AMY MERRILL
Artist, Activist, & future Ancestor
I operate at the intersections of art, technology and social change.
I’ve spent the past two decades navigating complex social issues, from human trafficking and gender equity to artist’s rights and free speech.
In 2015, I co-founded Plan C under a shared vision of transforming access to abortion pills by mail in the US. Today the public health initiative has grown into a trusted national resource, a catalyst for new methods of access and support, and a household name for safe self-managed abortion.
I’ve been named one of FastCompany’s Most Creative People in Business and as a Rock+Health Systems Disruptor. My background is in nonprofit management, digital and design, I’ve spent two decades navigating complex social issues from human trafficking and gender equity to artist’s rights and free speech.
I’m a lifelong musician and an amateur homesteader.
Have a question or idea? Get in touch.
Designing toward a world that works for all beings
Eyes Open is our conscious design and communications studio, in service of good information and big ideas.
Over the past decade we’ve built 80+ custom websites and digital communications campaigns for purpose-driven entrepreneurs and activists, companies and brands, and nonprofit organizations.
For the past two decades, I’ve helped nonprofits and startups with strategic planning, fundraising and messaging, digital infrastructure and information design. I’ve worked on complex social issues from human trafficking and gender equity to artist’s rights and free speech.
From impact trips to immersive music journeys, I’ve helped design and produce experiences intended to heal and transform, reflect reality and entertain, provide insights and inspire action.
Organizations and Experimentation
I believe camps, retreats and immersive experiences are most powerful when they create a temporary but tangible world—one that is smaller, intentional, and temporarily all-encompassing. Within that microcosm, we can experiment with new ways of living together and practice the values we want to see at scale: values like shared responsibility, creativity, care, and collective problem-solving.
I’ve explored these ideas through:
The Buckminster Fuller Institute’s Design Science Studio
The temporary city of Burning Man
UC Berkeley’s Lair of the Bear, Rotary’s Camp RYLA, and conferences like Summit Series and NEXUS
Adult sleepaway camps like Camp No Counselors and retreat centers like Esalen
Activist and organizer networks
None of these organizations are perfect. Each experience has informed my sense of possibility, chosen family and community, and the kind of world we can build together.
speaking truths & Examining power
Throughout my life, I’ve followed threads of activism rooted in personal agency and bodily autonomy, art as a tool for transformation, and imagination as a way to envision a better world.
My design studio Eyes Open leads digital communications for purpose-driven individuals and organizations. Over the years, we’ve built and worked on nearly 100 websites for friends, colleagues, national nonprofits, startups, public speakers, and coaches. I see a website as a window into a world, a chance to tell a story about what matters and offering of how someone can participate.
In 2015, I co-founded Plan C by building a simple website grounded in that same belief. It started with an “aha” moment, recognizing that by detangling abortion pills from institutions and governments and leveraging the power of the internet, we could catalyze a profound shift in this hot-button US issue. Today the term “Plan C” has become shorthand for safe, self-directed abortion care and an example of how communities and individuals can reclaim agency in the face of unjust policies and misplaced power.
In 2023 I was honored to be named as part of Fast Company’s 2023 Most Creative People in Business and as a Rock+Health Systems Disruptor. I currently serve as an advisor for gen-z emergency contraception brand Julie (member of the Starface brand family) and my local arts center.
In 2020 I was an inaugural member of the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s Design Science Studio, and advisor and artist-in-residence for the LA-based Jane Club as they transitioned from a bricks and mortar space to an online community.
I’ve spent the past two decades navigating complex social issues, from human trafficking and economic injustice to gender equity, focusing on reproductive health as one of the most urgent unsolved challenges. After studying nonprofit management and questioning traditional models of making impact, I worked alongside a leading anti–sex trafficking activist as the issue entered mainstream awareness, guiding celebrities and brands as they took public stands and experimenting with social enterprise (for-profit, for-good) models within capitalist structures.
I later pivoted to tech, helping build an experiential fundraising platform that enabled individuals to fund homes and schools through personal video campaigns — campaigns that raised $4M to fund hundreds of projects.
Witnessing how those experiences transformed people, I co-founded social enterprise Journey in 2015 to help people actually touch their impact. Over two years, we thoughtfully led 500+ people on international trips to build homes and renovate schools with local communities and nonprofit partners on the ground, experiences that often left people forever changed.
After sunsetting Journey, I grew Eyes Open and deepened my focus on reproductive health. As the U.S. entered a new era of crisis, I doubled down on Plan C, leaning into the high-stakes, edgy narrative of direct pill access that many thought would be shut down, but I knew needed to be heard. A decade later, Plan C reaches tens of millions annually through partnerships across research, tech, and creative sectors.
At my core, I am an artist and musician. I write and perform with my partner in post-apocalyptic space-folk band Formerly Alien, entertaining possible futures within immersive music experiences built on themes of hope, belonging and possibility. I write and produce solo as Amy Batara.
As a future ancestor and pragmatic prepper, I’m learning to homestead and experiment with regenerative practices on a tiny home farm with my husband, chickens and our cat.
Recent stages include:
SXSW
CES
Fast Company Impact Council
Summit Series
NEXUS Summit
Advertising Week
and reproductive health & justice conferences.
Talks cover:
What it means to do high-stakes work under governmental threat and Big Tech censorship — and how to keep going.
Why creativity and persistence aren’t optional, but essential tools for making life-saving public health information accessible and actionable at scale.
