College Uncovered: Abortion on the ballot … and in the mail

Greater Boston – a region famous for its sheer number of colleges – is also home to an underground network that helps women get access to abortion pills.

Every week, a group including many Boston-area college and medical students meets to put together abortion pill “care packages” to send to women in states where abortion is illegal or restricted.

While the founders call them “pill-packing parties” the work is not without risk. Women in Texas, Mississippi and other states can be prosecuted for aborting a fetus.

College students have long been active in the abortion movement, but the activism looks very different today than it did in the 1960s. In this election season, College Uncovered takes you to a “pill-packing party” at an undisclosed location in Greater Boston and talks with college students mobilizing to help women get abortion medication wherever they live.

We also look at the re-energized anti-abortion movement in the wake of the Dobbs ruling two years ago and hear from a leader of the “pro-life generation.”

GBH’s Andrea Asuaje, senior producer for Under the Radar with Callie Crossley hosts this week’s episode, taking a deep dive into the sweeping ways medication abortion and the internet have changed college activism around reproductive rights.

Listen to the whole series

TRANSCRIPT

[Kirk] Hey, everyone, It’s Kirk Carapezza at GBH News.

[Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus from The Hechinger Report.

Thanks for listening to another episode of College Uncovered. We’ve been diving into the politics of college this season. And this week we’re covering abortion.

[Kirk] So for this show, we’re handing the mic over to my colleague, senior producer Andrea Asuaje. Andrea, welcome to College Uncovered.

[Andrea] Hey, Kirk. Hey, Jon. Thanks for having me. 

[Jon] Andrea, we’ll let you take it from here. 

[Ambient sound] Well, wonderful. Thank you all so much for coming. I think we’re going to go ahead and get started.

[Andrea] In an undisclosed location in Massachusetts, a group of women — from college students in their early 20s to retirees in their mid-60s — sit around a large circular table. For the last year, they’ve been getting together to sit and chat and laugh while putting together special packages for recipients they don’t know and may never meet.

[Woman’s voice] After about six months of doing packing parties, we finally figured out a system that was efficient. And so we’re quite happy with our station system now.

[Andrea] This is a pill-packing party. An abortion pill-packing party.

We’re not going to tell you where this pill packing party is taking place, due to safety concerns, but it is in Greater Boston. Over the course of two hours, they will box up more than 300 packages of mifespristone and misoprostol, the two drugs used to induce abortions. 

Then they mail the pills to people who requested them through a website staffed by clinicians. The patients may be from rural Mississippi or suburban Houston, Tennessee, Kentucky or Indiana. For as little as $5, they will send the pills to patients in any state, including where abortion is illegal, and including to college students across the country.

It’s risky work, especially since critics say these volunteers should be prosecuted for committing a crime across state lines. But that doesn’t stop most of the pill-packing volunteers, like Massachusetts college student Andy, who’s originally from Texas.

[Andy] No matter how many activities I’m involved in or what’s going on in my life, I know what we’re doing is so impactful and essential. I always felt very strongly about women’s reproductive health. And so, I mean, that’s why I keep doing it. I’m doing it for these women, for people who don’t have the income or the accessibility to abortion medication.

[Andrea] This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work and why it matters to you.

I’m Andrea Asuaje with GBH News. Cohosts Kirk Carapezza, my colleague at GBH, and Jon Marcus at the Hechinger Report will be back after the election with a special episode.

There’s a lot happening on college campuses that matters during this election season. We’re exploring how deeply politicized higher education has become and how students, families and administrators are responding.

Today on the show: “Abortion on the Ballot … and in the Mail.

So one of the top issues that is mobilizing college students in the upcoming election is abortion. A new generation is talking more openly about abortion, not because there’s less shame or stigma around it, but because recent court rulings, including at the highest level, the Supreme Court, have made it something students have to think about and plan for in a bigger and more personal way.

Women in their 20s account for more than half of abortions, or 57 percent, according to the CDC. Roe vs. Wade guaranteed the right to an abortion for 50 years. Then in the summer of 2022, the case Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a.k.a. the Dobbs decision, overturned Roe and threw the U.S. reproductive care system into a tailspin. Two years later, with the presidential election looming, abortion is top of mind for both college-age voters and the candidates.

Here’s Kamala Harris on the campaign trail.

