July 9, 2025 • 34 mins
Jessa Crispin details their new book What Is Wrong with Men. Rebecca Grant examines her new book Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Freedom.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean
we don't have a great show for you Today. Rebecca
Graham stops by to talk about her new book Access,
Inside the Abortion Underground and the sixty year battle for
(00:22):
reproductive freedom. But first we have Jessa Crispin to talk
about her new book, What Is Wrong With Men. Welcome
to Fast Politics, Jessa.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Thank you. I'm so pleased to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
I'm excited to have you too.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Your sub stack again.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is just such a good title because it's really
like where I am in life is the culture we deserve?
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Yeah, I mean it is.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
First, let's talk about why originally I wanted to have
you here, But then we can talk about the plethora
of other things you write about. But American men doing great.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Oh yeah, thriving, flourishing.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
And by the way, I hate this topic because I
think the entire culture is set up for men. You know,
there was a moment where white men were not absolutely
at the top of the pecking order, and they were
so angry that we got another Trump administration so I
want the caveat to live in the earth so that
everyone hears that while we are talking about how hard
(01:24):
it is to be the most privileged group of people
there are on the earth, we still understand how ridiculous
it is that they need this.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Sorry, Jesse, it's absolutely a strange phenomenon, because you're right,
we still have all these structures in place that not
only privilegemen and prioritize them, but still have an exclusionary
gatekeeping toward anybody who's not right. And clearly there are
(01:53):
all the markers of who runs the corporations, who runs politics, etc.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Who runs the world the world.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
But the other ninety eight percent of men really aren't
doing very well, and in the sense of higher rates
of addiction, higher rates of suicide, meeting fewer educational markers,
et cetera, et cetera. Like you know, the statistics are
kind of always there. And there was really this enormous
(02:23):
shift that happened from the seventies to the nineties where
a lot of our institutions changed, the legal code changed,
the way that we manage the financial systems changed, and
women were in a position where because of the mainstreaming
of feminism. We're creating institutions and structures in order to
(02:48):
help women navigate these changes, and men didn't do any
of that. Men didn't do any of the cultural decisions
that need to happen when men are being asked to
live entirely different kinds of lives, because it is a
kind of different life in your marriage, if you're no
longer the patriarch, if you're no longer head of household.
(03:10):
So how do you figure out how to navigate those roles? Well,
there weren't any movies about that, there weren't books about that. Really,
women wrote books about how to navigate a different kind
of life, but men didn't have the same. Women have
nonprofits in order to help them deal with the new
expectations for education, helping women succeed, helping women thrive. Men
(03:32):
didn't do that because they expected the institutions for work
to work for them exclusively, and when they stopped, they
were really sort of left. I don't want to say
a disadvantage, because I think that's too strong of a word,
but certainly flat footed. You didn't know how to adapt.
And I think also no one told them that they
(03:54):
would have to adapt.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
So that is really interesting and important, and I want
to say, you know, I have all the kids and
two of them are boys, and you do see when
you're playing your kids to college, just how much there's
a man problem in higher education, right. They can't get them,
they can't you know, you have these colleges. And it's
even more true with if you look at the HBCUs
(04:18):
where they're having just a steep drop off in male admissions,
male applications, male admissions. So this is not a fake problem.
This is like it's funny because I reread the book
Backlash recently, and one of the things that Backlash does
is it talks so much about how there are fake
like that the mainstream media created the mainstream media rip
(04:41):
you know personally, you know, I'm not going to criticize
them because they're so dead and it makes me so sad.
But they did in fact create crisises that weren't necessarily
happening in.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
The real world.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Yes, now, this though, is actually something, and it's happening
unlike a lot of vis is where they're happening to
people who are disadvantaged, but not to happening to this
sort of upper middle class or the middle class. This
is really happening everywhere. There are things like men's rights
(05:15):
activists and the sort of media complex that has sprung
up from that. Can you talk us through sort of
how that was created, how that exists, and what that
says about where we are in the crisis.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
That's also part of the problem is that while women
were sort of focused on adaptation, men got stuck in
grievance culture, and grievance culture became a huge industry. So, yeah,
men's right activism. Really it's weird because the MRA movement
came out of what was supposed to be men supporting feminism,
(05:51):
and so there were these groups that started that men
were like, you know what, women are changing what they want,
and we have to respond to this. We have to
figure it out. And you get a bunch of men
in a room and suddenly they start thinking, you know what,
I actually don't think women need these things that they're
asking for, and I think that this is an imposition
(06:13):
upon me. And so it really became going from a
pseudo feminist movement into an anti feminist movement where men
were sort of supporting each other in this idea that
actually they were the disadvantage ones that everything that women
were asking for was being taken from men. Rather than
(06:34):
having a kind of mutual sense of expansion, Women were
kind of expanding their sense of what their lives could
be like, and men did not take this moment as
an opportunity to think about it in that way. Instead,
so all of these different groups arose as far as
like men are the real victims of family court, men
(06:56):
are the real victims of sexual harassment. From there you
have the rise of the what we have now with
the manisphere. You have either on one side, you have
Jordan Peterson or someone like him offering this like fantastical,
nostalgic version of patriarch if we just go back to
if we just go back to the way things were,
(07:18):
they were so much better offering that kind of thing.
Or you have the Andrew Tait just like hyper violent,
hyper aggressive version of masculinity. And those are kind of
your two options, because there isn't something to weave between
that and say we have to rethink this, we have
(07:39):
to adapt, and men don't. They don't feel like they
have to adapt to the world as it is right now.
They think right now, I mean, you know, obviously I'm
speaking in generality in the widespread culture, you have winners
and losers, and the winners aren't really interested in helping
the losers, and the loser are so stuck in a
(08:02):
sense of what they should be having instead sense of grievance,
the sense that something has been taken from them that
they can't sort of just get it together and adapt
to the world as it is now.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Yeah, that's exactly right and just a completely strange moment
to be in.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
So I have this obsession.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
My new obsession this week is the Andrew Breitbark quote,
and I have been working through it. But the politics
is downstream the culture because Trump won presidency both times
really by getting in the culture and then having the
culture dictate the politics. Trump one point zero. We had
a culture that was filled with resistance. Now we have
(08:44):
a culture this is terrified of politics because they're worried
you can't get in trouble. First of all, I want
you to talk about this culture, politics, trump ism. Answer
this question however you want. But you see what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah, I mean trump Ism is not just a p
of men, though, is it. I mean, he's very popular
with women voters, and I think the culture that created
Donald Trump is very much a part of these changes
that were happening in the seventies and the eighties to
change the way investment banking works, to change the way
Wall Street works, to change the way that international financial
(09:21):
systems work, the way foreign policy works, etc.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Etc.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
That is what sort of undergirds Donald Trump's success. And
then on top of that, of course, you know reality
TV and sort of sensational news rather than actual information,
all of that kind of it's all a part of it.
