What happened when one woman tried to make safe and cheap abortion pills available through the mail.
For two years, before she headed off to her full-time job as a web developer, or after she put her daughter to bed at night, Ursula Wing ran a business selling abortion pills from the bedroom of her New York City apartment. The 40-year-old single mother would fill orders that had been submitted through her website, dropping a piece of inexpensive jewelry into a mailer with a return address for “Fatima’s Bead Basket.” Hidden behind a panel taped inside were one tablet of mifepristone and four tablets of misoprostol.
Unlike many people involved in the underground movement to help women defy increasingly limited access to abortion providers, Wing did not originally think of herself as an activist. She began this work because she needed money to pay legal fees during a protracted custody dispute with her former partner. She knew there was a need out there. In 2012 she had written on her blog, the Macrobiotic Stoner, about terminating her own pregnancy with pills she’d bought online, and women regularly posted comments asking for help to do the same. So in May 2016, Wing launched a “secret bodega” page, where customers could buy a medication abortion kit, no consultation or prescription needed, for $85 with expedited shipping. Over the next two years, she would serve more than 2,000 customers.
Wing told no one about her entry into the global network of unregulated suppliers of abortion medications. She posted a link to the store in the comments section of her blog but otherwise did not advertise. “I did not want to be found too easily,” she says. “And I know that any woman who was online looking for this stuff—she will read through the 40th page of Google results until she finds what she’s looking for.”
This story is from the March/April 2019 edition of Mother Jones.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the March/April 2019 edition of Mother Jones.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Let Them Eat Kelp
Is seaweed farming the wave of the future?
To Match a Predator
Dating apps promise to hook you up with romance. But they can deliver con artists, rapists, and murderers.
A Pennsylvania Prophet
Meet the Christian nationalists who want to assert dominion-starting with the Keystone State.
"I'm Not Turming the Other Cheek Any More"
Radicals took over the Michigan GOP. Now they can't stop losing.
"Absolutely Do Not Send Them There"
Foster kids have few advocates and little agency. That makes them the perfect cash cow for the country's biggest psychiatric hospital chain.
RICH DOC, POOR DOC
Why do the most important kinds of doctors earn the least money?
FREEDOM READERS
Authors of banned books-like me-are battling right-wing censorship daily. But we can't do it alone.
VAPOR TRAIL
After a cannabis product turned up at my kid's school, I rode into the Wild West of unregulated pot.
MEDICAL RESTRAINTS
How health care companies use debt to trap nurses on the job
Bad Neighbors
Tightly packed poultry and pig farms could be incubating the next deadly flu.