2023 Impact Report

50 Years. 3 States. 1 Mission.

2023 Impact Report


Table of Contents

Meet the Reproductive Equity Now Team.

Passionate. Focused. Committed.

Reproductive Equity Now’s team and boards have not slowed down in our work to protect and expand reproductive health care access across New England. Meet the team that is behind our organization’s advocacy, organizing, and electoral work.

A Letter From Our President

Rebecca Hart Holder

By the Numbers:

75%

of Town & City Champions were elected to municipal office this Election Day

35,000+

visits to Reproductive Equity Now’s website

200

volunteers organized through ‘Organizing for Equity: The Roe’d Show’ events in 2023

20,000+

views on Repro Equity Now’s educational videos across platforms

State-by-State Work to Build Regional Power

This September, Reproductive Equity Now expanded our advocacy, organizing, and electoral work into New Hampshire and Connecticut as we work state-by-state to build a regional block for abortion access — right here in New England. 

We’re taking our legislative, coalition-building, and organizing expertise and sharing it across the region to build the nation’s first regional model for abortion advocacy and ensure New England remains a beacon for reproductive freedom in a post-Roe world.

Read About Our Expansion

  • Ms. Magazine: New England Advocates Build a Regional Model for Abortion Rights

  • NH Bulletin: A Massachusetts abortion rights group sets its eyes on New Hampshire

  • CT Mirror: CT joins other New England states to form regional reproductive rights coalition

Across New England, people were talking about Repro Equity Now…

Take a peek at the work we’ve been doing to advance reproductive equity across three New England states:

Celebrating 50 Years of Reproductive Equity Now

Thank you for supporting 50 years of advocating, organizing, and advancing reproductive equity in Massachusetts.

Reproductive Equity Now: A Year In Review

Massachusetts Abortion Legal Hotline

Connecting patients & providers with legal support

The fall of Roe v. Wade has raised new and unprecedented legal questions concerning the provision of abortion care, especially as anti-abortion actors in states across the country look to restrict access to care across state lines. That’s why Reproductive Equity Now joined with Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, the Women’s Bar Foundation, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and five law firms across Massachusetts to launch the Abortion Legal Hotline this year.

The Hotline is a free and confidential resource to connect Massachusetts-based health care providers, helpers, and patients obtaining care in Massachusetts with free legal advice and resources about abortion access and care.

So far, the Hotline has received nearly 100 calls from patients and providers who Reproductive Equity Now has connected with
pro-bono legal support.

Abortion Legal Hotline press coverage:

Associated Press | Massachusetts abortion hotline now offers free legal advice

WBUR | Abortion legal hotline launches in Mass. but open to all

WCVB | New Abortion Legal Hotline connects Mass. abortion patients, providers with legal advice

2023 Priority Bills in Massachusetts

Reproductive Equity Now spent 2023 setting the agenda for Massachusetts

In the first year of the Massachusetts Legislature’s 2023-2024 session, Reproductive Equity Now began building support and power behind our legislative priorities. Our legislative agenda reflects our commitment to ensuring the full spectrum of reproductive care for every person—from protecting abortion seekers’ digital privacy to increasing access to doulas and midwives, and ensuring affordable, universal child care for Massachusetts families.

Take a look at a few of our priority bills below:

1 — The Location Shield Act

Every day, unregulated data brokers buy and sell personal location data from apps on our cell phones, revealing where we live, work, play, and receive health care. Anyone can buy this location data, including anti-abortion extremists or politicians, and use it to threaten or harass abortion seekers traveling to our state for care.

That’s why Repro Equity Now joined with the ACLU of Massachusetts to advocate for the Location Shield Act, legislation to ban the sale of cell phone location data in Massachusetts and protect patients traveling to our state. 

Learn more about the Location Shield Act
and ways to take action here.

2 — Birthing Justice Bill

As more than 20 states have moved to ban or severely restrict abortion, we have seen the devastating impact of abortion bans on the full spectrum of reproductive health care, especially for already-marginalized communities. Even here in Massachusetts, new data shows that the maternal health crisis is worsening, and exponentially so for Black birthing people.

