The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jia Tolentino and Stephania Taladrid on the End of Roe v. Wade

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dobbs case was not a surprise; given the draft opinion that was leaked in May, its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey was nearly a certainty. But the effects of the ruling have been rapid and chaotic. In some states, abortions stopped overnight; in others, there’s profound confusion over what qualifies as a legally acceptable reason for having an abortion. Far from settling the legal issue of abortion—by sending it back to the states—the Dobbs ruling opens an uncharted legal dimension where the health of a pregnant person is being pitted against the life of a fetus, with potentially fatal consequences. “Flat out, women will die in the course of ordinary pregnancy,” Jia Tolentino says, “because of physician fears about anything that might make them liable for felony changes of performing an abortion. It will make pregnancy significantly more dangerous for many, many people.” Tolentino and Stephania Taladrid have both reported extensively on abortion access, and they spoke this week with the New Yorker editor Tyler Foggatt.  A longer version of this conversation appears on The New Yorker’s Politics and More podcast.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The Supreme Court's ruling in the Dobbs case didn't come as any surprise. In fact, given the draft opinion that was leaked in May, overturning Roe v. Wade was nearly a certainty. But the effects have been rapid and chaotic. In some states, abortion stopped overnight. In others, there's confusion about what kinds of minorities. internal care might now be potentially criminal. And the response from Democrats in Washington

struck many supporters of abortion rights as painfully inadequate. Gia Tolentino and Stefaniya Teladreid have both reported extensively on the issue. They spoke this week with New Yorker's senior editor Tyler Foggett on the podcast, Politics and More. Stephanie had returned from the state of Texas, where she was in an abortion clinic in Houston exactly when the Dobbs decision was announced. The decision came shortly after 9 a.m. and several members of the staff were kind of huddled in the front desk area, and the reactions were dramatic. I mean, people started crying. People were just in complete disbelief of what was happening. And then at some point a patient comes up to the clinic director and says, you know, why are you all crying? And then she kind of had to put herself together

and swipe away her tears and go up to the patients who were waiting in the waiting room and say, ladies, the Supreme Court just struck down Roe v. Wade, meaning that we can no longer operate as an abortion clinic, and we will not be able to assist you today. And I was struck by a Cuban woman who spoke no English, and she couldn't really understand what was happening. And at one point, she turns to the clinic director and says, you know, what did just happen? And then someone explained to her what had happened, and then she just left.

And many of the other patients, the minute that the decision was announced, they just fled the clinic. Because they were worried about getting in trouble just for being there? Potentially, potentially. I mean, who knows? There were just so many reasons why that could have been.

And to me, you know, what was most striking was just seeing kind of the enormous distance separating what was happening in D.C. and the reality on the ground. So, Gia, you grew up in Texas. Can you talk a little bit about the cultural attitudes toward abortion that you observed, you know, long before this? Yeah. I grew up in Texas, in Houston, actually, where the clinic that Stefani just visited is located. And I don't think I knew a single person that was not anti-abortion until I went to college, really. But I also think that the anti-abortion movement

that has entrenched itself in half the country and that has become victorious in half the country is one that is significantly markedly more extreme than the one that was dominant in the 80s and the 90s. This is an anti-abortion movement that has been as radicalized as the GOP has since 2016. There are at least 11 states that have no exceptions for rape and incest,

which is previously, I mean, an unthinkable level of extremity and cruelty. And so the people that I grew up around, they talked about abortion as murder. You know, there was this doctrine that life begins at conception that abortion is killing a baby. But I think that when it really came down to it, abortion was not actually instinctively tantamount to murder. There was an understanding that there was a loss in abortion, but that there was not actually a reason why you would deny a pregnant person chemotherapy because she was pregnant, right? That you would refuse someone care for a septic uterus because you would have to stop the fetus's heartbeat first. I think that the true implications of fetal personhood, which is

what this current anti-abortion movement has organized itself around, you know, the idea that effectively the fetus is a kind of person with with rights that are not only equal to, but really far superior to any that any of us enjoy, you know, the right to make someone die so that you can live. That is significantly more extreme than any of what I grew up around. And that was already quite extreme. Yeah, it seems like there's been a real shift. Like I was thinking about SB8, which is the Texas law that banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. You know, that allows private citizens to go after abortion providers and people who aid and abet those seeking an abortion, like the Uber driver who takes you to the clinic. But that law technically doesn't hold the person

who got the abortion liable. And then in 2014, Tennessee, what was the first law in the United States to allow women to be prosecuted for drug use during pregnancy. But even that was discontinued after a couple of years. So it seems like there has been sort of a hesitation up until this point to actually go after the women who are getting the abortions, even if, you know, you're indirectly going after them by making it harder for them to get the procedure. But now you're seeing in states like, you know, Wyoming that they're looking to pass their own versions of the Tennessee law. So basically going after women for this idea. of fetal endangerment. And so I'm wondering if you guys have any thoughts on like the exact point at which

