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ACCESS: Rebecca Grant in conversation with Zoë Carpenter

Tue, July 1 from 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm PDT
716 SE Grand Ave Portland, OR 97214

Join us for a timely conversation with two local journalists Rebecca Grant and Zoë Carpenter about Grant’s forthcoming title, Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom.


About the book:
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.
Rebecca Grant

Rebecca Grant

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 AtlanticVICE, 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.

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Zoë Carpenter

Zoë Carpenter

Zoë Carpenter is a journalist and fiction writer from Oregon. Her writing has been published in Rolling Stone, The Nation, Guernica, Narratively, and elsewhere. A recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, she has also received grants and fellowships from the Pulitzer Center, the Catwalk Art Institute, PLAYA, and Yaddo. She has an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was a postgraduate Zell Fellow. Prior to that she was an editor at The Nation, where she worked on reported features, investigations, and opinion pieces for print and online.

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