We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - The Wild, Untold Story of How They Made Abortion Political: Witches, Healers & Liars | Amanda with Jessica Valenti

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

Abortion isn't just about abortion—it’s about everything.  It's about who gets to decide the course of a woman's life. It's about healthcare, democracy, power, freedom, and the stories we've been taught to believe. In this can’t-miss conversation, Amanda traces the shocking history of abortion in America—from witch hunts to medical monopolies to the political strategy that transformed abortion into a partisan weapon. Then journalist and activist Jessica Valenti joins to expose what extremists are doing now, why these attacks were never really about abortion, and why she refuses to believe they're winning. If you've ever felt overwhelmed, confused, or hopeless about this moment, this episode will give you something even more powerful than outrage: clarity. - How abortion became a political weapon—and what it's really about. - Why abortion bans haven't reduced abortions. - How attacks on abortion threaten all reproductive healthcare. - The hidden strategies extremists are using now—and how to recognize them. - How the vast majority of Americans are on the same side—and why hope is a strategy. - Practical ways to take action, support local abortion funds, and protect your community. For more with Jessica Valenti, please listen to:  353. How We’ll Save Abortion: A Must-Listen with Jessica Valenti  About Jessica:  Jessica Valenti is a writer, activist, and one of the country’s most influential voices on gender and politics. The award-winning author of eight books—including the New York Times bestseller Abortion—she  has shaped the national conversation on feminism for over two decades. Jessica’s groundbreaking anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape set what’s now considered the gold standard for sexual consent and paved the way for legislation of the same name. She is also widely credited with sparking feminism’s online wave as the founder of the trailblazing blog Feministing. A former columnist for The Guardian and The Nation, Jessica’s sharp, uncompromising analysis has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and on media outlets from CNN to The Daily Show. She speaks at colleges and organizations nationwide about feminism, abortion, and sexual violence. After the fall of Roe, Jessica founded Abortion, Every Day, an urgent synthesis of anything and everything happening with abortion rights in the United States. Follow We Can Do Hard Things on:  Instagram — ⁠https://www.instagram.com/wecandohardthings⁠

Friends, welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. This is Amanda. I am so happy you are here because today's conversation is so important. It's important to me and to all of us. Today is about abortion. We hear a lot about abortion, but rarely, if ever, do we hear the truth. Abortion is everything. abortion is everything because outlawing abortion is about controlling women. When a woman cannot make decisions about her own health, her own future, her own finances, her own family, she does not control her life. Abortion is the foundation upon which a woman's ability to live freely rests, including her right to vote, to earn money, to own the fruits of her brain and her work,

the ability to move freely in the world, the ability to protect herself and her family. Today, we are unveiling the truth about the history of abortion. We are debunking every myth, extremists perpetuate, and we are talking to the remarkable journalist and activist Jessica Valenti, who will go down in history as a hero of our times, tracking and exposing and decoding every attack and lie, an extremist strategy of anti-abortionists. And we will see. And we will see, that we are and have always been the winning side. Before we start, let's take a step back to understand what we are doing today and why. Our lifetimes are a tiny moment inside a vast expanse of history, but it is human nature not to think that way. It is human nature to observe the story

we are living inside of, to see how things are, and to believe that the way it is, is the way it has always been, and the way it will always be. It just is. But the truth. But the truth is, truth is that the story where living was written by someone with a specific agenda, told and retold and reinforced and compelled, until we believe it is just how it is, until we accept that there is really no sense in imagining it a different way. This is the way it is. That strategy is intentional, and it is a lie. Pulitzer Prize winning author Vitan Wynne wrote, all wars are fought twice. The first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. Political and legal clashes are just the first round of battle, and often the quickest. The real war friends is won or lost based on whose narratives, histories, and memories ultimately define our cultural memory. The story that takes hold matters even more than the original battlefield operations. Because after all, the controlling story is the way we know. know who is the terrorist and who is the freedom fighter, who is the defender and who is the

aggressor, who is the political prisoner, and who is the common criminal, who is the hero, and who is the villain, and what each was actually fighting for. The story that is recorded and remembered ultimately determines what we accept as how it is, whether we will resurrect a more accurate story of how we got here, and whether we will even have the fight in us to know and believe that the story we are swallowing is bullshit, and that another way of how it is is actually right under our noses, right within our grasp. The war on abortion is exactly this way. The abortion story that has been enforced into our memory is a series of intentional strategic lies. One of the ways we will win this war with extremists is by first reclaiming an accurate cultural memory, by first uncovering

the truth about what extremists have actually been fighting for when they've been pretending to fight about abortion by first calling bullshit on their lies. What we are talking about today is that the myth, it has always been this way, it will always be this way, could not be further from the truth. First of all, for 99.95% of human history, legal, religious, and governmental authorities understood abortion had nothing to do with them. The authority over reproduction, including the knowledge, skills, resources of the practitioners, the choices of the women over themselves, the consequences of those decisions, all of it rested with women themselves and with the women who cared for them. The fiction that reproductive health

care belongs in the governmental realm has only existed for 0.05% of human history. Second, abortion is understood today as the defining partisan issue. of our time, the intractable wedge dividing the nation with an equal number of zealots on both sides. It's an irredeemable divide. The truth is that this has only been a partisan wedge issue for less than 50 years. And as we will learn, the intentional manipulation of abortion as a wedge issue had nothing to do with abortion and everything to do with segregation and greed. And third, we are not and have never been irredeemably divided. Indeed, we are not even divided. More than 81% of Americans today, Republicans and Democrats, believe that decisions regarding abortion should be made privately between a

pregnant person and their doctor rather than dictated by politicians. The radical extremists know that Americans do not want the big government overreach into personal liberties that they are imposing. which is why abortion is about democracy, about whether the will of the people prevails over the minority of the extremists. Buckle up buttercups. Today we are going back to tell the truth. And the truth about abortion actually has very little to do with abortion. It's a story about wise women and witches and medical monopoly and greed and fights to preserve

profits and segregation. Abortion has been a centuries-long bait and switch. a chess piece, a cover for a different fight altogether. And we're about to expose it all. Let's roll. If you were a woman living in New England in the 17th or 18th centuries and needed or wanted an abortion, no legal, social, or religious force would have stopped you. And you and the community would have been untroubled.

For 99.95% of human history, people have been having babies and avoiding having babies. babies without state, legal, and religious prohibition. For the vast majority of history, these institutions couldn't be bothered. Promoting fertility, avoiding fertility, getting pregnant, avoiding pregnancy, labor and delivery, each was, quite literally, a woman's problem, which she handled with skilled, wise women and lay healers from her community. A healer learned her craft from her mother or elders, who learned it from her mother or her elders. She knows how to deliver babies, stop bleeding, treat miscarriages, encourage fertility, or prevent it. She knows herbs, anatomy, labor, breastfeeding, and the rhythms of women's bodies in ways that no formal

medical school teaches because there are no medical schools teaching this. For the vast majority of human history, reproductive health care was women's work and women's business. Today we're walking through the three big fights about abortion that were never about abortion. The most recent was about segregation and greed. The one before that was about medical monopoly, and the first, which we will turn to now, was about witches. Well, to be more accurate, it was a war over worldview and world order. And the battlefield was the witch hunts. During the European witch hunts from roughly the 1400s through the 1600s and which spread to colonial New England, tens of thousands of people were executed after being accused of witchcraft. About 80% of those executed

were women. Many were older women, widows, herbal healers, or women who held positions of community authority. These women possessed knowledge that wasn't taught or approved by the church. They knew how to make medicines from plants, how to care for the sick, how to deliver babies, how to treat ailments passed down through generations of experience. One quarter to one third of those accused of witchcraft were women lay healers and midwives. Why? Because these, these, these were these women, these women wielding knowledge and authority outside of the control of the church and state threatened, quite literally, the world order imposed by the church monarchy control. To be clear, the Catholic Church was not against quasi-medicine for the upper class.

