Chris Charbonneau: My name is Chris Charbonneau and I'm the host of the Fall of Roe podcast. I'm a 40-year veteran of the pro-choice movement. I have been the CEO of Planned Parenthoods in 7 different states, and have decades of experience in the pro-choice realm.
This is an unapologetically pro-choice podcast. We are going to talk about the disaster that is the unfolding dismantling of the Roe standard across the United States creating 50 states' worth of patchwork laws, and the danger that that poses to anyone of reproductive age and all of us who love them. We need to figure out how we as a collective are going to get through this, change this situation, give ourselves some hope and get back to sanity in this country.
Hello, friends! This is Chris Charbonneau, the host of the Fall of Roe podcast, and I'm delighted today to be talking with Allison Fine. Allison has been both a pro-choice movement leader and also is the author of a variety of books, most recently, The Smart Nonprofit: Staying Human-Centered in an Automated World. Welcome, Allison!
Allison Fine: Thank you for having me, Chris.
Chris Charbonneau: Well, it's so delightful to talk to you and I can see your face, other people can't, but it’s wonderful to have you on the show. I know you have been very active in the pro-choice movement culminating in I think the chairmanship of the Board of NARAL Pro-Choice Washington. I mean, Pro-Choice America, sorry! Washingtonian here sort of automatically go into my local affiliate. Talk to me about your work in the pro-choice movement.
Allison Dine: Sure. I joined the National Board of NARAL in 2014. I became Chair of the Board, Chris, while we were watching the Kavanaugh hearings. So, that was a tough day.
Chris Charbonneau: Right! Alas, we were not in bars while we were doing all of our daily work that day.
Allison Fine: No, that was a tough day. It was an honor. I was Chair of the C3 Board, which is the non-political side of the organization. I was here for about 18 months and then ran for Congress here in New York. After that campaign, which I didn't win, but thoroughly enjoyed, I have been working with Plan C Pills since then.
Chris Charbonneau: That's fantastic because I think that's going to be the crux of our work in disaster mitigations. Let’s put it that way. I mean, I think that there have been a number of advantages over the years antibiotics and various things that have made dying from abortion much less likely, of course, legal abortion made it unnecessary to worry about but now that that's not where we are things like medication abortion where you don't actually infiltrate a uterus, therefore, you don't cause the problems that come from doing that, is vital. So, thank you for all the work you've done, and for continuing to work on that.
Today, though, I invited Allison to be here because Allison is a serious IT and AI expert. And we are going to talk about the surveillance state a bit that we believe has come with the Dobbs ruling and the reaction to that.
We're obviously in a situation where a variety of politicians aiming to make names for themselves have begun to harass women. And I think we've seen that this week in unfortunate glory as they go after doctors that serve 10-year-old rape victims, and there's a mother-daughter pair in Nebraska who are being harassed for reasons that are entirely unclear to me. It doesn't look from the story as though they broke any law and that you have a prosecutor casting around for something to charge them with, but aided by searches and things on their computer and when attempting to learn becomes evidence against you. In something like this, it's obviously a vastly different world than we've lived in.
So, Allison, give us your top-level thoughts as an expert on this topic, about where you see us in this environment right now.
Allison Fine: So, that was a great framing of it, Chris. This is a problem that has been 15-20 years in the making, right? Congress has kicked the can on creating a framework for regulating big tech and how it uses our data in a way that say the European Union has it, right?
They have a whole set of rules called GDPR, which of course I can't remember what it stands for right now. But it is about regulating how companies use our data. It's our data and they have commercialized it and profited from it for years. That's their business model. It's an extractive model of data use. It's not a secret why Facebook has become the second largest lobbyist in DC, right? The largest lobbying crew in headcount in DC.
Chris Charbonneau: Wow, I didn't realize that. I mean, it shouldn't shock me, but it sort of does.
Allison Fine: Larger than the NRA. More money is being put into the pockets of politicians to stop them from doing that. And so, at the same time that Facebook is saying, yes, we are waiting for Congress to tell us what we can and can't do. They are lobbying Congress to stop them from doing anything.
So, the case in Nebraska is just heartbreaking on so many levels, Chris. The girl who was 17 was 23 weeks pregnant. She took abortion medication far beyond the first trimester that it's recommended for - the limit in Nebraska is 20 weeks. But at the heart of the problem, I think, is both a human problem, right? The authorities were alerted by a friend of hers, which is heartbreaking, right?
