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

Grant, Rebecca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 166805325X ISBN 13: 9781668053256

Verlag: Avid Reader Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rebecca Grant is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon, who covers reproductive rights, health, and justice. Her work has appeared in NPR, New York magazine, The Atlantic, VICE, The Nation, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost, and The Guardian, among other publications. She has received grants and fellowships from the International Women’s Media Foundation, the International Reporting Project, The Fund for Investigative Journalists, and Type Investigations, reporting stories around the US and the world. Rebecca studied English and art history at Cornell University and served in the Peace Corps in Thailand. Before full-time freelancing, she worked at Washingtonian Magazine and wrote about startups in San Francisco. She is the author of Birth and Access.

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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.

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Chapter One: San Francisco, California, 1966 One SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, 1966
At the stroke of 9 a.m. on Friday, July 29, 1966, Patricia Theresa Maginnis approached the Federal Building, a stately Renaissance Revival structure in San Francisco’s Civic Center, holding a box of leaflets. It was a cool and overcast morning and a gaggle of reporters had already amassed outside, waiting for the small figure with the big box to arrive. Described by The New York Times as a slender and intense spinster “with the eyes of a zealot,” Maginnis was striking as she marched into the crowd with a mane of tousled hair that framed her angular face.

Once inside the scrum, she began passing out yellow leaflets to the journalists and passersby that advertised “Classes in Abortion” and listed female anatomy, sterile technique, after-abortion care, methods of abortions, dangers involved, police questioning, and foreign abortion specialists as topics she would cover over the course of four Wednesday-evening sessions. The leaflets also included a list of addresses and prices for doctors who provided abortions in other countries and described in detail, complete with diagrams, two methods for self-inducing abortion. “I am attempting to show women an alternative to knitting needles, coat hangers, and household cleaning agents,” Maginnis proclaimed to the bystanders, urging those around her to take the papers and pass them on. At a time when abortion was swathed in taboo, stigma, and shame, Maginnis was making the argument that anyone who wanted one should be able to get one without having to navigate legal, political, or medical barriers, on demand, without apology or justification, for free. In distributing the leaflets, she wasn’t just doing something radical—she was doing something potentially illegal, and she knew it. Section 276 of the California Penal Code stated that helping a woman have an abortion, or soliciting her to have one, was punishable by up to five years in prison. The law had largely been unchanged in California since 1850, and Maginnis believed that changing it required a test case. But in order to do that, she needed to be charged and go to court. She planned to leaflet until the authorities got sick of her, arrested her, or gave in and repealed the law.

She’d already been at it for six weeks, handing out leaflets to anyone who would take one on the streets of San Francisco and keeping the police abreast of her activities. Law enforcement, however, was wary of the attention that arresting her would bring and frustrated her ambitions by leaving her alone. When they still had not arrived at the Federal Building by 10:30 a.m. on the twenty-ninth, Gary Bentley, a member of a Channel 7 camera crew that was filming a piece about Maginnis, grew impatient and took matters into his own hands. After ensuring the camera was trained on him, Bentley announced he was placing Maginnis under citizen’s arrest for violating Section 188 of the Municipal Police Code, a local ordinance that prohibited advertising abortion and lewd literature.

“What do you think of that?” he asked Maginnis.

“Excuse me, please,” she said, dismissing him as she rushed after another woman to hand her a leaflet.

At last, a policeman arrived on the scene to take Maginnis into custody (emphasizing while doing so that it was Bentley, not him, who was making the arrest) and drove away with her in his car. Soon thereafter, Section 188 was found unconstitutional, and the case was thrown out, but to Maginnis, the victory felt insufficient. Her aims were higher—total repeal of the state’s abortion laws. “A decade before Roe, with her ungainly activism, her proclivity for wearing clothes she’d found on the street, and her righteous, unquenchable rage, Maginnis helped to fundamentally reshape the abortion debate into the terms we’re still using today,” journalist Lili Loofbourow wrote in a profile years later. “She was the first to take a passionate, public stance arguing that the medical stranglehold over women’s reproductive lives was corrosive.”

At the time Maginnis took her stand, abortion had been illegal in the US for nearly a century. Every state in the country had criminal abortion laws with exceptions only offered for procedures necessary to save or preserve the life of the mother. These were known as “therapeutic abortions,” although there was not a clear definition or universal agreement on what qualified as “necessary.” What one hospital considered permissible under the law, another might not, and to get approval for the procedure, patients had to go before hospital committees composed entirely of men and plead their case. It was a terrifying, alienating, and humiliating hurdle to overcome, not to mention a high one, as women had to bare their most vulnerable, intimate selves in supplication to physicians who had the power to determine their fates.

In practice, few women qualified for therapeutic abortions, and those who didn’t had to resort to other measures. Women with the most resources could travel to places where abortion was legal, while the rest had to seek out underground providers or figure out a way to end the pregnancy themselves. In the best-case scenario, and only for those who could afford it, there were physicians who would quietly and capably perform the procedure as a clandestine part of their medical practice.

Until a surge in prosecutions of abortion providers during the 1940s and ’50s, many physicians had operated for decades in what was essentially open secrecy, and although their numbers dwindled after the crackdowns, there was still a cluster of such doctors in every state by the mid-1960s. Many had gotten into the work after treating people who became grievously ill from botched abortions, feeling they couldn’t stand by and do nothing. There were also skilled midwives, like the so-called Mrs. Vineyards, who practiced in the St. Louis area for some thirty years, providing proficient, albeit expensive, abortion care.

On the other end of the spectrum were inept and callous providers who took advantage of a desperate and vulnerable clientele, practicing in unsanitary conditions, treating clients badly, and inflicting serious, sometimes permanent damage. For women who couldn’t afford a provider of any stripe, didn’t know where to find one, or were too afraid or unable to visit one, there was a long and seemingly ever-growing list of methods they tried to induce an abortion themselves: Lysol douche, glycerin douche, powdered kitchen mustard douche, hydrogen peroxide douche, potassium permanganate corrosive tablets, intrauterine installation of kerosene and vinegar, paintbrushes, curtain rods, slippery elm sticks, garden hoses, glass cocktail stirrers, ear syringes, telephone wire, copper wire, coat hangers, nut picks, pencils, cotton swabs, clothespins, knitting needles, rubber catheters, chopsticks, bicycle pumps, gramophone needles, castor oil by mouth, and turpentine. During this period, there were so many women suffering from abortion complications that hospitals had dedicated wards called Infected OB to treat them.

The consequences of unsafe abortions were ghastly, ubiquitous, and becoming impossible to ignore, and in 1961, after hearing the story of a woman forced to carry a child conceived in an assault, a freshman California assemblyman named John Knox introduced a bill that would broaden exceptions to California’s abortion law. At the time, around 30 percent of the state’s population identified as Catholic, and politicians, afraid of backlash from a powerful voting constituency, kept the proposal from even reaching the floor of either chamber. When a young...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Avid Reader Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 166805325X
• ISBN 13: 9781668053256
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 480
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar