June 23, 2022 • 59 mins
On Part 3 of Abortion: The Body Politic focuses on Roe and its unraveling. The last living Roe prosecutor, Linda Coffee, shares her recollections of that historic Supreme Court case and how she found out she had won. We learn of the immediate failings of Roe, especially for Black women, and the birth of the Reproductive Justice movement. Experts trace the politicization of abortion, the belated moral-issue grab by evangelicals, the violence that hit abortion doctors and clinics in the 1990s, and the anti-abortion strategy that forever altered American politics. We hear first-person experiences of long-time abortion doctors as well as fresh medical students who share why they felt inspired to join the cause. We also hear from two abortion storytellers about their experiences navigating a convoluted system that can be particularly apathetic to the needs of those seeking later abortions.
More information on this episode’s guests and resources:
- Access Reproductive Justice
- Boulder Abortion Clinic
- The Bixby Center for Reproductive Health
- Physicians for Reproductive Health
- The Doula Project
- Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast
Books and more
- Roe v. Wade’s secret heroine tells her story [Vanity Fair]
- Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present, by Mary Ziegler
- Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment, by Mary Zeilger
- Reproductive Justice, by Loretta Ross and Rickie Solinger
- Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, by Randall Balmer
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Good evening and a landmark ruling. The Supreme Court today
legalized abortions the majority and to raise the dignity of
woman and give her freedom of choice in this area
is an extraordinary event. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Couric, and
(00:26):
this is Abortion the Body Politic Part three. Today we
explored that historic nineteen seventy three decision and it's unraveling
in the five decades that followed. But let's begin where
we left off. When someone doesn't really know who I
am and have heard that I'm a lawyer, but they
don't know much about me, when I'd say, well, have
(00:48):
you ever heard of the case of roversus Wade? And
then they're usually stunned, because I mean, it's often still
described as the most one of the most well known
cases in favor of a shouldn't that there is? My
name is Linda Nelling. Coffee and Iron my late friend
(01:09):
Sarah Weddington were the two women did that pursued the
case of Roe versus Wade. It's impossible to talk about
the abortion rights movement without first talking to Linda. Linda
is the last living Road prosecutor after Sarah Weddington died
on December Linda knows the case intimately, and at eighty
(01:35):
she's witnessed the decades long fight to chip away at Row.
She spoke to us from a studio not far from
her home, which she shares with her longtime partner Becky Hart.
I had the distinct honor of having a blind day
with Lee Cogan December nine three, and over the course
(01:59):
of a whole evening, she said that she had worked
with Sarah Winnington on this Ruby Wade case. I said, well, no,
if that can't be, I'm a Dallas side. It was
a Dallas attorney named Linda Coffee, and her face fell
because she's that introverted. So for thirty eight years we've
been together, She's done mostly bankruptcy law, and I've done
(02:21):
different jobs and things. Linda is a lifelong Texan and
lives in a small town about eighty five miles east
of Dallas. She was born in Houston, graduated from Rice University,
and went on to law school. I went to University
of Texas at Austin and there were only about including me,
(02:42):
there was only about six women into the class that
that I started with, and we all would talk together
in the one place we usually could talk and and
not have to worry about anyone overhearing us was in
the the women's restroom, which was on the first floor
of the building. We were coming up at a time
(03:03):
when things were changing quickly for women. That was really
excited to think about helping women prepared to gain higher
positions and to seek a way of continuing their education
and not be compromised or having to worry about being
fired if they became pregnant or had someone decided they
(03:26):
had to meet children that they might not continue to
do a good job. After graduating from law school with
honors in getting the second highest score on the state
bar exam, Linda earned a coveted clerkship with Judge Sarah Hughes,
Texas is first female federal judge who was best known
(03:47):
for swearing and Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force one
after President Kennedy was assassinated in nineteen sixty three that
I was thankfully once again, here's Becky Hart. It's hard
to get a clerk job for the judges. You have
(04:08):
to be intelligent and do very well in law school. Succinctly,
Linda's scores were so high that she applied for that job,
and she got it. It's an honor, and that's what
set the whole ball in motion on abortion rights. The
first case that I was aware of was the case
(04:30):
out in California in nineteen sixty seven. California Governor Ronald
Reagan was among the first to liberalize abortion laws, extending
exceptions for therapeutic abortions. But the case Linda's talking about
came two years later in nineteen sixty nine, the People
Versus Bellis. The four to three decision from the state
(04:53):
Supreme Court declared California's eighteen fifty criminal abortion law unconstitutional.
The ruling helped repeal a conviction of Dr Leon P. Bellis,
who helped a woman get an abortion. It was a big,
big news deal. So I've just read about the case
just in the Dallas Morning News, and then I knew
(05:15):
there were some other cases that then followed, like there
was a case in Wisconsin, and then there was a
case in New York. So that's why I thought that
there would be a decent chance to win the case
if we filed in Texas. I still kept in contact
with some of the with Sarah what Eaton and some
of the other women that that I knew in my
(05:37):
class that it graduated. One of the things I did
when I decided that I had a sufficient basis was
I wrote to Sarah because I had heard she was
ready to follow them suit against the Texas abortion Law.
So I wrote her a letter and said to see
if she was interested in joining me in that suit.
(05:59):
They teamed up and on March third, nineteen seventy, Linda
filed a suit in Dallas on behalf of their client,
Norman McCorvey, using the pseudonym Jane Rowe. The hearing before
the three judge Corey in Dallas went went pretty smoothly.
The lower court unanimously ruled in Jane Roe's favor, finding
(06:20):
the Texas abortion law unconstitutional because it violated the right
to privacy. But when the district Attorney Henry Wade yes
that Wade announced he would continue to pursue abortion cases,
Linda was able to file a repeal directly to the
Supreme Court. Oral arguments were set for December thirteenth, ninety one.
(06:45):
We hear arguments number eighteen against whenever you're ready, Mr
Chief Justice, and may have pleased the Court. The instant
case is a direct appeal from a decision of the
United States District Court of the Northern District of Texas,
and then again on October eleventh, nine, first seventy eight
(07:11):
and roll against Wade Yes Lyndon. Sarah had to reargue
the case, a rare occurrence because there were only seven
justices present the first time. Weddington, you may proceed when
here you're ready, Mr Chief Justice, and may have placed
the court. We are once again before this Court to
(07:31):
ask relief against the continued enforcement of the Texas Abortion Statute,
and asked that you affirm the ruling of the three
judge court below, which held our statute unconstitutional for two reasons,
the first that it was vague and the second that
it interfered with the Ninth Amendment right of a woman
to determine whether or not she would continue or terminate
(07:54):
a pregnancy. As you will recall there are Linda recalls
a few details that stand out about her Supreme Court experience.
The closest restroom to where the Supreme Court held their
arguments was three three big staircases below. People would probably
(08:15):
notice that if they were women, but not not men,
and at one of the arguments some of the justices
wives were sitting in the courtroom, I wouldn't have recognized
the wives, but I just told us we were walking
in that several of the wives of the Supreme Court
were there. So I just assumed that that probably meant
from people that had been around more Supreme Court arguments
(08:37):
than I had, that that was probably a good sign
that that wasn't considered important by the court. While Linda
and Sarah split the oral arguments and the lower court,
it was Sarah who presented and the Supreme Court. Linda
took notes. She spoke, and I thought she did very well,
and uh, it was kind of hard to write everything down,
(09:03):
so I tried to just write down the questions because
I figured i'd remember the the answers. I think I
was probably more nervous that time. I wasn't that nervous
before the three judge court in Dallas, but to get
it when you're really going for the highest court in
the land. Curiously, the original Road decision was leaked to
(09:28):
a Supreme Court clerk shared the court ruling on background
to a Time magazine reporter, But when the decision was
delayed slightly and Time a weekly ran the story anyway,
it appeared in print the day before the actual decision
was handed down. I first read the Time magazine that
(09:48):
said the Supreme Court was ready to overrule the Texas
abortion law and it was going to be about a
serace of seven to vote. So I had read about it,
I think the day before it came out, and Sarah
said she found out about it when she heard the
decision that was rendered the next day, and that's when
(10:09):
she started getting her phone was calling and and at
first she wasn't sure what it was, and they were
they were saying that we had won, and that was
just that was just great because the phones were calling
and everything was mostly mostly on the only the people
that called were very positive about it. I really thought
that was gonna be it after the first Supreme Court victory.
(10:32):
But the afternoon after the decision in Roe versus Way
came out, l b J died. The senior partner in
the firm that I was with came in and said, well,
you've been knocked off the front page because L b
J died, And and that's what was the headline and
the Dallas Morning News and then our story I think
it was below what they called below the fold. Here's
(10:54):
abortion legal scholar Mary Ziggler to help explain the details
of the jan The Supreme Court voted seven to two
in nineteen seventy three that that law was unconstitutional and
that it violated a constitutional right to privacy that the
Court had recognized in earlier rulings on things like marriage
(11:17):
and contraception. The Court held that right to privacy was
broad enough to encompass the decision about whether to have
an abortion, and the Court laid out what at the
time was called the trimester frameworks that would be used
to determine if abortion laws were constitutional. The Court also
rejected a lot of key anti abortion arguments, like the
(11:38):
argument that the Constitution recognized fetal personhood, which would have
made abortion unconstitutional nationwide. So, coming out of Row, um,
you know, the majority of state laws that were then
on the books were rendered unconstitutional. We'll be right back. Well,
(12:15):
I think it depends on where you stand and who
you are whether you think that Row was successful or unsuccessful.
Historian Ricky Solinger. When feminists and other women experienced the
Roe v. Wade decision in they expected that a nationalization
(12:39):
of the right to abortion would lead to a number
of transformative experiences for women in the United States, they
expected marriages that were more equal, They were possessors of
(13:01):
their own sexuality, that they could have premarital sex without
the fear of unwed pregnancy and the shames that that
had carried for several decades. They felt much safer embracing
their own sexuality and pursuing it. Then, of course, there
(13:23):
were the economic expectations that if you can control your fertility,
you have a much better chance of being able to
pursue the educational programs that you said before, yourself, making
professional choices, being able to get a job, that you
(13:45):
can time your maternity according to your professional growth, that
you can stay or go where you can be an
equal to your husband and also be economically independent. That
changes the landscape so profoundly that you're hardly the same
(14:05):
person anymore, that that has enormous repercussions for what woman means.
Other women have been very clear eyed about the limits
of the impact of legalization. As Black women, we knew
that role was going to be inadequate to protect us
(14:26):
from the intersectional oppression. Activists academic and one of the
founders of the reproductive justice movement, Loretta Ross, the National
Council of Negro Women wrote a statement about that in
nine three in response to Row, when they talked about
how role will become just another way to deny Black
(14:48):
women are full human rights, are full right to self determination.
And the reason we know that, or knew that well
because there were so many way other ways that we
had already experienced where Black women's parenting and reproductive options
were being threatened, like with sterilization abuse, but more gregious
(15:11):
and more obvious. Was at any time Black women became
civically active around voting rights or housing rights or trying
to fight violence that was technical any of that time,
the first thing the government would do with be to
threaten to take our children away, you know, and fighting
(15:31):
well abortion rights didn't address that. We always knew that
even if we had fully funded abortion services that were
totally safe and totally accessible, we still suffer from a
racialized gender oppression that we had to fight. The leaders
(15:56):
of Reproductive Justice point out regularly that abortion has been
legal for fifty years, but how accessible has it been
two women without resources to be adequate consumers. So we
know that Within two years of ROW, the Congress worked
(16:20):
very hard to pass the High Amendment, which by the
by the was complete, which said no federal funding for
abortion the one medical prostidure that was singled out to
be excluded from federal funding um under the Medicaid Act,
(16:46):
and that meant that poor women were poor choicemakers. The
pro choice framework assumed that you have choices. It's a
marketplace idea, when actually the marketplace doesn't work well for
people who don't have you know, the currency or the
(17:06):
privileged as a marketplace doesn't the same way the SBA.
The Texas abortion ban is not gonna fall most heavily
on women with the means to go to another state.
It's gonna fall it was heavily on the people who
are trapped, who can't go anywhere. The Norman G. Mccorby's
(17:28):
of the world, the original Rose who idonically was from Texas.
Loretta understands this all too well. She's the survivor of
sexual violence and sterilization. You might recall some of Loretta's
story from episode two, but how a university while I
(17:50):
was a student there, I accepted implantation of the i
u D called the Dalkon shield in despite her IUD
causing acute pelvic inflammatory disease. A doctor refused to take
out the device and her fallopian tubes burst. I didn't
(18:10):
enter this movement fighting for abortion rights. I was into
the movement fighting for the right to have children. And
it wasn't until I got into the work that I
saw that they were two sides of the same coin,
and it's all about denying women the right to con
to make our own reproductive decisions, whether to have a
child or not to have a child. And then when
(18:33):
you intersect the sexual violence I had been through, then
I knew that we needed a larger framework than what
the current discussions were paralyzed by that pro life pro
choice dichotomy, which was so inadequate for describing my lived
experiences and so how reproductive justice is developed. Was at
(19:03):
a conference organized by the Illinois Pro Choice Alliance in
June in Chicago. On the first day of the conference,
we heard a presentation by representative of the Clinton administration.
Hillary Clinton had been put in charge of the Clinton
administration effort to do health care reform, but this representative
(19:27):
said that they knew was going to be a fight
to get healthcare reform past the Republicans, and so they
conceptualized that if they omitted or at least reduced all
references to reproductive healthcare that that would increase his chances
of passage. There were twelve most black women who were
(19:50):
at this conference. The prefer might have been even more,
but able Mabel Thomas, who was a Georgia state representative
at the time, called us together in her hotel room
that night after we heard this presentation, and she's like,
this doesn't make any sense. Why would they come to
a feminist conference, a pro choice conference asked us to
(20:11):
endorse a healthcare plan that all misreproductive healthcare. That's like
the most male centric health care plan you could think of,
because reproductive healthcare is what drives women to the doctor.
That was the night in which we conceptualized reproductive justice
(20:31):
because the other thing that we realized was that we
were dissatisfied with how abortion was always isolated from social
justice issues, and that isolation wasn't doing us any good.
Are representing what black women went through because any time
a woman is pregnant, oh well, let's put it this way,
(20:54):
she doesn't even have to be pregnant. Any time her
period is just late. She has where we can all
these oh my god, conversations oh my god, am I pregnant?
Oh my god? What am I gonna tell my mom?
Or what am I gonna tell my partner? Am I
gonna keep my job? Or can I stay in school?
Or do even I'm a bedroom to put this child in.
(21:15):
So she's got good answers to the oh my god questions,
This is gonna turn an unplanned pregnancy into a wanted child.
But if she has bad answers to the oh my
god question, she may even turn a planned pregnancy into
an abortion. And so for the pro life movement and
the pro choice me with the both start with the
(21:36):
pregnancy is starting too far downstream in our opinion. If
you really want to quote reduce the need for abortion,
really talk about how actual human beings make decisions and
address those things that discourage people from becoming parents. And
(21:59):
so we splice together social justice and reproductive rights to
create the term reproductive justice. We define reproductive justice as
the right to have a child, the right not to
have a child, and the right to raise your children
in safe and healthy environments. And then that was how
(22:20):
we articulated in a But by two thousand and four,
a new generation of activists were coming up. Black women
in particular, who are arguing that the original three tenants
didn't include gender not conforming in LGBT people, and so
(22:40):
they added a fourth tenant to talk about the right
to gender identity, sexual pleasure, and self determination in terms
of one's reproductive options and choices. I'm pleased to say
that even though we didn't intend it to move so
(23:01):
successfully from the margins to the center, it has done that,
and it is supplanted how people talk about reproductive politics
moving up beyond that pro choice, pro life. Binary people
have realized that that framework, that limited framework, has outlived
it's usefulness. My name is Laarata Lee Wallace and I
(23:31):
am a organizer based in othern California, and I am
work with our statewide abortion front here in California called
Access Reproductive Justice. So my first abortion, the pregnancy test
came back positive, and before I could even get off
the toilet with the pregnancy test in my hand, I
had messaged one of my friends who I knew was
very active in the repros DAIS and it was also
(23:53):
on the board of our abortion from back home, who
was also like my supervisor at the time at the
Reproductive Dresses Order that I was working with UM. It
was like, Hey, I'm pregnant, don't want to be what
do I do? Like verbatim, And she was like, perfect,
you came to the right place. We'll get you squared away.
Like what do you need? And I'm like, I can't
afford an abortion. First and foremost, I was a Medicaid recipient,
and we know because of the High Ammendment that you
(24:14):
can't medicate recipients, can't you know, use their Medicaid to
provide to cover abortion costs. It was also a full
time student at the time a couple of years emancipated
from the foster care system, so I was essentially like
on my own, UM, and I have messaged her and
asked her like I don't know, I don't really know
what I need right now, UM, but I just need
the money. UM. So I was able to pledge maybe
(24:35):
like a hundred dollars to my abortion at the time,
but that was all I could do and the Abortion
Fund covered the rest. But as I was in the clinic,
I was like watching a bunch of news coverage around
the murders of Brianna Taylor in the mad Aubrey. As
I'm sitting in this abortion clinic, as I'm also thinking,
like I hope I don't get COVID, and also as
my support people can't come in with me to the
(24:56):
clinic because of COVID. So I'm like sitting here in
this clinic for like I have like three appointments, like
two and a half three hours at a time, um
if like peak covid. Um So, I was able to
get my abortion medication. But I had my appointment on
a Friday, and because the clinic wasn't open on Saturday
or Sunday, and there's this twenty four hour waiting period.
(25:18):
Even though I had had them my ultrasound and like
everything was good to go, I had to wait until
that following Monday to then get my medication. But then
I had to wait another two and a half hours
after the doctor got done seeing everybody to just to
get my medication. Um So I was able to get
you know, my medication and go home and you know,
finish my abortion and went back a few weeks later
(25:41):
to make sure that um I didn't have like any
retain products um of the pregnancy, and I didn't, so
I was fine. Um but I did, like the cart
was outside of the abortion clinic. Was so happy that
it was finally over because I knew immediately when I
was pregnant that I wanted to have an abortion. There
was also no shame in it. I was actually also
very empowered that for the first time in my life
(26:03):
and realizing, you know that this is a decision that
I'm making for me and historically, you know, black women
and them have not been able to make their own
reproductive decisions. And also as someone who has essentially been
a word of the state, you know, being owned, you know,
by the state as a foster, as the foster care youth,
it made all the difference for me because I'm like, Wow,
(26:24):
this is like one of the biggest decisions for me,
um in my life that I'm going to going to
make or to not make right, but regardless of what happens,
is going to impact the trajectory of my life forever.
So being able to make that decision as a black
person person and foremost um and also for myself made
all the difference for me. When we come back how
abortion got politicized Before Roe v. Wade, the pro life
(26:59):
movement was not partisan. Daniel Williams is a historian and
author of defenders of the unborn. The pro life movement
before Roe v. Wade. If one had to describe it
as associated with a particular ideology rather than the other,
it would be more accurate to describe it as a
(27:20):
liberal political movement than a conservative one, because the majority
of pro life activists before Row were for the most
part Democrats who believed in the principles of an expanded
social welfare state. The pro life movement was overwhelmingly Catholic
before Roe v. Wade, and most Northeastern and Midwestern Catholics
(27:42):
had in the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies been
shaped to at least a certain extent by the assumptions
of of New Deal liberalism, the assumptions that the state
had an obligation to care for the less fortunate. A
number of pro life activists in the late nineteen sixties
and early nineteen seventies were also opposed to Vietnam War.
The number were very liberal Democrats. UH number head concerns
(28:04):
about capital punishment. UH and some of the pro life
organizations at the time advocated expanded a maternal health insurance,
subsidized daycare, other ways to to encourage women to not
have abortions and to empower them to make the decisions
not to have abortions. What I call the abortion myth
(28:25):
is the fiction that the religious right galvanized as a
political movement in response to the Roe v. Wage decision
of January twenty two, nineteen seventy three. I'm Randall Balmer,
John Phillips, Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College, and my
most recent book is Bad Faith, Race and the Rise
of the Religious Right. To understand the context, you have
(28:49):
to understand that for roughly fifty years before that moment,
evangelicals were not engaged politically, certainly not in an organized way.
