Three years (yes, only three) have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court issued the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, unraveling nearly 50 years of precedent and stripping away the constitutional right to abortion care and services. In those three years, abortion access has not just been diminished; it has been criminalized, surveilled, disincentivized, and twisted into a weapon of confusion, shame, and fear.
But the frontlines of abortion access have made it loud and clear that we are no longer in a post-Dobbs moment. We are in a rebuilding one, and it requires clarity, courage, and community.
As a Black reproductive justice organizer working parallel to the philanthropic sector, I hold many contradictions. I am both a survivor of this system and a strategist inside it. I’m brought into decision-making spaces, but the dynamics in the room often leave me feeling like I have to earn my right to stay. But I stay because I believe deeply in the power of moving resources toward liberation, especially when done in solidarity with the movements that got us here and will continue to lead us forward.
At NCRP, we have spent the past five years walking alongside abortion leaders, deepening our accountability, and confronting our own missteps in this work. We’ve studied what didn’t work, we’ve amplified what did, and we’ve consistently reminded this sector that abortion is essential healthcare and funding it is both legally sound and morally urgent.
In this moment, philanthropy has a choice to make. Will you stand behind sanitized statements and cautious commitments? Or will you meet this moment with the kind of bold, transformative solidarity that reproductive justice movements deserve? Right now, we are witnessing the resurgence of a fierce and targeted backlash against the most vulnerable, facing the most obstacles to abortion access.
The number of states enforcing total or near-total abortion bans has doubled. While Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) are taking in eight times the support of actual abortion providers in 2021. Meanwhile, CPCs, misleading, anti-abortion institutions, have grown in both scope and funding. These organizations weaponize fear through disinformation campaigns, racism by co-opting Black maternal health narratives and practices, and faith through shame-based counseling that manipulates and controls. Their rise is not a side effect; it is a strategy. A moment that requires funders to get clear about who they are funding and why. Rebuilding trust with the people most harmed by Dobbs starts with action, not optics.
Watch: Emergency Funder Briefing After