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Fast Politics w/ Molly Jong-Fast on YouTube
Fast Politics w/ Molly Jong-Fast
Transcript
Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to part three of our new docu-series, Project 2029 of Reimagining.
Speaker 1: I'm Molly Jungfest, a columnist, podcaster, and person you occasionally see on cable news.
Speaker 1: In this series, we're trying to start a conversation about where the Democratic Party goes when it regains power.
Speaker
1: The hope is that there will be an agenda that puts people first and
creates incentives for many of the voters Democrats have lost to come
back to the party.
Speaker 1: In this episode, we're going to discuss reproductive rights and how, when Democrats regain power,
Speaker
1: we can work to make sure those rights are codified. Speaker 1: We've
assembled some of the smartest people we know to explain to us how we
can begin to protect, codify,
Speaker 1: and help change our legislation so we never have to fight for these rights again.
Speaker 1: But first, it's easy to forget just all the ways these rights are being attacked.
Speaker 1: So let's walk through where we are at this very moment in America today.
Speaker
2: Probably the most significant thing that's happened in recent years
is that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which opened the door
to a bunch of other legal changes that are really unprecedented, right?
Speaker
2: So we've seen criminal abortion laws that are much more stringent
than anything that was on the books in the 19th century.
Speaker
2: We've seen those laws interpreted in ways that preclude physicians
from intervening in miscarriages and stillbirths, not just in situations
where people are seeking abortions.
Speaker 2: And we've seen that those laws can have unintended consequences for people at the end of life, too.
Speaker 2: People whose advanced directives don't address pregnancy or who don't have advanced directives at all.
Speaker
2: So I think one of the things we've seen is that what seems to be
changes just about abortion, which are significant enough in their own
right, are spilling over into lots of areas involving people's lives,
whether that's birth control or IVF on the one hand, or certainly people
with wanted pregnancies having pregnancy complications on the other.
Speaker 3: So you both have the flat out criminal laws that make abortion a crime, aiding and abetting abortion a crime.
Speaker
3: You know, Texas has been the innovator on this, for lack of a better
word, that allows these bounty hunting lawsuits where ordinary
individuals can sue someone because they have provided an abortion,
aided and abetted providing an abortion.
Speaker
3: They just passed a law about going after the manufacturers and the
shippers of medication abortion, which has been a lifeline in post-Roe
America.
Speaker
3: So it's everything from the state prosecuting to giving individuals
the power to become sort of their own vigilante attorneys general to go
after people who, again, might be a friend helping someone, you know, go
out of state.
Speaker
3: I mean, we have represented individuals in the state of Texas where
an abusive boyfriend has sued the friends and family of a woman, in one
case, who left the state of Texas to have an abortion in another state.
Speaker
3: That's perfectly legal to do. Speaker 3: But he brought this lawsuit
against them. Speaker 3: We represented another woman.
Speaker
3: She found out when she was driving around that a million-dollar
lawsuit had been filed against her for allegedly helping a friend secure
medication abortion in the state of Texas.
Speaker
1: And all of this madness started with SB8. Speaker 2: So SB8 was
passed in 2021, and at the time it was mostly designed to circumvent
Roe.
Speaker
2: So the idea was that instead of the government enforcing criminal
abortion laws, that enforcement would be outsourced to private citizens
who could sue anyone who performed an abortion for at least $10,000,
regardless of whether that person had any connection to the abortion.
Speaker
2: This was designed to scare abortion providers to stop offering
services. Speaker 2: It was designed to kind of incentivize a group of
bounty hunters to go after them.
Speaker
2: And it legally meant that some of the constitutional roadblocks that
could be in place if the government was enforcing these laws would go
away.
Speaker
2: And, of course, SB8 stopped mattering as much when Roe came down
because Texas could enforce lots of other criminal bans.
Speaker
2: But it still mattered in lots of other ways because we've seen that
sometimes politicians hesitate to enforce the most stringent bans
because they know that doing so will be politically unpopular.