Although modern medicine did not exist, kings and nobles had their own court physicians, some of whom were actually priests. The issue was control and authority, specifically from whose authority healing was administered. Male upper class healing under the control of and with the credit to the church was acceptable. Female healing by laywomen for the benefit of the peasant class expressly outside the control of and credit to the church was not acceptable. Significantly, it was not that the church believed the women healers were not effective. The opposite was true. They knew these women healers were effective. And since their healing happened outside the church, it was not authorized by God.

In terms of healing, the church believed that there were two equally effective options. One, the spiritual power of prayer authorized by God through the church. And two, the spiritual power of the magic authorized by the devil through the women lay healers. This was an existential problem for the church because the stronger the midwives and healers' powers to help the peasants, the weaker the peasants' dependence was on the church. And just as bad, the powers and authority of the healers were beyond the control and authority of the church, and contrary to key teachings of the church. For example, these wise women used botanical herbal and fungal remedies, like opium, belladonna, ergot, and mandrake, to effectively

ease women's pain and labor. But the Catholic Church demanded that women be an agony during childbirth as divine punishment for Eve's original sin. So the midwives alleviating women's labor pain was an interference with God's will and church teachings and therefore heretical witchcraft. But the greatest threat the wise women midwife healers posed was their empirical scientific methods, a worldview that could effectively collapse the Catholic royal world order. Note here the anti-science suspicion that is ever present today. Here's what I mean. The Catholic monarchy world order was based on a total surrender to a fully ordained spiritual worldview.

Midwives and lay healers embodied the opposite worldview. One of empirical scientific reasoning, reliance on the wise women's calculated observations, what she observed with her own senses, from her active inquiry, from cause and effect, trial and error, how she could apply her learnings and skill to change outcomes. This was the ultimate threat to the church, which enforced utter mistrust and disdain of the material world and the senses, which compelled followers to not rely on anything you see, but instead rely on the unseen spiritual realm, which can be interpreted not by you, but exclusively by the church. Lean not on your own understanding, rely not on scientific reasoning, wait until the church tells you what everything

means. As such, a midwife healer was what Barbara Aaron Wright called the Catholic Church's triple threat. She was a woman confident in her own power. She was part of an organized underground serving and empowering peasant women. And her practice was based on empirical study, trust in our own senses and abilities, and an order wholly ungovernable by the rules and laws of the Church. Is it any wonder then that the 15th century Catholic witch hunting guide, the Malius Malifacarum, a book so popular it was second only to the Bible in sales for 200 years, declared of all the threats and evils and demons to be feared that, quote, no one does more harm to the Catholic faith than midwives. It turns out that the Catholic Church Monarchy

complex feared the women's magic precisely because it was not magic, precisely because it was science. Turns out it was declared the biggest threat to the church order because the women's wisdom would prove that it was in fact the church that was magic. And the church's ultimate magic trick was projecting faith to protect the precarious order of enforced an unnatural wealth disparity and patriarchy. Abortion has never been about abortion. The witches had to die because they were too scientific. That is, right up until the midwives had to be illegal because they were not scientific enough. We are now in colonial America for the second fight about abortion that is not about abortion.

For centuries, the practice of healing had been passed down through wisdom and learning and primarily through women, including in America. As late as 1818, medical practice in the state of New Jersey, for example, was mainly in the hands of women. Until the late 1800s, women healers in Western Europe and the U.S. provided abortions and trained other women to do so without legal prohibitions. Across the colonies and later across the United States, reproductive care remained largely in women's hands. Childbirth, miscarriage management, contraception, fertility regulation, and abortion weren't separate medical specialties. They were part of a continuum of care. Midwives cared for women through every stage of reproductive life. In many communities, these experts were black women. In the South,

enslaved black midwives delivered babies for enslaved women, and often the white families as well. Indigenous communities maintain their own rich traditions of reproductive knowledge, including childbirth practices and fertility regulations that had developed over centuries. Their expertise was extraordinary, yet their authority was limited. Inslave black women could be trusted to deliver a child safely into the world while having almost no legal control over whether they themselves would bear children. Under slavery, women's reproductive capacity became an economic asset owned by enslavers. Reproduction itself became part of the machinery of American enslavement. This contradiction, relying on these women's labor and expertise while denying them authority over

their own bodies, is in many ways the story of America. But suddenly, in the middle of the 18th, In the 1800s, American medicine was undergoing a revolution. Doctors wanted something they had never fully possessed, professional authority, and economic monopoly. In order to get those things, medicine needed to be organized, standardized, licensed. In order to rule people out, you had to have a licensing process to rule people in. In 1847, male physicians founded the American Medical Association. One of its goals was to elevate medicine into an elite profession with recognized expertise and legal authority.

And to do that, they had to eliminate the expertise and authority of what they called, quote, irregular practitioners, midwives, herbalists, folk healers, and anyone practicing medicine outside the new professional establishment. One of the leaders of this movement was Dr. Horatio Storer, who launched the 1800s physicians campaign against abortion. Storer and his movement argued that abortion should be criminalized and that licensed physicians, not midwives and not women themselves, should control reproductive medicine. This campaign had multiple motivations. First, the medical establishment had actively taken up the anti-abortion cause as part of its effort to eliminate competition from midwives.

Second, it was part of an anti-feminist backlash to the growing movements for suffrage, voluntary motherhood, and other women's rights in the 19th century. And third, with the declining birth rate among whites in the late 1800s, the U.S. government and the eugenics movement warned against the threat of race suicide and was desperate for white. women to reproduce. Even then, the issue was not about whether abortion was ethical. It was about who had the authority to decide it, who had the authority to perform it, and whom they wanted to reproduce at all. This so-called professionalization didn't mean much in terms of helping those who needed help. Formal medical training required no high school education lasted merely a few months

to a max of two years. There was very few clinical facilities. and frankly, no body of medical science to be trained in. Medicine at this time consisted of providing laxatives, bleeding, and opium. By all accounts, lay practitioners were safer and more effective than the certified doctors. But formal certification did offer two irresistible advantages to male physicians. One, a monopoly on the industry of medicine, since poor women were spending $5 million a year on midwives who are often black, indigenous, and immigrant women, that profit could be diverted through legal requirements to the certified males. And two, control and authority over what was

being offered as medicine. The American Medical Association, branding the midwives, impossibly dirty, incompetent, ignorant, and unscientific, successfully lobbied state legislatures to pass strict, restrictive licensing laws that made it near impossible. for traditional lay midwives to serve women with fertility, abortion, and childbirth care. The midwives who were too scientific to live centuries before were now cast as too unscientific to practice. The radical change happened with lightning speed. In 1900, nearly 100% of births were at home attended by midwives. By 1950, more than 80% of deliveries were in hospitals attended by licensed physicians.