Many were not even register and devote, and so there
emergence as a political force in the nineteen seventies was
a major event, and as we see now, it really
(29:12):
began the reshaping of the American political landscape on the
subject of abortion, and eventually row evangelicals were actually supportive
in Christianity. Today magazine, which is the flagship magazine of evangelicalism,
conducted a conference with the Christian Medical Society. Twenty three
(29:34):
heavyweight theologians from the evangelical world showed up and over
several days debated the morality of abortion. At the conclusion
of that meeting, they issued a statement saying, we can't
decide whether or not abortion is a moral issue, but
we think it should be available. In seventy one, the
Southern Baptist Convention, not known as the Redoubt of liberalism,
(29:58):
passed to resolution call for the legalization of abortion, which
they reaffirmed in nineteen seventy four, the year after Roe v. Wade,
and again in nineteen seventy six when the Roe v.
Wade ruling was handed down. Several evangelical leaders praised the
Roe v. Wade decision. The mobilization of evangelicals as a
(30:23):
political movement did start with a court ruling, but it
wasn't Row. It was a ruling on segregated private schools
that came out of a district court in Washington, d c.
And on June the district court ruled that and the
organization that engages in racial segregation or racial discrimination is not,
(30:46):
by definition a charitable institution, and therefore it has no
claims on tax exempt status. As the Internal Revenue Service
began to enforce that ruling over the course of the seventies,
it got the attention of places like Bob Jones University
in Greenville, South Carolina, a fundamental school that had segregation
(31:10):
virtually written into its charter, as well as people like
Jerry Folwell, who had started his own segregation academy in Lynchburg,
Virginia in nineteen sixty seven. It's time now for the
Old Time Gospel Hour with Jerry Folwell, mastor of the
Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. We are not
(31:31):
ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. That is what proved
to be the catalyst for the organizing surrounding the religious way.
So how did the evangelical movement go from supporting school
(31:53):
segregation to the powerful conservative force in American politics that
it is today. The answer a man named Paul Wyrick.
Wyrick was clever enough to realize that organizing a political
movement to defend racial segregation was not likely to generate
(32:15):
a huge grassroots audience, so he made two moves. The
first move he made was to say, no, we're not
defending racial segregation, we are defending religious freedom, which is
writing a page from the current current religious right Republican
(32:36):
Party playbook. His second move really fell into his lap,
and that was the abortion issue, and that happened in
the midterm elections. Wyck determined, according to his own account,
to go out at elect some improbable people in He
focused on four Senate races, and in all four of
(32:57):
those elections. The final weekend, pro lifers leaf litted church
parking lots, and two days later all four favored Democratic
candidates lost to anti abortion Republicans. He finally had found
the issue that he could use to mobilize grassroots evangelicals.
(33:23):
Abortion is a very fairly low cost political issue. The
fetus does not demand healthcare, a fetus does not demand
an education, and so the adoption of abortion as the
(33:43):
central plank of the religious right early in the nineties
really it didn't didn't cost them much in terms of
a political price. In the ninety six presidential election, evangelicals
voted for one of their own, Jimmy Carter, a proud
born again Christian. But ahead of the nineteen eighty election,
(34:06):
evangelical leaders openly targeted the Democrat and sought to find
a candidate who would do more for their cause. They
began sort of canvassing the Republican field looking for a challenger.
Two Jimmy Carter and finally, of course, they settled on
Ronald Reagan, an unlikely choice because here you had governor
(34:29):
of California, Hollywood actor. Hollywood was not exactly known as
a province of piety to many evangelicals, and somebody who
had been divorced and remarried, who in nineteen sixty seven
had signed into law the most liberal abortion bill in
the country. And nevertheless, the religious right decided that Reagan
was going to be their political messiah. In night, I
(34:52):
came across the memorandum from within the Reagan Bush campaign,
and I don't remember the precise state, but I believe
September of nine, and the internal memorandum said, we're in
trouble here. Uh, we're not pulling away from Carter. We
have to somehow rejig our message. And one of the
(35:14):
recommendations was to start talking about abortion. If there's even
a question about when human life begins, isn't it our
duty to err on the side of life. We must
not rest. And I a pledge to you that I
will not rest until a human life amendment becomes a
part of our constitution. With a so called pro life
(35:40):
president in the White House, thanks to his evangelical base,
the anti abortion movement gets to work once again. Legal
scholar Mary Ziggler. Initially, the anti abortion movement focused its
attentions on a constitutional amendment that would have not just
overturned Robe, but banned abortion coast to coast. By the
(36:05):
early eighties, it was becoming increasingly clear that that just
wasn't going to happen. So then the movement kind of
changed its focus, and its inspiration in part came from
Supreme Court decision where Ronald Reagan's first nominee, Sandra Day
O'Connor writes this descent, essentially suggesting that Row doesn't make
(36:26):
a lot of sense. And so the anti abortion movement
looks at this descent and says, you know, more people
like Sandra Day O'Connor on the court. We might not
be able to get abortion banned nationwide, but we could
at least get real overturned for groups life. The National
Right to Life Committee overturning Roe v. Wade has become
the holy Grail, has has become the race on detra
(36:47):
of the pro life movement, which it never originally was.
Again Daniel Williams, and once the strategy shifted to that
as the goal. Then it became very difficult for any
pro life activists to imagine supporting Democratic presidents or Democratic
senators who would not want to see the Supreme Court
(37:08):
shifted to the right on this particular issue, and similarly,
with the Republican Party, became more and more difficult for
most pro choice Republicans who care strongly about the issue
to imagine staying in a party that was moving so
decisively toward making Row a thing of the past. If
(37:28):
the goal is to appoint particular Supreme Court justices, then
the situation that we're in today is one where Republican
presidents are going to make sure that the justice that
they appoint is going to likely vote overturned Row, and
(37:53):
Democratic presidents, on the other hand, are always going to
try to appoint a justice who courts abortion rights, who
wants to leave the parameters of route intact. It was
not clear until the early at least that Supreme Court
appointments would decide the fate of Row. The Supreme Court,
(38:15):
it's what it's all about. The justices that I'm going
to a point will be pro life. They will have
a conservative bent. I think the case that most people
are thinking about right now in the case that every
nominee gets asked about Role v. Wade. Can you tell
me whether Roe was decided correctly? Center Again, I would
(38:37):
tell you that Roe versus Wade decided in ye as
a president United States Supreme Court, it has been reaffirmed
well as a general proposition. I understand the importance of
the precedent set forth in Roe v. Wade. But again,
I can't pre commit or say yes, I'm going in
(39:00):
with some agenda, because I'm not. I don't have any agenda.
I have no agenda to try to overrule casey um.
I have an agenda to stick to the rule of
law and decide cases as they come. We'll be right back.
(39:26):
Even if evangelicals didn't rally around the anti abortion movement
until the late nineteen seventies, the anti agitation started almost
immediately after row Here's sociologists Carol Joffey Roll versus Wade
was decided in January nineteen seventy three. Literally four days
(39:49):
later in Congress Um there's a resolution introduced, the so
called Church Amendment, named after Senator Frank church A, that
no entity would lose any phones if they refused to
perform abortion. So it was clear to me that this
was going to be an issue that was very divisive.
(40:12):
They called me and they said, would you be willing
to help us start uh an outpatient abortion clinic in Boulder,
And I said yes, I think that would be an
important thing to do, because I thought that that we
mean implementing the roll versus way decision, which wouldn't mean
anything unless doctors were doing abortions. Dr Warren Hern is
(40:34):
a physician and director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic in Boulder, Colorado.
He specializes in abortions that are harder to get, the
ones later in pregnancy. He's been doing this work for
more than fifty years. I thought I would do this
for a year or two then go back to school.
I helped start this clinic. I was the founding medical director.
(40:57):
I set up the clinic, I got the to mention
the equipment, I wrote the protocols, I devised the whole system,
and then I was performing all the abortions there. And
by the end of that first year, it was clear
to me that the performing abortions was the most important
thing that I could do in my medical career. Immediately,
(41:22):
I became the target of very vicious attacks by the
anti abortion people. I started getting obscene death threats in
the middle of the night two weeks after we opened
the office. There was a lot of his hostility among
in the medical community. There were some doctors who supported
what we were doing, but it was very tense and
(41:43):
very difficult. It became clear to me that the resistance
to this was really fanatic, that the anti abortion people
were really frightening. They were threatening me and other people,
and I couldn't understand why this was so controversial because
we were helping women. There were five shots fir the
(42:05):
front windows of my office. One of the bullets just
missed a member of my staff. I had just walked
through the front room. I really expect, have expected for
all this time to be assassinated at any time, so
when I'm leaving my office, I checked the perimeter to
see if they're out there. I cannot use the front
(42:27):
door of my office when the anti abortion people who
are demonstrated are out there, because I have to assume
that they're armed and they will kill me at the
first opportunity. Five of my medical colleagues have been assassinated,
several at point blank range. I have received letters from
the anti abortion fanatics saying, don't bother wearing a bullet
(42:49):
proof vest. We're gonna go for a head shot. And
that's what they did to Dr Tiller. One of the
nation's most well known late term abortion doctors, Dr George Tiller,
was and killed in church yesterday on May the thirty first,
two thousand nine. Doctor George Tiller was was an usher
(43:09):
for his Lutheran church in his wife was singing in
the choir. Dr Tiller was in the foyer of the church.
UH Scott Rhodor walked up to Dr Tiller and shot
him in the head, assassinating him. To the abortion providing community,
Dr Tiller was a saint, I mean, and they literally
(43:30):
referred to him as St. George. To the anti abortion community,
he was this egregious murderer. Once again, Carol Joffe. There's
only a handful of clinics in the United States where
people can get later abortions later here, meaning post twenty
four weeks. Doctor Hearne for many years has been one
(43:51):
of them. He's been targeted for years. Dr Tiller in Wichita,
who was a very close friend of of Dr Hearne.
He for years was targeted. Um Bill O'Reilly when he
had his Fox News show repeatedly referred to him as
Tiller the killer. Later that week, the week that Dr
(44:15):
Tiller was assassinated, I was invited to speak at the
Temple Manuel in Denver by the rabbi and the head
of the religious Coalition for Abortion Rights. I was there
taken there in an armored car by the the US
Federal Marshals. My family was not allowed to be with me.
They got there by other means, and there was a
(44:36):
large group of people in the temple. It was a
very very emotional situation to talking about my friend who
had been assassinated. And and so we're surrounded by armed officers.
And at one point our son said to his mom, Mommy,
are we the good ones? Are the bad ones? On
(44:59):
several occasions when Dr Tiller was assassinated, I was put
under the twenty four protection of US Federal marson who
were heavily armed. And one of the things they said,
you may not sit with your back to the window.
So when I'm out with friends or my family, you
know I'm in a wresting, I I don't sit with
my back to window. At home, we will not leave
(45:23):
the window shades up at night we closed the window shades.
Where else an American medicine would we tolerate. This very
important concept for me in my work on abortion and
trying to understand it is the idea of abortion exceptionalism
and the idea that abortion is treated like no other
(45:45):
aspect of of the health care system in America. It's
a common procedure. Uh, women who have babies at different
times in their lives have abortions. Um Sometimes they have
babies first and then an abortion. Sometimes I have an
abortion and then have babies when they're more ready to
have children. A very common procedure. But where else do
(46:08):
we see pickets? Do we see blockades? Do we see shootings?
Do we see regulation that that exists? No? Nowhere else?
I mean the state legislators over a thousand restrictions passed
over the years. I mean, just regulating it in ways
that are inappropriate. I will never forget the young woman
(46:32):
who was a teenager in high school from northern state,
and she looked at me said thank you for giving
me back my life. Well, you know, nothing takes the
place of that. Another young woman, the first year I
was doing this told me how she felt it makes
(46:54):
me choke. Up every time I think about it, and
and she said, he's going ever stopped doing this? So
you know this, this moves me fifty years later, okay,
to think about it. So I think that it's very
(47:14):
important to concentrate on this human interaction, this human process
of one person helping another person. That's what the practice
of medicine is. To be an abortion doctor then and
now takes a particular type of person. We wanted to
learn more about the people going into this profession in
(47:35):
the midst of all this controversy. I think I was
attuned to the need to fight free to reproductive freedom
because I was born at home and home birth is
also very controversial, so when I was born in Connecticut,
it wasn't legal. So I feel like I came into
(47:58):
this world being like, Yeah, you need to fight for
your bodily autonomy and for your reproductive experience. I'm Klin
Gregory Davis, and I am a medical student at UVM
Larner College of Medicine from a fourth year and I'm
going into O b G. I N at Brown. So
I really always wanted to be a midwife. That was
(48:18):
what I wanted to do when I was younger, and
so to get involved UM. I first became a duela UM,
which is, you know, a non medical labor and pregnancy
support person. I got trained with the DULA Project of
New York City, which is actually an organization that does
birth dualer services, but it also does abortion dualer services.
(48:39):
And I ended up absolutely loving my abortion dealer shifts UM.
I would go into the Planned Parenthood and up in
the Bronx and also in Brooklyn UM and would just
be with people through their abortion. And so from there
I decided that I wanted to be an abortion provider UM,
which kind of steered me into a different path than
(49:02):
midwif free UM in part just because you know, nurse
midwives can do abortions in some states, but it's a
little bit limited. And yeah, I didn't want to be
limited by anything, and I knew that, like politically, things
could always change, and so I felt like I needed
to get a degree that would be the most likely
(49:22):
UM for these procedures to be accessible to me. So,
in terms of abortion training, I think there are a
lot of places, and especially now as laws are going
to change, if a hospital is not able to do abortions,
then like nobody can get trained, right like there needs
to be the procedures in order to train the next generation.
So if a hospital or a state UM decides that
(49:44):
it's illegal, then like no students in that state are
going to be able to get trained. I think it's
probably already happening. I know it's been a big issue
in Texas UM since SP eight, and that has had
a big effect on where I applied to residency UM.
So I was applying in this this past fall. UM.
You know, sp A was under way, and I pretty
(50:08):
much did not apply or at least an't interview UM
at any states where I felt like if Roe v.
Wade was overturned, abortion would become illegal. I came to
medical school so that I could do this work. I
didn't come to medical school to like be an m
D so that I could deliver babies all the time,
although that's great UM, and so I have had the
(50:30):
thought like, oh my gosh, what if this becomes like
entirely illegal, and then I went to medical school and
can't do the thing that I wanted to do UM
and so that feels really kind of like an uncertain
future UM. But it also just inspires me to do
everything I can to keep this accessible and also to
get all the training that I can get. My name
(50:52):
is Dr Bob and Kumar use he him pronouns, and
I'm a family medicine physician working at Plant Parenthood, so
I provide abortion care here. I'm also the medical director
for Primary and trans Care, so provide some primary care
and gender care as well. Um and I've been in
Texas for about seven years now. For me growing up
(51:14):
in Corsicana, being we were undocumented at the time, and
then being you know, brown skinned, gay, and then experiencing
UH in that town and the over racism and really
recognizing what life is like for people like me compared
to other people. And then once I was in medical school,
(51:36):
I was pro choice, had no sense of, you know,
wanting to become an abortion provider, but then learned about
how safe it is, how common it is, how few
providers there are, and what a drastic difference it makes.
Recognize that there's a concentration of abortion access among folks
of color, that most people are low income or poor,
(51:57):
and it just was like, you know, of course, if
I want to help people like me, even though I
can never become pregnant, then the best thing I can
do as the doctors to provide abortion care. The abortion
care that Dr Kumar had wanted to provide has been
severely restricted since September when Texas enacted Senate Bill eight,
(52:17):
which effectively prohibits abortions after six weeks. So we went
from providing care up to um twenty weeks of conception,
which we were able to see the vast majority of folks.
Now with Senate Bill eight, I would say we're seeing
about a third to a half of the patients that
come into our clinics and providing an abortion for them,
(52:39):
and the rest of the patients or folks that we're
seeing where instead helping them figure out how to get
out of state so that means travel, um taking time
off of work. About sixty folks that access abortion in
the country already had children at home. We're spending a
lot of time navigating that. There is a lot of
anxiety stress that is new and different from what I've
(53:03):
experienced in the last seven years providing abortion care among
people and also staff, because I think for me and
the staff that I work with, we all show up
to help people they're pregnant. They know that they can't
be pregnant. We can make them feel better. We can
help them with that. That's what our job is, and
that's been taken away from us. And now we're in
crisis with our patients and they're asking us, am I
(53:25):
going to get there? What if the clinic closes, what
if I don't make it, what if my car doesn't
make all of these questions, and it's like, oh, we
can't help you, and we feel their stress. So it
is I think even as I'm talking, I'm feeling the
stress of my neck, like because it is every single
day for the last eight months of seeing so many
patients that we're not able to help. It is just very,
(53:45):
very heavy and traumatic, I think for all of us.
So last summer, my husband and I found out we
were pregnant with our first child um and after are
being cautiously optimistic through the first trimester, doing a variety
of testing and sonograms, we believe we're in the clear
(54:07):
and began to share the news with our friends and
our family, and at around thirteen weeks we had a
routine sonogram where the doctor suddenly saw a thickened band
behind the baby's neck, flagging us to go get additional
imaging by kind of assuring us that it was probably
nothing to worry about. A week later, the fetal medicine
(54:29):
sonographer was able to get a clear picture and see
a variety of health issues with our baby. And following
that sonogram, we went and sat in this room and
heard a group of doctors and geneticists explain the findings
and let us know that it was unlikely that our
baby would survive past birth, and their recommendation was to
(54:51):
do a CBS test that day to try to define
what exactly it was which they were thinking was likely chromosomal,
and unfortunately the results of this test can take weeks
to get back. So we went home that day knowing
that our pregnancy likely would need to be terminated, but
with no real clear answer on when we would know
(55:14):
exactly what was causing the issue. So over the next
several days we deliberated over what to do. And with
something like medical termination, the doctor cannot explicitly tell you
what to do. But with nothing but the sonogram findings,
that's all we really had to go off of. And
(55:34):
so you know, I spent a lot of time talking
about what our options were, and I just couldn't bear
holding our baby for weeks as my belly began to grow,
knowing that it was only really a matter of time
until we would have to end the pregnancy, and so
we ultimately decided to end the pregnancy with a DNA procedure,
(55:57):
which is um a surgery. It's done when you're in
your second trimester, so it's a little bit more involved.
And so as soon as we made the decision, it
quickly became very cut and dry, UM, and it was
it was pretty void of emotional support from that point on,
(56:18):
and my doctor or the doctor who was performing the surgery,
actually had to meet with me UM to confirm that
I understood what this decision meant, UM, and that this
was something that I wanted to do UM, which you know,
obviously this was the furthest thing from what I wanted
to do. I was given medicine a few hours in
(56:40):
advance of the surgery to begin the process, and as
I drove to the hospital with my husband, I you know,
started to experience tremendous physical pain as the process slowly
was starting, and prior to the surgery, as I led
in the hospital bed waiting to be wheeled off, I
was asked countless time what I was there for forcing
(57:02):
me to repeat over and over that I was there
for d n me to end my pregnancy. The physical
emotional pain of this day, these weeks, and the pain
that I continue to carry from this experience will stay
with me forever, and they continue to have lasting impacts
on so many parts of my life. And so I
(57:26):
just think that until you've gone through something like this,
you can't not imagine the trauma and sadness of these
moments that I'm describing, UM. And you know, this was
such an isolating experience, UM more than I ever imagined
it would be. Yet the more I speak about it,
(57:46):
the more I realize how I'm not alone. UM. As
I've shared my stories are looked for support. I have
found people that have gone through what I've gone through
and realized that while we are a very small percentage UM,
there is a community of us out there. I wanted,
(58:07):
and I still want nothing more than to have a baby,
and so terminating this pregnancy was the hardest decision of
my life, and it was not something I could have
ever imagined or wanted. And I feel thankful that I
live in a city where I did have access to
(58:27):
incredible health care that would allow me and only me
to ultimately make this decision abortion. The Body Politic is
executive produced by me Katie Couric and was created by
(58:49):
small team led by our intrepid supervising producer Lauren Hansen.
