Special thanks to Alexis, Healthline, and ARC staff for supporting this post
Around twenty of us are all lined up in the basement of an old Atlanta building. It’s February 2025; the concrete floor is particularly cold. Some of us are bundled up with small cups of burnt coffee and wooden stirrers. “What risks are you willing to take to support reproductive justice?” The question hangs in the air.
On one side there are people more risk tolerant; on the other side there are people who are more risk adverse. I barely had enough time to process the last four years let alone the last four months; I am somewhere in the middle and I am more afraid than ever. My coworkers, my friends in this movement, give me insight: Who will all of our people turn to for abortion support during this year? In 2024, we supported around 3,300 callers. If everyone shuts their doors due to fear, what will happen to our community? What will happen to the South?
We’re from the South. A few folks moved down here from up North, some of us came by way of Florida or Alabama, and a lot of us are ATLiens (or close enough). We know everybody. Our volunteers show up eager to support caller drop offs and invite their friends to ARC’s book club meetings. Earlier this year, I received my IUD care from the Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation, one of the first clinics ARC supported with abortion funding. Many of our callers become ingrained in reproductive justice and they find ways to join us in the movement, like teaching yoga for ARC’s 10 year anniversary celebration. We partner with many community orgs, on everything from teach-ins to Plan B kit-making and community dinners.
We’ve been doing this work through many crises: from new abortion bans to devastating hurricanes, through Cop Cities and criminalized pregnancies, despite misinformation campaigns and government targeting. And 2025 was no different.
After the fall of Roe in 2022, our Healthline launched a gas card program with 2 clinics, because half of the states we serve have total abortion bans. This means many callers are driving anywhere from 5 to 9 hours to receive routine abortion care, an average of 400 miles round trip. As of this year, we have expanded this program ten fold to a total of 22 clinics! Multiple times a month, we’re able to send out batches of gas cards to clinics for our callers to use for their return trip home. Most callers opt to drive because, although ARC can help pay for a plane ticket, driving means they can bring someone with them for support. Others opt to drive because they are afraid of flying, and some may be afraid to fly because of their immigration status or many other reasons.
Our communities are facing increased surveillance and violence by federal and local policing agencies, and rampant misinformation from mainstream media and social platforms. This includes Southerners from many different communities — trans and TLGBQ+ folks, immigrants, Black people, and poor folks. The result is an even worse climate of fear that our callers and staff have to navigate.
In response, ARC’s support for callers has never been more robust. I have supported abortion access with ARC since 2019. In my 6 years of working here, I have never been more proud of the work we do. The average amount we paid for each individual abortion was $488 for the year of 2025, and Healthline trained new staff members to support with funding and travel support. We continued developing our intake process to make things smoother and care-full for our callers. We toured six clinics within our growing network. We shared dinner with front line healthcare providers and they told us the challenges patients experience when trying to seek abortion care, like lack of childcare and money for gas. This allowed us to form deeper connections with not only our clinics but expand our gas card program to more clinics in ARC’s network.
Collaboration has been our saving grace in these times. Connecting with other regional and state abortion funds has allowed us to share and refine our travel support processes together.
In Florida there has been a frightening drop in support requests; we do not know if this is due to laws affecting freedom of travel, stigma and misinformation, or lack of trust. In 2025, ARC joined Florida funds like FAN, EMA, TBAF, and WEN, in an ongoing effort to meet the needs of Florida residents seeking abortion care, due to the state’s 6 week ban. We meet monthly to build sustainable organizational capacity through funding and staffing; address misinformation and low public awareness through storytelling; and strengthen standards of care amid ongoing clinic capacity constraints.. Our collective knowledge allowed us to decrease confusion and increase capacity for travel support, which averaged a whopping $665 per request for the year of 2025.
In 2025, we saw over 5,400 callers – that’s nearly double the number of callers we served last year. The needs of each caller are increasingly complex. The average amount callers could pay out of pocket this year was just $278. This year we needed to connect to more clinics, people, and organizations, because the need has never been greater.
In addition to expanding tangible and financial resources for our callers, Healthline staff have participated in trainings to provide better emotional and social support. Connecting with organizations like HEART not only allowed us to understand the intersection of reproductive justice and Palestinian justice, but also helped us provide culturally relevant resources for a caller trying to flee from domestic violence. Working with organizations like Caminar Latino helped us better understand navigating callers in these difficult situations, while Peoples Hub helped inform our whole organization on the intricacies of weaving disability justice into our work.
At times, it feels hopeless. One of my callers was in deep rural Mississippi without transportation or money, and she did not know how far along she was; she told me that she planned to ask a friend to drive 9 hrs for a medical abortion that she may have been too far along to receive. In times like these, I rely on my team in the Healthline. We brainstormed ideas and luckily, she eventually found a legitimate clinic to give her an ultrasound as opposed to one of the many crisis pregnancy centers that litter the South with stigma and disinformation.
From there, I found a clinic within driving distance of a major airport. ARC provided the plane ticket for her and the volunteer escort she needed to sign in for her surgical abortion. We also provided a hotel, and then I collaborated with two other organizations to cover local rides and food. But then her first escort cancelled at the last minute, as did the second person who agreed to escort her. I remember staying up late at a conference, inside the hotel, waiting for her to call me back, praying for her to let me know she checked into the hotel. She did, and we damn near cried together! She received her abortion. ARC covered over $2100 for this individual’s travel and remaining abortion cost; this was more than the cost of the procedure itself.
Collaborating together, being in community together is our power—including when it comes to the care we provide our staff to mitigate burnout and stress. This year, ARC partnered with Don’t Clock Out, a peer support group for healthcare providers, to facilitate emotional support sessions for our staff who speak with callers, including our facilitator of Sow Now What, ARC’s caller-only support group. In these sessions, we learned about self-care after secondhand trauma, sensory toolkits, and ways to process grief.
There’s still so much work to be done. ARC is working with Amplify, a collaboration of reproductive justice organizations, to make a coordinated, long-term fight for reproductive justice in Georgia. In the next year Healthline hopes to increase access to resources for callers who speak different languages, who need childcare, or live in rural communities. We’ve already begun to pilot a childcare program, thanks to my colleagues Zoe and Shaquira.
“We onboarded our first cohort of medical support doulas in October to support callers across the state of Georgia. We have coverage from the city of Atlanta to Camila,” Zoe and Shaquira said. They also shared with me that as we continue to see the gaps in accessing abortion and child care “our goal is to expand this program and lean into partnerships with additional funds and clinics to make a tangible difference in some of the angst preparing for the clinical experience.”
In addition to these efforts, we’re looking toward supporting callers outside of Georgia more, especially those in the deepest parts of the South that need our help. ARC’s outreach team is is also expanding access to Plan B and Opill (the first over the counter birth control pill), while others are working to continue providing critical political education and health information. We worked well up to the publishing of this blog post just to plan for the new year!
We’re tired, but we will be here with you to support our community. Every step of the way.
For 2026, we’ll see y’all outside!
— Kenny
(they.them)