You can't really solve the problem just by getting rid
of Donald Trump. It's really where everything is sort of
(09:49):
structured to make Donald Trump successful or people like him.
And that's the worst part of it, because it's not
just about we win the next selection and everything goes better. Now.
There are deep fundamental changes that have to happen so
that we don't get conmon so we don't get a
circus buskers, we don't get snake oil salesmen, because that's
(10:14):
what our system rewards at the moment.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Trump comes from reality television.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
He may have existed in Europe before that, but really
reality television is what kicked him to the next level.
As we look at sort of this culture creating politicians
maybe or elevating them.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Think of AOC. Where does that go?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Well, it's not just a reality television platformed Donald Trump.
Reality television really changed the way we look at everything. Right,
The whole idea of a red state versus a blue
state that was created by CNN the year that Survivor
really took over television, and they realize this is how
(10:57):
you get people to pay attention to This is if
you create kind of us against them, you create something
that people can root for. And so it's no longer
about the politics of oh, we need to pass like
a minimum wage raise in order so that people can
live lives of dignity, even if they have jobs that
(11:17):
we don't think of as being dignified. Now it's no
you know who wants that? AOC. You know who wants that?
The bidens the Clintons, and we are against them, and
so we are against minimum wage. It's it's everything became polarized.
And this whole idea that some people live in a
red state, some people live in a blue state is
(11:38):
completely fabricated by a news organization that was sort of
hopped up on the ratings of reality television. It sounds
kind of overly simplistic, and yet the way that that
moment has sort of changed the way we think about bipartisanship,
about politics in general, about tribalism in politicy. This is
(12:01):
my party, This defines me, this is my ideology, and
if you are against any aspect of my ideology, then
you are my enemy. Like, that's a completely fantastical invention
that only goes back, you know, twenty five years.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, it is, and that is certainly true. So there
were a lot of people at X and then they
were gone. Now there's sort of a question of like
where are people And they were people at Drudge. I
think there's still some movement of Drudge, but like where
are the people online?
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yeah, it's gotten really really clicky, right, It's gotten really
really sort of like some people are on Blue Sky
and they all kind of agree with one another. Some
people are on Reddit and they all agree with each other,
and some you know, so it's not just conservatives go
here and liberals go here. It's really sort of splintering
(12:59):
in a way that I think is going to be
increasingly difficult to manage, especially with the rise of like
the podcast that just produce like ten hours of content
a week, like, how do you keep on top of that?
And in some way that traps people because if there
is ten hours of content and it's your favorite thing
and you want to keep on top of it, it
(13:20):
keeps you from hearing any other voices. And it's kind
of like this mode of overproduction creates these cult like audiences.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Absolutely Rogan has rolled turnout power like Rush Limbaugh did.
Where else is their political turnout power besides rogen?
Speaker 2 (13:38):
The fear of right wing podcast is slightly overblown because
I don't think that a podcast versus you know, the
institutions of power can really do as much as people
are sort of afraid of In this moment, I think
(13:58):
people are sort of like look looking around for things
to blame, and I think that jer Vergan becomes like
a little bit of a scapegoat. But you know, the
New York Times has more subscribers than it's ever had,
and if it is failing to create turnout power based
on that, that's kind of their own fault, right, I Mean,
(14:20):
that's something where they're not connecting.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Can I just push back for a second.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
One of the pieces of information we learned in this
election was that if you read a newspaper at all.
New York Time is all the way down to the
New York Post, which we'll use as the bottom, even
though probably there are things.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Worse than the New York Post. But I'm in New Yorker.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
If you read any newspaper, you were like twenty five
percent more likely to support Biden. It may not be
driving turnout, and it may not have the numbers. I
mean as a country of three hundred and thirty million people,
So I just wonder where are all those other people?
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Well, I'm well, where are the newspapers? I mean, I'm
from the state of Kansas. My town, my hometown is
lucky that it still has its local newspaper because the
regional papers and the papers that used to sustain the
towns around where I'm from have folded or they've cut
(15:17):
back to a biweekly publication rate or something of that nature.
And so the disappearance of newspapers is not because nobody
wants a newspaper. The disappearance of newspaper is because of
venture capitalism and private equity which bought up all of
these papers, strip them for parts, and then shut them down.
So it's an artificial news drought that is absolutely fixable,
(15:43):
but it's not an enormous money maker, and so people
are not really interested in doing it. But that's kind
of what has to happen. You have to rebuild infrastructure
and news media that is not just The New York Times,
which on an international scope they can't cover the problems
(16:05):
of the local sheriff skimming money and taking bribes in
a small town in Kansas. They're not interested. So you
do need organizations that are interested and invested, and I
think that is a fundamental piece of this recovery that
has to happen. But people don't want to do it
because it's hard and expensive.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Rebecca Grant is a journalist and the author of Access
Inside the Abortion Underground and the Six Year Battle for
Reproductive Freedom. Welcome to Bad Politics, Rebecca.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
Thank you, Mollie. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
I'm so happy to have you. It is the three
year anniversary of the end of Row and you are
a tireless reporter. I just was reading a really great
piece you in teen Vogue. Teen Vogue is one of
the outlets that I am just so proud, makes me
so proud to work at Conte nast. I wonder if
(17:08):
you could talk about, like, you know, what the landscape
looks like right now.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah, I mean I think it's pretty dire. Things are bad.
