Air Date 10/4/2024

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[00:00:00] 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. 

When women's value is seen only in relation to their ability to bear and raise children, you get policies that strip them of the right to choose whether or not that's something they actually want for themselves. And the lived consequences are devastating. 

Sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include The ReidOut, NowThis Impact, Danielle Moodie, Democracy Now!, Brittany Page, and The Defenders. Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in five sections: Section A. The casualties; Section B. Religion; Section C. The punishment is the point; Section D. Black women; and Section E. The pushback.

‘Authoritarian’: Vance’s weird war on women echoes history's biggest facists - The ReidOut - Air Date 8-15-24

 

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: You may not be familiar with the term [00:01:00] called "coverture," but stick with me for a moment because I'm going to explain. Coverture was the law of the land in Europe and in America for the first three and a half centuries, from colonization through the creation of the United States. And it's the reason women in the 1800s and before -- and we're talking white women here, not enslaved black women -- had essentially no rights over their money, land, or even their own bodies. Under coverture, married women were considered the property of their husbands, which meant they could not seek gainful employment or manage their assets independently. 

It wasn't until the women's rights movement in the mid 1800s that women began to gain financial and legal control over their lives. Specifically, the passage of the Married Women's Property Act in Mississippi in 1839 triggered a wave of similar legislation across the country that allowed women to regain ownership of their property. And that [00:02:00] was all before women gained the right to vote, which didn't happen until 1920 and still didn't include all women.

And even after that, there were still things women couldn't do without a husband or father's permission, including buying stocks and opening a bank account. Women didn't gain those rights until 1974 when President Gerald Ford signed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act into law. And that was nine years after the Supreme Court gave women the right to use contraception, and one year after the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade gave women the right to an abortion. A right the current Supreme Court majority rescinded in 2022. 

And apparently it's not just Sam Alito and his five Leonard Leo friends who disagree that women achieving full citizenship was a good thing.

Enter J. D. Vance, who has said so many disparaging things about women, specifically childless women. It is hard to put them all in one montage. But here's our good old college [00:03:00] try. 

JD VANCE: We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.

Just to be a little stark about this, I think we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country. 

AOC has said basically, if you look at her public remarks on this, that it's immoral to have children because of climate change concerns, right? This is -- let's just be direct -- a sociopathic attitude towards families.

If you bought into an idea that it's liberating to leave an 8-week-old baby to go work 90 hours a week at Goldman Sachs, you've been had. 

When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don't have kids.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: I mean, did anybody in the Trump campaign even vet this guy? And by the way, none of this is super old. That was [00:04:00] Vance. I mean, this was Vance as we played for you last night on this show just four years ago on a right wing podcast denigrating, in one go, menopausal women, grandmothers, and Indian women like his own mother-in-law.

JD VANCE: They spoil him. There's sort of all the classic stuff that grandparents do to grandchildren. But it makes him a much better human being to have exposure to his grandparents. And the evidence on this, by the way, is super clear. That's the whole purpose of the post monopausal female in theory. 

When your child was born, did your in-laws, and particularly your mother-in-law, show up in some huge way?

She lived with us for a year. Right. So, you know, I didn't know the answer to that. That's this weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: And just last night, when asked by a friendly host on Fox about what he would say to suburban women who are worried about abortion rights, this was Vance's response.

JD VANCE: [00:05:00] Well, first of all, I don't buy that, Laura. I think most suburban women care about the normal things that most Americans care about. 

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: J. D. Vance has a long obsession with childlessness, with there being a problem that enough women in America are not bearing children. Talk about this obsession and how you fit that in the construct of his wider belief. 

RUTH BEN GHIAT: He is like a one-man compendium of misogynist ideas and, although it's unfortunate he's in the position of vice presidential candidate, it's useful for us to track this, because he expresses these attitudes which are really at the roots of authoritarianism's war on women.

 I'm often asked, when do the kind of charismatic demagogues and authoritarians appeal? And it's often when women have made great strides in society. And my book shows case studies from after World War I, when there was tons of gender emancipation, Spain, 1930s, before the coup of [00:06:00] Franco, women had won all these economic independence for the first time and so on and so on. And it creates this kind of backlash. 

And so you get this focus, obsession with women whose value has to be in their ability to bear children, to be mothers. And so there's a whole century of this. And Vance is an example of this, but it goes all over the global right today.

In Italy with Giorgio Meloni. She says, Oh, I'm breaking the glass ceiling. But she also says that my value is as a mother. So the childlessness obsession has demographic implications, has racial implications because it's usually tied to wanting more white Christian babies, and it's this massive fear and dread of female autonomy, female independence in all ways.

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: Yeah, to go to the piece about it being international, in Hungary, Victor Orban encourages mothers in Hungary to have [00:07:00] four or more babies. We will note that Mussolini argued that the Italian people have a duty to produce as many children as possible. He introduced a number of measures to encourage reproduction. Loans often offered to marry couples. The part of the loan canceled with each new child. Any married man that had more than six children was made exempt from taxation. His regime outlawed abortion, restricted women's access to birth control. You've got Republicans, conservatives in red states who are getting rid of no fault divorce, or at least trying to get rid of it.

And then they're tying it to this other piece, which I think people don't often connect: immigration. Here is JD Vance talking about abortion and tying it to cheap labor and immigration 

JD VANCE: When the big corporations come against you for passing abortion restrictions, when corporations are so desperate for cheap labor that they don't want people to parent children, she's right to say that abortion restrictions are bad for business. We should be for abortion restrictions, even [00:08:00] if they are bad for business. 

JOY REID - HOST, THE REIDOUT: And the idea being that if they can do mass deportation, they must tie it to forcing American women to bear more children so that they can be the labor. I think people don't often tie all that together, but they certainly seem to.

RUTH BEN GHIAT: Yeah, and it's really good we're talking about this, because mass deportation on a truly old dictator scale. They're talking about 15 million people being deported, is part of Project 2025, and it's part of what Trump said in his interview with Time magazine, that they would deport 15 to 20 million people who would be undocumented immigrants, people of color, and that creates a need for more babies of the right race and the right religion.

So these things are always tied in history.

Where Did MAGA's 'Post-Birth' Abortion Claim Come From? - NowThis Impact - Air Date 9-12-24

 

CHELSEA FRISBIE - HOST, NOWTHIS IMPACT: At the debate, Donald Trump kept insisting that babies are getting aborted after they're born, saying: 

DONALD TRUMP : Just look at the [00:09:00] governor, former governor of Virginia, the governor of Virginia said, we put the baby aside and then we determine what we want to do with the baby. 

CHELSEA FRISBIE - HOST, NOWTHIS IMPACT: So what Trump is referring to is a clip from former Democratic governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, who in 2019 was on a radio show talking about newborns who were born with a birth defect so severe that they would not survive outside of the womb for long.

He was saying that in that specific case, the priority would be the comfort of that newborn and the will of the parents. He was talking about a newborn baby that a mother wanted, carried for nine months, had hopes and dreams and outfits for. He was talking about what happens when that baby doesn't make it more than a few hours after being born.

He was saying the woman who carried that baby inside of her Yeah, her comfort, her will, her opinion is valued, heard, and prioritized. But of course, that was all taken out of context. So no, Democrats don't want to kill your baby once they're outside of the womb. They want that baby to be [00:10:00] pain free. And they want to do everything they can to empower parents as they witness a child that was supposed to outlive them pass away in their arms.

And it speaks volumes of MAGA Republicans that they can't wrap their goddamn heads around the fact that for some people, the heartbreak that comes from making these decisions are private and the government shouldn't have a say.

Woman Shares 'Trauma' of Abortion Bans During Senate Hearing - NowThis Impact - Air Date 9-24-24

 

KAITLYN JOSHUA: My name is Kaitlyn Joshua, and I'm from Louisiana. I'm here to talk about my own experience under extreme abortion bans in my home state soon after the Supreme Court eliminated the federal right to abortion care more than two years ago, and the problem these laws caused me and continue to cause other pregnant Louisianians and their families.

You see, I was turned away without care twice from two different emergency rooms in Louisiana while experiencing a painful and potentially dangerous miscarriage. This was two summers ago. My husband Landon and I were already parents to a curious and happy four year old daughter when we found out [00:11:00] I was pregnant again.

We were thrilled. At least to us, this was the perfect time to add a second baby. But this time, Louisiana's new abortion ban affected my pregnancy from the very start. When I called to schedule my first prenatal appointment, I was told I would have to wait until I was 12 weeks pregnant, a month longer than my first pregnancy.

I was asked, or I asked, excuse me, if this was because of the Louisiana abortion ban and the young lady was very candid. She said yes. Because of the abortion ban, prenatal appointments were purposely scheduled weeks later than normal, delayed further into pregnancy when miscarriages are less common, so avoid potential legal and criminal liability for medical providers.

Practically overnight, these laws were already compromising health care for all pregnant patients. 

Aside from experiencing some mild cramping and spotting, my second pregnancy was going along okay until around 11 weeks, just one week shy of that first prenatal appointment. I started bleeding while also experiencing pain worse than childbirth. My husband was at work at the time, so I drove myself to the emergency room. [00:12:00] There, the medical team evaluated me and told me that my fetus had completely stopped growing. I realized I was having a miscarriage, but because of the state's abortion ban, the healthcare team wouldn't even say the word. They sent me home telling me that they would pray for me.

The next day, the bleeding and pain got worse. I did not want to go back to the same hospital that I had been turned away the day before. So I met my mom and husband at a different hospital. I was losing so much blood at this time, even the security guard knew to put me in a wheelchair. The standard treatment for a miscarriage, what I was experiencing, is exactly the same treatment as abortion care: to empty the uterus by prescribing pills or a procedure called a DNC. It is an abortion, yet in the second hospital, the staff told me we're not doing that right now and told me to go home and wait. 

Ultimately, it took me weeks for me to pass my pregnancy at home, on my own, without medical care, and I was absolutely terrified. 

This experience has made me see and realize how black women like me die needlessly in and around childbirth.

Since telling my story, I've received hundreds of letters [00:13:00] from women across Louisiana who have had similar experiences. And we know routine and potentially life-saving medical care is being in denied states across the country. 

And I've met so many other women who are also suffering because of abortion bans like others in Louisiana. 22 states have banned all or most abortions, and several states have criminal penalties for healthcare providers. As a result, doctors and other healthcare providers are afraid to treat patients who are miscarrying. And that's why women like me are being denied the dignity of basic, essential, time sensitive health care that saves our lives: abortion care. 

Capable and caring physicians simply cannot practice medicine based on their training and expertise and of course the Hippocratic Oath. We're simply asking for, yet still being denied, the most basic level of maternal health care. 

Sharing my story is not fun, nor is it easy. I don't like being away from home. I have two children now and part of me would like to forget the weeks of trauma I endured. But I know that I have to speak out. I owe it to those women who wrote to me, who have [00:14:00] met in person, for women who look like me and who women or for women who don't. 

This is certainly an attack and an affront to our most basic fundamental rights: life, liberty, health, happiness, self determination.

This is government and political interference in private healthcare decisions. How is that okay in a freedom loving country in 2024?

Donald wants to CONTROL WOMEN not PROTECT them. The truth behind his FALSE PROMISE. - Danielle Moodie - Air Date 9-25-24

 

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, DANIELLE MOODIE: If White women didn't go along with and parent in a way that would have White men think that everyone is just there to cater to their needs, to their tantrums. Then maybe they would turn out as better fucking men and I mean that real talk because the fact of the matter is that when you look at the Brett Kavanaugh's, the Donald Trump's, the Justice Roberts, the list of horrible CEOs, the [00:15:00] string of me too's and all of these things, it is White men, White, heterosexual, Christian, pseudo-Christian men that have caused so much goddamn damage, not just in this country, but around the world.

And you would think then, that much in the same way that Black women have been pathologized, with regard to Black men and high incarceration rates and all of these things that we would have a serious conversation about White women parenting White boys that turn into incel misogynistic men like Donald Trump and JD Vance.

But we don't because when it comes to White women and White men, they get to be [00:16:00] individuals. We don't think about them as a collective and that if we were to actually unpack the internalized Right misogyny that White women carry if we were to unpack right the racism that has been innate and figure out what is at the root of the root of the thing and talk about accountability and responsibility, then maybe we would get somewhere and we wouldn't see numbers folks.

Like this one. Take a look. Yes, that's CNN's recent poll that has White women polling 50 percent for Donald Trump and 47 percent for Vice President Harris. So, the woman in the lobby, the White woman in the lobby, is not alone in her thinking. Because 50 percent of White [00:17:00] women think the same way. And if you recall, 2016 and 2020 had their numbers grow.

Which is why you had Shannon Watts, following the lead of Jotaka Eadie and Win With Black Women, put together her call, the second call that we, the third call that we saw after Black men, White women answer the call because there is a set of White women that are recognizing their role and responsibility to bring their community along to the side of democracy and educate these women into understanding that your whiteness and proximity to maleness is not going to save you in Trump's America.

So Donald [00:18:00] Trump, as he's starting to see his numbers with other demographic women, Black women, Latina women. Asian women, Indigenous women, traditionally, these women are like, Yeah, no, I'm good. I'm good with your misogyny and I'm good with your racism. So listen to what Donald Trump just said recently at a rally in Pennsylvania. Take a listen. 

DONALD TRUMP : You know why they like, they like to have strong borders. They like to have safety, nothing personal. I think they like me, but I make this statement. I love you too. I love you too, because I am your protector. I want to be your protectors president.

I have to be your protector. I hope you don't make too much of it. I hope the fake news as ago, he wants to be their protector. Well, I am as president, I have to be your protector. I will make you [00:19:00] safe at the border. On the sidewalks of your now violent cities, in the suburbs where you are under migrant criminal siege, and with our military protecting you from foreign enemies, of which we have many today because of the incompetent leadership that we have, you will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared.

You will no longer be in danger. You're not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected and I will be your protector. 

DANIELLE MOODIE - HOST, DANIELLE MOODIE: "I will be your protector" coming from a man who is an adjudicated rapist and owes E. Jean Carroll, the woman whom he raped 80 million or something to that [00:20:00] effect.

Because like he said on the Access Hollywood tapes, "when they're a star, they just let you do it. You can grab a woman by the pussy". So when I hear this man say, I will be your protector. I am your protector. What I hear is a toxic, violent abuser and what was so disgusting, folks, were the rounds of applause and cat calls from women in the audience.

So we wonder, where do the men like JD Vance and Donald Trump come from? They come from White women who have told them, you can do whatever it is that you want. Because the world is yours and we are here to do nothing [00:21:00] other than be ornaments in your life and serve you. That's why JD Vance continues to go on his misogynistic sprees where he talks about, Oh, how feminism and independence and working got women out of their traditional roles.

Where Donald Trump is saying, you don't need to worry your pretty little head about abortion. I took care of that. All you need to worry about is tending to my needs. They want to take away not only bodily autonomy, but any choice that you have whatsoever. And the target, dear friends, truly is White women because it goes hand in hand with their ability to create more White men to avoid what they have been referring to as [00:22:00] the Great Replacement Theory.

So if you get rid of abortion like they've done and you force women into becoming mothers and then they have to drop out of the workforce. Their plans are in motion and folks, we don't have to wait for the election to see Project 2025 and their plan for women operationalized because it's already here. There are women dying in Georgia. There are women bleeding out in parking lots in Texas, Alabama. These red states are blood red because the lives of women, the deaths of women are on their hands. And Donald Trump's response is "I will be your protector. Don't worry your pretty little head about it".

Georgia's Deadly Abortion Ban: The Tragic Deaths of Two Black Women, Candi Miller & Amber Thurman - Democracy Now! - Air Date 9-18-24

 

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: [00:23:00] On Tuesday, Republican senators once again blocked legislation to protect access to IVF, in vitro fertilization, and require health insurers to cover the fertility treatment, after Democrats forced a vote.

Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris slammed Donald Trump, her Republican rival, for his role in abolishing national abortion rights after he appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who issued the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. In an interview yesterday with the National Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia, Vice President Harris cited the case, reported by ProPublica, of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old Black woman in Georgia who died from a fatal infection after doctors refused to treat a rare complication from a medication abortion.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: I don’t know if anyone here has heard most recently the stories out of Georgia, [00:24:00] tragic story, about a young woman who died because, it appears, the people who should have given her healthcare were afraid they’d be criminalized, after the Dobbs decision came down, laws that make no exception even for rape or incest, which means that you’re telling a survivor of a crime of a violation to their body that they have no right to make a decision about what happens to their body next, which is immoral, an approach that doesn’t take into account that — most people, I think, agree you don’t have to abandon your faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do with her body.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Georgia’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee found Amber Thurman’s death was preventable and largely due to delays in care. This comes as Project 2025 staffer, former Trump White House personnel chief John McEntee [00:25:00] doubted the danger of abortion bans in a TikTok post last Thursday.

JOHN McENTEE: Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned? Don’t hold your breath.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: McEntee was widely ridiculed as women posted responses about their experiences being denied care.

Well, today, ProPublica published a new report on a second woman in Georgia who died from medical abortion complications. Candi Miller’s family said she didn’t visit a doctor, quote, “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions,” unquote. Overall, deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Monica Simpson is with us. She’s executive director of SisterSong, the national women of color reproductive justice collective based in Georgia. And Ziva Branstetter is also joining us, from Walnut Creek, California, senior editor [00:26:00] at ProPublica, who helped edit two new reports by Kavitha Surana.

We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! I want to begin with Ziva. Actually, Vice President Harris cited your investigation in her answers to questions from the National Association of Black Journalists yesterday. Can you lay out the stories of [Amber] Thurman and also today you’ve just broke a new story on a second death?

ZIVA BRANSTETTER: Correct. Well, thank you, first of all, Democracy Now!, for having me on to talk about reporting by ProPublica and reporter Kavitha Surana. We have reported two stories. Both deaths of these women occurred in the months following the overturn of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court. Both were in Georgia. Both were African American women.

The first case, Amber Thurman, 28-year-old single mother with a 3-year-old son, she died after doctors did not provide care over about a [00:27:00] 20-hour period in the emergency room. She had taken abortion medication to end her pregnancy, and fetal tissue remained, which is a rare — a very rare complication of taking abortion medication, very simply solved with a procedure called a D&C, that doctors did not provide over 20 hours in the emergency room. That procedure, in almost all cases in Georgia now and in other abortion ban states, is a felony. Doctors could face criminal prosecution for performing it. We don’t know what was going through their minds, but they did not operate over 20 hours. And she died in August of 2022.

