Factually! with Adam Conover - The End of Women's Rights with Mary Ziegler

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

The Dobbs Decision is one of the biggest blows to human rights in our lifetimes, and it’s just the beginning. Ending access to abortion is only the first step in the pro-life movement’s war on bodily autonomy. This week Adam sits with Mary Ziegler, law professor and author of Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction, to discuss the devastating reproductive reality our country might be heading toward. Find Mary's book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. You know, three years ago, the anti-abortion movement won what for years many had considered to be their ultimate goal. The Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturned Roe versus Wade and took away a woman's right

to choose whether or not to be pregnant in this country. Right-wing states then instituted complete bans on abortion and a safe, often medically necessary medical procedure that had been a right for decades in America became a crime instead in huge parts of this country. This is one of the greatest rollbacks of civil rights in my lifetime, period. It's frankly the greatest.

And it's an assault on women's autonomy couched in the language of states' rights. It's horrendous, it's wrong, and it's also not what the majority of Americans want. Nearly two-thirds of Americans support the right to abortion in all or most cases. But you know what? The anti-abortion movement isn't too happy either,

because if their goal was stopping abortion, guess what? It didn't work. Because it is still possible to procure abortion medication across state lines, abortion actually went up in America in the years after Dobbs, even in states that had total abortion bans.

So the pro-life movement is not happy or content with this outcome at all. After all, their goal is not to increase medication abortions, it is to end abortion entirely, to make it impossible for a woman to choose and to punish those that do. The Dobbs decision was not the end of America's fight over abortion, it was just the beginning of a new stage

in an ongoing war. And we should be well aware that things in this country could get much, much worse because the anti-abortion movement has an even bigger ultimate goal in sight that they are pushing for every single day. This week on the show, we're gonna talk about it and what we can all do to fight back.

But before we get into that, I wanna remind you that if you wanna support this show and all the episodes we bring you every single week, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free. You can also join our online community. We'd love to have you.

And if you want to come see me on the road doing standup comedy, I am out there. Head to adamconover.net for all my tickets and tour dates. Coming up soon, I'm headed to Oklahoma, Washington state, Brea, California. We got other dates that are gonna hit my schedule real soon. So keep up to date at adamconover.net. And now let's get to this week's episode.

My guest today is a past guest on the show. She's a law professor. And she is one of the foremost scholars of America's fight over reproductive rights in the country. In her new book, she argues that ending Roe was never the end goal of the anti-abortion movement. Instead, they are looking to give legal rights to all fetuses under the constitution

with potentially devastating results. That book is called, Personhood, The New Civil War Over Reproduction, and the author is Mary Ziegler. Please welcome her on the show today. Mary, thank you so much for being on the show again. It's wonderful to have you. Yeah, thanks for having me.

We've had you on, we sort of have you on every time there is some bad news about the fight to protect abortion access in America. Most recently, of course, the Rovers Wade decision has been overturned by the jobs decision. Why isn't the anti-abortion movement happy with this, given that that was sort of their historic goal? Yeah, I mean, the simple answer is it wasn't their historic goal.

And it's sort of easy to realize why when you remember that abortion seven actually declined since Roe was overturned. And I think anti-abortion groups always wanted not states rights. They wanted no abortion anywhere, because the ultimate goal was always what they call fetal personhood. So they're not happy with Ro being gone, they are just getting started. So what do they mean by fetal personhood?

Tell me about this. Yeah, so it's a legal claim. The 14th Amendment is the part of the Constitution that gives us liberty and equality. And they argue that the word person in that part of the Constitution actually applies to a fertilized egg. So the claim is not just that human life begins at fertilization,

it's also that all of those constitutional rights come into play as soon as there's fertilization. And that would have consequences for everything from abortion to whether people have a right to say no to a C-section to whether people people can use in weaker fertilization. Yeah, so let's talk about what some of those rights are. Yeah, what's one of the biggest in your view? Well, I think probably, I mean, obviously with personhood,

the biggest, most obvious thing is abortion. So if the anti-abortion movement was successful with this, it would mean that no state could have a liberal abortion law, even if voters wanted one. So it would mean no more ballot initiatives. It would mean an abortion ban in California and New York. It would also mean that in vitro fertilization would either be illegal or would have to really radically change because to make it affordable, people often make more than one embryo at a time. And they will store those embryos potentially if IVF doesn't work that cycle

or for later use, all of that would have to go. Um, and that's just kind of the tip of the iceberg, right? I mean, if you think about it, anytime we think of someone as a person in the law, that would potentially apply to a fertilized egg. So this is really sort of a Pandora's box kind of idea. Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking about even beyond abortion, there are so many other situations where

if a pregnant person is always considered to be two people who have equal rights, that could have a lot of strange cascading effects in the law. Are there any that jump out at you? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think probably jumps out at me the most is having written about it.

People don't, haven't really thought through what it's gonna mean. And that's actually pretty frightening. So this is not a scenario where, as much as people in the anti-abortion movement have been fighting for this idea for 50 years, they definitely haven't worked out the kinks because up until recently, this was a moonshot, right?

I don't know the equivalent for progressives would be, I don't know, something like ending climate change or universal basic income or something where progressives are like, oh, wouldn't that be great? But nobody really thinks it's ever gonna happen. So nobody really works out what it means. And now all of a sudden they woke up after roving on and they're like, wow, maybe we actually can do this. So I don't think they've thought it all the way through. I mean, we've seen recent cases involving pregnant people driving in the HOV. I mean, we've seen recent cases, you know, involving pregnant people driving the HOV lane and saying, Hey, there are two of us, I get to drive in the HOV lane.

Pregnant people arguing that, you know, they were deprived of their unborn children's rights when they weren't allowed to leave work because they were having pregnancy complications. And you can see conservative states not really knowing what to do with these arguments because they, they haven't thought through what they need beyond just criminalizing stuff, which has sort of been the go-to option so far.

Right. I mean, some of those arguments seem kind of trivial, but if that becomes the law of the land, it opens that Pandora's box of people being able to make those arguments. I mean, like, I assume would mean that embryos have free speech rights. God knows what that would mean, but presumably someone could bring some sort of strange novel case about, oh, well, you're impinging on my embryos, freedom of speech. So therefore you have to X, Y, Z. Yeah. I mean, probably the weirdest claim I mean, would be, um, I've seen actual claims.

There's a woman in Florida who was incarcerated for homicide, right? And so she was in jail pending her trial and she was pregnant. And so her lawyer filed a motion saying she should be released from prison, regardless of whether or not she killed this dude, because the unworn baby is in prison and the unworn baby didn't do anything.

So, you know, she's a hideous corpus, right? Like this innocent unborn baby shouldn't be in jail. So that's a real, like that actually happens. That kind of thing, I think, will happen if this theory actually gets more and more traction. Yeah, I mean, we're laughing, but like it seems non-trivial to rebut that argument if you've accepted the theory of fetal personhood.

Oh yeah, well, I mean, I think one of the things that really is important to know is that if you think the anti-abortion movement is powerful, and I think you really should because it has, you know, there are nonprofits with hundreds of millions of dollars that fund the anti-abortion movement. The anti-abortion movement has a lot of pull in the Republican party.

