Plain English with Derek Thompson - The End of Roe v. Wade Changes Everything

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

We react to the landmark Supreme Court decision and explain how it could affect the future of the court, national politics, fertility and family planning, state law, corporate policy, and more. To further explain the implications of this decision we re-air an interview we did seven weeks ago with Margot Sanger-Katz when news of the Supreme Court leak first broke. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Margot Sanger-Katz Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From the host that brought you to Coding Westworld. And Westworld, the recapables. Comes the Ringer Prestige TV podcast on Westworld. I'm Joanna Robinson. I'm Danny Hyfitz. And I'm David Shoemaker. Welcome to Westworld Season 4 in the Prestige TV podcast feed, where we're going to break down every episode of Westworld season four.

Every Monday, the day after the show comes out on the Prestige TV podcast feed. Wherever you get your podcast, but get them on Spotify. Roe versus Wade is dead. That is the headline. This episode isn't about the headline. It's about implications. I myself am still processing what the Dobbs case means, what this 6-3 ruling means,

and what the end of Roe v. Wade is going to mean for America and its politics and its family, its business, our dealings with each other. I'm going to be doing a lot of episodes about this probably over the next few weeks, but I wanted to share how I'm feeling

and thinking about this issue right now. by focusing on the implications of this ruling, the domino effects of this ruling. And I want to talk about four implications specifically. The legal implication, the political implication, the fertility implication, and finally the corporate piece. So first, the legal implication. This is a massive win for the conservative movement, period.

This is a massive win for originalism, for the federalist society, for the multi-decade effort to move conservatives into the court system, and push back against the liberal wave. It's a massive win for Trump appointees. It's a big win for conservatives who believed in Trump, even if they hated him. They all win right now.

There's no other way to put it. In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas remarked that he would also support overturning precedents on contraceptives, LGBT rights, gay marriage. This was a concurring opinion, so it's not clear that those rulings will be imminently overturned. But I think if you're a reasonable person, especially if you are a reasonable and scared liberal,

you compare the comments that justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch made about how Roe was safe during their nomination hearings, and you compare that to this ruling and the fact that they sided with the 60 majority in overturning Roe v. Wade, I think you can reasonably worry that the conservative revolution in the courts is not even close to being over.

Now, all that said, right, I'm trying to look around corners here, right? I'm trying to imagine how this move affects the next move, affects the next move. For years, the conservative court has remained broadly within the bounds of popular opinion. I do think it is safe to say, even if you are a pro-life conservative or a pro-life moderate, it is safe to say that the Supreme Court is at the moment escaping those bounds. Roe v. Wade is a popular opinion. It's gone. It's simply gone. And the fact that gay marriage is popular or the fact that contraception is clearly popular will not be enough, clearly, to say,

them. And if a Republican-appointed court fully departs from the realm of mainstream political opinion, the political implications for Republicans are going to be pretty damn fascinating. And that brings me to the second implication, the political implication. Now look, you want me to comment about midterms? I have no frigging idea how this is going to affect the midterms. Like, on its face, of course, I think this is a cannonball drops in a lake. Of course, I think this makes me much less certain about any particular outcome in November. But for now, if you look at the polling, Americans just seem to care much, much more

about the economy, about inflation, than they do about the end of Roe v. Wade. Maybe that changes with this official decision coming down, but it hasn't changed yet, at least in the polling. So I'm not particularly confident about this changing the midterms. But let me keep with some polling here to tell you how I think about the longer term political implications. Most Americans support legal abortion in the first trimester.

and 80% of abortions take place in the first trimester. Let me repeat this. I really do think this is the most important fact about abortion in all of politics. A clear majority of abortions are supported by a clear majority of Americans. A clear majority of abortions are supported by a clear majority of Americans. Now, why does that matter? America is not a perfect democracy, but it is a democracy. And when politics get way out of line with public preferences, the politicians behind those policies get punished.