The story that we just published today on ProPublica’s website is about Candi Miller, a 41-year-old woman, also from Georgia, a mother of three, who also self-managed her abortion at home, which is becoming far more regular under abortion bans. She took abortion medication. Again, rare complication. [00:28:00] Instead of going to the hospital, she was afraid to seek care, and did not and died at home with a mixture of drugs that her family believes was trying to manage the pain. And she died, as well, in November of 2022. That death has been ruled by the state preventable and, not only that, directly related to the state’s abortion ban, which is the first time we’ve seen this reported.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And explain the abortion ban in Georgia.

ZIVA BRANSTETTER: Correct. It’s a six-week ban. You know, we classify that almost the same as a complete ban, because many people can become pregnant and don’t know at that point that they are even pregnant. And experts say a six-week ban is tantamount to a complete ban. And there are no health exceptions in Georgia’s ban. Well, Candi Miller had lupus. She had hypertension. She had diabetes. She’s 41 years old. She already has three children. She found herself pregnant. Doctors had told her, [00:29:00] “You can’t. Your body cannot survive another pregnancy. It will kill you.” So, she had, literally, no good options under Georgia’s abortion ban.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Now, can you talk about how rare medication abortion complications are, Ziva?

ZIVA BRANSTETTER: About 6 million people, since the FDA approved abortion medication, have used it, and there have been 31 deaths of any kind, only 11 of those from sepsis. It is 0.0005% of cases that are fatal, which is a lower complication rate than penicillin and Viagra. And so, it’s extremely safe. All medications have risk. There is a simple solution to a complication with abortion medication, and that is a D&C. And abortion ban states, for the vast majority of cases, criminalize that procedure. 

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: I want to turn to Monica Simpson. You’re [00:30:00] executive director of the Georgia organization SisterSong. Can you talk about the levels of Black maternal mortality in Georgia? 

MONICA SIMPSON: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me this morning.

We are devastated to hear this news and to see that Black women are still not being treated in the ways that they need to by our healthcare system in Georgia. What is real in the state of Georgia is that we are in a maternal healthcare crisis in our state. We are a state that has yet to expand Medicaid, which means that thousands upon thousands of people are already falling under the radar and not getting access to the care that they need. And on top of that, we are dealing with the fact that we are in this country seeing Black women die at a rate three to four times higher than white women in childbirth, right?

So, we look at that, and coupled with the fact that Georgia has a desert of OB-GYN availability in our state. There are over half of our states that do not — excuse me, half of our counties that do not have access to [00:31:00] an OB-GYN, so people are having to travel miles upon miles just to get care. So, when you bring all of that together in this context of a state that is also dealing with a six-week abortion ban — SisterSong is the lead plaintiff in that case against our state; we have been fighting that for many years now, trying to get this ban removed — we are seeing a really dire picture for Black women and for people in general in the state of Georgia.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: In this case that ProPublica talked about today, the story of Candi Miller, Monica, Candi Miller’s health was so fragile — I’m reading the first sentences. “Candi Miller’s health was so fragile, doctors warned having another baby could kill her.” So she was already at high risk. Her previous pregnancy was high-risk. But she was terrified to go to the doctor. Talk about that, what this means. And the number of women who may be [00:32:00] suffering or have died that we don’t know, it’s because of their fear of going to the doctor, that they would be criminalized.

MONICA SIMPSON: Absolutely. We hear this story far too often, that we know too many Black women, in particular — right? — are saying that they do not feel safe when they go to their doctor. They don’t feel as if they’re listened to. They don’t feel as if they’re trusted. We have seen this show up in the lives of people who are celebrities, like Serena Williams, right? So, if we have people who have the amount of privilege and resources that a Serena Williams has and they are still not listened to and trusted by healthcare providers, imagine what that looks like on the ground for everyday people who are trying to get access to care. In our membership, we get these stories all the time, that we don’t feel like we’re trusted, we don’t feel like we’re going to get access to the information that we want. And so it silences people. And we know that that silence then drives people inward, and it does not allow them to be able to move towards the solutions that they need for [00:33:00] themselves and their families.

So, this is a really sad day in the state of Georgia. Our elected officials need to be on top of this more than ever. And we have to take this very seriously, because we knew and we have been saying, since the Dobbs decision and even before then, that when you remove access, restrict access, ban access to lifesaving care, healthcare that people need, then those who have historically been pushed to the margins will be the ones most affected. And we are seeing that in the state of Georgia, where these Black women have lost their lives to a preventable — preventable — issue that could have been taken care of in real time.

Texas Republicans ARE KILLING WOMEN!!! - Brittany Page - Air Date 9-26-24

 

BRITTANY PAGE - HOST, BRITTANY PAGE: Last week I covered the first confirmed preventable death from abortion bans in Georgia, with reporting from ProPublica. Shortly after I posted that video, ProPublica announced a second preventable, confirmed preventable death in Georgia, this time involving a woman [00:34:00] named Candy Miller. And in the video, I said this was just the beginning because Georgia's Maternal Mortality Review Committee is two years behind. They are reviewing deaths from fall 2022.

I said we would get more deaths from abortion bans, but I also said Georgia is just one state. And now we're starting to see the impact of abortion bans from other states, this time in Texas. In an analysis shared exclusively with NBC News, the Gender Equity and Policy Institute used publicly available data from the CDC and found, quote, from 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11 percent nationwide during the same period.

"There's only one explanation for this staggering difference in maternal mortality", said Nancy L. Cohen, president of GEPI. "All research points to Texas's abortion ban as the primary driver of this [00:35:00] alarming increase. Texas, I fear, is a harbinger of what's to come in other states", she said.

Now, anyone who has been paying attention could have predicted this. Experts have warned politicians repeatedly that abortion bans kill women. And yet, we're still existing in a world where Republicans continue to push lies about abortion, and try to hide their true goals of banning abortion entirely.

Which, as we're seeing now, causes more death for mothers. In Texas, we've read the stories about OBGYNs fleeing the state, increasingly fearful of what will happen to them under draconian laws that put lives at risk. Leaving behind, in some cases, maternal health care deserts. But Texas restricted abortion before the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June 2022.

So we have an even more unique glimpse into the damage caused by abortion bans in Texas. Reading again from NBC News, "The Texas [00:36:00] legislature banned abortion care as early as five weeks into pregnancy in September 2021. Nearly one year before the U. S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the case that protected a federal right to abortion in June 2022.

The passage of Texas Senate Bill 8 gave GEPI researchers the opportunity to take an early look at how near total bans on abortion, including cases in which the mother's life was in danger, affected the health and safety of pregnant women. The SB8 effect, Cohen's team found, was swift and stark. Within a year, maternal mortality rose in all racial groups studied.

Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant during childbirth or soon after increased from 14. 5 maternal deaths per 100, 000 live births in 2019 to 18. 9 in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled from 20 per 100, 000 to [00:37:00] 39. 1. And black women, who historically have higher chances of dying while pregnant during childbirth or soon after, saw their rates go from 31.

6 to 43. 6 per 100, 000 live births. And so what is the result of this? Well, obviously, inaction on the part of Republicans. Well, inaction and doubling down on restrictions on abortion from Republicans. But also, what is the result of this, meaning what is the impact of this on women? I'm sure you can guess that it's fear.

And this quote really stood out to me. "Fear is something I'd never seen in practice prior to Senate Bill 8", said Dr. Leah Tatum, an OB GYN in private practice in Austin, Texas. Tatum, who was not involved with the GEPI study, said the request for sterilization procedures among her patients doubled after the state's abortion ban.

That is, women prefer to lose their ability to ever have [00:38:00] children over the chance that they might become pregnant following SB8. So for the pro family, pro life party, we have Republicans doubling down on policies that are not just increasing the maternal mortality rate, not just killing women. Who are often already mothers, but also forcing women to choose sterilization over the possibility of death due to pregnancy or due to the inability of having access to life saving medical care in the form of abortion.

of an abortion, if needed. We need to keep this issue front and center, because these stories are the kind of thing that can move the needle. And it's unfortunate when people can't find their empathy before their tragedy. We would hope that people don't need to experience something firsthand before understanding an issue fully and investing themselves in activism.

But that's often the way that it works, and we're [00:39:00] slowly starting to see that happen as more people suffer the negative consequences of these dangerous policies. So keep talking about it, keep sharing it.

Everyone Loves Someone Who's Had an Abortion - The Defenders - Air Date 12-30-23

 

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Obviously the majority of Americans who support abortion rights, but many people are locked into an old way of seeing things. And I’m hearing you say that we there is new, there is a fresh way to look at it, there is new thinking there is new, relevant information that everybody deserves to have, and an arms you.

JESSICA VALENTI: It does, so many people even though we are the majority still have that mindset of this is a controversial issue that we are split on. But when you actually look at the polls, that’s just not borne out, like we are seeing that people really understand this issue in a much more nuanced and complicated way than they did even five years ago, young people especially. [00:40:00] And I think we just need to give them credit for that and start talking about this in the way we want the policy to look like and in the way that we want our future with pregnancy and abortion to look like and stop holding on to those old ways of thinking and having this conversation.

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: And the old language, the old verbiage of like safe, legal rare, which we’ll.

JESSICA VALENTI: No, like overlooks all over it like it’s, it is. It is so stigmatizing honestly, I’ve struggled with that in my own life like for when I used to talk about having an abortion. At first I only talked about the abortion I had after my daughter was born, and I had a really terrible pregnancy and almost died and being pregnant again, could kill me and so it was not really a choice. I was like, well, you know, I don’t want to leave my daughter mother listened so I had an abortion. It was very easy for me to talk about that abortion, and less easy for me to talk about the abortion I had, you know, four years [00:41:00] before or before I met my husband before I had my daughter because that was like not as okay, right? And I’m someone who does this for a living and I internalize that stigma. There’s just so much of that we need to like really move past it.

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I could not agree more that stigma can impact any of us, even those who write about this topic for a living like Jessica. So how do we move past it? Part of it is doing the work arming the choir with the information that they need to break it down. Like Jessica’s incredible newsletter, Abortion Every Day, which we will of course link in the show notes for you. But another part of it is in the stories we tell each other. This is something I got to chat about with Renee Bracey Sherman of We Testify.

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: What feels important is educating the mass on why people have abortions. And we can do that through our [00:42:00] stories, and dispelling the myths that exist about abortion that we’ve all believed.

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: We testify supports abortion storytellers, especially for marginalized backgrounds. Renee was motivated to do this work because of her own experience sharing her abortion story. We dug into her personal story and why she works to train storytellers in our interview. So okay, so can you tell us why? Why did you decide to start this organization? What was the genesis of that?

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: I did not see people who looked like me sharing their abortion stories. It was about a little over a decade ago, when I first started sharing my abortion story and it was so isolating, not seeing people of color and their stories be out there especially with who was like interviewed in the news or when abortion was the topic. [00:43:00] And when I had my abortion at 19, I thought I was like the only person of color to have an abortion ever. It was like me and like rumor Lil Kim. That was it right? And I knew that my cousins and aunts, White women in my family, had had abortions, but it had not been talked about with Black folks in my family. And so I really felt like what do we need to do to create a space and to create a world in which people of color who have abortions feel like they are able to step in and feel supported to share they’re stories. And it was it again, I would be on panels and people of color would come up to me and say I had an abortion too. I had an abortion too. And that was really, really wonderful but it was like, okay, but why am I still like the only on this panel?

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Right? It’s just me and Lil [00:44:00] Kim out here and we could use some company.

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: Yeah, and I later learned Vanessa Williams. There’s just so few of us. And so I, I don’t think that you can ask someone to do something that you’re not willing to do yourself. And it’s not right to ask people to do things without giving them the proper training and support. And when I first started sharing my abortion story, the harassment was so bad, especially so racist. And I definitely heard from a lot of White leaders at the time, well, that’s just part of it. That’s just it is what it is. And there wasn’t this desire to fix it. And so when I thought about how do we actually protect abortion, storytellers, they are the people that were say we’re supporting, they are at the core of this work. But they’re not centered. They’re not invited to be part of our movement. They’re not the leaders of our movement. They’re not the spokespeople of our movement. How do we support them and [00:45:00] so then I did an a survey 10, it’ll be 10 years ago next year, where I interviewed abortion storytellers and asked them what it was that they needed. And they said that they needed harassment support, they needed compensation for their time and their energy. They needed someone to be there with them. And so then I started creating a curriculum for that which later, then became we testify as an organization. And what I have sought to do is just to make sure that all abortion stories are heard, that the stories are as diverse as the people who have them, and that it’s within proportion of who has abortions on why the majority of people who have abortions are people of color, their parents, their spiritual, they experienced financial, logistical and legal barriers to their abortions. But what ends up happening is that White women’s stories get elevated, especially if there’s tears [00:46:00] involved. And Black folks, Black and Brown folks, just their stories get deprioritize. So the majority of abortion stories that you hear should be from people of color. But we’re not there yet. We’re getting there, right now. All right, yeah.

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I guess let’s can I, we talk about the approach? Because you’re using storytelling as a way to build leadership within the movement? I guess why is that more effective or more important than just trying to run out and change the minds of people who disagree with us. Do you know what I mean?

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: Well, couple things. I think there’s a misunderstanding of the people who agree with us and people who don’t. The majority of the country agrees with us. I believe in reminding them as we say that we testify, everyone loves someone who’s had an abortion, that the things that you think about abortion, even if you’re supportive of it, you might think of some things that are stigmatizing like, oh, well, it’s [00:47:00] dangerous. And so for me, what feels important is dispelling the myths, the pro choice myths that we write, which Paul protrace politicians spread constantly.

SAMANTHA BEE - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Yeah, I was just gonna say that, like generationally, too. There’s like a whole cohort, like a large cohort of people who support abortion, but it’s, you know, there’s some conditional support, you know, people who are like, I’m fine with abortion, but I don’t want people to use it as birth control it things like that.

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: That is the stigma right there. And at the end of the day, they’re uncomfortable with abortion, and you need to get deeper into figuring out why you’re uncomfortable with abortion, not shaming people who have abortions along the way.

Notes from the Editor about further demands for reproductive justice

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with The ReidOut, discussing the worldview of people like JD Vance. NowThis Impact explained the truth behind the lie of post-birth [00:48:00] abortion. Also from NowThis Impact, there was featured testimony given by a woman to describe her experience with pregnancy in Louisiana. Danielle Moodie discussed the role of patriarchy on how men are raised to see women as subservient. Democracy Now!, looked at the preventable deaths of two women in Georgia who couldn't access the reproductive care they needed. Brittany Page looked at the rising rate of maternity mortality in Texas and the promise of the trend spreading. And The Defenders stressed the importance of de-stigmatizing abortion. And those were just the Top Takes. 

There's a lot more in the Deeper Dives section, but first a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes, featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support—there's a link in the show notes—through [00:49:00] our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but I'll note that anyone, depending on the app you use to listen, may be able to use the time codes we provide in the show notes to jump around the show, similar to how chapter markers work. Now, if regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. 

Now, before we continue on to the Deeper Dives half the show, I have a couple of articles I wanted to highlight with some counter narratives, but they're counter from even further left. The first was published in Jacobin though I've seen similar sentiments expressed in multiple outlets. It's titled "We Need Better Than a Return to the Roe Status Quo". And basically, the initial stance of the Democratic Party after the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade was to call for a reinstatement of [00:50:00] the previous status quo through legislation, going around the Supreme court. Reproductive justice advocates, I think, rightly recognize that this is actually a once in a generation opportunity to demand, not a return to the old, entirely insufficient status quo, but a real fundamental shift in reproductive and family policy under a reproductive justice framework. Which, by the way, is also in line with what the majority of people in the country actually support. So, from the article, "It's not only reproductive health care that's necessary for communities to thrive, but also Medicare for All, universal childcare, more funding for public education, paid family leave, and a higher minimum wage, all demands of the reproductive justice movement". And they go on to put a finer point on the problem itself: "A right without access is meaningless, and access [00:51:00] was frequently blocked by pre-Dobbs restrictions on Medicaid funding for abortion, state restrictions on health insurance coverage of abortion, and state regulations on abortion clinics, that have led to many clinic closures. Roe did not ensure that everyone was able to make unencumbered decisions about their bodies and lives and was decided on flimsy legal arguments about the constitutional right to privacy that did not sufficiently advance or protect women's rights to autonomy and self-determination". 

And there is certainly hope that the shift in this stance is already underway. They point out that, in a 2023 interview on Face the Nation, Kamala Harris said, "We're not trying to do something new. We need to put into law the protections of Roe vs. Wade, and that is about going back to where we were before the Dobbs decision". However, "In Harris's August 6th rally in [00:52:00] Pennsylvania, her language evolved from the 'Restore Roe' call that Biden popularized. Under her presidency. She said, 'We will restore reproductive freedom'". 

And finally the article highlights further ideas to promote "expanded access to care by funding clinics and direct service providers for ending the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, especially for pregnant people of color, and for the repeal of the Comstock Act, a 19th century anti-obscenity law that could function as a nationwide abortion ban". 

All good ideas. 

Now, next up, this article published in The Nation is highlighting a split between large reproductive rights groups and those local groups providing services in their local communities. The headline is "National Abortion Rights Groups Have the Wrong Priorities For Our Movement". And it starts out pointing out that this piece was written and signed by a [00:53:00] collective of abortion fund representatives. So, it was written by several people and then it was signed onto by many, many groups and it says. "As representatives of local abortion funds across the country, we of course support any political efforts to expand abortion access in the future. But we also want to pose this question to the elite sectors of our movement: where is your strategy to increase abortion care right now when it has never been needed more?". And highlighting their meager resources and the ever-increasing need for their services, the local groups points to "Some national funds with resources that our organizations could only dream of are making it harder, not easier, to get abortion care. In June, for instance, the National Abortion Federation announced that it would be cutting back on the amount it gives people who qualify for its financial assistance program. Where the NAF previously paid for 50% of the cost of care, it will now pay for [00:54:00] just 30%. These groups blamed their decision on budget constraints. But their resources dwarf anything local funds can provide. For instance, planned parenthood received $275 million in 2022 from just one donor. Every budget is a reflection of priorities". 

Now, the argument that these big groups are making for the decisions with their budgetary priorities, right?, is that they're keeping an eye on the political landscape and efforts to establish new lasting policy that will benefit all going forward. And it's not a ridiculous case to make. But it's important to not lose sight of the immediate emergency of need for care right now. And the 34 signatories to this article theorize that the lack of funding may be at least partly due to differing official stances between [00:55:00] the organizations. "Local funds have been put in a position to disproportionally hold the weight of abortion access while being abandoned based on their more radical and staunch values than their national counterparts. Local abortion funds are the experts in this political moment and deserve respect and investment". And then finally they say, "In order to more directly support abortion seekers now donate directly to your local abortion funds to ensure that your donation gets to abortion seekers and realizes abortion access right now". And they link to an Act Blue donation page to support abortion access right now. I will link to that along with these two articles in the show notes. 

SECTION A: THE CASUALTIES

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to a dive deeper on five topics. Next up, Section A: The casualties. Followed by Section B: Religion. Section C: The punishment is the point, Section D: [00:56:00] Black women. And Section E: The pushback.

Trump-Vance Ticket and the He-Man Woman Haters - Hysteria - Air Date 9-19-24

 

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: We've got Some interesting news in Nebraska. The Supreme Court ruled last week that opposing constitutional amendments can appear on state ballots in November. So currently, Nebraska law prohibits abortion after 12 weeks, with exceptions for medical emergencies, sexual assault and incest. Now, let me just say 90 percent of abortions take place at 12 weeks or earlier because the first trimester sucks.

Most of the time, you know you're pregnant. There are circumstances where you might not know you're pregnant or you're disenfranchised and you can't. You can't access the care that you need, but 90 percent of abortions take place before that 12 week mark. The ones that are delayed until after that often take place because of something catastrophic, heartbreaking, awful, terrible.

Like, you get your NIPT results back around 12 weeks, and that can tell you if your child has like a, um, a genetic defect that's incompatible with life. It doesn't test [00:57:00] for all of them, but it catches some of the big ones, and sometimes you're not gonna know until you're 12, 13 weeks along. You know? Anyway, that's neither here nor there.

One amendment known as Protect Women and Children would codify that law, like keep it on the books, and another amendment called Protect the Right to Abortion would effectively reverse it. So only a handful of states have protections for the right to abortion in their state constitutions, and Nebraska is a deeply red state.

Alyssa, do you think, That the Protect the Right to Abortion Amendment has a chance at passing. Or is that wishful thinking? 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: I'm concerned about the name of the second amendment. Like, it's very confusing. Protect Women and Children. If you're a low From what? Right, if you're a low information voter, and you're going into the Like, like, if you're just looking at the name of it, you're like, I guess, yeah, of course I want to protect women and children.

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: Not if you're a gay man woman hater. 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: You might actually be like, you know what, I'm motivated by my hatred for women and children. So fuck them. Fuck them kids. Listen, I think that Republicans continue to underestimate, [00:58:00] look, Kansas, Ohio, overwhelmingly people have voted to protect a woman's right to abortion.

So I don't know, fingers crossed. I feel less, a little less hopeful about this because of the dueling amendments and because I do think that they were wrong to have let. The second amendment protect women and children be named protect women and children. I actually do think it's confusing. It is 

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: confusing and it's inaccurate because, uh, pregnancy is more dangerous than being an on duty police officer.

If it were a job, it would be one of the top five most dangerous jobs in the U. S. Yeah. You're right. More likely to die when you're pregnant or in the first year after giving birth than you are if you are literally a non duty cop. Uh, so, yeah. Um, Nebraska's one of ten states where constitutional amendments that would protect or expand abortion rights are set to appear on ballots in November.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: Mm hmm. 

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: What do you think these amendments mean for the future of abortion in a post Roe country? 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: Look, what we've seen is that when there are amendments, [00:59:00] Thus far, they are passing overwhelmingly. I think maybe at some point, I mean, look, and the thing that's like really fucking creepy about Republicans is that their constituents are telling them what they think, not, I'm not talking about the core base of their party, I mean, the constituents that they represent in their state are telling them abortion, reproductive freedom.

Should exist. Um, women should have access to it and then it passes and then what do they do like in Ohio? Secretary of State's like mmm. We actually think that some of the some of the sentences in here are like not constitutional So we're gonna go line by line and try to strike them all it's bullshit, but I do think at some point Ignoring the will of your constituents will have consequences, you know, like too many local leaders are running on a national platform, um, that I think at some point is going to truly, uh, bite them in the ass, 

But, Erin, this isn't the only issue. We have our eyes on down the ballot in Nebraska. Democrats are also hoping to flip the congressional seat in Nebraska's second [01:00:00] district. Incumbent Don Bacon The Republican and Tony Vargas, the Democrat, are in a tight race and we know we can flip the seat. Ooh, it would save America. 

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: Dot com slash vote 2024.

I think it's slash 2024 or slash vote either way either one. You're gonna get what you need All right another couple things, you know, this is another situation where uh conservative legislators Put all the ingredients to make a cake in a bowl stirred the cake stirred the ingredients around Put it in a cake pan, put it in the oven that was preheated to 350 degrees after about 30 minutes, took it out, and act shocked that it became a cake.

Uh, back in May, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed a bill into law making abortion pills, Mifepristone and Mizoprostol, controlled substances. The law will go into effect on October 1st. And this is what I mean about people getting their science tests handed back to them face down. Mm hmm. Because both of these drugs Are important drugs in the treatment of things [01:01:00] besides post miscarriage care and abortion care like even if you want to be like, fuck them women, abortions, you know, we don't even take care of miscarriages like Both of those drugs have other uses.

Both of those drugs. 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: And can I give you, I have a lot of thoughts on this. One, for the misoprostol, which I know doctors use especially if a woman is hemorrhaging, right? And so now it's a controlled substance akin to Valium or Xanax. If a woman is bleeding out, normally misoprostol would be in the crash cart.

Now it is in a locked room, potentially very far away. Do you know that doctors in Louisiana right now are doing time trials to see how far and how long it will take them to write the prescription, run to where it's kept, and get back to the rooms where they would be using it? That's fucking deranged, number one.

Number two, even though they're classifying it as Xanax and Valium, here's something. [01:02:00] Erin, I take Xanax. I don't take it every day. I take it when I need it. My doctor says, Alyssa, here's X number of pills. I pick up my prescription. I don't have to have a nervous breakdown, wait for it to get really bad, and then call my doctor and try to get a pill and run to CVS and get it before I'm a messy puddle on the bathroom of my floor.

So it doesn't even work like the controlled substances they're talking about. 

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: Mhm. No, and like, you know, when's the last time you crushed up a mythoprostone and snorted a couple lines of it? Like, me and my girls in the bathroom, we're having abort summer. We're going into the bathroom, we're doing key bumps of misoprostol.

It's like, no, it's not, it doesn't get you high. Nobody's breaking into, like, houses to, to, nobody's breaking into pharmacies to raid them as a pro, postal supply. Yet. So now they should. Exactly. Um, but it also may, means that in order to access the drugs, you need to have a prescription from a medical professional based in Louisiana, which [01:03:00] totally bans abortion.

So, like, If you're trying to do the pills by mail thing, like, that's another added layer of risk, and it's really, really stupid. It is a huge waste of time and a huge waste of money, and people are going to die. People in Georgia have died because of the abortion ban ProPublica uncovered just this week.

It's, it's just, it's disgusting. Um, Ron DeSantis still being, uh, trying his hardest to be somehow less appealing than J. D. Vance is having his goons go around knocking on doors trying to verify that real people signed a petition that meant to get an abortion amendment on the ballot this November. What is Ron DeSantis long game here?

Does he really want to like, edge out J. D. Vance as America's biggest fucking prick? 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: Erin, that's a sad thing. I think he's spiraling, and this is part of a midlife crisis, because he knows that he lost his one chance. He's nothing but to sanctimonious now to Republicans, and God knows Democrats [01:04:00] don't want him.

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: Mm hmm. Yeah, you can't click those high heels together and bring back the political career that you thought you had. Nope! But some good news. Some men in red states have come out loud in support of abortion rights, which would give us some hope in places like Florida and Louisiana.

I gotta admit that it is a little frustrating for me to read Story after story that's like, man, I was really against abortion. And then my wife needed one or she would die. And then I was like, wait a minute. Are other women also people? And then I realized that abortion wasn't a frivolous procedure for loose women.

Uh, it's just, okay. Like glad to have you welcome in, but like, I'm giving you like a little bit of side eye cause it shouldn't take somebody in your immediate family suffering a medical emergency for you to see other people as human...

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: because fundamentally it means you lacked empathy. 

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: But I'm glad. Welcome to team. We're here. We're not judging. Um, you know, show me when you get your one year [01:05:00] chip and I will, I will gladly applaud you. And I really appreciate them being outspoken. You know, it's, it's never too late to do the right thing. Yeah, it's sometimes it's almost too late. It's before election day.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - HOST, HYSTERIA: So we're like, okay, 

ERIN RYAN - HOST, HYSTERIA: that's true. That's true. Okay, so good job. Tepidly, red state men, don't take your foot off the gas because we are going to be watching.

Exactly how Trump could ban abortion - Vox - Air Date 9-9-24

 

MARY ZEIGLER: Banned states want the possibility of prosecuting people, abortion providers, abortion funds, organizations that help abortion seekers. 

ADAM FREELANDER - HOST, VOX: A Trump administration could help states get that information, either by lifting the protections that keep doctors from sharing it, or by using the Center for Disease Control to create detailed records on every pregnancy in the country.

All these plans are written down in a document called Mandate for Leadership. You probably know it. As Project 2025, [01:06:00] a plan written by conservative analysts and former Trump administration officials for what they would do in a new Trump administration. The document includes the word abortion just about 200 times, and we've only touched on a few of its plans to limit abortion access, but It actually contains one anti abortion measure that dwarfs all the others.

If the other plans in Project 2025 are more piecemeal, just kind of chipping away at abortion access, this one would come the closest to an actual national abortion ban. And it uses a powerful tool to make that happen. Something that has just been kind of hiding in the law of the United States. for a hundred and fifty years.

No obscene publication or any article or thing intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion shall be carried in the mail. This is the Comstock Act of 1873. It banned the mailing of three things. Obscene publications, [01:07:00] pornography, and then anything intended for either The Prevention of Conception, or Abortion.

In the 150 years after this law was passed, it was weakened by various court cases and used less and less, and Congress eventually repealed part of it entirely. But the overturning of Roe v. Wade brought this part back, and how or whether to enforce it is now up to the U. S. Department of Justice, overseen by the President.

In December 2022, the Biden administration said that the revived Comstock Act does not prohibit the mailing or receipt by mail of Mifepristo. In other words, mailing abortion pills is illegal. Still okay. But a Trump administration would probably feel differently. Not long after that, a group of Republican members of Congress wrote to the Biden administration urging them to enforce the Comstock Act and stop the reckless distribution of abortion drugs by mail.

One of those members of Congress was Senator J. D. Vance, [01:08:00] who is now running to be Trump's vice president. It's pretty straightforward to see how the revived Comstock Act could be interpreted to prohibit the mailing of abortion pills from providers. But if that's the case, there's no reason it wouldn't also prohibit the shipping of abortion pills from manufacturers.

To providers, and for that matter, 

CARRIE N. BAKER: about two thirds of abortion are done with pills now, but about a third are done with instruments and mailing. Those instruments could be a violation of Comstock Law if the Trump administration interprets Comstock as prohibiting the mailing of anything. They could accomplish an abortion.

And that would shut down abortion nationwide, in all states, because every doctor orders things from out of state. 

ADAM FREELANDER - HOST, VOX: An administration enforcing the Comstock Act would probably target the two major manufacturers of mifepristone first. And just going after a few doctors would probably be enough to create a chilling effect on all doctors providing abortions everywhere.[01:09:00] 

In August, Trump finally addressed this, kind of. 

MARY ZEIGLER: It's kind of been Trump's game plan from the beginning to be confusing about what exactly he means on abortion. Would you enforce the Comstock Act, which could prohibit the distribution of medication abortion by male? 

DONALD TRUMP : First he said no. No, uh, and then we will be discussing specifics of it, but generally speaking, no.

And that 

MARY ZEIGLER: was reported as no, but I don't know what generally no means or we'll discuss the specifics. Does that mean you're going to prosecute some people, but not other people? Like does it mean you're going to prosecute people sometimes and not, like, He hasn't been as clear, I think, as is sometimes reported.

CARRIE N. BAKER: Look at what he's done rather than what he says he will do. Look at who his supporters are. He says what he says to get elected to office, and then he does what he does. 

ADAM FREELANDER - HOST, VOX: We don't know what will happen with the Comstock Act. If Democrats win control of the government, They could repeal it.

 This is the 2024 Republican Party platform. It barely [01:10:00] mentions abortion. What it does say is more interesting. It says, we stand for families and life, and that the 14th amendment guarantees no person can be denied life or liberty. What It doesn't sound too out there, but that is actually coded language.

Anytime you see these phrases together, 14th Amendment and the repeated use of the word life, they are talking about an idea called fetal personhood. Fetal personhood gives fetuses, embryos, fertilized eggs, full constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment with the assumption that those rights would override the rights of pregnant people.

MARY ZEIGLER: The anti abortion movement has, um thought of fetal personhood as the kind of endgame since the 1960s. To the extent that Comstock approximates a national ban, fetal personhood is pretty much a ban full stop. You can't legally justify abortion if the law says that embryos are people. Nineteen of the states actually already have some form of personhood law on the books.

ADAM FREELANDER - HOST, VOX: But [01:11:00] on the national level, this is almost certainly not something Congress will be able to pass. And it's not something the president can do either. It will have to be done through the courts. This is where the anti abortion movement ultimately wants to go. This is sort of the next Roe v. Wade. In 2019, an anti abortion group filed a lawsuit in the state of Rhode Island, asking the state's court to block Rhode Island's abortion rights law on the basis that Human life commences at the instant of conception, and that said human life is a person.

In other words, fetal personhood. They lost. After Roe v. Wade was overturned, they appealed that case to the U. S. Supreme Court, again on the basis of fetal personhood. The Supreme Court declined to hear their case. But the Supreme Court can change, and the groundwork has already been laid for that. Over the course of Trump's first [01:12:00] administration, he installed right wing judges throughout the federal court system, which is where future Supreme Court justices will probably come from.

And in just four years, Trump was able to replace one third of an already conservative Supreme Court. Another Trump term could do the same.

South Carolina Woman Charged with MURDER Following Life-Threatening Miscarriage - The Humanist Report - Air Date 9-28-24

 

MIKE FIGUEREDO - HOST, THE HUMANIST REPORT: This is genuinely Orwellian and reading the details sent chills down my spine.

Mari Marsh had just finished her junior year at South Carolina State University in May of 2023 when she received a text message from a law enforcement officer. Sorry, it has taken this long for paperwork to come back, the officer wrote. But I finally had the final report and wanted to see if you and your boyfriend could meet me Wednesday afternoon for a follow up.

Marsha understood that the report was related to a pregnancy loss she'd experienced that March. Okay, having to talk to a police officer due to a miscarriage you had already. [01:13:00] Deeply, deeply draconian situation we're dealing with here, but it's so much worse. During her second trimester, Marsh said she unexpectedly gave birth in the middle of the night while on a toilet in her off campus apartment.

She remembered screaming and panicking and said the bathroom was covered in blood. I couldn't breathe, said Marsh, now 23. The next day when Marsh woke up in the hospital, she said, a law enforcement officer asked her questions. Then a few weeks later, she said she received a call saying she could collect her daughter's ashes.

So, just to kind of slow down a little bit, so we can try to process the insanity here. She has a medical emergency, bleeds in the bathroom, panics, probably thinking, you know, she's gonna die. Uh, and the next day in the hospital, she's visited by a fucking police officer. Why? Because she had a miscarriage.

There are no words for this. [01:14:00] Uh, at that point, she said she didn't know she was being criminally investigated. Uh, yet three months after her loss, Marsh was charged with murder homicide by child abuse, law enforcement record show. She had a miscarriage, ended up in the hospital because of it through no fault of her own.

And she was charged with murder. How fucking insane is that? She spent 22 days at the Orangeburg Calhoun Regional Detention Center. She went to jail for having a miscarriage! What the fuck? Where she was initially held without bond, facing 20 years to life in prison. Folks, this is why the issue of abortion is so salient to women.

Men don't have to deal with this shit. I never have to worry about this. This is genuinely astonishing to hear. Like, this is the type of shit [01:15:00] that we hear about from authoritarian regimes, right? But it's happening in the United States. She went to jail for having a fucking miscarriage. This is August, 13 months after she was released from jail to house arrest with an ankle monitor.

Again, all for a fucking miscarriage. Marsh was cleared by a grand jury. Her case will not proceed to trial. And again, we're talking about a 23 year old. This is a very young woman. She's 23. And she had to deal with this through no fault of her fucking own. When Marsh took an at home pregnancy test in November 2022, the positive result scared her.

I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to let my parents down. She said, I was in a state of shock. She didn't seek prenatal care, she said, because she kept having her period. She thought the pregnancy test might have been wrong. An incident report filed by the Orangeburg County Sheriff's Office on the day she lost the pregnancy stated that in January of 2023, Marsh made an appointment at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Columbia to take the Plan C pill, which would possibly cause an abortion to occur.

The report doesn't specify whether [01:16:00] she took or even obtained the drug. During an interview at her parents house, Marsh denied going to Planned Parenthood or taking medicine to induce abortion. It shouldn't even fucking matter. Why does this matter at all? It's insane to me that she went to jail for all of this.

I've never been in trouble. I've never been pulled over. I've never been arrested, Marsh said. Uh, I never even gotten written up at school. She played clarinet as section leader in the marching band and once performed at Carnegie Hall. In college, she was majoring in biology and planned to become a doctor.

South Carolina State Representative Seth Rose, a Democrat in Columbia and one of Marsh's attorneys, called it a really tragic case. It's our position that she lost the child through natural causes, he said. No, no, no, but, uh, Apparently, there was an incident report filed because she went to Planned Parenthood and was considering getting an abortion.

So when she ends up having a miscarriage naturally after not getting an abortion, uh, then she's a criminal all of a sudden. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's, we gotta back up and just [01:17:00] go, go through how crazy this is. An incident report for going to Planned Parenthood. 2024 America, folks. 2024 America. So on February 28th of 2023, Marsh said she experienced abdominal pain and that was way worse than regular menstrual cramps.

She went to the emergency room investigation record show, but left after several hours without being treated. Back at home, she said the pain grew worse. She returned to the hospital, this time by ambulance. Hospital staffers crowded around her, she said, and none of them explained what was happening to her.

Bright lights shone in her face. I was scared, she said. According to the Sheriff's Department report, hospital staffers told Marsh that she was pregnant and that a fetal heartbeat could be detected. Freaked out and confused, she chose to leave the hospital a second time, she said, and her pain had subsided.

In the middle of the night, she said, the pain started again. She woke up, she recalled, feeling an intense urge to use the bathroom. And when I did, the child came, she said. I screamed because I was scared. Because I didn't [01:18:00] know what was going on. Her boyfriend at the time called 911. The emergency dispatcher kept telling me to take the baby out of the toilet, she recalled.

I couldn't because I couldn't even keep myself together. First medical responders detected signs of life and tried to perform life saving measures as they headed to Regional Medical Center in Orangeburg. The incident report said, but at the hospital, Marsh learned that her infant girl had not survived.

I kept asking, asking to see the baby. She said they wouldn't let me. So, It seems like she wanted to have the baby, and even if she was considering getting an abortion, that is fine, it's her body. Um, but she wanted the baby, and she still, even wanting to see the baby, she went to jail for a fucking miscarriage.

I can't get over this. I mean, it's really not that surprising, um, given this is kind of what we expected to happen if Roe v. Wade was overturned. But, this young woman, Was traumatized again, unnecessarily. So [01:19:00] the following day, a sheriff's deputy told Marsh in our hospital room that the incident was under investigation, but said that Marsh was currently not in any trouble.

According to the report, Marsh responded that she did not feel as though she did anything wrong. Yeah, because she didn't. And I'm sorry, like, I have to go back to this. You're a police officer like this is what you want to focus on. Like, look, I don't like Police officers. Uh, that's a different story for a different day, right?

I don't think you can reform this system. But like, I would imagine that there's at least some naive belief in anyone who becomes a cop that they're doing this to stop the bad guys, right? Do you really feel like you're accomplishing much by going to the hospital and visiting this woman who just had a miscarriage?

Because she's a little bit sus. Do you really feel like you're accomplishing a lot by doing that? Like, what the fuck is happening? More than 10 weeks later, nothing about the text messages she received from an officer in mid May implied that the follow up meeting about the final report was urgent. Oh, it doesn't have to be Wednesday.

It can be next week or another week. The officer wrote in [01:20:00] an exchange that Marsh shared with KFF Health News. I just have to meet with y'all in person before I can close the case. I'm so sorry. No problem. Understand. Marsh wrote back. So she's like going out of her way to be so cooperative when she has every right to.

To be like, fuck you. I'm not cooperating with you. It's none of your business. I had a miscarriage. Leave me alone. Why are you nagging me? Take him and talk to you. Fuck off. Like she is well within her right to say that, but she's not. She's a sweet person. And she's like, no, I understand. I'll cooperate when she doesn't have to, or she shouldn't have to, I should say.

She didn't tell her parents or consider hiring a lawyer. I didn't think I needed one, she said. Marsh arranged to meet the officer on June 2nd of 2023. During that meeting, she was arrested. Her boyfriend was not charged. How reasonable of them.

How Texas' Abortion Ban Increased Infant Deaths - Mama Doctor Jones - Air Date 9-8-23

 

DANIELLE JONES - HOST, DOCTOR MAMA JONES: What did abortion in Texas look like before SBA?

Well, to be honest, it [01:21:00] wasn't entirely easy to access at all before that. There were huge barriers. Most hospitals in Texas won't let the OB GYNs working there provide abortions even if they want to. Most pharmacies don't dispense because of the regulations and because of just statewide trends towards being opposed.

It's incredibly difficult. For example, I have trained and worked up until I moved here my entire life in Texas and I've never worked at a facility where I was allowed to do abortions or like elective abortions or to give people medication for it. It just was not something I could do in Texas for a whole lot of reasons that I've talked about in a whole lot of other videos.

I don't know how much that this actually changed access. Except that it made people scared. It changed like the face of abortion access in Texas. Does that make sense? Because it doesn't do anything, SBA doesn't do anything to make it technically more difficult. It just made people scared to access it and to provide it.

I [01:22:00] don't think most people Physicians who were already providing abortions in Texas would have stopped providing them based on this SB 8 bill. It just kind of gave people a lot of hesitancy in accessing that kind of care. All right, so they found that spike. It's interesting, they say here, earlier research has found that the number of Texas residents who travel out of state for an abortion spiked after SB 8 took effect.

And, uh, It says that may not be an option for as many people under DAWBS. As many neighboring states, more than a dozen states nationwide, have also enacted abortion bans. Other factors may affect birth trends too, so this is what I was getting at that we don't know for sure that we can see a change in this related to that ruling specifically.

Okay, so, um, At least we can see this public health journal, review it and see if they address the overall birth rate. So researchers expect that the number of abortion procedures to drop and live births to increase when abortion [01:23:00] restrictions go into effect, but don't know what the extent of that will be.

Okay, so it's, it's compared to what they would have expected it to be based on birth trends. around the country. So they have controlled for the expected birth rate. So it's not just comparing it to like last year or anything like that. It's comparing it to expected birth rates based on other places. So that makes sense.

And it's 3 percent higher than what they would have expected. All right. So that's kind of where we're starting with this. So we know that after the 2021 abortion ban. went into place, we saw an increase in the birth rate. Nearly two years after Texas's six week abortion ban, more infants are dying. Texas abortion restrictions, some of the strictest in the country, may be fueling a sudden spike in infant mortality as women are forced to carry non viable pregnancies to term.

And not just non viable pregnancies, right? Any pregnancies that previously would not have been terminated. happening. So some 2, 200 infants died in Texas in 2022, an [01:24:00] increase of 227 deaths or 11. 5 percent over the previous year. According to preliminary infant mortality data from the Texas Department of State and Health Services, CNN obtained through a public records request, infant deaths caused by severe genetic and birth defects rose 22 percent.

So we are noticing a trend here, right? Severe Genetic and birth defects rose by 22 percent. Essentially what they were saying, the number of pregnancies people are forced to carry to term, which then puts them and their health at risk, and also puts their family in a position of not having an option for what to do in a situation where they are put between a rock and a hard place, essentially.

You have to remember most of these people are pregnant with pregnancies they want to have, and then they find out a devastating problem, and they. are not allowed to make a choice, right? So, I kind of liken this to life support options for people. If you are pregnant with a fetus that has a lethal anomaly, and you don't want to continue that [01:25:00] pregnancy, I don't think anybody should be forced to terminate a pregnancy for any reason, obviously.

But, uh, But you also should not force somebody to continue a pregnancy, particularly in a situation where you know that the health outcome is going to be dire. Why? Well, for a whole lot of reasons, not the least of which being, in that interim period from, I don't know, 18 ish weeks when you find out that this could be going on, up until the point that you end up delivering, your health is at risk, right?

So pregnancy is not a health neutral state. Being pregnant puts you at an increased risk of pretty much everything bad that can happen to you in life, and you are naturally at an increased risk. So why it doesn't make any sense to force people to have that. And then in addition to that, while some people would like to have time with a baby if it's born or let things happen naturally on their own.

Some people would really like to, [01:26:00] in what they see, in my experience taking care of these patients, is that some patients fall into that group of like, I just want to stay pregnant as long as possible, have as much time with this baby that is my baby as long as I can. Or in the event that it's born alive, I just want to be able to have that time with it.

And that's perfectly reasonable. I don't know what I would do in that situation. And I think anybody who says that they do know what they would do in that situation, if they have not been through that situation, is lying to themselves and everybody else if they say they know what they would do. Because I've seen this happen hundreds of times, and I can tell you for sure, I don't know what I would do.

That being said, there are some people who fall into another group, which is, I would like to Make what I see as the most humane decision to end this pregnancy so that maybe they think that the fetus is suffering or that when the baby is born, it will suffer and they don't want that to happen. So this is a very personal thing, right?

I think that's really important when we're discussing this is not to lose sight of [01:27:00] the fact that some people on Twitter in particular have looked at this and said, oh, 2200 infants have died. Well, that's, you know, X number less than how many abortions there would have been. And what we're not going to do is compare taking a pill to induce a miscarriage to Somebody having a two month old or a two hour old or a three month old die.

Because those are not the same thing. And we're not going to pretend they are. If somebody wants to pretend that's the same thing, they are just lying because you know And I know that that's not the same thing. That is not to diminish the absolute horrible heartbreak that it can be for people who have lost pregnancies even really early.

That can also be a tragedy. It's not competition of tragicness, but we cannot, Sit here and say that, you know, there's 2000 Texas families [01:28:00] in this short time frame who have lost newborns or babies that were a few months old and say that that's worth it. That is not necessarily something that I will get on board with.

That is a wild thing to even imply. In addition to that, people were asking, well, you know, why would it be associated with higher neonatal and infant mortality to ban abortion. So let's talk a little bit about that. There's a few reasons for this, and it's multifactorial. One is that a lot of times people who have terminations are doing so because they're not in a health situation where they can take care of, grow, birth, and safely care for after birth.

a newborn. Anyone who is at a higher risk of having pregnancy complications, which is a large number of people who choose to have an abortion, they are also at [01:29:00] an increased risk of pregnancy complications, which increase risk of infant mortality. So a higher risk pregnancy, which is Not everybody who has an abortion would fall into a high risk pregnancy group, but a good number of them will.

So you've increased the number of people who have higher risk pregnancies, which increases the risk of having complications related to the pregnancy, specifically things like preterm birth, premature rupture of membranes, abruptions, small for gestational age babies, which increases the risk of things like cerebral palsy, and also, all of those things increase the risk of neonatal and infant mortality.

So yes, banning abortion does increase infant and neonatal mortality rates. We know this. We know this from the plethora of research that we have on this topic, but we also can understand it from a basic level of thinking through what happens when more people are pregnant. And another thing that came up on Twitter was, okay, well, there's more babies being born, so obviously [01:30:00] there's going to be more infant deaths.

And that is true. But the rate is what we're talking about. So if you have one in one hundred, that's one percent. If you have ten and a thousand, that's still one percent. The rate should not change just because the absolute number goes up. And what we're seeing is a trend towards that happening in Texas.

We don't have enough data, I don't think, to know that for sure because I think I'm not positive on this. Again, I would have to look at the data specifically, but I would imagine that we are in too short of a time frame at this point to say if that is an actual change or if it's just related to something else.

But we know this from other data. We know this from logical thinking. We know this from other data on the topic. Banning abortion will increase maternal and infant mortality. What is happening? already starting to happen. It was predictable that this is what would happen, and I think we need to be aware that that's what's happening, because you cannot in one breath [01:31:00] say, I am pro life, and in a second breath ignore the fact that we have thousands of families now grieving their infants dying.

Okay? We cannot ignore that, and we cannot ignore what will likely be an increase in maternal mortality as well.

SECTION B: RELIGION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Religion.

LIVE FROM NETROOTS NATION 2024 #3: Yes, Pro-Faith and Pro-Abortion IS A THING! With Ashley Wilson & Rev. Terry Williams - Feminist Buzzkills - Air Date 9-20-24

 

REV TERRY WILLIAMS: I just want to lift up the joy and the wonder that we have in partnering with local clinics and with organizations such as your own, that we get people who send folk to us not because they are primarily having a moral decision making quandary around abortion, but because they're struggling with the stigma and the violence that has been forced on them by religious systems that don't represent the majority but do represent in many systems and many situations, the power [01:32:00] structures. And they get this messaging, this consistent onslaught of very loud messaging, and the silent majority is not heard in their life. So they come to us and they say, I'm struggling with the stigma, not with the decision, but with the stigma and the violence of this society. And for us, like you said, to be able to just hold space with people and say, you know what? You're not alone. Not only are you not alone, you're in the majority, and you are beloved. And you know your body and what your body needs and what your life looks like. When you think about a flourishing future, you are the expert on your own future and the expert on your own body.

KRISTIN HADY - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILS: So good.

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: And I just want to say, too, as somebody who is brought up Catholic, sometimes when we look at who's outside of those clinics and we look at those men that we just showed you, right? Those violent men. while they are holy garbage, sometimes you can say, oh, yes, I [01:33:00] know that. And sometimes for a young person of faith who is coming to have an abortion, maybe alone, maybe Catholic, those guys are predictably awful. And sometimes the more damaging stigmatizing person can be that quiet person with a rosary who, as the person walks into their procedure, says, if you go in there, you will not have salvation. And those, sometimes I think that we look at the loud ones as the most aggressive, when really it's sometimes the people who pretend to be peaceful who can really take that and make that experience be really scary.

ASHLEY WILSON: It's spiritual violence is what we call it at Catholics for choice. You know, I, everyone, I used to love Pope Francis, and now I have a complicated opinion. He has said that if you have an abortion, you have hired a hitman. And, like, that is bananas [01:34:00] to me. Right. And, like, shows how truly out of touch, you know? Never forget, in the Catholic Church, the people who are writing our policies are ostensibly celibate, ostensibly straight men who have no inroads into the lives of women. They don't have children. They're just so far removed. And they're also obsessed with sex. And it just creates this, like, dark black hole, like, this black hole of spiritual violence and shame that just ripples out everywhere. Even though in the United States, one in four abortion patients in this country identifies as Catholic.

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: I also want to say that being the coolest pope is sort of like being the smartest person at Fox News. It's like. It's kind of like. Not that. It's like, okay, fine. Like, you know, like, what are the pickings here? The history's not that great.

REV TERRY WILLIAMS: As an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and part [01:35:00] of the german protestant tradition, I've had a very clear opinion about the pope for about 400 years.

KRISTIN HADY - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILS: you're like, I was ahead of the game. I'm glad everybody's catching up.

REV TERRY WILLIAMS: But I think to Lizz's point, we have for so long in religious circles, we've given people a pass on the worst possible behavior of, like, oh, they're not totally trash today. Guess what? There are people who aren't just minimally, not totally trash. There are people with really great theology and who support abortion access, people who have stood up for decades across many different denominations, across many different systems of faith within the catholic hierarchy, to say no, actually, consciousness is important, and your ability to control your body is a really big fucking deal, to paraphrase.

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: So I want to jump on that exactly, because I think it's important to talk about the history of abortion and [01:36:00] religion, how it wound up in the hands or rephrase clutches of these extremists and their narrative around. So let's just talk about the history of abortion.

ASHLEY WILSON: Well, I will say, you know, at Catholics or choice, we talk about the very rich tradition of choice that our religion has. You know, Mary famously was visited by the angel Gabriel and had a choice or not to bear the son of God. And she said, yes. And if Mary had a choice, you should too.

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: Oh, wow. That's going over well with those Catholics at the Vatican Church.

KRISTIN HADY - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILS: Merch alert.

REV TERRY WILLIAMS: Mary had a baby by choice.

ASHLEY WILSON: Yeah. And the reality is the catholic hierarchy's obsession with abortion is much more recent. The formal catholic church didn't have a position totally banning abortion until 1917\. It was only a little bit before that, that one of the pope piuses, I think, 9th, [01:37:00] firststarted talking about abortion.

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: Can we call him pp nine?

ASHLEY WILSON: Yeah. For real. So all of this is much more modern, really. We're thinking we're looking at the last hundred years, and when you look at the universe that is the United States today, and you look at people like Leonard Leo who have constructed this Supreme Court, people forget Paul Weyrich, who's one of the co founders of the Heritage foundation. He's Catholic. You know, Leonard Leo, who is the architect of the Supreme Court, he's Catholic. 

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: Six justices.

ASHLEY WILSON: Every member of the Supreme Court who overturned Roe versus Wade, Catholic. Paul Ryan, Catholic. John Boehner, Catholic. Like all of these members of Congress and our government at all levels have literally, intentionally been put there by religious overreach and the catholic bishops to advance this very anti [01:38:00] LGBTQ, anti woman, anti abortion agenda. And it is like the signs of the Catholic Church becoming this political body that has been devastating. And then we're at progressive conferences like this, and the word religion is never talked about. And I'm always like, but Heritage foundation is the one behind project 2025\. Let's look at those roots. The roots are all catholic.

LIZZ WINSTEAD - HOST, FEMINIST BUZZKILLS: Totally. And also, just to point out that once you realize that the priest can't get married, thing changed in the 7th century because the church was like, these bitches are dying and giving their property to their families. We want their property. So we're gonna change up that rule. And so when you see the patriarchal spiral of how do we keep control? Eventually you're gonna get to the narrative of let's control the reproduction of people so that this patriarchal [01:39:00] system can work for us.

ASHLEY WILSON: Yeah.

REV TERRY WILLIAMS: The roman empire did not fall. It became a church. Right? I mean, literally, like, this idea of constantly utilizing those systems to reinforce the power and the ability to hold onto resources that has become institutionalized religion, whether it's protestant or catholic, particularly in this country, for decades. I love the phrase that you used, Ashley, that the roots are Catholic. The roots might be catholic, but the fruits are protestant.

Project 2025: The Plan To DESTROY Women’s Rights - Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast - Air Date 7-22-24

 

MOLLY JONG-FAST - HOST, FAST POLITICS: I'm hoping you could talk us through where we are in America right now with abortion.

That sets the stage for all of this. 

MARY ZEIGLER: Yeah, I mean, where we are right now is, is it kind of a mess, right? I mean, there are two pending U. S. Supreme Court cases that we're likely to hear about any time between this week and the end of the month. There are any number of [01:40:00] divergent state laws. States are introducing new bans, even as they already have existing bans.

We're starting to see more interest in conservative states in limiting travel for abortion. We're seeing conservative efforts to introduce a kind of backdoor federal ban on abortion through the Comstock Act that they're hoping a potential Trump administration would enforce. And we're also seeing, I think, leakage or slippage between the concepts of contraception and birth control that could have a lot of consequences.

So, I mean, big picture, you know, the U. S. Supreme Court, when it overturned Roe v. Wade, was essentially saying, well, sure, you know, everybody's going to lose this fundamental right, and that's kind of too bad, but on the bright side, the abortion conflict will simmer down, because the real problem was Roe v.

Wade. So, once we, the Supreme Court, like, exit stage left, everyone is just going to get along better, and this conflict is not really going to exist anymore. And, you know, it turns out that that's not the case. Not true, right? Um, and it turns out that not only that, but the U. S. Supreme Court has more abortion cases than ever before, not fewer.

So the kind of general [01:41:00] picture is sort of is chaos, but also I think it's not necessarily that we've hit rock bottom either. I mean, I think that it, you know, since we're talking about 2025, things could get a lot more draconian at the federal level still. 

MOLLY JONG-FAST - HOST, FAST POLITICS: Part of the plan here is this embryonic personhood.

So I'm hoping that you could talk a little bit about how heritage. Um, and the question is, how did the, the movement get involved in that? And what that means in this post Roe America? 

MARY ZEIGLER: Yeah. One of the things that most people don't understand is that the embryonic personhood was sort of the reason the anti abortion movement came into being, right.

The anti abortion movement existed before Roe v Wade. Like it started, the modern anti abortion movement started in the 1960s as soon as states tried to reform their criminal abortion laws. and the argument that the movement made Was essentially, well, you can't, you know, have reformed abortion laws because it violates the constitutional rights of fetuses and embryos.

And that [01:42:00] argument never went away. If people want to kind of, you know, check me on this, look at the Republican Party platform, starting in the 1980s, it always called for a fetal personhood amendment. It was just that the anti abortion movement thought it was politically impossible for a long time to get such an amendment or to get a court to say that fetuses or embryos had constitutional rights.

And now for obvious reasons that isn't true anymore, right? I mean, it seems that some conservative judges are, are quite open to this idea. And so that's always been kind of the end game for the anti abortion movement. And since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, you know, the overturned window has shifted and we've seen more and more conservative groups saying, yeah, you know, we're, we're here for fetal personhood.

Like that's the, the idea. Um, they have referred to the, uh, um, Coalition of anti abortion groups refers to this as the movement's new North Star. Um, and they have quoted, for example, Abraham Lincoln saying, you know, you can't have a nation that's half slave and half free, by which they mean you can't have a nation where abortion is [01:43:00] legal in some places and illegal in others.

There needs to be a sort of one size solution imposed on everyone from the top down. I 

MOLLY JONG-FAST - HOST, FAST POLITICS: mean, they went from states rights to we have to ban this, making us think that this was never, ever. Ever about states rights. 

MARY ZEIGLER: No, yeah. It totally wasn't. I mean, the anti apportionment movement is not the pro democracy or pro states rights movement.

I mean, the idea that anybody like believed that that was the point is sort of beggar's belief a little bit. 

MOLLY JONG-FAST - HOST, FAST POLITICS: Right. No, I agree. So Heritage has sort of mapped out a kind of roadmap for this post Roe America and includes this embryonic personhood. and in this embryonic personhood is regulating. IVF. Now, if you look at the, the heritage documents, there's no even pretend there's just like, why don't we regulate IVF?

Why, you know, let's not regulate Exxon because oil companies are fine. Let's [01:44:00] not regulate cigarettes. Let's not regulate, but we have to regulate IVF. Can you sort of make this make sense? 

MARY ZEIGLER: Well, still, if you, if you buy the argument, so, I mean, there are two, there are two things going on here, right? One is that if you buy the argument that fetuses and embryos are persons, then IVF might be weird to you, right?

Because you'll see anti abortion people saying, Well, we can't put children in freezers, and we can't donate children for research, and we can't destroy children. So once you kind of go down that road, that's part of what's going on. I think the other thing that's going on in the background is that often beliefs about personhood travel alongside beliefs about gender, sex, sort of the idea that there are God given gender roles, that those are necessary to human flourishing.

And I think there's always been a subset of people within the anti abortion movement who are disturbed by IVF because they see it as sort of antithetical to the idea that children are only born when straight married people have sex [01:45:00] or that it's sort of is used in ways that subvert their, their beliefs vis a vis gender and sex, right?

You have lots of queer families that use IVF, you have single parents, single women who use IVF. So, uh, I think it's both about personhood, but also about this kind of constellation of beliefs that often travel alongside personhood. 

MOLLY JONG-FAST - HOST, FAST POLITICS: From there, there's this, like, need to regulate birth control, and that's sort of another branch of this fetal personhood.

So, these are wildly unpopular things. It's not like abortion where you poll it and you get 60, 65 percent say there shouldn't be, you know, there should be choice. It's like 80%. You don't 90%. Nobody wants to take away birth control. Nobody wants to take away IVF, but the part of this is birth control. So can you talk us through?

And it's not just the morning after pill, which might. In this idea sort of makes sense [01:46:00] because I mean, again, it doesn't. But the idea is that maybe, you know, whereas the birth control just totally doesn't make sense at all. I mean, by this sort of fake logic. So talk us through that for a minute. 

MARY ZEIGLER: Yeah, well, I mean, I think that there there again, two things going on.

So the first thing some people may remember back to the fight about the Obamacare contraceptive mandate. So there were lots of conservatives at the time. Lobby. It turns, right, Hobby Lobby, that it turns out that most of the things we all thought were contraceptives are actually abortifacients, right, so not just emergency contraceptives but IUDs and the birth control pill.

And ever since Hobby Lobby, really powerful anti abortion groups like Students for Life on which Leonard Leo sat on the board of directors, you know, they've said, you know, contraception is a con, right, this is the sort of marketing, right, that these things, we're being told these things are contraceptives, but they're not, and this has been a major, um, social media campaign.

So, part of the, the Push back against contraception is a definitional thing, like another interesting feature is that, um, since dogs, [01:47:00] several states have, um, reformed their definitions of abortion to remove language that excludes contraceptives, right? So, um, that's created some kind of gray area. Uh, they haven't, you know, said that contraceptives are a worse patients either.

They're just leaving that to the imagination. The other thing I think that's happening is that, again, many conservatives have been uncomfortable with contraception going back some time to viewing, you know, separating sex and reproduction as immoral or as encouraging promiscuity or as unnatural or as contrary to their religious teachings.

So we're starting to to see some conservatives mount efforts to criticize contraception, not as abortion, but just to say, contraception is bad as contraception. The most obvious at the moment focus unsurprisingly on on minors, right? So saying minors shouldn't be able to access contraception and if their parents don't want them to.

We've started to see some arguments that kind of parallel ones we saw about abortion where you're hearing them say, well, contraceptives are [01:48:00] dangerous and they increase the risk of depression and cancer. Kind of the same thing we saw with abortion. And we're seeing, I think one of the interesting things too is, you know, a lot of kind of.

Behind the scenes efforts to defeat right to contraceptive bills, even when conservatives are not always putting out front why they oppose contraception, they don't want right to contraception bills either. 

Weekly Roundup: Trump Makes Republicans Pro-Choice - And His Christian Base Revolts - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 8-30-24

 

DANILE MILLER - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: I want to remind people, because I've had people who reach out, who, who again are like, why, why is IVF like, like, why are the, the, the anti abortion people so opposed to IVF? And again, we've talked about this, but just to throw it out, You have fertilized eggs that are destroyed in the process of IVF, and if you believe, if one believes that a fertilized egg is a full human person with human rights and all of that, that's the issue.

Um, this is like, again, one of these like, kind of unforced errors that Trump keeps doing. Um, It's also sort of [01:49:00] humorous, like, so I, I can imagine, I can imagine, you know, they're sitting around strategizing and they know that banning IVF is colossally, colossally unpopular. We've, we've heard Vance trying to walk back on this, Trump has been trying to do this and so forth.

And I can hear the analysts now, because they know, they know that they're pissing off all the, the, the anti abortion people, like, we need to frame this as not being pro choice, but as being pro family. People need to be able to have families, families are important, it's pro family, and Trump, the other thing about this is, not only does he come out in favor of IVF, And like a mandate for it and whatever, but he, he, the way he talked about it was sort of comical.

So here's what he said, because we want more babies to put it very nicely. And for this same reason, we will also allow new parents to deduct major newborn expenses, uh, from their taxes so that parents can have, uh, that beautiful baby will be able. So we're pro family. It's like, it's like, he's like, let me get all the buzzwords [01:50:00] in babies and families, and we're pro family.

And it's just, on one hand, the transparency of it. We need to sound pro family, so let's throw this out there, and we need to try to appeal to other people. I, I, I don't, I'm, I'm with the right wingers who say I don't see the, the strong benefit of this for Trump. You're right, I, I'm with you, I don't think that this moves the needle much for Trump with most populations, cause he's, he lies all the time, everybody knows he lies all the time.

He clearly, the way he articulates these things makes explicit that it's a political calculation. Yes, politicians are politicians. They're always making political calculations, but like on abortion, Trump has said, we need to not talk about abortion so much because like, it's not a good policy win for us.

Like he says the quiet parts out loud, but this, if this catches fire the way that it appears that it might, and it kind of has, and if it keeps going, I think this only hurts him with some of his own people. He had a major [01:51:00] abortion rights group this week before the IVF comment, who said we're not obligated to vote for Donald Trump.

I mean, it was kind of a warning shot to his campaign. And I think we also see, and we can get into the Florida stuff a bit more in a minute, I could see him tomorrow turning around and having to try to walk this back and creating the policy salad that he does. Where, no, no, no, it's states rights, I always said it was states rights, I'm the one that took away Roe v.

Wade, and you're like, cool, so like, how, like, how, how do you square this circle, Donald Trump, in saying we're pro family, isn't gonna be enough, it isn't gonna do it, so, it's, yeah, it's a, if I thought Trump was more of a calculating person, like, like, more sort of logical and strategic in his thinking, instead of just sort of instinctive and reactionary, I would be like, what in the world is he doing?

Um, I think this comes out to me as like a really bad mashup of political strategists trying to get him to do things mixed together with Trump [01:52:00] mixed together with, I think desperation. Um, so yeah, you're, well, I think, I think he knows, 

BRADLEY ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: I think he knows that an abortion ban, whether a full abortion ban or a six week abortion ban is wildly unpopular.

I think he knows that. I think he, so is he calculating? I don't think that's the right word. What I think he's doing is saying, if I come out and say that. I'm it's wildly unpopular what he's not calculating and this is the part I want to dig into and I think is the part That on this show we can really speak to is this has been one of the the excuses to vote for trump Well, yeah, he's not he's not a great christian.

Yes, uh porn stars. Yes adultery, yes, uh You know eugene carroll. Yes all that stuff grab them by the dad But abortion but abortion 

DANILE MILLER - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: but abortion. Okay, 

BRADLEY ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: so here's what peter You Peter Wiener says at the at the Atlantic, how could an evangelical who claims to be passionately pro-life vote for a presidential candidate who now promises that his administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights, [01:53:00] especially when that person has cheated on his wives and anonymous taxes, paid hush money to porn stars and been found liable of sexual assault.

So, dent, let's just, let's just kind of cut to the chase. Does this make a difference? Does it make a difference? I mean, you know, a lot of, a lot of folks are waiting for Al Mohler in about a week to come up with a tweet thread that says, well, we're disappointed in President, former President Trump, but when it comes to the two choices, he's still better than Kamala Harris.

That's gonna happen. And I don't know if that'll be Al Mohler specifically, but it might be Marjorie Taylor Greene. It might be Ralph Reed. It might be any number of like evangelical Christian nationalists, luminaries who are all, all completely against reproductive rights. They, they will rationalize their way into a vote for Trump.

The, the thing that I, I think is important is 2016 and 2020, he gets 80 percent or more of the white evangelical vote. He cannot afford to let that slip [01:54:00] to like 75. He cannot afford to let some of those people just not vote. Because if they write in, if they write in somebody, if they write in a candidate, if they write in Ron DeSantis, if they stay home, they're Whatever that white evangelical base shrinks every year because there's less and less white evangelicals every year.

The Trump campaigns basically approached 2024. Like we've got them in the bag. They didn't pick a Mike Pence evangelical. They picked JD Vance. Right. And who is a reactionary Catholic, but nonetheless is not that like tried and true evangelical Reaganite kind of legacy pick. In addition, they are really looking at Latino and black voters as the kind of new Christian, uh, population and constituency that they would like to win this time.

All in my opinion, assuming that they will get 82, [01:55:00] percent of the evangelical and other white Christian nationalists sort of base, whether that's Pentecostals, whether that's Catholics, This might be one of those moments where, like, 2024, we see the election results, and it's like, he got 77, he got 76, but that, Dan, that could be Pennsylvania, that could be Wisconsin, that could be Georgia, because if enough of those hard line, anti abortion people are willing to not be Al Mohler or someone else, and just say, we're not voting for him now, he's in trouble, and it may be, like, three percentage points in, in one category of religious voter in the country, But it may be enough.

That's my, that's my take. And that's my, that's how I'm looking at this whole issue as we go forward. Final thoughts, and we'll go to Arlington. 

DANILE MILLER - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Yeah, just a couple thoughts about that. Um, is number one, I, I, I think that that all makes sense. And I think we're not talking about, I think this is important, we're not talking about people who are going to go to Harris, but you're talking about the same kind of enthusiasm gap that can [01:56:00] start to open up that was plaguing Democrats forever.

And if there's an enthusiasm gap for Trump with religious voters, that's a huge problem. I'm also thinking about, you know, there was an article, maybe it was Politico, I don't remember where I read it, but, you know, they were at a Trump rally in Michigan, and they're interviewing rally goers there, and the people, the, the, you know, who absolutely do not believe that Donald Trump is behind in the polls, this one dude's predicting he's gonna win by, you know, an 80 percent to 20 percent margin, and this is all fake, and like, whatever.

Remember in 2016? When Hillary Clinton lost, in part because a lot of people who would have voted for Clinton weren't super excited about her, but thought she was going to win the election, so they didn't vote. If you get a tiny sliver of people that do that for Trump, they think he's got it overall, yeah, they would like him better than Harris, but you know, they're upset about what he's now saying about abortion, and they stay home, I, I, I think it's, I think it's a possibility.

The last point I want to do, I just want to talk about in Florida real quick, and the, you know, what happens here. [01:57:00] You get Trump who one minute, you know, he's asked about DeSantis and as you say this, this thing and he says that, you know, six weeks is too short and they asked him, Oh, you'll vote in favor of the amendment then that would, you know, override this.

Um, he says, I'm going to be voting that we need more than six weeks. And so people that the headline was Donald Trump opposes this and his pro life. And then immediately his campaign turns around and says he hasn't said how he'll vote. He just said he believes six weeks is too short. That is not going to be what those religious voters want to hear.

They want to hear him say, we are going to eradicate abortion. Now, when he says I'll veto a federal ban, if they still believe that there's a wink wink with that, I'm saying this, I have to say this to get elected. We all know I need to say this to get elected, but you put it on my desk and once I'm in office, I'll do whatever the hell I want.

If they still believe that, okay, maybe they go. But if he keeps doing this, I think that sows that doubt and there's the chance of losing that.

SECTION C: THE PUNISHMENT IS THE POINT

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [01:58:00] You've reached Section C: The punishment is the point.

Blue State Barriers and the Messy Map of Abortion Access - Reveal - Air Date 3-8-24

 

 

AL LETSON: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas have all banned abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. wade in 2022. 

 Georgia and South Carolina only allow abortions up to six weeks, before most women know they’re pregnant. Up until recently, Florida was a stronghold of abortion access in the South. 

 Over the last seven years, more than 30,000 abortions were performed on patients from out of state. But in 2022, a Republican super majority passed a law banning abortions after 15 weeks. 

 And then last year they passed a six-week ban. And Sadie says, if the Florida Supreme Court upholds this ban, women’s health across the South will [01:59:00] be at risk. 

SADI SUMMERLIN: It is scary to be somebody capable of becoming pregnant right now. It is terrifying. And when I say- 

AL LETSON: Sadi’s standing with about five other activists, she’s holding a bullhorn and a sign that says “Pro-women. Pro-choice.” 

SADI SUMMERLIN: We need Florida. We need Florida. 

SPEAKER 17: If Florida falls, where would people go? 

SADI SUMMERLIN: Florida falls, Virginia, basically, they’re going to have to go up to Virginia. 

AL LETSON: Virginia. It’s the one state in the South where abortion is still legal. Up to 26 weeks. Over the last six months, Laura’s been talking to one Florida abortion provider who’s been preparing for this very moment. Laura takes it from here. 

LAURA MOREL: It’s July 2023, two months before the hearing at Florida Supreme Court, and Kelly Flynn is preparing for abortion access to keep shrinking across the South. 

KELLY FLYNN: All right, [02:00:00] you got the measuring tape? 

LAURA MOREL: She’s standing in a medical plaza in Danville, Virginia checking out an office. She put an offer on site unseen and she’s trying to be inconspicuous. 

KELLY FLYNN: Yeah, so I’m been trying to be really discreet about this because I don’t want to get any backlash before we open. 

LAURA MOREL: Kelly walks across the parking lot with a purple notepad and a Diet Coke. This is her latest venture, her next abortion clinic, and she’s got to do it quietly, because she’s worried about protests and pushback. 

KELLY FLYNN: But yeah, we’ll take a walk around and see. 

LAURA MOREL: This used to be an OBGYN’s office, but it’s been empty for a while and it looks pretty rough. Kelly’s walking around the rooms, making notes, measuring door frames. 

KELLY FLYNN: Oh whoa, this room, it’s orange. And brown. Or something. 

LAURA MOREL: [02:01:00] It’s truly an awful color like pumpkin pie filling, but years expired. 

 Kelly knows she’s got a lot of work ahead of her. There’s water damage. A bunch of the cabinet doors are broken and there’s a room with stacks of documents from 2001. She keeps clicking her pen. It’s this giveaway that she’s anxious. 

KELLY FLYNN: I’m really excited, nervous and scared at the same time, because I never know how unpredictable these laws are going to be, but it looks like Virginia is pretty safe right now. 

LAURA MOREL: In Virginia. Democrats have been protective of abortion rights. They’re in control of the state legislature, and won’t face reelection in the Senate until 2027. 

KELLY FLYNN: So my contractor is going to be here in just a little bit to go ahead and start the remodeling process. We plan to close on this building pretty quickly, as our patients in North Carolina [02:02:00] need somewhere to go. 

LAURA MOREL: She owns three clinics in North Carolina and one in Florida. And ever since Roe fell, Kelly’s been shifting and pivoting like a point guard scanning the court for the next open play. 

 So, when Florida passed a 15-week ban, Kelly sent her patients to North Carolina where abortion was still legal up to 20 weeks. But then last year, North Carolina passed a 12-week ban, so Kelly sent her patients back to Florida, but now that Florida is facing a possible six-week ban, her new plan is that women can come here to this clinic in Danville, Virginia. 

KELLY FLYNN: I have big visions for this place. It’s going to look really pretty when we’re done, and the goal is to be open, ideally… I mean in a perfect world, I’d like end of August, but I’m thinking mid-September. 

LAURA MOREL: Kelly’s on a mission to make sure people can access abortion and it’s something she can relate to. She had two abortions during [02:03:00] college and the second time she ended up comforting another patient because Kelly knew what to expect. She held the patient’s hand while they ate crackers in the recovery room, the clinic staff noticed and offered her a job. That was her path to becoming a provider. 

 I’ve known Kelly since 2021, when I interviewed her for a story about harassment and violence targeting abortion clinics. After that story aired, Kelly and I kept in touch mostly over the phone. I wanted to understand what the fall of Roe would mean for providers. 

 And Kelly agreed to let me follow her. 

KELLY FLYNN: Just text me if you need anything. And I’m sorry about the delay in the schedule. 

LAURA MOREL: Oh, it’s fine. No worries. We’ll touch base next week. 

 One I learned about Kelly early on is that she’s really careful. 

KELLY FLYNN: Because I’ve got my little boy. I never know how crazy somebody can get, and how obsessive they become. So I mean, I take it very personally, and I’m careful in terms of [02:04:00] who I choose to bring into my circle. 

