Image: We Won!! by Črt Piksi
The European Citizens’ Initiative My Voice My Choice, launched in Slovenia by Nika Kovač and the 8 March Institute, set out with a clear and concrete objective: to ask the European Union to establish a financial mechanism to support access to safe abortion care for people who cannot obtain it in their own country.
From the very beginning, the initiative was supported by a broad European coalition. More than 300 civil society organisations joined the campaign, alongside thousands of volunteers and activists who organised events, collected signatures and brought the issue of access to safe abortion into public debate across Europe.
In Italy, the campaign was supported and promoted by the Luca Coscioni Association, which coordinated the national physical mobilisation for signature collection and helped build a wide network of activists and organisations working on civil and reproductive rights. Together with Federica Vinci and Matteo Cadeddu, I had the opportunity to coordinate this mobilisation in Italy, which ultimately contributed more than 166,000 signatures to the initiative. Italy thus became one of the countries contributing the highest number of signatures to the campaign, with France and Germany.
EUMANS – the pan-European civic movement based in Brussels – also joined and supported the campaign, reinforcing its transnational dimension. EUMANS had already been active on this issue through a European petition calling for the inclusion of abortion rights in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and helped raise awareness and political support for My Voice My Choice across the European debate.
Thanks to this amazing mobilisation, more than 1.2 million Europeans signed the Initiative, allowing it to pass the threshold required for a European Citizens’ Initiative and enter the institutional phase.
Following the signature collection, the campaign continued with public events and advocacy activities aimed at accompanying the initiative through the European institutional process. In this context, on 1 December 2025 EUMANS organised an event in Brussels dedicated to fundamental rights and democratic participation in Europe, where My Voice My Choice was also discussed, with the participation of campaign organisers and activists. The event provided an opportunity to take stock of the initiative’s progress and to explain in detail the institutional step that would take place the following day at the European Parliament.
On 2 December 2025, the official public hearing of the European Citizens’ Initiative took place at the European Parliament, allowing a direct exchange between the citizens’ committee and Members of the EP.
Just a few days later, on 17 December 2025, the European Parliament adopted a resolution supporting the initiative during its plenary session in Strasbourg, with 358 votes in favour, 202 against and 79 abstentions. The result was politically significant, particularly because support for the resolution came from several political groups, including the European People’s Party (EPP), the largest group in Parliament. This broad majority sent a strong political signal to the European Commission about the level of parliamentary support for the initiative.
On 26 February 2026, the European Commission issued its official response. While the Commission did not create a new dedicated fund, it took an important political step by clarifying that existing EU funding instruments (in particular the European Social Fund Plus – ESF+) can be used by Member States to support access to abortion care, including covering travel and accommodation costs for those forced to seek care abroad.
For the first time, access to abortion has been explicitly recognised within the scope of EU funding instruments. This creates a concrete opportunity for Member States that wish to guarantee access to care, in a European context where reproductive rights remain highly uneven.
But the significance of My Voice My Choice goes beyond this specific policy development. The initiative also shows that European participatory democracy can have real political impact. More than 1.2 million citizens, together with hundreds of civil society organisations across Europe, used one of the democratic tools provided by the EU treaties to bring a fundamental rights issue onto the European political agenda.
The next phase now shifts to EU Member States, which will decide whether and how to make use of these instruments. For My Voice My Choice committee this is not the end of the campaign: it is the beginning of a new phase.
Our task now is to ensure that this political opening becomes a real change on the ground, translating into safe and accessible abortion care for everyone in Europe.
SOURCE: Alice Spaccini, Membro di Giunta Associazione Luca Coscioni, Roma, Italy. E-mail, 11 March 2026.