The anti-abortion movement has majorities in roughly half of the United States state legislatures. It is the fetal personhood movement. Like there is no the mainstream anti-abortion movement has majorities in roughly half of the United States state legislatures, it is the fetal personhood movement. Like there is no the mainstream anti-abortion movement and the fetal personhood movement. This has always been the end game. And so as much as this sounds weird, it's something that a lot of people are pursuing. And it's also, I think, worth emphasizing that fetal personhood doesn't have like an objective meaning. So people in the anti-abortion movement can change what it means to make it work for them. Not politically, I think that's never going to happen, but more with judges because that's the audience. They've seen the same movie we have

since 2022, which is one where most Americans are not happy with what's happening with abortion rights in the US, but where the Supreme Court, which has a conservative super majority, is really happy, right? So that's who they're trying to talk to. They're not trying to talk to the rest of us because we're probably not gonna change our minds. Right, and for all of us talking about, oh, here are the consequences of,

if you really were to take this idea seriously, if you accept fetal personhood, you'd have to accept ABC. Well, just because they have a principle doesn't mean they have to follow it all the time. Same as with freedom of speech or freedom of religion or anything else. You know, these ideological movements are very content

to say, you know, to be hypocritical about it and say, okay, well, you know, I don't need freedom of speech for you. I only want it for myself or et cetera. We've seen that happen in plenty of other areas in conservative law. But as you say this, you know, that the anti-abortion movement,

the fetal personhood movement is so powerful. It has all these judges, it has all these foundations. Why do you think it has become so powerful in American society, while the pro-choice movement has become less politically powerful, despite the fact that the pro-choice movement has the numbers on powerful, despite the fact that the pro-choice movement has the numbers on its side,

and is the sort of more, I don't wanna say reasonable, but it's like the less crazy position. You know what I mean? It's the more, it's the truly more mainstream, hey, we just want people to be able to get this, widely accepted medical procedure that's done all over the world.

It's not really that big of a deal, right? It doesn't require this sort of intense ideology and yet it's much less powerful in our politics. Why do you think that is? Yeah, I mean, so I think the dynamics in the US were always driven by the fact that a lot of politicians believed that voters who were pro-choice didn't really care a whole lot about abortion,

but that voters who were opposed to abortion, that was their main issue. So the idea was that if you're trying to tap someone for a vote or tap someone for money, the anti-abortion people are just way more committed. And so they kind of punched above their weight for that reason. And then over time, anti-abortion lawyers

have sort of found lots of other ways to be useful to the GOP. So a lot of people may remember the case Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission, right? The sort of famous like corporate money is speech case. That was launched by anti-abortion lawyers who were trying to find ways to help the GOP and also to get more of their own dark money into politics. They did a lot of the work to try to limit access to voting, right? Like drafted a lot of voter ID laws, did a lot of litigation about making it illegal for people to

vote by mail, did some of the work trying to overturn the 2020 election. So there was also, I think, a way in which anti-abortion lawyers sort of understood the GOP better and found ways to make themselves useful and powerful that didn't really have to do with the popularity of what they were fighting for, right? And I don't think there's been an equivalent among people who are groups that are pro-choice.

At the same time, in 2011, I remember, there was a voter ID fight in Mississippi and Planned Parenthood just like opted out. They're like, that's not our thing. You know, meanwhile, anti-abortion groups were working with Republicans to write the bill and defend the bill. And so they sort of understood that this was a much bigger picture. And if they were going to continue to have any kind of thumb on the scale, they would need to do other things. Because, you know, it's not lost anybody now. Donald Trump's running away for any abortion issue all the time, right? I mean, it's not good politics.

So you have to find other ways to keep Republicans in line when you don't have enough voters with you. Right. So they have had more of a, maybe ideological solidarity on their side. Like they've been working more coalitionally with each other than folks who are pro-choice have been. That Planned Parenthood sort of stays in its lane,

does its thing, but there isn't this sort of working together on the, I guess I'd say on the left, although I didn't even really consider, you know, pro-choice to be a left issue. But at the same time, in the US, we do have a large, large number of people who are ideologically committed to anti-abortion, to fetal personhood. You know, they believe it. In the same way that in the U.S. we have a lot of people who just,

they genuinely believe in gun rights. Maybe we can say they've been propagandized and they've been lied to, and they've been converted, but they do genuinely believe it. And something that I'm always wondering is, why is America the home of this ideology? Because, again, when you look around the world, you don't see this sort of deeply rooted, fetal personhood movement in most countries.

What is unique about America that caused it to spring up here? Yeah, so it started as a kind of Catholic idea, right? So the other place that had a big fetal personhood moment was Ireland and it was the Catholic church, unambiguously. But what happened in the United States that didn't happen in Ireland was that the anti-abortion movement in the US realized

that having a Catholic fetal personhood movement was gonna be a non-starter. There just weren't enough Catholics. There's always been some anti-Catholic sentiment. So they decided to make it into a secular civil rights argument. And they did this at a time when a lot of white Americans were really anxious about the civil rights movement, right? This was the 1960s.

This was right around the time Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. And so there was this way that I think fetal personhood spoke to a lot of conservative Americans who were really uncomfortable with the way debates about race in the US were going and said, you know, what discrimination really looks like is abortion, right? It's not discrimination against women. It's not discrimination against gay people. It's not discrimination against black people. It's discrimination against the unborn child. And I think that really struck a nerve with people who felt like they were being wrong, to felt that the civil rights movement wasn't really legitimate. Like it was a way of talking about equality that I think really resonated with a lot of people who were looking for a new way to think about this. And pretty much the entire trajectory of the Fetal Personhood Movement, people in it were picking up on these other ideas about equality. So I think it became a way for people to, you know, basically push back against other ideas of equality that were coming more mainstream with their own idea of like what discrimination really was. And they're still doing that now.

That's really interesting. Like it's sort of an alternative shadow civil rights movement to the rights movement for black Americans. But is there some way that they're more connected than that? Like, was it somehow a response to the increase in rights for black Americans? Like, not just like, oh, hey, I want an alternative set of people to say deserve rights.

Was there some deeper racist core to it? Well, I mean, yes and no, right? I mean, there were people in the anti-abortion movement who had racist beliefs and there were people who didn't. I think the common denominator was essentially right, Catholic lawyers just were losing, right? So they came up with the things you would expect, like we can't legalize abortion because then people are gonna the things you would expect, like we can't legalize abortion, because then

people are gonna have all kinds of crazy sex, and we can't legalize abortion because pregnancy isn't dangerous. And none of that worked, of course, because pregnancy was still dangerous, and people didn't mind the idea of other people having crazies, like none of that was helping, right? So then they came up with this fetal personhood idea, mostly just as a sort of strategic necessity, because they were losing. And then once they started it, they found that all these people from kind of white moderates who were not openly racist

and may have even been sympathetic to the civil rights movement, to people who were pretty racist, all just love this idea of fetal personhood because it said something to them about what they thought equality really meant. So it almost was like an accidental discovery, right? They kind of stumbled into this thing that people really cared about and sincerely believed in, which started really just as sort of like a way to stop getting destroyed in every legislative fight they were in. But it became obviously something much bigger than that. You know, folks, if you've been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, you know how much I love Delete Me. In a world where all of our personal data is being sold and traded online by data brokers,

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Same goes for their factuality rating. They give you a rating of how factual each source is so you can avoid misinformation and know that you're getting the real deal. We use ground news on this very show in our research process and we find it super reliable. And I think you're gonna find it really useful as well. So if you wanna break out of your bubble

and make sure you're getting the real story, well guess what, you can get 40% off a Ground News membership if you go to groundnews.com slash factually. Once again, that is 40% off if you go to groundnews.com slash factually. The thing that is hard to wrap one's head around I think from my point of view is,

is it truly like a genuine belief? Like is that where it stemmed from in the right of fetal personhood? Or is there another motivation, right? Or how do we evaluate which is which? I mean, I don't wanna spend too long trying to psychologize a movement that I'm not a member of.

We can move on from it. I'm just curious to hear your thoughts about it a little bit more deeply. Like do you take it as a movement that I'm not a member of, we can move on from it. I'm just curious to hear your thoughts about it a little bit more deeply. Like, do you take it as a good faith argument or is it an attempt to do something else by making this sort of quasi philosophical moral argument? I mean, I think for a lot of people, it's both, right? So I mean, if you're trying to test, is it sincere?

One of the things you do as a historian is if you're in people's papers, like you're reading the meeting, is it sincere? One of the things you do as a historian is if you're in people's papers, like you're reading the meeting minutes when there's no one in the media and there are no politicians in the room. Like what do people say, right? When there's nobody else to kind of shame them about it. And they still talk about fetal personhood.

But then the other thing you would notice is like, well, how do they talk about fetal personhood? And do they talk about it in ways that make them, you think there's something underneath it? And I think both things seem to be true. Like, people seem to be sincere, but when they're talking about fetal personhood, they're also very much talking sometimes about other stuff, like what they think about motherhood and what they think about Christianity and the constitution and what they think about race. So I do think it's sincere, but I think if people had the feeling

that that can't be all there is to it, it isn't all there is to it, right? It's sort of like, if you believe anything, the reasons you may believe that and what drove you to that point, probably is going to be more complicated. And that's, I think what you see as beautiful. So, so it is sincere, but it is also tied up in ideas that a lot of people listening to this probably considered to be sexist or racist ideas

about the role of women or other races in America or Christianity and the foundation of America. Like it's sort of a blob of concepts. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's one of the things that's also true about that is that our version, like the US version of Fetal Person is also very much a blob of ideas

about criminal punishment, right? If you go to other countries in the world and you say, does a fetus have a right to life? You may get a yes, but then if you ask, does that follow that we have to criminalize abortion? They would say, well, why, like, no, not necessarily. Just let the person drive into HOB lane and give them child support and healthcare during pregnancy.

So our version of fetal personhood has landed really hard on this kind of pro incarceration idea that also I think tells you a lot about the people who believe it, because there are people, people have really complicated ideas about pregnancy, right? I mean, a lot of people listening may know someone who's had a miscarriage or a stillbirth or they have had one themselves, and they may think, well, I sort of think life begins at conception. And then if you ask them, do you think you should go to jail for helping someone with IVF or abortion there to be like, well, no, why would I think that? So that's a normal reaction, but it's not one that is normal

in our politics right now, because I think a lot of the other things under the surface of field personhood are really about punishing people as the way we do justice and expanding like more and more who's in the group of people who gets punished. And that's part of American culture and politics, even separately from any of these other ideas. Just America is a punishment and vengeance based society

where it's just all through every part of the American legal system and our media and everything else and in ways that are really harmful. So if this movement's goal is to establish fetal personhood, what does that mean they hope to accomplish? Like if their first big victory was repealing Roe versus Wade, what is their actual ultimate victory?

Yeah, the current game plan would be another US Supreme Court decision. So if you wanna kind of check me on how long have people cared about this, you can Google all the Republican Party platforms going back to 1980, and they always refer to this thing called the Human Life Amendment. So that was the idea that you were going to amend the Constitution to do fetal personhood. And that turns out to be a bad idea

because number one, no one can amend the Constitution anymore. And number two, nobody likes fetal personhood, so you're not going to get a super majority of Americans saying thumbs up. The other problem, so then they pivoted to, well, we don't need to change the constitution, we just need to convince five judges that the constitution already says this stuff. So now the end game is to kind of build up the same way there was a buildup toward overruling Roby Wade, to build up toward a fetal personhood Supreme Court decision. So the ultimate victory would look like the Supreme Court saying,

hey, all of you states that have liberal laws on abortion or IVF or maybe contraception or lots of other things, you don't get to do that because this decision is, has to be decided at the federal constitutional level by us, which would mean, any conservative in California could challenge the rules on things like abortion and IVS. That's kind of what they're hoping for in the end. So what they're hoping for is a Supreme Court decision

that establishes fetal personhood as being in the Constitution in the same way that the right to an abortion was previously considered to be part of the Constitution by a Supreme Court. Yeah, 100%. It's kind of like they're hoping for their own Roe v. Wade. That's what it is. And that goes beyond simply a nationwide abortion ban.

It would be a nationwide abortion ban, but it would actually be far more than that, right? Yeah, totally. Because again, all these Pandora's box consequences. Like if an embryo or a fertilized egg is a person, they're a person. Like they're not a person just for the purposes of abortion. I mean, people might find ways to try to fudge that, but yeah, it would definitely be much more about abortion.

So let's talk about what the consequences of that would be. I mean, first of all, abortion would be outlawed nationwide, uh, including the medication abortions that have risen in number recently. It would also make every miscarriage a death. And what would the consequences of that be in the real world for real women? Yeah, I mean, probably the practical implications

would be one, that it would be really hard for people experiencing miscarriages who were in emergencies to get treatment. They would probably wind up worrying that doctors would worry about going to jail if they treated them. It would probably also mean that a lot of miscarriages would be investigated as abortions because you mentioned abortion pills. People, doctors can't tell after something has happened if it's a miscarriage or someone took abortion pills. People, doctors can't tell after something has happened if it's a miscarriage or someone took abortion pills.

So a lot of people who had miscarriages would be suspect for having had abortions, which would be illegal. So that's probably what that would look like most often. I assume it would also depend on how much these things would be prosecuted and like what the enforcement would be, the enforcement regime. But I guess we can also assume that

if there's a federal mandate that every miscarriage is a death in at least some states, you're gonna have attempts at like really aggressive prosecution, I would assume. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I think it's hard to know, cause to your point, I mean, when things have been criminal before,

there's been uneven enforcement, but it would certainly be an option for any kind of prosecutor that cares about this to pursue. So I'm guessing that, uh, so let's imagine this passes and I'm a doctor in a state where they're taking a very harsh view of this kind of thing. Um, at like a state in which abortion is currently banned And there's a woman who is having a, you know, crisis pregnancy of some kind. Um, so I'm now looking at her and going, okay, well there's the life of the woman, but there's also this like fetal personhood and there's a,

there's an embryo whose life I also need to save and weigh those against each other in my medical decisions. and now I'm in a legal bind. Is there any kind of current situation in medicine that would be comparable for a doctor where they're trying to like weigh one life against another? Like it sounds like an almost impossible position to put doctors in. Yeah, I mean, occasionally we've seen examples of this

