New Orleans, LA, June 13, 2024— The Louisiana Abortion Fund released the following statement in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling unanimously rejecting restrictions on the widely used medication mifepristone:
“The Supreme Court’s ruling maintains mifepristone’s broad accessibility, in line with what medical experts, the FDA, and those who have been working to improve reproductive healthcare have known all along—this medication is a safe and effective way to end a pregnancy and treat miscarriage.
Now is the time for our lawmakers, advocates, and folks across the country to focus on advancing reproductive justice. We all deserve the right to determine if or when we have children and to live and raise children in healthy and thriving communities. We will continue to work towards a Louisiana, Gulf South, and nation where everyone has bodily autonomy and access to quality healthcare where treatment is determined by individuals with the help of their healthcare providers and not lawmakers.
While we are relieved that today’s decision avoided worsening the existing crisis of care for the millions of birthing people in the Gulf South, we know this will not be the last time extremists pull stunts like this in an attempt to impose cruel, unnecessary restrictions on necessary care. Instead of working to erect barriers between individuals and safe, effective healthcare, we should all be working to ensure that everyone has access to safe, affordable, and quality reproductive healthcare regardless of where one lives.
—Chasity Wilson, Executive Director of the Louisiana Abortion Fund
About the Louisiana Abortion Fund
The Louisiana Abortion Fund (formerly the New Orleans Abortion Fund) is a community fund that assists our neighbors in overcoming the economic and geographic barriers erected to prevent them from accessing abortion care. By providing low-barrier financial support for abortions and support for travel and childcare, we are investing in our community’s liberation. We work to center Black people, Indigenous communities, people of color, queer folks, and immigrants, because we know that when the most marginalized among us are free, we will all be free.
Our work is rooted in the principles of reproductive justice as defined by SisterSong as, “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”
As a Black-led organization in the Deep South in a post-Roe landscape, we recognize that the barriers to abortion care were too high and too many long before the Supreme Court’s most recent ruling. We envision a world where everyone has access to the healthcare they determine is right for them, and those who decide to raise children can raise them in a world free from state violence and the violences of poverty, patriarchy, white supremacy, and queerphobia.
Learn more about Louisiana Abortion Fund at www.louisianaabortionfund.org/