[Kamala Harris] This is a healthcare crisis. This is a healthcare crisis. And Donald Trump is the architect of this crisis. He brags about overturning Roe vs. Wade. In his own words, quote, ‘I did it and I’m proud to have done it,’ he says.He is proud. Proud that women are dying. Proud that young women today have few more rights than their mothers and grandmothers.How dare he? 

[Andrea] Here, in stark contrast is Donald Trump, referring to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz during their debate.

[Donald Trump] Her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth, it’s an execution. No longer abortion because the baby is born is okay. And that’s not okay with me.

[Andrea] Obviously untrue, by the way. 

Massachusetts was the first of eight states to pass laws shielding abortion providers from criminal and civil liability, making it a safe haven for clinicians who provide telehealth services that help patients access abortions. Massachusetts, a state packed with colleges where women increasingly outnumber men, has become the home of a relatively underground network that’s helping people across the country get abortion care.

[Angel Foster] My name is Angel Foster. I am the cofounder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, or the MAP. And my big-girl job is that I’m a professor in the faculty of health sciences at the University of Ottawa.

[Andrea] Foster studied medication abortion for two decades in humanitarian settings in the global South. After graduating from Harvard Medical School, she lives in both Massachusetts and Canada, using what she learned as a researcher to help create the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, which we’ll just call the MAP from now on.

[Angel Foster] Even before the Dobbs decision in 2022, we know that access to abortion care in parts of the United States was horrible. It was hard to access abortion care in most of the South and a lot of the Midwest. And then with Dobbs, 14 states almost immediately banned abortion in almost all circumstances. We now have four states that ban abortion at early gestational ages. Obviously, the landscape keeps shifting. But suffice it to say, about a third of women of reproductive age in the United States now live in a part of the country with a very restrictive abortion law. 

[Andrea] People hear that they can get abortion pills from the MAP by word of mouth on campus or on social media, like on Reddit. There’s a few rounds of online screening for medical eligibility that’s reviewed by a clinician, but no video or phone call is needed. Patients can get approval for pills in just a few hours. 

[Angel Foster] And the abortion seeker receives information about what to do next, which is to make a payment. And then once we receive the payment, we shift the pills from our office.

[Andrea] The MAP employees and volunteers are the ones filling the orders for pills, and the MAP is a homespun operation. Angel jokingly calls it the Etsy of abortion, since the organization straddles the line between clinic and small business. And for the record, the Food and Drug Administration states that mifepristone the first pill in a medication abortion, is safer than some of the most commonly used medications in the country. The rate of death from mifepristone? Five in 1,000,000. For penicillin, it’s 20 deaths in a million. And for Viagra, it’s 49 in a million.

The MAP, which was founded in October 2023, has been helping hundreds of patients across the country, month after month, particularly low-income people in places where abortion is highly restricted or straight-up illegal. It’s a pay-what-you-can setup for patients. Some get the pills for as little as $5, even though it can cost up to $250.

[Angel Foster] And what we found in our first year was that a third of our patients paid $25 or less. In my mind’s eye, I imagine someone sitting at their kitchen table and kind of counting out pennies to say, ‘How much do I actually have?’

[Andrea] The MAP is able to provide care at these deeply discounted rates thanks to donors big and small and volunteers who gladly give their time. Then there are also the paid employees of the MAP who keep it running like me.

[Maeve] You know, I have a lot of, like, hopes and dreams for my own future. And I know that if I had a child now, that would definitely get in the way. And I think that’s the same way for a lot of women and a lot of people in general.

[Andrea] Maeve is one of three project managers at the MAP, all of whom are local college students.

[Maeve] I love children. I think they’re, you know, a blessing to the world. But, like, when you don’t want a child at that time, you shouldn’t have a child at that time.

[Andrea] Her work with the MAP is simple. 

[Maeve] So I mostly do like the shipping. So I, like, will make the shipping labels on the USPS website and then put them on the packages. Take the packages to the … [fades out]

[Andrea] Yes, it may seem repetitive and, well, kind of boring to the rest of us, but Maeve feels that her work is tremendously important to the process.

[Maeve] I know that with every package I ship out, I’m helping someone and I’m, like, relieving an incredible amount of stress from someone’s life and, like, it’s just one package to me, technically, but like, for whoever is receiving it, it’s life changing. 

[Andrea] And although she recognizes how essential the work is to MAP’s mission, there’s still a little space in her brain all the way deep down in the back where fear lies. It’s why only a few people in her life know about her involvement with the MAP. 

[Maeve] I am, to an extent, putting myself at risk by working for the MAP, even though I’ve never, like, technically done anything illegal. And, like, everything we do is legal. A lot of people are not happy about it.

