August 19, 2026:

Feminists and organizers across Europe must start building the kinds of grassroots networks that have helped pregnant Americans get abortion care even in states with bans.

As abortion bans rise across the United States, European countries are pushing to enshrine reproductive rights in their national constitutions. 

In March 2026, Luxembourg amended its constitution to protect reproductive rights, in direct response to the U.S. overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022.  In June 2026, Finland’s leading political parties voted that abortion rights must be secured in its constitution. In April, Spain advanced a draft constitutional reform to “guarantee the exercise of women’s right to voluntary termination of pregnancy.” 

This progress follows France’s historic 2024 declaration of “freedom guaranteed to the woman of having recourse to a voluntary interruption of pregnancy.” Together, these changes might suggest that the continent is becoming an unassailable sanctuary for reproductive rights—particularly for people in the United States, whose abortion rights depend on their state of residence. Many Europeans believe that, too.

The truth on the ground, as I know from my work coordinating support for abortion providers and patients at the Netherlands-based nonprofit Supporting Abortions for Everyone (SAFE), is more complicated. In practice, Europe remains a minefield for people who want or need to end their pregnancy—and Europeans could learn a lot from the U.S. about helping them get care.

Reality check: Europe’s abortion-access crisis

While cementing constitutional protection in four major European countries would represent major, symbolic victories for reproductive rights and raise the political bar against potential far-right rollbacks, words on paper are not the same as health-care delivery in practice. 

A constitutional amendment does not create medical infrastructure, nor does it eliminate structural inequalities in health-care access; it has no effect on existing statutory restrictions, such as gestational limits or mandatory waiting periods.

More fundamentally, most European countries impose strict gestational limits, with many restricting abortion on request beyond the first trimester. The Netherlands and the United Kingdom have the highest gestational limits, allowing abortion up to 24 weeks. Poland, Malta, Monaco, and Liechtenstein prohibit abortion in all but the most narrow, specific circumstances, like to save the pregnant person’s life. But even these exceptions are rarely granted. In Andorra and Vatican City, abortion is completely illegal.

Even in places with longer term limits, like the UK and the Netherlands, the law never tells the full story. 

Just as in the post-Roe U.S., health-care professionals throughout most of Europe can refuse to provide abortion care on moral or religious grounds. These carveouts, known as “conscientious objection” exemptions, create de facto bans, even when abortion is supposedly legal. 

In Croatia, abortion is legally available on request up to ten weeks. But 60 percent of health-care workers there refuse to provide abortion care, according to a 2022 report. In Italy, where laws state that abortion on request is available up to 13 weeks, that number rises to 70 percent. In conservative southern regions such as Molise, that figure rises to a whopping 90 percent—making it extremely difficult to find a provider willing to perform the procedure or prescribe medication abortion. 

The pattern is similar in Spain and Romania, where elective abortions are legal up to 14 weeks: in eight of Spain’s 50 provinces, no public hospital has performed an abortion for decades. That’s an area larger than the entire Republic of Ireland.

For some, the religious beliefs behind refusal are genuinely, deeply felt. In many parts of Europe, Christianity remains a cornerstone of identity and community, and exerts powerful cultural and political influence. 

Yet a closer look at some regions suggests more than religion is at play. In Italy’s conservative southern regions, for example, the number of conscientious objectors nearly doubled between 2006 and 2013. Weekly church attendance fell during the same period. 

Based on this data, it seems likely that institutional peer pressure and shifting norms are also driving conscientious objection to abortion.

Much of Europe typically has robust public health-care systems meant to serve all residents at low or no cost. When public hospitals deny care, it pushes patients into private clinics where abortions are provided at massively inflated costs—around €350 ($400) for a medication abortion in Spain, for example, and €2,200 ($2,500) for a procedural abortion. At these prices, abortion care becomes available only to those who can afford it. 

In Croatia, this care is often provided by the very same doctors who “conscientiously object” in the public health-care system, according to a 2018 study commissioned by the European Parliament. The discrepancy between public refusals and private provision points to a financial incentive, where doctors leverage conscientious objection in public systems to drive lucrative private practice demand.

Rural communities, migrant populations, and other marginalized groups face additional barriers that can effectively exclude them from needed care because legal abortion is meaningless without local infrastructure.

In Scotland, for example, only one surgeon in a country of 5.5 million residents is trained to provide second-trimester procedural abortions up to the legal limit of 24 weeks. Throughout Europe, migrants—including international students from outside the European Union, undocumented migrants, and some asylum seekers—are often barred from using public health-care systems, again meaning that only those who can pay for private care are able to access abortion.

Meanwhile, Europeans without a fixed address, such as people experiencing homelessness, cannot get care because of requirements for registration and official documentation. Nomadic Roma and Traveller communities are often similarly excluded.