I mean, there's just like so many things that are
bad on so many different fronts, and so like there's
a lot of stuff that I've been following, you know,
even just in the past couple of weeks, like the
Adriana Smith case in Georgia, and like that awful tragic situation.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Just for the people who are not completely read in,
just give us the shorthand on that case.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Joanna Smith was a nurse in Georgia who went into
a hospital complaining of really severe headaches and then ultimately
she experienced brain death and she passed away. But because
she was nine weeks pregnant, the hospital believed whether or
not this was true, the hospital believed that they had
to try to keep her alive to the extent that
(17:59):
they were able to to in order that the fetus
could ultimately be delivered because of the abortion ban, and
so the family had that choice removed from them. And
I think that it's yet another troubling example of all
of the ways in which the Dobs decision has created
an incredibly dangerous situation for people who can get pregnant,
(18:20):
whether that means medically, whether that means they can't get
the type of pregnancy or abortion care that they need,
and legally as well, people are being criminalized for their
pregnancy outcomes. And that was happening before the Dobs decision,
but it's certainly escalated now there's information or there's data
about increases in anti abortion violence, which especially given what
happened in Minnesota last week and the fact that the
(18:42):
list there was a list of abortion providers that the
shooter also had, So that's really troubling.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
What you're talking about in Minnesota is the murder of
this former speaker of the Minnesota State House who was
a tireless advocate for women's RCT.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Yes, absolutely, and the shooter apparently had a list of
other people that he was going to go after that
included abortion providers. And so that's an example of how
people who work for and fight for and provide abortion
care have been the target of extremist violence for decades
and decades. So that's something that is concerning. I think
(19:17):
the ongoing questions over whether MEFI pristone will remain an
FDA approved drug or something.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
I've been and that.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Looks like there's a case coming up. Talk about that
for a minute, because I just that's important. There's been
efforts for years now.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
I mean, I think a really prominent one happened in
twenty twenty two, which was a case that a sort
of random group of anti abortion lawyers kind of dreamt up.
But the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine I believe the organization
was called claiming that if a pristone was dangerous and
that the initial approval of the drug in two thousand
had been rushed, which is absolutely nonsense. There's so much
(19:56):
data and research over so many decades all over the
world that sizes its safety. As part of this larger
effort to target abortion pills, because as I document in
the book, even though the impact of dobs has been
devastating and not everyone is able to get abortions and
they have to resort to other means, whether that's traveling
out of state or using telemedicine, the ability of people
(20:18):
to access medication abortion has kind of been a game changer.
At the same time, whether they're doing it through telemedicine
or they're self managing with pills that they access from
community support networks, and so as a result of that,
the anti abortion movement has really made targeting abortion pills
one of their top priorities.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Talk to me about the book, Explain to me sort
of why you decided to write this book and how
you got here.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
I was really interested in the reporting that I had done,
certainly before Dobs, but I think I really started to
focus on this after Dobs, on the stories of activists
who were fighting to keep abortion accessible regardless of the law,
in spite of the law, and that took a number
of different forms. But you know, we hear so much,
(21:05):
and I just spoke about how dire things are and
how kind of bad everything is. But also I think
the story of the past couple years after Dobbs is
one of incredible courage and resilience, Like there are so
many badass activists who were fighting before that decision and
have continued to fight, often putting themselves on the line
in order to make sure that people can access the
(21:26):
abortions that they need. And so so much of the
of like the coverage and the narrative over the years,
including a lot of stories that I've done have really
focused on politics and on the courts and the legal situation,
but both within the US and around the world, there's
this whole other movement around self managed abortion and about
(21:47):
making abortion available outside of the political legal medical system
that I think deserves a lot more attention because it
has had an incredible impact, both in terms of the
number of people it is enabled to access abortion and
restrictive environments, but also I think these networks, whether it's
telemedicine with you know, legal US clinicians, or whether it's
(22:10):
these sort of underground pell distributors, ultimately what they're doing
is they're subverting abortion bands, they're fighting back against abortion bans,
They're rejecting the idea that the government can dictate what
someone does with their body. And so I think that
they function kind of on multiple levels, and I was
really interested in how that happened and what that feminist
(22:31):
legacy was, because that's been true in Poland and Ireland
and Argentina and Mexico and after Dobs. There were two
kind of activists in particular that I focused on in
the book. One is doctor Rebecca Gomberts, who's a Dutch doctor,
and the other is Veronica Cruz who's an activist from Mexico,
and they really helped the US ecosystem kind of like
(22:55):
figure things out after dobs and get up and running
so that there were we for people in states of
demand abortion to access the medication safely after the decision.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
It strikes me that now that we have the pills
being easier to access or fairly easy to access, the
people who are the most in danger from these abortion
bands actually are pregnant women because they are far enough
(23:28):
along often who want a baby, but something has gone
horribly wrong, and those women are too far along a
lot of times to get the pills, but not far enough,
you know, not far enough along to deliver the baby.
And so we see a lot of reporting about women
(23:48):
who either their lives are at risk or they die
or they have you know, they can't get and you
know they're bleeding out in a parking lot. We saw
a Republican woman who was in legislature blaming Democrats for that.
I don't know if you saw this story in the
Wall Street Journal. I just wonder if you can talk
(24:09):
about sort of that moment these women who are as
someone who has had three children and who has had
very scary pregnancies. It strikes me that what has happened
as a result of the fall of Row it really
puts pregnant women in even more peril.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Yeah. Absolutely, And that's such a good point because something
that I'm really careful to make clear in the book
is that access to medication abortion is not some kind
of like panacea silver bullet situation. It is not going
to be a good option for everyone for a variety
of reasons. You know, someone who doesn't have a safe
home environment, for instance, it might not be a viable
(24:46):
option for them to receive the medication in the mail.
And to your point, folks who are leader on in
pregnancy or have more complicated pregnancies or situations, the pills
are also not going to be the best option for them.
And there's been a whole bunch of research that has
come out about the impact of dobs on maternal mortality rates.
And I believe that in states with abortion bans, the
(25:10):
maternal mortality rate has is something like twice that of
states without abortion bans. The rates of sepsis have gone
up significantly, I mean sepsis. There's kind of this this
idea that abortion care is not part of the broader
spectrum of reproductive health care that we've been hearing anti abortion,
you know, politicians talk about for a long time, but
(25:31):
that is just completely untrue for anyone who has the
most basic knowledge of the way that pregnancy or child
birth works. There's so many reasons why people might need
a procedure to save their lives, or they might need
a procedure in order to maintain their future fertility, or
because they receive some sort of fetal diagnosis that I
should be up to down whether they want to make
(25:53):
that decision, And all these states that have banned abortion
are taking that decision making capacity away from both the
patient and for the doctors who want to be able
to treat them. And so as a result, you also
have all of these obgyns who are leaving states with
abortion bands because they feel like they can't practice in
a way that feels in line with their medical ethics.
