Spain blocks access to reproductive rights website Women on Web

As of February 2020, Spain has blocked access to the reproductive rights website Women on Web. We reported on this block back in May 2020 as part of our evaluations of our new experiments and measurement engine. At the time, we determined that the block was implemented by means of SNI filtering, which is a way of blocking websites by reading the website’s name during the early stage of a secure connection and stopping access before the page loads.

Today, six years later, access to Women on Web’s website (www.womenonweb.org) remains blocked on multiple networks in Spain. This is evident through OONI data, which is collected by OONI Probe users in Spain and published by OONI as open data.

OONI Probe is free and open source software that is run daily by volunteers in most countries, including Spain. It includes a variety of experiments, including the Web Connectivity test designed to measure the blocking of websites.

This test runs a series of checks (DNS lookup, TCP connection, TLS handshake, and HTTP(S) request) both from a known uncensored network (the “control”) and from the user’s local network. The results are then automatically compared. If they match, the website is considered accessible. If they differ, an “anomaly” is recorded, suggesting that access to the website may be interfered with. The type of mismatch helps identify how the blocking is being carried out.

Access to Women on Web’s website (www.womenonweb.org) has been measured regularly over the last years on multiple networks in Spain. The following chart aggregates OONI measurement coverage from the testing of www.womenonweb.org on 28 networks in Spain over the last month (between 26th April 2026 to 25th May 2026).

As is evident from the above chart, the majority of measurements presented anomalies, suggesting that access to www.womenonweb.org was blocked on most tested networks in Spain. It’s worth noting though that some measurements throughout this period were successful (annotated in green as “OK”), indicating that the block is not implemented on all networks in Spain.

A per-network breakdown of the measurement coverage (pertaining to the OONI Probe testing of www.womenonweb.org in Spain over the last month) shows that out of 28 tested networks, the largest volume of anomalies – and, therefore, the strongest signals of blocking – are observed on the following 6 networks: Telefónica de España, S.A.U. (AS3352), Xtra Telecom (AS15704), Vodafone Espana (AS12430), Orange Espagne (AS12479), Vodafone ONO (AS6739), R Cable y Telecable Telecomunicaciones, S.A.U. (AS12334).

In most cases, OONI data shows that the blocking of www.womenonweb.org is implemented by means of TLS interference because the connection is reset after the ClientHello message during the TLS handshake (which is consistent with TLS based interference observed in our 2020 study). This means the connection is cut off right after the browser tries to start a secure connection to the website, before any content can be exchanged. TLS interference is observed on all the aforementioned networks, excluding Orange Espagne (AS12479), where access to www.womenonweb.org is blocked by means of DNS tampering. On this network, OONI data shows that the domain name is resolved to the local loopback address 127.0.0.1 – meaning it is redirected to the user’s own device – rather than to the actual IP address of the website (www.womenonweb.org).

Women on Web, together with Women’s Link Worldwide, challenged the blocking of the website through legal action in Spain. In October 2022, the Spanish Supreme Court ruled in favour of partially unblocking the site, but required that the section used for abortion pill consultations remain blocked. While the court recognised the importance of access to online abortion information, the Spanish authorities later stated that technically separating parts of the website was not feasible, so the full block remained in place. After exhausting legal options in Spanish courts, Women’s Link Worldwide is preparing to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights to seek full unblocking of the site.

If you are in Spain, you can help test Women on Web’s website and contribute more measurements by running OONI Probe.