The past few years have been a catastrophe for bodily autonomy in the United States. Halfway through 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court defied a half-century of precedent to assert that laws requiring forced pregnancy were constitutional after all. Abortion access organizations nationwide braced for impact.
At Software for Good, we take the fight to preserve reproductive justice personally. Our company and many on our team are based in Minnesota, where abortion is still legally accessible to those who need it — including the residents of other states, where radical new laws have clamped down hard on reproductive freedom. Across the Midwest, abortion is now inaccessible or banned outright in 10 states out of 12, including every state that touches Minnesota’s borders.
Soon after the Dobbs decision, our friends at the Digital Defense Fund connected us with the Midwest Access Coalition, which helps people get the support they need to get abortion care across the region. Like many reproductive justice organizations, they had an I.T. department of just one, a dedicated volunteer — so we provided the technical support she needed to keep the organization’s app up and running under unprecedented new demand.
Since then, we’ve been proud to support the Northwest Abortion Access Fund and DARIA Services, which provides open-source software for abortion funds. As technologists in Minnesota, one of the few remaining places in the United States where reproductive freedom still has the protection of law, the Software for Good team is determined to keep using the power of data and technology to keep fighting for bodily autonomy for everyone.
If you’re working to defend reproductive justice, we’ll help you harness the power of data and tech to help.