Hey, I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is the second episode of The Network. If you haven't listened to the first episode, go back and start there. In the first episode, we traveled to Brazil to follow a discovery that a pill for stomach ulcers could be repurposed for abortion, no doctor required. Soon after that, a network started to form in

Brazil, a whisper network, really, where women were telling each other about these pills,

passing on info person to person about where to get the pills and how to use them. In this episode,

our hosts, Victoria Estrada and Marta Martinez Martinez take us to a new era of the network

when it moves way beyond whispers and beyond Brazil.

Here's Victoria and Marta.

Saintec.

That was the name that some Brazilian doctors started calling cytotech in the 1980s, because far fewer women

were dying from abortion complications, thanks to this ulcer pill.

But not everyone was ready to canonize it.

During the 90s, the Brazilian government cracked down on side attack, the commercial name

of misoprostol or miso, for short.

Eventually, the government banned the medication and labeled it a controlled substance,

which meant miso had restrictions similar to what dangerous drugs like fentanyl now have.

And conditions got harsh for women who had abortions. The government targeted them more and more, arrested them on charges of distributing miso and with prosecutors called self-induced abortion.

A cleaning lady has been arrested. She's suspected of having a clandestine abortion.

But despite official She's suspected of having a clandestine abortion.

But despite official attempts to control Miso, the secret was out.

Reproductive health workers in Latin America heard about the pill when they traveled.

Some people got some from Colombia and then some people got some from Brazil. From a Peruvian city in the Amazon jungle.

And she said, here we use a bill.

And I said, what bill is that?

...