[Andrea] That sense of fear of potential repercussions isn’t paranoia. Despite Massachusetts being a shield-law state. While Angel, the founder of the MAP, says its strategy is legal, it also hasn’t been tested in the court system.

Then there’s the fact that 30 years ago, Brookline, Massachusetts, was the site of horrific attacks by John Salvi, who was fueled by anti-abortion sentiment. Salvi opened fire in a Planned Parenthood and then at a second clinic that performed abortions, killing two women and wounding five people. It’s the reason we’re keeping specific details about Maeve and the MAP private, because the work is risky. And that’s especially true for people who aren’t from shield-law states. That includes people like Andy, the student you heard from earlier. 

[Andy] Going back to Texas, it reminds me how necessary this work is, because you cannot get an abortion in Texas, which is terrifying. And a third of our patients are from Texas, actually, or close to a third. So where I am from, we are literally helping so many women. Even, like, I’ve sent packages to somebody in my neighborhood, which is insane to me.

[Andrea] You heard her right. She sent packages to someone in her old neighborhood, where her parents live.

[Andy] You know, I was sitting in my chair looking at my computer in this office, and I was just taken aback by the gravity of the situation and what I was doing and the fact that it has reached literally to my hometown — like, in my neighborhood. And realizing that there are so many women out there who need our help. 

[Andrea] The gravity of the situation is a mild way of putting it, when you look at how Texas has legally dealt with people seeking or somehow getting an abortion since the fall of Roe. In Texas two years ago, a 26-year-old woman who took medication for an unwanted pregnancy was charged with murder. The charge was eventually dropped, but now the woman is suing the district attorney for $1 million in damages.

These volunteers and employees with the MAP will probably never actually meet the people they’re helping. But project manager and Massachusetts college student Avery said they still feel connected to every patient who needs their help.

[Avery] I think I came back from, like, a break of some sort from school and I came back to the office and our boss had been here and she put up — Angel — she had put up a bunch of different, like, cards. We’d been sent just cards — like, people thanking us over and over again. And I remember coming in and being like, ‘My gosh.’ 

[Andrea] Avery, who’s originally from Pennsylvania, says living in Massachusetts means living in a place where most people her age in her classes and her friend group friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, most of them support abortion rights. 

[Avery] I think a part of this is acknowledging that we do live in this blue bubble. And I think this work shows us that, like, what we believe, what the people in our geographic proximity believe, is not what the rest of the country believes.

[Andrea] Maeve and Andy and Avery spend hours working with the MAP each week, helping to keep it running while taking full course loads in college and being involved with various extracurricular activities. And they’re doing it with only a few loved ones actually knowing they’re a part of this network. It’s a lot of work.

[Avery] When the work gets stressful and the work gets hard, it’s, like, corny, but, like, I kind of just have to stop for a second and, like, think about, yeah, I’m clicking a lot of buttons and I’m running boxes to the post office. But this is going to have a real effect and it’s going to benefit so many women’s lives. And this is something that I should be grateful that I get the privilege to do every day.

[Andrea] Massachusetts has a unique role as a safe haven where people can come to get an abortion or abortion services or access doctors and get help remotely. And college students are active in the effort, if not leading it.

But the Dobbs ruling has also re-energized anti-abortion activists on campuses. 

[Kristan Hawkins] Thank you all for coming to tonight’s event. My name is Sam Delmar. I’m the president of the Harvard Law Students for Life. And it’s my honor to introduce Kristan Hawkins.

[Andrea] Kristan Hawkins is the president of Students for Life of America, which has become the largest anti-abortion youth organization in the world under her leadership. The group says it has nearly 1,500 campus student groups dedicated to the anti-abortion cause, up from a few dozen 20 years ago. And Harvard is just one of her stops on a multi-year college speaking tour.

[Kristan Hawkins] I prepared a little with something because, you know, I’m at Harvard Law and you all tend to remind each other and others that you go to Harvard. So I was, like, I got to step up my game a little bit. I’m a bumpkin from West Virginia. I did want to go to law school until I met a bunch of lawyers. No offense. 

[Andrea] Hawkins says she likes to argue and found her calling as an anti-abortion activist. She calls herself a Christian wife, mother and leader of the post-Roe generation, and she calls her website unapologetically pro-life. Hawkins tells the crowd that she had an abortion when she was 20 and suffered emotionally from it for decades as a result.

