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A Letter from Vitala Global’s Co-Founders

Vitala Global Foundation

Together with women and girls* and their communities, we are co-creating and implementing open-access digital tools.

发布日期: 2022年7月1日

Last Friday we got the news that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe. This past week we took time to reflect, digest and take long deep breaths together. As co-founders of Vitala Global, we have committed ourselves to work in community with women and girls, people with uterus’ living in the most challenging contexts of the world. Over the course of the last decade, we have worked as obstetrician gynecologists in humanitarian and fragile settings including Yemen, Nigeria and Lebanon. We have witnessed severe complications and even death due to unsafe abortion in countries with restrictive laws and lack of access to comprehensive abortion care. Restricting abortion does not decrease the number of abortions but instead further deepens inequities on access and quality of care for those who have often been marginalized - black, indigenous, brown bodies, LGBTQI2+, trans folks and people with disabilities.?

The last two years, Vitala Global has committed to co-create and design a digital platform with Venezuelan women, girls and local grassroots feminist organizations who are working on the frontlines. Venezuela is a country facing a complex humanitarian crisis and a restrictive legal context. It is a country that has had a flux of millions of migrants and refugees to neighboring countries, people facing gender-based violence, mortality and morbidity due to unsafe abortions. In response, we co-created a digital solution that is offering a harm-reduction approach to facilitate safe, supported self-managed medical abortion and personalized contraceptive care. We have experience in working in some of the most challenging contexts and know that to make real change, it is not about reinventing the wheel. It is about working in community together and to empower the work of local organizations who have been at the frontlines for decades. It is about taking a step back, to take a deep breath, to be reflective and proactive, be mindful and not reactionary. We have learned in our activism, our advocacy and our humanitarianism that the best approach is the one done as a collective, with humility, with an open mind and willingness to learn.

We know it can be difficult to talk about abortion. We know for some, you have needed time to reflect and digest and how to navigate your emotions around this and that is okay. We have all been facing unprecedented times over the last few years. If you are stuck on where and how you can help with the current situation, there are a number of reproductive justice and grassroots organizations in the United States who have been hard at this work for decades. We encourage you to learn about them, reach out and start having open conversations amongst your community. Our work has been and will continue to be one where we reimagine a world, a future where truly every person can have the bodily autonomy to choose what is best for them. We invite you to join us:?