Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, people have been reaching out to abortion funds for help in historic numbers. In the first year after the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the National Network of Abortion Funds, a nationwide network of 100 abortion funds, financially supported more than 100,000 people seeking abortion care. NNAF disbursed over $36 million to people seeking abortions, and an additional $10 million in practical support funding, which includes transportation, lodging, and child care.

The decision also resulted in abortion funds receiving unprecedented amounts in donations. An influx of donations to Indigenous Women Rising, an abortion fund dedicated to Native and Indigenous people in the United States and Canada, allowed the organization to double its staff and expand employee benefits.

“We’re so grateful for the folks around the globe who donated right after Dobbs,” said Rachael Lorenzo, Indigenous Women Rising’s executive director. “I’m proud of using those funds to invest in my staff because the work that we do requires a lot of emotional labor, and I want to compensate them for the heavy work they do. It’s made such a positive impact on our organization, especially since a majority of our staff do not have college degrees.”

However, that level of donations has not been maintained since what Sylvia Ghazarian, executive director of the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project, a national abortion fund, calls 2022’s “rage giving.”

Ghazarian said when it comes to donations since Dobbs, “we’ve reversed back to where it was. We’re in constant fundraising mode because a person can’t wait to have an abortion.”

At the same time, expenses have only grown as state abortion bans and restrictions made getting care more complicated and onerous.

“All of us across the board have seen an increase in legal and security costs, which have skyrocketed,” Ghazarian said. “That’s just the reality of this crisis.”

Abortion funds have been largely ignored by traditional philanthropy and therefore rely heavily on individual donors, making financial planning difficult, if not impossible. Many funds operate on such thin margins that they can’t afford to hire development staff and often don’t have anyone with fundraising expertise.

“We aren’t funded enough to bring in development experts,” Lexis Dotson-Dufault, executive director of the Abortion Fund of Ohio, said. “This is something that a lot of abortion........

© Rewire.News