(26:14):
So I know that like in Idaho, for instance, like
something like one in five obgyns had left and there
were already maternity care deserts there. Pesians have been advised
to get airlift insurance in case they are in a
situation where they need a life saving abortion if they
live in one of those states. And so we live
in a country where maternal mortality is already so much
(26:34):
higher than it should be. I mean, my first book
was about maternal healthcare and about how our rates of
maternal mortality are way out of line with other countries
that are sort of, you know, in that high income,
industrialized category, and we're one of the few countries where
our maternal mortality rates have gotten worse. And then you
add the dangers of dobs on top of that, because ultimately,
(26:54):
you can never legislate every single pregnancy complication that might arise,
Like you can never say, oh, a life saving abortion
for this condition is okay, but not for this one.
I mean that should be up to doctors and their
medical judgment.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
What you have here is doctors afraid of legislators, Republican legislators,
which is no way to practice medicine.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Fair. Yeah, absolutely, And I mean there've even been cases
where essentially like women and their doctors have called politicians bluff.
So I think the case of Kate Cox in Texas
was sor the illuminating one in which she received a
diagnosis and she and her husband decided that the best
course for their family was to end the pregnancy, and
(27:39):
brought a case to get clarity from a judge in
Texas as to whether they the doctor was able to
provide her with an abortion without being subject to some
form of prosecution. And then the court denied their case. So,
I mean they essentially called the bluff. They said, you know,
you say that the abortions are like exceptions are allowed
in X, Y and Z reasons, but then it was
(28:01):
clear that they weren't. And so that's just another reason
why this idea of exceptions that anti abortion and politicians
try to use to make their policies seem more warm
and fuzzy or just total bullshit.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Right, how old are you? Theres you thirty eight? So
you're I'm forty six, which I love to talk about
how old I am and we are this you know,
we're about the same generation. We're a generation that had
row right, we had it until we didn't. And I
just would love you to talk about sort of where
we are as women, where we are as feminists, what
(28:35):
it looks like. I mean, I feel like the Trump
administration has definitely been very misogynistic in a lot of
its legislation, but I don't know that We've had so
many public conversations about misogyny, and I'm wondering we've seen
them be much worse to other people, right, in much
(28:56):
more of a flagrant way. You know, I had this
colonel on who is losing her job because she's trans.
I've had you know, I've for sure had seen a
lot of cruelty from this administration. But I'm wondering able
to talk about just the misogyny underlying misogyny that comes
(29:17):
from this war on choice and also just sort of
expand on that however you want.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Yeah, I mean I think that abortion bands. I mean
something that one of the activists said to me. I
think it was Vero in Mexico, but something that she
said was to frame abortion bands as a form of
like state sanctioned gender based violence. And I thought that
that was so interesting, Like it kind of blew my
mind a little bit, because ultimately, it is a government
(29:45):
that is saying both, we do not trust you to
make the decisions that are right for you. We believe
that we know better than you what is best for
you and your family. And it's also part of I
think a broader misogynistic effort to keep women in their place,
to maintain this like gender binary and essentialism and sort
(30:06):
of saying that like, if you can get pregnant, then
that is your lot in life, and you will be
punished if you have I don't know, nonprocreative sex, like
I mean, that's ultimately what they're saying. And I think
that there's no way to separate abortion bands from misogyny.
I mean, they're just like completely interlaced, and you can't.
(30:27):
I just don't know how you could sort of see
an abortion band as being rooted in anything other than
a disregard for women's dignity and autonomy in their lives.
And I think that something that was really interesting to
me as I was reporting the book was Part one
is a lot of kind of pre Row history, and
it goes up to the eighties, so after Row, where
(30:47):
I talk about how the abortion pill was invented. But
I was doing all of this research into some of
these underground activist networks that were kind of cropped up
in the sixties in the early seventies that were part
of the second wave feminism and the ways that they
talked about that many of these activists talked about abortion
and some of the tensions that were involved in the
(31:08):
fight and the things that they felt like were important.
And there were activists in the sixties who were talking
about abortion on demand, for free, without apology, and that's
a message that still feels pretty radical today. And it's what,
I mean, what fifty sixty years old at this point.
And so I think that the thing that we have
been trying or like the movement has been trying to
(31:30):
fight for. I think there was this way enrich Row
did create a little bit of complacency, and I think
that sort of that memory of what those activists were
doing back then, I was sort of surprised, I guess,
I would say, by like how radical some of the
things that they were saying and things that they were
doing were. And then also while I was reporting, something
(31:52):
that was so interesting to me as I was reporting
on the some of the underground or community support networks
that are active now and distributing pills, is that many
of the people involved, not all, but many are older women,
women in their sixties, seventies. There was one woman in
her eighties. And I think that there's a number of
reasons why they've gotten so involved in some of this
(32:13):
legally risky early kind of legal gray area work. Some
of it is because some of them feel like, my
children are grown, I'm retired, I'm in a financially stable position,
and so I probably have less to lose, less to
lose than someone who is younger and you know, sort
of still figuring things out. But also they have this
memory of what it was like to live before ROW,
(32:35):
and I think that that made them kind of radical
in a way that felt really just like compelling and moving,
and so they were totally there to step up. At
the same time, I think that there are activists like
folks in the abortion fund movement and in the reproductive
justice movement who have been really pushing for the kind
(32:58):
of movement overall in what it's trying to fight for.
And I think that goes back a little bit to
the sense of complacency. Like I think, so if there
was this idea that we had ROW, and so even
if there was the High Amendment in place and so
you know that excluded women who are on Medicaid from
having their abortions covered, or even if like all these
(33:18):
states before DOBS had gestational limits or limits on minors
the accessing healthcare that that stuff was kind of okay
because it was necessary to maintain the status quo. And
so I think where things are moving now and have
been moving for a long time, largely due to the
tireless kind of advocacy of the reproductive justice movement, is
saying like, we don't have to accept these scraps, we
(33:39):
don't have to accept limits, and bands like we can
fight for something that's much bigger. We can fight for
abortion on demand without apology, which was, like I said,
the same thing that those activists from the sixties we're
fighting for.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean
we don't have a great show for you Today. Rebecca
Graham stops by to talk about her new book Access,
Inside the Abortion Underground and the sixty year battle for
(00:22):
reproductive freedom. But first we have Jessa Crispin to talk
about her new book, What Is Wrong With Men. Welcome
to Fast Politics, Jessa.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Thank you. I'm so pleased to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
I'm excited to have you too.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Your sub stack again.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is just such a good title because it's really
like where I am in life is the culture we deserve?