Chris Charbonneau: Yeah.
Allison Fine: And then the willingness of Facebook to give up her searches, right?
Chris Charbonneau: And to be clear, this was pre-Dobbs so the limit should not have been 20 weeks in Nebraska. The limit should have been closer to 24 weeks to express it in weeks – although the law doesn't really. And taking a medication, self-abortion, is also not illegal in Nebraska. Helping someone get an abortion also was not illegal in Nebraska, at least then, and sort of retroactively applying these things and then using her searches as evidence against her is highly problematic.
Allison Fine: Not just problematic, totalitarian, right? So, what we're seeing is a system of terrorizing women and people who can become pregnant, making it very difficult for people to access information and weaponize the technology against them.
In ecosystems like that, Chris, really, really bad things happen, right? When people get afraid like that, terrible things happen. I just saw a post on Twitter of a mom saying she brought her teen daughter to the doctor who asked her when she had her last period and she refused to answer the question. So, teens are telling other teens on TikTok and in other spaces, and probably just through text, to not give away any of their information.
Chris Charbonneau: Right! I saw the same meme and it stilled in my heart for a moment because we're beginning to see the underground of information beginning to flow.
I would reiterate again, for folks, if you take anything, there's really no need to tell a medical practitioner about it because no one can tell that from the outside and no one can tell about it later. You're complicating things. They could have been investigating this as a miscarriage and had no way to believe anything else. No evidence, no crime, people. So, don't be admitting to anything.
Allison, I have to say, from my medical experience on that side, taking those drugs that late was absolutely no guarantee that anything could happen. I mean, one of the reasons the FDA doesn't approve them at that stage is they don't work very well. And so, I'm a little confused about whether it actually was medication at that point, or whether she actually just did have a miscarriage. That's the kind of thing we won't be able to know.
Allison Fine: At the heart of how heartbreaking this is, Chris, they should have been talking to a clinician and they were afraid to, right?
Chris Charbonneau: Yeah! And had they, they wouldn't have anything on them whatsoever. I mean, now they're going to go for some bizarre thing about improper burial practices, for the love of everything, and entangle these people up. But make no mistake, everybody, the reason they're going after those two is to send a message to the rest of us.
Allison Fine: Yes, but part of it backfired, Chris, because last week, the Nebraska State Senate voted against a ban, right? They kept the 20 weeks. So, that was a real shock to political watchers there and across the nation. And so, the backlash of forcing 10-year-olds to have babies, of criminalizing somebody who has a miscarriage, is happening politically.
Chris Charbonneau: Fantastic because to know these people is to hate their worldview, right? The more you know about the world they want to create, the less you want to have anything to do with it.
But say more about all that Allison because it feels like you're giving us some hope in the middle of this, but probably they're also more cautions.
Allison Fine: Well, so let me tell you why I'm optimistic about large parts of this and it does come back to the original question around tech. The future of abortion care for first-trimester healthy people, Chris, is to go online and have a consultation with a clinician, which you can do through a site like ‘Hey Jane’ or ‘Aid Access’ right now. Have the prescription go to an online pharmacy like ‘Honeybee Health’ and have it mailed to you. It's private. It's secure. It's nobody's business. That is the future of abortion care and it scares the hell out of them. They can't stop that.
Chris Charbonneau: Yeah. Very difficult to regulate. I mean, pick that out among the 80 million Amazon packages, my friends.
Allison Fine: Right! So, you get this unmarked package going into people's mailboxes. They know they can't stop that, right? That's why they're in a frenzy about creating all sorts of ridiculous rules.
Mississippi right now is being sued by Biogen Pro, the makers of abortion medication, because Biogen Pro says our medication’s perfectly safe and were approved 22 years ago by the FDA, right? That's a federal regulatory body. We're moving it by the US Postal Service again, the federal and you the state of Mississippi can't tell us we can't do that. This is a really, really profound lawsuit, Chris of are we going to be a federation of 50 states or are we going to be the United States of America, right?
Chris Charbonneau: Right! Does Mississippi have the ability to regulate drug safety? I think the FDA is clear that only they have the ability to regulate drug safety and the state of Mississippi could go pound sand.
Allison Fine: If Biogen Pro wins that case, Chris, they get to ship abortion medication into every state.
Chris Charbonneau: Absolutely. I think Allison, we're gonna ship abortion medication into every state, no matter what. I mean, I think that that's the reality of it.
