF has made in the past two years and grateful that we are able to still fund abortions today. I don’t see a future where I’m not supporting or working for an abortion fund. I’m going to keep going at it [and seeing] the material change in someone’s life, how the abortion led them to a whole slew of opportunities that they probably wouldn’t have had if they didn’t have the abortion. My full time job takes more of a toll, and my work with NJAAF is like an escape from the real world. It feels really good to work on a board. We have full freedom to run this board exactly how we want.
Chelsea (NYAAF): The things I’m listening to and reading and conceptualizing are not necessarily fun projects. They’re [focused on] real liberation struggles. And that is where I find purpose and glimpses of joy. This is helping me process and be at peace in the world. And I am hoping to build further community. Ultimately, as I think about the struggles of repro right now, I’m connecting them to so many other struggles, including, of course, Palestine, but also throughout this country.
Marah (ALF-PA): I’ve been at this organization for eight years now, and I am so encouraged by Gen Z and youth and their organizing. We’re seeing the incredible power of youth organizers and young people. We see it now with students organizing for Palestine. I have so much trust in the next generation of people to see liberation through and know that the systems that are in place that got us here won’t be the ones to liberate us, and I think that’s probably a big piece of what held our movement up for a really long time.
Joelle (ALF-PA): I come from a legacy of reproductive violence that has been enacted against Black birthing people. And I am so proud to be doing the work that I do. It is rewarding, it is powerful and it is purposeful. I believe in the power of people. I believe in our ability to organize. It gives me hope to know that within the organization, we are moving in a direction of reproductive justice, and we are listening to Black feminists. This is a multigenerational, multicultural, multiracial movement, and I believe that there are tools here that are going to liberate us. It gives me hope that there’s already a blueprint. There’s already a model. We have a map.
Abortion Access and the 2024 Election
As abortion access is, yet again, a key issue in this year’s upcoming election, abortion fund activists remind their communities that funds will be there to support abortion seekers, regardless of the outcome in November.
Marah (ALF-PA)- “No matter what happens in any given election, including this next one, abortion funds are here. We’re hoping for a future where abortion funds don’t need to exist and abortion is liberated. But whether abortion is legal where you live, you still have an abortion fund.
While many states in the Northeast protect abortion rights, abortion fund staff and volunteers are working tirelessly to ensure access for their state residents and the thousands of abortion seekers traveling to their states for healthcare. Their efforts serve as a reminder that the Dobbs decision impacted Americans in every region of the U.S.
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