Speaker 2 (00:44):
Yeah, I mean it is.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
First, let's talk about why originally I wanted to have
you here, But then we can talk about the plethora
of other things you write about. But American men doing great.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Oh yeah, thriving, flourishing.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
And by the way, I hate this topic because I
think the entire culture is set up for men. You know,
there was a moment where white men were not absolutely
at the top of the pecking order, and they were
so angry that we got another Trump administration so I
want the caveat to live in the earth so that
everyone hears that while we are talking about how hard
(01:24):
it is to be the most privileged group of people
there are on the earth, we still understand how ridiculous
it is that they need this.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Sorry, Jesse, it's absolutely a strange phenomenon, because you're right,
we still have all these structures in place that not
only privilegemen and prioritize them, but still have an exclusionary
gatekeeping toward anybody who's not right. And clearly there are
(01:53):
all the markers of who runs the corporations, who runs politics, etc.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
Who runs the world the world.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
But the other ninety eight percent of men really aren't
doing very well, and in the sense of higher rates
of addiction, higher rates of suicide, meeting fewer educational markers,
et cetera, et cetera. Like you know, the statistics are
kind of always there. And there was really this enormous
(02:23):
shift that happened from the seventies to the nineties where
a lot of our institutions changed, the legal code changed,
the way that we manage the financial systems changed, and
women were in a position where because of the mainstreaming
of feminism. We're creating institutions and structures in order to
(02:48):
help women navigate these changes, and men didn't do any
of that. Men didn't do any of the cultural decisions
that need to happen when men are being asked to
live entirely different kinds of lives, because it is a
kind of different life in your marriage, if you're no
longer the patriarch, if you're no longer head of household.
(03:10):
So how do you figure out how to navigate those roles? Well,
there weren't any movies about that, there weren't books about that. Really,
women wrote books about how to navigate a different kind
of life, but men didn't have the same. Women have
nonprofits in order to help them deal with the new
expectations for education, helping women succeed, helping women thrive. Men
(03:32):
didn't do that because they expected the institutions for work
to work for them exclusively, and when they stopped, they
were really sort of left. I don't want to say
a disadvantage, because I think that's too strong of a word,
but certainly flat footed. You didn't know how to adapt.
And I think also no one told them that they
(03:54):
would have to adapt.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
So that is really interesting and important, and I want
to say, you know, I have all the kids and
two of them are boys, and you do see when
you're playing your kids to college, just how much there's
a man problem in higher education, right. They can't get them,
they can't you know, you have these colleges. And it's
even more true with if you look at the HBCUs
(04:18):
where they're having just a steep drop off in male admissions,
male applications, male admissions. So this is not a fake problem.
This is like it's funny because I reread the book
Backlash recently, and one of the things that Backlash does
is it talks so much about how there are fake
like that the mainstream media created the mainstream media rip
(04:41):
you know personally, you know, I'm not going to criticize
them because they're so dead and it makes me so sad.
But they did in fact create crisises that weren't necessarily
happening in.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
The real world.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Yes, now, this though, is actually something, and it's happening
unlike a lot of vis is where they're happening to
people who are disadvantaged, but not to happening to this
sort of upper middle class or the middle class. This
is really happening everywhere. There are things like men's rights
(05:15):
activists and the sort of media complex that has sprung
up from that. Can you talk us through sort of
how that was created, how that exists, and what that
says about where we are in the crisis.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
That's also part of the problem is that while women
were sort of focused on adaptation, men got stuck in
grievance culture, and grievance culture became a huge industry. So, yeah,
men's right activism. Really it's weird because the MRA movement
came out of what was supposed to be men supporting feminism,
(05:51):
and so there were these groups that started that men
were like, you know what, women are changing what they want,
and we have to respond to this. We have to
figure it out. And you get a bunch of men
in a room and suddenly they start thinking, you know what,
I actually don't think women need these things that they're
asking for, and I think that this is an imposition
(06:13):
upon me. And so it really became going from a
pseudo feminist movement into an anti feminist movement where men
were sort of supporting each other in this idea that
actually they were the disadvantage ones that everything that women
were asking for was being taken from men. Rather than
(06:34):
having a kind of mutual sense of expansion, Women were
kind of expanding their sense of what their lives could
be like, and men did not take this moment as
an opportunity to think about it in that way. Instead,
so all of these different groups arose as far as
like men are the real victims of family court, men
(06:56):
are the real victims of sexual harassment. From there you
have the rise of the what we have now with
the manisphere. You have either on one side, you have
Jordan Peterson or someone like him offering this like fantastical,
nostalgic version of patriarch if we just go back to
if we just go back to the way things were,
(07:18):
they were so much better offering that kind of thing.
Or you have the Andrew Tait just like hyper violent,
hyper aggressive version of masculinity. And those are kind of
your two options, because there isn't something to weave between
that and say we have to rethink this, we have
(07:39):
to adapt, and men don't. They don't feel like they
have to adapt to the world as it is right now.
They think right now, I mean, you know, obviously I'm
speaking in generality in the widespread culture, you have winners
and losers, and the winners aren't really interested in helping
the losers, and the loser are so stuck in a
(08:02):
sense of what they should be having instead sense of grievance,
the sense that something has been taken from them that
they can't sort of just get it together and adapt
to the world as it is now.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
Yeah, that's exactly right and just a completely strange moment
to be in.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
So I have this obsession.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
My new obsession this week is the Andrew Breitbark quote,
and I have been working through it. But the politics
is downstream the culture because Trump won presidency both times
really by getting in the culture and then having the
culture dictate the politics. Trump one point zero. We had
a culture that was filled with resistance. Now we have
(08:44):
a culture this is terrified of politics because they're worried
you can't get in trouble. First of all, I want
you to talk about this culture, politics, trump ism. Answer
this question however you want. But you see what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Yeah, I mean trump Ism is not just a p
of men, though, is it. I mean, he's very popular
with women voters, and I think the culture that created
Donald Trump is very much a part of these changes
that were happening in the seventies and the eighties to
change the way investment banking works, to change the way
Wall Street works, to change the way that international financial
(09:21):
systems work, the way foreign policy works, etc.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Etc.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
That is what sort of undergirds Donald Trump's success. And
then on top of that, of course, you know reality
TV and sort of sensational news rather than actual information,
all of that kind of it's all a part of it.
