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More than 800,000 individuals visited
r/abortion
⁠
in
2023
⁠
. OARS volunteers provided 24/7 personalized support and resources in response to more than 16,000 posts submitted by users from nearly 100 countries. Our volunteers also moderated more than 100,000 comments to ensure accuracy.
Providing this level of personalized help often requires days or weeks of back-and-forth communication with someone who posts on the forum. We cannot sustain this effort and keep meeting the growing need as a wholly volunteer effort. We need a small amount of staff capacity so we can train more volunteers, improve internal processes, and ensure that this vital resource doesn’t disappear. If OARS burns out, the abortion movement stands to lose three unique values we provide.

Expert support available 24/7, no matter where you live

OARS runs the only abortion resource that is staffed by experts 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. On a holiday or at 2 am when hotlines and clinics are closed, OARS is there helping people desperate for support.

A safe space to share and find accurate, stigma-free information

OARS is busting stigma by fostering a safe place online where people currently seeking – or having – abortions can talk to each other. As more people are ordering pills online and increasingly afraid they will be punished for having an abortion, it’s now common for someone to go through this process without speaking to another human. On r/abortion people realize that they are not alone. One post at a time, OARS fights the abortion stigma and misinformation that runs rampant online.

Real-time insights into what people need and how we can do better

In the process of helping abortion-seekers, OARS creates the opportunity to build a more impactful, in-touch advocacy movement. Many of the professionals in the abortion advocacy movement don’t interact regularly with people seeking abortions. Even those working on the frontlines in clinics or at abortion funds may only know what the experience is like for abortion-seekers at their organization or at the particular stage of a journey to navigate to care where they work. This limits advocates' understanding of what it’s like to seek an abortion now and how our movement might be getting its own way – often through a lack of coordination across the multiple organizations one person might have to interact to get an abortion. Volunteers trained by OARS take the lessons they learn from r/abortion and translate them into actionable insights for the larger abortion movement.

OARS is a fiscally-sponsored project of DKT International (EIN: 58-1593137), a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. Donations can be made via
ActBlue
⁠
or directly to
DKT
⁠
(earmarked for OARS).



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