About Women on Web
Our team is driven by feminist values
Our mission
Women on Web looks forward to a world in which abortion is recognised as part of life and is freely available.
Women on Web is a Canadian non-profit organization facilitating online access to abortion pills.
Our abortion pill service increases access to high quality abortion care for women and pregnant people on their own terms.
We are an international team of activists, researchers and medical providers offering support in 16 languages, in almost 200 countries.
Since 2005, our team has supported over 100,000 people to access safe abortion with pills and responded to over 1 million emails.
We carry out research on telemedicine abortion care and self-managed abortion and reach out to people with reliable, non-judgemental and practical information about abortion pills.
Through research and practice, we use our know-how for global advocacy to demedicalize, destigmatize and decriminalize abortion.
Our Story
Women on Web was founded by Dr Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician and renowned abortion activist. In 1999, she started Women on Waves that sailed boats to countries where abortion was highly restricted, taking women and pregnant people to the international waters where abortions could be legally provided. In 2005, she launched Women on Web, the first ever international telemedicine abortion service. The service became an immediate success, reaching restricted settings and producing compelling research about the safety and efficacy of abortion pills. Thanks to Dr Gomperts’ visionary work, today telemedicine abortion is an increasingly common way to end a pregnancy, supported by the best scientific evidence.
Today, Women on Web works at the intersection of digital technology and abortion access, operating in a complex technology landscape that involves Internet censorship, algorithmic systems and platform content moderation. We protect the free flow of abortion information in digital spaces and use strategic litigation to fight for digital and abortion rights and challenge the censorship of our websites. We are also founding members of Repro Uncensored, a coalition of reproductive health and internet freedom advocates that protects and promotes the right to have unrestricted access to transparent and truthful abortion information.
Our values
Feminism and equity
As a feminist organization we stand for the principle of women and pregnant people’s right to make autonomous decisions about their bodies and futures. We want to live up to our feminist values through building a diverse and inclusive culture of care and respect, acting in solidarity with each other, with our care seekers and with the global abortion justice movement.
Trust and transparency
We trust that care seekers know what they need; we trust the information they give; and we trust they can make informed choices based on the information we provide. We exercise transparency with our care seekers by informing them about the limitations of our services and about other available options to make informed choices.
Moving forwards despite the odds
We continue to seek and find new pathways for enabling abortion access, overcoming persistent and new challenges.