Speaker
3: Medication abortion, which is a two-pill regime that has been on the
market approved by the FDA for 25 years as safe and effective to
terminate a pregnancy in the early period of pregnancy.
Speaker 3: This has been the case as 10,000 women are getting abortion pills in states where there's a ban.
Speaker 3: So, of course, it's in the sideline of those who want to ban abortion entirely.
Speaker
3: And there are different ways that they're going about this. Speaker
3: Texas just passed a law that goes into effect December the 4th, H
House Bill 7, which says that vigilantes can come and sue manufacturers,
people who are mailing medication abortion to try to stop it.
Speaker
3: Second, you know, the Trump administration has asked the FDA to take
another look at the approval of medication abortion.
Speaker 3: Now, this is something that should be a determination on the science, on the facts, as it has been for 25 years.
Speaker
3: But they are seeking to get a reversal from the agency of the
approval of medication abortion, because then it would not only cut off
medication abortion in states where it's banned, but it would cut off
medication abortion in states where it's legal across the United States.
Speaker
1: And this, of course, means every woman, whether seeking an abortion
or not, can feel the implications of these overreaching laws.
Speaker 4: What this means is that every woman's pregnancy is suspect and every woman's reproductive health is at risk.
Speaker
4: We are seeing that with people who are pregnant and want to continue
their pregnancies but face a health care issue or health care crisis
who can't get the care that they need.
Speaker
4: We've seen that in Texas and Florida and Georgia. Speaker 4: We've
unfortunately seen the tragic deaths of several women, some of whom were
not seeking abortion care.
Speaker
4: They were seeking help with their pregnancies that they wanted.
Speaker 4: And I think that is the unfortunate reality of abortion bans,
is that doctors and hospital systems feel scared to provide necessary
care because the state law could essentially criminalize them for doing
so.
Speaker
4: It puts every woman and every person's health at risk. Speaker 1:
This is Jessica Valenti, who writes the definitive substack on women's
health, abortion every day.
Speaker 1: She has tirelessly chronicled these attacks on women's health.
Speaker
5: Women are dying. Speaker 5: Women are going septic. Speaker 5: The
maternal mortality rate is going up. Speaker 5: The infant mortality
rate is going up.
Speaker
5: The sepsis rate is going up, right? Speaker 5: Like all of these
things that we could sort of expect. Speaker 5: Then there are the
ripple effects of bans where you have OBGYNs leaving anti-abortion
Speaker 5: states as a result of that. Speaker 5: Maternity wards are shuttering as a result of maternity wards shuttering.
Speaker
5: There are these huge maternal health deserts across the country.
Speaker 5: Right. And so there's sort of like the the medical piece
that's happening.
Speaker
5: What is positive, I will say, and this is the thing that they're
trying to attack the most. Speaker 5: It should go without saying, but
it doesn't, that there isn't a fetal heartbeat when these bans are
limiting abortion.
Speaker 5: Right. When Republicans pass a heartbeat law, it's generally at around six weeks of pregnancy.
Speaker
5: There is no heartbeat then because there is no heart formed yet.
Speaker 5: And so this really is just, again, a fake science thing to
try to ban abortion as early as possible.
Speaker
5: Most people are not going to know that they're pregnant at six
weeks. Speaker 5: And I think it's part of this broader effort by
Republicans to seem medically credible, to seem scientifically credible,
because they can't just say, oh, we just don't want you having a birth,
right?
Speaker 5: or this is religious or this is ideological, because they know how incredibly, incredibly
Speaker
5: unpopular it is. That's the same reason they're doing, we're just
concerned about women's health, Speaker 5: we're just concerned about
coercion, we're just concerned about clean water. They can't say what
Speaker 5: they actually want because no one agrees with them. And I mean, no one, not even in red states.