Now licensed male doctors had a monopoly on the newfound economic and social power of medicine and who and who would not get abortions. By the end of the 19th century, nearly every state had enacted criminal abortion laws. The legal transformation happened as quickly as the medical revolution. In just a few decades, what had once been governed largely through common law, local practice, and community norms became increasingly regulated through criminal statutes and physician oversight. Then as now, making abortion illegal neither eliminated the need for abortion nor prevented its practice. In the 1890s, doctors estimated that there were two million abortions a year in the United States.

That's compared to 1.1 million today. Through the church-controlled witch trials, any woman who heals must be a witch and any witch must be killed. Through the professionalization of medicine, anyone who heals without being a doctor is outlawed. A woman cannot be a doctor, so any woman healer is outlawed. Through both, the healers became the demons. Through both, any woman seeking healing outside what the church, law, and government ordains is marked forever with suspicion and superstition, which all institutions must be on guard to control. This is how, through both witch trials and through the professionalization of medicine,

we lost not only the lives of countless wise women healers through torture and murder, but lost centuries of wisdom about women's health and lost autonomy over our own fertility and reproduction. Because in order to officially withhold something, you cannot have the knowledge and wisdom and abilities unregulated outside of official control. You have to first control the means by which that, thing is administered. You have to hold power over those who are capable of administering it. You have to make it official before you can officially take it away. Centuries of community knowledge and wisdom had to be eradicated so that authority could be institutionally controlled.

Abortion has never been about abortion. So it was that the first laws against abortion before quickening did not take effect in the United States until the revolution of modern medicine began in the 1860s. Prior to that medical movement, American colonies, following English common law, protected the right to abortion before quickening. Quickening referred to the time when a woman felt a fetus kick, generally between 16 to 20 weeks into pregnancy. The understanding being that life began at quickening, and abortions prior to that point

were therefore not the law's business. But even after the medical fight to criminalize abortion, the tradition of women's right to early abortion was already too deeply rooted in U.S. society. Abortionists continued to practice openly and with public support, and juries refused to convict them. So for almost a century after abortion was officially illegal, abortion remained, if politically complicated, certainly not partisan. There were strong opponents, especially within the Catholic Church. But the issue was not a Democratic-Republican dividing line. Republican and Democratic officials had roughly the same voting records on abortion. And outside the Catholic faith, it wasn't a religious issue.

Evangelicals were not only not mobilized around anti-abortion. They were largely unmoved by it. In the late 1960s, there was a growing feminist grassroots movement claiming that women could not be full citizens without the control over their own reproduction. And this movement, together with the National Organization for Women, lobbied effectively to convince 17, states to pass more liberal abortion laws prior even to Roe v. Wade, which significantly, Republican governors were also instrumental in passing. In 1967, as governor of California, Ronald Reagan, the self-same Ronald Reagan, who would a mere 13 years later become the presidential candidate of the emerging religious right condemning abortion at all costs, that Ronald Reagan

signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country. the Therapeutic Abortion Act. Republicans' willingness to support legal abortion was intellectually consistent with their ideological priorities of individual rights, small government, and privacy and moral autonomy. Republican Governor Rockefeller enacted New York's abortion on demand law in 1970, with a coded dig against the Catholic anti-abortion effort, saying, quote, I do not believe it is right for one group to impose its vision of morality. on an entire society.

Access to abortion also happened to align with Republicans' preference for abortion over years of taxpayer-funded support for poor women and children. Abortion was not the partisan litmus test it is today. After signing the most liberal abortion laws in the country, Rockefeller became the Republican vice president, and then Reagan became the president. So to review, the Catholic Church is still very upset about and, for you. fighting against abortion. The feminists are fighting for safe access to abortion health care. Republicans and Democrats have no line in the sand. In fact, the general social survey opinion poll

in 1977 found that Republicans even exceeded Democrats in saying that abortion should be allowed for any reason. So it's not a partisan fight, nor is it an evangelicals mainly stayed out of the political arena. And when they did fray into the political realm on the topic of abortion, they were generally thinking things were pretty much A-OK. Five years before Roe in 1968, the flagship evangelical publication Christianity Today sponsored a symposium with the Christian Medical Society in which they refused to characterize abortion as a sin and identified justifications for ending a pregnancy, including individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility. Jerry Falwell, like many prominent

evangelical leaders was Baptist. The Southern Baptist Convention, America's largest Protestant denomination, had resolved a year before Roe, to press for legislation allowing abortion in limited cases, reaffirming this position a year after Roe in 1974 and again in 1976. When Roe was decided, W.A. Criswell, the former president of the Southern Baptists, declared that, convention's endorsement of the Roe v. Wade decision. He said, quote, I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person. And it has always, therefore, seemed to be that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed, end quote. Similarly, Barry Garrett of the Baptist press wrote of the

decision, quote, religious liberty, human equality, and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court decision. The religious right wasn't motivated by abortion because the religious rights later fight against abortion was never about abortion. Contrary to how extremists have rewritten history, the mobilization of the religious right didn't arise at a row v. Wade, which made abortion legal. The mobilization of the religious right, in fact, arose out of Brown v. Board of Education, which made segregation illegal. By the late 1960s, the civil rights movement had won its greatest legal victories. Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Congress had passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the same one the Supreme Court just eviscerated a couple of months ago,

and the Supreme Court had declared segregated public schools unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. In defiance of the new desegregation orders arising out of the Brown decision, segregationists throughout the South founded a new system specifically to avoid desegregation. Rather than integrating public schools, white Southerners created private schools. They called themselves Christian schools. Historians call them segregation academies. Note here that we have the label of Christianity as a literal cover to protect white supremacy. By labeling their segregation academies Christian, they magically transform overt racism into protected activity. Let's take the example of Holmes County, Mississippi.

The year prior to desegregation, there were 771 white students enrolled in Holmes County Public Schools. schools. During the first year of mandatory desegregation, those 771 white students plummeted to 28 white students. A year later, there were zero white students in the public school system. And because these segregation academies were set up as religious, charitable nonprofits, they benefited from the enormous financial advantage, the federal treasury department, IRS, grants to religious, nonprofit. The segregation academies paid no federal income tax, and the segregationists who funded those segregation academies received enormous taxpayer subsidized deductions for their donations, reducing their tax liability. All while southern segregationist legislatures eviscerated public funding from the public school system, now attended exclusively by black students. In 1969, a brave group of black parents in Holmes County, sued the Federal Treasury Department asking, why should taxpayers subsidize private schools established to maintain racial segregation?

They asked the court to rule that the three new whites-only segregation academies should not have tax-exempt status, since the discriminatory policies and purposes of these schools barred them from being considered charitable institutions. In that case, the federal court granted the parties a preliminary injunction denying the tax-exempt status until further review. Later that year, the IRS, under President Nixon of all gin joints, issued a new policy stating that while it was not illegal for a private school to operate on a discriminatory basis, such a school could not be deemed a tax-exempt charitable organization. since it was operating contrary to public policy against racial discrimination.