There is a word for this. It's the thermostatic theory of public opinion. And we've talked about this on the show. If you end of Roe v. Wade and if you have to defend the end of Roe v. Wade, that is the mother of all thermostatic tests. We were already seeing states like Missouri and other states starting to ban almost all abortions, including some abortions in the case of rape and incest. All right. Now, Democrats clearly have every right to be despondent.

Pro-choice women and men have every right to be despondent. But we're about to see what politics looks like in a world without row. What politics looks like in a world where governors have to defend laws that ban abortions in the case of rape versus incest. So I'm not optimistic about Democrats in the midterms, but in the next two, five, ten midterm and presidential elections, man, I wonder what it looks like when Republicans have to publicly and consistently defend a policy that a majority of Americans consistently say they don't like.

I mean, just one more cut at this. For years now, the Dave Portnoy adjacent, you know, bro-centric bloc, right, has been hammering the left for what they see as a kind of like scoldy wokeism. And I think a huge part of their anger at what they see as the woke left is that the woke left is constantly telling them what to do, what to think, what to say. Don't use that vocabulary. Don't use that vocabulary. Well, I'm sorry, it doesn't get a lot more scoldy as a philosophy than telling women what to do with their bodies in the case of rape and incest. So I'm very curious to see how that anti-scowled philosophy among the sort of centrist bro-block changes as a result of Dobbs.

I also want you to imagine new stories about enforcement. Right? So reading here from the dissenting opinion in Dobbs, the dissenting opinion says, quote, enforcement of these restrictions will be largely left to the state's devices. A state can, of course, impose criminal penalties on abortion providers, including lengthy prison sentences, but sometimes states will not stop there. Perhaps a state law will criminalize the woman's conduct, too, incarcerating or finding her for daring to see. or obtain an abortion, end quote. Just think about that for a second. This is grisly, and I don't want to be grisly,

but the following scenario is going to happen. It is a matter of inevitability. It is a matter of inevitability that a young girl will be sexually abused by her family. That this sexually abused young girl will try or succeed in having an in-state abortion in a state or abortion is illegal, and she will be prosecuted by that state.

That means that in the next few months or years, A raped girl will be arrested for trying to abort her rapist baby. This is going to happen. And the politics of that, to say nothing about the ethics, the politics of that will be absolutely fucking horrendous. So this is not to say that I think Republicans can't win elections in the era of Dobbs, that every state that currently has a trigger law is going to move to potentially threaten incarceration of women who get an abortion in the case of rape versus incest. I don't have any amount of certainty here except that something like this is going to happen,

some kind of flashpoint like this is going to happen. We're in a new regime. Dozens of states will restrict or eliminate abortions far beyond the preferences of their voters, and that will be a, to say it incredibly lightly, incredibly dynamic, surprising utterly uncertain political environment. The third implication I want to talk about is fertility. A lot of opponents of Roe v. Wade are also advocates of higher fertility.

There's all sorts of religious reasons for this, the religious traditions that are both critical of abortion and also more likely to have children. But I'd like to at least consider the possibility that the end of Roe versus Wade will reduce fertility. Now, why would that be? Well, one possibility is that Americans are already having

significantly less sex than they used to have. And imagine what the elimination of legal abortion will do to the sex rate. Okay, now that alone might just reduce pregnancies among teens and single people, but consider one way that Dobbs and a particular interpretation of Dobbs could reduce pregnancies among married couples. I'm very interested to see how this decision affects the debate over IVF in vitro fertilization, which is a means of a couple getting pregnant by taking the woman's eggs, fertilizing them in a lab and then transferring them back to the woman for pregnancy.

For a variety of reasons, delayed marriage, delayed childbirth, longer education periods for women, more career opportunities for women, the average age of conception has increased in the last few decades, and IVF has become a very popular and often very necessary means for couples of all ages to have more children. But this process incurs the elimination of embryos. It incurs the destruction of embryos that aren't transferred. which means that there are IVF labs that might be sensitive to state laws that criminalize the destruction of fertilized eggs.