Speaker 5: Even in the reddest states and the states that are considered the most anti-abortion,
Speaker 5: People still don't want these laws, right? Speaker 5: Like they still want to repeal abortion bans.
Speaker 5: Republicans still want to repeal abortion bans. Speaker 5: There is no overseeing how unpopular these laws are.
Speaker
5: I think they may be the most unpopular laws on the books in America.
Speaker 5: And again, this is part of why I do the newsletter too,
because there is this real issue with
Speaker 5: a lot of lefty male pundits and, you know, experts who want to say that we need to compromise on
Speaker
5: abortion and that's how we're going to win red states. And that's
where we're going to, you know, Speaker 5: meet in the middle somehow.
And it's so far removed from the reality of this issue that I'm just,
Speaker 5: I'm desperate to be like constantly reiterating this so that people understand how popular this
Speaker 5: issue is for Democrats. I think one of the best examples of that is the rise of what conservatives
Speaker 5: call equal protection bills, which basically claim they're a fetal personhood push, basically claim
Speaker 5: that fetuses, embryos, fertilized eggs have equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment of the
Speaker 5: Constitution. And we've seen over a dozen states introduce bills that would state that and would
Speaker 5: make having an abortion, would punish the abortion patient as a murderer. And in a lot of these
Speaker
5: states, that could mean the death penalty. A couple of years ago,
Republicans would say, Speaker 5: you know, the legislators would say,
oh, these are just a couple of like outliers. These are a couple
Speaker
5: of extremists. No one is taking these bills seriously. Guess what?
We're seeing more of Speaker 5: the bills introduced. We're seeing the
bills get more co-sponsors. Just a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 5: South Carolina had multiple hearings on one of these bills. This is a real thing.
Speaker
5: And it really concerns me that the mainstream media in particular,
because they know that these bills are not going to pass right now, they
sort of tend to ignore them, right? Or they treat them as if, well, you
know, again, these are extreme. This is radical. This is not going to
go anywhere. That's not true. We see it increasing.
Speaker
5: I think it was a few months ago after Kentucky introduced one of
these bills, the Courier Journal in Kentucky, like the largest, most
circulated newspaper in Kentucky, ran an op-ed by one of these guys who
pushes equal protection bills.
Speaker
5: They call themselves abortion abolitionists. Speaker 5: They ran an
op-ed by him where he's defending this. And it's like, how is it
possible that we've gotten to the point where a state's paper of record
is seriously talking about whether or not to give women the death
penalty for abortion?
Speaker
5: The other thing, in addition to the equal protection, is the attacks
on travel, right? We've seen multiple states and attacks on speech.
We've seen multiple states like Idaho and Tennessee pass what they call
anti-trafficking, anti-abortion trafficking laws that they claim are to
help minors who might be being abused.
Speaker
5: It says you can't take a minor out of state without parental
permission for an abortion, which on its face sounds like, OK, like that
sounds reasonable.
Speaker
5: The laws are written and I should say they are in court and some
sections of this have been blocked. Speaker 5: But the way that they're
written, it basically says helping a teenager get an abortion in any
way, not just having them leave the state, driving them to the post
office to pick up abortion pills, texting them the URL to a clinic could
be a felony.
Speaker
5: Right. And then you have I forget how many counties it is, but it's
like over a dozen counties in Texas that have passed anti-trafficking
ordinances, not just directed at minors, but of women of all ages so
that it's illegal to help someone leave the state in these counties.
Speaker
5: And so you're talking about literally restricting adult women's
right to travel. And again, we're not hearing about it, right? Like if
there were dozens of counties doing this to men saying men can't leave
the state or you can be sued if you help a woman leave the state, you
would hear about it every day.
Speaker
1: And while many anti-choice activists believe that you can ban
abortion and still protect pregnant women from the downstream effects of
banning abortion, we know that in reality that doesn't work.
