We continue our series titled “Abortion Struggles Around the World” with our interview with Women Help Women team. To learn more about Women Help Women’s work, please visit their website.
Could you tell us a little about WHW? When was it founded, how is it organized, and what are its main goals?
Women Help Women is a global feminist organization working at the intersection of abortion access, feminist technologies, and social movements. We were founded in 2014 by activists, counsellors, and researchers who had already spent years on abortion hotlines, accompanying people in their communities, and sharing critical information. What brought us together was a simple but ambitious goal: to build an infrastructure that connects the safety and science of medical abortion with the power, knowledge, and reach of feminist movements.
Today, we are a small, distributed team working across regions, in close collaboration with partners and collectives in dozens of countries. While we run a global telehealth platform, our work goes far beyond service provision. We focus on strengthening ecosystems, supporting local organizations through partnerships, training, and shared strategies so they can develop and sustain their own models of access.
At the core our work is a clear understanding: safe, effective, and affordable abortion medicines already exist. However, access remains deeply unequal because of criminalization, stigma, restrictive policies, and distorted pharmaceutical markets. These forces determine who can access care and who cannot.
What we do at Women Help Women is shift that balance of power by expanding access, supporting frontline actors, and building feminist infrastructures that make self-managed abortion possible, safe, and supported.
Medical abortion has become an increasingly accepted method around the world. Can you share the latest developments on medical abortion and how widespread it is in the regions you support?
Medical abortion is no longer experimental or marginal; it is the backbone of abortion access globally, and the evidence is overwhelming. WHO concludes that for pregnancies under 12 weeks, people “can safely and effectively manage their own medical abortions using mifepristone and misoprostol in combination or misoprostol alone,” and that enabling this “can significantly improve access to safe, timely, affordable and person-centered abortion care.” Standard mifepristone–misoprostol regimens achieve around 95–98% complete abortion in early pregnancy, with serious complications well under 1% when used as recommended. Research by IBIS reproductive health shows that self‑managed medication abortion with accompaniment support is highly effective and non‑inferior to clinic‑based care, including in misoprostol‑only regimens. Put simply, it’s unstoppable: people want safer, simpler, easier ways to control their reproductive lives, and feminist telehealth, hotlines, and accompaniment networks, like us, are already turning that demand into reality. Alongside using existing products, we are also building our own abortion technologies from the ground up. At Women Help Women, we have developed a custom combi pack with extra misoprostol for peace of mind, designed around what people need when they are managing an abortion themselves. The pack is lighter and more eco‑friendly, reducing unnecessary materials and shipping weight while keeping quality tightly controlled from the source. This is what feminist Abotech looks like: not just delivering pills, but re‑engineering how they are packaged, priced, and presented so that safe, effective medical abortion is easier, more dignified, and more sustainable for the people who use it.
Can you walk us through the procedure when a woman contacts you? Could you tell us more about the self-managed medical abortion process you facilitate, and how it progresses from the initial contact?
Most people reach us through our website, where they complete a confidential consultation form, or via our helpdesks in different languages; they tell us where they are, how far along the pregnancy is, any health conditions, and often share their story in detail—why they want this abortion, what they are worried about, who they can or cannot tell. We work every day, in nine different languages, on an encrypted platform that protects the information people share and allows us to truly meet them where they are.
From that first point, we do three things. First, we provide clear, evidence-based information on their options and on how medical abortion works, what to expect physically and emotionally, how to recognize normal bleeding, and which warning signs would require in person care. Second, we run a telehealth care program and, since opening in 2014, have provided access to essential medicines to more than 100,000 people globally. Third, we offer ongoing support: people can write back with questions at any stage of the process, whether they are asking about pain management, emotional reactions, or simply needing reassurance that what they are experiencing is normal.
Self-managed abortion in this context means that the person is in control: they decide where, when, and with whom they use the medicines. Our role is to make sure they have the right information, a quality product, and someone on the other end of the line if they need support.
Can you tell us about your telehealth support? How do women reach out to you, and in what ways do you support them?
Our telehealth work combines a global platform with very localized knowledge. People reach us primarily online—through our website, social media, and word of mouth, often via other feminist groups and activists. Once they fill in the online consultation in our website womenhelp.org, trained counsellors review their information, respond in their language, and accompany them through the process.
