Today, Explained - The New Abortion Wars

Episode Date: March 28, 2018

Kentucky just joined a wave of states attempting to severely limit when a woman can terminate her pregnancy. Vox’s Anna North surveys the growing restrictions on women’s reproduction under the Trump administration, and explains why the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade might once again be in jeopardy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Data, the best character from Star Trek TNG, and the best way to make your business work better. Google Cloud Platform can help you predict so your business can thrive using data. Go to g.co slash getcloudai to learn more. There are well over a hundred clinics where you can get an abortion in California. In Mississippi, there's one. The clinic is called Jackson Women's Health Organization, but people also call it the Pink House because it's bright pink. Anna North writes about gender at Vox.

They've been fielding various challenges to their operations for many years, and this facility is pretty familiar with controversy over many years. They're protesters. You are killing your child because to cover up your own sin. There are also folks who come there

as clinic escorts to walk people past protesters. Our purpose here is to get patients from their car to the clinic doors as safely and with as little harassment as possible. When there's only a few abortion providers in the state, it actually can be kind of dangerous to be an abortion provider. You don't necessarily want to take that on. People aren't moving to these states where abortion is very, very stigmatized to try to become providers. And Mississippi just made it even harder to

get an abortion. Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant has signed some of the nation's toughest restrictions on abortions into law. The bill bans most abortions after 15 weeks. Bryant, a Republican, previously said he wanted to make Mississippi the safest place in America for an unborn child. We have a human being 15 weeks old, and people believe that you ought to be able to destroy that life. We don't. So I'm very encouraged about where we're at.

I hope at some point Mississippi is free of abortion completely, and I hope that it is before I leave office. There are a couple of exceptions for severe fetal abnormality and I think for medical emergencies, but no exceptions for rape or incest, so it's a pretty strict bill. The only exceptions, in fact, are for situations where the health of the mother or the fetus is threatened. Abortion rights advocates are calling the law unconstitutional. So the clinic immediately sued. They argue that this law violates Roe v. Wade and is unconstitutional. And pretty quickly, a judge has issued a temporary restraining order. So

the law is actually not in effect right now. Okay. And we'll see in the next few days whether the law actually goes into effect or it may just get tied up in this court challenge for a while. And could that get appealed up or do you think this will stay in Mississippi? It's a great question. There's hope on the part of some conservative groups that have been behind the law that they can, you know, appeal this up all the way to the Supreme Court and try to get a decision there. I think a lot of reproductive rights groups feel like it won't get that far, but that's kind of another question. If it does get there to the Supreme Court, how does this Mississippi law violate Roe v. Wade? Roe v. Wade and a number of decisions afterwards sort of established the precedent that states can't ban abortions before a fetus

is viable. And when's viable? What's viability? Viability is kind of a tricky thing to pinpoint, but typically doctors will put it around 24 weeks. So 15 weeks is well before that. I think pretty much experts agree there's really no fetus that's viable at 15 weeks. So a 15-week ban is a basically direct challenge to Roe v. Wade. But this is not the only challenge to Roe v. Wade that we're seeing on the horizon. Some Ohio legislators just introduced a bill that would just ban abortion completely in the state. Completely? Yes. Completely, completely? Yes. Nobody can get an abortion even right away. Okay. We're also seeing a new effort in Louisiana that would be a pre-viability ban that's going to work its way through the legislature. So this is definitely something

that is on the radar of a lot of anti-abortion groups right now. Are there other things other states are doing outside of legislation to discourage women from having abortions or to sort of drive abortion clinics out of business? It's been interesting. I mean, anti-abortion groups have had to change their tactics a little bit because a few years ago, it was very common for states to try to pass laws that would be more about, like, your hallways have to be this wide, or your doctor has to be able to get admitting privileges in a hospital. And that sounds like the admitting privileges thing,

that sounds like it wouldn't be that big a deal, but it was a big deal. Because, for instance, like, Catholic hospitals weren't going to want to give admitting privileges to someone who's an abortion provider. Practically speaking, like that could end up shutting clinics down. So in 2016, in Whole Woman's Health versus Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court made it much harder for states to pass these kinds of laws that target the sort of operations of abortion clinics. When the law was passed, the number of abortion clinics in Texas went from 42 to 19, a more than 50 percent reduction. And the advocates said if this law remained on the books, the total number of clinics in the state would go to 10. And so since then, it's been a lot more difficult for states to go that route.