Speaker
3: What people aren't seeing, because although it gets coverage to some
extent in the press, it doesn't get covered a lot, is how impossible it
is to craft exceptions to abortion bans for health risks.
Speaker
3: It is impossible. Speaker 3: You cannot list the conditions. Speaker
3: And part of it's impossible because the way health care is normally
practiced, you make a decision for yourself about benefits and risks.
Speaker
2: I mean, I think that one of the things we've seen since Roe has
overturned is that movements to criminalize abortion are having a lot of
unintended consequences. So we've seen that doctors and hospitals and
lawmakers don't know what abortion means, right? So if you have someone
coming in suffering from preeclampsia or someone who's had a miscarriage
and there may still be fetal cardiac activity, but a pregnancy is
fundamentally ended, we've seen doctors saying, sorry, you know, your
wife may die, but we can't intervene yet because if we intervene,
that'll be an abortion and that will be an abortion.
Speaker
2: be committing a felony and will go to jail for a decade or more. And
so we've seen a lot of people Speaker 2: who are not abortion seekers,
right? People who are just have wanted pregnancies, who are having
Speaker 2: medical emergencies, be turned away. We've seen hospitals, sometimes the Associated Press reporting
Speaker
2: that some emergency rooms don't want to treat pregnant patients at
all because they're afraid Speaker 2: of the legal complications. We've
seen patients in end-of-life scenarios who are diagnosed with
Speaker
2: essentially brain death, have their families be unable to decide
whether they should remain on Speaker 2: life support during a pregnancy
because doctors and lawmakers interpret the law to say that that
Speaker 2: would be an abortion. And we've seen IVF families, some of whom view their own embryos as their
Speaker 2: children, be told that as an unintended consequence of some of these changes, they no longer have access
Speaker 1: to IVF. It's not just that the right refuses to carve out protections for pregnant women.
Speaker 1: It's more than that. They have declared war on birth control. And this war on birth control
Speaker 1: has spilled out into one of the greatest technological achievements for having more
Speaker 2: children, IVF. IVF wasn't a culture war issue until recently, if you think about it. And it's
Speaker 2: become one, I think partly because of the overruling of Roe. That was pretty obvious in February 2024
Speaker
2: when the Alabama Supreme Court held that the state's wrongful death
law, which allows you to Speaker 2: bring certain lawsuits, applied to
IVF embryos. And that had the effect of basically entirely
Speaker 2: stopping IVF in the state until lawmakers passed a statute, essentially not denying that IVF embryos
Speaker 2: were people, but allowing IVF to go forward. But that wasn't the end of it. We've seen people in
Speaker 2: the anti-abortion, we've been continuing to push to limit IVF and promoting what they call a more
Speaker 2: effective alternative to IVF. They call restorative reproductive medicine. So we've started to see
Speaker 2: states in the South promoting this idea as an alternative to IVF. And what restorative
Speaker
2: reproductive medicine is, just for context, is essentially a lot of
the treatments that you Speaker 2: would get for infertility that
stopped short of IVF, they focus almost entirely on female
Speaker 2: infertility. Speaker 2: And they often end up being ineffective for people who would need IVF or people dealing
Speaker
2: with male factor infertility. Speaker 2: And they can be used by
people whose clock is running out as far as the efficacy of IVF
Speaker
2: is concerned. Speaker 2: So we're seeing an ongoing effort to
restrict IVF and also to fund and promote an alternative
Speaker
2: that may not work as well for people experiencing infertility.
Speaker 1: And what you see over and over again is these laws sweep up
people who aren't even having abortions.
Speaker
1: This case is a prime example. Speaker 5: She had a miscarriage. And
like most people do, you put your miscarriage remains in the trash.
Speaker
5: What else are you supposed to do with them? And so she was arrested
for that. Speaker 5: There was a woman in Texas who spent five months in
jail after she miscarried in a public bathroom
Speaker
5: because they didn't like that she flushed it. Speaker 5: I have
taken like internally to calling them like ick laws because all of these
it's like the ick factor.
