Journalist Rebecca Grant’s new book, Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the 60-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom, from Simon & Schuster’s Avid Reader Press, charts the reproductive freedom movement from the days before Roe through the seismic impact of Dobbs, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing states to ban abortion. With support from the Fund, Grant investigated how, in the wake of the Dobbs decision, American activists established so-called “community support networks,” telehealth platforms and e-commerce sites for distributing abortion pills outside of FDA-approved channels. Most of these sources relied on generic versions of the medication from India, and Grant traced the black-market supply chain for medication abortion through multiple countries, meeting with pharmaceutical entrepreneurs in India, ex-pat activists who honed new models for supporting abortion access in states with bans, “carriers” who traveled abroad and smuggled medication back into the US in their suitcases, and people on the ground who were physically putting packages with medication in the mail.
In new book, grantee documents black-market supply chain for medication abortion post-Dobbs
