Year: 2019–2022 | Role: Country Coordinator & Counselor — Thailand
Reproductive Rights · Counseling · Grassroots Organizing
The Challenge
Access to safe abortion care in Thailand is limited by law, by stigma, and by the fact that most people don’t know where to look or who to trust. Women Help Women is an international activist organization with feminist activists, trained counselors, medical professionals, and researchers working across four continents, with a strong focus on supporting self-managed abortion in places where it is restricted. The Thailand chapter needed someone who could hold both sides of the work: coordination and direct human support.
What I Did
Jillian, who I had first met during my time at Mae Tao Clinic, reached out about the coordinator position and I joined. The work had a few different shapes. The main one was telehealth counseling: responding directly to individuals navigating unwanted pregnancies, providing information about medication abortion, answering questions, and making sure people felt informed and accompanied rather than alone. Alongside that, I translated and adapted materials into Thai so that the information was accessible in a language and register people could actually use. And there was local advocacy work too: showing up publicly alongside organizations working on reproductive health rights in Thailand, putting WHW’s presence into national conversations about access.
Counseling this kind of work teaches you that consistency is its own form of care. Staying steady while someone else is frightened is a skill, and it is one I had to learn properly.
Outcomes
Over three years, I supported hundreds of individuals through safe, informed access to abortion care. I grew the Thailand network’s capacity and reach through local partnerships and contributed Thai-language materials that the organization continued to use. This work sits in a different category from most things on this page. The stakes were most immediate here, and most personal, and it is where I felt most clearly what it means to serve a person rather than a process.
