2026 Call to Action!

Our Commitment

Through this Call to Action on this #September28, which marks the 2026 International Safe Abortion Day, we reaffirm our commitment to  #SolidarityInAction to demand safe, accessible and quality abortion services and care for every person, everywhere. No one should be criminalized for their reproductive choices, forced to continue a pregnancy, undergo an abortion, or disclose personal reproductive decisions because of pressure from families, partners, communities, institutions or healthcare providers.

Reproductive justice can only be truly achieved when we are free to exercise our bodily autonomy and access the healthcare we  need without judgment, punishment, or barriers. This Call to Action  strongly demands advancing reproductive justice and strengthening  health systems so that they recognize comprehensive abortion care (CAC) as an essential part of healthcare.

When rights are attacked, we all pay the price

A health system cannot be universal if people are excluded from the care they need. Universal healthcare must include comprehensive abortion care. Legal recognition alone does not guarantee meaningful access: people may still face financial, geographic, administrative, institutional, social, and discriminatory barriers to care. Advancing reproductive justice therefore requires removing these barriers and ensuring that health systems are capable of delivering comprehensive abortion care to all who need it. 

In recent decades, anti-rights actors have become increasingly coordinated and transnational, embedding themselves across political, institutional, multilateral and diplomatic spaces. They share resources, strategies, narratives, and tactics to restrict abortion access, spread disinformation, undermine bodily autonomy, and weaken reproductive justice movements. They increasingly co-opt the language of human rights, culture, family, and public health to legitimize policies that deny people autonomy over their bodies and lives.

These efforts are taking place alongside broader political and economic pressures on health systems, including cuts to public health budgets, inadequate investment in healthcare workers, shortages of essential medicines, and weakened primary and community healthcare. These pressures  have implications far beyond  access to safe abortion and comprehensive safe abortion care. The lack of resources and attention to health has also undermined access to contraception, maternal healthcare, STI prevention and treatment, cancer screening, emergency care, and other essential services. Strengthening health systems is therefore inseparable from strengthening abortion care and sexual and reproductive health rights for all.

When health systems fail or fall short of demand, the burden does not fall equally. People with greater resources may be able to travel, pay for private care, or navigate fragmented systems, while people living in poverty, rural and geographically isolated communities, indigenous peoples, Black and Afro-descendant communities, young people, people with disabilities, migrants and refugees, LGBTQIA+ people, and people affected by conflict and crisis face compounded barriers. Health systems must therefore  confront structural inequalities and ensure culturally safe, community-responsive and anti-racist models of care that reverse the ongoing effects of colonialism and discrimination.

Solidarity in Action: A Call to Our Movement 

We call on our allies across the broader social justice movement to join us in taking action for the right to safe, accessible, and comprehensive abortion care. Together, through #SolidarityInAction, we can advance reproductive justice, strengthen health systems, uphold bodily autonomy, and build a future where everyone can access the care they need. 

Solidarity in action means more than defending abortion rights when they are under threat. It means building the conditions in which those rights can be realized and sustained. It means connecting movements with health systems, communities with providers, knowledge with action, and resources with the people and organizations doing the work. It also means acknowledging Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and community-based systems that have long sustained reproductive health, collective care, accompaniment, and bodily autonomy. We must continue building connections across movements, generations, regions, and struggles; and sharing knowledge, resources, strategies, protection, platforms, and power. We are part of a diverse reproductive justice ecosystem that includes people seeking abortion, healthcare providers, community health workers, doulas and acompañantes, abortion funds and hotlines, feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements, legal advocates, researchers, communicators, journalists, technologists, developers, policymakers, governments, funders, and many others who make abortion care and access possible.

This September 28, we call on all of us to turn solidarity into action: to defend abortion as healthcare, remove the barriers that prevent people from accessing care, advance reproductive justice, strengthen the health systems and community-based systems of care that make access possible, and build a future where everyone can access the care they need with dignity, autonomy, safety, and support.

Together, we are building the conditions for reproductive freedom not only to protect the gains we have made, but to expand access, strengthen health systems, and make comprehensive abortion care a reality for all.

We call on governments to:

• Recognize abortion as essential healthcare and integrate comprehensive abortion care into universal health coverage and national health systems.
• Decriminalize abortion and remove legal, administrative, financial, and institutional barriers that delay or deny care.
• Ensure access to safe, timely, affordable, confidential, and stigma-free abortion care, including quality-assured medicines, trained providers, referral pathways, and comprehensive post-abortion care.
• Strengthen primary, community-based, and decentralized health services, including appropriate models of self-managed abortion, telehealth, and community-based care.
• Protect healthcare workers, community providers, doulas, acompañantes, advocates, and people seeking abortion from criminalization, surveillance, harassment, and violence.
• Ensure comprehensive abortion care remains available in conflict, humanitarian emergencies, disasters, and other crises, and address the compounded barriers faced by marginalized communities.
• Provide comprehensive sexuality education and accurate, accessible, evidence-based reproductive health information, including through channels and languages that reach young people and underserved communities.
• Ensure adolescent- and youth-friendly abortion and SRHR services that protect confidentiality, privacy, informed decision-making and non-discrimination, and remove unnecessary barriers created by stigma, age or provider attitudes. 
• Establish effective accountability mechanisms  when legally permissible abortion care is denied, and meaningfully involve affected communities in shaping and monitoring health policies and services. Ensure accessible and confidential complaints and referral mechanisms for people who experience denial of care, discrimination, coercion, stigma, or mistreatment within abortion services. 
• Ensure abortion and sexual and reproductive health services are accessible, acceptable, culturally responsive and available in languages that communities understand and use , particularly for Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, linguistic minorities, and geographically marginalised populations.
• Address racism, discrimination, and colonial legacies within health systems through training, accountability mechanisms, and meaningful participation of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in policy design, implementation and monitoring.

