“Courts Will Not Save Us”: Abortion Funds as Everyday Resistance

• In Event: Strategies of Resistance: Feminist Organizing and Activism

Abstract

This paper argues that everyday forms of resistance, including mutual aid networks such as abortion funds, can subvert hegemonic modes of reproductive oppression and control. Despite widespread precarity, reproductive justice activists across the United States engage in the daily grind of assisting pregnant people in accessing abortion care. I draw from five years of experience as an abortion fund case manager, as well as the scholarship of queer theorists such as Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant, to demonstrate that vulnerability can be a radical form of resistance.

Presenter

• Rebecca Lentjes, NYAAF