Now, let me state this plainly, any state that attempts to ban the sort of practices that are necessary for IVF is a state that is destroying for thousands and thousands of couples their best chance to have a family. And in this way, I think a radical interpretation of Dobbs could ironically severely reduce fertility in America.

And I think that's not an implication that people are thinking about. out just enough. Finally, I want to talk about the corporate piece. We have seen how companies are already playing a proxy role in politics. I mean, Disney is basically the Democratic Party of Florida. It's going to be fascinating to see how this changes, how this evolves in an era of jobs, in an era where more states are banning abortions.

We've already seen that some companies like Tesla, whose CEO is not exactly a liberal wokester has said that they are willing to pay for their employees to travel out of the state in the event that their state bans abortion. In previous episodes that I've done about abortion, we've talked about how abortion pills that are mailed across the country are becoming a more important part of the abortion landscape. So pharmaceutical companies and pharma policy is going to be significantly more important. I think that's probably the next big terrain, the next big fight over abortion laws? Where can these pills potentially be delivered? And what is the regulatory policy or the enforcement policy for like shaking a pill box and saying, ooh, that sounds like

Tylenol versus ooh, that sounds like an abortion pill? Very, very difficult to ban the interstate transfer, the interstate transport of abortion pills. So I think the relationship that Democrats in corporate America have is going to deepen as a result of this law. More companies who have liberal millennials in their middle managerial staff, and these millennials tend to be more liberal, more pro-choice, are going to offer policies to their employees in these states that ban abortions to travel outside of the state. And then meanwhile, a lot of Democrats are going to discover that in half the country, these pharmaceutical companies are their best friends in the abortion fight because they are transferring the pills that allow for abortions to happen

pharmaceutical rather than in a clinic. So I know this is an emotional subject, and I hope you can bear with my passion on this issue, my perspective on this issue, even though I want to say, I know we have a ideologically diverse listenership. I know we have people who are probably deeply pro-life who listen to this show.

I know for a fact we have lots of people who are pro-choice who listen to this show. I want to listen to everybody, and I thank you for listening to me. Send your comments, as always, to plain English at Spotify.com. That's all I got for today. And next up, we were going to air an interview that we did a few weeks ago when this decision became a fait accompli

about the other surprising and important spillover effects of the end of Roversus' Wait. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Margo, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. So I want to talk to you about this leaked decision from Justice Alito and how it's actually going to affect Americans' lives. What an America without Roe would look like.

I want to start with this. If Roe v. Wade is indeed overturned, where is abortion likely to become illegal? So we don't know exactly. There are, you know, 25 to 26 states that look like they are poised to ban abortion almost entirely. There are 13 states that have passed these special kind of laws known as trigger laws that basically say, if Roe is overturned, then abortion is banned. So those are kind of like waiting to be tripped by the decision coming down. There are also a bunch of states that have old laws from back before Roe versus Wade. So abortion was illegal before.

Then the Supreme Court said, no, there is a constitutional right to abortion everywhere. And those states never repealed those laws. They've kind of been just like hanging out there in the background. those could get reactivated in a number of states. And then there are quite a few states that have recently passed new abortion bans. Basically, they know that the Supreme Court is going to rule on this soon and they want to be ready for it. And so those laws also are sort of ready and waiting. And, you know, depending on how you interpret those laws and the various legal vagaries of them,

it looks like about half the states are getting ready to ban abortion. They're not spread out randomly around the country. They're really geographically clustered. So pretty much all the states in the south, except for Florida, almost all of the states in the Midwest, with the exception of Illinois, and quite a lot of the states in the Great Plains. So you will see, you know, large swaths of the country, big regions where there just aren't any abortion clinics at all. Right. I'm looking at a map of the states that are most likely to be affected by the end of Roe v. Wade in terms of they would suddenly become illegal for women to have abortions in. for the most part it kind of looks like an upside down tea you have the line coming down from michigan through alabama and then it extends as a band along the south from texas through georgia into the carolinas that's really where you would have uh where it would be hardest to

if not impossible to get a legal abortion i think i just want to stop here and and point out that, you know, some people in a world without Rovi Wade would try to travel across state lines sometimes to get an abortion. But for someone who lives and say, I'm just looking at this map, Mississippi, it looks like it might require a three-hour drive, a 10-hour drive to get to a state or an area that would have legal abortion. Is that right? Is it in some places in the south, you would just have to travel very, very far in a world without Roe v. Wade in order to get a legal abortion. Yeah, I mean, I think that that is really an effect that is hard to understand until you look at the map. Most women that get abortions now are poor, and we know from research on when

abortion clinics have closed in the last couple of years, that for poor women, the further away the nearest clinic is, the less likely they are to get there. And this is for reasons that are, like, kind of predictable. I mean, maybe they don't have money for gas. or for a plane ticket, they might not have access to a car, may not have a flexible job that allows them to take time off, money for a hotel room, they may not have access to child care if they have to be gone for a long time. And so what that means is that the further these women have to travel, the less likely they are to actually get to a place where they can have an abortion. Richer women in general tend to have more resources. You know what I mean? If you have the ability

to fly to a state like California or New York, probably this is not going to change a lot for you. It will be inconvenient. It will be expensive. And it might be hard to get an appointment in some of those states because there are going to be women like you from all over the country who may be flooding into the states that still have legal abortion. But the real barriers are going to be for these poor women who have fewer resources and for whom travel is a much bigger hurdle. The typical patient, the typical American who gets an abortion, you say is already a mother, is in her late 20s, attended some college, has a low income, is unmarried, is having her first abortion, and lives in a blue state. All that comes from the article that you just published this morning. Which of those demographics were most surprising to you? There were a couple that were kind of surprising to me in terms of who the typical patient is, what surprised you the most when you learned that? I have to say a bunch of them actually were. I think that there are certain stereotypes that circulate about who has abortions. I think there's a sense that many people have abortions again and again. That's actually relatively rare. There are a lot of women who just have one abortion. Their abortion is their first abortion. I do think that there is a sense that very young women teenagers are the people who are having abortions. That doesn't

really seem to be true. It's a slightly older women, still younger women, but not. children, and people who are already mothers. They understand what it is to carry a pregnancy, to have a child, and to care for a child, what that means kind of emotionally, financially, logistically. That's really, I agree with that. To me, the most surprising thing is that the typical abortion patient is already a mother. I don't think I ever would have guessed that. I want to go to something else that you mentioned, which is the question of how the number of abortions in the U.S. might change as the result of the end of Roe v. Wade. To a certain extent, we can look at this question writ small by looking at Texas. Texas passed an infamous law that

essentially deputizes Texas citizens to bring lawsuits against anyone who has an abortion or anyone who assists in an abortion. And you write that abortions at Texas clinics fell by half, but the overall decline of abortions was only around 10% or has only been around 10% in Texas. Tell me a little bit about that. Why have abortions only declined 10% in a state where, as far as I understand it, you cannot find a clinic that will provide a legal abortion. So you can get an abortion in Texas up to around six weeks of pregnancy. So if you're very early in your pregnancy, you can still get an abortion in Texas,

but about half of the abortions no longer were happening in Texas. Texas. And I think this really shows how, first of all, that there's a lot of demand. You know, women who want to have an abortion, they're going to work pretty hard to find a place where they can get it. And also it shows how there is this kind of cross-state travel that happens and that can happen. The third thing that we found in this story that I think was really interesting, and I think is perhaps the biggest harbinger of what we may see in the future, is that we saw a lot of women who lived in Texas who were ordering abortion pills on the internet from overseas medical providers. So the abortion pill has been approved by the FDA. A lot of women, about half of women early in pregnancy,

