By Emily Baker-White, Forbes Staff

To a Facebook group of more than 8,000 strangers, Brazilian women plead for help.

“I’m 15 weeks pregnant I don’t know what to do anymore. I tried the medicine at 8 weeks and it went wrong,” says one message.

“I’m 9 weeks and 4 days pregnant. I’ve tried all the possible teas that I saw on the internet, and some of them really hurt. I already have two small children, and this one came from carelessness …. Time is passing and I am desperate,” says another.

A third woman says she cannot afford abortion medicine, so she’s seeking other remedies. A fourth says she spent the only money she had on a sale she now fears was a scam.

The group hosting these messages is called “Safe Abortion — Helping Women.” In Brazil, where abortion is illegal in most cases, nearly two hundred thousand women have joined similar groups devoted to buying and selling mifepristone, misoprostol and a variety of homemade remedies that they hope might terminate their unwanted pregnancies.

The groups are not for the faint of heart. Many feature photos of bloody sanitary pads and fetal solids, and many more feature cries for help from women fleeing abusive partners or fearing for the health of their existing children. Posts warning of scammers and fake pills are common, as are side-conversations about unprotected sex and contraception. Occasionally, a person opposed to abortion chimes in advising the women to consider adoption.

Brazil is one of many countries where women have turned to a muddied Facebook landscape to seek abortion care. A Forbes review of the platform found nearly 800 groups and pages across 76 countries offering to connect women to abortion remedies — at least 300 of which operate in countries where abortion is at least sometimes illegal, or even a criminal offense. All told, the groups have nearly 1.8 million members.Forbes found that Facebook groups and pages selling abortion drugs were present in nearly every major region around the world, including abortion-restrictive population centers like Brazil (111 groups; >191,000 members), Kenya (50 groups, >111,000 members) and the Philippines (57 groups; >37,000 members). We also found them in Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, Germany and Norway.

Seventeen groups and pages claimed to provide abortion pills to women in the United States, though it is unclear how many of them actually make the pills available. The largest, which has more than 117,000 members, directed users to an abortion-related URL that subsequently redirected to an adult website.........

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