You can't really solve the problem just by getting rid
of Donald Trump. It's really where everything is sort of
(09:49):
structured to make Donald Trump successful or people like him.
And that's the worst part of it, because it's not
just about we win the next selection and everything goes better. Now.
There are deep fundamental changes that have to happen so
that we don't get conmon so we don't get a
circus buskers, we don't get snake oil salesmen, because that's
(10:14):
what our system rewards at the moment.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Trump comes from reality television.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
He may have existed in Europe before that, but really
reality television is what kicked him to the next level.
As we look at sort of this culture creating politicians
maybe or elevating them.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Think of AOC. Where does that go?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
Well, it's not just a reality television platformed Donald Trump.
Reality television really changed the way we look at everything. Right,
The whole idea of a red state versus a blue
state that was created by CNN the year that Survivor
really took over television, and they realize this is how
(10:57):
you get people to pay attention to This is if
you create kind of us against them, you create something
that people can root for. And so it's no longer
about the politics of oh, we need to pass like
a minimum wage raise in order so that people can
live lives of dignity, even if they have jobs that
(11:17):
we don't think of as being dignified. Now it's no
you know who wants that? AOC. You know who wants that?
The bidens the Clintons, and we are against them, and
so we are against minimum wage. It's it's everything became polarized.
And this whole idea that some people live in a
red state, some people live in a blue state is
(11:38):
completely fabricated by a news organization that was sort of
hopped up on the ratings of reality television. It sounds
kind of overly simplistic, and yet the way that that
moment has sort of changed the way we think about bipartisanship,
about politics in general, about tribalism in politicy. This is
(12:01):
my party, This defines me, this is my ideology, and
if you are against any aspect of my ideology, then
you are my enemy. Like, that's a completely fantastical invention
that only goes back, you know, twenty five years.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Yeah, it is, and that is certainly true. So there
were a lot of people at X and then they
were gone. Now there's sort of a question of like
where are people And they were people at Drudge. I
think there's still some movement of Drudge, but like where
are the people online?
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Yeah, it's gotten really really clicky, right, It's gotten really
really sort of like some people are on Blue Sky
and they all kind of agree with one another. Some
people are on Reddit and they all agree with each other,
and some you know, so it's not just conservatives go
here and liberals go here. It's really sort of splintering
(12:59):
in a way that I think is going to be
increasingly difficult to manage, especially with the rise of like
the podcast that just produce like ten hours of content
a week, like, how do you keep on top of that?
And in some way that traps people because if there
is ten hours of content and it's your favorite thing
and you want to keep on top of it, it
(13:20):
keeps you from hearing any other voices. And it's kind
of like this mode of overproduction creates these cult like audiences.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Absolutely Rogan has rolled turnout power like Rush Limbaugh did.
Where else is their political turnout power besides rogen?
Speaker 2 (13:38):
The fear of right wing podcast is slightly overblown because
I don't think that a podcast versus you know, the
institutions of power can really do as much as people
are sort of afraid of In this moment, I think
(13:58):
people are sort of like look looking around for things
to blame, and I think that jer Vergan becomes like
a little bit of a scapegoat. But you know, the
New York Times has more subscribers than it's ever had,
and if it is failing to create turnout power based
on that, that's kind of their own fault, right, I Mean,
(14:20):
that's something where they're not connecting.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Can I just push back for a second.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
One of the pieces of information we learned in this
election was that if you read a newspaper at all.
New York Time is all the way down to the
New York Post, which we'll use as the bottom, even
though probably there are things.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Worse than the New York Post. But I'm in New Yorker.
Speaker 1 (14:40):
If you read any newspaper, you were like twenty five
percent more likely to support Biden. It may not be
driving turnout, and it may not have the numbers. I
mean as a country of three hundred and thirty million people,
So I just wonder where are all those other people?
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Well, I'm well, where are the newspapers? I mean, I'm
from the state of Kansas. My town, my hometown is
lucky that it still has its local newspaper because the
regional papers and the papers that used to sustain the
towns around where I'm from have folded or they've cut
(15:17):
back to a biweekly publication rate or something of that nature.
And so the disappearance of newspapers is not because nobody
wants a newspaper. The disappearance of newspaper is because of
venture capitalism and private equity which bought up all of
these papers, strip them for parts, and then shut them down.
So it's an artificial news drought that is absolutely fixable,
(15:43):
but it's not an enormous money maker, and so people
are not really interested in doing it. But that's kind
of what has to happen. You have to rebuild infrastructure
and news media that is not just The New York Times,
which on an international scope they can't cover the problems
(16:05):
of the local sheriff skimming money and taking bribes in
a small town in Kansas. They're not interested. So you
do need organizations that are interested and invested, and I
think that is a fundamental piece of this recovery that
has to happen. But people don't want to do it
because it's hard and expensive.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (16:27):
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Rebecca Grant is a journalist and the author of Access
Inside the Abortion Underground and the Six Year Battle for
Reproductive Freedom. Welcome to Bad Politics, Rebecca.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
Thank you, Mollie. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
I'm so happy to have you. It is the three
year anniversary of the end of Row and you are
a tireless reporter. I just was reading a really great
piece you in teen Vogue. Teen Vogue is one of
the outlets that I am just so proud, makes me
so proud to work at Conte nast. I wonder if
(17:08):
you could talk about, like, you know, what the landscape
looks like right now.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yeah, I mean I think it's pretty dire. Things are bad.