Allison Fine: Right! We should just be doing that. However, the terror campaigns work, Chris, right? If you're 17 and you're thinking you're going to go to jail for being pregnant, it is terrifying. It's heartbreaking. And that other side is fantastic at paralyzing people for fear.
Chris Charbonneau: Yeah, fear-mongering is a little bit their brand at this point.
Allison Fine: That's exactly right. That's the only thing that they're left to stand on is fear and cruelty.
Chris Charbonneau: Which is the point! It's very difficult to run a totalitarian regime without terrorizing everybody because all the freedom-loving Americans won't have it and yet here were these two people in Nebraska with internet access, they were terrorized out of making one phone call that could have assisted them through all of this.
Allison Fine: I think that's just right. And the totalitarian state is being aided by big tech, by the surveillance economy they've created. PayPal is taking down accounts at random of abortion providers who are selling abortion medication perfectly legal, but they saw Mifepristone, the formal name for abortion medication, and just went willy-nilly taking down the accounts, right? These abortion providers now can't get paid.
So, the role of big tech and the need for our government to finally get our hands around the misuse of data has come to fruition. The FTC just asked for comments from the public on what they should be doing with big tech. It's late. It's going to take a while but we're here.
Lina Khan, the head of the FTC really gets this deeply and she is starting to move in creating a framework for saying that we own our data, we need to be asked for the use of our data, and it can't be sold to third parties, right? That's the heart of this.
I don't know if you're aware, Chris, but our location data is being sold to marketplaces of people who buy it for their own purposes. There’s nothing more frightening than the entire e-commerce world knowing exactly where we are and where we've been.
Chris Charbonneau: Well, exactly. I mean, I noticed this when I'm driving along, and suddenly, something pops up on my phone, like, do you want to take the right turn here and go buy a Subway sandwich? Are you kidding me with this?
Allison Fine: That's exactly right. I mean, they are tracking us, and look, it’s a science fiction writer's dream, maybe just a dystopian dream.
Chris Charbonneau: Yeah, I was going to say dystopian drink. I mean, if Margaret Atwood had had geofencing before she wrote The Handmaid's Tale, a whole 'nother chapter on that would have kept me from sleeping in the 1980s when I read it. So, say more though about all that. What should people be careful about?
Allison Fine: So, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a very good primer on their website on how we can each protect ourselves, for instance, using DuckDuckGo for our browser instead of Chrome, or Firefox. DuckDuckGo is encrypted and the data can be erased. There's been some mumbling about DuckDuckGo working with Microsoft, but there's no evidence yet that they've compromised our data by doing that. They do have to make a living.
But that is the safest way to browse right now. If you're going to talk to people, you should be using a platform like Signal, which is end-to-end encrypted. We should not be using WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook. You should get off of Facebook and Twitter. They’re dreadful.
Chris Charbonneau: Say the name of that, again, you said the electronic…?
Allison Fine: The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Chris Charbonneau: eff.org, everybody, which would have some explanation about ways to keep your data safe, at the very least around your abortion conversations. What I have had a lot of people ask me about is, I don't know enough about your field to know this, maybe you do, if everyone in America did 5 abortion searches, would it be protective because it's not differentiated?
Allison Fine: I think that's right. Look, we could be flooding all of the browsers with our searches. We could be mailing pills in huge numbers into Texas right now. That is an approach that we could take. I think we're winning politically, Chris. I don't want to minimize it. I just saw that 30 clinics have closed since Dobbs came out. It's dreadful what's happening. I believe that people are fundamentally good and kind. And when they're actually seeing the implications of criminalizing abortion, I think they're appalled, right?
We saw that in Kansas, and we're gonna see it in Michigan, and Nebraska last week, and we just need to keep voting on this issue. One thing that's always confounded me and maybe you know better than I, Chris, is why we don't vote on this issue.
Chris Charbonneau: Well, I believe since Kansas, Allison, that this answered a question for me. I knew that people cared a lot about abortion but they didn't vote on it. One reason I believe since Kansas is that they didn't think it was imminently threatened. They could afford to vote on other things because there was Roe.
And Kansas, I mean, it doesn't get a whole lot redder than that, saying, I always knew pulled in 10s of states that if you had to vote abortion rights up or down, abortion would win hands down in every state. People don't like the idea of telling their neighbors what to do. They don't like the idea of 10-year-old rape victims having to go from place to place. They don't like the idea of people traveling. They don't like any of those ideas. That's all awful. And it is, and people have that right.
