I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.

In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?

Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.

A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by

their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism with me,

Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. The bomb unearths a gripping true story of espionage at the

core of the British American atomic research programmes.

Find out more in Season 2 of The Bomb, a podcast from the BBC World Service, available now.

Hello and thank you for downloading the BBC Witness History podcast from the World Service.

This week we're going to bring you stories about women's reproductive rights around the world.

This follows the US Supreme Court's ruling on Roe v. Wade, which removes the constitutional right to abortion in America.

The contraceptive pill was first approved for use in the US in 1960. It wasn't until 1999 that women in Japan were allowed to take oral contraceptives. In 2020, Rebecca Kesby spoke to politician Yuriko Modoka, who fought for the right for Japanese women to take the pill. Most of the, of person that the more resistance I face, the more motivated I am.

Yoriko Madoka is a politician who served in the upper house of the Japanese parliament between

1993 and 2010, as one of the Japanese parliament between 1993 and 2010.

As one of the few women in politics at the time, she made a point of speaking up for women's rights,

including the right to take the contraceptive pill.

The reason I started pushing for the legalization of the pill was because, before I became an MP,

I used to give a class for women called the Smiley Divorce Class.

I wasn't a professional counselor or anything.

I was just a journalist, but I volunteered to help people

who were divorcing because I'd been through it myself. We had a helpline that people could

phone to and thousands of women got in touch. When they talked about what had gone wrong in their marriages, a lot of them

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