Session: Navigating Access: Community, Care, and Attitudes in the Changing Landscape of Abortion (Society for Social Work and Research 30th Annual Conference Anniversary)

In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision and amidst evolving global reproductive landscapes, access to abortion care is increasingly defined by systemic inequities, grassroots resilience, and shifting cultural norms. This session brings together three presentations that explore how abortion access is being navigated, supported, and reimagined across legal, social, and geographic contexts. Each presentation highlights a different yet interconnected dimension of abortion access: funding and logistics, social work student attitudes, and on-the-ground accompaniment efforts. The first presentation, Bridging the Gap: A Systematic Review of the Role of Abortion Funds in Facilitating Abortion Access, examines the critical work of abortion funds in facilitating care for individuals navigating restrictive laws, long travel distances, and financial barriers. Findings from a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature exploring the role of abortion funds is discussed, with a focus on how abortion funds have expanded their operations, deepened cross-state collaborations, and navigated the limits of mutual aid models within an increasingly hostile legal landscape. The second presentation, Navigating Values: Exploring Social Work Student Attitudes Toward Abortion Post-Dobbs, delves into the beliefs, biases, and educational needs of future social workers as they grapple with their professional responsibilities and personal values in a polarized climate. Using survey data from social work programs across the U.S., this study investigates how social work students understand reproductive justice, how they perceive their role in abortion-related care, and what support or curricular interventions are needed to prepare them for ethically complex practice in post-Dobbs America. The final presentation, Abortion accompaniment: Loving resistance and reproductive citizenship in Mexico, offers a transnational perspective by analyzing abortion accompaniment networks operating in Mexico. This ethnographic study explores how accompaniment providing physical, emotional, informational, and logistical support throughout the abortion process acts as both a form of care and a strategy of resistance. The presentation highlights the expertise and solidarity within these networks, and the insights they offer for reproductive justice work in other contexts. These presentations highlight how meaningful access to safe and legal abortion remains a critical issue in global health, human rights, and gender equity. Despite advancements in medical technology and legal frameworks in some regions, many individuals continue to face systemic, geographic, financial, and cultural barriers to abortion care. This symposium presents findings from three unique studies to explore the multifaceted dimensions of abortion access across diverse contexts. The goal is to foster dialogue, share knowledge, and develop actionable solutions for social workers to ensure abortion access is equitable, evidence-based, and centered on bodily autonomy. Together, these presentations underscore the urgent need for both local and global strategies to ensure abortion access that is equitable, compassionate, and community-centered. This session encourages critical reflection on what abortion access really means and how it can be built and sustained across borders, belief systems and diverse state settings.