Editing and sound designed by Derrick Clements and Jessica crime Chi.
Production help from Julia Weaver. Researched by Nina Perlman and
especial thanks to Case and producers Courtney Litz and Adriana
(59:10):
Fasio
Good evening and a landmark ruling. The Supreme Court today
legalized abortions the majority and to raise the dignity of
woman and give her freedom of choice in this area
is an extraordinary event. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Couric, and
(00:26):
this is Abortion the Body Politic Part three. Today we
explored that historic nineteen seventy three decision and it's unraveling
in the five decades that followed. But let's begin where
we left off. When someone doesn't really know who I
am and have heard that I'm a lawyer, but they
don't know much about me, when I'd say, well, have
(00:48):
you ever heard of the case of roversus Wade? And
then they're usually stunned, because I mean, it's often still
described as the most one of the most well known
cases in favor of a shouldn't that there is? My
name is Linda Nelling. Coffee and Iron my late friend
(01:09):
Sarah Weddington were the two women did that pursued the
case of Roe versus Wade. It's impossible to talk about
the abortion rights movement without first talking to Linda. Linda
is the last living Road prosecutor after Sarah Weddington died
on December Linda knows the case intimately, and at eighty
(01:35):
she's witnessed the decades long fight to chip away at Row.
She spoke to us from a studio not far from
her home, which she shares with her longtime partner Becky Hart.
I had the distinct honor of having a blind day
with Lee Cogan December nine three, and over the course
(01:59):
of a whole evening, she said that she had worked
with Sarah Winnington on this Ruby Wade case. I said, well, no,
if that can't be, I'm a Dallas side. It was
a Dallas attorney named Linda Coffee, and her face fell
because she's that introverted. So for thirty eight years we've
been together, She's done mostly bankruptcy law, and I've done
(02:21):
different jobs and things. Linda is a lifelong Texan and
lives in a small town about eighty five miles east
of Dallas. She was born in Houston, graduated from Rice University,
and went on to law school. I went to University
of Texas at Austin and there were only about including me,
(02:42):
there was only about six women into the class that
that I started with, and we all would talk together
in the one place we usually could talk and and
not have to worry about anyone overhearing us was in
the the women's restroom, which was on the first floor
of the building. We were coming up at a time
(03:03):
when things were changing quickly for women. That was really
excited to think about helping women prepared to gain higher
positions and to seek a way of continuing their education
and not be compromised or having to worry about being
fired if they became pregnant or had someone decided they
(03:26):
had to meet children that they might not continue to
do a good job. After graduating from law school with
honors in getting the second highest score on the state
bar exam, Linda earned a coveted clerkship with Judge Sarah Hughes,
Texas is first female federal judge who was best known
(03:47):
for swearing and Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force one
after President Kennedy was assassinated in nineteen sixty three that
I was thankfully once again, here's Becky Hart. It's hard
to get a clerk job for the judges. You have
(04:08):
to be intelligent and do very well in law school. Succinctly,
Linda's scores were so high that she applied for that job,
and she got it. It's an honor, and that's what
set the whole ball in motion on abortion rights. The
first case that I was aware of was the case
(04:30):
out in California in nineteen sixty seven. California Governor Ronald
Reagan was among the first to liberalize abortion laws, extending
exceptions for therapeutic abortions. But the case Linda's talking about
came two years later in nineteen sixty nine, the People
Versus Bellis. The four to three decision from the state
(04:53):
Supreme Court declared California's eighteen fifty criminal abortion law unconstitutional.
The ruling helped repeal a conviction of Dr Leon P. Bellis,
who helped a woman get an abortion. It was a big,
big news deal. So I've just read about the case
just in the Dallas Morning News, and then I knew
(05:15):
there were some other cases that then followed, like there
was a case in Wisconsin, and then there was a
case in New York. So that's why I thought that
there would be a decent chance to win the case
if we filed in Texas. I still kept in contact
with some of the with Sarah what Eaton and some
of the other women that that I knew in my
(05:37):
class that it graduated. One of the things I did
when I decided that I had a sufficient basis was
I wrote to Sarah because I had heard she was
ready to follow them suit against the Texas abortion Law.
So I wrote her a letter and said to see
if she was interested in joining me in that suit.
(05:59):
They teamed up and on March third, nineteen seventy, Linda
filed a suit in Dallas on behalf of their client,
Norman McCorvey, using the pseudonym Jane Rowe. The hearing before
the three judge Corey in Dallas went went pretty smoothly.
The lower court unanimously ruled in Jane Roe's favor, finding
(06:20):
the Texas abortion law unconstitutional because it violated the right
to privacy. But when the district Attorney Henry Wade yes
that Wade announced he would continue to pursue abortion cases,
Linda was able to file a repeal directly to the
Supreme Court. Oral arguments were set for December thirteenth, ninety one.
(06:45):
We hear arguments number eighteen against whenever you're ready, Mr
Chief Justice, and may have pleased the Court. The instant
case is a direct appeal from a decision of the
United States District Court of the Northern District of Texas,
and then again on October eleventh, nine, first seventy eight
(07:11):
and roll against Wade Yes Lyndon. Sarah had to reargue
the case, a rare occurrence because there were only seven
justices present the first time. Weddington, you may proceed when
here you're ready, Mr Chief Justice, and may have placed
the court. We are once again before this Court to
(07:31):
ask relief against the continued enforcement of the Texas Abortion Statute,
and asked that you affirm the ruling of the three
judge court below, which held our statute unconstitutional for two reasons,
the first that it was vague and the second that
it interfered with the Ninth Amendment right of a woman
to determine whether or not she would continue or terminate
(07:54):
a pregnancy. As you will recall there are Linda recalls
a few details that stand out about her Supreme Court experience.
The closest restroom to where the Supreme Court held their
arguments was three three big staircases below. People would probably
(08:15):
notice that if they were women, but not not men,
and at one of the arguments some of the justices
wives were sitting in the courtroom, I wouldn't have recognized
the wives, but I just told us we were walking
in that several of the wives of the Supreme Court
were there. So I just assumed that that probably meant
from people that had been around more Supreme Court arguments
(08:37):
than I had, that that was probably a good sign
that that wasn't considered important by the court. While Linda
and Sarah split the oral arguments and the lower court,
it was Sarah who presented and the Supreme Court. Linda
took notes. She spoke, and I thought she did very well,
and uh, it was kind of hard to write everything down,
(09:03):
so I tried to just write down the questions because
I figured i'd remember the the answers. I think I
was probably more nervous that time. I wasn't that nervous
before the three judge court in Dallas, but to get
it when you're really going for the highest court in
the land. Curiously, the original Road decision was leaked to
(09:28):
a Supreme Court clerk shared the court ruling on background
to a Time magazine reporter, But when the decision was
delayed slightly and Time a weekly ran the story anyway,
it appeared in print the day before the actual decision
was handed down. I first read the Time magazine that
(09:48):
said the Supreme Court was ready to overrule the Texas
abortion law and it was going to be about a
serace of seven to vote. So I had read about it,
I think the day before it came out, and Sarah
said she found out about it when she heard the
decision that was rendered the next day, and that's when
(10:09):
she started getting her phone was calling and and at
first she wasn't sure what it was, and they were
they were saying that we had won, and that was
just that was just great because the phones were calling
and everything was mostly mostly on the only the people
that called were very positive about it. I really thought
that was gonna be it after the first Supreme Court victory.
(10:32):
But the afternoon after the decision in Roe versus Way
came out, l b J died. The senior partner in
the firm that I was with came in and said, well,
you've been knocked off the front page because L b
J died, And and that's what was the headline and
the Dallas Morning News and then our story I think
it was below what they called below the fold. Here's
(10:54):
abortion legal scholar Mary Ziggler to help explain the details
of the jan The Supreme Court voted seven to two
in nineteen seventy three that that law was unconstitutional and
that it violated a constitutional right to privacy that the
Court had recognized in earlier rulings on things like marriage
(11:17):
and contraception. The Court held that right to privacy was
broad enough to encompass the decision about whether to have
an abortion, and the Court laid out what at the
time was called the trimester frameworks that would be used
to determine if abortion laws were constitutional. The Court also
rejected a lot of key anti abortion arguments, like the
(11:38):
argument that the Constitution recognized fetal personhood, which would have
made abortion unconstitutional nationwide. So, coming out of Row, um,
you know, the majority of state laws that were then
on the books were rendered unconstitutional. We'll be right back. Well,
(12:15):
I think it depends on where you stand and who
you are whether you think that Row was successful or unsuccessful.
Historian Ricky Solinger. When feminists and other women experienced the
Roe v. Wade decision in they expected that a nationalization
(12:39):
of the right to abortion would lead to a number
of transformative experiences for women in the United States, they
expected marriages that were more equal, They were possessors of
(13:01):
their own sexuality, that they could have premarital sex without
the fear of unwed pregnancy and the shames that that
had carried for several decades. They felt much safer embracing
their own sexuality and pursuing it. Then, of course, there
(13:23):
were the economic expectations that if you can control your fertility,
you have a much better chance of being able to
pursue the educational programs that you said before, yourself, making
professional choices, being able to get a job, that you
(13:45):
can time your maternity according to your professional growth, that
you can stay or go where you can be an
equal to your husband and also be economically independent. That
changes the landscape so profoundly that you're hardly the same
(14:05):
person anymore, that that has enormous repercussions for what woman means.
Other women have been very clear eyed about the limits
of the impact of legalization. As Black women, we knew
that role was going to be inadequate to protect us
(14:26):
from the intersectional oppression. Activists academic and one of the
founders of the reproductive justice movement, Loretta Ross, the National
Council of Negro Women wrote a statement about that in
nine three in response to Row, when they talked about
how role will become just another way to deny Black
(14:48):
women are full human rights, are full right to self determination.
