Where Abortion Funding Meets Care
I came to Power to Decide after nearly a decade working in direct abortion funding. Over the course of my tenure with the Carolina Abortion Fund (CAF), I was fortunate to help evolve the fund’s relationship with technology as both our security needs and profile grew in tandem. Around the time that we were undertaking conversations about how to best evolve our communication with the population we served, Power to Decide’s Navigate team reached out to me. This was genuine kismet: the Navigate platform (and AbortionFinder more broadly) seemed to be an answer to so many meetings that ended with someone saying, “I wish a platform existed that somehow had all of this information in one place.”
CAF integrated Navigate as a hub for clinic partner material internally and actively directed our audience and callers to AbortionFinder. Later, I joined Power to Decide as a Digital Fellow. As a Fellow I’m responsible for ensuring the same information I’d relied on at CAF is as up to date as possible. It’s not lost on me how unique this experience is; I have to imagine it’s at least somewhat akin to getting hired at Google after using the search engine feature continuously since 2004.
I’m relieved, in more ways than one, that Navigate is not actually magic (as I still imagine many of the mechanisms behind Google search are). It’s a dynamic organism, representing daily labor by Fellows, policy experts, abortion advocates, a user experience team, and software developers, not to mention the abortion providers and support organizations that provide the information. I feel proud to be one of the many sets of hands making quick work to accurately represent the constantly changing legal landscape around abortion and birth control access, as well as maintaining relationships between clinics and support organizations. I am constantly reminded of how much care goes into ensuring the information displayed on AbortionFinder is not only accurate, but digestible for a lay audience. And I’m heartened to continue to have the opportunity to speak directly to partners in reproductive well-being — something I was anxious about leaving behind in my previous role.
This isn’t to say that my current day-to-day matches precisely with my position with CAF. Abortion funding means getting your heart broken daily; finding money where there isn’t any to be found; saying yes a fraction as often as you’d like to (and then making it work anyway). Working at AbortionFinder is different. In some ways I’m zoomed out on the minutiae of making abortion possible. In other ways, I feel closer.
AbortionFinder (and Navigate) are tools, made and maintained by people who want them to work—for support organizations, yes, but most importantly for people seeking abortion care. I have carried into my work on AbortionFinder the conversations I’ve had with hundreds of callers over the years — especially their fears and their frustrations in how information was (or was not) accessible or evident to them in their moment of need. Then, as now, I am humbled by their candor, and honored to use this knowledge to (hopefully) make things easier for those who need help finding abortion care now and in the future.
No one should have to fight to get a semblance of what options are available to them. No one should be trapped or misled by predatory websites. I am proud that I landed at Power to Decide, and that my relationship to abortion work has grown and changed shape.