the pro-life movement pivoted to the criminalization of people who are getting abortions or pregnant people rather than going after the doctors or the people who are sort of surrounding the procedure. So it's true that currently the anti-abortion movement is sticking to the idea that, you know, there will be me for wayward mothers. But this, I have a strong feeling is, a veil that will fall soon enough, right? Because progressive states are passing laws that will shield women and doctors from out-of-state prosecutions to block medical records, et cetera. And once you can't target people out of state, once you can't target doctors effectively for providing abortions, the only people to target to stop abortions will really be the people who are getting them.

And there are a lot of people who have felt quite surprised by this, where in fact the people in the reproductive rights community in Texas, for example, have known that this moment was coming with absolute certainty, I would say, since about 2011, when the Texas state bans began passing that were then replicated in so many other states around the country. And in terms of the criminalization of pregnancy, the national advocates for pregnant women have done, like, uniquely valuable work on this. There's been a myriad of charges. There's child endangerment. There's possession and distribution of narcotics to a minor. You know, there's manslaughter charges in some cases of stillbirth, even when no causal link could be drawn between the actions of the

pregnant person and the stillbirth itself, right? This has been a tactic that has been tested on low-income women on brown and black women since the 80s, really. I would say that's when it really started. There were hospitals in South Carolina that were drug testing women at labor secretly and then charging them. And it has been pretty successful because even those of us who have defended reproductive rights have tended to think of these cases as outliers. And I I think we are in an era now when we will see they were not the outliers. They experienced what is coming for a lot more people. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come.

So how hard is it to distinguish between an abortion and a miscarriage? Is this the kind of thing where a doctor can step in and say this is very obviously an unintentional miscarriage rather than an intentional abortion? So abortion and miscarriage are both incredibly common. Both occur about a million times per year. and in many cases they're clinically indistinguishable. If a woman's uterus expels its contents, there is no sort of instant test to distinguish whether it was a deliberate miscarriage or a natural one. And on the one hand, this is helpful for people who will be seeking abortions and getting them, there is no obligation for them to walk into an urgent care facility and say,

I took misoprostol and I think I might be bleeding to me. much and I would like to have an exam. They don't need to do that. And in fact, they should not. However, what that also means is that women who are experiencing miscarriage naturally, who walk into an urgent care center and say, I miscarried, I'm at 12 weeks, and I think I might be bleeding too much. Under certain hospitals, under certain district attorney's jurisdictions, that miscarriage can and will be investigated as a possible crime, as the possible crime of abortion. So the indistinguishability of these two incredibly common events. On the one hand, it is a shield for women seeking abortions,

and on the one hand, it is a cudgel towards women who miscarry. And how do you expect this to affect the care that pregnant women receive? What all of these restrictions do is they present a legal framework for charging and detaining women for doing anything that could possibly cause a miscarriage that could be seen to cause early labor, to cause a stillbirth. it will have an incredibly chilling effect on prenatal care in prohibition states. You know, right now, most of the charges for child endangerment while pregnant have come from drug use.

But there are plenty of other things that pregnant women are told they are not allowed to do because it will endanger the baby. Like taking hot baths and exercising too much and eating deli turkey and all of these things, traveling, you know, working a certain kind of job. The inevitable effect is to set people in an adversarial relationship with their own pregnancy. which has happened in states like Tennessee with things like the fetal assault law, which was discontinued precisely because it caused an increase in maternal and infant death. You will see many, many, many stories of people who experience pregnancy complications. And the doctor will need to do hours of judicial review to make sure that they can't get sued for providing any procedure that might endanger the fetus and women will die because of it.

flat out, women will die in the course of ordinary pregnancy because of physician fears of doing anything that might make them liable for felony charges of performing an abortion. It will make pregnancy significantly more dangerous for many, many people. You mentioned that this is a win for the Republicans, but I'm wondering to what extent this is, you know, more a failure of the Democratic Party that sort of had a chance to enshrine abortion rights and law and didn't take the opportunity. Do you guys have thoughts on sort of how the Democrats failed to respond to the threat to abortion rights in the Biden administration and, you know, even before that? Oh, I have so many thoughts about this. I have thoughts about this that, you know, I think would require a lot of bleeping.