Segregation academies would no longer receive tax-exempt status. They would have to pay federal income tax, and donations to these academies would no longer be tax-deductible contributions. In other words, if you want to discriminate on the basis of race, you can. But the American taxpayer doesn't have to pay for it. Note that the law that you could discriminate on the basis of, race was the law until 1976 when the Supreme Court said that you can't have racial exclusion even in private schools. Then came Bob Jones University. No school was more symbolic and arguably

powerful in the evangelical world than Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Bob Jones, not a college grad himself, founded the university in 1927. In 1960, Jones gave a sermon on segregation as a biblical principle, stating, quote, if you are against segregation and against racial separation, then you are against God Almighty, end quote. The university completely excluded black students. It was also, like many evangelical institutions at the time, blatantly anti-Catholic, calling Catholics and Mormons members of, quote, cults which call themselves Christian, as late as the year 2000. In 1977, in 1970, the IRS revoked Bob Jones University tax exempt status. The university's case against that decision

went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Bob Jones University lost and had to pay a million dollars in back taxes. In response to the loss, it began to admit married black students, but maintained its strict rules against interracial dating and marriage into the year 2000, arguing that these rules reflected religious beliefs. After issuing an apology for their policies, Bob Jones University, who's so-called biology department, still teaches creationism, calling evolution, quote, an unsupportable and unworkable hypothesis, regained its 501c3 tax-exempt status in 2017. But the decade-long legal battle between the IRS and Bob Jones University,

regarding whether it could keep its tax-exempt status changed everything. Okay, enter Paul Wyrick. Wyrick was a religious conservative political activist who co-founded a freaking course, the Heritage Foundation. Wyrick had spent decades trying to identify an issue that would bring evangelicals out of the political wings and irrevocably into the Republican coalition. If he got the evangelicals, Wyrick knew he'd have an unbeatable voting block with unlimited potential. He called this would-be coalition, if he could pull it off, the moral majority, saying that its political power would, quote, exceed our wildest dreams.

Wyrick had tested multiple issues to determine which issue would ignite evangelicals to join the political fray. He had tried abortion previously. But that didn't work because of the evangelicals' anti-Catholic bias and the anti-abortion movement being so closely aligned with Catholicism. Remember, in 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled Roe, the anti-abortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. And to evangelicals, like the Bob Jones evangelicals, the Catholics were occult and not even Christian. So no dice. He had tried pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. he said, quote, I was trying to get these people interested in these issues and I utterly failed.

Nothing got their attention until the IRS began to pursue the tax exemption of racially segregated schools, end quote. Suddenly, with profits at risk and desegregation threatened, Wyrick had the evangelical leader's attention for the first time. Bob Jones University was going to lose its status. Evangelical leaders running highly profitable, segregated institutions, were receiving IRS questionnaires threatening their own status. Even Jerry Falwell, a prominent religious right leader, a rabid segregationist who said segregation was the Lord's will, even Falwell's own Lynchburg Christian Academy was facing IRS inquiry into its racial policies. Wyrick had their attention and was hell-bent to

leverage it. Forget the fact that the IRS policy was mandated by Republican President Nixon and that Bob Jones had lost its exemption under Republican President Ford. By the time Wyrick got the evangelicals fired up and organized, Democrat President Carter was in office. And with Wyrick's support, white evangelical leaders made sure that their followers believed that this vital issue wasn't actually about leaders' profits and taxes or even about racist segregation. It was actually about the government asserting authority over religious institutions. Really attacks against religious rights vary values. Really attacks against tradition and culture and family.

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Wyrick and Jerry Falwell officially formed the moral majority in 1979. Their moral majority hoisted a pro-family banner and decouement. declared war on abortion. Wait, 1979? 1979 is six years after Roe v. Wade was passed. So the storyline that the moral majority was actually about an ethical uproar over the abomination of abortion doesn't make any sense. Yes. Yes, you're right. In the words of former Jerry Falwell ally, Ed Dobson, quote, the religious new right did not start because of a concern about abortion. I sat in the back room with the moral majority and I frankly do not remember abortion ever being mentioned as a

reason why we ought to do something. End quote. What actually moved evangelicals to start paying attention to Wyrick's political games was the threat to their pocketbooks and to their beloved segregation. But as late as 1979, the rallying cry to defend segregation and defend evangelical prophets was not going to be a winning message. In order to build a rock-solid majority coalition, they needed another issue. Wyrick, who watched the 1978 midterm elections carefully, was as surprised as the rest of America to see the success of Catholic anti-abortion activists in toppling pro-choice candidates. Abortion, he thought, could be worth another try.

He liked that he could frame abortion to hit where Americans cared most, framed as defense of the family. He liked that it could appeal to growing distrust and anxiety over second wave feminism and sexual politics. Unlike segregation, abortion could be framed as protecting innocent life. Unlike taxes, it evoked profound moral emotion. Unlike economic policy, it united conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants. So he went back to the well and pulled up abortion as the bait and switch to hide the origins of the movement, which was actually evangelical racial resentment and leadership greed, into an irreproachable political identity defending morality and the family. It was a good idea.

But ideas need story and emotion and broad buy-in. So starting in 1979, Wyrick and other new right leaders began to enthusiastically promote a film created by evangelical theologian Francis Schaefer, his son, and pediatric surgeon C. Everett Coop, who later became Reagan Surgeon General. The film was called Whatever Happened to the Human Race. It toured churches across America and expressly linked abortion to a much larger story. The decline of Christian civilization, the rise of secular humanism, the collapse of the family. Millions of evangelicals watched the film in their home churches.

The film, reinforced by evangelical leadership messaging from the pulpit, reframed abortion, which the Congress, supported or ignored just three years prior as the defining moral issue for conservative Protestants. And evangelical voters integrated the anti-abortion cause into the mainstream of the conservative political movement. So why Rick now had the masses, the evangelical churchgoers. He had their enforcers, the evangelical leaders. He had their political puppeteers, fall well in the moral majority. He just needed a politician. willing to take orders in exchange for the treasure of his voting block.

And since history loves irony and politicians go to the highest bidder, Ronald Reagan, who just a dozen years prior had passed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the nation, signed up for the gig. Candidate Reagan became the puzzle piece cementing the Republican Party to the religious right. In 1980, Reagan addressed a rally of 10,000 evangelicals in Dallas, condemning the federal government for attacking the tax exemption of evangelical segregationist academies. And he made opposition to abortion rights central to the Republican platform, including a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion. And with that, anti-abortion, which had a handful of years prior

been a fringe radical Catholic pet project, suddenly became a political identity, a judicial litmus, a fundraising engine, a turnout machine, and an enduring market of partisan allegiance. Abortion has never been about abortion. Since the fight about abortion has never been about abortion, and since we are fighting like hell over abortion today, then what is it? We are actually fighting about now. What is the strategy and what is the end game? That is what we're going to talk to Jessica Valenti about. We are so damn lucky to have Jessica Valenti share her inexhaustible expertise and grit and genius and fortitude with us today. Jessica is a writer, activist, and one of the country's most influential voices on gender and politics. An award-winning author

of eight books, including the New York Times bestseller abortion, which is an absolute must-read. She has vitally shaped feminist thought for over two decades. Her groundbreaking anthology, yes means yes, sets what's now considered the gold standard for sexual consent and paved the way for legislation of the same name. Since the fall of Roe, Jessica has hosted a daily newsletter community called abortion every day. I have been a longstanding subscriber and highly recommend it to you. What I love about Jessica is she is as tireless and unrelenting as our opposition.

