One of the experiences we treasure most involves our minds being changed on an issue. If we’re wrong about something, we’d prefer to be nudged in a less wrong direction.

We did NOT expect to have one of these experiences when clicking through to learn about a truly modern meet-cute: When Romy Holland met her future husband—and the father of her now-young child—at Aella’s famous birthday gangbang, which she both helped to organize and supported as a fluffer.

Anyway, you’ll see for yourself in today’s episode of Based Camp. Happy Monday! Make sure you read Romy’s full essay—the one that ultimately changed our views on misoprostol, which we had previously seen as pretty innocuous; she’s an eloquent and moving writer.

Show Notes

One of the fluffers at Aella’s birthday gangbangs paired up and ultimately had a child with one of the guests/participants

Crazier than that, this young woman radicalized me on early-term abortion!

The Gist: Romy Holland, a friend of Aella’s, recently went on Slate’s podcast, Death, Sex & Money, to talk about her experience meeting a guy at Aella’s birthday gang bang and eventually falling in love with him. This story was originally covered in the San Francisco Standard. In her

What Happened

* Romy helped organize the famous 42-man gangbang birthday party in 2024

* She also acted as a fluffer at this event

* In this capacity, she met a programmer she had previously noticed online

* They subsequently began dating, had a kid together, and are now engage and—for the time being at least—monogamous

Underrated: Romy blackpilled me on the abortion pill

An underrated element of Romy’s narrative arc thus far is her experience with abortion—something she articulated so beautifully and powerfully that it has totally radicalized me on misoprostol.

Her one substack article (as of June 2026), titled What Nobody Told Me About Abortion, describes her harrowing experience attempting an abortion.

She describes blithe comfort in the face of lies told to us

“On the sort of afternoon full of ripe summer fruit, my new boyfriend and I—still flush with sweat and limerence after some midday sex—stared at an ovulation test strip and realized we’d misread an earlier test.

“Uh oh,” I said, lightly amused as a thousand rom com moments flashed through my mind. Cue the clueless horror movie protagonist who fails to notice the axe murderer behind the bedroom door, mistaken about the genre of the story unfolding.

We listened to music and I swiveled back and forth in an office chair while narrating ChatGPT’s damning answers to my questions about fertile windows and test strip line darkness. My boyfriend kissed me on the cheek each time he walked past. We riffed about games we could play at our abortion party.

Our decision calculus was numerical, emotions an afterthought. There is a 1 in 4 chance of conception each month, so deciding not to take Plan B would result in a 25% risk of needing an abortion. Plan B costs $50 and an abortion costs $500, but with only a 25% chance of conception the expected value of that option is $125. Plan B and early stage abortion seemed physically pretty similar—nothing to consider there.

“If you get pregnant, we’d both know we’re fertile,” my boyfriend pointed out.

“True, why would anyone pay for fertility testing with such a thrilling alternative available?” I quipped back.

In the end, my sense that failing to take Plan B seemed plainly stupid led us to swing by CVS on our way to an under-the-sea-themed party in San Francisco. I was wearing a black and gold ballgown, he, a shimmery jacket that made him look like an undiscovered mer-creature dredged up into the fluorescently lit family planning aisle. Later at the party, I recounted our ill-fated afternoon with punchlines as I pried open the clamshell package and unceremoniously swallowed the Plan B in my friends’ cozy kitchen.”

Then she describes how it goes south

* She got a positive pregnancy test nine days later

* She was fully determined to not see it

* “Ignoring the mounting hum of my instinctual self, I walked across Berkeley on a chilly August evening to pick up abortion pills from the sort of friend who people think of when they say they know a guy.”

“Nobody talks about the hell that is misoprostol, the abortion pill. I suspect that, in its politicization, no one wants to mention that the drug in question is a sledgehammer—on its quest to destroy the fetus, it also obliterates the mother. On Thursday afternoon I unceremoniously took the first of three doses: four little white pills shoved into my vagina as far up as I could wedge them. Tiny bombs placed quietly beside the cradle where my unsuspecting baby slept.