And anti-abortion groups haven't been pushing those kinds of restrictions as much. And so instead, we've seen more of these kinds of pre-viability bans, these sort of earlier and earlier, like banning abortion after six weeks, banning abortion after 15 weeks, things like that. And is the Supreme Court dealing with any abortion cases this term? Yeah, so the Supreme Court this term is hearing a case, NIFLA v. Becerra. What's NIFLA? NIFLA is the National Institute of Family Life Advocates. Abortion and free speech collide at the Supreme Court today. The case before the court involves so-called crisis pregnancy centers,

and whether a California law can require those centers to more fully disclose what they are and what services they do and do not offer. What these facilities typically do is they will offer counseling for people who are pregnant. It doesn't include abortion, and it's typically meant to discourage abortion. California decided that they wanted to regulate these crisis pregnancy centers, and they wanted to make it clear that there were other places women could go if they wanted to learn about abortion. The crisis pregnancy centers pushed back, saying, our whole thing is not talking about abortion.

So why would we post this notice that talks about abortion and tells you you could get one? And this has gone all the way up to the Supreme Court. So now the court will decide whether it's OK to force these centers to kind of post a notice saying you can get other information elsewhere. It's going to be complicated. Oral arguments were just last week, and we'll probably get a decision this summer. And how did oral arguments go? Did we get a sense of how it might be decided? My sense throughout this has been that the justices will not treat this just as an abortion case and that they are interested in the sort of speech issues here.

How can a state limit or not limit speech in this way? The Supreme Court is pretty much split down the middle on abortion, and so is the country. And depending on the day, so is the president. That's just ahead. I don't have a business, but I went to g.co slash getcloudai to learn more about the Google Cloud Platform anyway. It's this thing Google built to help you use data to improve your business. Thank you. says try it free. Who doesn't like free? The Google Cloud Platform, g.co slash getcloudai. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm speaking with Anna North about abortion.

Anna, where does the president stand on this issue? My speculation has always been, ever since the campaign started, that he doesn't care about abortion or reproductive health very much and he doesn't have a lot of thoughts about it. And that's based on the way that he has talked about this issue in interviews and the way that he's talked about it in debates. I'm very pro-choice. I hate the concept of abortion. I hate it.

But you still, I just believe in choice. He goes back and forth a ton. I am pro-life. You're pro-life, but you do think that there should be exceptions for rape and incest. Yes, and life. He said things that made it clear that he, you know, is not necessarily super well informed. Like what? There was an interview that he did where he talked about that it would be fine if there was some sort of punishment for a woman who got an abortion. Do you believe in punishment

for abortion? Yes or no? As a principle. The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment. For the woman? Yeah, there has to be some form of punishment. For the woman? Yeah, there has to be some form. 10 years? I don't know. That I don't know. Which actually really isn't a party line that anti-abortion groups use very often because it's so unpopular. Nobody really wants to think about punishing a patient who was probably in dire straits. It's just like doesn't play well at all with anyone.

And the fact that Trump didn't know that suggested to me that like he just hadn't really done the reading and that this is not an issue that is very important to him or that he thinks about very much. My sense is basically just that ever since he's become president, he has allowed, you know, has just sort of said, OK, like I'm going to be my presidency is going to be anti-abortion. I'm going to let anti-abortion groups and advocates kind of run the show when it comes to reproductive health. The president obviously gets to appoint lots of judges, including, of course, Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Has he been choosing people across the board with strong stances on abortion? Yes. So Gorsuch was considered a big win on the anti-abortion side, I think, when he joined the court. And the president has also then appointed to lower federal courts a number of

folks also with, you know, quite conservative reputations who anti-abortion groups believe are going to rule, you know, kind of in their favor. And so this might help sort of embolden states to push more restrictive abortion laws because they think, you know, well, the federal judiciary is getting more conservative. We might be able to actually get these laws through the courts in ways that we haven't before. You know, maybe we can even get it all the way up to the Supreme Court. Maybe the Supreme Court will, you know, be up for reconsidering this issue. Maybe by the time it gets to the Supreme Court, Trump will get another appointee. I think these are all kind of part of the calculus among folks who are abortion opponents right now. For a president who doesn't seem to have like a super clear ideology on this issue or even a super strong will to do much about it, he seems to be getting things done.

