Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom by Rebecca Grant
On the day of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, June 24, 2022, I was in the middle of writing a chapter for my book about feminism in the 1960s describing pre-Roe abortion horror stories. Of the 120 women I interviewed, most had had at least one illegal abortion, and each story was more harrowing than the last.
That ugly past had now roared into the present. Would American women living in abortion-ban states suffer again at the hands of back-alley butchers? Three years later, countless atrocities have indeed occurred, but there is one significant difference between illegal abortion in America in 1965 and 2025: mifepristone.