LAURA MOREL: And this venture into Danville. Only a very select group of people know about it. Kelly’s worried about attracting backlash before she’s even had a chance to open, and there’s good reason to be so cautious. 

 After Tennessee banned abortion, a clinic in Bristol crossed state lines to open in Virginia, and almost immediately, it faced legal challenges and protests. 

VICTORIA COBB: Virginians, no matter where they stand on the value of human life, don’t want abortion to be part of the tourism offerings. 

LAURA MOREL: This is Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation of Virginia, an anti-abortion group based in Richmond. Victoria doesn’t live in Bristol, but her group has organized residents there and in other cities along Virginia’s border to advocate for laws that would stop abortion providers from coming to the state. 

VICTORIA COBB: People don’t want to see a commercial that says, “Come to Virginia, visit historic Williamsburg and get your abortion while you’re [02:05:00] here.” 

 That’s not any community’s desire. And so that’s what these communities are trying to do, is wall off being exploited by the abortion industry. 

LAURA MOREL: What is abortion tourism? How would you define that? 

VICTORIA COBB: I would say it is marketing our location, our commonwealth as a place to pursue your abortion. 

LAURA MOREL: Victoria’s organization had a strategy for Bristol. They drafted a zoning ordinance that would ban future abortion clinics from operating within city limits. 

VICTORIA COBB: Yeah, I mean it’s essentially in the same way that an ordinance would prevent a strip club from setting up next to a church or a school, for example. 

LAURA MOREL: Bristol’s ordinance hasn’t gone into effect yet. It still has to be approved by other city officials. 

 It is a particularly hard time to open an abortion clinic in the US. There’s a complicated [02:06:00] web of local ordinances and state laws to maneuver around. And with so many states enacting all-out bans, more than 60 clinics have closed or stopped offering abortion care across the country. 

 But that also means they’re clearing out offices, getting rid of equipment. 

KELLY FLYNN: I’ve got equipment in my garage that I bought from another office earlier this year, like exam tables and chairs. 

LAURA MOREL: It’s all now heading to Virginia. 

 Honestly, it’s like the floor is lava. You know that game where you jump from couch to chair across your living room? Each state that passes a ban is one less safe place for abortion providers like Kelly to stand. 

 I don’t know. I am assuming that’s got to be a very surprising shift for you in the last few months, just realizing that, “Well, if I want to keep doing this, then I’m going to have to go to another state.” 

KELLY FLYNN: Right. I feel like I’m too young to retire [02:07:00] and too stubborn to quit, and this is my life’s work. I am still in a little bit of disbelief that we are going backwards.

A Right-Wing Conspiracy Overturned Roe, Then Came Back for More. - Grave Injustice - Air Date 3-9-24

 

 

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Small details are important to Bex. She notices things. And the details are what made her first abortion, I don’t want to speak for her and call it traumatic, but it was pretty clearly an overwhelming experience.

BEX: So like immediately it just kind of feels a little, it felt a little intense for me. I don’t know about like feeling unsafe, but I was just like, whoa, this was unexpected. 

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: For context, she had her first abortion in 2017 in Texas, where she’s from. It was a surgical procedure. It wasn’t an easy process. For starters, Bex was broke.

Also, the clinic was an hour and a half drive from her house, and she had to go twice, first for an ultrasound, and then for the procedure itself. But it was the little things that made the [02:08:00] procedure so ghoulish.

BEX: I walked in the building, there’s like, you know, metal detectors, and you have to take everything out of your pockets, and they like, check your IDs.

It’s like, not, also not like a normal routine thing for healthcare, um, to be like, Someone with a gun is like asking for your ID when you walk through the door. 

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Then there was the sterile, uninviting medicalness of the whole place.

BEX: I grew up, um, homeschooled, so I didn’t go to school, which also meant we didn’t really have to go to the doctor.

So I think that I still have like really, um, extreme feelings of discomfort in a lot of medical settings. They weren’t like a routine thing for me growing up. So whenever I went, it was like something really bad happened or I just feel really uncomfortable. I would say in like most medical settings.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: She had to listen to the fetal circulatory system and they also made her look at the ultrasound display.

BEX: Because of [02:09:00] regulations, you had to have an ultrasound, you had to listen to the like heartbeat. cardiac activity. They actually made me look at the screen. And then two days later I came back. And that was after waiting three weeks from the time I called asking for an appointment. You know, so there was a lot of travel involved, which just kind of like added

 to the

 stress level, like logistics.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Bex’s next abortion last year was a lot better. She caught the pregnancy early. She was more informed and medication abortions were more accessible. She literally took a day off, took her pills, and that was that.

BEX: It felt simple. It felt straightforward. Very uneventful. Like, in a way, it was like, very nice that it was private and at home.

It was very important to me to be able to do it myself and to not have to go into, like, a medical facility.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Whether to take an abortion medication, Mifeprestone, off the market in all 50 states will be the Supreme Court’s first abortion decision since it overturned Roe [02:10:00] v. Wade in the summer of 2022. That case, of course, was Dobbs v.

Jackson Women’s Health Organization, or just Dobbs for short. I’ll try not to swamp you with case names and legalese, but the upshot is that with Dobbs, the Supreme Court decided that abortion access isn’t a right. It was a moment many red states had been waiting for. Several had trigger bans. That is, anti abortion legislation set to spring into effect the moment the Supreme Court overturned Roe.

Since the ruling, 21 states have restricted abortion beyond what the Roe vs. Wade standard would have allowed. 14 have banned it outright. What has this meant for women in America? To find out, I spoke with an abortion provider.

LAUREN JACOBSON: My name is Lauren Jacobson. I’m a women’s health nurse practitioner, and I work as an abortion provider for Aid Access.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Aid Access mails pills for medication abortion to women throughout the U. S., and since Dobbs, demand has skyrocketed.

LAUREN JACOBSON: Right [02:11:00] now, 50 percent of all of our pills are going into Texas. So, just for context, um, Yeah, and I’m sending 30 to 50 packages a day total, and there’s about 10 of us now, so if you do the math there, it’s a lot.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Lauren says her clients in states like Texas are nervous, not just because they now need to outsource their abortion in distant states, but also because they just don’t know what’s going to happen next.

LAUREN JACOBSON: There’s a lot of fear. Because some people don’t know what can happen to them. You know, we see people who are four weeks pregnant.

We see people who are 12 weeks, five days. You see this whole spectrum. So some people, I think, are more, and this is anecdotal, are more aware of You know their bodies and if they’re pregnant and they’re testing quicker and then they’re just like got to get the pills as soon as possible because I’m in a restricted state, but then there’s also people who of course know what’s going on and they’re afraid and so they wait longer.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Last year that [02:12:00] aforementioned Texas judge.

ruled to strike down FDA approval for Mifepristone, which is one of two pills used in the most reliable medication abortion method. The plaintiffs in that case were a group of anti abortion doctors who call themselves the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. They claim that Mifepristone was rammed through the FDA approval process back in 2000 and was never proven to be safe.

That claim is, of course, bullshit. Mifepristone is safe. A paper in the Stanford Law Review pointed out that after 20 years on the market, Mifepristone is, quote, one of the most studied drugs available, end quote, and is safer than penicillin and Viagra, and 14 times safer than childbirth.

LAUREN JACOBSON: It’s just crazy to me that a pill that was FDA approved, like, what, 23 years ago, is suddenly just, people are deciding, Oh no, we’re gonna say it’s no longer, uh, safe.

Based on absolutely no evidence. I mean, it’s incredibly safe comparatively to like, as you know, Tylenol, Viagra, [02:13:00] the potential risks or complications are less with Mifepristone.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Renee Bracey Sherman agrees. She’s the founder of We Testify, an abortion advocacy group. She also co hosts the podcast, The A Files, A Secret History of Abortion.

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: It’s like settled science. We, this pill has been around globally since 1988. It’s been in the United States since 2000. It’s widely available. Mifepristone is one of the safest medications that we have, right? But that is being put into question on purpose by people who want to sow this distrust and, and miscommunication and confusion.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Who exactly are these people sowing miscommunication and confusion? In this case, they have a name, Alliance Defending Freedom.

ADF PROMO TAPE: Wherever human freedom is under attack. We stand ready to defend it, both at home and around the world, in courtrooms, legislatures, [02:14:00] and the public square. You’ll find us on the front lines.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: Architect the Dobbs case and overturn Roe v. Wade. They’re also bent on overturning same sex marriage and restricting trans rights. The Southern Poverty Law Center is called ADF, an anti LGBTQ hate group. They have strong ties to Washington, including to Amy Coney Barrett. who spoke at ADF backed events before she became a justice on the U. S. Supreme Court.

PAUL WEYRICH: Louisville wedding photographer has won her federal lawsuit.

 

ADF PROMO TAPE: We must protect Title IX and women’s sports for the next generation. One powerful Christian legal organization has been planning a strategy to overturn Roe v. Wade. Their plan worked. ADF is one team, a part of a broader alliance.

We are Christ centered. We are committed to victory.

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: ADF helped launch the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine in 2022 [02:15:00] in Amarillo, Texas. Why Amarillo? Because that was the home of this one Trump appointed judge named Matthew Kaczmarek in the District Court of Northern Texas. Matthew Kaczmarek backed Trump’s harsh immigration policies, shot down the Biden administration’s protection for LGBTQ plus workers, and has been an outspoken anti abortionist before he took the bench.

If anyone was going to ignore the science and ban the abortion pill, it was going to be this guy. 

RENEE BRACEY SHERMAN: So they’re judge shopping. Like, that’s what that is. There’s not a question about the science here. There’s not a question about, you know, what the American public wants. There’s not a question about, ah, do four out of five doctors believe this?

We don’t know. There’s no question there. What they’re doing is judge shopping for any sort of decision that they want. 

LISA GRAVES - HOST, GRAVE INJUSTICE: The lower federal courts have spent the last year bickering over Matthew Kasner’s ruling. Another U. S. district judge in Washington state ordered the FDA to leave Mifepristone on the [02:16:00] market.

For Later, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which includes Texas, ruled that while Mifepristone could stay on the market, it reinstated old regulations that required women to obtain a prescription and pick up the pills in person. So no more getting pills by mail from providers like Lauren Jacobson.

Finally, in December, the U. S. Supreme Court agreed to make a final call. They might side against both Kasemiric and the Fifth Circuit and leave Mifepristone as it was. They might uphold the old regulations and make the pill harder to get. Or they might just ban it for everyone, in every state. Even if the worst happens, there is still another abortion pill on the market.

It’s called misoprostol, which was technically approved as a medicine for stomach ulcers, not an abortifacient, making it much harder for the likes of ADF and Casimiric to target. It’s still effective when used on its own, but less so. Right now, the far right agenda isn’t about huge victories. The game plan isn’t to wipe out abortion access in one fell swoop.

[02:17:00] It’s about the little things, making it that much harder for people to obtain medical abortions, sowing that much confusion and misinformation about their options, setting a precedent for revoking FDA approval so that maybe, next time, they can go after a stomach ulcer medication, or surgical abortions, or even contraception.

Abortion bans reduce women to breeding stocks– and that’s exactly the point - Velshi - Air Date 9-15-24

 

JOHN McENTEE: Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned? Don't hold your breath. 

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: Don't hold your breath. That condescending smirk belongs to John McEntee, who is a former Trump White House official and now a staffer for Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for a second Trump term.

Thousands of women responded to his callous post, sharing stories of being denied abortion care during a health emergency. Among them was Carmen Brewster. [02:18:00] 

CARMEN BREWSTER: Present. I'm right here. I had a 19 day miscarriage in Idaho because of the abortion regulations. I was turned away, not from one ER, but two ERs, technically three, because I walked into one and they said they wouldn't help me and I had to walk out.

I blacked out in my hallway due to blood loss. I developed a heart condition called AFib. It, it means my heart doesn't work right anymore, and it f s up. So if I get too excited, too hot, too much in pain, uh, too traumatized, if somebody yells at me too much, my heart f s. And so I have to regulate for my heart to keep active, otherwise I could have a heart attack and die.

I have to deal with these side effects for the rest of my life because of abortion laws. But yeah, women are bleeding out in parking lots. I actually have a pinned video of me saying. They're gonna just let me f ing bleed out here, [02:19:00] if you want to refer to that. But I'm present! Hi! But yeah, we exist. 

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: Some Republicans want you to think of abortion as, uh, sort of an isolated elective procedure with no medical basis that's disconnected from women's overall reproductive health.

But since the Dobbs decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion, stories like Carmen's underscore the reality that abortion care is a critical component of maternal health. Many women who have been denied care because of draconian abortion bans were carrying wanted pregnancies, but each faced health complications that required abortions to save their lives.

Their stories illustrate a very stark, uh, in very stark terms, how the politicization of this aspect of women's health has life or death consequences for any woman who can be pregnant. Everything that could go wrong as a result of Dobbs has, including the case of Caitlin Cash, a Texas woman whose routine postpartum care was delayed for the removal of remaining placental tissue after giving birth to a healthy baby [02:20:00] girl.

That procedure, known as a D& C, is also used in abortion care, which may be why medical staff at the hospital where Caitlin was staying failed to perform it. Texas's near total abortion ban criminalizes medical professionals who carry out abortion procedures. Even when DNCs are used for other medical purposes, doctors are simply too afraid to be able to do their jobs.

When Caitlin didn't receive the care she needed, her condition deteriorated and she lost consciousness. What began as a normal delivery ended up with her in the ICU and she was later told she was lucky to have not lost her uterus. This is what it means to be a pregnant woman in post Roe America. The U.

S. already has the highest rate of maternal death among high income countries, according to the Commonwealth Fund. Abortion bans have only made that worse. A KFF study found that 68 percent of OBGYNs believe the Dobbs ruling has worsened their ability to manage pregnancy [02:21:00] related emergencies, and 64 percent say pregnancy related mortality has increased.

For At best, the anti abortion activists pushing these abortion bans assume that nothing can go wrong during a pregnancy, but you have to be pretty stupid to think that's true. There is, however, a darker truth lurking behind these efforts. To remain indifferent to the countless women who are harmed by these abortion bans is to see them as nothing more than collateral damage in a broader crusade to impose forced births.

Let's be clear. This isn't actually about saving unborn babies. It never has been. 

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Should the woman be punished for having an abortion? Uh, look, uh, This is not something you can dodge. If you say abortion is a crime or abortion is murder, you have to deal with it under the law. Should abortion be punished?

Well, people in certain parts of the Republican Party and conservative Republicans would say yes, they should be punished. How about you? Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no, as a principle? The [02:22:00] answer is that abortion There has to be some form of punishment. For the woman? Yeah. 

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: The answer is there has to be some sort of punishment for the woman.

By treating abortion as a crime, as something isolated from general maternal health care, Christian fundamentalist extremists frame women's bodily autonomy as something to be policed and controlled by the state. Now, imagine if men's healthcare were treated the same way. Imagine a world in which a man is denied basic care for a prostate condition because a law overrides his urologist's professional judgment.

Imagine men being forced to bleed out in parking lots because lawmakers felt entitled to interfere with their doctor's decisions. It's almost inconceivable because it sounds so absurd, yet this is the reality for women in America today. Men don't live in a world where their reproductive organs are treated as state property.

I have greater rights over my body today than the segment producer who wrote this script. Than my senior producer. Than [02:23:00] her boss, my executive producer. Than her boss and her boss. I have greater bodily autonomy than the majority of my staff. All the women in my family and in fact all the women in America watching me right now.

And that's not right. That's not equality, that's not liberty, and that's not democracy. No one living in a democracy should have to endure such intrusion into the most personal and intimate aspects of our lives. This is the very definition of a human rights violation, made possible only in a world that reduces women to mere instruments of reproduction.

Abortion care is health care, and the GOP's campaign to convince you otherwise poses a deadly threat to American women.

SECTION D: BLACK WOMEN

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Up next Section D: Black women

Maternal Mortality Crisis: Why Black Women in the U.S. Are Dying During Childbirth w/ Dr. Joia Perry - Marc Lamont Hill - Air Date 7-31-24

 

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: What, what was the main factor for black women receiving birth support? Uh, these drastically negative outcomes. It's like, if there's nothing [02:24:00] biological about us as black people that makes us more likely to die giving birth, why are we dying more giving 

DR. JOIA PERRY: birth?

Well, it's racism. We know that despite income or education, even a black woman who has a college degree, it's five times more likely to die within a year of childbirth than a white woman who has no high school education. So if you think about that, even when we're normal weight, we are more likely to die than a white woman who's obese.

Even when we live in a fancy neighborhood, we move into gated communities. I love my other doctor friends who love staying. I went to my Fancy HPC or my IV. And now I live in this gated community. Guess what's this? You're still more likely to die than a white woman who doesn't even have a high school diploma.

So despite our income, despite our education, we cannot buy or educate our way out of dying from the impact of racism. 

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: Connect the dots for me though, because people are going to be watching this and they're going to say, well, how does racism make you die? Well, I don't see it. 

DR. JOIA PERRY: True. Well, I mean, your first comments were really important.

You talked about the blood pressure cuffs. That would be, I liked your, that statement. That was very important. So who are you going to take the time to put the right cuff on? [02:25:00] Who do you care about enough to stop and say, Hey, your arm is not the regular size. You have a smaller arm or bigger arm. We know right now that one of the leading reasons that people die from in childbirth is a heart attack.

Or Kira Johnson, Charles Johnson's wife, who died, um, who is Judge Hatchett's daughter in law. So think about all the layers of privilege that this woman had. She was a healthy, FAMU grad, loved by her husband, brought there for a repeat C section. And she was allowed to bleed to death for hours. And what the nurse said to his wife, to Charles was, Your wife's just not a priority right now.

So even as he tried to advocate for his wife as a Black man, With a suit on, at a fancy hospital, guess what? The more he escalated, the more they downgraded and didn't listen to him. So, that's how you get those outcomes. 

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: Wow. You know, the idea that we don't listen to black women's pain. We don't trust their expression of pain levels.

Uh, we're sort of dismissive of them in general. It's something that we experienced throughout life, not just in the hospital, [02:26:00] all parts of life. But it seems like it's playing out so much in U. S. Hospitals. But the report also mentioned that black women in Latin America and the Caribbean face racism in health care as well.

So, uh, You know, why the U. S. Why do we focus on the U. S. So much? 

DR. JOIA PERRY: Well, I mean, the truth is, I live here. I'm from here. I'm from New Orleans. And so as a black woman who's an OBGYN who's had three different complicated births myself. Um, like most black women, you start an organization to fix your own problem first, right?

