Access
Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning author of Birth, a journey into the underground activist networks that have been working to protect women’s autonomy over their bodies amidst legal, political, religious, and cultural oppression over the past sixty years.
In this definitive, eye-opening history, award-winning author Rebecca Grant charts the reproductive freedom movement from the days before Roe through the seismic impact of Dobbs. The stories in Access span four continents, tracing strategies across generations and borders. Grant centers those activists who have been engaged in direct action to help people get the abortions they need. Their efforts involve no small measure of daring-do, spy craft, sea adventures, close calls, undercover operations, smuggling, sequins, legal dramas, victories, defeats, and above all, a deeply held conviction that all the risks are worth it for the cause.
In Access, we meet a cast of brave, bold, and unforgettable women: the founders of the Jane Collective, a group of anonymous providers working clandestinely between Chicago apartments to perform abortions in the pre-Roe years; the originators and leaders of the abortion fund movement; Verónica Cruz Sánchez, a Mexican activist who works to support self-managed abortion with pills and fights to free women targeted by the criminalization of abortion; and Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch doctor who realizes that there is one place abortion bans cannot reach: international waters.
Post-Dobbs, activist groups have once again stepped up and put themselves on the line to resist. Building on the work of their feminist forebearers and international allies, they are charting new pathways for access in the face of unprecedented acts to subjugate and control half of America’s population. Working above ground, underground, and in legal gray areas, they’ve helped people travel across state lines for care, established telehealth practices, and formed community networks to distribute pills for free to people who needed them.
Drawing on expert research and investigative reporting, told with deep compassion and humanity by a journalist who has spent her career on the frontlines of the fight, Access celebrates the bravery, ingenuity, and determination of women across decades who have fought for a fundamental human right—and serves as an inspiring rallying cry for the work that lies ahead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A ship in international waters that offers abortions to anyone, underground pill smuggling networks, and global lists of secretive abortion providers are some of the inventive means by which activists thwart abortion restrictions in this defiant history from journalist Grant (Birth). After a brief look back at a mid-19th-century foremother to these efforts—Madame Restell, the "wickedest woman in New York," who sold "Female Monthly Pills" before abortion's criminalization—Grant homes in on the last 60 years of such illicit activism. She begins just before Roe, with groups like the "Army of Three," who compiled "the first open (and illegal) abortion referral service" in the U.S., and ends with Roe's overturning. Notwithstanding the U.S.-centric framing, the book's scope is international, covering battles for abortion access in Ireland, Poland, Brazil, and the "abortion corridor between the U.S. and Mexico"—an illicit connection that has become more important post-Roe as "older white women," the "least likely to attract scrutiny from customs agents," collaborate with Mexican feminist groups to ferry abortion pills into America. Grant's roving, keenly reported account also looks at how the internet revolutionized possibilities for remote treatment as pioneering websites like Women on Web guided people through the abortion consultation process and at how in recent years women's deaths and imprisonment due to lack of abortion access have galvanized mass protests that successfully demanded change. With an inspiring focus on ordinary people who risk their livelihoods, freedom, and safety to help others, this rivets.