with fetal personhood in the past. So anti-abortion groups, I mean, occasionally we've seen examples of this with fetal personhood in the past. So anti-abortion groups, for example, have pushed for scenarios where a doctor thinks a C-section would be better for a fetus and the woman doesn't want it to go ahead with the C-section and basically to go to court and force the C-section. That's already happening. There have been scenarios where people have actually died, right? There's one in 2014, there's one ongoing in Georgia now, where somebody, there's a woman in Georgia whose name is Adriana Smith, is brain dead and was nine weeks pregnant when she became brain

dead. And the hospital is not allowing her family to decide whether to take her off life support because she's pregnant. And even now, states like Idaho say they can't really intervene in medical emergencies in some instances because they have to value the life of the unborn patient as much as the life of the pregnant patient. And sometimes that's resulted in people being, you know, airlifted from Idaho hospitals out of state because there's no state hospital that's really allowed to treat conditions that can be life or health threatening that way. Wow. So despite the fact that there, we do not have this Supreme court decision yet

that the fetal personhood movement wants, it's clear the ideology is already affecting the medical system, that there are places and situations in which these states are cracking down, or at least the doctors are living in fear of this ideology such that they're already bending to it. Or maybe not the doctors, but at least the medical system that they're a part of is refusing

to give certain types of care. And I think the other thing that's probably worth seeing is the fetal personhood people are not waiting for the US Supreme Court decision. They're fighting for like little fetal personhood wins. So in Georgia, where Adriana Smith is, that state doesn't just ban abortion. It says that at six weeks after someone misses their period, that is a person. That person gets counted in the census. That person gets child support. And so that's, that's already in the law, right? There's been this

effort. I mean, a lot of people will know there's like fetal homicide laws in most states. Some states allow you to bring a wrongful death lawsuit. If you lose a pregnancy, there are so there's been this sort of very it'll feel familiar. People who remember what happened with Roe like drip drip drip that no one's paying attention to and the law changes gradually. So then by the time the Supreme Court is looking at it, they can say, well, wow, look, all that no one's paying attention to. And the law changes gradually. So then by the time the Supreme court is looking at it, they can say, well, wow, look, all these conservative States have all these laws and there's all these state judicial decisions. Isn't it weird that you guys don't say this as a person when all these other

conservatives are saying it's a person? So it's not just the ideology. It's there's actually already places in the law where this is happening. Got it. Because then the Supreme court will look at it and say, oh, this is just part of the American legal tradition, look at all the different places this is established, clearly this is what the American people want in this sort of general way.

Yeah, and that's what, if you remember Brett Kavanaugh, so if you think of all the Supreme Court justices and you're trying to imagine like, what are their personalities, Brett Kavanaugh is like the sort of like Boy Scout dad who does the really uncool thing, but then tries to make you feel better about it. Like that's his always his jam. So he, he and dogs sort of said, Well, look, you know, all these states are asking me

to overturn Roe, like, who am I to say no to that? And they're going for the same sort of thing, right? They're going for saying all these states are going to recognize fetal personhood in all these different ways. Who is the Supreme Court to ignore that? So they're using the same playbook because it worked, right? Which isn't surprising. And it's similar too in the sense that I think it's going to be very easy for people who are not looking for this outcome to let their guard down because it's not something that's gonna happen in one fell swoop, but there are already signs that it's working in ways that I think are surprising to me

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in America over the past 50 years, it's obviously been massively successful. And I don't know why we wouldn't continue to expect it to be, why has the pro-choice movement not been as strategic, not been as focused? Certainly the liberals in the left have used strategic litigation at many other times

in the past in order to establish certain rights. in the past in order to establish certain rights. Why are we playing defense and never going on offense in the same way? Yeah, I mean, I think that before Roe was gone, there were a couple different problems. I think generally speaking, people who are pro-choice thought that people who were in favor of fetal personhood were so out there that it would never work.

Like people really didn't believe Roe would be overturned until Roe was overturned. So I think there was a certain amount of, and I mean, you see that over and over again, right? I don't think people believe Donald Trump would be reelected until he was, or that people like me a lot. So I think-

I think pretty much everything that's happened over the past 10 years, nobody expected to happen. Right, and so I think part of it is, and I think related to that were that a lot of people who were pro-choice were not paying attention to what people on the other side were doing or taking it seriously. In addition to, I mean, I think since then, the pro-choice movement has been much more on the offensive. They have had lots of successful ballot initiative campaigns. They're doing lots of successful state litigation. I think the only danger, which relates back to another thing they were doing

wrong is everybody is doing a good job in court, right? That's true of both movements. But again, I think the anti-aversion movement realized that you're not even going to get a court to do this kind of stuff unless you change out courts, do business historically, a lot of courts don't want to piss off voters, right? They don't even federal judges. If you look historically, like Supreme Court opinions don't deviate very far from popular opinion in either direction.

Right. So when the Supreme Court says, hey, no more school segregation, popular opinion had come pretty close to that. When the Supreme Court says, hey, you know, same sex couples, you can marry now. That wasn't going to have happened 10 years earlier. So I think anti-worshiper groups realized you have to change a lot of other things about politics, right? You're not going to win a fair fight where everybody's voting. So you have to change how Supreme Court justices get nominated. You have to change who's running the Republican Party. So there was sort of like big picture

thinking, I think, sometimes that pro-choice groups missed. And I think that's changing, but I think there's still this sort of legacy of like how we fix this as we just go to court. And that's great, but it's not gonna solve all your problems, right? So I think there's still, I think an impulse to go back to that well, a little too effing.

Yeah, and what you're making me realize to editorialize a little bit is that it seems like everyone in American politics other than the far right has too small of a sense of possibility. Everybody from the center to the left tends to say, you know what, the big things we wanna do, they're probably not possible.

The things you listed, you know, healthcare for everybody or, you know, an amendment protecting abortion or whatever, or fighting climate change. Those are too big, we probably can't do those. And also, the people who are against us will never win their ultimate victory. They'll never pass Roe versus, or they'll never overturn Roe versus Wade.

They'll never get fetal personhood enshrined. And the right has had the imagination to say, hey, what if we actually fight for the big thing that we want? And what if we actually have some vision? What if we shift politics and have a long-term strategy and believe that the thing that we want is possible? And that's just been missing in the rest

of American politics with pretty disastrous results, I think. Yeah, I think it's a combo of being more ambitious and then also being willing to change the way the democracy works, right? Because I think there's a point at which, because people on the left looked at it and said, there's no way voters are gonna support getting rid of Roe v. Wade. And guess what? They didn't. And now they're looking

at it and saying, well, voters aren't going to support fetal personhood. And guess what? They're not. So it's not, it's not even just changing political, what's politically possible, because it's not politically possible. What they're doing essentially is saying, if the country is less democratic, we don't need to persuade voters. If all this stuff is being decided by a Supreme Court that's being picked by people that a lot of people don't like or didn't vote for, what do we care if voters don't like it? Or what if we're at a point where almost all state legislatures in

the United States are politically uncompetitive and in control of a single party? You have to worry about, they're not worrying about getting booted out by voters. So they kind of looked for soft spots in the democracy where they could get ahead without voters agreeing with them, even as they try to persuade voters of the kind of like their moonshot ideas are right. And I don't think people on from the center left onward are doing either of those things, right? They're not trying to persuade people of the moonshot, and they're not trying necessarily to like shore up those weak spots either.