That’s why Reproductive Equity Now is advocating for a birthing justice package that includes legislation to expand access to doula care, better integrate midwifery care into our maternal health care system to improve access to out-of-hospital birthing options, and reduce financial and administrative barriers to the creation of free-standing birth centers. 

3 — Full Spectrum Pregnancy Care

Last session, the Massachusetts Legislature took bold action to break down cost barriers to care by eliminating cost-sharing for abortion. However, people on high deductible plans still face exorbitant out-of-pocket costs for the full spectrum of pregnancy care.

Now, we must go further and enact legislation that would require health insurance plans to cover all pregnancy care—including abortion, prenatal care, childbirth, and postpartum care—without any kind of cost-sharing. Any financial barrier to reproductive health care limits people’s ability to make personal decisions about their reproductive destiny. Pregnant people should be the ones to dictate their own reproductive health care—not deductibles or insurance plans.

4 — Common Start

Reproductive equity is not only the ability to decide if and when to have a family—it’s also about ensuring that when you decide to become a parent, you can raise a family in a safe and healthy environment without breaking the bank on child care.

We’re proud to work with the Common Start Coalition to establish a five-year pathway to a universal system of affordable, high-quality early education and child care for all Massachusetts families, starting at birth. Massachusetts has the second highest child care costs in the country. These exorbitant early childhood care costs harm both parents and children.

Fighting Back Against Anti-Abortion Centers

A big focus of 2023 was how Reproductive Equity Now could combat anti-abortion centers’, or crisis pregnancy centers’, deception and misinformation. Anti-abortion centers are facilities that present themselves as resources for people facing unplanned pregnancy, when in reality, they exist to dissuade patients from accessing abortion care.

Reproductive Equity Now made big progress this year in cracking down on these facilities across New England:

Combatting National Attacks on Reproductive Equity

More patients are traveling
to New England for care

When the Dobbs decision was decided in June 2022, the national abortion landscape drastically changed over night. As more states implemented abortion bans and restrictions, patients have been forced to travel farther than ever before for care — if they can afford to travel at all.

Researchers at Brigham and Women’s released new data this year that showed an expected 37% increase in patients traveling to Massachusetts for abortion care. So how did Massachusetts respond to the influx of patients?

Expanding and investing in abortion access in New England

In response to this attack on care, Reproductive Equity Now partnered with Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey to announce a nearly two-year stockpile of a state supply of mifepristone. The Governor also clarified that the shield law that Massachusetts passed in 2022 will protect patients and providers seeking and offering medication abortion.

With our partner in the Corner Office, we will ensure that medication abortion access remains uninterrupted in Massachusetts—no matter what a judge in Texas rules.


Attacks on medication
abortion across state borders

Reproductive Equity Now helped secure nearly $20 million for abortion access and infrastructure in Massachusetts after the fall of Roe. Through this funding, Health Imperatives, a family planning clinic with seven locations across southeastern Massachusetts and the Cape & Islands, received a grant to begin offering medication abortion at its brick-and-mortar sites. This expansion of care helped address a major access desert in Massachusetts as the region had previously been without abortion care.

In 2022, Reproductive Equity Now helped to pass a major reproductive health care package that included a provision to require Massachusetts public colleges and universities to provide medication abortion, or referrals for medication abortion, on college campuses. This year, we focused on the implementation of this new law by working with the Department of Public Health to create a toolkit to support colleges and universities in creating readiness plans to begin offering this type of care on campus.

Stockpiling and protecting medication abortion in MA

But anti-abortion extremists’ attacks on reproductive freedom did not stop in red states.

Using a tilted judiciary, the Alliance Defending Freedom (the same extremist group that overturned Roe) is attempting to restrict access to mifepristone, the first drug used in a typical medication abortion regimen.

By going through rigged, far-right federal courts, anti-abortion extremists are working to limit access to abortion even in blue states like those in New England. So how do we ensure the region is still able to access care?


These attacks are
not stopping at abortion

We know that attacking abortion access is not the end-game for these far-right extremists.

They have already begun to make their next attacks clear: banning birth control, eliminating sex ed, and attacking trans kids is all a part of their master plan of control. So how are we preparing for these assaults on reproductive equity?

