Europeans have lead the field on access to abortion, but a conservative comeback has caused a lot of those advances to regress.
Research published earlier this week (28 September) by the Centre for Reproductive Rights (CRR) found that despite an upward trend of legalisation, some countries are still seeking to enforce barriers and rolling back entitlement to abortion care.
This resistance to change is also evidenced in the lack of member state participation in safe abortion funds available since the the ‘My Voice, My Choice’ European citizens’ initiative for safe and accessible abortion was passed into law last February.
EU funds could since then be used to create regional programmes for safe abortion care for anyone who can’t access it in their own country, as well as financing travel to a country where abortion is available.
However, no funds have yet been used.
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As the EU seeks budget cuts to break a stalemate in member states’ talks, women’s rights groups are on the chopping bloc, prompting advocates’ concern that the cause is fading from the common agenda.
Research published on Monday (28 September) by rights initiative MOTERIS showed a consistent loss of funding for feminist organisations across EU countries.
Some groups are also facing political conditions on the money they receive, for instance in Poland and Croatia, alongside groups reporting increasing dependance on unpaid work.
And the trajectory points toward decreased funding in the 2028-2034 EU multi-annual framework (MFF), which is currently being haggled in Brussels, making matters worse.
Feminist groups pointed toward AgoraEU as evidence of the trend – the proposed new single-funding stream is to merge grants for culture, media, equality and civil society under in the same MFF bracket, in what would make equally worthy causes and their defenders compete against one another for diluted resources.
And the ongoing cuts at national level meant that “EU funds are a crucial lifeline for many women’s rights groups where state funding is insufficient,” MOTERIS said.
Small, grassroots rights groups, many of whom MOTERIS represents, find it even harder to access grants due to heavy administrative requirements.
Meanwhile, the Czech Republic and Lithuania served as examples of EU countries whose philanthropy was dependent on external top-ups, making them “more vulnerable to geopolitical shifts, such as the withdrawal of US funding.”
MOTERIS staged a protest to push for MFF support for women’s rights groups outside the European Parliament in Brussels on Tuesday (29 September), ahead of an MEPs’ debate on the topic.
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EU migrant return hubs became the subject of a summit held in Munich on Saturday (26 September) as interior ministers from member and associate states met the European Commission to advance projects aimed at offshoring rejected asylum seekers.
But the meeting made little progress, partly because many of the attendees met in Copenhagen on 4 September, where leaders had announced an expected start to the policy by 2027.
Instead, the main takeaways from Munich included rehashed commitments on improved emergency responses as well as broadened use of Frontex, the EU’s border control agency, and migration diplomacy with third states.
Though the mass border crossing into Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in North Africa, was a subject of discussion, the 18 EU and non-EU interior ministers present in Munich did not include a representative from Spain, possibly due to Pedro Sánchez’s opposition to the return hubs policy.
But the UK’s home secretary Shabana Mahmood was present, talking of the need for close cooperation within Europe on migration issues,” Germany’s interior minister and meeting host, Alexander Dobrindt, told reporters on Saturday.
Despite Donrindt’s focus on “innovative solutions” for those with no right to stay in Europe but no way or returning, Berlin’s migration response would also be significantly dependent on expanded powers for Europe’s border agency, Frontex.
“We are seeing that the Pact is working. The number of irregular arrivals is dropping across the EU while at the same time the numbers of returns to third countries are increasing. That said, we cannot become complacent,” Jim O’Callaghan, Irish interior minister, told the press before the meeting.
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“It’s career suicide…but this is why the abuse continues.”
Anca Păduraru was working in the communications sector of an EU-funded NGO in Brussels until she realised that a colleague of her same experience and managerial level was being paid more than her.
The colleague was a man.
While on medical leave, and less than a year into becoming a mother, Anca was fired for having brought up the subject of the pay gap.
“I was fired in 2024 on 8 March, so on International Women’s Day,” she told EUobserver. What ensued was a labour tribunal battle she eventually lost, costing her family over €60,000.
The originally Romanian citizen refused to stop fighting, and submitted an appeal in September 2026 for multiple counts of discrimination, despite her former employer’s successful court narrative depicting Anca as unreliable, and greedy.
The in-office conversations that had revealed the discrepancy in pay had not been recorded, while her employer had held the right to withhold the pay structure, the pay criteria, and the guidelines of employment.
“It’s about what proof a woman needs to prove pay disparity, which only the employer has,” she said.
That’s what Brussels’ most recent legislative effort was built to protect against, in the form of the EU Pay transparency directive. Workplaces employing more than 100 people would have a duty to report on the company’s gender pay gap figures.
The implementation deadline for the directive had been set at 7 June 2026, by which time all but five member states had managed to transpose it into their own systems.
Among those laggards is Belgium, which has only implemented the directive as far as its public offices, while EU data shows that the private sector harbours a significantly higher pay gap. In Belgium’s case, numbers for income difference go from the second-lowest rate in the EU at 0.7 percent in all sectors to 6.1 percent in the private sector.
A study by the World Economic Forum from 16 September found the global gender gap to stand at 30.8 percent, having improved by 5.2 percent in 20 years. Europe is its highest overall performer.
With an EU average pay gap of 11.1 percent in 2024, the pay transparency directive was seen as a major reform to advance the cause for equal workplaces.
But that left out smaller workplaces like Anca’s.
She had no real figure to turn to in reporting gender pay discrimination, as “in small organisations, there is no human resources,” nor are there real transparency obligations.
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