Access to abortion pills has grown since Dobbs
practical ways to help homeless people + lessons from Canada's "$10-a-day" child care
Hi all —
I hope you are having a happy holiday season, and maybe even getting time off work now. While I hope to do some kind of EOY reflection before 2024, but this isn’t that.
I have a few new pieces to share:
1. I have a story out today about how abortion pill access has grown since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. Yes there are still innumerable threats to reproductive health care, but the new, cheaper, faster ways people in all 50 states can now get abortion pills should not be overlooked. And importantly, many of these options will remain even if the Supreme Court issues a bad ruling next summer. This is an evolving story, but it’s clear that many of the people who would most benefit from information about all their options do not have it.
An excerpt:
Getting the word out about medication abortion has been difficult for activists, especially with headline-grabbing news stories about new efforts to restrict the pills and punish those seeking to bypass state bans. In the early months following the Dobbs decision, if you lived in a state that banned abortion, your best bet was probably ordering pills from overseas, via the reproductive health care nonprofit Aid Access, even though their shipments could take two to three weeks.
Today, though, providers and new organizations ship pills directly from the US to pregnant people living in more restrictive states, dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes to send the medication through the mail. International volunteer networks have also expanded to help women end their pregnancies, and campaigns to destigmatize misoprostol-only abortions, a common method used around the world, have accelerated.
“We’re trying to shout this all from the rooftop,” Elisa Wells, the cofounder of Plan C, told Vox. “People are worried and there’s a lot of questions out there — is this all legit? Are the pills actually going to arrive? And we’re trying to say yes, these really are real routes of access.”
2. I wrote a piece about Canada’s ongoing experiment with providing ‘$10-a-day’ child care to families, and what political lessons American child care advocates can learn from our northern neighbors. It’s the kind of story I really like to do — exploring problems but also practical solutions. It can be easy to think nothing will ever change, but I find it’s much easier to resist that nihilism by learning about what’s actually happening and changing. In the last two years I’ve reported on some big first-of-its-kind child care policy wins in the United States in New Mexico, California, and ermont. Learning about those winning campaigns and the one in Canada I think really does start to paint a clarifying picture.
You can read that full piece here
3. This last piece is one we published on Christmas Day laying out things you can do, as an individual, to help address the homeless crisis and help those experiencing homelessness. A reader last month wrote to me saying they often feel helpless about the situation, and wondered what, if anything they could really do. We decided it was an important question that merited real reporting, and I hope some of these suggestions inspire you.
I also wanted to lift up this lovely, stirring New York Times op-ed published on Sunday that engages directly with (and links to) my motherhood dread essay.
(I think I just used a gift link so hopefully you will not have a paywall issue??)
The headline is: I Used To Write Jokes About How Parenting is Terrible. Then I Had My Daughter.
Thanks for reading,