I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is a Sunday story where we go beyond the news of the day to bring you one big story.
You're probably familiar with the baby boom.
After World War II, there was a huge spike in fertility rates,
but not all of those babies were wanted.
At the time, abortion was mostly illegal in the U.S. and so that baby boom,
it also led to something that people have called the baby scoop era.
Yes, that's actually what they called it.
Before Roe v. Wade,
there was a period from 1943 to 1973 when many unmarried women and girls were forced to give birth and put their babies up for adoption.
The exact numbers are hard to know
because these births often happened in secret in places called maternity homes.
Grady Hendricks is an acclaimed horror writer and he made this tragic history the setting of his latest novel,
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls.
It's a book that in some ways reverberates with the present.
Today, things are obviously different from the years before Roe v. Wade.
Abortion is still a protected right in 21 states and the District of Columbia and there are abortion pills now that can cross state lines.
But with the fall of Roe and the resulting abortion restrictions, some of this history it echoes.
Hendricks' novel is a spellbinding work that explores what happens when people who have been stripped of power suddenly gain it.
My conversation with Grady Hendricks when we come back, stay with us.
This is Outer Glass.