Speaker 5: All of these mostly male cops and prosecutors have no idea what pregnancy loss really looks like.
Speaker 5: They get icked out when they see blood. Right. And they're desperate to punish people.
Speaker 5: And so it really is this like loophole. It's this way around the prohibition on arresting abortion patients.
Speaker 5: figure out different seemingly unrelated charges to bring against women. And crisis pregnancy
Speaker 1: centers are the right answer to much of this. And we all know those do nothing but fail women's
Speaker 5: health needs. That like crisis pregnancy centers really are central to Republicans plan for all of
Speaker 5: this that, you know, CPCs are their enforcement arm. They are trying to sort of give CPCs this
Speaker 5: super immunity from state regulation so that trying to regulate them at all, trying to say,
Speaker 5: hey, you can't lie to women, you can't put out this nonsense, is considered a First Amendment
Speaker
5: violation. And so they're really, it's not just that they're using
these groups to funnel, you Speaker 5: know, millions of taxpayer
dollars into religious organizations, but they are emboldening and
Speaker 5: empowering these organizations, which they say are good to replace all the Planned Parenthood
Speaker 5: clinics that their policies are shuttering, right? So they are saying, yeah, they're the opposite,
Speaker
5: and they're not real healthcare clinics. That's how little they
think about our health. They're Speaker 5: saying, we're going to give
millions and millions of dollars to these groups that don't have doctors
Speaker
5: on staff for the most part. Sometimes they have a medical director
that'll come in once or twice Speaker 5: a month and usually they're
like a retired urologist. It's just absurd. They're not real,
Speaker 5: but they're trying to paint this picture of CPCs as a reasonable replacement for Planned Parenthood
Speaker 5: clinics. And one of the primary reasons they're doing that is to enact an informal ban on birth
Speaker 5: control, right? They don't want to come out and say birth control is illegal. They don't want to,
Speaker 5: they don't want that heat. They don't want that backlash. But if they can get rid of every single
Speaker 5: credible reproductive health clinic in a state and replace it with a crisis pregnancy center
Speaker 5: that one can't prescribe birth control because there's no doctors there and two won't and the
Speaker
5: only way that they'll talk about it is to say that it'll give you
cancer or it'll kill you Speaker 5: there you have like a ban on birth
control without ever having to to write it in the books
Speaker
1: And what is very striking is that the abortion rate has actually not
gone down despite all the obstacles and work the right wing has put
into trying to make it harder to get an abortion.
Speaker
5: What is positive is that the abortion rate hasn't gone down, right?
These laws have been shockingly ineffective at reducing the abortion
rate. The only thing that they have done is increase suffering, increase
death, right? Like they're not reducing the abortion rate. And that's
in large part because of abortion medication and telehealth.
Speaker
5: Right now, I think it's about one in four, the last study showed,
one in four abortions in America are provided via telehealth.
Speaker
5: And so you have all of these women in red states getting abortion
pills shipped to them from doctors in Shield states.
Speaker
5: Anti-abortion people are really, really pissed about that. Speaker
5: And so the vast majority of attacks that we're seeing right now, the
attacks that we're seeing this year especially, are on abortion pills.
Speaker
5: That is what they are most desperate to do away with, with
telehealth specifically. Speaker 1: And some blue states have already
enacted shield laws.
Speaker
4: Abortion shield laws are policies that states enact that aim to, in
some way, protect abortion providers in that state from being able to
provide care to those who live in other states.
Speaker
4: So essentially protecting an abortion provider in your state from
any charges from a state that bans abortion and might want to go after
you.
Speaker
4: About 22 states have some kind of shield law on the books in some
way, but eight states have a really important component, which is this
extension of the shield law protections to telehealth provision.
Speaker
4: So that's what really allows a provider in a protective state to
treat a patient in another state via telehealth and get them the
medication that they need to have the abortion care that they need.
Speaker
4: So incredibly important, huge innovation, lots of room for states to
continue enacting them and also continue strengthening them because the
legal developments on these change almost every week, week to week,
month to month.
Speaker
4: And so it's really important for states to know that none of these
laws are one and done. Speaker 4: You can't just pass one shield law or
pass the right to abortion and call it a day.
Speaker
4: You have to keep abreast of what the attacks are and keep finding
ways in your state to respond to them and to protect abortion provision.
Speaker 1: But the goal here is to protect women's reproductive rights so that there isn't a cycle of losing and gaining rights.
Speaker
2: The kind of endgame for the anti-abortion movement is fetal
personhood. The idea that, you know, from the moment of fertilization,
they're constitutional rights. And they think that would be a path to a
national abortion ban through the judiciary that would also apply to
things like IVF.
Speaker
2: It turns out, unsurprisingly, that strong majorities of voters don't
want this and that they could put some effective pressure on state
judges and even federal judges and Republican politicians not to embrace
this.
Speaker
2: But normal people don't know that that's what this is. Right. It's
like the life begins at conception thing. Speaker 2: If you say to an
average voter, when do you think life begins? Some of them who are not
opposed to abortion may well say conception. Right.
Speaker
2: I mean, that doesn't follow. Speaker 2: All this other stuff doesn't
follow from that. Speaker 2: So I think if people want to make a
difference on reproductive rights, in addition to voting,
Speaker
2: in addition to campaigning, in addition to donating to organizations
that are either Speaker 2: litigating this or helping people access
services, there's also just telling your neighbors what
Speaker
2: this actually is and is not, right? Speaker 2: To say to people, the
issue here is not that when you see an ultrasound from your friend
Speaker
2: who's excited to be pregnant, that you think that's a baby. Speaker
2: The issue is, do you want people who do these things to go to jail?
Speaker
2: Because that's what we're talking about. It's not about do you value
life or do you not value life or do you value this life more than the
pregnant person's life? It's essentially putting women and pregnant
people back in the picture and saying what we're doing is criminalizing
some of these people. We're not actually helping anyone by doing that.
We're just creating a bigger carceral state.
Speaker
3: When there is a majority in the Congress that supports abortion
rights and a president who will sign that legislation, that Congress
needs to pass comprehensive legislation to protect access to abortion.
Speaker 3: And it cannot be about going back to, you know, the shreds that were left of Roe.
Speaker
3: It has to be comprehensive. Speaker 3: It has to be stronger.
Speaker 3: And here's the thing. Because of Roe versus Wade, for many
years, people did not understand that Congress has the power to do this.
But they do. And let me just say about this, the American public is
already way ahead of Congress on this.
Speaker
3: In every state where they've been given the opportunity, a majority
has voted for access to abortion. So we think about people have to
realize this is within grasp of being able to have, you know, Congress
address this national nightmare of the criminalization of abortion.
Congress can do it.
Speaker
3: The movement has been working on some very strong legislation that
when there is a majority supporting abortion rights, I would fully
expect to be introduced.
Speaker
3: And it would be legislation that covers the two big prongs, which
is, you know, the legal right to access abortion care.
Speaker
3: And the second would be the addressing the financial issues, the
insurance issues that I just talked about, you know, as well as issues
of, you know, not excluding immigrants from health care.
Speaker
2: One thing I think a kind of bare minimum idea Democrats would
explore would probably be repealing bad old laws like the Comstock Act,
which is sort of hanging fire as a possibility for a Republican
administration to use to mail ban the mailing of any item related to
abortion, which could be a backdoor national ban on abortion.
Speaker
2: So I think a first step for Democrats would be to take that off the
table. Speaker 2: Democrats have also been focusing on some kind of
federal guarantee for access to reproductive rights.