And I don't think they, I mean, now maybe they are, obviously now they're trying to rule of law concerns, but I think that is a relatively recent development. While I think before you had a lot of people seeing like where are the places, where are the levers I can turn, even if what I'm ultimately trying to do is not something that most people want. Yeah. And it's, it's just such a fundamental political mistake. I mean, politics is the type of game where the rules are the, the rules of the game are part of the game and changing the rules is part of playing it because the whole game is a game where, you know, people vote to change the rules. It's a it because the whole game is a game where, you know, people vote to change the rules.

It's a game about creating rules and then following them or not. And so if you're not doing that, if you're just saying, oh, the rules are what they are and I'll just follow them, which is what, you know, Democrats and liberals and people on the center have done for decades, then the people who actually have the bigger view of how to get things done are gonna whoop your ass,

which is what has happened. Yeah, I think that's a good summary. And I think the diagnosis of the sort of like, I have to play by the rules being something only some people think is correct in this context and across a whole bunch of other things too. Yeah, well, let's talk again about more of the consequences of this.

One thing that really strikes me is how this changes, how this changes, it's already happening, but of course the final version of it they're shooting for, how that would change what it means to be pregnant. Like, I can imagine, I cannot in my life ever become pregnant, but I know many people who would wish to be, and it seems like a very strange thing if you were to become pregnant, but I know many people who would wish to be. And it seems like a very strange thing if you were to become pregnant

and suddenly you're carrying around this sort of like enormous legal liability that might be more important than yourself, that you might be in a situation where someone with legal authority is gonna tell you you're going to jail or something medically is gonna happen to you that you don't wanna have happen to you because you are carrying around this thing

that is more precious than you are. That's a bizarre reconfiguration of what pregnancy and motherhood is to me. Yeah, I mean, you can already see kind of shadows of this. So again, in this effort to get fetal personhood into the law already, anti-abortion groups in the 80s and 90s, sort of at the height of panic about crack, right, started saying we should prosecute people for things they do during pregnancy.

And mostly that so far that's been substance use. It's expanded from being mostly black people using illegal drugs to also people with opioid addiction issues, people with alcohol abuse issues, essentially saying you're abusing a child, right? Like you need to go to jail because you're pregnant and you haven't gotten your substance abuse issues under control. Not like you need to go to rehab because you have substance abuse issues and then we'll try to make you a better parent so that if this pregnancy comes to term, you actually can do what a mother would need to do. No, it's like you need to go to jail because you're a child abuser. You would imagine that that would

expand much more to cover lots of other behaviors during pregnancy beyond just substance use. Right? So like, what if you take Advil or something that is counter-indicated during pregnancy? What if you take a kickboxing class? Like any of those sorts of things. And it's not hard at all to imagine people experiencing the idea that they're not as important as the fetus. Anyone who's been to a Catholic hospital when I was pregnant, my doctor, who was a nice person, said, just so you know, if there is a complication and it's between you and the baby, this is a Catholic hospital. We're going to pick the baby. This is a Catholic hospital. We're gonna pick the baby.

So you should have a backup plan. Or if you're experiencing a life threatening medical emergency, you should go to, you should find another hospital, even if it's further away. The doctor at the hospital said this to you? Your own doctor? Yes, my own doctor.

And I'm sorry, I just have to ask. Did your doctor like disagree with this policy and was saying, hey, you know, you should go somewhere else or like, that's a bizarre negotiation with the policy to tell you that to me. Yeah, I mean, I think the doctor probably just wanted me to know, she didn't wanna be in a position

where I showed up in the medical emergency and she killed me, basically, was my route. I think she wanted to sort of say, if we get to that point, don't put me in that position, just go someplace else. But that's, don't put me in that position, just go someplace else. But that's, you know, that would be everybody, right? I mean, it's unfortunately, again, a reality a lot of people experience, again,

sometimes in states like California too, because if you are in a place where the only nearby hospital is run by either the Catholic church or some sort of conservative, Protestant religious group, there may be policies that say this already, right? But again, there would be no alternative where I could go to the other hospital, right? It would be every hospital. And I do think that would be, I mean, it's already, I imagine, for a lot of people who are pregnant, there's

already probably a feeling culturally that people care more about the pregnancy than they care about you. But for that to be constitutional law in the United States, I think would feel really weird and alienating. Yeah. I'm sorry for cutting you off. Do you have more on that before? Yeah, that was it. OK. Yeah.

I mean, I know, you know, I know plenty of people who have kids and they tell me about how, you about how there's this sort of specter of other people judging you when you're pregnant or when you have young children. Just the person looking across at you across the playground or whatever going, oh, look at what she's doing. What a horrible parent or whatever.

And everyone does this and everyone experiences it and feels that it's unfair, right? I feel like that's a universal part of parenthood or being an expecting parent. But is that something that we wanna go to jail for? Right? Because someone looks at you and says, oh, you're having a sip of wine at dinner

or you're doing whatever little thing someone else thinks you shouldn't be doing. Now we're gonna criminalize those behaviors. That's really frightening. Yeah, and I think the other thing we've seen in the past is sort of like, people may wonder like, how is anyone gonna enforce this? And the answer, if you look at history again,

is like unevenly, right? I mean, criminal abortion laws have never been evenly enforced. Laws saying you can't mail things related to abortion art and evenly enforce. And that'd be true with fetal personhood too. So now even when anti-worshippers are recruiting people to kind of like advance this idea of fetal personhood, what they're finding usually is men who are pissed off that their exes broke up with them, who are suing people connected to their

exes, like their ex's friends, their ex's doctor, for the wrongful death of what they say is their unborn baby, right? Wow. They may, I'm sure, may sometimes care about what they think is the loss of the pregnancy too. But again, it's sort of like serving this other private agenda. And that's what you would expect. That people will kind of like use this idea of fetal personhood to get other things they want. Like maybe they don't like their neighbor, maybe they want something else from someone they could see go to jail like their property or their job or whatever. So that's kind of what you would expect. This is not going to be evenly enforced. It's not like if JD Vance's wife has a sip of wine at dinner, he'd necessarily turn her in or something, right? It's gonna be more a scenario where people know this is,

would be a scenario where people would know this is available and then they would use it at their convenience to get other things they want. Yeah, I also, when you're talking about uneven enforcement, I'm thinking about how uneven the criminal justice system already is in America, how certain populations, people of color, how those communities are radically over policed.

And, you know, there's an effort to throw folks in jail or at least have them interact with the criminal justice system, you know, for any minor infraction. You know, classic example, I remember having grown up, not growing up, but in my twenties, like, oh, it's totally okay in New York city to, you know, have a, have an open bottle of wine in Bryant park on a sunny day. But if you're,

you know, drinking on a stoop in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the cops are going to come rough you up. Like just that sort of, you know, distinction, right? Oh, that's, that's the way it is across America. And so I'm also imagining for poorer women, women of color, et cetera, how much this would be used against those folks in ways that would just be designed to have more quote undesirable people in prison more often. Do you see that happening?