I, you know, I'm not enamored of Democratic Party leadership and can't think of a single time in my lifetime when I have felt that way. But. When the decision came down and we saw what the Democratic Party leadership had to offer, that was a moment for me where I began to genuinely suspect for the first time in my life that actually the Democrats are not interested at all in protecting the right to abortion. It was presented on the day as nothing but a reason to get people to donate. And that I found so abominable, you know, that repro activists have been preparing for this moment for a decade. We knew for a fact that it was going to happen in 2018 once Kavanaugh was confirmed. And then an extra layer of absolutely this is going to happen with Amy Coney-Barritt. The Democrats have sat by even before this, while abortion was basically made inaccessible to poor and minority women in many states in the South and Southeast over the

last decade. Every candidate campaigns on making row the law of the land, and then as soon as they get elected, they back away and focus on things that they consider more important. You know, I'm sure, Stefania, you've seen it in your reporting. The people that we've been in contact with who have been laying the systems of protection in place, just these tiny threads of connection and support person to person with so little funding, with so little anything other than the will to help people. And so much risk. And so much risk to themselves. the way that they have been doing this for years. You know, I mean, I wasn't expecting the Democrats to, you know, override the filibuster and codify Roe if they weren't going to do it for the Voting Rights Act.

But I've been, as you can tell, I've been incensed about it. And it was interesting, as Gia pointed out, the main message that we got from the president that day was Roe was on the ballot, right? And I think the reaction for a lot of people was, how can you be telling me that the answer is to vote when we already voted you into office, right? I mean, you're there. And it was interesting to see that after the decision was announced, I went up to a small rally that several of the staff members at the clinic attended. And people were rightly upset, and they were, you know, shouting, bands off our buddies, and we won't go back and fuck Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas.

And then at one point, better work showed up. And, you know, there were some among the crowd. who wanted to hear from him. The majority did not. And then the chant became Democrats, we call your bluff. And what was good to see was that instead of running away from that criticism or just, you know, going on CNN and finding another kind of podium, Beto stayed. And he listened to people's abortion stories.

And he wasn't hoping to co-op that moment and to, you know, take the mic away from, from the women and the pregnant people who were hoping to express their anger and their frustration and their fear, frankly, for their lives and those of their generations to come. But he stayed and he listened as a way to show to them, you know, I'm here and I stand with you. And within the party itself, we've heard proposals to build abortion clinics on federal land, to fund people seeking abortions out of state, to expand the Supreme Court. Court's membership, right? And in a way, I think it's been quite overwhelming to see that the White House's response has been, well, we'll protect the right to seek medical care. And we stand

with the Attorney General who has said that no state can interfere with a woman's ability to travel to another state. We have yet to see whether that's true or not. But then that doesn't solve the issue of what happens to those who cannot afford to travel anywhere else, right? right, you'll have to spend all of your savings or the money that you don't even have to get an abortion out of state. I mean, it's just completely insane. We did a story on a family from Dallas who had to travel from Dallas to a city called Santa Teresa so that their eighth grader could get an abortion. And the family had $1,500 left in savings.

They just put in a down payment for a house that they'd just put in a down payment for a house that they They had worked pretty much their entire lives to be able to afford. And they were suddenly faced with a cost of $1,300 to get an abortion. And I followed this family. I met them at the clinic in New Mexico, and I followed them back to Texas. And just the sense of anxiety, the dread, and the fear, genuine fear, of thinking, you know, where do we go from here? We have $200 left in our savings account. It's just completely depleted our savings.

I mean, what we're talking about here is the ability to make a life. And I don't mean, I'm not talking about fetal life. There is perhaps no more fundamental issue to even to any sort of human autonomy, to the narrative control of your aspirations, to the fulfillment of your hopes, to your ability to feed your family, to your education, to everyone else's lives in your family, in your community. It's at the nexus of every single issue because every person, we are all the product of reproductive decisions or the lack of them, the population's ability to make free choices and to live in ways that are decent and abundant and loving and free. And there's nothing that

breaks that desire and that ability like pregnancy before you're ready or when you're not able. Stephanie, I'm sure you've had a lot of friends texting you. It's like, what can I do? What can I do? Right. Because there's too much to do. There's too much. It feels really overwhelming. And I keep telling people just, you know, remember all of these things are connected. All these forms of justice are connected.

And if you find one thread to pull and just keep pulling it, you know, that's what we have to do. Thank you both so much. Thank you. Thanks. Gia Tolentino and Stephanie Atuladreed, they spoke with Tyler Foggett, who's a senior editor at the New Yorker. There's more from their conversation on our podcast, politics, and more. And you can read all of our coverage on the overturning of Roe v. Wade at New Yorker.com. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today.

Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avehese, Rio, Breedah Green, Kalilea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Puttubelli, with help from Alison McAdam, David Gable, Harrison Keithline, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Mengfay Chen.

We had additional help this week from Michael May. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.