On a summer day in 2015, Renata and more than a dozen women, all strangers from different parts of the country, sat in a semicircle on the living-room floor of a house, deep in the rural South. A lean twentysomething with a wide smile and olive skin, Renata was the only nonwhite person in the group. And she felt conspicuous in other ways too—many of the women struck her as kind of “new agey,” and some had been involved in a “crystal energetics” midwifery program. All of them had big red binders full of worksheets and documents related to the topic at hand: how to help women self-induce an abortion. “My initial thought,” she recalls, “is, ‘What the fuck did I get myself into?'”

Renata had come from Arizona to attend the weeklong training. She learned how, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, white male doctors consolidated their professional power in part by sidelining female and often nonwhite midwives and other community healers. She learned which drugs and herbs induce a miscarriage and where to buy the small, plastic, strawlike instrument that is inserted into the uterus and suctions out an unwanted pregnancy. If problems arise, what should one say to avoid scrutiny at the emergency room? In which states is self-induced abortion, and helping women self-induce, a crime?

On the second day, the group split into pairs, and in different rooms they practiced pelvic exams. Renata (whose name, along with those of other providers and clients in this story, has been changed) and her partner, propped up by pillows, tried not to pinch each other with the plastic speculum they were still learning to use. “It was emotional,” she remembers. “It’s a heavy topic, and you’re working with each other’s bodies.” The next day, a member of the group demonstrated on a woman having her period how a manual vacuum aspiration device, a handheld plastic syringe used by clinics for first-trimester abortions, could pull out the menses—or a pregnancy.

As long as women have had unwanted pregnancies, other women have helped them resolve the problem. After the mid-19th century, when abortion was outlawed, women either found a physician who did it on the sly or turned to traditional helpers, a practice that continued even after the Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973. Today, as abortion rights are restricted at an unprecedented rate—between 2011 and 2016, more than 160 clinics closed—this informal network of nonmedical providers is responsible for a small but significant number of abortions nationwide.