Yeah, I do. I mean, one of the really interesting features of the fetal personhood debate right now is there's a real fight within the anti-abortion movement about whether you could punish women for abortion at all. What isn't clear is there's lots of interest in punishing women for everything else related to pregnancy, right? And most of the people who you unsurprisingly see punished for that stuff is the same people who get punished for everything else, right? All of them are poor. Most of them are black and brown, you know, kind of unsurprising stuff.

And you'd imagine that's true of abortion too. I think the forces in the anti-abortion movement who want to punish women for abortion are growing more vocal. They also, a lot of them, see IVF as murder. Some people who are doing IVF may have started to see anti-abortion protesters outside of IVF clinics. That's starting to become a thing for this reason. So yeah, generally you would expect some people to be punished more often than others. The only exception to that is that if you look at the kind of long history of how this has been done, there's sometimes a desire to make an example of someone. So sometimes people with more resources are targeted

because that's viewed as something that'll scare a lot more people off. I think correctly, right? Because I think unfortunately a lot of us think that we would never go to jail for certain behaviors because we just have too many resources or we're too connected or we're not the type of person who gets in prison,

which is true. So sometimes there's an effort to kind of like range beyond that to frighten everybody else. Right, and honestly, I see the right doing that currently. When I look at, for instance, on immigration, the prosecution of, you know, students at Ivy League colleges who are in, you know, in America on a foreign visa, I think part of the point of that is to frighten

wealthy liberals, right? And to say, oh yeah, actually everybody is going to be subject to this new regime. It's not just, you know, the folks in the fields and in the factories, right? It's like we, it's a shock and awe tactic. And so I could, I could imagine the same thing happening if we were to have this legal, you know, new legal regime continue to grow around pregnancy. I just, it's just such a strange prospect though, to imagine that, you know,

these folks say they care so much about pregnancy, about childbirth, about children, right? And the solution is to create a complex and extremely rigid legal regime around pregnancy. That to me really changes the nature of what it means to have kids in America in a fundamental way that would be like the, when I go forward to the end goal,

I'm like, this is suddenly an extremely fraught prospect having a kid, you know? You're gonna be really worried about like going to jail, right, if they have their way. Is that really something that even they fucking want? It's bizarre. I mean, no, I think, I mean, so they're not all on one page about this.

I would say if we're gonna like grossly generalize, there's more people who are Catholic in the movement who say, we're not being nice enough to pregnant women, right? Like there's no carrot with the stick here. This is all just putting people in jail and it's not going to work. I think there's also not really a sense of how this would look in practice because it's never been in practice, right? It's just sort of been like hypotheticals like we were saying about ending climate change or mass incarceration or

something. So I don't think they've thought this all the way through. And so, yeah, I think it would have unintended consequences. And there's reason to think that too. Like in all of these states that have the laws about, you know, if you do something wrong during pregnancy, you're committing child abuse. Since those laws have come into effect, there's been more infant mortality, more miscarriage and stillbirth. What generally tends to happen is that when people are pregnant, they try to avoid people who they think could get them in trouble. They don't go to the doctor for their prenatal visit because they think, well, what if the doctor thinks I'm doing something wrong?

I could get arrested. Or they don't necessarily call 911 when they're having like bleeding because they're thinking, oh, you know, if I call 911, what if I get in trouble? And all of that winds up having really negative effects on pregnancy and infants, right? Because you're not getting help you need to be healthy. So yeah, I think fetal person would have a lot of unintended consequences, but I think a lot of people are so invested in it

that it's hard for them to see that. And they don't really have to see it because there hasn't been the full blown version of what they want in effect. So they can say, well, in theory, what we get exactly what we want, it's gonna be awesome, even if that seems, you know, pretty unlikely soon.

It's so funny because it's like this flip of a common conservative argument about gun control, which is, you know, if gun ownership is criminalized, only criminals will own guns. It's like, well, if pregnancy is criminalized, don't the only criminals become pregnant? Like it drives so much of the activity to this, to this like gray legal zone or underground,

or in this way that, you know, is so much less healthy. Tell me a little bit about, is IVF splitting this movement apart at all? Because, you know, you have Trump out there saying he's gonna be the fertilization president and they're gonna grow IVF when there are people in the movement who, you know, consider IVF to be a form of murder?

The better way to put it is, IVF is splitting the organizations and the people with the money from just the rank and file people who think they're pro-life. And it's spreading the movement and the people with the money from the GOP. So the GOP is looking at this and saying,

more than 80% of Americans like IVF. It's worth just sitting with that for a moment because I don't think there's more than 80% of Americans like IVF. Like it's worth just sitting with that for a moment because I don't think there's more than 80% of Americans that like almost anything, right? Like if you ask Americans, like, do you like Friday night? You wouldn't get to 80%. That's just mind blowing as someone who studies politics to get something more than 80%.

Like that's amazing. So Republicans look at that and are sort of like, sorry, anti-abortion movement. We're not going to be anti-IVF because that's just ridiculous. Then on the other, sorry, anti-abortion movement, we're not gonna be anti-IVF because that's just ridiculous. Then on the other end of the anti-abortion movement saying, okay, but you can't actually pass the right to IVF bill because that's, you're gonna piss us off

and we're not gonna donate to you. So Republicans are in this weird position of sort of having to cater to the anti-abortion movement. It's not just the anti-abortion movement, it's the Catholic Church, which is supposed to IVF, and it's the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the largest Protestant denomination period and the largest conservative Christian denomination in the US, have all come out against IVF, right? So they can't ignore that either. So I don't know what's going to come out of this with Trump, but he's going to internally have to be kind of doing this

two-step to placate people with completely different views. And it's sort of true of the anti-abortion movement too, because the anti-abortion movement's lobbying conservative pastors and lobbying conservative legislatures, while realizing that a lot of people in the anti-abortion movement know people who have used IVF, might want to use IVF themselves, don't dislike IVF, so it's complicated. But again, I mean, this is a movement that at this point is sort of committed to doing things that it knows are really, really unpopular.

So I guess IVF is not that different. The compromise that's come out has seemed to be that they're trying to say, we don't want to, most of them. We're not trying to criminalize IVF, we're just trying to say the only way IVF can work is if you create one embryo and then implant that embryo. And that would make IVF really ineffective and really expensive.

And IVF is, a lot of people know, is already really expensive and already effective in limited ways for a lot of people. So it would potentially make IVF something people didn't even want to pursue because it didn't work or it was prohibitively expensive. But that's kind of where the moderates in the movement are trying to go right now.

Wow, it's sort of the, here's the ideological compromise that doesn't really work. That will let us say that we're supporting it, but we actually don't care if it works for people or not. We'll just like, you know, really limit it so we can say that it's available, but you know, in this form that doesn't actually produce pregnancies for anybody.

Yeah, and I think it's important to note too, that it's not just opposition to destroying embryos, it's opposition to storing embryos, right? So a lot of people will, you know, create more embryos than they need to use because there's no guarantee. I mean, if you're, depending on how old you are, your chances of success with an IVF cycle are not very high each time.

Or it may be a scenario where you think maybe later you're going to come around and you want to have another kid. All of that would be out the door too. It would not just be destroying embryos, it would be the really common practice of storing embryos, which I think virtually everyone who has done IVF has experienced it. And how has this debate affected by the Alabama ruling

about IVF from a few years ago, because that caused an uproar. And yeah, what effect did that have on the political conversation? Well, it kind of hardened everybody's position. So the anti-abortion movement was really excited by it. The Heritage Foundation, which most people know as the group behind Project 2025, rolled out this big initiative to go after IVF.

