Abortion rights

Mail a postcard

Postcards from Forever is a series of postcards highlighting the timelessness and perpetuity of certain social issues – as well as the immense power of people in protest to defend and uphold human rights. The postcards are meant to be sent to anyone – friends, families, or legislators – as a reminder, as an uplift, as an act of hope, or as a demand.

At the moment, we are distributing postcards at key events and protests across Poland and the US, where women’s rights are at stake. 

If you are an activist, community organizer, teacher, etc., you can download postcards from this website, and then print them at your local print shop. Currently, you can download the postcards in English and in Polish.

About the Abortion edition

Abortion is a basic healthcare need for millions of women, girls and others who can become pregnant – every year a quarter of pregnancies end in abortion. However, access to safe and legal abortion services is far from guaranteed. Preventing women and girls from accessing an abortion does not mean they stop needing one – when governments restrict access to abortions, people are compelled to resort to clandestine, unsafe ones. That’s why attempts to ban or restrict abortions do nothing to reduce the number of abortions, it only forces people to seek out unsafe abortions. The WHO estimates that 25 million unsafe abortions take place each year.

​​Access to safe abortion services is a human right. As Amnesty International states, under international human rights law, everyone has a right to life, a right to health, and a right to be free from violence, discrimination, and torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Human rights law clearly spells out that decisions about your body are yours alone – this is what is known as bodily autonomy. Forcing someone to carry on an unwanted pregnancy, or forcing them to seek out an unsafe abortion, is a violation of their human rights, including the rights to privacy and bodily autonomy.   

As Amnesty points out, in many circumstances, those who have no choice but to resort to unsafe abortions also risk prosecution and punishment, including imprisonment, and can face cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and discrimination in, and exclusion from, vital post-abortion health care. Access to abortion is therefore fundamentally linked to protecting and upholding the human rights of women, girls and others who can become pregnant, and thus for achieving social and gender justice.

Learn more about the situation in Poland

Learn more about the situation in the US