As of the end of June, 1461 days since the Dobbs decision, Jessica had published 1,414 editions of abortion every day, giving us all the urgent synthesis of local, state, and federal extremist actions, and the dire consequences for American women, decoding all of it so we can see clearly what they are doing and how to strategically resist and support one another. Jessica, you are a personal hero of mine, and I am so thankful that you are back. We can do hard things. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I wish it was under better circumstances always, but always happy to be here. Well, the circumstances would be worse without you, so I'm grateful. Oh, thanks. Before you joined, we just went through a lot of the history of abortion as a centuries-long bait-and-switch

in which political operatives have been using it as a chess piece for a fight that actually isn't about. abortion. Since attacks on abortion are actually not about abortion, and since we are still ostensibly fighting over abortion, what are we actually fighting about right now? I mean, so much. I think, you know, we've talked about this before as abortion as sort of the litmus test for where we are with democracy, right? I do think abortion is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to that broader fight. But I also think, as you said, it's not really about abortion. It is about misogyny, though, and it's about power and control. And I think it is the first step in this broader goal of subjugating women, pushing them back into the private sphere,

getting them out of work, getting them out of education, right, reinforcing traditional gender roles, the traditional gender binary. It's just like a sexist structure for them. It's a tool, Right. Banting abortion, I think, is a tool for them to go down that road. And as we've seen over the last four years, since Roe was overturned, they're moving pretty quickly down that road. They have not really slowed down. Well, this is a hard conversation because of impacts on people's lives and also just the spiritual impact of knowing that your country doesn't value you and your daughters. And so I think it would be lovely. to not hide the good news because I feel like we don't focus on the very good news, which is that the vast majority of people are on our side. Like, can we talk about the problems that the extremists are facing to start? What are the extremist anti-abortionists problems right now in America? I mean, their biggest problem is exactly what you said, which is that the vast majority of Americans do not want these laws, not even in Republican states, not even Republican voters,

right? Like, these laws, I would argue, are the most unpopular laws in the country. 81% is how many Americans do not want any government involvement in abortion and pregnancy at all, which is a tremendous number, right? And so they really are fighting against this tidal wave of opposition and unpopularity, which is why so many. of their attacks are focused on democracy and focused on trying to make sure that people can't vote, can't make their voices heard on this issue because they know that they'll lose if people are able to have a fair say. And I think one of the, you know, the best things that they've done for themselves is forward this lie that the country is somehow split, right?

That the country is polarized. We're not. We have not been for decades. Abortion is incredibly popular. And so that gives me so much hope, remembering that we're not just in the majority, but that we're in the vast majority. And because we're in the vast majority and because so many people care about this issue, you know, the abortion rate has not decreased at all, not a single percent, despite 50 years of them preparing for this moment, despite billions of dollars spent, despite all of these bills and political energy and political capital, they have not been able to reduce the abortion rate by a single percent. That's because of how strong our movement is, because of how much people care about this issue,

that there are people in every state, in every community, ready to help someone get the care that they need. That to me, you can't ever make me feel pessimistic about this issue because of that. You can't ever make me feel pessimistic about this issue because of the people who are so willing to show up for the people who need health care? Yeah. I don't know if I've ever told you the story, but like, one of the things that impacted me the most was after Florida passed its six-week abortion ban, I went down to visit some clinics, to talk with some activists. And, you know, because the ban had just passed, the clinic was very empty.

And they sort of took us on this tour, room by room. So waiting room completely empty, exam room's completely empty. And then they took us all the way back to this very sort of cramped room. And when you walked in, there were about a dozen or so women, most of the same. of them young, all wearing headsets, on the phone, booking bus tickets, helping people get hotel rooms. Someone was texting emotional support to a patient who had never been on a plane before, right? And it was this incredible reminder that no matter what law you pass, there are rooms like that in every single state of people who are working their asses off to make sure that

people can get the help and care that they need. And so that's why I just will never feel they're never going to win on this, right? They can do a lot of damage in the lead-up, but they're never going to win on this. That is such a powerful image to hold in our heads and to know that we can join in. And I think you'd give so much very practical information to folks who feel like this is such a huge issue and what can I do. And I think it was cool for me to hear that the most effective thing you can do with your doctor, and your time are in the very micro-local organizations. If I am in my little town in Virginia, how do I know where to show up?

How do I know where to send my money? Because I give to the big organizations on the top and then some of them that I've heard of, but I don't know what my local ones are. Yeah. The best thing that you can do is look for your local abortion fund, right? Look for your local abortion fund, look for whatever local organization, independent providers, independent clinics, you will inevitably find people who are working very, very hard. And at the end of the day, those are the people who are financing and helping people get those

abortions, get that care, right? That is life-changing. If you want your money to go to something where you know that that is going to have this, like, incredible life-changing effect, help someone get an abortion, help someone get the care that they need. But also to that point, I think paying attention to what is happening locally with your elections is incredibly important. Even getting like more local than the state, look at your ordinances, right? You mentioned Virginia. In Virginia, a bunch of towns are trying to pass local ordinances by changing the law around zoning to make it so that even though abortion is legal in Virginia, you can't open an abortion clinic a certain number of feet away from a playground, a museum, a park, a school, a town. church, right? So they're using all of these like various, very insidious, surreptitious ways,

even when abortion is legal to try to decrease access. And so if you're paying attention locally, if you're paying attention to those town ordinances, if you're paying attention to what's happening in your kids' school, right, finding out what they're being taught, all of that matters, a lot more than you might think. So I think a lot of people will be very surprised to hear what you just said, which is that abortions have not gone down one iota since the Dobbs decision. This is something that extremists are fighting very hard to have us not be talking about because the question becomes, if Dobbs didn't reduce abortions, what did Dobbs do? Exactly. How did Dobbs not actually reduce abortions and how are people getting abortion care? And then second,

take us into the world of what Dobbs actually resulted in? So the primary reason people are still able to get abortions even in banned states is because of abortion medication, which now accounts for about two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. And telehealth specifically, which means you can get on a Zoom, you can do an online visitation or go to a website, and you can get abortion pills shipped to you from a pro-choice state in a band state. And pretty much everyone who is having an abortion in a banned state is using abortion medication, right? Like there are some people who are traveling out of state, but that's not possible for everyone. Not everyone has the money, the ability to take time off of work, the ability to get

childcare. And so abortion pills really have been this literal lifesaver for people in ban states, which is why Republicans are working so hard to stop telehealth, to stop the shipping of abortion pills. And the reason that those pills are able to be shipped is because of what I said earlier, all of these activists are out there, you know, making sure the people know about them, taking those phone calls. There are incredible abortion providers in blue states who are really putting their freedom on the line, their freedom and their lives on the line to make sure that people in other states can get care. You know, Louisiana has already put out two extradition orders on providers in California and New York, right? They want to extradite our doctors.

and bring them there to stand trial for murder, right? Like, that blows my mind. And so that really is the primary reason that we haven't seen the abortion rate go down and why it's so important that we're protecting abortion pills and access to abortion pills. In terms of what these laws have done, it's pretty much as bad as you can imagine and exactly what you would expect. Maternal mortality has gone up. Infant mortality has gone up.

maternal health care deserts have increased because doctors in anti-abortion states can't practice there. They're leaving. That exodus of OBGYNs means that hospital maternity wards are shutting down. So even women who are just looking for a place to give birth in some of these states now have to drive hours to find a hospital where they can safely do that. And that is just sort of the medical piece. We've talked about this, an increase in pregnancy-related arrests, just the first two years after Roe was overturned. There were over 400 pregnancy-related arrests that we know about. I've covered a lot of these stories myself, you know, and for the most part,

they're miscarriages. It's women who are being arrested for not disposing of their miscarriage in the right way. There was a woman in Ohio who was arrested for abuse of a corpse for flushing her miscarriage, a woman in South Carolina arrested for the same for putting the remains of her miscarriage in the trash, right? It has over. open the door to all sorts of really awful criminalization. And then just the last thing I'll mention is related to that. The worst of the worst kinds of extremists have been really emboldened by the end of row. And whereas the anti-abortion movement used to say they would never, ever seek to punish women,

that it was only about punishing providers, which is bad enough. Now, over a dozen states have considered laws that would charge abortion patients with murder. that movement is gaining a lot of popularity. It's becoming very quickly normalized. And we're seeing more bills that would punish women. And so those are like just a couple of the very big things that have gone on. And I think a lot of us have seen the stories, just the horror stories in general, right, of women who've gone septic, women who've been forced to carry non-viable pregnancies to term.

