After Roe, a New Abortion Underground
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 17 October 2022
⏱️ 28 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the contributor Stephania Taladrid has been following a network of women who are secretly distributing abortion pills across the United States. The group has its roots in Mexico, where some medications used for at-home abortions are available at a lower cost over the counter. Volunteers—they call themselves “pill fairies”—are sourcing the medications at Mexican pharmacies and bringing them over the border. The work is increasingly perilous: in states like Texas, abetting an abortion is considered a felony, carrying long prison sentences. But, to Taladrid’s sources, the work is imperative. “I mean, there’s nothing else to do, right?” one woman in Texas, who had an abortion using the medication she received from a pill fairy, said. “You can’t just lie down and accept it. You can’t.”
Note: The interview excerpts featured in this story (with the exception of Verónica Cruz’s) are not the actual voices of Taladrid’s subjects. To protect their anonymity, the excerpts were re-recorded by actors.
Read Stephania Taladrid’s full reporting here.
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| 1:19.2 | Since Roe v. Wade fell, a network of activists has been putting medications used for |
| 1:24.7 | at-home abortions into the hands of women who have lost the constitutional |
| 1:28.8 | right to reproductive choice. |
| 1:31.5 | So they actually started calling themselves the pill fairies, and this is a collective |
| 1:37.6 | of women who range an age from 30 to 82, and they each have a different role in this network. |
| 1:50.4 | Stephanie Ataladreid has been reporting for the New Yorker on abortion since well before the Dobbs decision. |
| 1:55.9 | Steph, this is now the first time that we're hearing from women who are really doing this, |
| 2:00.1 | sometimes at great |
| 2:00.9 | personal risk, where does it start? Who's coordinating this effort? So the woman coordinating |
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