Most of the big anti-abortion organizations did, too. The Republican Party was really scared by this. They didn't want to talk about IVF. They didn't want to condemn IVF. But again, they couldn't really entirely be to talk about IVF, they didn't want to condemn IVF, but again, they couldn't really entirely be in favor of IVF because that would piss off people they needed to please to. So that started this kind of weird awkwardness for the Republican party that I think we're still seeing, and it made everybody else in America even more pro-IVF. So it's the sort of a similar

story, right, in the sense that if you're the anti-worship movement, you're not going to get a ban on IVF from, most likely from Congress. You're certainly not going to get it from Trump, and you're probably not even going to get what you really want from a Republican legislature. So they're looking to courts, right? It's not an accident that what happened in Alabama was a state court. So, and in fact, they're back in Alabama, trying to say the law the Alabama legislature passed violates the rights of the fetus. So they got the memo, so they're already going where they think they can get ahead with IVF,

which is often with judges. Well, let's talk about how this affects, you know, the other half of politics. I remember after this IVF decision and a bunch of other severe restrictions on abortion placed on different states, Democrats really saw this as like, oh, the wind is at our backs. You know, the public is rebelling against the Dobbs decision. And there was this idea that, you know, Republicans were the sort of party that caught the car, the

dog that caught the car that, you know that, this was gonna backfire on them. They don't really know what they've done and it's going to hurt their near term political prospects. And of course we know what happened in the election last year, right? That like the Democrats did not ride this wave to political victory. Why do you think that is?

And do you think that, this is going to backfire politically on the democratic level against the right at all? Yeah, I mean, I think what happened was two things. I mean, one, I think everybody was primarily voting based on economic issues and inflation. So I think there was a little bit of an exaggeration of the importance of this issue.

I do think voters care more about this issue that people think though, in part because I think Donald Trump handled it well. So Donald Trump's message was, he didn't really come out to say this, but you don't have to like what I think about this, because I'm not going to do anything. Like I'm going to let the states do their own thing. I've already done what I'm going to do and getting rid of Roe v. Wade. And oh, by the way, Kamala Harris can't do anything. Like she can't get Congress to pass a law. So basically the the message was who was in the White House is completely irrelevant to this issue. And I think a lot of voters believe that because they watched Joe Biden and later Harris for like

four years, not really do a whole lot, even after Roe was overturned. And they believe Trump with his state's rights stuff. So I think if the dog is going to catch the car, it's going to be because Republicans misread all of that and say, oh, hey, you know, it turns out nobody gives a crap about this, so we can just do what the anti-abortion movement wants, because they have like all these donors and all these people would be really happy if we do that. So why not? It's not like anybody else cares. If, for example, which I think is likely, the Trump administration puts a bunch of restrictions on mythocris stone, which is used in now like two thirds of abortions, I think a lot of people will be bad. I think if Trump does something like he's trying to turn or people want him to

turn this 19th century obscenity law into a national abortion ban, like if he does that, people are going to be mad and it's's gonna be a big issue again. So I think in part, the reason it didn't work is because people just didn't think anything was gonna change regardless of who's in the White House. But if something changes, I think everybody will react. Yeah, I remember reading something that a certain number of people thought

that it was Biden's fault that Roe versus Wade was overturned because it happened under his presidency. And you know, a lot of the democratic reaction of that was Biden's fault that Roe versus Wade was overturned because it happened under his presidency. And you know, a lot of the democratic reaction to that was, that's ridiculous, of course that's Trump, he put those justices in place. But like, yeah, I mean, he was in charge for four years, you know, he had a congressional majority for some of that time.

And you know, there's this sort of traditional knock against the Democrats that they run on abortion, but then do nothing about it, or they run on abortion access, but then do nothing about it. And that run on abortion access, but then do nothing about it. And that the public has finally been fed up with it and said, well, I mean, why is this even a political issue? Because nothing ever changes on this side, right?

When I vote for it. Do you think that's a fair criticism? Well, I mean, I think it was, I think that a lot of the things, yes and no, right? So I think that there were things that Biden could have tried that probably wouldn't have worked. I think there were a lot of the things that yes and no, right? So I think that there were things that Biden could have tried that probably wouldn't have worked. I think there were a lot of things that were not helping, like Joe Manchin and the Supreme Court that were limiting what he could do. But I think part of the problem was he wasn't even very good at expressing, like, what could

go wrong if Trump were elected, right? Because it's some, I think the Democrats were failing both to do anything, but also to explain that things could get worse, right? Yeah. Because I think there was this feeling people had, I think in 2024, that either it was gonna be the status quo ante, or, you know, it was gonna be these do nothing Democrats

failing to like make things better. And it's hard for Democrats to make things better, but things definitely can get a whole lot worse. And I don't think Democrats really talked about that. It was all sort of like, oh, be mad at Donald Trump that Roe was overturned. And I'm sure people were, but that's not gonna change what happens

to them next year, right? I mean, I think they wanted to know what's gonna change going forward. And I think both Harris and Biden did a crappy job explaining that. There was also a lack of fight, right? Like even if he's hamstrung by Joe Manchin and the Supreme Court, why not, you know, talk about it more often? Why not put a bill out there?

Why not put the question to those people or to the Supreme Court and then say, if you elect these extra Democrats, I will do X, Y, Z, or, you know, here's the bill. I will pass if we, you know, have a Senate majority, even if you don these extra Democrats, I will do XYZ, or here's the bill I will pass if we have a Senate majority, even if you don't think you're gonna get the Senate majority, like make a real visible show of fighting to show that the ball can move, right? Rather than say, ah, my hands are tied.

Oh, I'd love it to happen, but someone else needs to do something first before I can really fight for it. How's that a winning political strategy? Yeah, and I think Biden was also a bad messenger too, obviously, because he was obviously visibly uncomfortable. I mean, some people may remember there's actually a website that used to track how long it had been since Biden said the word abortion.

And that's obviously a bad look too, because people who care about this issue don't think that Democrats do too, until election time rolls around and then Biden's all about it. I think that kind of grossed people out too. But really, I think at the end of the day, people fundamentally didn't get that things could get worse. That's kind of all the way back to the idea of a fetal person. People were just like, oh, well, you know, broken down, it's over. I had a reporter friend who texted me that night and it was like, I'm sure you're getting slammed by media, but what are you going to do now? Because no one's going to talk about this anymore.

Nothing is happening. I was like, sorry to tell you, but it's going to suck even worse. This is just the reading. But I don't think a lot of voters appreciated that. I think sometimes it slowly dawns on people that things could get worse and it'll come from judges, it'll come from Trump, but I think until people get that, even that, right? Like that you could fight to move the ball one way or that they are already fighting to move the ball the other way,

then I think people don't have a reason. Yeah, and they had also, the anti-abortion forces had moved the ball before the Dobbs decision, right? That like, we can say that that decision took a fundamental right away from Americans, which it did, but also that movement had nullified the right in plenty of states by, you know, making sure there's one Planned Parenthood clinic

in like the middle of Alabama or whatever, that's opened one hour a day on alternate leap years. Like it had already been taken away by nicks and cuts. And that was a story that had not been sufficiently told or fought again. I mean, there was a constitutional right on the books and it was not being fought to be protected. Yeah, I think that's right.

