A History of Abortion Undergrounds—and a Guide to Starting One

Journalist Rebecca Grant shifts the abortion conversation away from laws and morals to focus on access: getting people the care they seek.

Jessie Kindig
August 4, 2025

On a rainy evening in June 2001, abortion pirates sailed into Dublin harbor. Their converted fishing trawler had a portable clinic bolted to the deck, and the cargo included 20 doses of medication abortion (mifepristone and misoprostol), thousands of condoms, 120 IUDs, and 250 morning-after pills. The ship’s nearly all-female crew included a nurse and a gynecologist and was led by Rebecca Gomperts, a freckled and dark-haired Dutch doctor in her mid-thirties. The boat made its way up the River Liffey and docked close to a waiting crowd of activists and journalists.

Continued: https://newrepublic.com/article/198369/abortion-undergrounds-history-guide

Mexico / Malta – These two women are making abortions possible for those whose governments won’t allow it

“Our aim is to guarantee free and safe legal abortions to rape survivors”

September 27, 2024

Verónica Cruz Sánchez, for Amnesty International

Years ago in Guanajuato and throughout Mexico, abortion for survivors of rape wasn’t available. While it was technically legal, our government did not provide the services women and girls needed.

We created our feminist organization Las Libres (the Free Ones) in 2000 because we wanted to promote women’s rights and be there for those who had been raped. It seemed completely inhuman to think that these girls would have to bring these pregnancies to term. We wanted to make sure their rights were upheld, so we formed a network of gynaecologists, along with psychologists and lawyers to help guarantee the right to free and safe abortion. We also wanted to support girls and women who wanted to terminate unwanted pregnancies at home without medical supervision by accessing abortion pills for free.

Continued: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2024/09/these-two-women-are-making-abortions-possible-for-those-whose-governments-wont-allow-it/

27.09.2024

Commentary

abortion decriminalization

Amnesty International

Isabel Stabile

Las Libres

Verónica Cruz Sánchez

Global: Abortion rights defenders facing violence and stigmatization share powerful stories as part of Amnesty’s new podcast

September 26, 2024
Amnesty International

People defending the right to abortion have revealed what it’s like to provide life-saving healthcare in the face of violence, repression and stigma, as part of Amnesty International’s second season of On the Side of Humanity podcast.

The three-part series – slated for release on International Safe Abortion Day on 28 September and available via all good podcast apps – features stories from healthcare workers and activists who are defending the right of women, girls and anyone who can get pregnant to take control over their own bodies and to get the best available healthcare when they most need it. Each episode is approximately 30 minutes.

Continued: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/09/global-abortion-rights-defenders-facing-violence-and-stigmatization-share-powerful-stories-as-part-of-amnestys-new-podcast/

Mexico’s abortion activists pivot to help Americans as they struggle with the post-Roe reality

Mexicans once envied the reproductive freedoms available in the United States. Now, they’re shipping pills across the border and fielding desperate questions from states where abortion is effectively banned

JANICE DICKSON, INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS REPORTER
PHOTOGRAPHY BY VERÓNICA GABRIELA CÁRDENAS
June 26, 2024

Vanessa Jiménez Rubalcava could spend all day responding to text messages. They come in at all hours, a torrent of questions from Americans translated into Spanish. The women and girls on the other end are all looking for the same thing: abortion pills.

On a quiet street in Monterrey, a sprawling city in northern Mexico, getting help from Ms. Jiménez Rubalcava and her wife, Sandra Cardona Alanís, is the only option for many women living north of the border who are desperate to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

Continued: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/us-politics/article-mexicos-abortion-activists-pivot-to-help-americans-as-they-struggle/

A Mexican Underground Movement to Provide US Women Abortion Pills

These networks, led primarily by women, operate outside of the established medical world.

Isaiah Thompson
January 18, 2024

As abortion access becomes increasingly restricted across the United States, underground activist networks, known as “companion networks,” in Mexico are providing women with abortion medications—not just in their own country but across the US border, too.

These networks, led primarily by women, operate outside of the established medical world and the law to create access to abortion even in states where abortions have become effectively, if not literally, illegal.