10-year-olds, 11-year-olds, forced to give birth. like this is not just like, oh, some downside. This is a real true health care crisis across the country, not just in anti-abortion states, across the country because of these laws. When it comes to makeup, I don't know about you guys, but I'm done with the 20 layers of products. I just want to look like myself, but maybe a little more awake. You know what I mean? Okay. Jones Road Beauty gets me.

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Again, that's fabletics.com slash we can do hard things for 70 to 80% off everything as a new VIP. One thing we've talked about a lot on this show is that the hardest seasons of life become so much lighter. when you stop trying to carry them by yourself. And eating disorders are one of those things that can make people feel incredibly alone. I certainly know that. Eating disorders can make you question whether things are bad enough to ask for help and they leave so many parents feeling scared and overwhelmed, wondering what to do next for their kids. Equip provides 100% virtual evidence-based treatment for eating disorders across all diagnoses and all bodies. But what really stands out to me is that they don't expect you to figure this out on your own.

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there is no plucking abortion out of the ecosystem and taking it away. It screws up the whole thing. And abortion belongs there. I'm not an apologist. I'm just saying that there is no way to protect women's health without protecting abortion. Absolutely. It's not even just in anti-abortion states if you want that cervical cancer screening, it's in pro-choice states, because pro-choice doctors are so inundated with out-of-state patients, right, that the system across the country is collapsing. So even if you are in a pro-choice state and you just need an exam, I just went through this recently. It was going to take me three months to see, you know, a doctor for something. Everyone is under strain. Like talk to the doctors in Illinois, talk to the doctors

in New York, they are seeing so many out-of-state patients and a lot of out-of-state patients who are dealing with some really complicated pregnancies that can't be handled with abortion medication, right? And so they come to these other states and you're talking about people who are going septic, people who have fatal fetal abnormalities, who are later in their pregnancies. And so it really is something that is impacting all of us. One of the things I value most about your work, Jessica, is that you are a decoder of the things that happen because the extremists are so tricky and smart about what they do, that they're not coming out and saying that this is what they're doing. It's always coded in some kind of language that makes it sound like something you might want

to get behind, like equal protection, for example. I think that sounds great. What you need to know about that is that that is a code word for a very, very highly extremist word. Like, abolitionist. Like, I would love to go through some of this, just kind of decoding some of these words that we need to be on the lookout for to understand what the end game is of those words because they don't sound inherently bad.

No, and I think that the example you brought. up is a perfect one, equal protection and abolitionist, which anti-abortion activists have sort of co-opted. Equal protection sounds really great. It sounds like almost feminist. Right. It sounds like it might be part of the Constitution and we might like to get behind it. Yeah. Right. So equal protection is the anti-abortion argument that fetuses, embryos, fertilized eggs have equal protection under the U.S. Constitution as a human being. As such, these are the same. people, the abolitionists, abolitionists who are supporting equal protection bills, that would punish abortion patients with murder, right? They're saying that the murder of a fetus embryo-fertilized

egg should be treated the same in criminal codes as the murder of a human being. And in a lot of these states that have considered these bills, that means life in prison. That means execution. Again, it's one of those things that they said they would never, ever get behind. But now all of a sudden, you have multiple states picking this up. They are getting further each time. It's not just like they're being introduced and then killed. They're being introduced and they're being heard. They're going to committee in a couple of states.

They got voted through committee. They're gaining co-sponsors each time. And what is so distressing to me about this also, and this is part of the inability to decode, is that people are not taking this seriously. They really think that is so radical and so extreme, it's never going to happen. They said the same thing about row ending, right?

It absolutely, we are on the road. We are watching it happen. In South Carolina, not too long ago, there was one of these equal protection bills, and they made it through committee, but they weren't able to get it further. And so the legislators amended it so that it wouldn't be charging women with murder.

It would charge them for something else, and they would only get two years in prison, right? So they're trying to test the waters to see, okay, maybe if we don't make it murder, if we make it something a little bit less, when they did that, students for life, which is one of the biggest and most mainstream anti-abortion groups, got behind it. So now for the first time ever, you have an anti-abortion, national anti-abortion organization supporting legislation that would punish abortion patients. And in terms of legislators, in Texas, they have that in their party platform.

They have put language in the official party platform of the second largest state in the United States that, abortion patients should be charged with murder, right? You almost never see stories about this. You almost never see coverage about this, in part because I think, you know, anything having to do with women and women's bodies gets sort of like shuffled to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to media coverage, but in part because people are under the mistaken impression that this just can't happen. All roads lead to here, this kind of fetal personhood if we establish that a person is a person when they are a fertilized egg, which is well before anyone involved knows that there has been any kind of conception whatsoever, then they can control the whole ballgame.

So can you talk a little bit about the attacks on birth control that we're seeing, which also was at one point a total non-starter and people were being extremist even discussing that birth control would be under threat. seems like if you're just looking from the outside and don't understand it, like these are all just disparate, crazy attacks that don't make any sense. But can you explain to us how they all lead from the same place and are going to the same end game? Yeah. No, I think that that is a great way to look at it in a great prompt. Before I say something about birth control, you said something that just sparked a thought in my head about like when you have fetal personhood and when you're

defining embryos, you know, fertilized eggs as people. It's not even just that they can pass a law that says abortion is murder. It's that your miscarriage is under suspicion. It's that if you lifted something too heavy at work, is that child abuse because you are pregnant, right? Like, the slippery slope there is something we really need to keep in mind and something that we're already seeing happen across the country. It's a good way to control women's behavior from crib to grave because, I mean, it is not a way, like they always take the most extreme thing that you can be like, well, actually, I do think that women who do a lot of drugs while they're pregnant are pretty bad guys. Okay?

You think that. And then also, do you really think women should be working while they're pregnant? In fact, do you really think that women should be traveling really at all? Because they could get pregnant. Do you really think it's safe at any moment a woman could get pregnant? pregnant. So she pretty much should just be able to do nothing for her life. These are all on the logical path from taking the worst kind of gal you could consider and criminalizing her and then just taking a step back and a step back and a step back. Absolutely. I mean, that that is the goal

is total and complete control, right? And that really does lead to the attacks on birth control, which, as you said, was supposed to be a non-starter. Of course, we would never go after birth control, never, ever. Well, guess what? The Trump administration now officially classifies some of the most common forms of birth control as a Board of Facients. And again, something that is just not getting coverage,

two different agencies, you know, the State Department, they are saying it out loud. They are actually being very, very clear about it and not enough people are paying attention. They just put out a document, you know, the Trump administration cut all of, of this money from the teen pregnancy prevention programs that they had going on. But they want to put that money into new programs. And these new programs, they don't want them to teach contraception.