when they go to have an abortion, they're not having a surgical procedure in a clinic. They talk to a doctor, they get a prescription for a medicine, they take the pills at home, and they have essentially a miscarriage in their home. This is a common, like, normal, sanctioned medical process. But it turns out that you can also get those pills on the internet from an Indian pharmacy that will mail them to your home. And so you're not necessarily getting care from a U.S. doctor, you're not necessarily getting drugs that are, you know, regulated by the FDA that come through some sanctioned process. But there is a lot of evidence that when people order these pills on the internet and labs test them, they seem to be authentic for the most part. People aren't getting phony pills. They aren't getting expired pills.

And there is a kind of growth in organizations like the one that we tracked called Aid Access, where they kind of hook you up with a real medical professional, just someone not in the United States. So this organization connects women in the United States with doctors in Europe who ask them some questions. And then if they think that they would be a good candidate for medical abortion, they make sure that they get these pills from India. So if we're interested in what an America without Roe could look like. It's important to keep in mind both the fact that people will travel out of state. Obviously it's easier for people with means, with resources to travel out state, but also you have the rise of abortion pills that's going to play a relatively significant

role. Let's say you're a, or let's say we have a conservative leader of a state, Governor Abbott of Texas, who sees that abortions have only declined by 10% in the last few months and tries to stop these abortion pills. To what extent do you understand the states or the federal government has the ability to stop the shipment of abortion pills to people who live in a state where abortion clinics themselves are not legal. I think it's definitely the case that these states are going to try to stop and regulate this. Obviously, if they want to ban abortions, they want to prevent all abortions, not just abortions that are taking place in clinics in their states.

But I do think that this kind of technology is pretty hard to ban. It's pretty easy, legally speaking, to close a clinic. You know, you can go there and see that they're not open anymore. You can make sure that these procedures aren't happening. But in general, I think it is hard for the states to regulate things that are coming through the mail. You know, we just generally don't have a process in which the police are reading and opening people's mail before they get them. The pills are quite safe. And when you have an abortion that are caused by these pills, it looks exactly in almost all cases just like a normal natural miscarriage. So even if you took these pills and you ended up in a hospital, if you didn't tell anyone, you'd gotten these pills, no doctor could tell, no police officer would easily be able to tell. And so I do think that there is a real enforcement challenge for these states in preventing the flow of these drugs. There are efforts underway. I mean, you know, including things like trying to figure out, can they go after these overseas doctors and try to shut down what they're doing? Can they go after their websites or their web providers so that women can't access the online

portal. So I think this is an area that is ripe for regulation and law enforcement. But I do think that unlike abortions that are happening in a physical place where a person is doing something to a woman, I think that there are some real law enforcement challenges inherent in these pills because they are so easily transported from other countries and because they come in the mail, which is kind of an inherently private and hard-to-police space. Absolutely. Right. It's a layer of privacy on top of a layer of privacy. I am really interested in the degree to which abortion pills could potentially become a focal point

for both the left and the right. You can take either of these and take it where you want to go. On the right, I could easily see that if you're someone who believes very fervently that abortion is murder, then of course you don't just want to stop at shutting down the abortion clinics.

You want to stop the mailing of these pills, which means you would try to pass laws at the state, local, national level, banning the distribution of these pills. At the same time, if you're a Democrat, if you're a pro-choice Democrat, you might want to make it easier for women in, say, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, who are hundreds and hundreds, if not a thousand miles away from the nearest district where they can get a legal abortion in a clinic to have easier access and more awareness of the fact of these abortion pills. Am I right in seeing that the pills themselves might be sort of the next battleground for a certain left versus right war if we are indeed entering a future where Roe versus Wade is no longer the law of the land? I think so and I think it's really kind of a transformational technology because before Roe, you know, people hearken back to what did an illegal abortion look like before Roe? It looked like something that was pretty dangerous.