I mean, there's just like so many things that are
bad on so many different fronts, and so like there's
a lot of stuff that I've been following, you know,
even just in the past couple of weeks, like the
Adriana Smith case in Georgia, and like that awful tragic situation.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Just for the people who are not completely read in,
just give us the shorthand on that case.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
Joanna Smith was a nurse in Georgia who went into
a hospital complaining of really severe headaches and then ultimately
she experienced brain death and she passed away. But because
she was nine weeks pregnant, the hospital believed whether or
not this was true, the hospital believed that they had
to try to keep her alive to the extent that
(17:59):
they were able to to in order that the fetus
could ultimately be delivered because of the abortion ban, and
so the family had that choice removed from them. And
I think that it's yet another troubling example of all
of the ways in which the Dobs decision has created
an incredibly dangerous situation for people who can get pregnant,
(18:20):
whether that means medically, whether that means they can't get
the type of pregnancy or abortion care that they need,
and legally as well, people are being criminalized for their
pregnancy outcomes. And that was happening before the Dobs decision,
but it's certainly escalated now there's information or there's data
about increases in anti abortion violence, which especially given what
happened in Minnesota last week and the fact that the
(18:42):
list there was a list of abortion providers that the
shooter also had, So that's really troubling.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
What you're talking about in Minnesota is the murder of
this former speaker of the Minnesota State House who was
a tireless advocate for women's RCT.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
Yes, absolutely, and the shooter apparently had a list of
other people that he was going to go after that
included abortion providers. And so that's an example of how
people who work for and fight for and provide abortion
care have been the target of extremist violence for decades
and decades. So that's something that is concerning. I think
(19:17):
the ongoing questions over whether MEFI pristone will remain an
FDA approved drug or something.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
I've been and that.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Looks like there's a case coming up. Talk about that
for a minute, because I just that's important. There's been
efforts for years now.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
I mean, I think a really prominent one happened in
twenty twenty two, which was a case that a sort
of random group of anti abortion lawyers kind of dreamt up.
But the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine I believe the organization
was called claiming that if a pristone was dangerous and
that the initial approval of the drug in two thousand
had been rushed, which is absolutely nonsense. There's so much
(19:56):
data and research over so many decades all over the
world that sizes its safety. As part of this larger
effort to target abortion pills, because as I document in
the book, even though the impact of dobs has been
devastating and not everyone is able to get abortions and
they have to resort to other means, whether that's traveling
out of state or using telemedicine, the ability of people
(20:18):
to access medication abortion has kind of been a game changer.
At the same time, whether they're doing it through telemedicine
or they're self managing with pills that they access from
community support networks, and so as a result of that,
the anti abortion movement has really made targeting abortion pills
one of their top priorities.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Talk to me about the book, Explain to me sort
of why you decided to write this book and how
you got here.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
I was really interested in the reporting that I had done,
certainly before Dobs, but I think I really started to
focus on this after Dobs, on the stories of activists
who were fighting to keep abortion accessible regardless of the law,
in spite of the law, and that took a number
of different forms. But you know, we hear so much,
(21:05):
and I just spoke about how dire things are and
how kind of bad everything is. But also I think
the story of the past couple years after Dobbs is
one of incredible courage and resilience, Like there are so
many badass activists who were fighting before that decision and
have continued to fight, often putting themselves on the line
in order to make sure that people can access the
(21:26):
abortions that they need. And so so much of the
of like the coverage and the narrative over the years,
including a lot of stories that I've done have really
focused on politics and on the courts and the legal situation,
but both within the US and around the world, there's
this whole other movement around self managed abortion and about
(21:47):
making abortion available outside of the political legal medical system
that I think deserves a lot more attention because it
has had an incredible impact, both in terms of the
number of people it is enabled to access abortion and
restrictive environments, but also I think these networks, whether it's
telemedicine with you know, legal US clinicians, or whether it's
(22:10):
these sort of underground pell distributors, ultimately what they're doing
is they're subverting abortion bands, they're fighting back against abortion bans,
They're rejecting the idea that the government can dictate what
someone does with their body. And so I think that
they function kind of on multiple levels, and I was
really interested in how that happened and what that feminist
(22:31):
legacy was, because that's been true in Poland and Ireland
and Argentina and Mexico and after Dobs. There were two
kind of activists in particular that I focused on in
the book. One is doctor Rebecca Gomberts, who's a Dutch doctor,
and the other is Veronica Cruz who's an activist from Mexico,
and they really helped the US ecosystem kind of like
(22:55):
figure things out after dobs and get up and running
so that there were we for people in states of
demand abortion to access the medication safely after the decision.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
It strikes me that now that we have the pills
being easier to access or fairly easy to access, the
people who are the most in danger from these abortion
bands actually are pregnant women because they are far enough
(23:28):
along often who want a baby, but something has gone
horribly wrong, and those women are too far along a
lot of times to get the pills, but not far enough,
you know, not far enough along to deliver the baby.
And so we see a lot of reporting about women
(23:48):
who either their lives are at risk or they die
or they have you know, they can't get and you
know they're bleeding out in a parking lot. We saw
a Republican woman who was in legislature blaming Democrats for that.
I don't know if you saw this story in the
Wall Street Journal. I just wonder if you can talk
(24:09):
about sort of that moment these women who are as
someone who has had three children and who has had
very scary pregnancies. It strikes me that what has happened
as a result of the fall of Row it really
puts pregnant women in even more peril.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Yeah. Absolutely, And that's such a good point because something
that I'm really careful to make clear in the book
is that access to medication abortion is not some kind
of like panacea silver bullet situation. It is not going
to be a good option for everyone for a variety
of reasons. You know, someone who doesn't have a safe
home environment, for instance, it might not be a viable
(24:46):
option for them to receive the medication in the mail.
And to your point, folks who are leader on in
pregnancy or have more complicated pregnancies or situations, the pills
are also not going to be the best option for them.
And there's been a whole bunch of research that has
come out about the impact of dobs on maternal mortality rates.
And I believe that in states with abortion bans, the
(25:10):
maternal mortality rate has is something like twice that of
states without abortion bans. The rates of sepsis have gone
up significantly, I mean sepsis. There's kind of this this
idea that abortion care is not part of the broader
spectrum of reproductive health care that we've been hearing anti abortion,
you know, politicians talk about for a long time, but
(25:31):
that is just completely untrue for anyone who has the
most basic knowledge of the way that pregnancy or child
birth works. There's so many reasons why people might need
a procedure to save their lives, or they might need
a procedure in order to maintain their future fertility, or
because they receive some sort of fetal diagnosis that I
should be up to down whether they want to make
(25:53):
that decision, And all these states that have banned abortion
are taking that decision making capacity away from both the
patient and for the doctors who want to be able
to treat them. And so as a result, you also
have all of these obgyns who are leaving states with
abortion bands because they feel like they can't practice in
a way that feels in line with their medical ethics.