This model for us is a form of feminist care at a distance. We answer questions before, during and after the abortion; we explain what is happening in the body; we validate feelings of relief, sadness, anger, or all the above. We also help people navigate the health system if they need in person follow up—for example, by helping them understand when something is urgent and when it is not.
In some settings, it is the only way to access high‑quality abortion care; in others, people actively prefer it because it fits their lives. Crucially, it allows us to reach people where physical clinics are closed, criminalized, too far away, or too expensive, and where people prefer to self‑manage their abortions with trusted support. It cuts out the need to travel, take time off work, find childcare, rearrange daily life, or run the gauntlet of protesters outside a clinic. In that sense, it is not a poor substitute for “real” care; it is a way of expanding what real care can look like.
Given that abortion has become such a highly medicalized procedure, there are often questions about self‑managed abortion at home. Could you explain what this process means for women? Why is it safe, how should it be carried out, and what are the risks involved?
Abortion medicines are extremely safe—often safer than drugs people can buy over the counter, like sildenafil in any Turkish pharmacy—yet they are far more tightly controlled because they touch reproductive power, not because of their risk profile. The World Health Organization classifies both mifepristone and misoprostol as essential medicines and explicitly recognizes that people can use them without close medical supervision when they have accurate information and access to backup care. We know our bodies, our needs, our dreams, our plans; we are the experts of our own lives, and we know that, with the right information and support, we can safely self‑manage an abortion.
The medical risks are generally minimal; what is dangerous are conservative, patriarchal laws and medical systems that criminalize, delay, or deny care. That is why feminist organizations emphasize not only pharmacology but also accompaniment, legal information, and advocacy: when people have the tools and the knowledge, self‑management is not a risky last resort but a profoundly safe, dignifying way to take abortion out of institutional control and return it to the people who need it.
The instructions to use the pills and other info can be accessed via womenhelp.org.
Your website states that you provide support not only to individuals seeking an abortion, but also to women’s organizations and similar groups that wish to support abortion access. Could you explain how you collaborate with and support these organizations?
From the beginning, Women Help Women has been as much about building movement infrastructure as about direct action. Sustainable access doesn’t come from one website; it comes from feminist groups rooted in their communities, speaking local languages, navigating local politics, and still being there when projects and funding cycles end.
We support organizations in three main ways. First, through training and technical support: we share evidence, protocols, and practical tools on self‑managed abortion, digital security, communications, and accompaniment—anything from helping a group start a hotline to co‑creating materials or supporting a regional network to swap strategies across borders. All our materials are open source, so people can adapt them to their realities.
Second, through collaborative projects and research. We don’t parachute in; we develop initiatives with partners—whether that means trying out new ways of delivering pills, documenting people’s experiences, or building collective power. The aim is to co‑create knowledge and infrastructure, not to roll out a single model everywhere.
Third, through solidarity and political work. In many places, organizations and activists are under direct attack from smear campaigns to prosecution. We use our international position to amplify their voices, connect them with allies, and push to make sure that any talk of “innovation” or “access” starts with the people on the frontlines. Supporting organizations means standing behind their strategies, not swapping them out for ours.
Recently, anti-abortion rhetoric and policies among both political authorities and certain groups have significantly surged worldwide. Has this had a direct impact on your work? If so, how do you counter and resist these challenges?
The global backlash is not abstract for us; it’s the weather we work in every day. We are seeing increased surveillance of digital spaces, harassment and doxxing of staff and partners, legal threats, payment processors and platforms cutting off services, and direct attacks on telehealth models. Backlash also emboldens local actors, conservative groups, religious fundamentalists who target our partners, our users, and our stories.
It hits us in very concrete ways: more security work, more emotional and legal risk for staff, and sometimes the need to redesign or relocate parts of our operations. But it also makes our work more necessary than ever. When states and institutions retreat or attack, self‑managed abortion and feminist networks become lifelines.
We respond on several levels. Operationally, we invest in digital and physical security, legal support, and contingency plans. Politically, we refuse to let anti‑rights forces set the terms of the debate: we center evidence, lived experience, and a feminist narrative of abortion as care and as a right. Strategically, we build alliances with other SRHR (sexual and reproductive health and rights) groups, broader social movements, researchers, and lawyers so no organization faces these attacks alone. In the middle of this backlash, we are not just holding the line; we are building the future of abortion care one network, one hotline, and one person at a time.