I mean, there were thousands of women, you know, who would end up in hospital emergency rooms with life-threatening infections because someone gave. them a surgical abortion and they weren't a really, you know, weren't a licensed medical practitioner. They didn't have like a safe and sterile environment. Or, of course, there are, you know, are stories of women who did desperate things and tried to end their pregnancies themselves without a lot of expertise or sterile technique. I think, you know, these pills are different because they aren't dangerous in the same way. They're pretty safe and they're pretty effective and they're pretty discreet relative to these other methods. We do see the Biden administration has done some things to help, not with these illegal pills, but with pills that you just

get through like a normal telemedicine appointment, you know, where you go on a Zoom call with a doctor and maybe an out-of-state doctor could prescribe you the pills and mail them to you. That wasn't really allowed before in the Food and Drug Administration just in the last couple of months made that legal. But we are seeing, again, you know, states that are cracking down on abortions that are looking to ban abortions at clinics in their state are also trying to prevent out-of-state doctors from doing these telemedicine abortion and mailing pills through these legal channels. For those interested in the pre-row history of abortions or the 19th, early 20th century history of abortions, the Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan wrote this really powerful essay,

The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate is the name of the essay that begins with a long lead about just how gruesome some of these injuries were and how life-threatening, consistently life-threatening abortions have been in American history. I want to move on to timing. At the moment, abortion remains legal in every state, at least some level. In Texas, you said it's up to six weeks. And you say that every state today has at least one clinic that is in operation. What do you expect the timing to look like if we get a decision in the next few months written by Justice Alito that says basically everything that the leak does,

document says, what could the timing look like for the first state in America to register zero on the number of clinics that it has opened for legal abortions? I think that it is likely to happen very fast, but it is not likely to happen instantly. So I think pretty much as soon as it becomes clear that prosecutors are going to enforce criminal laws against abortion providers, the abortion clinics are going to close. You know, they do not want their practitioners to end up in prison. We saw in Texas, in Texas, the penalty is you could get a $10,000, you could be sued for a $10,000 penalty. The day that law went into effect all of the abortion clinics in Texas, you know, changed the way they were doing business to make sure they did not run a foul of that law.

I think that's a good model for what we could expect. But these different state laws, you know, I mentioned they have these different characteristics. So some of these trigger laws, like, they go into effect, you know, 10 days after the court decision is, or 30 days after, or 30 days after the legislature certifies that the court has changed the rule. So I think we're going to see kind of a rolling basis where different laws kick in at different times in different states, but pretty much as soon as the writing is on the wall that the state is going to actively enforce an abortion ban, I think we could expect to see the clinics in that state close to immediately. Close to immediately in a matter of weeks at the latest. I want to ask you about

where America is situated in the global picture of abortion. rights. I think it's very interesting that abortion doesn't seem in Western and Central Europe to play quite the same political role that it does in America. It's also really important, I think, to keep front of mind when comparing the U.S. to Europe. The U.S. has a much higher rate of maternal mortality. I think two, three, six times higher rates of maternal mortality in the U.S. than a lot of countries in Europe. Characterize it as you wish. Like, Where does America fit in to the global picture in terms of our current abortion rules and where we might be in a world without Roe v. Wade? So my colleague, Claire Kane-Miller and I did some reporting on this a couple of months ago.

And I think the thing that's interesting about it is it's sort of a weird country either way. The U.S. is weird. The U.S. is weird. So if you look around the world, right now what Roe v. Wade says is that women have a constitutional right to abortion up until the point of fetal viability. That's when the fetus could survive outside the womb right now. That's like 23, 24 weeks. So pretty late in pregnancy, women have a constitutional right to abortion. There aren't a lot of other countries in the world that are like that. Most countries in Europe, not all, but most allow abortions up to about 14 weeks of pregnancy, 12 or 14 weeks, for any reason. And then after that, you kind of have to have a reason. Maybe there's a health reason. Some of them have socioeconomic reasons. But there's not, it's not like the U.S. where if you just go to an provider that can provide you with the abortion and you want the abortion. It's kind of no questions asked up until the point of fetal viability. There are other countries like this, but not a lot. On the other hand, if you look at the global trend, while there are a number of countries where

