Last year, inroads marked 10 years of building, holding, and resourcing a global abortion justice community. Today, the network connects more than 2,600 abortion justice changemakers organizing across regions at the intersections of abortion stigma and systemic oppression.

For us, anniversaries invite reflection, not only on growth and learning, but also on responsibility.

Alongside this, devastating violence was unfolding across regions where our members live and organize, namely the ongoing occupation and genocide in Gaza, the war in Sudan, and mass violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

During a virtual solidarity session with inroads members directly experiencing these realities, we asked ourselves: What does solidarity look like right now? How do we weave learning, care, and reproductive justice more intentionally within the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region?

Our membership in SWANA was still small, and yet, we knew that the reflections, resistance, and movement-building happening there are vital to reproductive justice and abortion liberation everywhere.

Seeding the idea

We began exploring and fundraising for a SWANA regional abortion justice circle.

We knew that, like all inroads gatherings, it should be small, intimate, co-created, with representation across the region and funding for those who might not be in the room otherwise. In-person gatherings at inroads have always been spaces of fruitful, long-lasting relationships and solidarity building.

We held learning calls with members across the SWANA region who were supporting abortion in many different ways, including running sexuality hotlines, creating multimedia resources in Arabic, building local feminist communities, supporting access to abortion pills, organizing policy advocacy, and more. It was clear that our members shared diverse, flexible, and powerfully creative ways of working, needs, and contexts for reproductive justice and abortion liberation across the region. 

From the outset, it was also clear that language, memory, and historical context were not peripheral, but foundational to building and sustaining relationships. This clarity emerged within a region long shaped by extraction, intervention, and repeated harm by Western imperialist powers, producing a shared political consciousness that was marked by deep skepticism toward the non-profit industrial complex, philanthropy, and externally driven agendas. 

At the same time, criminalization, surveillance, and threats to physical, digital, and community safety often narrow the space for anything beyond survival. The intensity of civil society repression, criminalization, and threats to holistic security demanded immediate and sustained attention, often narrowing the space for anything beyond survival and protection. 

And yet, activists across the region spoke, clearly and insistently:

– About the illusion of “choice” under structural constraint.
– About dismantling colonial and imperial systems that fragment solidarity.
– About refusing funding practices that treat relationships as transactions.
– About confronting displacement, extraction, and violence as interconnected realities and not isolated crises.

Decades of geopolitical fragmentation had also produced a paradox, in which activists within the region found it easier to travel outward toward global convenings and international spaces than to encounter one another across borders at home. 

inroads has hosted many regional and global convenings over the past decade, but we began to understand that this moment required something different.

We realized it was essential for movements to lead autonomously, set their own terms of engagement, and convene in ways rooted in regional realities rather than external architectures.

Autonomy and solidarity are not opposites

Autonomy has always been central to feminist and abortion justice movements, just as bodily autonomy is foundational to a world without abortion stigma.

In this work and in our movements, we also know that autonomy is also collective. Regional autonomy – freedom from domination and imperial control – is deeply connected to the freedom of bodies and territories. Feminists in Latin America, Asia Pacific, and SWANA have long insisted on this.

As a global network, we are continuing to learn that solidarity and autonomy are not in tension, but that they deeply need each other.

Autonomy in our reproductive journeys becomes more possible when we can also experience autonomy in how we gather, dream, and build together. In spaces where bodies and spirits can meet without intervention; that are as non-hierarchical as possible; where people are not performing for donors or international audiences. These are the spaces that matter more than ever as we meet this moment fully.

Conversations that rooted us

At the Abortion and Reproductive Justice Conference in 2024, dialogue with The A Project, a long-time inroads member based in Lebanon, revealed a powerful alignment. While inroads had been exploring how to support a SWANA abortion justice convening, The A Project had already been developing a contextualized reproductive justice framework for the region and was preparing to convene regional activists.

Our conversations with The A Project clarified something important: rather than initiating a separate process, inroads made an intentional decision to support and strengthen the convening already being shaped by regional leadership.

Our early conversations with The A Project reaffirmed that abortion, particularly within the SWANA region, cannot be meaningfully understood or engaged in isolation. Abortion experiences are inextricably shaped by social norms around marriage, sexuality, and gender; by economic precarity and livelihoods; and by housing, displacement, and mobility, among other structural conditions that govern people’s lives.

We were deeply inspired by The A Project’s work to contextualise a Reproductive Justice framework within the SWANA region, and by what felt like a sustained, principled commitment to grappling with reproductive justice not as a singular issue area, but as a long-term political practice rooted in place, history, and lived realities.

As The A Project writes:

“In SWANA, colonial legacies and nation-state building, occupation and displacement, and racism and systemic inequities shape reproductive realities. These struggles intersect with border regimes, environmental destruction, economic exploitation, systematic erasure of communities, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Addressing these requires resistance, connection, and collective vision.”

Learning to step back and step in differently

When we first dreamed of supporting a SWANA gathering, we imagined being a close part of the process, bringing our community values of participation and care into it.

What we learned instead was something deeper. As global spaces that support regional work, supporting autonomy can also mean shifting what trust-based support means, through accompaniment without being in the room..

The retreat was created for and by SWANA-based activists, particularly grassroots feminist collectives. Inroads and three other small intermediary funders were not present in the physical space, as an intentional decision made by the organizers.

Historically, transformative change has been led by those living through and resisting oppression directly. The role of allies and funders is not to shape the vision, but to resource it, accompany it, and align with it politically.

As we accompanied this process, we were able to ask ourselves:

– What burdens can we take on so that our movements don’t have to?
– How can we make funding smoother, more flexible, and more trust-based?
– How do we support without reenacting imperialist models of control and extractivism?

The first SWANA Reproductive Justice Retreat

After months of collective planning, The A Project, alongside regional partners and activists from multiple countries across SWANA, held the first SWANA Reproductive Justice retreat in October 2025, with support from inroads.

The retreat was intentionally small and intimate. It was also held in Arabic, creating a shared linguistic and political space where participants could speak, think, and reflect without translation or explanation for external audiences. Creating this time and space to connect was itself an act of resistance.

The retreat centered trust-building, shared political reflection, and collective care. 

The core goal was simple but powerful: to build relationships and weave connections among feminist activists in the region. In a context shaped by border regimes, participants explored how reproductive justice is shaped by occupation, economic precarity, migration, state violence, and social norms around gender and sexuality. They examined how abortion access intersects with broader struggles for bodily autonomy, territorial sovereignty, and liberation from imperial control.

Importantly, the space was designed to undo patterns many activists have experienced in global convenings: extractivism, tokenization, and the pressure to translate local struggles into simplified narratives for international consumption.

inroads’ role was to resource and support the conditions that made this possible, through providing flexible funding, connecting and supporting the attendance of more inroads members, absorbing burdens where possible, and stepping back from the physical gathering space in alignment with the organizers’ political vision.

In a region shaped by fragmentation, repression, and enforced separation, strengthening relational infrastructure is transformative work. From that foundation of trust, partnerships can form more organically, ideas can deepen, and collective strategies can take shape. 

Through this retreat, the connective tissue that makes sustained, collective reproductive justice work possible was strengthened.

Moving forward

Moving forward, we are cognizant of the sheer underresourcing, as well as the pressures that come with resourcing for movements and groups in SWANA, to attend to the genuine, authentic concerns and issues of their communities and region. 

We stand firmer in our commitment to always hold learning spaces and support around abortion stigma through an intersectional and reproductive justice lens. 

What is essential, now more than ever, is that the leadership, autonomy, and political authority of those building pathways toward reproductive and abortion freedoms are recognised, resourced, and upheld on their own terms.