Behind the scenes, research-backed explanations of the rapidly evolving landscape of abortion access, from shield laws and cross-state telehealth to decentralized networks. These systems both legal and extralegal are expanding pill access in ways most people don’t yet know about or understand.
Pushing for progress at the intersections of justice and gender equity, polarization and culture change, and the roles technology can play in expanding autonomy and collective well-being.
January 2023 panel on reproductive health, tech and online search at CES in Las Vegas.
RECENT PRESS
I do press interviews and write op-eds on abortion pills, digital, search and AI strategy, within the context of the reproductive rights and access movement.
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ChatGPT is changing the abortion landscape
AI is changing many aspects of modern life, including abortion access.
Read the article on Mashable.com here
December 2025
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Brick-and-Mortar Pharmacies Begin Dispensing Abortion Pills Across the U.S.
While the anti-abortion movement is trying to remove mifepristone from the market, pharmacy access to abortion pills is slowly expanding.
Read the article on Ms. Magazine here
Oct 2023
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Abortion Pills Are in My Medicine Cabinet. They Should Be in Yours Too
op-ed by Amy Merrill.
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Abortion Pills Are Under Threat - This Nonprofit is Pushing Back
As abortion restrictions grow, Plan C offers pills-by-mail resources and vital information.
In 2023 Fast Company named Plan C cofounders Amy Merrill, Elisa Wells and Francine Coeytaux to their Most Creative People in Business list.
Read the article on FastCo here
July 2023
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‘We Won’t Be Bullied’: Abortion Pill Website Fights Texas Censorship
Tracy Droz Tragos’ documentary Plan C, now screening at SXSW, follows the ongoing fight to expand access to abortion medication.
Read the article on the Texas Observer here
March 2023
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Buying Abortion Pills Online Is Overwhelmingly Safe, But Maybe Illegal
Escalating attacks on abortion have created additional barriers to accessing the procedure over the last several years, making it somewhat inevitable that people are turning to the internet for help—not just for information about their nearest abortion clinic, or for money to cover the procedure, but, increasingly, to learn how to end their pregnancies themselves.
July 2019
Podcasts
I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing on activism, design and my own philosophy on living in this wild world on these recent podcasts.
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Disruptive Tech Solutions for Reproductive Health
Interview with Elisa Wells and Amy Merrill (Amy at minute 20).
April 2025
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Should I be scared? We’ll let you know.
Breaking down the recent flurry of assaults on medication abortion with the Co-Founder and Co-Director of Plan C. Amy helps us navigate the case of the NY doctor being sued for sending abortion pills through the mail, and how abobo patients can better protect themselves – especially as we are heading into the abortion upside down.
Times are heavy, but knowledge is power, y’all. We gotchu.
Feb 2025
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Podcast Interview: conversation on Digital Surveillance and Reproductive Rights. Comments from Amy Merrill at minutes 35 and 49. Pod by Emerson Collective.
May 2024
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BRANDS IN ACTION, BALDWIN&: Interview with Amy Merrill
On today’s episode, we welcome Amy Merrill. When it comes to brands leading the way in using what they do to create social change, Amy and her brand, Plan C, are the real deal. Amy talks about the opportunities and challenges Plan C has found in providing information and access to women who’ve been deprived of their personal choice. Branding, social mission, and creativity collide in a fascinating conversation.
Mar 2023
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Plan C, Abortion Stigma, + Clarifying Your Options with Amy Merrill
To help us make sense of the SCOTUS ruling on abortion rights, I have with me today Amy Merrill, the founder of Plan C, an organization here to give you the information + support necessary for you to take back the agency of your own body.
This is an incredible conversation we get into, one that not only touches on what’s happening in our political system around abortion, but also what’s brought us to this point.
Aug 2022
Books
I’ve had the honor of having my work with Plan C included in recent books on reproductive health, access and politics.
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by Naomi Braine
On Building a Global Feminist Movement for Self-Managed Abortion.
April 2025
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by Rebecca Grant
Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom, tells the tale of an ongoing struggle for women and gender expansive people to obtain their body autonomy.
April 2025
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by Rebecca Kelliher
The Extraordinary Story of a Revolution in Abortion Care.
Journalist Rebecca Kelliher dives into the radical history of the abortion pills from invention to distribution to today.
September 2025
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by Carrie Baker
This is the first book to offer a comprehensive history of abortion pills in the United States. Public intellectual and lawyer Carrie N. Baker shows how courageous activists waged a decades-long campaign to establish, expand, and maintain access to abortion pills.
2024
Writing
Subversive Tendencies is own ongoing substack where I explore overlaps of spirituality, social change and the unknown. Most transmissions include both a written piece and original audio + music voiceover.
Subscribe to monthly-ish posts at subversivetendencies.com.
Music & ART
The year is 2076. Earth has been destroyed, and we’re searching for a new home. Formerly Alien is a space folk band playing from the decks of the Elysium as the passengers and crew dream of where they might be headed. What does it look and feel like? Who will be there, how will they participate? What did we learn from our time on Earth?
The ship’s motto, Delivering us to a Better Tomorrow, captures the spirit of the band, harnessing the opportunity to cultivate hope and belonging within the dark realities of the unknown.
Since 2017, Formerly Alien has played stages from living rooms to art galleries, from converted auto body shops to the Ace Hotel Theater in LA.
A lifelong piano player and singer, I write solo music under the moniker Amy Batara. This is the first nickname a childhood best friend gave me. When I heard it again as an adult, it felt like my truest more bare self reanimated.
The music comes from a similar stream-of-consciousness essential place.