They want girls to learn about period tracking instead, which of course we know is very ineffective. This is what we call, I mean, for the Catholics among us, this is what we call natural family planning. Okay. And so the old joke was, I mean, I grew up Catholic. The old joke, what do you call people who practice natural family planning, parents. That's what you call them, because it is notoriously unreliable. It is especially for teenagers who have irregular periods who can't find their fucking socks, much less track their periods. This is not functional.

So the end game, you did hear Jessica Wright, the Trump administration just cut tens of millions of dollars from the teen pregnancy. prevention funds. Okay. Ask yourself, why does the Trump administration want teen pregnancies? Jessica, why does the Trump administration want teen pregnancies? It's part increase the birth rate, right? They see teens because again, this is notoriously ineffective for a reason. There's a reason they are pushing period tracking. The woman who came up with this idea of period tracking, 14 girls under the Trump administration. Emma Waters, yeah, was brought on to help increase the birth rate.

And so she worked for the Heritage Foundation. She was brought into the Trump administration from the Heritage Foundation. She is 28 years old. She likes to advocate that even though she is like in the presidential administration in a high profile career, her big message is spent. your 20s and 30s, not doing what she's doing, but staying home and having as many babies as possible. And also she's not saying it, but through all of her work in this, let's teach teens to not use contraception, she's also saying spend your teens having babies. Yes. So this is to make

an enfeebled, impoverished, unempowered set of women who are home taking care of babies from the time their teenagers on. Is that what this is? Yeah, 100%. I mean, and the Heritage Foundation has a document where they lay this out very clearly, where the goal is to push teen girls out of higher education, out of the professional world, into the home, to have them get married as early as possible, have as many children as early as possible, and then to change the divorce laws so that those very young women are trapped in those marriages, right? Like, It's a very, there's a very clear line. And to me, the thing that like really turns my stomach about all of this is at the same time that this is happening with with everything on teen pregnancy,

we know that the majority of pregnant teens were impregnated by an adult. Okay. And then you have Republicans refusing to change child marriage laws. To me, like, it all leads to a very obvious place. And I hate to sound like the person with my tinfoil hat on. But there, They're writing documents about it. They're publishing documents about it. They just say it in a nicer sounding way, right? They don't say, yeah, we want, we want teen girls to be pregnant and, you know, married to old men and locked up at home.

But all of the policies that they're pushing have that inevitable end. We need to be paying attention to this and taking this as seriously as we possibly can. These are not theories. I love how it's like, you're a conspiracy theorist that you're saying that. We're like, no, we read the paper where they said, this is what we're going to do and why we're going to do it. It is the opposite of being paranoid to believe that the document that they have been following very carefully is the document they will continue to follow. That's what's happening here. The divorce reference that you just made was to the objective to disallow no-fault divorces.

this is also part of this spectrum that we're talking about in terms of when we say anti-choice, we mean anti-choice all the way through. Pro choice is pro. I can choose to leave my abusive partner. I can choose to leave the person I married. Oopsie-Daisie by mistake. I can choose that for myself. I can choose my future.

I can choose the family I want to have and when I want to have it and when I don't. These are all the things that are all attacks on choice. when no fault divorce was instituted, women's suicide rate went down by 20%. Mm-hmm. Like overnight. Yeah. That's what this is. This is trying to trap women in lives that are so intolerable that they would

extinguish their lives for them. That's what is happening. Yeah. Across the board. They really, truly do not care. They do not. They know that women are dying from abortion bans. they know that women have died because of abusive marriages and trapping women in abusive marriages.

They do not care. We are acceptable and expendable deaths to that broader goal of gaining a foothold on all women. Like really and truly, they do not care. And I think that is one of the hardest things for a lot of people to believe when you talk about, well, they want to ban birth control. Well, why would they want to do that? Because don't they want to reduce abortion? Right? Like none of this makes sense when you believe their public statements. When they say, oh, we just want to virgin. You cannot believe their public statements. You need to understand that all of these things are happening because they do not care about women's lives. All they care is about control and power, reinforcing those traditional gender roles. Again, I'm going to sound like a woman's

and gender studies professor, but it's true, like enforcing white supremacist patriarchy. That's what the goal is. Right. That's what, I mean, it's not. even, that's a documented goal of why they went after abortion in the middle of the 1800s, which is exactly why they're going. Like, it's the race suicide. It's why Elon Musk has 57 children. It's why, I mean, it's all part of the like precious superior whites are going to be eradicated and we're scared of that and we need to be in control. Like that's a whole sister fear to the women are going to be in control. And I think Jessica, it's really interesting because it's like, Like, I think they actually very, very much care about women's lives.

I think that they are so terrified of what they see as women's power and ability to fuck up their whole system, that this is a drowning man's game of pulling everyone down. It is true that women are a threat to their order and that they need to stop us and to push us back 200 years. They don't care that we are collateral damage and we have no lived lives and we hate our lives. Like that is what they're going for. Why would you be so afraid of women being active members of society that you would have to remove them from active membership of society? unless they were a threat. No, you're right. There is a tremendous, tremendous amount of fear there that any women, not even doing well,

not even succeeding or exceeding, women just being equal, doing like, okay, is a tremendous threat to them. Like, look at all the language that we've seen about, like, the crisis with men. And it's all women's fault because women don't want to date them, right? Like it really does all come back to this fear of women having the power to do what they want to do with their lives. That is unthinkable to them. Like it really, really is. So I think you're exactly right.

Can you get to the kind of surveillance state piece of this that, I mean, we see so much of that happening across the board with this regime. And can you speak to it in terms of these very sneaky ways that are being suggesting? to us that we consume as well as what happens if you go for medical care, what they're being required to track and what we need to be on alert for? There's both the, we're worried about like the digital bigger surveillance, right, like the flock cameras, the automated license plate readers. We have seen those used in certain cases. There was a case in Texas where police tracked a woman who had self-managed her abortion by accessing 83,000 cameras to look for her license plate, right? And so those things are happening. We are worried about data, period tracking

apps, your geolocation pinging when you leave the state. All of those things are really concerning. So would you support a blanket statement? Do not use any period tracking apps. I mean, a lot of these period tracking apps are being funded by these extreme groups without any disclosure of that. You could stumble into one and not know that is actually sponsored by one of these extremists who is then feeding the information back to the state. There's a couple of pro-choice period tracking apps. Their name is alluding me right now, but I have them listed on the website. But yeah, for the most part, that is absolutely true. There's a lot of conservative billionaire-backed.

These are data collection tools that are very dangerous. And I wouldn't want my daughter using one of them, right? that said, a lot of the surveillance and policing that we're seeing is much more old school. I wrote about a woman, for example, in an anti-abortion state who was going to take her 14-year-old daughter out of the state to get an abortion, which is completely legal. Someone from her family called Child Protective Services, right? Child Protective Services came, and they took that 14-year-old from her home, kept her from her home until that appointment date had passed

and told the mother, we will charge you with murder if you bring your daughter out of state for an abortion. Completely illegal, completely insane, but that is a kind of surveillance when you have a state agency, keeping track of you and your children and a state agency is making you feel too fearful

to help to get your child legal care, right? Because now one of the reasons we didn't, when I wrote about this woman's story, we didn't name her, we didn't say what state she was from, because CPS, once you're in CPS's system, you're there. She's terrified of having her children taken away from her in the future as some sort of retaliation. And so just those very old school basic ways of surveillance that really do focus on the most marginalized people that focus on four people, that focus on black women and their families.