Speaker
2: The model that was receiving the most attention in the Biden years
was the Women's Health Protection Act. And we may see a kind of updated,
you know, Women's Health Protection Act 2.0 that will recognize some of
the changes we've seen since that bill was drafted.
Speaker
2: because that bill was drafted, of course, you know, in an era where a
lot of the kinds of state laws Speaker 2: we're seeing from
conservatives just weren't on the books. So and the reason that's
important is
Speaker 2: because Republicans are not very likely to pass a sweeping bill criminalizing abortion and IVF
Speaker
2: and contraception, because then they're going to have to have that
be on their voting record. Speaker 2: The danger about something like
the Comstock Act is that Republicans can say, hey, it's not me,
Speaker 2: it's just existing federal law. I'm just enforcing existing federal law. So removing the Comstock
Speaker
2: Act would mean essentially that to get to the same results,
Republicans would actually have to be Speaker 2: accountable for what
they were voting for. And I think that would be a much, much heavier
lift for
Speaker 2: people opposed to abortion. You know, Roe v. Wade was the floor, not the ceiling. And I think that's
Speaker 4: an important reminder for what we think about now when we think about, OK, Roe is gone. We have to
Speaker 4: build back something better and stronger and something that really allows for true reproductive
Speaker
4: of health care access for all and not the limitations that we had
even under the Roe Speaker 4: framework, that there's no one fix.
Speaker 4: This is an effort that needs to happen at every level of government, the state legislatures,
Speaker
4: the courts, Congress, and a federal administration. Speaker 4:
Nothing short of an all-out national right to abortion for anyone at any
time without
Speaker 4: barriers is acceptable from a values judgment, right, from a values point of view, from our
Speaker 4: human rights point of view. But what that means in practice is we have to be responding to all of
Speaker
4: the attacks that we are searing. There are city councils who are
passing laws saying you can't Speaker 4: use the roads in that city or
county to leave to go get an abortion. There are states that are
Speaker 4: trying to ban people from helping someone leave the state to get abortion care that is legal in
Speaker 4: another state, right? Like they are really finding any lever they can to criminalize patients and
Speaker 4: providers and really limit your ability as a human being to move around the country with ease,
Speaker 4: which is your constitutional right to travel. And so I say that because we can't just say,
Speaker
4: hey, there's one silver bullet here. It's not ballot measures.
That's part of the toolbox, Speaker 4: right? That's one tool in the
toolbox. The wins that we've had in state ballot measures are an
Speaker 4: incredible display of clear articulation that the public wants to see abortion rights protected,
Speaker 4: even in what we would consider kind of traditionally hostile or so-called red states,
Speaker 4: right? That's not universally true, but it's by and large true. And I think that I would start with
Speaker 4: a state-by-state strategy, leave no state untested. When you can win in Missouri,
Speaker 4: when you can win in Kansas, it means you can win in other places too. Build the ground game,
Speaker 4: build the state policy muscle to remove abortion bans, to overturn abortion bans,
Speaker
4: and to start focusing on access, right? Speaker 4: Not just
legality, but access. Speaker 4: And then use that momentum at the
federal level to enact a national right to abortion
Speaker 4: and to do things like protecting your ability to travel across state lines for health care of any kind,
Speaker 4: protecting your ability to access a full range of information about how to use Mifepristone
Speaker 4: or how to use Medicaid to an abortion, to enact levers and create abortion funds that are publicly
Speaker 4: funded, make sure Medicaid and other public insurance programs cover abortion care, make
Speaker 4: sure there are not limitations for private insurance. We know that the Hyde Amendment has
Speaker 4: been a horrific policy for also nearly 50 years that even while Rose stood, really stopped people
Speaker 1: from getting the care that they need that they otherwise would have gotten. We need to think big.
Speaker
1: This new era of politics shouldn't be about Democrats taking half
measures the way they might have in previous administrations.
Speaker
5: The ideal scenario is national protections for abortion by just
saying the government has no place intervening in pregnancy ever.