And the reason we know that, or knew that well
because there were so many way other ways that we
had already experienced where Black women's parenting and reproductive options
were being threatened, like with sterilization abuse, but more gregious
(15:11):
and more obvious. Was at any time Black women became
civically active around voting rights or housing rights or trying
to fight violence that was technical any of that time,
the first thing the government would do with be to
threaten to take our children away, you know, and fighting
(15:31):
well abortion rights didn't address that. We always knew that
even if we had fully funded abortion services that were
totally safe and totally accessible, we still suffer from a
racialized gender oppression that we had to fight. The leaders
(15:56):
of Reproductive Justice point out regularly that abortion has been
legal for fifty years, but how accessible has it been
two women without resources to be adequate consumers. So we
know that Within two years of ROW, the Congress worked
(16:20):
very hard to pass the High Amendment, which by the
by the was complete, which said no federal funding for
abortion the one medical prostidure that was singled out to
be excluded from federal funding um under the Medicaid Act,
(16:46):
and that meant that poor women were poor choicemakers. The
pro choice framework assumed that you have choices. It's a
marketplace idea, when actually the marketplace doesn't work well for
people who don't have you know, the currency or the
(17:06):
privileged as a marketplace doesn't the same way the SBA.
The Texas abortion ban is not gonna fall most heavily
on women with the means to go to another state.
It's gonna fall it was heavily on the people who
are trapped, who can't go anywhere. The Norman G. Mccorby's
(17:28):
of the world, the original Rose who idonically was from Texas.
Loretta understands this all too well. She's the survivor of
sexual violence and sterilization. You might recall some of Loretta's
story from episode two, but how a university while I
(17:50):
was a student there, I accepted implantation of the i
u D called the Dalkon shield in despite her IUD
causing acute pelvic inflammatory disease. A doctor refused to take
out the device and her fallopian tubes burst. I didn't
(18:10):
enter this movement fighting for abortion rights. I was into
the movement fighting for the right to have children. And
it wasn't until I got into the work that I
saw that they were two sides of the same coin,
and it's all about denying women the right to con
to make our own reproductive decisions, whether to have a
child or not to have a child. And then when
(18:33):
you intersect the sexual violence I had been through, then
I knew that we needed a larger framework than what
the current discussions were paralyzed by that pro life pro
choice dichotomy, which was so inadequate for describing my lived
experiences and so how reproductive justice is developed. Was at
(19:03):
a conference organized by the Illinois Pro Choice Alliance in
June in Chicago. On the first day of the conference,
we heard a presentation by representative of the Clinton administration.
Hillary Clinton had been put in charge of the Clinton
administration effort to do health care reform, but this representative
(19:27):
said that they knew was going to be a fight
to get healthcare reform past the Republicans, and so they
conceptualized that if they omitted or at least reduced all
references to reproductive healthcare that that would increase his chances
of passage. There were twelve most black women who were
(19:50):
at this conference. The prefer might have been even more,
but able Mabel Thomas, who was a Georgia state representative
at the time, called us together in her hotel room
that night after we heard this presentation, and she's like,
this doesn't make any sense. Why would they come to
a feminist conference, a pro choice conference asked us to
(20:11):
endorse a healthcare plan that all misreproductive healthcare. That's like
the most male centric health care plan you could think of,
because reproductive healthcare is what drives women to the doctor.
That was the night in which we conceptualized reproductive justice
(20:31):
because the other thing that we realized was that we
were dissatisfied with how abortion was always isolated from social
justice issues, and that isolation wasn't doing us any good.
Are representing what black women went through because any time
a woman is pregnant, oh well, let's put it this way,
(20:54):
she doesn't even have to be pregnant. Any time her
period is just late. She has where we can all
these oh my god, conversations oh my god, am I pregnant?
Oh my god? What am I gonna tell my mom?
Or what am I gonna tell my partner? Am I
gonna keep my job? Or can I stay in school?
Or do even I'm a bedroom to put this child in.
(21:15):
So she's got good answers to the oh my god questions,
This is gonna turn an unplanned pregnancy into a wanted child.
But if she has bad answers to the oh my
god question, she may even turn a planned pregnancy into
an abortion. And so for the pro life movement and
the pro choice me with the both start with the
(21:36):
pregnancy is starting too far downstream in our opinion. If
you really want to quote reduce the need for abortion,
really talk about how actual human beings make decisions and
address those things that discourage people from becoming parents. And
(21:59):
so we splice together social justice and reproductive rights to
create the term reproductive justice. We define reproductive justice as
the right to have a child, the right not to
have a child, and the right to raise your children
in safe and healthy environments. And then that was how
(22:20):
we articulated in a But by two thousand and four,
a new generation of activists were coming up. Black women
in particular, who are arguing that the original three tenants
didn't include gender not conforming in LGBT people, and so
(22:40):
they added a fourth tenant to talk about the right
to gender identity, sexual pleasure, and self determination in terms
of one's reproductive options and choices. I'm pleased to say
that even though we didn't intend it to move so
(23:01):
successfully from the margins to the center, it has done that,
and it is supplanted how people talk about reproductive politics
moving up beyond that pro choice, pro life. Binary people
have realized that that framework, that limited framework, has outlived
it's usefulness. My name is Laarata Lee Wallace and I
(23:31):
am a organizer based in othern California, and I am
work with our statewide abortion front here in California called
Access Reproductive Justice. So my first abortion, the pregnancy test
came back positive, and before I could even get off
the toilet with the pregnancy test in my hand, I
had messaged one of my friends who I knew was
very active in the repros DAIS and it was also
(23:53):
on the board of our abortion from back home, who
was also like my supervisor at the time at the
Reproductive Dresses Order that I was working with UM. It
was like, Hey, I'm pregnant, don't want to be what
do I do? Like verbatim, And she was like, perfect,
you came to the right place. We'll get you squared away.
Like what do you need? And I'm like, I can't
afford an abortion. First and foremost, I was a Medicaid recipient,
and we know because of the High Ammendment that you
(24:14):
can't medicate recipients, can't you know, use their Medicaid to
provide to cover abortion costs. It was also a full
time student at the time a couple of years emancipated
from the foster care system, so I was essentially like
on my own, UM, and I have messaged her and
asked her like I don't know, I don't really know
what I need right now, UM, but I just need
the money. UM. So I was able to pledge maybe
(24:35):
like a hundred dollars to my abortion at the time,
but that was all I could do and the Abortion
Fund covered the rest. But as I was in the clinic,
I was like watching a bunch of news coverage around
the murders of Brianna Taylor in the mad Aubrey. As
I'm sitting in this abortion clinic, as I'm also thinking,
like I hope I don't get COVID, and also as
my support people can't come in with me to the
(24:56):
clinic because of COVID. So I'm like sitting here in
this clinic for like I have like three appointments, like
two and a half three hours at a time, um
if like peak covid. Um So, I was able to
get my abortion medication. But I had my appointment on
a Friday, and because the clinic wasn't open on Saturday
or Sunday, and there's this twenty four hour waiting period.
(25:18):
Even though I had had them my ultrasound and like
everything was good to go, I had to wait until
that following Monday to then get my medication. But then
I had to wait another two and a half hours
after the doctor got done seeing everybody to just to
get my medication. Um So I was able to get
you know, my medication and go home and you know,
finish my abortion and went back a few weeks later
(25:41):
to make sure that um I didn't have like any
retain products um of the pregnancy, and I didn't, so
I was fine. Um but I did, like the cart
was outside of the abortion clinic. Was so happy that
it was finally over because I knew immediately when I
was pregnant that I wanted to have an abortion. There
was also no shame in it. I was actually also
very empowered that for the first time in my life
(26:03):
and realizing, you know that this is a decision that
I'm making for me and historically, you know, black women
and them have not been able to make their own
reproductive decisions. And also as someone who has essentially been
a word of the state, you know, being owned, you know,
by the state as a foster, as the foster care youth,
it made all the difference for me because I'm like, Wow,
(26:24):
this is like one of the biggest decisions for me,
um in my life that I'm going to going to
make or to not make right, but regardless of what happens,
is going to impact the trajectory of my life forever.
So being able to make that decision as a black
person person and foremost um and also for myself made
all the difference for me. When we come back how
abortion got politicized Before Roe v. Wade, the pro life
(26:59):
movement was not partisan. Daniel Williams is a historian and
author of defenders of the unborn. The pro life movement
before Roe v. Wade. If one had to describe it
as associated with a particular ideology rather than the other,
it would be more accurate to describe it as a
(27:20):
liberal political movement than a conservative one, because the majority
of pro life activists before Row were for the most
part Democrats who believed in the principles of an expanded
social welfare state. The pro life movement was overwhelmingly Catholic
before Roe v. Wade, and most Northeastern and Midwestern Catholics
(27:42):
had in the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies been
shaped to at least a certain extent by the assumptions
of of New Deal liberalism, the assumptions that the state
had an obligation to care for the less fortunate. A
number of pro life activists in the late nineteen sixties
and early nineteen seventies were also opposed to Vietnam War.
The number were very liberal Democrats. UH number head concerns
(28:04):
about capital punishment. UH and some of the pro life
organizations at the time advocated expanded a maternal health insurance,
subsidized daycare, other ways to to encourage women to not
have abortions and to empower them to make the decisions
not to have abortions. What I call the abortion myth
(28:25):
is the fiction that the religious right galvanized as a
political movement in response to the Roe v. Wage decision
of January twenty two, nineteen seventy three. I'm Randall Balmer,
John Phillips, Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College, and my
most recent book is Bad Faith, Race and the Rise
of the Religious Right. To understand the context, you have
(28:49):
to understand that for roughly fifty years before that moment,
evangelicals were not engaged politically, certainly not in an organized way.
