Repro Uncensored Joins the Onion Family
Authored by Tor and Repro Uncensored
In late 2024, The Tor Project and Repro Uncensored built a partnership based on a mutual goal to nurture an awareness of digital censorship and surveillance techniques and nourish infrastructures to combat them.
In November last year, we jointly published a digital security toolkit outlining basic digital security measures people could take to protect themselves from prying eyes.
As bodily autonomy becomes a point of contention, and as the world moves to criminalise abortion and ban access to reproductive healthcare, we must ensure that we – who live and work for a better Web – can maintain a space where such activity can persevere and can be pursued in safety; safety from surveillance and what follows from it.
Our location data, chat and browsing history, and search activity related to our bodies and how we decide to reproduce, suddenly carry harmful consequences to us.
So today, as a small contribution to this goal, we are proud to announce the release of Repro Uncensored’s onion site. Repro Uncensored is a global coalition of organizations from across the spectrum of entities who care about and seek to further reproductive justice including reproductive health organizations, human rights organizations, internet freedom groups, and artists.
“At Repro Uncensored, we receive reports every day from organizations and individuals who run into barriers trying to access or share reproductive health information. It can come with serious risks - especially for people in hostile legal environments. We partnered with Tor because we trust its long-standing commitment to privacy and resistance to censorship. Tor allows us to keep information available for those who need it most, without exposing them to surveillance and risk of criminalization. I think of Repro Uncensored as both a shield and a space to experiment - a place where we can test censorship-resistant infrastructure and privacy-preserving practices that can be adapted by other organizations and movements navigating similar threats.”
Martha Dimitratou, Co-Founder and Digital Director, Repro Uncensored
We also appreciate that many newcomers might be reading this and wondering, ‘What are onion sites, and what is their use?’ Simply put, onion sites are the safest way to browse the Web; they are websites that can only be accessed through Tor Browser (or any other browser configured to connect to the Tor network), and actually offer an incognito browsing experience. Try entering this URL into a regular browser:
https://www.repro4olawbnocan6bcbmeoystb3adusrg6ppg6qr7my6nenjs2r3bqd.onion/
A regular browser will fail to load the page. But if you access it using Tor Browser, the website will load fully, and you’ll be able to view all of its contents. Onion sites provide many benefits including:
Censorship Resistance: an onion service is accessible as long as Tor is reachable to user, it is also not possible for any state or internet provider to censor an onion address;
Privacy Safeguards: the communication between the user and the website is fully end-to-end encrypted, with anonymity on both ends;
Metadata Elimination: people can be prosecuted just on metadata and with onion sites, metadata logging is eliminated on both ends.
So when you visit an onion site, it’s an entirely private visit (like it should be!); no one can see that you even intended to visit the site, and as a result, no one can block you from reaching it. Akin to paying a visit to a friend, with onion sites, there’s someone you can lean on and confide in.
That’s it for now. We continue fighting for reproductive justice, whether in the onion world or outside. We certainly hope that Tor’s partnership with Repro Uncensored can inspire more action toward serving communities within the reproductive justice space, resisting censorship, and protecting them from surveillance.
Learn more about Tor and get in touch with their team here