I waited, fever rising, for the bleeding that should have started after an hour or two. The second dose came and went. By dose three I could barely move. I took the stairs one at a time, weakly gripping the railing, my joints aching with each step, the inside of my mouth painfully raw. Curled in bed, I whispered for more and more blankets, shivering and only dimly aware of my boyfriend there beside me searching the internet for answers about my racing heart and shallow, rapid breathing.

In the morning I felt drained, but the fever and pain were gone. The large maxi pad, which the internet warned I may soak through as often as once per hour, was entirely dry.”

* She goes on to observe that “Misoprostol as an abortion protocol is 85% effective. As the 24 hour time point neared and I felt not even the slightest cramping, it became clear that I was among the unlucky 15% of women for whom a second attempt would be necessary.”

* “In taking the first dose of pills, I’d started down an inescapable path and had no choice but to march to its end. As a friend would later say, the correct number of abortions is either zero or as many as it takes.”

* She ultimately had to do four rounds

* She went to Planned Parenthood in San Francisco

* “Desperation welled inside of me. I wanted to grip her bony shoulders, to look her in the eye and ask her what she would have me do with this broken beautiful thing inside of me that had survived six doses of poison and was now fated to die.”

* “More abortion pills, more waiting, more shivering in a ball of feverish torment. Still no blood.”

“My memories of the surgical D&C procedure four days later come to me in fragments that feel sharp in my chest. I remember a cold wand pushed into me searching for a smudge of evidence of my baby. And then a room with a chair and an iPad video that soothingly warned of hysterectomy risk. Finally, a room that smelled of chemicals where I sat on crisp paper and stared at a tray strewn with ominous medical instruments. Panic.”

…

“Through this, I did not move. Tears gathered in my eyes at the inevitability of the situation, at my overwhelming helplessness. I presented my arm to the pretty young nurse who would administer the fentanyl and sedatives. I lay down and spread my legs for the kind practitioner there to vacuum out my stubborn baby. What’s a mother to do in a moment like this, but carry her child gently to the executioner’s arms?”

Romy Meets Other People Who Were Scarred

“I recently had coffee with a friend who became very still when I mentioned my abortion. Tears sprang to her eyes as she told me that she’d once had an abortion too, and although it was seven years ago and although she never wanted the baby, never even wanted to be a mother, it still makes her cry every time she remembers it. She’d taken the abortion pills and two days later, in a grungy dive bar bathroom with music thrumming through the door, she’d found her clot of a baby in her bloody pad.

“I knew I had to eat it,” she told me. And then, as though suddenly realizing that this might sound absurd, she tried to explain. “I mean, I couldn’t just leave it in that dirty bathroom, it was my baby. What was I going to do, throw it in the trash?

I stopped her, shaking my head “no, no, it makes perfect sense to me. It really does, of course you had to eat it, it was your baby.” The maternal logic of this was unassailable. Anyone who has been a mother for any stretch of time would not question such a primordial urge. The animal mother knows what to do, and your judgements are not what carried evolution billions of years to this moment.

“So what did you do?” I asked her.

“I ate it.” She said it wide eyed.””

Romy Experiences the Mental Fallout

“I was not permitted to eat my baby, nor bring it home in a little vial to bury it, or put it on the mantel, or inspect it under a microscope for a tail. Perhaps if I had been, the cataclysmic crash of hormones that awaited me would have taken a gentler shape.

Instead, in the days that followed, I began to experience borderline psychotic episodes.

These hours-long periods would begin with a vague sense of unease and build until the world around me became twisted and surreal, like a haunted house. Sometimes, anger at my boyfriend would inexplicably swell inside of me, sharp and alienating, distancing me from the one person who might understand my pain. Often, I was consumed with an urgent need to go find my missing baby.

My thoughts would enter obsessive, f...