Launched last year, the “My Voice, My Choice” campaign urged Brussels to help women from EU countries where abortion is not readily available to undergo the procedure elsewhere in the bloc.

“We are now fine tuning every last detail. Be patient, be confident, we are on it,” Equality commissioner Hadja Lahbib said in an Instagram video on Wednesday.

“Just know one thing, the European Union is committed to women’s health, security and dignity”.

Campaigners have grown uneasy about the EU’s expected response, which is to be presented at a press conference in Brussels Thursday afternoon.

“We unofficially got information that the draft of the decision is written with a negative attitude,” the campaign organisers wrote on their website this week.

That spurred an outpour of solidarity, including from Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo, who said he had backed the initiative believing the EU could be “a leader for both women’s rights & democracy”.

“What’s happened since is incredible. But what might happen this week is devastating,” he wrote on social media, telling EU chief Ursula von der Leyen: “you can make all the difference!”.

– ‘Every woman’ –

Liberalised across most of the 27-nation bloc, the right to end pregnancies remains severely restricted in some countries — notably Malta and Poland.

As a consequence, more than 20 million women in the European Union do not have access to safe abortion care, women’s rights campaigners say.

Rather than requiring changes in national laws, the petitioners asked Brussels to set up a financial mechanism to help liberal member states provide abortions to women from countries where it is not readily available.

“In many countries in Europe abortion is not safe, it’s not accessible, it’s not free, and we want to provide every woman the possibility of having it,” Federica Vinci, the campaign’s coordinator for Italy, told AFP in September.

The initiative secured more than one million signatures — the minimum threshold required to force the European Commission to address it.

It is not legally binding, but the commission had to issue a reply before March 2, 2026, outlining the actions it intends to take.

Malta allows abortion only in cases where the mother’s life is in danger or the foetus has no chance of survival, whereas in Poland ending a pregnancy is only permitted in cases of rape, incest or if the mother’s life is in danger.

ub/ec/ach