Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom

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. (June)