So I had a son who was born premature and I started him back to say now what is wrong with me? I know that there is no biological basis of race. Me having more melanin does not make my kidneys act differently. Doesn't make my lungs act differently. All those were racist tropes. We were taught, I was taught in medical school at Louisiana State University, a publicly funded university, playing state dollars in a state that has a lot of black folks in it, that there were three biological races.

Mongoloid, Caucasoid, and Negroid. That was taught in a lecture in class in the 1990s. What year was that? 

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: Oh my god, that's [02:27:00] like, that's like early 20th century race science. We still doing We're still doing that eugenic 

DR. JOIA PERRY: science in medical schools. Yes. And then, so even when we get rid of it finally across the United States, guess where we export it?

The Caribbean and Central and Latin America. Guess where they get their textbooks from? Our old textbooks. So guess what they're learning? Eugenics, race based science. So yes, it's also we don't listen to black women and we don't listen to black men. I just don't want to over to discount that black men are showing up for their wives, for their partners.

Just like Charles Johnson did. And even, you know, if you escalate, if you buck, guess what happens, a nurse is going to buck back, and nothing happens, and then you can end up, the police get called on you so many times, people getting kicked out of hospitals. Oh, I've seen it. Because they're part of security.

I have seen it. So this is, this is a real thing. Racism kills us for real. Like, it's not just police brutality. I love to talk to, um, Kimberley Crenshaw about how, like, yes, we talk about what happens in the streets, but the hospitals are also a war zone for us being able to survive and live. 

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: Absolutely. You know, I, I [02:28:00] was, uh, my, my, my one year old was born.

Uh, 

DR. JOIA PERRY: We 

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: were born, you know, we were in the hospital, we were in the NICU for months. Um, and you know, we had the ability to advocate for ourselves in certain kinds of ways. And, and we were sort of legible to them as people who deserved certain kinds of treatment, uh, sometimes. But as, but when you sit there for months, you watch different people come in and And I watched how nurses treated different people and how they disregarded people's concerns and people's pain.

And I heard people talk about how they, when they decided to drug test certain people during delivery and not others. And when they, they sort of weaponized all aspects of the system against black women and particularly poor and working class black women. That's a key thing. But you said something else that I thought was important, which was that you can't behave your way out of it and you can't, you know, Achieve your way out of it.

And we've seen that with celebrities like Beyonces, uh, Serena Williams. They talk about the experiences they've had giving birth, and if they ain't listening to Beyonce, people pay 300 to sit behind a wall, to listen to Beyonce at the [02:29:00] concert, but they're not listening to her in the hospital. What, what hope do we have?

DR. JOIA PERRY: I mean, I'm thinking about Serena being pregnant right now, right? So I'm thinking about her. She's married to a very kind of appearing white man who's a, who's a billionaire, and yet she almost died. So here she is. if you hear her story, wh is that she said to them She walked to the nurse's listen, I think I might b just give me some heparin blood clot?

And they were feel faint because you ju is a world class athlete If you don't listen to Serena Williams, so they made her go lay back down, they didn't listen to her for hours. Serena would be dead if she didn't act as what they like to call her as a diva. If she didn't keep saying, you know, for real, I need a CAT scan and I need, they first did an ultrasound, they did all these other things to stall.

These are things that could have killed her. So then if you are Serena, where do you go now for help here? Where do you and your billionaire husband go that you're going to be seen and be valued? So what we say, I'm not all doom and gloom. [02:30:00] You really have to find someone who you trust. If you don't trust them, leave, just like you would do with anything else.

You don't have to stay with the provider you don't trust. If you don't trust the healthcare facility, go somewhere else. And while you're there, you're constantly negotiating all those things. I might vote my father's a doctor, my mom's a pharmacist. I still have to go in hospitals with them, with their elder care, I'm sorry, and do the same kinds of things to make sure that they, our elder black folks can still get medical 

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: treatment.

DR. JOIA PERRY: You ain't 

MARC LAMONT HILL- HOST, MARC LAMONT HILL: never lied, I asked. I had similar experiences. It's just crazy that in this country, it's not surprising, but it's just still crazy that in this country we still have to wrestle with this stuff as black folk, no matter how hard we work, no matter what we do. Everybody deserves quality health care.

Everybody deserves quality treatment. You shouldn't need a degree or a big bank account to get treated well.

Treating abortion bans ‘as if they aren’t violence’ turns Black women into ‘collateral’ - Velshi - Air Date 9-22-24

 

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: You and I have not had a chance to see each other in person for some time, but as soon as Roe fell, you were my first stop. I went to Alabama. We talked about some of the things that women were going to face and you pointed out that women across [02:31:00] Alabama and across the Southeast were going to face these problems, but black women were going to face them.

yet more harshly. Tell me about how these restrictions have exacerbated exacerbated the challenges that black women in the south were already facing. 

JENICE FOUNTAIN: First of all, I really want to thank you for your coverage of this. Um, and I have to apologize. I'm still very emotional about all this happening. But when I joined you in Tuscaloosa, I remember saying that black women would die right from this abortion ban.

It was a death threat. And so many people told us. And I was told me that that was hyperbolic, that I was exaggerating. And now here we are with Amber Thurman and Candy Miller being casualties of this country's attack on reproductive health care. And they're not just inconvenienced. They're dead, right?

They're not coming back. There's not going to be a policy change that means that they get to take care of their children. They're gone.[02:32:00] 

And we, we named this, right? We said this would happen. And so it's just infuriating for people to, um, still have these conversations about abortion bans as if they aren't violence, as if they aren't killing people. And Black women shouldn't be the collateral for people's political campaigns. Um, and fighting this has been such an uphill battle because there's that, we have to be civically engaged, right?

But we have to organize now. Like, not all of us are going to make it to see those policy wins. So what is it like to care for people now, in this moment, where we're having to watch Black women die and be collateral for political agendas? 

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: Yeah, you did name it. You, you were very, very clear about how this is going to unfold.

Michelle, um, let's talk about why it's especially dangerous for women of color to have abortion access isolated and removed from the umbrella of, of health, reproductive health, and maternal health, all of which [02:33:00] suffer in this country in a way that they do not in most, most developed countries. 

MICHELLE GOODWIN: Such a long legacy of the targeting of black women and utilizing their bodies in the most horrific ways.

We know this. It's written in stone in terms of the history of our country, a disregard for the lives, the well being, the health, the safety of black women from time of slavery through Jim Crow. We see it now there is a book called unequal treatment. The Institute of medicine published this over 20 years ago.

And they chronicled virtually every area of health care, and it turned out in every area of health care in the United States, black people had it worse. And the only area where black people got more service than white people did was with amputation. Black people were two to six times more likely to have their limbs amputated.

The only area. And when we think about matters of reproductive health and safety, my goodness, what black women have been targeted with. In the 1960s, when black women demanded inclusion and [02:34:00] welfare programs and Medicare, Medicaid, that's when we get the Mississippi appendectomy, the coercive sterilization of black women because they wanted equality.

Fannie Lou Hamer told us about that the Supreme Court itself has acknowledged that an abortion is far safer than carrying a pregnancy to turn. You know, just a few years ago, in the Supreme Court case, Whole Woman's Healthy Hellerstedt, Justice Breyer, in writing that opinion, said that you're 14 times more likely to die carrying a pregnancy to term in the United States than having an abortion.

Abortions are incredibly safe. And when you look at the risks that are involved, if these were men, the government would say, Save your lives. Do that, which is 14 times more likely to save your life, and we will fund it. We will underwrite it rather than the risk of you dying. But when it comes to women, there is that disregard, and then it becomes even heavier, like concrete tied around the ankles for women of color and especially black women in [02:35:00] communities where there's just been historic mistreatment in the medical community.

I mean, if we're honest about it, Ali, then we know that there are black people in the 19 forties, fifties and sixties that were dying on the steps of hospitals that refused to admit them. Segregation within hospitals. And there's still suspicion about black folks. And let me just add one thing that I think will bring it home for your listeners and viewers.

At the University of Virginia, they did a study within the last decade of medical students. And residents to see whether or not they had these same beliefs that people had 50 years ago, and it turned out they did, you know, that they believe that black people had thicker skin density, that they don't feel pain that they have a different kind of blood that their blood coagulates differently.

So, Ali, that's where we are. 

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: Uh, these, these myths persist and you make an interesting point, Michelle, that when it suited people, black women are being sterilized. Uh, when it suits people's political agenda, uh, then to, uh, Janice [02:36:00] for black people to have an abortion is black genocide. And in fact, this black genocide thing is having a bit of a revival.

I'm hoping your answer is no, but do you hear people using this argument? 

JENICE FOUNTAIN: Oh, absolutely. I will live with transport folks to the Atlanta abortion clinic. That's all you heard in the background was, well, I guess black lives don't matter. Well, y'all are killing all the black people. It's not us. So, absolutely.

There's definitely a resurgence of that. What's difficult is that there are conversations that have to be had around how we offer abortion and how we talk about reproductive autonomy. Absolutely. But that's not it, right? That's not that conversation has been weaponized in an intentional way against us and not as a part of bodily autonomy at all.

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: One of the things you pointed out to me, Janice, when we were in Tuscaloosa, Is it for a lot of one of the inherent structural pieces of racism that is only multiplied by this is the lesser access, the lower [02:37:00] access to health care or health insurance that black women in places like Alabama have. So they're starting from a net negative place in the first place.

And then if they require added protections or added reproductive health services, they're not available to them anyway, but they weren't getting them in the first place. 

JENICE FOUNTAIN: Oh, absolutely. I think one of the things that people don't talk about enough in terms of access or in terms of what abortion bans mean for black women is that we're largely relying on state clinics, state, you know, like state medical care, which is obviously incredibly biased.

It's not like, we're talking to primary care physicians that trust what we're communicating to them is that we're having to take whatever we can. And that's a risk. And a lot of people don't know where they can go to actually have. conversations with their providers that actually care about their well being.

Not everyone knows that Dr Yoshiko Robinson has a birthing center and that she's pro abortion right where they can have a candidate conversation about their choices [02:38:00] or Heather's games. And a lot of people are just scared. So it's either that they don't seek that medical care at all, but they don't know how to have the conversations with someone that is biased in that way.

ALI VELSHI - HOST, VELSHI: Michelle, what's your sense of this, this black genocide conversation and its historical context. 

MICHELLE GOODWIN: Well, you know, it's it's the big lie that's been portrayed by the Supreme Court. And this is where we should be very, very cynical and skeptical about the court itself. Because genocide, as Justice Thomas should know, who's been a perpetrator of this mythology, 1927, the Buck v Bell decision is where the United States Supreme Court.

Permits eugenics policies to go in place. And we know explicitly it's not a case about black women. We know it's not a case about black women and abortion. It is a case where Justice Oliver Wendell Hobbs says Carrie Buck is a poor white girl and the reality. And it's a 2020 project 2025 reality. And people should know this in the United States at the turn of the century.

There was a real question about what to do with poor white [02:39:00] people. And we are a country that in 1927, our Supreme Court said it was okay to coercively and forcibly sterilize poor white people, just as Holmes said, better than to let them starve for their imbecility. Society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind manifestly unfit.

It was considered white people. The state of Virginia was rounding up poor white people, little girls, 10, 11, 12 years old. and sterilizing them. The idea was America had no room, no space for poor white people. And Justice Holmes said three generations of imbeciles are enough. And the subject of that litigation was a poor white girl who had been raped at 16 and had a baby out of wedlock.

So this mythology is a made up thing. And what makes it so horrific is that this is a Supreme Court case. Our Supreme Court justices should know the law and should know this case and its origin. And so there has been a way again of utilizing black people, black women in this [02:40:00] space of mythology, stereotype and stigma.

SECTION E: THE PUSHBACK

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section E: The pushback.

Why Ron DeSantis Hates Direct Democracy - Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Air Date 9-14-24

 

DALIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: Explain the mechanics of how direct democracy works. In over half of all of the states, the people can place measures on their ballots. They can pass statutes, constitutional amendments. They can do it through the popular vote. And yes, the process varies. And yes, the number of signatures vary. And yes, the percentage of the populace that vote, yes can vary. But can you just explain to us what this logic of sort of ballot initiatives, constitutional amendments is and why only half the states do this kind of direct democracy?

JESSICA VALENTI: It has only been literally in the last two years that I have learned anything about ballot measures, and now this is all I think about.

 As you said, it’s half the states in the country have the ability to bring citizen led initiatives [02:41:00] where, depending on the state, you need to get a certain amount of signatures from a certain amount of counties to get something directly on the ballot, whether it’s abortion rights, marijuana, what have you, and then in half the states, it’s only legislators who can get something on the ballot.

 And what’s been really sort of fascinating to me, especially over the last year, because these abortion rights ballot measures are getting so much attention and people are so excited about the ability to perhaps be able to restore abortion rights, that in the states where there aren’t citizen led initiatives, voters are asking why this link between democracy and abortion rights has just never been clearer.

 Voters are p***** off when they don’t have the ability to weigh in directly on abortion. I’ve read piece after piece from columnists who are talking about readers writing in, asking them, why don’t we have this [02:42:00] ability? Why aren’t we doing this? I think it was in Mississippi where they had to put the question of why there wasn’t the ability to vote directly on abortion rights.

 They had to ask it at the gubernatorial debate because it became such a big deal for voters wanting to know why they couldn’t do this, watching states like Ohio restore abortion rights, getting really excited about that possibility, and then figuring out that actually they don’t have the same right to direct democracy that other people do.

 And as you said, this is what makes Trump’s will of the people. I gave it back to the people. Such utter nonsense. Because that’s not true for everyone and as we’ve seen in the states that do have the ability to vote directly on abortion rights, Republicans, anti abortion activists, legislators are doing everything that they can to make sure that that just doesn’t happen. They are working overtime to keep voters as far away from this issue as possible because they know that when voters have a direct on abortion, abortion wins.

DALIA LITHWICK - HOST, AMICUS: So, Lauren, one of the [02:43:00] reasons I really wanted to talk to you in as part of this conversation is that the week kind of opened this week with the Tampa Bay Times revealing that Florida’s State Department is like scrutinizing amendment four signatures for vote fraud and that the secretary of state, Brad McVeigh, is contacting supervisors to collect signatures for review.

 And I think what is so crazy about this is how quickly we kinda of vaulted from, you know, we want to make sure people have the right information, quote unquote, to oh no, we’re knocking signatures off the freaking ballot.

 So I would love for you to just tell us how we got here in Florida because this is actually quite a shocking intervention and it’s much more dramatic than, you know, the earlier iterations of the shenanigans, which are like, futzing with the language.

LAUREN BRENZEL: First and foremost, I want to say about this moment. There wasn’t a time where the Florida [02:44:00] coalition didn’t think that this was coming. We saw in 2022 the arrest of numerous individuals who had felony convictions for registering to vote, despite the fact that it was put to Florida voters that they wanted to give those folks the right to vote back. And then most of those cases were dismissed afterwards.

 We have seen people bust out of state because of their immigration status. This is like the playbook of Florida right now. It’s what our government does.

 There are few people who are deeply in charge who weaponize state systems against people. We’ve had democratically elected officials removed from office for saying that they were going to protect abortion patients and abortion providers.

We have right now at my alma mater, books being put into a dumpster from our gender and diversity center. Like, this is the model and the playbook. And I think something that’s really disheartening on our end is this coalition has worked incredibly hard to make this process as non [02:45:00] political as possible. We have really relied on the voters of Florida, the coalition of organizations, on patient stories, on activists, in order to qualify this for the ballot. And that’s been in removing conversations about any political party. But it’s also just been in how we structured this.

 We are not coordinated with the Florida Democratic Party. We are not speaking out against republican actors because we know we have a 60% threshold. And we are aware that that means that people need to think of this issue as a health care issue, not a partisan issue. And so to have a year and a half of work to really intentionally center, be entirely disrupted and have this turn into a fight about DeSantis like this needs to last beyond any administration in the state of Florida.

 We’re talking about our constitution. So seeing narrative shift so quickly into what has Ron done? And take away all of the focus and the emphasis that we’ve been very intentional about is also the playbook. Like, [02:46:00] part of this is to stoke fear. I have, like, 70 year old white women right now telling me that they’re afraid to go vote this November, and it’s like hitting them that they think that the election police are gonna come after them to ask them about whether they sign the abortion petition and what their vote is.

 And like, that is part of the mind game as well. It’s just so the idea that we’re not credible actors, it’s to one disrupt. Also, the petition collector vendor that they’re going after is like the only progressive vendor in the state of Florida. So none of the corporate initiatives have been investigated. It is solely the one who, like, works for progressive initiatives. It’s the same vendor who successfully qualified medical marijuana, the dollar 15 minimum wage redistricting initiative, and citizens rights restoration. So that’s incredibly telling of. And then it’s a distraction and it’s a misinformation campaign. It’s a disinformation campaign to cause fear and to weaponize all systems so that we’re having to fight on the legal front, we’re having to fight on the comms front, we’re having to [02:47:00] fight on the reputational front. And it is the playbook of authoritarianism. And people let it happen for abortion in very specific ways because we know that there are actors who are so radicalized on this issue that they believe that abortion advocates are actual murderers. So they’re willing to put aside any belief they have in democracy or democratic processes because they are such radicalized actors on this subject. And once you learn how far you can radicalize people, you can figure out how to do that for any issue.

What’s At Stake in Arizona - The Defenders - Air Date 9-12-24

 

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: This past spring, there was a lot of whiplash for Arizonans. Within just one month. Right when things were starting to feel really hopeful, Arizona came close to losing almost all access to abortion.

First, in early April, the coalition behind the ballot initiative [02:48:00] announced it had collected more than half a million signatures. 

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Arizona for abortion access need about 300, 000 signatures to put their question on the ballot. But today, this group said they have more than 500, 000 signatures on their petition, and they still have more than three months left until the deadline.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Things were looking up. And then, just a week later, the Arizona Supreme Court revived the 1864 near total ban on abortion. You know, the one we talked about earlier, that Athena had been trying to repeal for years as a legislator. 

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: Arizona's highest court today backing a law that bans nearly all abortions, and carries up to five years in prison for doctors who perform one.

Immediately, there was confusion. The legal ramifications of all of this, a lot of questions there, the political consequences of all of this, a lot of questions there, a lot is up in the air right now. 

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: And in an election year, the court ruling set off a political storm. With even anti [02:49:00] abortion state legislators calling for the ban's repeal, but it still took a few attempts before the Arizona legislature narrowly voted to repeal it a few weeks later.

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The repeal passes by a 16 to 14 vote here in the state senate with Republicans helping out Democrats to cross the finish line. They've gotten to that 16, the magic number of 16 to repeal the 1864. Abortion ban. The eyes of the nation are on the statehouse in Phoenix today. 