That is the kind of surveillance, I think, that we need to worry about the most because it happens the most often and it's the most likely to be ignored. Why does every home need abortion meds in our medicine cabinet? And how do we get them? Absolutely. It's called advanced provision. You can get abortion pills to have on hand just in case to keep in your medicine cabinet in case you need them in case your teenage daughter needs them. I have resources listed at abortion every day.com in the resource section, there are a tremendous number of places of safe websites that you can go to to order these pills ahead of time. A lot of them will work on a sliding scale fee. So if you are concerned about money, they can work with you on that. They have a shelf life of multiple years. So if you get it now, you will have them on hand for, you know, three to five years.

So incredibly important, right? Like I think about it in the same way that like everyone should have Narcan. Yes. It's an important thing to have. Pregnancy is dangerous. Yes. In the United States, pregnancy is dangerous. And with the attacks right now on abortion pills specifically, and because we

don't know what is going to happen with abortion pills and the ability to have abortion pills shipped, it's never been more important that people order these pills, order a couple of them, and have them in your medicine cabinet just in case. I'm thinking like localized our medicine cabinet, our house, our kids' schools. Can you tell us about baby Olivia and how we are to find out what kind of extremist propaganda is making its way into our kids' schools and what we can do about it. Yeah. So it used to be, I think a lot of parents and a lot of parents who care about this issue know enough to go look at their kids' sex ed lessons, right? People know, okay, I want to know what is happening in my kids' sex ed class. I want to make sure there's no shame-based teaching. I can opt them out if I need to, if they're doing some purity shit. Yeah. Exactly. What a lot of people don't know, though, is that the anti-abortion movement is now sneaking in,

anti-abortion propaganda into science and health classes. Baby Olivia is a video that was put together by an extremist group called Live Action that purports to show, you know, fetal development. It's ostensibly a fetal development lesson to show the stages of life. It's not, it's anti-abortion propaganda. It has no basis in science or fact. And they are sneaking it really into school classrooms and passing laws that say, if a school does not play this video, the AG can go after them. They can be brought up with civil suits, right? Like, they're attaching punishment to not indoctrinating young people. And again, I think this comes back to, they know that abortion is so popular, especially with younger people, especially with younger people. People are getting more pro-choice with every generation.

they know that they need to get in there and indoctrinate young people as early as possible. And so that is what they are doing with these laws. And so no matter what state you live in, find out what's happening with the field development lessons in your kids' schools, right? Like don't, yes, look at sex education, but look at all of it. Look at all of it. It all matters. It's so gross because it's, I mean, in the intro we talked about the 1979, whatever happened

to the human race film and how that was shared everywhere to get the evangelicals on board to care about abortion, which they didn't before that. And it's like that with the decline of churches, they need a way to indoctrinate through other means. Like, of course they're going to be like schools, we got to get in the schools. How are we going to curb what is a distaste for anti-choice among young people without getting to them early enough. So be aware of that. For all the people who are like hands off my kids, hands off my family, this is doing quite the opposite. Last question here is the, you talked about the Mithoprestone case in the Supreme Court. Basically, what that was is a, the Fifth Circuit had said the FDA can't allow this pill to be

granted through telehealth because, again, so if I'm in Louisiana and I do a telehealth meeting with someone in New York, now I can get what I need for my health care. And so they were trying to say, you can't do telehealth and give these drugs because that was a way to isolate these anti-choice constituents within only the confines of their anti-choice state, right? So remarkably, in that case, obviously the people who stand to also lose a lot of money, the developers of these drugs, appeal that decision to the Supreme Court. The FDA, whose authority is under attack, it is the business of federal agencies to defend themselves and their authority. They do not appeal. They're like, you're pretty much right. We exceeded our authority, which is wild.

The Supreme Court pauses basically the Fifth Circuit's ruling saying the Fifth Circuit said, can't do that anymore. You can't give this drug through telehealth. Supreme Court pauses it. So far as I understand the case, that's, we're still in the pause section of that case. It's going to go back to the lower court. It's going to go to the Fifth Circuit. They are going to try to figure out these legal issues about the FDA's authority or not on the substance of them. Or it could go back up to the Supreme Court to figure it out. I don't really understand. I don't really understand how long that pause is going to be. The Fifth Circuit is notorious. So in terms of being very, very conservative. So what do you see happening there? I mean, it seemed pretty clear to me that

the Supreme Court pushing that case back to the Fifth Circuit was about not wanting to issue an anti-abortion judgment ahead of the midterms, right? They knew how damaging that would be for Republicans. And so I am curious to see how long they will drag this out. Obviously, the Republican attorneys general who are behind, you know, pushing for the end of Pryston, are asking the Fifth Circuit to move very quickly. And so probably this will get back to the Supreme Court before the presidential election, I think. But they have every reason possible to try to draw this out, right?

To try to draw this out as long as possible. You don't want on midterms. Yeah. No. they really don't want Republicans to have to deal with this. And the credibility of the Supreme Court is so best case scenario precarious that they're trying to keep their hands laughably clean. If the Fifth Circuit decides it and it comes back to them, they can just be like, well, wouldn't have been what we do, but we approve.

Right. It's really pretty nefarious. And in the meantime, what the FDA is doing is the FDA says, well, we're going to conduct a study on Mithiphrestone. We're going to conduct a safety study, even though there's been decades of research and we know Mitha Pryston is safe and effective, right? They are conducting a so-called safety study. Again, as a way to draw this out, but if they come, we have no idea, the hope is that the FDA will stick with the science, that they will do their job, that they will report accurately. But they have been pressured by the anti-abortion movement to come back and say Mitha-Pristone is not safe, right? And so, it really is all in the hands of the FDA.

If the FDA comes back and says this medication isn't safe, even though we know it is, we will be in a world of hurt, right? Like, we're already in the middle of a healthcare crisis. There is no explaining what that will look like if Mifipristone is unable to be shipped legally. Or like right now, nearly 30% of abortions in the U.S. are done via telehealth.

That's a huge, huge number, right? If that goes away, listen, And like, people will continue to ship it anyway. I want to make that clear for anyone who's worried. We're not going to just stop shipping abortion medication, right? Like, there's always going to be someone who's going to be willing to ship it. But it's going to become more dangerous legally. It's going to hurt a lot of people.

But it really is a matter, I think, of the Trump administration not wanting to deal with this issue that they know is incredibly unpopular. Which goes back again to where we started, which is that the extremists have an enormous problem. They are trying to compel something on the people that the people do not want. We are in the winning side of this. So we're going to stay the course. We are going to be able to decode everything that's happening through Jessica's help. Abortion every day. Y'all go be a part of that community. It really is hopeful. We are not going to go quietly into the night. They're not going to win on this. And I just really thank you for your leadership. Very, very, very.

much. Thank you. Thank you for the conversation. Grateful. We are proud to say that We Can Do Hard Things is an independent production brought to you by us, Treat Media. Treat Media makes art for humans who want to stay human. And you can follow us at We Can Do Hard Things on Instagram.