But what I wondered was will people mobilize now that it's deadly? In Kansas, they saw it for what it was, they saw it for how disgusting it was – my friends in Kansas, tell me that people say, ‘Well, I'm not wild about abortion, but I don't like this world that we're creating. This isn't it for me.’ It's like, why ever you go to the polls to vote against anti-choice politicians, or anti-choice referenda, or whatever your state allows - you’re right to do it. So, questions asked and answered.
This is going to be the issue in many places in November, and I can only hope that we could circumvent a lot of our pain by handing the anti-choice side, the Republican side, a rounding defeat in November so that whatever fun they have talking about being anti-choice with their own group they need to know that their constituency is smaller every day, and less impressed with them every day.
And so, I'm excited that the question asked and answered, will people vote on abortion when it comes to it? And the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. So, I agree with you in the places where the gerrymandering and the vote suppression and all of that hasn't overtaken the entire system yet, there is going to be a real price to pay for being anti-choice and fomenting things like this. And people who think they're going to be elected on a statewide basis anywhere with these kinds of positions, I think are going to find themselves in a world of hurt.
Allison Fine: Well, and even in the gerrymandered place, Kansas is steeply gerrymandered, right? One there. Nebraska is deeply gerrymandered.
Chris Charbonneau: But if you need a whole state, if you need a whole state to vote on you like you're a senator, or you're voting on a statewide referendum, you’ve got no prayer. Even if you're in a protected sort of district, you have to know that – I mean, in Kansas, it's clear by the results, a huge percentage of the Republican conservatives had to turn out and vote ‘no’. I mean, yeah, the no vote was correct in that one, no vote on that. And so, you're not going to have the whole room that you're talking to.
Allison Fine: What I loved most about Kansas, Chris, is that the 60% was across the board rural to urban.
Chris Charbonneau: Rural, urban, the independents were there, the Republicans were there. It was not just the city Ds. It is what they think and it's because it's about humanity.
Allison Fine: Well, that's just it. And we have a chance to resurrect the pro-choice Republican women that we need desperately on this issue, right? We need Republican women to stand up for choice.
The rationale, which I totally respect of, this may not be my choice but I want other people to have this choice, really resonates with people for whom the value of freedom resonates so deeply. And, look, we've never ever as a country taken away a human right from people.
Chris Charbonneau: Until now.
Allison Fine: Until - for women, right?
Chris Charbonneau: Yeah! By the way, the majority of the voting population, just saying – I mean, it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to pull off something like that. So, to me, now, Allison, it's the list of 25 states that were kind of careening toward undoing women's rights, let's just scratch them off one at a time. And so, Kansas, splash one.
Allison Fine: Nebraska too.
Chris Charbonneau: Nebraska, absolutely. Even a panderer like the governor of Florida not even attempting to do anything other than sort of a middle trimester limit – I mean, I think Florida's purple, it's certainly not red, and the state of Florida would sit by and allow some of those shenanigans? I just can't imagine.
Allison Fine: Well, I don't rely on Florida for anything at all.
Chris Charbonneau: PTSD from Al Gore, am I right?
Allison Fine: Yeah, it goes way back with us and crazy Florida. But there are other places. And I think there's a reckoning in places like Ohio, Chris. Ohio is fascinating, right? The legislature is so extreme and so far out of touch with the voters there. Now what we have to do is get abortion on the ballot in those places, which takes some time.
Chris Charbonneau: And not every state is set up as an initiative state. So, in the states where you can actually sign petitions and bring things to the ballot, I think we have every reason to be elated with our chances. In the places where you have to have another process, it might take us a bit longer and in different ways. But I have not given up on the idea that if you vote for your local representatives, and we support nationwide pro-choice candidates, that we could actually with the right math be looking at a nationwide Reproductive Privacy Act that sort of recreates Roe in all 50 states.
That seems to me the shortest way to it. It seems like a way that's going to get challenged in a lot of ways and so it's good to have state backup. But I don't think we're going to look at anything like a rolling anti-choice. initiative. I think the Republicans are already ringing their own death knell in other ways. The idea that they're going to get a majority and then pass an anti-choice law that affects all of us would absolutely be their end, although I absolutely believe they would do it and I absolutely believe there'd be healthcare mayhem if they did.
