Her books include The Women’s Movement Against Sexual Harassment and Fighting the US Sex Trade, and scores of peer-reviewed scholarly articles on gender, law, and social movements for women’s rights. She is a regular writer and contributing editor at Ms. magazine, covering reproductive rights, discrimination in employment and education, sexual harassment, and the Equal Rights Amendment.
Baker applied the “Page 99 Test to her latest book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics, and reported the following:
#FreeTheAbortionPillVisit Carrie N. Baker's website.
At page 99, The World Health Organization had just declared that the COVID-19 outbreak was a global pandemic. State and local governments began issuing stay-at-home orders to combat spread of the disease. Many schools and businesses shut down and governors issued orders delaying non-essential medical procedures to preserve protective gear for medical workers. In several states, including Texas, Alabama, Iowa, Ohio and Oklahoma, governors declared abortion was a non-essential medical procedure. In response, reproductive freedom advocates called on Trump’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to remove longstanding in-person dispensing requirements for the abortion pill mifepristone so that people could obtain abortion pills without having to travel to abortion clinics to pick them up.
Page 99 describes the National Women’s Health Network’s social media campaign called “Get the Pill Where You Take It—At Home!” with the hashtag #FreeTheAbortionPill, a video, a petition, and digital billboards. “There are more complications and deaths associated with Tylenol than mifepristone,” said Dr. Jamila Perritt of Physicians for Reproductive Health. Page 99 also quotes NWHN’s executive director Cynthia Pearson later reflections on the campaign: “We might not have even tried without the pandemic. But it was just the moment. Things were really different. We realized we could do things now that we couldn’t have done two to four months ago.” Page 99 also quotes New York attorney gender Leticia James: “As the coronavirus spreads across the country and residents are asked to stay at home, the federal government should be doing everything in its power to ensure … that no woman is forced to risk her health while exercising her constitutional right to abortion.”
In the third of six chapters, page 99 (of 237) describes a dramatic turning point in the decades-long fight to increase access to the abortion pill mifepristone. By quoting activists and government officials, page 99 gives browsers a good idea of the whole work. For the book, I conducted interviews with over 80 activists, researchers, policymakers, lawyers and people who have used abortion pills. The book is full of the voices of these folks. In addition to sharing several powerful statements from these interviews, page 99 draws on information from a press release, a newspaper op ed, and a letter written to the FDA from 80 women’s health organizations. By using a broad range of sources and demonstrating the passion of abortion pill advocates, this page is a good representation of the book as a whole. Piquing the browser’s curiosity, this page leaves them without a resolution, which is how the book ends as well. Nevertheless, the advocates’ passion and determination may leave the browser optimistic that they will prevail despite tremendous odds--similar to how the reader may feel at the end of the book, and today if they follow my ongoing coverage of this issue.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned constitutional abortion rights and today 18 states ban first trimester abortions. Despite these restrictions, more people are accessing abortion today with telehealth and abortion pills than before the pandemic due to the creative, determined and courageous activism documented in Abortion Pills: US History and Politics, available open access here.
--Marshal Zeringue
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