Expanding access to contraception and updating MA’s sex education frameworks

Reproductive Equity Now, along with State Senator Michael Moore and State Representatives Lindsay Sabadosa and Christine Barber, worked to include legislation in the FY2024 budget that would expand access to contraceptive care by authorizing pharmacists to prescribe birth control. This provision will help remove barriers to hormonal contraception by eliminating the need to visit a doctor to receive a basic prescription, expanding access to care, especially for working people and parents.

Reproductive Equity Now also joined Governor Maura Healey this June to announce updates to Massachusetts’ sex education framework to ensure it is LGBTQ+ inclusive, medically accurate and developmentally- and age-appropriate. Our schools will be places where students feel protected, loved, and accepted. And our educators will be equipped to give students the tools and support to make safe and healthy decisions about their reproductive lives.


Leading Locally: Our Municipal Work

WBUR Cognoscenti | The next battle over abortion is very local

By Kim Driscoll and Rebecca Hart Holder

The anti-abortion movement has begun the next phase in its crusade to ban abortion nationally by descending on cities and towns. More than 45 municipalities in Texas, Nebraska, New Mexico and Ohio have taken steps to ban abortion at the local level. Several of these city-wide bans are likely to be taken to court, but some, like a law in Lubbock, Texas, have already survived legal challenges. Massachusetts is not immune.

City-wide bans make it abundantly clear that the fight for reproductive freedom will not only be fought within the walls of Congress or the halls of the Supreme Court. We have to meet this battle where it is: on the ground in cities and states across the country.

2023 Town & City Champion Pledge

Reproductive Equity Now launched its 2023 Town and City Champion Pledge this spring to build local power and help elect repro equity candidates in cities and towns across the Commonwealth.

Reproductive Equity Now’s Town & City Champion Pledge is a way for municipal candidates and elected officials to show their constituents that they support every person’s right to access the full range of reproductive health options, including preventing unintended pregnancy, bearing and raising healthy children, and choosing safe, legal abortion. This year, we had over 85 candidates sign the pledge, 75% of whom were elected to office!

Advancing Repro Equity in Communities

Reproductive Equity Now also worked with 2021 City Champions to pass bold local policy to advance reproductive equity. This year, we successfully passed several recommendations from our Win and Deliver Toolkit, including ordinances in Natick, Brookline, and Amherst to build off the state’s shield law and codify legal protections for providers, patients, and helpers at the municipal level.

The ordinances prohibit these towns and cities, and any recipient of town or city funds, from providing assistance to any out-of-state actor trying to sue providers, patients, and helpers for providing, accessing, or facilitating access to lawful abortion care. As efforts to criminalize abortion care are ever-evolving, Massachusetts leaders—at every level of government—must continue to do all they can to protect our providers and patients seeking care. We look forward to mobilizing with this year’s newly elected Town & City Champions as soon as they take office!

Supporting Local Reproductive Health Clinics

We know that local reproductive health clinics are essential to the health of our communities. That’s why in New Hampshire, we have been advocating for the Executive Council to support Family Planning Program funding for New Hampshire’s reproductive and sexual health clinics. In November, Reproductive Equity Now launched a petition that garnered more than 450 signatures, urging the Council to support funding for Lovering Health Center, Equality Health Center, and Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. We wrote a letter to the editor in the Portsmouth Herald about why this funding is critical to the health and well-being of Seacoast communities, and we helped Jinelle Hobson, the Executive Director of Equality Health Center, draft and place an op-ed on the work that the clinic does for the Concord community.

Unfortunately, the Executive Council voted for the fifth consecutive time to deny funding to Lovering Health Center, Equality Health Center, and Planned Parenthood of Northern New England in November, impacting the clinics’ ability to provide basic, essential health care like STD testing and treatment, cancer screenings, and contraceptive care to patients. Now, we’re rallying our movement around our clinics and holding the Executive Councilors who voted against their funding accountable in 2024.

2023 Events and Organizing

A Note to Our Supporters and Donors

We are tremendously grateful to everyone who has invested both time and dollars in our work.

Without your support, none of our progress would be possible. On behalf of all of us at Reproductive Equity Now and the Reproductive Equity Now Foundation, thank you!