abortion is illegal around the world, most countries that are changing their laws are liberalizing their abortion laws. They're decriminalizing abortion. They're allowing abortion in more situations. We've seen a lot of countries around the world, even countries like, say, Ireland, that we think of as being, you know, deeply Catholic countries with very strong religious traditions where you might expect them to have deeply seated views opposing abortion. Those kinds of countries are liberalizing their laws. The U.S. would be pretty rare in tightening up and moving in the opposite direction. But, again, so they're weird in that way. And then I think they're kind of weird in a third way. And this is just very much the American system where this decision is not.

saying that abortion will be illegal everywhere. It's just saying that the states can decide. And so I think what we're going to see in the United States is just a huge amount of regional variation. A lot of states are going to ban almost all abortions. And then we're going to have a lot of states where abortion access remains extremely liberal, where if you have the means and if you live in that state, you're going to be able to get an abortion quite easily. And so that range is also unusual. Most countries, it's kind of the same everywhere or kind of in a narrow band of seamness everywhere. Right. You're saying in this future that we might be entering, where you live says way more about your abortion access than it has for the last 50 years, where Roe v. Wade has been the law of the entire land. But I do take your point that America is weird in at least three ways, I counted. We're weird, number one, unusual in allowing abortion for any reason up until around 23 weeks. That's longer than a lot of European countries. We're weird in that we are becoming more conservative, rather than liberalizing, which is the trend of the world. We might also. be weird because there's a lot of states, again, in that upside-down tea, down the middle of

the Midwest and across the South that are going to move to be much more conservative than most countries in Europe when it comes to our abortion rules. Last question that I have for you is how you think this is going to change abortion laws in countries, in, excuse me, in states that are clearly blue. Can you imagine the pendulum swinging to the left, to the liberal side, where states like California or states like Virginia, which border, you know, the Carolinas and the South, where abortion rights are going to go in the conservative direction, could you see them swinging to the left in order to compensate for the fact that Rue of Ewaite has fallen at the national level?

So I think that you've mentioned two states that I think are going to go in very different direction. So it's interesting to talk about both of them. I think California is very much in mold that you're describing where politicians there kind of want to be an abortion haven. They want to be able to be a place that can help women who are unable to get abortions in other states. And they're thinking about how to do that. How can we build capacity? How can we make a friendly infrastructure? California also is just, you know, if you live in California, you can get public financing for abortion. You can get it covered by Medicaid. California is like a very abortion friendly state in general. And they are trying to think about how they can go farther. But the other thing that's

we're thinking about as like a state like Virginia, I really don't know what is going to happen in a state like Virginia. It does not seem clear that Virginia is going to want to ban abortions. I think it is not a state like Texas that is really just waiting for this decision to come down to change everything. But I do think that Virginia is a state that might regulate abortions somewhat. You know, we see this in a number of states where they're not going to ban it, but maybe they're going to say 24 weeks, that's too late in pregnancy. You know, no abortions after 20 weeks, no abortions after 15 weeks, maybe there are more rules, you know, about who can have an abortion and when, whether your reason is good enough, maybe there will be more regulations of abortion clinics than there

were before. The Roe versus Wade decision really limited what states could do. It kind of was like everyone has to meet this high bar for what's legally possible. And now we're going to see all this variation, you know, all the way from the states that are going to totally ban it to the states like California that are very enthusiastically trying to help women who need abortions that live out of their state. And I think Virginia is an example of a state that may end up kind of somewhere in the middle, probably really important for access for women coming from the south. It's sort of the nearest state on the way north that is going to have abortion clinics, but also may not be super friendly to them and welcoming to them. I think Virginia is very interesting. It's a border state

in this way between a south that's going to be extremely conservative about access to abortions and in Northeast that I think is going to be extremely accommodating. It's also a state that is moving left faster than almost any other state in the country because there are so many college graduates in northern Virginia and college graduates have moved left a lot in the last 12 years. At the same time, the governor is a Republican.

