By Alexia Rice-Henry and Angel Whaley
Despite funding cuts, increased needs, and intensified bans across the states we serve — we find a way.
Deep breaths as we reflect on this past year.
Inhale: Whether seeking an abortion or gender affirming care, the state wants to criminalize your bodily autonomy.
Exhale: Our work fills in the gaps that the state deliberately creates.
In 2024 barriers intensified, resulting in the deaths of pregnant people and national funding cuts impacting orgs like ARC-Southeast. Maternal mortality rates have been on the rise across the United States, almost doubling between 2014 to 2021, before Dobbs fell. Where we work and who we serve—Southern states and especially Black folks—are experiencing the highest rates of occurrence. Centering our callers and our staff who serve them is how we stay grounded. Not just grounded in the current conditions we’re facing, but also in the possibilities of world-building through care.
It’s clear that lawmakers’ intentional misinformation campaigns have increased confusion among our callers. As we meet the moment with harm reduction services, we also recognize traveling for abortion care is not an ideal or sustainable solution, and should not be normalized.
As we inhale what the system throws at us and our people, we will continue to exhale creative, adaptive care. While our staff gets ready to take a much-needed winter break, we wanted to share some lessons and wins from the year.
Lessons: Relationships and Knowledge Lower Burdens for Callers
We are one year deep into our Co-Leadership Model and it has strengthened our resilience in these turbulent times. We dedicated our first year to familiarizing ourselves and our team with the unique challenges that individuals in the South encounter when seeking safe and legal abortion services, contraceptives, and other reproductive healthcare options. We added three new Healthline team members and added Saturday hours for intake this year; taking the time to strengthen relationships with doulas, doctors, midwives and other essential workers ensures our staff is addressing the material realities of the states we serve.
That’s why in the spring we toured clinics with the Healthline staff to connect with clinicians, fellow funds or other sister organizations. Additionally, our entire staff and board participated in the Colorado Doula Project’s Abortion Doula Training, which will now be a standard part of our teams’ onboarding. As a result our staff is better plugged into the repro healthcare ecosystem and better equipped to reinforce community-driven infrastructure. Deeply knowing who and what comprises our network has improved our referral process, our health service delivery and our allocation of financial support services. The biggest blessing: this connectivity reduces the financial, mental burden on people seeking care.
Wins: Strengthening our Infrastructure of Care Inside and Out
We’ve been at this work for nearly a decade and it’s important that our mission is reflected in our internal org culture. As our staff grew, so did how we supported them. This year we:
- – Provided Healthline Staff with a Mental Health Stipend
- – Made space for Healthline and Outreach & Organizing team retreats that included some much needed rest and political education
- – Began an Organization-Wide Equitable Compensation Project with staff to move all staff to a Thriving Wage
Programmatically, we launched new funds and educational tools while deepening ways to build relationships. These efforts combined extend the mutual aid qualities of our work to meet the moment. They include:
- – Expanded Sow.Now.What (SNW), ARC-Southeast’s Peer-to-Peer Emotional Support Group for our callers, from one to two support groups held virtually on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month.
- – Launched our mutual aid fund, the Safe & Sustained Fund (SSF), in December 2023. SSF supported 110 people: beginning with former and current callers and SNW participants, and then expanding to include formerly incarcerated folks, trans and gender non-conforming people, and sex workers. More than 280 people requested a total of $142,007 via the SSF, and we were able to invest $41,500 to assist with rent, utility bills, childcare costs, and cash income supplements.
- – Began recording Southern Synergy, a podcast-based education campaign designed to explore the intersections of Reproductive Justice and the many issues we face in our lives and communities.
- – Launched Southern Echoes: A Fellowship for Reproductive Justice Storytellers, a dynamic, months-long virtual program dedicated to empowering storytellers across the Southeast to amplify the narratives central to reproductive justice and abolition.
Looking Ahead: Growing our Network, Alchemizing our Fear
The state will continue to fail us. We channel our anger and fear into action, and invite you to do the same. We can build the world we deserve with care at the center.
At ARC-SE we’re growing a network of informed advocates for reproductive justice across the South by leaning into our roots: teach-ins on survival first aid, fertility awareness, period care during climate disasters, self-managed abortion, infection prevention, intimate partner violence and more. Strengthening the RJ movement means equipping communities to be part of the caregiving process. We’re tightening our narrative through intensive political education and study, training our spokespeople, and developing a clear line for when we speak with community and media about abortion. And we’re being creative as we imagine what this work can look like in 2025.
There are many roles in our fight for collective liberation. If you’re sick and tired of the status quo join us by:
- – Challenging abortion stigma within your communities
- – Educating yourself on the limitations of Roe and the deadly results of abortion bans
- – Sharing this blog with a friend and asking them to sign up for our newsletter to stay informed, involved in what’s happening in the Southeast
- – Donating directly to local abortion funds and reproductive justice organizations. You can start with ARC-Southeast.
- – Applying to our new MonARCh voltuneer program via this form if you’re interested in providing rides to clinics, providing callers with gas cards, and being trained to be an Abortion Doula or Support Person.
As we move forward, we know the field is fraught with uncertainties, fear, and new challenges. But as abortion advocates in the South, none of this is new to us. We understand that fear is not a sustainable source from which to make decisions and organize, so we are choosing to rely on each other, and rely on our principles. By allowing the principles of reproductive justice to guide us, we are confident that we can navigate whatever the year 2025 may throw at us.