Yeah, like a lot is getting done. And, you know, obviously the Trump administration sort of weakened the Obamacare mandate to cover contraception. So it's easier now for companies to get out of that. That was kind of a big deal. And I think a lot is getting done without a ton of attention. Some of these restrictions on reproductive health care, they affect women, they affect people of color, they affect poor

people. A lot of things that make abortion or birth control hard to access are always going to come down harder on poor patients because they are the ones that rely on federal aid more. They have a harder time getting together the money for medical treatments, all these things. And so sometimes I do think some of these attacks on reproductive health specifically, they can kind of fly under the radar. As a country, is this one of the more active moments we've seen on this issue since, you know, this fight really began? The moment Roe v. Wade was decided by the Supreme Court? That's a really interesting question. I have been covering this issue of reproductive health and reproductive rights for like about 10 years now.

I couldn't tell you that there's ever felt like there was an inactive moment. But, you know, banning abortion outright tends to not work particularly well. Most groups that study reproductive health agree that there will always be people who seek abortions for various reasons. And so if you ban it, they're going to do it in much less safe ways. They're notare actually instituted a bunch of really helpful reforms when it came to contraception. And now we're seeing a lot of that get rolled back. But doesn't contraception, be easy to obtain. And we've seen rates of unintended pregnancy actually go down in the country. A lot of that people attribute to the availability, not just of contraception in general, but of forms of contraception that work for a long time. So things like IUDs, which are a little bit expensive to get, but then they last for five years. Under Obamacare, you could get your IUD covered. And then we have seen that go backwards. And that is difficult for a lot of people to see. And just generally, do we know if the country is getting more abortions or fewer abortions right now than in the past few years? Have we seen any numbers? Unintended pregnancies are down,

abortions are down, but we might see them start to go up if we also see people unable to access birth control. It's like some sort of cognitive dissonance that the rate of unintended pregnancies and abortions is going down while this fight seems to be ramping up. Yes. Like what are people so mad about? Why? Why is Mississippi passing legislation? Is there some, you know, in a state where there probably just aren't that many abortions happening? Yes. Considering they have one clinic. So why is this pressing legislation in Mississippi? Or is it just purely symbolic?

This gets at kind of, I think, a bigger question about our country, which is how do people think about abortion and what are their feelings about it. The answers turns out to be both kind of complicated and kind of simple. In the fall, I sat in on a focus group that was male Trump voters, and this was in Virginia, and they gave these men like a list of all the abortion restriction laws in the state of Virginia and said like, these are all the abortion laws in your state state of Virginia and said, like, these are all the abortion laws in your state. Did you know about this? What do you think? And a couple of the men were like, this sounds great. This sounds fine. But a lot of them were like, what is this? Like, I don't care about this. A lot of them said, like, these sound silly. Like, some of them said,

you know, this is just really not a top issue for me. I don't know why my legislators are making such a big deal about this. Yeah. So I do think the abortion issue is an issue like, you know, yeah, I don't love the idea of abortion, but I think it should be legal in some circumstances. Or they'll say, I don't love the idea, but I really don't think about it very much. You'll get like pretty nuanced conversations. But there is a core, there's a base of people for whom restricting abortion is this really important issue. And they see an opening right now, and they're not sure, like, if they don't take it, when are they going to get this kind of opening again?

Anna North is a senior reporter at Vox. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. We're produced by Bridget McCarthy, Noam Hassenfeld, and Luke Vanderplug. Afim Shapiro is our engineer, and Kathy makes music for us. Shout-outs to Vox's Karen Turner for helping us with the show this week and to Vox's Julie Bogan for crushing it for us on Twitter.com.

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