And all this fetal personhood stuff too, right? I mean, because all the people I was talking about who were getting prosecuted for like drinking too much during pregnancy, like that was happening in 1995 and in 2010. And like, so all of that kind of erosion of rights was happening too. And I don't think people really understood that either.

So I think there was also sort of like a failure to communicate as people say, right? I don't think people understood what was going on. Yeah. I mean, what it looks like to me is there was all this talk of, hey, you know, the Dobs decision is horrible, but it'll be a huge watershed moment for Democrats because there's gonna be public rage about this issue.

There was public rage. It was a complete squandering of the chance to build a movement, right? The chance to carry that political wind and do something with it. They just, it was completely wasted and it's a shame. I'm curious what you think about, you know, will Donald Trump prevent those things

that you talked about from happening? Clearly there's people in his coalition, I'm sure there's folks in his White House who would love to ban, Mifepristone, you're gonna pronounce it correctly. Mifepristone, thank you. That would love to ban this abortion medication, which has been the main replacement for,

you know, the abortion in the states that have banned it. I'm sure there are many folks who would love to institute such a ban. Is he really so aware of political reality that he's going to stop that from happening or is he going to allow, you know, the movement to sort of run away with him here? I don't know, you know, so, so far, right? What he's been saying is he's going to investigate it.

So RFK went before Congress the other day and says, we're looking, said they're looking into it. He seemed to credit this study that came along, kind of magically from this anti-abortion group saying, it turns out Mipha Prystone is a lot less safe than we thought it was. This was designed pretty clearly to give Trump political cover to say,

well, yeah, I promised not to mess with Mipha Prystone, but I have this new data, stuff changes, so now I'm gonna change my tune. I'm a little more convinced that he could go that road now that RFK is kind of telegraphing that's what he might do. But Trump has been slow walking this issue so much that it's really hard to tell which way he's going.

Well, it could go very badly, is what you're telling me. I mean, look, you've been on the show before and last time you were on, it was, look, you've been on the show before and last time you were on, the first time you were on the show was prior to the Dobbs decision. And you spoke very piercingly about like how America would change

if that decision went the way that we thought it would. You were right. Things have gotten worse in this country on this issue. You are now here telling us again that things can still get even worse in ways that we need to appreciate. And I think we should listen to your warning. What I wanna know is what should we do about it?

Do you have a call to action for folks who want to protect abortion rights or reverse the losses of abortion rights that we've seen in this country. How can we begin to fight back? What needs to be done? Well, I mean, I think obviously there are things people are already aware of that are happening.

There are, you know, you can lobby your state legislature, you can vote, you can give money to organizations. But I think the other really important thing is that people who wanna support abortion rights need to stop thinking of this as a single issue. And that goes in either direction. I think there are people who really care about this issue who don't want to get involved in things like voting rights work or kind of rule of law stuff. And there are people who sort of look at this and say, well, you know, I'm never going to get anybody pregnant. I'm not going to get pregnant. Like this is like, I feel bad about

this, but it's just not, I don't really care. All of that thinking is wrong because the people who have gotten as far as they have with something like fetal person or frankly, even the dogs got there by seeing how all these issues are interconnected. So I think that's a huge part of what you do to fight back. And I mean, it does the, uh, does the pro-choice movement itself, like need to adopt a new legal strategy? Do we need to have a change in democratic politics? Is there any bigger picture structural change

that we need to make in our strategic approach beyond that very good point that you made? I mean, I think you mentioned before, like there was a lot of rage and it was wasted. I mean, I think there also probably needs to be more kind of building from the grassroots up. There'd been a kind of like professionalization of pro-choice advocacy, where a lot of stuff that was focus group and a lot of stuff coming from democratic politicians and regular Americans who were pissed off were not as organized. And that's not really sustainable.

Right. I mean, you can't have a movement run by focus group and political consultants, right? Like, so I think that's important too. And I think, again, I mean, sadly, the worse things get, the more likely that becomes because the more people become impacted and the more willing they are to get active. But I think the more that happens, the more effective will be you too. I'm just curious as a final thought, I'm thinking about, I don't know the history that well, but the history that led to the original decision of Roe versus Wade that was the result of a civil rights movement for women and public pressure. And I'm sure the Supreme, I've not read the decision,

but I'm sure the Supreme Court would have made some reference to the fact that the public was calling for this. Do we need a new movement like that in America? I do. I mean, I think there already is some movement like that in America, but it needs to be bigger and again, kind of less rooted in the Beltway, right?

Like people, more people in like everywhere in America as opposed to just people in DC. And that's absolutely right. I mean, even though Roe was a Supreme Court decision, like everywhere in America, as opposed to just people in DC. And that's absolutely right. I mean, even though Roe was a Supreme court decision, Supreme court decisions never happened in a vacuum and they're never just the responsibility of lawyers. And we're never gonna get to another equivalent of Roe without something much bigger than this.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Mary. It's always incredible to have you. I cannot believe how calmly you dissect this extremely. I mean, it doesn't always work. Like my husband on the night Ro was overturned, I'd been on TV all day and whatever. And then my husband is like, he's cute about this.

He's like, my daughter was in bed. He's like, let's watch you on TV. And then I just started sobbing because like, it just hit me so I can kind of put the, like, I's like, let's watch you on TV. And then I just started sobbing because like it just hit me. So I can kind of put the, like, I'm going to just be the analyst hat on. And then sometimes I can't, it's not always possible, but now I'm going to. I think you have to have both. I think you need to feel it personally to, to work on it the way that you do.

And you have to be able to put those feelings aside, but then you have to feel them and let them power you. Yeah, totally. I think that's right. And I mean, I do find it intellectually interesting as well as personally horrifying. So I think both things are necessary to, you know, why these things happen

or like what makes people tick is really cool and interesting and then also disturbing too. Yeah, no, and I geek out as well, but the political history of it and why do we have this in America and not other countries? And then, you can sort of look at it dispassionately and try to understand it and then it hits you full force. Here's what's happening to real people,

real people who I know and love in the country that I live in. And the place that I live in is getting worse in this really tangible way that upends a lot of my beliefs about the society that I thought I lived in. You have to hold both together. Yeah, I feel the same way. Well, thank you again for coming on, Mary.

Where can people find your most recent work on this? So you can get my new book on personhood, which came out. You can get it, I think, in most bookstores. You can get it on Amazon and other kind of online booksellers. You can read a review of it in the New Yorker if you're the kind of person like I am who doesn't have time to read a book. That's like one of the long reviews.

So you can, any of those places are the places to look. And of course you can pick up a copy of the book at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. Thank you so much for coming on, Mary. And we'll have you back on in a year or so to keep us up to date on whether things are getting better and worse on this issue. Thank you so much.

Yeah, unless something really goes to hell first, which is always possible. And then we'll do an emergency episode. Thanks again for being here. Okay, no worries. Thanks everybody. Well, thank you once again to Mary for coming on the show. Once again, you can pick up a copy of her book

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