[Kristan Hawkins] I had an abortion. Abortion didn’t solve the problem I thought it was going to solve. It kept me in abusive relationship. It hurt my body. It’s made me infertile. I’ve been suffering from abortion for decades emotionally, because of that decision I made when I was 20 years old. 

[Andrea] In her speech, Hawkins echoed the refrain of the anti-abortion movement around what she calls natural rights.

[Kristan Hawkins] Every single abortion is killing, ending the life of a unique whole living human being that never existed before and will never exist again. We in the pro-life movement see all human beings as equally valuable, deserving, at the very minimum, of those natural rights of the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Therefore, abortion is wrong.

[Andrea] But mostly, Hawkins encourages audience members who favor abortion rights to ask questions first. She regularly posts her exchanges with her opponents on TikTok, where she has 134,000 followers.

We reached out to Kristan Hawkins for an interview when she was in Boston, but we didn’t hear back from her scheduler.

If Hawkins came ready for a debate, that’s probably because surveys show that most women with some college education or a degree support abortion rights under most circumstances. Pew Research Center found that number is around 75 percent.

In all, about 70 people attended Hawkins’s event at Harvard. But there weren’t protests or open debate, only respectful applause and polite disagreement.

Recent polls have shown that students are increasingly ruling out colleges in states where they disagree with the state’s laws around abortion and reproductive rights.

[Harper Brannock] I have seen in the South increasing anti-abortion rhetoric, violence against women who are seeking health care. And I know people who have been shunned from their communities because they had a medically necessary abortion.

[Andrea] That’s Harper Brannock. She’s 21 and a junior from Huntsville, Alabama. She spoke to us at a recent Boston University event, a drag bingo night held to raise money for an abortion fund in Brannock’s home state of Alabama. Abortions are illegal, except in cases where the life of the mother is at stake. And that’s one of the reasons Harper decided to attend a college in Massachusetts.

[Harper Brannock] I felt that it was just really important to me to come to a place where if something happens to me, even sexual assault or something completely consensual and I just couldn’t have the child, I really feel like it’s important that I can have safe access to health care. 

[Andrea] We were curious if these sentiments were shared by students who go to colleges with religious affiliations. So we sent our team out to Boston College, a Jesuit school, to talk to women on campus about the issue. Like other Catholic universities, the college health center doesn’t distribute birth control or refer women for abortions.

Here’s what some of those students had to say.

[Student 1] I kind of stayed away from, like, the southern schools, also because I really just like New England and I like the vibes, but thinking about like, how safe I feel as a woman and like how my choice is valued was, like, very important.

[Student 2] I think it’s telling that we have a pro-life club on campus, and just seeing it at, like, the club fair or things like that, especially my first year last year, was very shocking. And I didn’t really know how to process it. And at first when they came up to and were, like, ‘Do you want to know more about the pro-life club?’ I was, like, ‘No, not really.’

[Andrea] The students all agreed to speak to us without using their names due to privacy concerns. One BC sophomore told us that, yes, BC is a more conservative school known for its academics, but she’s made up her mind on who she’s going to cast her vote for on Nov. 5. And that’s Vice President Kamala Harris. 

[Student 3] Yes, 100 percent. I mean, just as a young woman in general, I don’t think I could feel safe voting for somebody who didn’t want to ensure my rights to my own body. So, yeah.

[Andrea] So the abortion movement has been underway for almost two centuries, going all the way back to federal legislation around contraceptives in the mid-1800s and really heating up in the 1960s when the FDA approved the pill.

In many ways, the pill-packing parties and the MAP are the modern incarnation of the Jane Collective, an underground organization in Chicago in the 1960s and ’70s that helped women get abortions in the days before Roe. The Janes, the anonymous women behind the collective, were mostly college students and women in their 20s. And the collective itself was founded by then 19-year-old University of Chicago college student Heather Booth. The Janes eventually started performing abortions themselves, and by the time Roe passed in 1973, the Janes had arranged or performed more than 11,000 abortions.

The abortion movement among college students today is very different than it was even a generation ago. The parents of college students listening to this podcast will not be at all surprised to hear this. There were no pill-packing parties in the ’80s, when the previous generation was college age. Mifespristone and misoprostol weren’t approved for use in the U.S. until 2000. The advent of medication abortion changed the landscape entirely.

And the internet wasn’t accessible to most people, unlike today, when organizing and finding access to abortion care or medication is done predominantly online and on social media.