(26:14):
So I know that like in Idaho, for instance, like
something like one in five obgyns had left and there
were already maternity care deserts there. Pesians have been advised
to get airlift insurance in case they are in a
situation where they need a life saving abortion if they
live in one of those states. And so we live
in a country where maternal mortality is already so much
(26:34):
higher than it should be. I mean, my first book
was about maternal healthcare and about how our rates of
maternal mortality are way out of line with other countries
that are sort of, you know, in that high income,
industrialized category, and we're one of the few countries where
our maternal mortality rates have gotten worse. And then you
add the dangers of dobs on top of that, because ultimately,
(26:54):
you can never legislate every single pregnancy complication that might arise,
Like you can never say, oh, a life saving abortion
for this condition is okay, but not for this one.
I mean that should be up to doctors and their
medical judgment.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
What you have here is doctors afraid of legislators, Republican legislators,
which is no way to practice medicine.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Fair. Yeah, absolutely, And I mean there've even been cases
where essentially like women and their doctors have called politicians bluff.
So I think the case of Kate Cox in Texas
was sor the illuminating one in which she received a
diagnosis and she and her husband decided that the best
course for their family was to end the pregnancy, and
(27:39):
brought a case to get clarity from a judge in
Texas as to whether they the doctor was able to
provide her with an abortion without being subject to some
form of prosecution. And then the court denied their case. So,
I mean they essentially called the bluff. They said, you know,
you say that the abortions are like exceptions are allowed
in X, Y and Z reasons, but then it was
(28:01):
clear that they weren't. And so that's just another reason
why this idea of exceptions that anti abortion and politicians
try to use to make their policies seem more warm
and fuzzy or just total bullshit.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Right, how old are you? Theres you thirty eight? So
you're I'm forty six, which I love to talk about
how old I am and we are this you know,
we're about the same generation. We're a generation that had
row right, we had it until we didn't. And I
just would love you to talk about sort of where
we are as women, where we are as feminists, what
(28:35):
it looks like. I mean, I feel like the Trump
administration has definitely been very misogynistic in a lot of
its legislation, but I don't know that We've had so
many public conversations about misogyny, and I'm wondering we've seen
them be much worse to other people, right, in much
(28:56):
more of a flagrant way. You know, I had this
colonel on who is losing her job because she's trans.
I've had you know, I've for sure had seen a
lot of cruelty from this administration. But I'm wondering able
to talk about just the misogyny underlying misogyny that comes
(29:17):
from this war on choice and also just sort of
expand on that however you want.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Yeah, I mean I think that abortion bands. I mean
something that one of the activists said to me. I
think it was Vero in Mexico, but something that she
said was to frame abortion bands as a form of
like state sanctioned gender based violence. And I thought that
that was so interesting, Like it kind of blew my
mind a little bit, because ultimately, it is a government
(29:45):
that is saying both, we do not trust you to
make the decisions that are right for you. We believe
that we know better than you what is best for
you and your family. And it's also part of I
think a broader misogynistic effort to keep women in their place,
to maintain this like gender binary and essentialism and sort
(30:06):
of saying that like, if you can get pregnant, then
that is your lot in life, and you will be
punished if you have I don't know, nonprocreative sex, like
I mean, that's ultimately what they're saying. And I think
that there's no way to separate abortion bands from misogyny.
I mean, they're just like completely interlaced, and you can't.
(30:27):
I just don't know how you could sort of see
an abortion band as being rooted in anything other than
a disregard for women's dignity and autonomy in their lives.
And I think that something that was really interesting to
me as I was reporting the book was Part one
is a lot of kind of pre Row history, and
it goes up to the eighties, so after Row, where
(30:47):
I talk about how the abortion pill was invented. But
I was doing all of this research into some of
these underground activist networks that were kind of cropped up
in the sixties in the early seventies that were part
of the second wave feminism and the ways that they
talked about that many of these activists talked about abortion
and some of the tensions that were involved in the
(31:08):
fight and the things that they felt like were important.
And there were activists in the sixties who were talking
about abortion on demand, for free, without apology, and that's
a message that still feels pretty radical today. And it's what,
I mean, what fifty sixty years old at this point.
And so I think that the thing that we have
been trying or like the movement has been trying to
(31:30):
fight for. I think there was this way enrich Row
did create a little bit of complacency, and I think
that sort of that memory of what those activists were
doing back then, I was sort of surprised, I guess,
I would say, by like how radical some of the
things that they were saying and things that they were
doing were. And then also while I was reporting, something
(31:52):
that was so interesting to me as I was reporting
on the some of the underground or community support networks
that are active now and distributing pills, is that many
of the people involved, not all, but many are older women,
women in their sixties, seventies. There was one woman in
her eighties. And I think that there's a number of
reasons why they've gotten so involved in some of this
(32:13):
legally risky early kind of legal gray area work. Some
of it is because some of them feel like, my
children are grown, I'm retired, I'm in a financially stable position,
and so I probably have less to lose, less to
lose than someone who is younger and you know, sort
of still figuring things out. But also they have this
memory of what it was like to live before ROW,
(32:35):
and I think that that made them kind of radical
in a way that felt really just like compelling and moving,
and so they were totally there to step up. At
the same time, I think that there are activists like
folks in the abortion fund movement and in the reproductive
justice movement who have been really pushing for the kind
(32:58):
of movement overall in what it's trying to fight for.
And I think that goes back a little bit to
the sense of complacency. Like I think, so if there
was this idea that we had ROW, and so even
if there was the High Amendment in place and so
you know that excluded women who are on Medicaid from
having their abortions covered, or even if like all these
(33:18):
states before DOBS had gestational limits or limits on minors
the accessing healthcare that that stuff was kind of okay
because it was necessary to maintain the status quo. And
so I think where things are moving now and have
been moving for a long time, largely due to the
tireless kind of advocacy of the reproductive justice movement, is
saying like, we don't have to accept these scraps, we
(33:39):
don't have to accept limits, and bands like we can
fight for something that's much bigger. We can fight for
abortion on demand without apology, which was, like I said,
the same thing that those activists from the sixties we're
fighting for.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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