NEW ORLEANS — The Louisiana Abortion Fund released the following statement in response to ten abortion-related state ballot measures:
“Abortion restrictions make birthing people less safe, create hurdles for healthcare providers as they seek to provide quality care, and threaten our basic human right to determine what happens to our bodies. While we were excited to see seven out of ten states voted to protect or expand access, yesterday’s losses are heartbreaking as real people—our neighbors, friends, mothers, and sisters—will pay the price.
It’s up to us, the people working to advance reproductive justice, to educate and mobilize our communities and build a shared vision for our future. We all want quality healthcare and to know that if something goes wrong, our doctors have every tool available to care for us. We all want to be able to make the decisions that are right for us and our families. And we all want safe, caring communities for ourselves and our young people. Abortion access is key to making those things a reality.
The Louisiana Abortion Fund will continue to help our neighbors overcome the geographic and financial hurdles placed between them and abortion care so that one day we can all determine when or if to have children and live in and care for our families in safe, healthy communities.”
—Chasity Wilson, Executive Director of the Louisiana Abortion Fund
About the Louisiana Abortion Fund
The Louisiana Abortion Fund (formerly the New Orleans Abortion Fund) is a community fund that assists our neighbors in overcoming the economic and geographic barriers erected to prevent them from accessing abortion care. By providing low-barrier financial support for abortions and support for travel and childcare, we are investing in our community’s liberation. We work to center Black people, Indigenous communities, people of color, queer folks, and immigrants, because we know that when the most marginalized among us are free, we will all be free.
Our work is rooted in the principles of reproductive justice as defined by SisterSong as, “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”
As a Black-led organization in the Deep South in a post-Roe landscape, we recognize that the barriers to abortion care were too high and too many long before the Supreme Court’s most recent ruling. We envision a world where everyone has access to the healthcare they determine is right for them, and those who decide to raise children can raise them in a world free from state violence and the violences of poverty, patriarchy, white supremacy, and queerphobia.
Learn more about Louisiana Abortion Fund at www.louisianaabortionfund.org.
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