Many were not even register and devote, and so there
emergence as a political force in the nineteen seventies was
a major event, and as we see now, it really
(29:12):
began the reshaping of the American political landscape on the
subject of abortion, and eventually row evangelicals were actually supportive
in Christianity. Today magazine, which is the flagship magazine of evangelicalism,
conducted a conference with the Christian Medical Society. Twenty three
(29:34):
heavyweight theologians from the evangelical world showed up and over
several days debated the morality of abortion. At the conclusion
of that meeting, they issued a statement saying, we can't
decide whether or not abortion is a moral issue, but
we think it should be available. In seventy one, the
Southern Baptist Convention, not known as the Redoubt of liberalism,
(29:58):
passed to resolution call for the legalization of abortion, which
they reaffirmed in nineteen seventy four, the year after Roe v. Wade,
and again in nineteen seventy six when the Roe v.
Wade ruling was handed down. Several evangelical leaders praised the
Roe v. Wade decision. The mobilization of evangelicals as a
(30:23):
political movement did start with a court ruling, but it
wasn't Row. It was a ruling on segregated private schools
that came out of a district court in Washington, d c.
And on June the district court ruled that and the
organization that engages in racial segregation or racial discrimination is not,
(30:46):
by definition a charitable institution, and therefore it has no
claims on tax exempt status. As the Internal Revenue Service
began to enforce that ruling over the course of the seventies,
it got the attention of places like Bob Jones University
in Greenville, South Carolina, a fundamental school that had segregation
(31:10):
virtually written into its charter, as well as people like
Jerry Folwell, who had started his own segregation academy in Lynchburg,
Virginia in nineteen sixty seven. It's time now for the
Old Time Gospel Hour with Jerry Folwell, mastor of the
Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia. We are not
(31:31):
ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. That is what proved
to be the catalyst for the organizing surrounding the religious way.
So how did the evangelical movement go from supporting school
(31:53):
segregation to the powerful conservative force in American politics that
it is today. The answer a man named Paul Wyrick.
Wyrick was clever enough to realize that organizing a political
movement to defend racial segregation was not likely to generate
(32:15):
a huge grassroots audience, so he made two moves. The
first move he made was to say, no, we're not
defending racial segregation, we are defending religious freedom, which is
writing a page from the current current religious right Republican
(32:36):
Party playbook. His second move really fell into his lap,
and that was the abortion issue, and that happened in
the midterm elections. Wyck determined, according to his own account,
to go out at elect some improbable people in He
focused on four Senate races, and in all four of
(32:57):
those elections. The final weekend, pro lifers leaf litted church
parking lots, and two days later all four favored Democratic
candidates lost to anti abortion Republicans. He finally had found
the issue that he could use to mobilize grassroots evangelicals.
(33:23):
Abortion is a very fairly low cost political issue. The
fetus does not demand healthcare, a fetus does not demand
an education, and so the adoption of abortion as the
(33:43):
central plank of the religious right early in the nineties
really it didn't didn't cost them much in terms of
a political price. In the ninety six presidential election, evangelicals
voted for one of their own, Jimmy Carter, a proud
born again Christian. But ahead of the nineteen eighty election,
(34:06):
evangelical leaders openly targeted the Democrat and sought to find
a candidate who would do more for their cause. They
began sort of canvassing the Republican field looking for a challenger.
Two Jimmy Carter and finally, of course, they settled on
Ronald Reagan, an unlikely choice because here you had governor
(34:29):
of California, Hollywood actor. Hollywood was not exactly known as
a province of piety to many evangelicals, and somebody who
had been divorced and remarried, who in nineteen sixty seven
had signed into law the most liberal abortion bill in
the country. And nevertheless, the religious right decided that Reagan
was going to be their political messiah. In night, I
(34:52):
came across the memorandum from within the Reagan Bush campaign,
and I don't remember the precise state, but I believe
September of nine, and the internal memorandum said, we're in
trouble here. Uh, we're not pulling away from Carter. We
have to somehow rejig our message. And one of the
(35:14):
recommendations was to start talking about abortion. If there's even
a question about when human life begins, isn't it our
duty to err on the side of life. We must
not rest. And I a pledge to you that I
will not rest until a human life amendment becomes a
part of our constitution. With a so called pro life
(35:40):
president in the White House, thanks to his evangelical base,
the anti abortion movement gets to work once again. Legal
scholar Mary Ziggler. Initially, the anti abortion movement focused its
attentions on a constitutional amendment that would have not just
overturned Robe, but banned abortion coast to coast. By the
(36:05):
early eighties, it was becoming increasingly clear that that just
wasn't going to happen. So then the movement kind of
changed its focus, and its inspiration in part came from
Supreme Court decision where Ronald Reagan's first nominee, Sandra Day
O'Connor writes this descent, essentially suggesting that Row doesn't make
(36:26):
a lot of sense. And so the anti abortion movement
looks at this descent and says, you know, more people
like Sandra Day O'Connor on the court. We might not
be able to get abortion banned nationwide, but we could
at least get real overturned for groups life. The National
Right to Life Committee overturning Roe v. Wade has become
the holy Grail, has has become the race on detra
(36:47):
of the pro life movement, which it never originally was.
Again Daniel Williams, and once the strategy shifted to that
as the goal. Then it became very difficult for any
pro life activists to imagine supporting Democratic presidents or Democratic
senators who would not want to see the Supreme Court
(37:08):
shifted to the right on this particular issue, and similarly,
with the Republican Party, became more and more difficult for
most pro choice Republicans who care strongly about the issue
to imagine staying in a party that was moving so
decisively toward making Row a thing of the past. If
(37:28):
the goal is to appoint particular Supreme Court justices, then
the situation that we're in today is one where Republican
presidents are going to make sure that the justice that
they appoint is going to likely vote overturned Row, and
(37:53):
Democratic presidents, on the other hand, are always going to
try to appoint a justice who courts abortion rights, who
wants to leave the parameters of route intact. It was
not clear until the early at least that Supreme Court
appointments would decide the fate of Row. The Supreme Court,
(38:15):
it's what it's all about. The justices that I'm going
to a point will be pro life. They will have
a conservative bent. I think the case that most people
are thinking about right now in the case that every
nominee gets asked about Role v. Wade. Can you tell
me whether Roe was decided correctly? Center Again, I would
(38:37):
tell you that Roe versus Wade decided in ye as
a president United States Supreme Court, it has been reaffirmed
well as a general proposition. I understand the importance of
the precedent set forth in Roe v. Wade. But again,
I can't pre commit or say yes, I'm going in
(39:00):
with some agenda, because I'm not. I don't have any agenda.
I have no agenda to try to overrule casey um.
I have an agenda to stick to the rule of
law and decide cases as they come. We'll be right back.
(39:26):
Even if evangelicals didn't rally around the anti abortion movement
until the late nineteen seventies, the anti agitation started almost
immediately after row Here's sociologists Carol Joffey Roll versus Wade
was decided in January nineteen seventy three. Literally four days
(39:49):
later in Congress Um there's a resolution introduced, the so
called Church Amendment, named after Senator Frank church A, that
no entity would lose any phones if they refused to
perform abortion. So it was clear to me that this
was going to be an issue that was very divisive.
(40:12):
They called me and they said, would you be willing
to help us start uh an outpatient abortion clinic in Boulder,
And I said yes, I think that would be an
important thing to do, because I thought that that we
mean implementing the roll versus way decision, which wouldn't mean
anything unless doctors were doing abortions. Dr Warren Hern is
(40:34):
a physician and director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic in Boulder, Colorado.
He specializes in abortions that are harder to get, the
ones later in pregnancy. He's been doing this work for
more than fifty years. I thought I would do this
for a year or two then go back to school.
I helped start this clinic. I was the founding medical director.
(40:57):
I set up the clinic, I got the to mention
the equipment, I wrote the protocols, I devised the whole system,
and then I was performing all the abortions there. And
by the end of that first year, it was clear
to me that the performing abortions was the most important
thing that I could do in my medical career. Immediately,
(41:22):
I became the target of very vicious attacks by the
anti abortion people. I started getting obscene death threats in
the middle of the night two weeks after we opened
the office. There was a lot of his hostility among
in the medical community. There were some doctors who supported
what we were doing, but it was very tense and
(41:43):
very difficult. It became clear to me that the resistance
to this was really fanatic, that the anti abortion people
were really frightening. They were threatening me and other people,
and I couldn't understand why this was so controversial because
we were helping women. There were five shots fir the
(42:05):
front windows of my office. One of the bullets just
missed a member of my staff. I had just walked
through the front room. I really expect, have expected for
all this time to be assassinated at any time, so
when I'm leaving my office, I checked the perimeter to
see if they're out there. I cannot use the front
(42:27):
door of my office when the anti abortion people who
are demonstrated are out there, because I have to assume
that they're armed and they will kill me at the
first opportunity. Five of my medical colleagues have been assassinated,
several at point blank range. I have received letters from
the anti abortion fanatics saying, don't bother wearing a bullet
(42:49):
proof vest. We're gonna go for a head shot. And
that's what they did to Dr Tiller. One of the
nation's most well known late term abortion doctors, Dr George Tiller,
was and killed in church yesterday on May the thirty first,
two thousand nine. Doctor George Tiller was was an usher
(43:09):
for his Lutheran church in his wife was singing in
the choir. Dr Tiller was in the foyer of the church.
UH Scott Rhodor walked up to Dr Tiller and shot
him in the head, assassinating him. To the abortion providing community,
Dr Tiller was a saint, I mean, and they literally
(43:30):
referred to him as St. George. To the anti abortion community,
he was this egregious murderer. Once again, Carol Joffe. There's
only a handful of clinics in the United States where
people can get later abortions later here, meaning post twenty
four weeks. Doctor Hearne for many years has been one
(43:51):
of them. He's been targeted for years. Dr Tiller in Wichita,
who was a very close friend of of Dr Hearne.
He for years was targeted. Um Bill O'Reilly when he
had his Fox News show repeatedly referred to him as
Tiller the killer. Later that week, the week that Dr
(44:15):
Tiller was assassinated, I was invited to speak at the
Temple Manuel in Denver by the rabbi and the head
of the religious Coalition for Abortion Rights. I was there
taken there in an armored car by the the US
Federal Marshals. My family was not allowed to be with me.
They got there by other means, and there was a
(44:36):
large group of people in the temple. It was a
very very emotional situation to talking about my friend who
had been assassinated. And and so we're surrounded by armed officers.