Governor Yonkin is a Republican, and I find it very unlikely that a Republican governor is going to, in the immediate aftermath of Roe v. Wade, immediately move to the left on abortion rights. So I think your point is very well taken there. Very, very last question, which is about politics. There is an observation that's been made about Roe v. Wade, which is that one of the reasons why it polarized America the way that it did is that the courts ran ahead of the political process. You had a country in the 1970s that was not particularly polarized on abortion, and then you had this seven-two decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973, and all of a sudden in the next decade, abortion became an extremely polarizing.

issue. Today, if you ask Americans, if they want Roe v. Wade overturned, it's kind of like the opposite situation. By a two to one margin, every year going back 20 years, Americans say, you know, we're kind of slid on abortion, but we do not want Roe v. Wade overturned. What do you think could be some of the political aftershocks of the court moving so far ahead of the political consensus of the population? I think there's a conventional wisdom among a lot of politicians and other political actors, that Roe v. Wade being overturned will be good for Democrats in general, that it will be mobilizing for their voters because there are a lot of voters who support abortion rights, but, like, don't, you know, weren't really thinking a lot

about this issue. You didn't think that they were in peril, and all of a sudden, now we're seeing all these headlines and we're going to hear about all these laws that are being passed. And if you think about the kinds of voters, particularly in a midterm election, which is coming up, that Democrats want to mobilize and want to get to vote and who don't always vote, they're the kinds of voters who may care about this issue, right? Younger voters, voters, voters of color, poor voters. These are people that don't always vote in midterm elections, but maybe if they're really energized, it'll give the Democrats a bump and it will hurt the Republican. So I think that's one theory about this. But I think there are also some indications that it may not be

as good for Democrats as they hope it will be. If you look at what's happening in Texas right now, Texas has effectively banned, you know, half of abortions for several months. And, you know, you just, they just had a primary election. No one was talking about this. No one was running TV ads about it. It just wasn't a prominent issue in the political discourse in Texas. Now, Texas is a really conservative state and, you know, it's different than, say, a state like Virginia where maybe it will be really mobilizing for Democrats. But I think it brings up another point, which is all of those national polls are looking across the entire United States and saying, okay, there's a majority of Americans that support some abortion rights. But like many other

issues in this country, I think there is a lot of polarization, not just in our politics, but in our geography. So the states that are looking to ban abortion, they tend to have populations that are a little bit more hostile towards abortion rights. And the states that are going to keep legal abortion tend to be the states where you have a population that disproportionately supports it. And so you think about the political consequences. I think there will be some national political reverberations of this, but it also may be that on the ground in a state like Texas, there's just not going to be enough mobilization of Democrats to change the legislature, to change their approach to this issue. And so you, you may end up sort of seeing this sorting where there's lots of agitation and democratic mobilization in states that are basically already blue and there's less activation in the states that are actually trying to restrict abortion. I think that's an incredibly sophisticated answer. It's basically salience versus sorting. On the one hand, with salience, it's going to be, I think, at the margins better for Democrats

to be able to run against the overturning of Roe v. Wade, considering that by a two-to-one margin, Americans keep saying, year after year, we don't want Roe v. Wade overturned. At the same time, this is not a national election. This is a midterm. And midterm elections are hyper-local at the state, at the local level, and the sorting effects that already exist in this country, where liberals live around liberals and Republicans live around Republicans, might not allow that sort of turn at the generic ballot level to cash out in Democrats actually making up a lot of ground in the mid-term elections. That seems like a relatively plausible hypothesis. Margo,

thank you so so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you very much for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Manzi. If you have a comment, a concern, a question, an idea for a future show, please email us at plain English at Spotify.com. That's plain, no space, English at Spotify.com.