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I imagine, uh, that that month was quite something for you.

So I would love for you to just tell me, you know, what were you thinking? How were you doing? I, 

ATHENA SALMON: I, I was among the people that just was not anticipating that the court was going to resurrect. a total ban on abortion from 160 years ago. It was a shock after the news came out. I didn't really take a second to actually feel it.

Yeah. I was just like, nope, not going to feel that. We're just going to go straight to the legislature and do the work to repeal this. And we are going to push [02:50:00] so hard and hold their feet to the fire. Um, and so we knew we were starting with 29 votes and 14 votes and we just had to find two more in the house and then in the Senate.

And it was interesting because The pressure in the moment and having the entire country watching what would happen next in Arizona, I think really laid the groundwork to finally get this law off the books. Um, and thank goodness, thank goodness we have a governor that is unapologetically supportive of Reproductive freedom and an attorney general, Attorney General Mays, who has just done a phenomenal job to make sure that this law doesn't take effect.

And so it's fundamental that we not only lock this right into the Constitution to prevent further interference by the state legislature, but we also have to flip the legislature to a reproductive [02:51:00] freedom majority to then defend that right. instead of passing laws that are intended to go to the courts that are not reflective of the American people that are also stacked with extremists and try to erode the rights that we just secured.

So I think it all goes hand in hand and it all connects to one another. 

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I, I'm, I'm curious. Can you tell me what it was like to be with Governor Katie Hobbs when she signed the repeal? What was going through your head at that time? 

ATHENA SALMON: I was standing there, um, behind the governor with allied organizations and with the legislators and you know, I was just like beaming.

I kind of felt like a mom in that moment. I was like, we did it. Like, I was just like getting teary eyed. I was like, Oh my gosh, like, look where, look how far we come. There's never been an Arizona that has not had the 1864 ban. 1864 was the first year that a legislature convened. [02:52:00] So I really just like soaked in the historical nature of that moment and these women that led the way.

And then a reporter from CBS News like being the most emotional person out there. She was like, Athena, can we get your remarks? And then I just started bawling. I was like, what? I'm sorry. I did not come prepared to speak today. I um,

I can't. Stop thinking about my daughters and how they will have a future. And as we continue to go into the future and protect and enshrine the constitutional right to abortion and reproductive freedom, that future generations will not have to live under the, the restrictions and the interference that we've had to experience.

So. It's just been an incredible moment, and I'm going to turn it back over to folks.[02:53:00] 

It was just very nice to be recognized in that moment. I wasn't expecting it. Hence, you know, the bawling. Hence the tears. 

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Yeah. Well, it also makes me think that it's a moment where you let yourself feel like all that hard work that you had done to carry that bill for so long, finally, in one moment, came to fruition, right?

ATHENA SALMON: It came to fruition, and I really let my guard down. 

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: With the 1864 abortion ban finally repealed, Athena could shift her efforts to door knocking for the abortion ballot measure. Let's move out again and look at the ballot initiative. So your organization, Reproductive Freedom for All, that's part of a larger coalition to pass the Arizona Abortion Access Act.

So walk us through what the ballot initiative proposes and what it will do if it passes. 

ATHENA SALMON: makes abortion a fundamental right in the constitution. It guarantees the right to abortion up to fetal [02:54:00] viability. And then after that, those decisions can occur with the consultation of your healthcare provider and the really good news.

And we see this at the doors where, you know, we're knocking on doors. We're talking to voters across political affiliations is nine out of 10 Arizonans support the legal right to abortion. It's actually higher than the national average nationally. It's eight out of ten Americans. So I think that the people are with us.

I think that's part of the reason why you saw one out of five Arizona voters signed the petition to refer this to the ballot so that they would have an opportunity to secure and lock this right in the Constitution. 

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I know that July 3rd was the deadline, right, to turn in the signatures for the ballot initiative.

Um, How many signatures can you tell me did it end up getting and what did it feel like to have those submitted and in? I mean, it's like, okay, dust off your hands. That's done. 

ATHENA SALMON: Yeah. We turned in over [02:55:00] 823, 000 signatures. It was a historic number of signatures. 

ARCHIVE NEWS CLIP: The most signatures ever submitted by a citizens initiative.

Yeah. To put that into context. That means one out of every five Arizona voters. Signed this petition. 

ATHENA SALMON: It really is incredible the grassroots effort that went behind mobilizing for the Arizona for Abortion Access Act. So it felt really good. It felt like we made history. And it's also a relief because I just with any Citizen initiative effort, like the signature phase is just so grueling and and towards the end, he said it's July 3rd.

I mean, to put it into context for your listeners, like it's like 115, 117 degrees that time of year. And we were collecting signatures all the way up until the [02:56:00] very, very end. 

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I'm curious what you're hearing from organizers who are door knocking and phone banking and are there any stories that stick with you?

Um, Um, and empower you in this fight. 

ATHENA SALMON: Um, there are so many stories that empower me. I love door knocking, you know, I'm out there door knocking organizers out there door knocking and we've received feedback where people were very closed minded and very black and white about what access to abortion care was about.

And then once conversations happened about like, Oh, this also includes like miscarriage management and helping people navigate. through unviable pregnancies. And like, this is health care. We talk about how it's health care. People walk away from those conversations being like, Oh, I didn't realize that that was also included in a part of abortion rights.

Yeah, I support that. I do support that. Right. And so like, there's really meaningful, important conversations that have been [02:57:00] happening on the ground that I challenge people to think. Overwhelmingly, people are supportive of the issue. So, always door knocking and talking to voters. It always gives me a lot of hope because when you actually talk to people, people are aligned with our values and people are with us on this issue.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Here's Arizona State Organizer with Reproductive Freedom for All, Jamila Rahim, who sent us this voice memo about door knocking. 

JAMILA RAHIM: We faced all kinds of voters at the doors from enthusiastic reproductive freedom voters Two voters who literally wins at the mention of the word abortion. There is one thing that remained constant, however, and it was that the American people seem tired and exhausted too, of the political vitriol, the extremist political agendas put forth before them and in general political fatigue, but right now in Arizona, there is another shift in energy starting to [02:58:00] take place.

People don't just seem tired. They seem angry. Whether it was a young woman in the professional space or an elder woman who does not want to relive the past, or even a father who simply cares for his daughter's future, I had conversations on the front porch of countless neighbors recounting over and over at how angry they had become that something like this could even happen in our state.

That an 1864 abortion ban could even be thought of, let alone materialize. That they would have to vote again for the autonomy of their own bodies.

Reversing Florida’s 6-week Abortion Ban - The Defenders - Air Date 9-19-24

 

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: What I want to know right now is for you, let's see, heading into the election. What is your day to day look like? What does every day look like for you? 

LAUREN JACOBSON: Everyone on this campaign is. Waking up every morning and going to bed every night, trying to do everything we can ahead of November. We have a really [02:59:00] phenomenal team of organizers who have already started their door knocking process.

They've already started phone banking. When we did phase one of this campaign, we set up hubs all across the state. We had over 50 hubs in the state of Florida where people could come get petitions so that they could gather signatures in their community and then drop them off to be submitted to us. And we're trying to rebuild that model right now for this canvassing phase.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I want to circle back for a moment and just get specifically to speaking to, uh, not the opposition, but the people that you have to convince, right? How do you go about that? What's the thought process in speaking to conservative and independent voters on this issue? 

LAUREN JACOBSON: It's another area where I feel stories are so incredibly instrumental to the work that we're doing.

And I also think that it's uplifting how ridiculous it is to trust a politician with your health care over a doctor. That's something that is resonant with [03:00:00] a wide variety of Floridians because they don't want politicians making medical decisions for them. They don't want politicians in their doctor's office with them.

So for swing voters, it's incredibly important for us that we talk about the realities of what it means to allow politicians to control your health care, and it's important that we share the stories of aboriginal Floridians who have experienced the harms of these abortion bans. 

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: What are the stories that you've heard that have stayed with you, that come to your mind quickly when you're thinking about?

Talking to not only Republican and independent voters, but just, I don't know, that you just can't let go of. 

LAUREN JACOBSON: I got a chance about a year ago now to meet, um, a man named Derek Cook and Derek's wife, Anya, was pregnant and she was, um, He was hemorrhaging and lost half of the blood in her body before she was offered a medically necessary abortion.

And she had come in for care two days before that happened. [03:01:00] And I was on a call with him and he talked about the loss of his child and the devastation and the trauma that that caused him. And then he talked about that moment calling him into action. And he's been volunteering with an organization called Men for Choice consistently over the past.

And Over a year since his family experienced this, I come back to it regularly. If I'm feeling tired or sad or unmotivated, and it's like, who am I to not show up every day in the same way that he shows up? And who am I not to advocate for others in the same way that he is advocating for his wife? And so that is a moment that I constantly come back to, seeing somebody translate.

A devastating [03:02:00] trauma into a desire to change his state for the better is one of the most impactful things that I've seen on this campaign. 

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: I love that. That's really beautiful. Who am I? Right? I mean, when you first started telling that story, I was thinking, Oh, I want to hear a story about a person. A person who's pregnant, but I like this idea of someone intimately adjacent being so invested.

So therefore, why can't you? Yeah. Yeah. 

LAUREN JACOBSON: Not everybody in the state of Florida should have to experience trauma at the level that the Cook family did, but everybody in this state better care about them. and what they experienced because we have a response. We are the only ones who are going to protect us from what's going on here.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: And you said that story is one that you reflect on when you, you know, feeling sad or unmotivated. So when somebody literally knocks on my door or the phone rings, [03:03:00] what am I going to hear? How do I? Get to hear that story 

LAUREN JACOBSON: right now in the organizing realm, we're honestly doing just a ton of public education about what the laws are here in Florida.

People know that they don't like extreme abortion bans, but they don't know that we have one in effect. Very oftentimes people don't find out about the ban until they're trying to actively seek care. It's incredibly common story that we're hearing right now. So we are trying to let everybody know that there is it.

It's almost all care banned in the state of Florida already, but there's also the other subsect of people that they don't need to be convinced on this issue, but they do need to be convinced that they should go to the polls and vote this November. And so that is a ton of the work that our organizers are doing at this stage in the game is not trying to persuade people to vote yes on this, but trying to persuade people to get up to the polls and vote in November on this issue.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Okay, so let's talk about an [03:04:00] ideal world in which this initiative passes. 

LAUREN JACOBSON: What happens? We have a fabulous network of abortion funds in the state of Florida, and I can't wait for them to go back to getting to do community activism instead of having to focus on getting folks out of the state. I would love for us to figure out more local solutions to making sure people have access to care and working on, you know, mutual aid within communities.

So I have to shout out, um, the phenomenal worship funds across the state of Florida who will be helping to lead that work. Um, and then we have to start building towards a long term vision of what change is possible in the future. I have not gotten that far yet. Um, I am, I am a singular thinker right now.

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: Yeah. I mean, and having been in this work for so long, Lauren, do you think Floridians have it in them to pass this initiative? 

LAUREN JACOBSON: I do. I think that they know what's at stake. I think we are resourced and if we do our job correctly over the next four months that we will win because I don't think Floridians are stupid.

I think they [03:05:00] are empathetic and I think they,

GLORIA RIVIERA - HOST, THE DEFENDERS: What can they do? What can Floridians do from now until November? 

LAUREN JACOBSON: Everybody should go to our website, Floridiansprotectingfreedom. com, and you can learn all about the stories of Floridians and how they've been impacted by these abortion bans. You can sign up for events in your community or online, and you should talk to everybody you know about what's going on in the state of Florida right now with regards to a lack of access to abortion and that there is a solution this November, and it's to vote yes on 4 and end Florida's abortion ban.

Want to Fight for Reproductive Health? Fight for Medicaid, Too. - rePROs Fight Back - Air Date 6-25-24

 

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: Medicaid has existed for almost 60 years. It is the largest public health insurance program for low-income people in the United States. And the way that it works is as a federal state partnership. So, the federal program [03:06:00] provides some amount of money for the states per service, and then the state gives at least half or even less than half of the amount for every service that is covered by Medicaid.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: That's so great. I think people, there's a lot of confusion around that. Like, you have Medicaid and Medicare and, like, how are they different? And like I think people don't not necessarily know how they're different or, like, get confused, like, with the Affordable Care Act and stuff. And I think there are so many different things that sound similar but are different that it's worth kind of digging into that a bit.

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: Yeah, it is so much. So, Medicare is a purely federal-run program. Medicaid is a state federal partnership and that means that it's really complicated because if you know Medicaid in one state, you just know Medicaid in that one state. It's very different across the board. Here in California, the Medicaid program is very different from New Mexico, even from New York, from Texas, from Mississippi—it's just really all over the [03:07:00] place. And that's what makes sometimes Medicare great, but sometimes Medicaid really confusing and bureaucratic.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: Yeah, I'm so glad we were able to kind of clarify that a little bit 'cause it really, it does vary so much state by state. One of the things we do is a 50-state report card that looks at sexual reproductive health and rights at the state level. And one of those things we look at is like Medicaid and like if this, if states have expanded their program, like, they were able to under the Affordable Care Act and like even there you just see such huge variety of, like, what states are doing and how many people are being left behind.

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: Yeah, I'm really glad that you raised that because historically before the Affordable Care Act, it was not enough to just be low-income or poor. You either had to be pregnant or you had to be a minor or you have to have a disability, or you have to be old. And thanks to the Affordable Care Act, we created Medicaid expansion, [03:08:00] which allows someone who is not pregnant or who doesn't have a child or doesn't have a disability to be able to qualify to the Medicaid program. Now when the Affordable Care Act was passed, it was supposed to extend this great new category for all states, and of course, you know, which states sued the federal government and said, no, we don't want healthcare for low-income individuals, so therefore they made it optional. And at the beginning there were about more than half of states who opted to expand Medicaid. And little by little other states have realized that actually it's really good because one of the things that the Affordable Care Act said is actually the state is only gonna be able to cover10% and the federal government picks up 90% of that healthcare service. So, now I'm pleased to say that only nine states have not expanded Medicaid [03:09:00] and there's definitely conversations in the works in some of the states where Medicaid has not expanded.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: That's so amazing.

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: One important thing...it is so wonderful. One of the things that I wanna highlight is that one out of five Americans are in the Medicaid program. I used to be in the Medicaid program. We believe at the National Health Law program that Medicaid saves lives. There are 77 million people who are on Medicaid and without Medicaid, people wouldn't frankly be able to live or to operate as human beings. So, it is absolutely critical to make sure that it's working and I'm happy to talk to you more about some of the complications which we know exist.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: So yeah, how does this relate to sexual and reproductive health?

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: Yeah, so Medicaid is actually a critical payer of sexual and reproductive healthcare services for the most part, and I'll talk about the [03:10:00] Hyde Amendment in a little bit, but in regards, for instance, to family planning, Medicaid is the largest public payer of family planning covering 75% of all public expenditures on family planning. Medicaid is the largest single payer of pregnancy services covering almost half of US births, and that includes prenatal, labor, delivery, postpartum. Medicaid also covers outpatient prescription drugs and sterilization and breast cancer services, and some gender-affirming care and mental health and all of the things that relate to sexual and reproductive health. But the one thing that we know Medicaid does not cover is abortion. Shortly after Roe v. Wade was held by the US Supreme Court, so many of your listeners I'm sure know, a congressman by the name of Henry Hyde wanted to get rid of [03:11:00] abortion access. And essentially, he knew that the first thing to do was to get rid of Medicaid coverage of abortion services. I'll paraphrase here, he said something like, I would for sure like to get rid of all abortions, but I know that the one way in which we can do that significantly is by running a Medicaid bill. So, since 1977, what we call the Hyde amendment bans Medicaid coverage of abortions with very limited, just with very few exceptions—rape, incest, and life endangerment. And as a result, a lot of people, I would say the majority or at least half of abortion patients, don't have their abortions covered because there is this prohibition. Now there are 17 states that use their own funds to cover abortions for their Medicaid beneficiaries. So [03:12:00] not all is lost, however, this is absolutely huge.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: Yeah. So, as a DC resident, like, definitely expressed my frustration as DC has tried so many times to expand coverage for Medicaid and abortion and Congress keeps blocking it. So, very frustrating.

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: Yeah, it's absolutely awful. And it's not only frustrating, but it really has endangered people. Since the Hyde amendment was passed, only months later, a Latina woman by the name of Rosie Jimenez lost her life because she couldn't, she was a Medicaid recipient, she wanted to get an abortion. She was a single mother, she was a part-time worker. She was a student, and unfortunately, she had to get an unsafe abortion that ended her life. So, it is no exaggeration to say that the Hyde Amendment is more than [03:13:00] frustrating.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: Yeah.

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: It's cruel. It is a danger to people's lives, and it has been for many years.

JENNIE WETTER - HOST, REPROS FIGHT BACK: Yeah, it just makes me think of like all of the people who could be able to access care, who are being blocked from it, who are having to go to abortion funds, which I mean thankfully are there, but like abortion funds shouldn't have to cover them because they should have coverage and then abortion funds would be able to fund other people who were needing access. Like, it's just like trying to fill in these stop gaps to ensure that people can get the basic healthcare they need.

FABIOLA DE LIBAN: Absolutely. Thank goodness for abortion funds. They do really the work that's really needed, but they shouldn't have to be. You're absolutely right. I mean, just do the math. If half of US births are covered by Medicaid, then if the Hyde amendment didn't exist, it would cover at the very least half of US abortions and, and the other side knows that really [03:14:00] well. So yeah, it's just really unfortunate, especially I think it's cruel to someone who's poor, someone who has children. I mean, you should get an abortion regardless of the circumstances, but it's particularly dangerous to prohibit the coverage of a healthcare service that used to be covered just like anything else once Roe v. Wade was held. And yeah, just to have this barrier is just really awful and it's just really cruel. And this has been happening for almost, I don't know, 50 years and the situation was even bad before the Dobbs decision. So yeah, there was definitely a lot of work to do there. I think given that so many of your listeners like myself, our advocates, as we're thinking about how to rebuild from having you know, the no more of the constitutional right to have abortion services, [03:15:00] that as we think about our long-term plan, we have to have coverage in the equation. We have to think about those who are at the margins and that includes low-income people in the Medicaid population.

Credits

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from Hysteria, Vox, The Humanist Report, Mama Doctor Jones, Feminist Buzzkills, Fast Politics, Straight White American Jesus, Reveal, Grave Injustice, Velshi, Marc Lamont Hill, Amicus, The Defenders, and rePROs Fight Back. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks to everyone for [03:16:00] listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet—Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew—for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to all those who support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion.

So, coming to from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from [03:17:00] BestOfTheLeft.com.