And at one point our son said to his mom, Mommy,
are we the good ones? Are the bad ones? On
(44:59):
several occasions when Dr Tiller was assassinated, I was put
under the twenty four protection of US Federal marson who
were heavily armed. And one of the things they said,
you may not sit with your back to the window.
So when I'm out with friends or my family, you
know I'm in a wresting, I I don't sit with
my back to window. At home, we will not leave
(45:23):
the window shades up at night we closed the window shades.
Where else an American medicine would we tolerate. This very
important concept for me in my work on abortion and
trying to understand it is the idea of abortion exceptionalism
and the idea that abortion is treated like no other
(45:45):
aspect of of the health care system in America. It's
a common procedure. Uh, women who have babies at different
times in their lives have abortions. Um Sometimes they have
babies first and then an abortion. Sometimes I have an
abortion and then have babies when they're more ready to
have children. A very common procedure. But where else do
(46:08):
we see pickets? Do we see blockades? Do we see shootings?
Do we see regulation that that exists? No? Nowhere else?
I mean the state legislators over a thousand restrictions passed
over the years. I mean, just regulating it in ways
that are inappropriate. I will never forget the young woman
(46:32):
who was a teenager in high school from northern state,
and she looked at me said thank you for giving
me back my life. Well, you know, nothing takes the
place of that. Another young woman, the first year I
was doing this told me how she felt it makes
(46:54):
me choke. Up every time I think about it, and
and she said, he's going ever stopped doing this? So
you know this, this moves me fifty years later, okay,
to think about it. So I think that it's very
(47:14):
important to concentrate on this human interaction, this human process
of one person helping another person. That's what the practice
of medicine is. To be an abortion doctor then and
now takes a particular type of person. We wanted to
learn more about the people going into this profession in
(47:35):
the midst of all this controversy. I think I was
attuned to the need to fight free to reproductive freedom
because I was born at home and home birth is
also very controversial, so when I was born in Connecticut,
it wasn't legal. So I feel like I came into
(47:58):
this world being like, Yeah, you need to fight for
your bodily autonomy and for your reproductive experience. I'm Klin
Gregory Davis, and I am a medical student at UVM
Larner College of Medicine from a fourth year and I'm
going into O b G. I N at Brown. So
I really always wanted to be a midwife. That was
(48:18):
what I wanted to do when I was younger, and
so to get involved UM. I first became a duela UM,
which is, you know, a non medical labor and pregnancy
support person. I got trained with the DULA Project of
New York City, which is actually an organization that does
birth dualer services, but it also does abortion dualer services.
(48:39):
And I ended up absolutely loving my abortion dealer shifts UM.
I would go into the Planned Parenthood and up in
the Bronx and also in Brooklyn UM and would just
be with people through their abortion. And so from there
I decided that I wanted to be an abortion provider UM,
which kind of steered me into a different path than
(49:02):
midwif free UM in part just because you know, nurse
midwives can do abortions in some states, but it's a
little bit limited. And yeah, I didn't want to be
limited by anything, and I knew that, like politically, things
could always change, and so I felt like I needed
to get a degree that would be the most likely
(49:22):
UM for these procedures to be accessible to me. So,
in terms of abortion training, I think there are a
lot of places, and especially now as laws are going
to change, if a hospital is not able to do abortions,
then like nobody can get trained, right like there needs
to be the procedures in order to train the next generation.
So if a hospital or a state UM decides that
(49:44):
it's illegal, then like no students in that state are
going to be able to get trained. I think it's
probably already happening. I know it's been a big issue
in Texas UM since SP eight, and that has had
a big effect on where I applied to residency UM.
So I was applying in this this past fall. UM.
You know, sp A was under way, and I pretty
(50:08):
much did not apply or at least an't interview UM
at any states where I felt like if Roe v.
Wade was overturned, abortion would become illegal. I came to
medical school so that I could do this work. I
didn't come to medical school to like be an m
D so that I could deliver babies all the time,
although that's great UM, and so I have had the
(50:30):
thought like, oh my gosh, what if this becomes like
entirely illegal, and then I went to medical school and
can't do the thing that I wanted to do UM
and so that feels really kind of like an uncertain
future UM. But it also just inspires me to do
everything I can to keep this accessible and also to
get all the training that I can get. My name
(50:52):
is Dr Bob and Kumar use he him pronouns, and
I'm a family medicine physician working at Plant Parenthood, so
I provide abortion care here. I'm also the medical director
for Primary and trans Care, so provide some primary care
and gender care as well. Um and I've been in
Texas for about seven years now. For me growing up
(51:14):
in Corsicana, being we were undocumented at the time, and
then being you know, brown skinned, gay, and then experiencing
UH in that town and the over racism and really
recognizing what life is like for people like me compared
to other people. And then once I was in medical school,
(51:36):
I was pro choice, had no sense of, you know,
wanting to become an abortion provider, but then learned about
how safe it is, how common it is, how few
providers there are, and what a drastic difference it makes.
Recognize that there's a concentration of abortion access among folks
of color, that most people are low income or poor,
(51:57):
and it just was like, you know, of course, if
I want to help people like me, even though I
can never become pregnant, then the best thing I can
do as the doctors to provide abortion care. The abortion
care that Dr Kumar had wanted to provide has been
severely restricted since September when Texas enacted Senate Bill eight,
(52:17):
which effectively prohibits abortions after six weeks. So we went
from providing care up to um twenty weeks of conception,
which we were able to see the vast majority of folks.
Now with Senate Bill eight, I would say we're seeing
about a third to a half of the patients that
come into our clinics and providing an abortion for them,
(52:39):
and the rest of the patients or folks that we're
seeing where instead helping them figure out how to get
out of state so that means travel, um taking time
off of work. About sixty folks that access abortion in
the country already had children at home. We're spending a
lot of time navigating that. There is a lot of
anxiety stress that is new and different from what I've
(53:03):
experienced in the last seven years providing abortion care among
people and also staff, because I think for me and
the staff that I work with, we all show up
to help people they're pregnant. They know that they can't
be pregnant. We can make them feel better. We can
help them with that. That's what our job is, and
that's been taken away from us. And now we're in
crisis with our patients and they're asking us, am I
(53:25):
going to get there? What if the clinic closes, what
if I don't make it, what if my car doesn't
make all of these questions, and it's like, oh, we
can't help you, and we feel their stress. So it
is I think even as I'm talking, I'm feeling the
stress of my neck, like because it is every single
day for the last eight months of seeing so many
patients that we're not able to help. It is just very,
(53:45):
very heavy and traumatic, I think for all of us.
So last summer, my husband and I found out we
were pregnant with our first child um and after are
being cautiously optimistic through the first trimester, doing a variety
of testing and sonograms, we believe we're in the clear
(54:07):
and began to share the news with our friends and
our family, and at around thirteen weeks we had a
routine sonogram where the doctor suddenly saw a thickened band
behind the baby's neck, flagging us to go get additional
imaging by kind of assuring us that it was probably
nothing to worry about. A week later, the fetal medicine
(54:29):
sonographer was able to get a clear picture and see
a variety of health issues with our baby. And following
that sonogram, we went and sat in this room and
heard a group of doctors and geneticists explain the findings
and let us know that it was unlikely that our
baby would survive past birth, and their recommendation was to
(54:51):
do a CBS test that day to try to define
what exactly it was which they were thinking was likely chromosomal,
and unfortunately the results of this test can take weeks
to get back. So we went home that day knowing
that our pregnancy likely would need to be terminated, but
with no real clear answer on when we would know
(55:14):
exactly what was causing the issue. So over the next
several days we deliberated over what to do. And with
something like medical termination, the doctor cannot explicitly tell you
what to do. But with nothing but the sonogram findings,
that's all we really had to go off of. And
(55:34):
so you know, I spent a lot of time talking
about what our options were, and I just couldn't bear
holding our baby for weeks as my belly began to grow,
knowing that it was only really a matter of time
until we would have to end the pregnancy, and so
we ultimately decided to end the pregnancy with a DNA procedure,
(55:57):
which is um a surgery. It's done when you're in
your second trimester, so it's a little bit more involved.
And so as soon as we made the decision, it
quickly became very cut and dry, UM, and it was
it was pretty void of emotional support from that point on,
(56:18):
and my doctor or the doctor who was performing the surgery,
actually had to meet with me UM to confirm that
I understood what this decision meant, UM, and that this
was something that I wanted to do UM, which you know,
obviously this was the furthest thing from what I wanted
to do. I was given medicine a few hours in
(56:40):
advance of the surgery to begin the process, and as
I drove to the hospital with my husband, I you know,
started to experience tremendous physical pain as the process slowly
was starting, and prior to the surgery, as I led
in the hospital bed waiting to be wheeled off, I
was asked countless time what I was there for forcing
(57:02):
me to repeat over and over that I was there
for d n me to end my pregnancy. The physical
emotional pain of this day, these weeks, and the pain
that I continue to carry from this experience will stay
with me forever, and they continue to have lasting impacts
on so many parts of my life. And so I
(57:26):
just think that until you've gone through something like this,
you can't not imagine the trauma and sadness of these
moments that I'm describing, UM. And you know, this was
such an isolating experience, UM more than I ever imagined
it would be. Yet the more I speak about it,
(57:46):
the more I realize how I'm not alone. UM. As
I've shared my stories are looked for support. I have
found people that have gone through what I've gone through
and realized that while we are a very small percentage UM,
there is a community of us out there. I wanted,
(58:07):
and I still want nothing more than to have a baby,
and so terminating this pregnancy was the hardest decision of
my life, and it was not something I could have
ever imagined or wanted. And I feel thankful that I
live in a city where I did have access to
(58:27):
incredible health care that would allow me and only me
to ultimately make this decision abortion. The Body Politic is
executive produced by me Katie Couric and was created by
(58:49):
small team led by our intrepid supervising producer Lauren Hansen.
Editing and sound designed by Derrick Clements and Jessica crime Chi.
Production help from Julia Weaver. Researched by Nina Perlman and
especial thanks to Case and producers Courtney Litz and Adriana
(59:10):
Fasio
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