Within countries where abortion is restricted or under threat, groups have organised on an international, regional and local basis to lobby governments and campaign for women's right to safe and legal abortion, as well as seeking ways to work within, and where necessary circumvent, the law, to provide access to abortion. This chapter offers insight into a number of highly successful organisations such as Women Help Women, inroads, Abortion Support Network, the International Campaign for Women's Right to Safe Abortion and Amnesty International. The breadth of activism around the world could indeed warrant the attention of a publication in itself. We have in this chapter selected exemplars of organisations that operate on a transnational basis, who collaborate with grassroots movements, encouraging shared learning and knowledge across disciplines. As noted in other chapters which feature the work of activist organisations such as IPPF (Chapter Five), Women on Web (Chapters Two and Three) and RESURJ (Chapter Seven), the role of activist organisations is key to understanding abortion politics.

There is a richness of evidence on twentieth-century activism, with a growing body of analysis of more recent trends. For instance, the advancement of new technologies has improved information-sharing within and between countries and campaigns, through global listserves, social media and other platforms. Developments in telemedicine have led to improvements in access, as demonstrated in Chapter Two on, ‘Criminalisation’, and Chapter Three, ‘Biomedicalisation’. This chapter will consider organisations who provide abortions outside of legal frameworks, those who work to fund abortions, those who campaign for improved access and those who focus on grassroots activism. It includes an examination of organisations which have not been subject to previous analysis and considers cross-movement solidarities that have emerged in the twenty-first century.

Overcoming barriers to accessing abortion may take individualised forms, such as seeking abortion away from legal settings, or collective forms. A spectrum exists of what is considered resistance, ranging from deliberate non-action to subtle and also more deliberate/blatant forms (Mishtal, 2016). For instance, a health worker may ignore evidence that a colleague has performed an abortion and that they recorded it as another procedure; another might provide information on alternative providers and direct an abortion seeker to reputable providers of abortion medication.