All of this translates into an estimated 20 million women in the European Union who cannot access safe and legal abortion, according to official data. Given that the EU includes only 27 out of Europe’s 50 countries, elsewhere on the continent, there are likely many millions more pregnant people without access to care.

The U.S. playbook: networks of resistance

A figure like that, in a complex legal and cultural landscape like Europe’s, requires creative solutions. For inspiration, I’ve been looking to the U.S., with its long history of abortion bans—and equally long history of building abortion access networks. 

As states began criminalizing abortion in the mid-19th century, underground networks immediately formed to maintain access to care, from Madame Restell’s network of clinics and mail-order providers from the 1800s to Black midwives’ mutual aid circles under Jim Crow. 

In the 1960s, the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion and the Jane Collective secretly worked with doctors who felt morally bound to give pregnant patients the care they deserved, despite the law.

The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision marked the extraordinary culmination of decades of grassroots campaigning and strategic legal advocacy to achieve a federal legal right to abortion in the U.S. But this constitutional guarantee was quickly undercut in practice by the Hyde Amendment, enacted in 1977 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980, which banned using federal funds to pay for abortion care. 

Recognizing that the rights granted by Roe were unattainable to many people without money, social support, and other resources, activists started launching local, community-run abortion funds at the close of the decade. The Rosie Jimenez Fund was originally established in Texas in 1978 in memory of the first woman known to die from an unsafe abortion after the Hyde Amendment revoked Medicaid funding for abortion care.

State abortion restrictions like mandatory waiting periods, forced counselling intensified in the following decades, primarily across the South and Midwest, targeted regulation of abortion providers (TRAP) laws imposed arbitrary requirements, such as the width of hospital hallways, to force clinics to close.

More local abortion funds formed throughout the 1980s to provide financial aid, raising community money to cover procedure costs for those blocked by Medicaid bans. In May 1993, representatives from 22 grassroots abortion funds across 14 states formed the National Network of Abortion Funds, or NNAF, to connect these local support networks into a cohesive national coalition. 

Over time, these funds evolved past paying only for procedures to also cover beginning-to-end care, including booking hotels for patients during waiting periods, driving pregnant people hundreds of miles across state lives, and covering child-care costs.

When the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe in 2022—allowing states’ trigger bans to take effect and stricter new laws to be passed—this mutual aid infrastructure had already been battle-tested. Organizations dedicated to supporting people who need abortions aggressively scaled up, helped in no small part by a groundswell of donor support. In the year post-Dobbs, NNAF members disbursed nearly $37 million, coordinating travel and care for more than 100,000 patients.

Now, it’s Europe’s turn

European civil society, in contrast, has historically relied on governments to deliver care—despite the massive gaps in access I’ve documented here. Grassroots abortion-support groups like mine, SAFE, are severely underfunded and tend to operate on overstretched volunteer labor. 

When a person in Europe finds they need to travel across national borders to get care—whether because they cannot find a nearby provider, they missed a strict gestational limit, or are excluded because of citizenship status—there simply is no extensive, well-funded network to catch them.

SAFE is one of the few organizations in all of Europe that helps people travel for care or pays for later abortions. 

Sweeping foreign aid reductions across major European donor governments have exacerbated the already scarce financial support for women’s rights and reproductive health-care. Money for sexual and reproductive rights programs typically makes up a fraction of a donor country’s foreign aid—around 2 percent. 

Now, this paltry amount is almost certainly declining. Since the beginning of 2026, the United Kingdom has cut total aid by 40 percent, France by 37 percent, Germany by 27 percent, and Belgium by 25 percent. The Netherlands’ centrist new government, where we are based, recently slashed NGO funding by over 70 percent and ended its targeted gender equality grants program. Feminist groups, civil society networks, and sexual health providers worldwide have lost hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Meanwhile, hard-right and neo-fascist political parties and candidates—nearly all of them staunchly anti-choice—are gaining ground across the continent. Funding for the anti-rights movement in Europe has soared in lockstep.

The European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights found in June 2025 that an “intricate network of 275 actors” funnelled some$1.18 billion to political coalitions, politicians, and parties that promote “anti-gender” policies—meaning, in effect, their platforms are anti-choice and anti-women’s rights. Russian and U.S. groups are among the documented donors. 

With the rising right across Europe setting its sights firmly on attacking abortion access, I believe we cannot keep relying on the state. We must prepare to rely on each other, too. 

It’s time for European feminists, organizers, and funders to wake up and redirect money where it’s most needed: grassroots groups. 

Legal victories offer little to real people without enforcement, vigorous defense of exercising those rights, and the medical infrastructure needed to do so. 

The U.S. has learned this lesson and written the playbook. Europe needs to follow it.

Source

Source link