Allison Fine: Well, that's just it. I mean, one thing we have learned from SCOTUS is we have to stop underestimating them, right?
Chris Charbonneau: Yep, they take the long view, there's no question in my mind.
Allison Fine: Right? They don't compromise, the extremists over there. They are very clear about what they want. They want a national ban on abortion. This is a political problem, which means it has a political solution. We have to vote.
Chris Charbonneau: We have to vote a lot and we have to support candidates and states maybe where we don't live. For those of you in blue states, the people fighting the good fight in the purple places need your support because if they can get over the line then that is protective in a whole different way that we absolutely need to take advantage of.
Allison Fine: Well, we're in the wild, wild west, legally, right now, Chris. So, you have a place like the Austin City Council saying we are not going to enforce any abortion bans here. So, it is a blue oasis within the red state of Texas. We don't know what that means and we don't know if it's enforceable.
Chris Charbonneau: Right. We even had the lead prosecutor in Georgia do the same thing.
Allison Fine: Exactly right. In Florida, the governor suspended a prosecutor for saying that so.. But again, that comes back to the terror campaign, right? Confusion and chaos is their weapon for paralyzing people. We need to go on offense in a way we haven't in a really long time, Chris, and say that we believe that this is an act of civil disobedience and those rules don't apply.
Chris Charbonneau: Yep, I absolutely think that that's what's going to happen. I am very much in favor of that kind of activity around the medication. You know, this is a drug regimen that's been proven safe. People need to take it according to the instructions. We in the movement need to be vigilant to make sure that anything anyone gets is actually the real drug made by Danco or GenBio Pro and that people are swallowing that and not some weird placebo that somebody threw into a plastic pill pocket and shipped off to them. So, I think that vigilance is important. But that's absolutely going to be where this is going to land.
Allison Fine: Well, and I'm not sure that most people know that right now anybody who could be pregnant in the next 2 years can go online to a group called aidaccess.org, they're based in the Netherlands, speak to a clinician there, and get the pills before they're pregnant, it's called advanced provision, and have it on hand just in case.
It is a phenomenal solution. If you, for instance, are going to school in a state with bands, right? If you're going to college, you take the pills with you. And again, we're back to privacy. Chris, nobody needs to know.
Chris Charbonneau: Right! Absolutely nobody needs to know. It's my understanding, Allison, that you don't even have to be a person with a uterus to buy these, that anyone can buy these and have them handy for the young people in their lives.
As I keep saying, make it known that you are a safe place to go, listeners, because you're likely to be stratospherically more educated than the average bear on these issues. This is the way that we prevent the kind of thing happening like what happened in Nebraska with this woman and her daughter and some ridiculous chasing thing after people who are just trying to do a health care thing that they feel they need to do. Tell us anything more that we need to be telling people about the surveillance state.
Allison Fine: So, we need to be hyper-aware that everything we do online, Chris, is being watched, monitored, and sold.
Chris Charbonneau: We are the product, right?
Allison Fine: We are the product and they don't care about us, right? Back to that extractive model again. So, for those of us of a certain age, Chris, we need to get back on the phone. The kids need to use signals. They are doing a really good job of protecting one another. But there is an opportunity right now with the FTC to tell them to make rules to prohibit the sale of our data. I have a newsletter coming out on that later today.
Chris Charbonneau: And where could people find your newsletter about that?
Allison Fine: It's on Substack. The newsletter is called ‘Our Next Chapter.’
Chris Charbonneau: Well, that's wonderful, Allison, because we need to be following what the process is for this advocacy that needs to be done about our privacy, and listeners, we all need to be calling our elected representatives and saying we expect them to do what it takes to protect data.
You can even use this as an example for your pro-choice legislators. We have to protect the young people with uteri, who might be needing to get abortions from being harassed endlessly, and all the people that surround them as well because clearly mom trying to keep her kids safe was no protection in the Nebraska case.
Anything you want to be sure that people know other than the advocacy on this? Are there things that people ought to be reading, things that people need to learn the concept of that we just don't play with very much?
Allison Fine: I would say the last thing I wanted to share, Chris, is we need a new narrative around accessing abortion care. So, the old narrative was women, people who could be pregnant in banned states need to travel, right? We need a new default setting on that. We need the pills to travel to them. It's so much less expensive and so much less disruptive than the $3,000 it's going to take to go to another state and access medical care.
