Part of the problem, I think, will be that this is such a highly politicised area that vague terms are often used so that it is not clear whether a charity is promoting abortion or not. I have seen a lot of this in developing countries in particular—family planning is promoted and contraception is the only element of this publicised—but abortion is promoted behind the scenes as well (because it is less glamorous and often illegal). All sorts of charities support abortion (in a variety of different ways) without many people realising—MSF, Oxfam, Water Aid, plausibly even groups like Christian Aid when you dig deep enough.
Of course none of this is specific evidence that FEM and MHI do so—but in general there is a pretty high prior probability that any given family planning organisation supports abortion in some way, and probably the presumption for anyone who opposes abortion is that family planning organisations have the burden of proving otherwise, given the prior probabilities. This may be unfair on those family planning organisations which genuinely don’t in any way support abortion—but unfortunately given the way the world is sometimes people have unfair burdens of proof.
Thank you for writing this. It was the effective altruism which (unintentionally, I guess) got me into abortion research (as my main area of research) and anti-abortion advocacy in the first place, for these kinds of reasons. I’ll probably upload my own thoughts on an EA case for anti-abortion advocacy in the relatively near future.
One major research gap which is particularly relevant to your emphasis on voluntary abortion reduction is: we have very little idea of what it would take, in practice, for women seeking abortion to change their minds. We know that most women seeking abortion do want another child in the future, and we know the broad reasons women cite for having abortions. But we have almost no research about what it would concretely take for them to choose otherwise (as an illustration of the point, we know that a large minority—in some countries a majority—of women cite financial concerns. But a) most of those women cite multiple reasons, so helping financially may not help that much; and b) there is some evidence that many such women do not want to know what financial support might be available). So that seems like a fruitful area for future primary research by EAs. Part of the problem is that the relevant population can usually only be accessed by abortion providers, who are less inclined to do this research.
I myself would go further and support involuntary abortion reduction (for reasons briefly explained here: https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2022/11/15/jme-2022-108572 ). But of course voluntary abortion reduction is even better to the extent that it can be achieved. I know that it is not always pleasant to talk about this topic in public, so thanks for your courage.