Access Format: Paperback

From the award-winning author of Birth, a journey into the underground activist networks that have been working to protect women’s autonomy over their bodies amidst legal, political, religious, and cultural oppression over the past sixty years.

In this definitive, eye-opening history, award-winning author Rebecca Grant charts the reproductive freedom movement from the days before Roe through the seismic impact of Dobbs. The stories in Access span four continents, tracing strategies across generations and borders. Grant centers those activists who have been engaged in direct action to help people get the abortions they need. Their efforts involve no small measure of daring-do, spy craft, sea adventures, close calls, undercover operations, smuggling, sequins, legal dramas, victories, defeats, and above all, a deeply held conviction that all the risks are worth it for the cause.

In Access, we meet a cast of brave, bold, and unforgettable women: the founders of the Jane Collective, a group of anonymous providers working clandestinely between Chicago apartments to perform abortions in the pre-Roe years; the originators and leaders of the abortion fund movement; Verónica Cruz Sánchez, a Mexican activist who works to support self-managed abortion with pills and fights to free women targeted by the criminalization of abortion; and Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch doctor who realizes that there is one place abortion bans cannot reach: international waters.

Post-Dobbs, activist groups have once again stepped up and put themselves on the line to resist. Building on the work of their feminist forebearers and international allies, they are charting new pathways for access in the face of unprecedented acts to subjugate and control half of America’s population. Working above ground, underground, and in legal gray areas, they’ve helped people travel across state lines for care, established telehealth practices, and formed community networks to distribute pills for free to people who needed them.

Drawing on expert research and investigative reporting, told with deep compassion and humanity by a journalist who has spent her career on the frontlines of the fight, Access celebrates the bravery, ingenuity, and determination of women across decades who have fought for a fundamental human right—and serves as an inspiring rallying cry for the work that lies ahead.

Rebecca Grant is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon, who covers reproductive rights, health, and justice. Her work has appeared in NPR, New York magazine, The Atlantic, VICE, The Nation, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost, and The Guardian, among other publications. She has received grants and fellowships from the International Women’s Media Foundation, the International Reporting Project, The Fund for Investigative Journalists, and Type Investigations, reporting stories around the US and the world. Rebecca studied English and art history at Cornell University and served in the Peace Corps in Thailand. Before full-time freelancing, she worked at Washingtonian Magazine and wrote about startups in San Francisco. She is the author of Birth and Access.