A Secret That Spread Across Continents
How a global movement is shaping abortion access in post-Roe America
Today marks three years since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion. As an editor for NPR’s Embedded, I’ve been working for months on a podcast series about one of the methods that women in the US have been using to end their pregnancies despite growing abortion restrictions — and which has been popular in other parts of the world for decades.
The series is called "The Network.” It starts with the unlikely origin story of this method — in Brazil, where abortion was almost entirely banned — and follows the spread of it far beyond the whisper network that initially got the word out.
Here are links to the series on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and below is the trailer to give you a flavor of what the series is like.
If you listen to the three episodes and can’t get enough, our team published a couple of long-form stories that expand on the podcast’s reporting: about the Latin American roots of this method and American doctors’ growing comfort with it. Two bonus episodes about the reporting process are also available for Embedded+ subscribers.
For those of you who follow this newsletter for my writing about rethinking relationships, this series is more connected to that topic than you might think. Yes, the series highlights a medical technology, but the more eye-opening part, I think, is its deep dive into a social technology that women developed and the challenge it poses to medical authorities. We decided on the title “The Network” because, first and foremost, we’re following the ties between women.
I hope you’ll listen and tell me what you think.
In other news
The paperback edition of my book came out last week! (As a reader, I prefer paperbacks to hardcovers, so this is particularly exciting to me.)
The Brazilian edition is also out! I’ve been curious about how publishers in other countries would translate the title of my book since the English is a riff on the idiom “significant others.” The Brazilian title translates into English as “Life is Better with Friends.” Can’t argue with that.
And DC-area folks, you can find me at the DC Writers’ Salon (which has become my second home for writing) on Thursday, July 17 at 6:30pm, in a conversation about the process of working on the book.