We call on global institutions, funders, and development partners to:

• Recognize comprehensive abortion care as essential to universal healthcare, reproductive justice, gender equality, and human rights.
• Invest in strong, equitable, and resilient health systems that integrate abortion care alongside primary healthcare, maternal health, contraception, STI services, cancer care, emergency care, and essential medicines.
• Provide core, flexible, long-term, and sustainable funding for abortion care, and the wider ecosystem that makes access possible, including community-based services, research, advocacy, legal support, digital access, and movement building.
• Resource the wider abortion care ecosystem, including providers, community health workers, doulas, acompañantes, hotlines, abortion funds, legal aid groups, researchers, and feminist organizations.
• Prioritize direct, flexible and long-term funding for grassroots, youth-led, LGBTQIA+-led, disability-led, Indigenous-led, Afro-descendant-led and community-based movements, particularly those working with communities facing the greatest barriers, and reduce unnecessary intermediary and administrative barriers that limit their access to resources.  
• Treat movement resilience, safety, and sustainability as fundable priorities, particularly as political and funding environments become more restrictive and anti-rights actors strengthen cross-border coordination and organizing. 
• Uphold international human rights standards and hold governments accountable for their obligations to protect the rights to health, life, privacy, equality, bodily autonomy, and freedom from discrimination.
• Protect and uphold existing international human rights standards on sexual and reproductive health and rights in multilateral processes, and resist efforts to weaken, condition or undermine previously agreed commitments. 

We call on media organizations and storytellers to:

• Recognize abortion as healthcare and report on it as a health, human rights, and reproductive justice issue, rather than framing it solely as a political and moral controversy.
• Tell accurate, nuanced, and stigma-free stories that center the voices, experiences, and agency of people seeking abortion, as well as providers, community workers, and movements.
• Challenge abortion-related misinformation, disinformation, stigma, and harmful narratives, including by examining how anti-rights actors shape public discourse.
• Use responsible language, imagery, and framing, and avoid sensationalizing abortion or exposing people to unnecessary risk, harassment, or criminalization.
• Create space for young, marginalized, and underrepresented voices, and support storytelling in local languages and through the platforms communities actually use.
• Use the power of popular culture and arts,  journalism, podcasts, film, and digital storytelling to shift public narratives from abortion as controversy to abortion as care, healthcare, and a matter of justice.
• Promote storytelling that reflects the diversity of abortion experiences, including those of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant communities, rural populations, migrants, and people living at the intersections of multiple forms of discrimination.
• Center people who have experienced abortion as experts and knowledge holders, recognizing the value of their lived experiences—including experiences of accessing safe abortion care or experiencing unsafe or inaccessible abortion—in shaping policy, health systems, advocacy, research, and movement strategies. Ensure that lived experience is engaged ethically and non-extractively, with informed consent, agency, safety, dignity, and control over how experiences are shared, without practices that could cause harm, reinforce stigma, or undermine efforts to improve abortion care.

We call on technology companies, digital platforms, and developers to:

• Protect access to accurate abortion and reproductive health information and stop unjustified censorship, removal, de-ranking, or suppression of legitimate health content.
• Establish transparent, rights-based content moderation and platform policies that do not conflate evidence-based SRHR information with prohibited content.
• Address the amplification of abortion-related misinformation, while protecting the ability of health providers, advocates, researchers, and communities to share trustworthy information.
• Protect people seeking, providing, and supporting abortion care from online harassment, doxxing, surveillance, threats, and coordinated abuse.
• Build accessible, secure, privacy-preserving, and inclusive technologies that support information, service navigation, referral, communication, and community care.
• Ensure that algorithms and AI systems do not reproduce anti-abortion bias, misinformation, or discriminatory barriers to reproductive health information and services. 
• Meaningfully engage healthcare providers, feminist and reproductive justice movements, digital rights advocates, developers, and affected communities in designing and governing technologies that shape access to care and information.

We call on civil society, allies, and movements to:

• Recognize abortion justice as integral to reproductive justice and inseparable from  broader struggles for universal healthcare, gender justice, economic justice, disability justice, LGBTQIA+ rights, racial justice, migrant justice, workers’ rights, peace, and democracy.
• Stand with people seeking abortion and with those who provide, accompany, support, advocate for, and defend abortion care.
• Turn solidarity into sustained action by sharing resources, data, knowledge, strategies, platforms, protection, and power across movements, generations, and borders.
• Strengthen coordination and information-sharing across national, regional, and global movements to monitor emerging anti-rights initiatives, anticipate restrictive narratives and strategies and respond collectively in national and multilateral spaces. 
• Challenge abortion stigma, misinformation, and exclusion within our own communities and movements, while reclaiming narratives that affirm abortion as care and healthcare.
• Center the leadership and lived experiences of young people and communities most affected by reproductive injustice, ensuring they are decision-makers and movement leaders, rather than being treated merely beneficiaries.
• Strengthen community-led systems of care, accompaniment, mutual aid, research, documentation, and advocacy while demanding that governments fulfill their responsibility to provide accessible public healthcare.
• Build cross-movement and cross-border solidarity to meet coordinated anti-rights organizing with coordinated, creative, and sustained collective action.
• Use advocacy, storytelling, research and documentation, organizing, strategic litigation, and public mobilization to hold institutions accountable and advance reproductive justice.
• Recognize  that reproductive justice is inseparable from the rights of Indigenous Peoples and Afro-descendant communities to self-determination, meaningful participation, cultural integrity, and equitable access to healthcare.

Ready to make an impact this September 28? Share your plans with us, and let’s collaborate to turn your ideas into reality. Don’t miss the chance to partner with the September 28 Working Group and Campaign Partners. Email us now and be part of the change!