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October eBulletin

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Welcome to your ASN eBulletin. Thanks so much to those of you who donated to our recent appeal! Make your past, present or future ASN donation worth 25% more. We hope to see you at our birthday party 26 October – please note the new venue! Women we’ve helped this month. Live in Liverpool and have a spare sofa or room? Are you a poster person for choice? Read on!

· We got what we wanted for our birthday!
· Register for Gift Aid
· Come to our birthday party – please note the new venue and RSVP!
· Women we’ve helped
· Seeking hosts in Liverpool
· Pro Choice photo project

Happy birthday to us!
Last month before we experienced the circumstances that resulted in our emergency appeal, we asked for people to donate in honour of our second birthday party. We never got to send out the official request card (it’s attached) but despite this, your generous response to our call for help put us ahead of our goal, which was to raise £2,222 in honour of our 2nd birthday. Our recent campaign brought in more than £2,300, including almost £100 in Standing Orders – putting us just over 80% of the way to our goal of £1,000 in SOs every month, and in a position to have reached our birthday goal before publicising it! Big thanks to all who donated – including a special shout out to our friends in NYC for their extraordinary support! An individual acknowledgment and thank you is on its way to each of you. If you don’t receive one by Monday, don’t hesitate to email us to make sure we have your contact details.

If you would still like to make a birthday donation – or better yet a birthday Standing Order – to ASN, you can find out how to do so here: https://www.asn.org.uk/support-us/donate/.

(And if you need a fabulous designer like the one who did the attached card, please contact Ruth)

Register for Gift Aid!

If you are a UK taxpayer, registering for Gift Aid will make your gift go 25% further. If you have donated to ASN in the past, or plan to do so in the future, please fill out a Gift Aid Form so that we can collect Gift Aid on your donation. You can fill out the form here and post it in, or wait until next month, when we will have a link to an online form that you can fill in. https://www.asn.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/ASN_GIFT_AID_FORM.pdf

Party! Party! Party!

We have so much to celebrate – the success of the recent campaign, the fact that we’ve heard from and helped THREE TIMES the number of women this year compared to last, and how much we appreciate you, our wonderful supporters and volunteers. Please come celebrate with us – and special guest speaker Diane Abbott MP!

ASN 2nd Birthday party
Wed 26 October
7.00-10.00 pm
THE ROEBUCK
50 Great Dover Street
London SE1 4YGMap Here

Can’t wait to see you there! PLEASE RSVP to [email protected].

Women we’ve helped

In August, ASN heard from 27 women, including the four urgent cases we emailed you about last week. We are immensely grateful to all of you who enable us to help women, the phone coordinators (Katie, Maddie, Sarah, and Jane) who help these women navigate their way to a safe and legal abortion, to Women on Web for the amazing services they provide, and to the clinics we work with for making it all possible.

In addition to the four women we emailed about last week, women we helped this month included:

  • A woman who delayed paying rent in order to afford flights to come to England
  • A woman late in pregnancy who was further delayed in coming to England as she needed a visa to travel.
  • A woman in a relationship with an abusive man who is against her having an abortion and spends the little money they have on drugs and alcohol.
  • A young single parent, recently laid off from her job and pregnant as the result of rape. She was so desperate for funds for her procedure that she was considering contacting her rapist for financial assistance. To add to her distress, the counselling service she contacted when she was raped were not supportive of her choosing to have an abortion.
  • A married couple with several children and financial difficulties. Prior to getting pregnant again they were so determined not to have more children that they asked their doctor about sterilisation, only to be told that she was too young, and that they could not afford it anyway.
  • A college student who can barely afford rent and groceries, let alone travelling to England to pay privately for an abortion.

ASN thanks these women and men for sharing their stories with us, and for permitting us to share them with you. We also thank the clinics, counsellors and other groups who ensure that these women receive the care they need.

Do you live in Liverpool & have thoughts of becoming an ASN host?

ASN will be in Liverpool on Saturday, October 8 to interview a potential host for the women who travel to the bpas Merseyside clinic. If you live near this clinic and have a spare room, pull out sofa or air mattress and the willingness to participate in this direct action work, please contact us.

Pro Choice Photo Project

We were contacted by a student obtaining her MFA in photography in N Ireland. She is in the process of putting together a photo journalism project about abortion, and has already interviewed a number of ASN volunteers. If you consider yourself to be someone who works, volunteers or campaigns in or around abortion, and are interested in being a part of this project, please email Emma. More about Emma on her website, www.emmacampbell.co.uk.
Thank you thank you thank you!

ASN is funded almost entirely by the generous donations of individual supporters – like you! Without ASN, the many women we help wouldn’t be able to access vital financial and practical support towards covering the costs of their procedures and their journeys. Donations to ASN are vitally important to the lives of women faced with unplanned pregnancies.

We are entirely volunteer-run, and our small overhead costs are covered by a regular donation. This means that any money you donate goes directly towards the cost of a woman’s abortion or transport to England.

Thank you again for all your support. Without you, we wouldn’t have been able to provide accommodation, financial assistance, and confidential, non-judgemental information to the women in difficult circumstances who have contacted us.