Speaker
5: Pregnancy is too complicated to legislate at any point. Speaker 5:
And we are like, I don't want to hear about like Roe, restoring Roe.
Speaker
5: I don't want to hear about 24 weeks. Speaker 5: I don't want to hear
about viability, which is a made up term. Speaker 5: That's not a
medical term.
Speaker 5: Just there is no place for the government in pregnancy, period.
Speaker 1: Another thing we must do is protect women from frivolous lawsuits filed to strip away their reproductive rights.
Speaker
5: From civil suits, right? Speaker 5: Like that's the other thing that
we're seeing. Speaker 5: Texas, which is always leading the way in
these sort of like nightmare bills.
Speaker
5: They passed a law that just went into effect this month that allows
people to sue pretty much anyone who touches abortion pills on their way
to a woman in Texas for $100,000.
Speaker
5: And so, again, it's a way to get around this idea that there's a
prohibition on actually criminalizing or actually suing the pregnant
person who's had an abortion.
Speaker
5: Instead of doing that, we'll ruin everyone's life around you, right?
Speaker 5: We'll make it so you have no support system.
Speaker
5: We'll make it so that your friends and family are too afraid to help
you get abortion pills, Speaker 5: too afraid to lend you money to get
out of town, too afraid to give you advice.
Speaker
5: They want to create isolation and fear and this chilling effect.
Speaker 2: So I think there's definitely a question of Democrats getting
their stuff together about it,
Speaker 2: because we've had plenty of scenarios where Democrats had majorities that could pass federal
Speaker
2: protections for reproductive rights, and they've literally never
done it. Speaker 2: They didn't do it in the 90s. Speaker 2: They didn't
do it in the aughts.
Speaker
2: And so I think an important thing to happen if Democrats are able to
do this again is to finally say, this time it's a priority, right?
Speaker
2: There was always this sort of either Democrats worrying with one
another about how progressive or practical to be to the point where they
didn't do anything.
Speaker 2: Or it was Democrats saying, well, we can deal with reproductive rights later because we have bigger problems.
Speaker
2: And I think if Democrats get into power again, there would have to
be a moment where they say, you know, the time is really now.
Speaker
2: This is a priority. It's not this is going to take backseat again to
whatever other issue of the day happens to be there.
Speaker
2: And I don't I'm not that pessimistic about that, because I think
we've seen since Roe was overturned that this is an issue on which
Democrats principles and kind of selfish priorities dovetail.
Speaker 2: right? A lot of Democrats' political self-interest aligns with their ability to enact their principles
Speaker
2: here, right? This isn't a situation where Democrats are out on a
limb doing something that's likely to Speaker 2: cost them electorally
when they're acting on their principles. Because one of the lessons
we've seen
Speaker 2: since the overruling of Dobbs is that reproductive rights are not a democratic issue. They're an
Speaker
2: issue everybody, not everybody, but that a majority of Americans
agree on. It's a winning issue in Speaker 2: deep red states like
Missouri, it's a winning issue, and purple states like Arizona and
Michigan.
Speaker
2: Polling in places like Louisiana suggests that a majority of voters
there think their abortion laws Speaker 2: are too harsh. So the ballot
initiative campaign's been a really powerful way to take advantage of
Speaker 2: that where it's possible to say essentially that where the Republican Party is on this is not where
Speaker 2: the American people are on this anywhere, including in some of the reddest states in America.
Speaker
1: Thank you so much for watching this episode. We made this series to
get the conversation Speaker 1: about what happens after Trumpism.
Democrats need to be more than just anti-Trump, and part of this
Speaker 1: includes a bold vision to rebuild after Trump's disastrous agenda reshapes America. We'd love to
Speaker
1: create as much of a conversation around this as possible. Please
share it with a friend, Speaker 1: and click like on this video, and
comment so it spreads to more people on YouTube.
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