Continued: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/a-mexican-underground-movement-to-provide-us-women-abortion-pills/

Mexico’s activist ‘companion networks’ quietly provide abortion pills and support to U.S. women

By Olivia Goldhill
Dec. 7, 2023

TIJUANA, Mexico — Just over a decade ago, when Crystal Pérez Lira needed an abortion, she had to leave Mexico. The procedure was illegal in her home state of Baja California and so deeply stigmatized that even Pérez Lira supported the procedure only for those who were raped. Until she unexpectedly got pregnant.

She traveled to the U.S. for help, walking alone across the border from Tijuana to San Diego, first for a health check and a compulsory ultrasound, and then back for a second appointment, when she was given pills to induce an abortion. She returned to Mexico, where she went through the procedure at a friend’s house.

Continued: https://www.statnews.com/2023/12/07/mexican-abortion-activist-networks-provides-abortion-pills-united-states/

Mexico Has Become a Haven for Americans Seeking an Abortion

“Whoever needs our help, we would be happy to serve.”

ABBY VESOULIS

Nov 22, 2023

One last-minute round-trip flight from Biloxi, Mississippi, to Cancún, Mexico, runs about $171 USD; three nights at a three-star hotel there can cost as little as $129. A three-day car rental in the resort town rings in at just $20 per day. And the price for one surgical abortion at MSI Reproductive Choices’ Cancún clinic would be about $350. The total cost for a trip to Cancún to access reproductive health services no longer available in some American states? $710.

Starting November 23, when the international sexual health organization MSI Reproductive Health Services opens the doors to its first Cancún reproductive health center, a pregnant American from a US state where abortion is banned could find the procedure to be both more affordable and more accessible in Mexico. Quintana Roo, the Mexican state where Cancún is located, has become one of at least a dozen Mexican states to decriminalize abortion in the last two years amid a series of judicial rulings that have strengthened reproductive rights, culminating in a September Mexican Supreme Court ruling that made state laws criminalizing abortion unconstitutional nationwide.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/mexico-has-become-a-haven-for-americans-seeking-an-abortion/

Mexican abortion-pill networks reach across U.S. border to help immigrants without access

By Marien López-Medina, Kevin Palomino, April Pierdant and Tori Gantz
Sep 9, 2023

MONTERREY, Mexico — Verónica Cruz Sánchez watched something remarkable happen from the office of her women’s rights organization in Guanajuato, the capital city of one of this country’s most conservative Catholic states.

Founder of Las Libres — “the free” in English — she had built an underground abortion-pill network in a country where having the procedure could have meant going to jail.

In September 2021, the Mexican Supreme Court issued a surprise ruling that abortion was no longer a crime — not even in places like Guanajuato, where it continues to be outlawed by the state.

Continued: https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/mexican-abortion-pill-networks-reach-across-u-s-border-to-help-immigrants-without-access/article_75ac1598-4d93-11ee-bd66-d34ec1a86685.html

USA – Inside the Secretive Network of Abortion Pill Vigilantes

Since the fall of Roe, a covert chain of activists have banded together to provide abortion medication to those in red states—and they’re risking everything in the process.

Decca Muldowney
May 23, 2023

Denny spends many of their days sitting on their bed packing small pills into plastic ziplock bags, and then into brown envelopes, ready to be mailed out to people seeking abortion medications in states like Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio.

The pills are mifepristone and misoprostol—two medications that are the subject of intense political and legal debate. Every package of pills Denny mails out puts them in danger. But they won’t stop doing it.

Continued: https://www.thedailybeast.com/abortion-pill-vigilantes-are-operating-a-covert-network-from-mexico-to-republican-states

Desperate pleas and smuggled pills: A covert abortion network rises after Roe

Amid legal and medical risks, a growing army of activists is funneling pills from Mexico into states that have banned abortion

By Caroline Kitchener
October 18, 2022

Monica had never used Reddit before. But sitting at her desk one afternoon in July — at least 10 weeks into an unwanted pregnancy in a state that had banned abortion — she didn’t know where else to turn.

“I need advice I am not prepared to have a child,” the 25-year-old wrote from her office, once everyone else had left for the day. She titled her post, “PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!”

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/18/illegal-abortion-pill-network/