[Loretta Ross] What is happening is that they’re generally not joining the legacy feminist organizations, and they’re developing their own ways of being active according to the conditions that they’re dealing with.

[Andrea] This is Loretta J. Ross, the renowned human rights activist who’s now a professor at Smith College. Ross used to be an organizer for NOW, the National Organization for Women, and helped organize the women’s marches in Washington, D.C., during the Reagan era. Those marches drew massive crowds of supporters unlike ever before. And that was before Trump was elected in 2016.

[Loretta Ross] The Women’s March, the pink pussy march, blew all of our previous numbers away in 2017. After that, all of a sudden, the abortion funds started exploding. We felt like Cassandras in the reproductive justice movement, always pointed at the sky was falling and then it fell down. So I don’t doubt that young women care about these issues.

[Andrea] After her work with NOW, Ross went on to become a founding member of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective in Atlanta.

[Loretta Ross] I would argue in one sense that Black women were far more interested in the politics of fertility control even. Man, even [than] white women, because since we were kidnapped here and brought here as slaves and forced to breed for profit, bodily autonomy has always been front and center for Black women, long before the Seneca Falls Declaration, etc., etc.. And so we’ve had a consistent demand for bodily autonomy.

[Andrea] Ross, who was sexually assaulted twice in her youth, says some of her earliest work studied the role religion played in women’s views on abortion and reproductive rights.

[Loretta Ross] There was not only a reluctance in the Black church to talk about reproduction. There was a reluctance to talk about sex because of AIDS. And so it’s like a perfect storm of shame was created around Black women’s sex, sexuality and reproduction. And yet, as I said, the rhetoric doesn’t match the data, because however shameful they feel about it, they still get one third of the abortions in this country.

[Andrea] And Ross makes the point that many first ladies, including most recently Melania Trump in her new autobiography, expressed support for the idea that women should make their own decisions about their bodies. Ross also believes the Republican Party is more committed to using abortion as a political football than caring about actual abortion bans. And that goes for Republicans from former President Ronald Reagan all the way to Donald Trump.

[Loretta Ross] Well, it’s always been a multi-front battle. So you battle in the courts, you battle in the legislature, you battle in the streets, and then you center your ability to provide services to the most vulnerable. I mean, this is what we’ve always had to do. And I think that’s what this new generation of people is doing.

[Ambient sound]

[Andrea] At tonight’s pill-packing party, everyone takes turns at each station, whether it’s folding boxes, packing pills or inserting directions at the big circular table. Avery is double-checking boxes at the end of the line.

Medical student Rasa puts bottles of misoprostol into each box. She keeps coming back because she says this is an important part of her training as a future OB-GYN.

[Rasa] I think it’s some of the most important work that I do as a med student. This is, like, the ultimate dream of how can I help people who my hand can’t reach?

[Andrea] And then there’s Cheryl Hamlin, a physician who performed abortions in the South, including in Jackson Women’s Health — yes, of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health — in Mississippi. She’s the first stop at the table folding boxes.

Cheryl may be retired, but that’s not stopping her from doing the work. 

[Cheryl Hamlin] I do think some younger people, especially in Massachusetts, don’t entirely understand how bad it is elsewhere. And, you know, I sort of feel like it’s my duty to whatever I can do to keep people informed. And if there is an opening to make a difference, whether it’s, you know, supporting a clinic or whatever, then I should do that.

[Andrea] The group meets weekly now to eat pizza, sip soda and wine and commiserate. The final touch added to each package at the end of the line is a handwritten note. The women take turns writing them. It’s nurse practitioner Erin’s favorite task.

[Erin] I always like to write the notes that we wish you the best, because I feel that I’m putting a little bit of myself into that box to really tell them this is hard and we’re supporting you and we’re wishing you the best.

[Andrea] The group mailed its 5,000th package this month.

This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Andrea Asuaje.

We’d love to hear from you. Send us an email to GBHNewsConnect@WGBH.org, or leave us a voicemail at 617-300-2486, and tell us what you think.

This episode was produced and written by me, Andrea Asuaje, and Meg Woolhouse, with reporting help from Diane Adame and Harriet Gaye.

It was edited by Jeff Keating.

Supervising editor is Meg Woolhouse.

Ellen London is executive producer

Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott.

Theme song and original music by Left Roman.

Mei He is our project manager, and head of GBH podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins

College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report and is distributed by PRX.

It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.

Thanks for listening.