The Wild, Wonderful Story of How the Abortion Pill Came to the US

A Q&A with Cover Up: The Pill Plot host T.J. Raphael

If there is one podcast you should go download right now, it’s Cover Up: The Pill Plot. It’s got it all: An international drug smuggling scheme; abortion rights; feckless politicians; the Supreme Court; anti-abortion terrorists; and a handful of dedicated radicals who changed American history forever.

I binged The Pill Plot in 48 hours, and even though I write about feminism and abortion rights for a living, the story of how the abortion pill came to the US is one I hadn’t ever heard. In Pill Plot podcast, host T.J. Raphael builds a narrative that is propulsive, shocking, and particularly enlightening for our current moment of anti-feminist backlash and misogynist retrenchment.

I chatted with T.J. about this phenomenal story, and what we can learn from the feminists — and the abortion opponents — who came before.

---

Jill: T.J., this is a crazy-ass story about how the abortion pill came to America, and like you, I've been covering reproductive health for a decade and had never heard about it. How did you come across it? 

T.J.: After Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, I started to look into mifepristone. I knew that the medication was vitally important in the face of abortion bans that were kicking in across the country. 

During an early phase of my research, I had seen this story about a pregnant woman who, in 1992, flew from London to JFK airport with mifepristone in an attempt to overturn what was then a federal ban on the drug. Her name is Leona Benten. Her story was mentioned in one paragraph of this academic paper I found. It seemed like an afterthought. But I started to pull the string, and uncovered a vast web of activism.

I dug through old newspapers to find the names of people who helped Benten pull off this stunt — namely, a clinic director named Linci Comy, and an abortion rights activist, Larry Lader, who Betty Friedan called the “father of the abortion rights movement.” 

I visited Smith College in Massachusetts and looked through the Lawrence Lader archives — his wife had donated all of his papers and life’s work to the school after his death in 2006. There, I found hundreds of documents containing original source materials, and I knew I had a big story!