European abortion fund director discusses state of affairs

Mara Clarke is a longtime abortion activist who cut her teeth in American abortion rights movement. She's helping to lead a new continent that has seen massive changes in recent years.

Europe has seen challenges to abortion rights as the medical landscape has shifted, and antiabortion reactionism has limited access to the procedure or medication.  

Mara Clarke, co-founder of Supporting Abortions for Everyone, an abortion fund known as SAFE for short, spoke with me about the things they’ve sought to do to address the problems brought on by bans and restrictions in different countries. She does a presentation where she dispels the notion that Europe is an “abortion utopia.”

“The law is one thing, and access is another,” Clarke said. 

They have helped 160,000 women in Poland, where abortion has been restricted in recent years to only allow it in circumstances involving rape or incest or when the mother’s life or health is endangered. Clarke’s organization will also create an online platform that explains how to establish and operate abortion funds in nine languages. It will tell people how to set one up and keep people out of trouble. 

“We need to write stuff down,” Clarke said. “We need to share knowledge. We need central human resources.” 

Clarke and her fellow activists are also skilled at developing tactics and strategies that permit activists in their country to operate within the confines of the law while having activists outside of those areas do the riskier things. 

Abortion rights activists have seen some successes in Denmark, where abortion restrictions went from 12 weeks to 18. Belgium may do the same. Sweden may decriminalize abortion. Spain made it easier for women under the age of 16 to get abortions. 

Still, some places have draconian sentences, like Malta, which calls for five years imprisonment for prescribing abortion medications. In April, I previewed a documentary called Stray Bodies, directed by Elina Psykou, which follows several women who cross borders to get reproductive care. The film focuses on in vitro fertilization, abortion, and euthanasia. 

In Malta, abortion isn’t permitted, even in circumstances involving rape or if the health of the mother is in question. In Italy, they can get abortions in hospitals. However, the documentary implies that some interview subjects had heard about back-alley procedures. In Sicily, women can be ripped off by illegal abortionists charging far too much money. 

To get IVF, women must cross borders. Italy forbids IVF treatment for single women. Many go to Greece to get treatment. This has to do with church leadership believing that personhood begins at conception. Thus, legal protections for embryo storage and destruction don’t exist. One 39-year-old woman made nine trips over five years, taking more than 700 pills and 250 injections. It’s called procreative tourism. 

Clarke explained how things seem different when you’re in the United States.

“People in America think everything here in Europe is great, and people in Europe thought everything in America was great until Trump was elected, and then until Roe was overturned,” Clarke said. 

In September, I attended a protest outside Parliament in London for abortion law reform. There had been a counter-protest to a massive March for Life. In England, there have been six prosecutions of women who took abortion medication in recent years. Abortion clinics there communicated with activist leaders and told them that they had been contacted more than 100 times as police investigated women for violating the Offense Against the Person Act, a Victorian-era law passed in 1861 that calls for nearly life imprisonment for performing an abortion.  One Englishwoman was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison for criminal abortion. She had her sentence commuted, but she served time, which is the more critical point. I’ll write about that more next week. 

The availability of abortion pills has changed the game and made it easier to supply women with an option to end an unwanted pregnancy. 

“Not only do we have abortion pills, but we have so many grassroots activists and people who wouldn't even consider themselves activists, but just human beings interested in helping other human beings,” Clarke said.