So, setting up and creating new narratives that become the standard is part of what we need to do now. Our movement has been slow, frankly, about it, right? I want to see an abortion ecosystem that begins with, of course, everyone having access to a clinician, to a medical professional to make sure their care is appropriate, and then access to the medication. Online, if they want it. In-person, if they want it. However, they want it but safe in your own home. I think that should be the goal.
Chris Charbonneau: I've always thought that everyone who has an abortion wants to go to sleep in their own bed. In England, they hospitalize everybody because they have this rule that either you get a lot of anesthetic or nothing. And therefore, if you have anything you have to hang out there, which is not very handy.
We've thought about the travel thing, I think, Allison because there's been a ‘well, if you can't do that there then travel somewhere where it's legal, and we can do it the way we've done it’. I think as the shock of Dobbs has worn off for a lot of people, people are getting a lot closer to, like, ‘I don't care what's legal in Idaho. I want to help people so that we don't have the young people in Idaho die.’
And so, really, that's what we're talking about. And that's why civil disobedience is perfectly appropriate. We're talking about throwing people lifelines. If we have to color outside the line in order to do that, the lines, by the way, are pretty indistinct at this point. I mean, our opponents don't appear to care about what really is legal and what really isn't. They’re just terrorizing people. And since we don't know what we're thinking of doing is actually illegal, and I don't believe that is, self-abortion remains legal in most states.
The whole thing of the anti-choice movement was always to frame women as the victims of horrific providers and activists like us, and that they were really kind of stupid, innocent lambs that got pulled along. They, as a result, avoided making laws that applied to the women themselves.
But I think to be able to legally ship something that is legal to swallow to someone who is permitted by their state law to do that is not highly risky and makes them fight for the obnoxious thing that they want to have be real in their laws.
Allison Fine: Well, it's been shocking, Chris, to see how extreme they've become. Total bans were not on the table 5 years ago.
Chris Charbonneau: No one would have dreamed of it. No one would have dreamed of criminalizing women. I mean, in Louisiana. Did you hear the debate, Allison? Did you hear that debate? They were talking about, ‘Can we execute a woman for having an abortion, or do we have to make sure that the abortion was actually successful because if it wasn't, she's still a vessel for a fetus, and let's make her then have that baby and then execute her after that.’
It's like, seriously? Seriously, that is the debate. Well, in Louisiana, also, like, let's not treat ectopic pregnancies. It's kind of wow to have the most ignorant people on the planet, about women's reproduction, having suggestions about what they should do – I mean it’s, in some way, a huge advantage.
I mean, they are really showing their cards.
And to know anything about these people is to want nothing to do with their worldview as I said before. I don't think anyone wants to see the young rape victim down the block who tries to get an abortion be executed. It’s like, what? We don't even prosecute rape in this country. How are we prosecuting the people who end up victimized by this? And yes, they become survivors after a fight inside themselves, but good grief, what are we talking about here?
Allison Fine: They have left the pale of civilization, they really have. Look, the demonization, the hatred, and the criminalization of women, in general, is illustrated in all of these efforts because you and I both know, the bottom line is when women can’t access reproductive health care, they can't be financially independent, right? That is the heart of this issue, it's that you cannot control your economic future if you can't control your reproduction. I think for a lot of antis, that's okay.
Chris Charbonneau: That's okay. I think what they overlook, however, is if you take the bulk of the workforce and you make them less successful, you take away the possibility of a successful economy for the entire country.
Allison Fine: That's exactly right. It's heartbreaking, right? It's heartbreaking to have your future decided for you at 17 because you weren't given health care, right?
Chris Charbonneau: Yeah, no, I mean, we fought this fight and we answered that question, and I believe for most of America, that question has been asked and answered. I am delighted with the Kansas result that appears in places where there can be consequences that are directly felt, that that's what happens. And so, both of us reiterated as much as we can vote, like your life depends on it, and like the lives of the people you love the most depend on it because, in this instance, it certainly does.
Allison Fine: I also think we need to raise the bar for our elected allies, Chris, right? When I was running for Congress, I constantly heard, like,’ that person over there, they're pro-choice enough. Like, they check the box.’ It's not enough. We need champions. We need people who will go to the floor wherever they are elected and fight for this as the starting point for freedom and equality for people because we don't have that if we don't have reproductive freedom.
Chris Charbonneau: Right! Absolutely! John Bel Edwards in Louisiana, you are a disgrace. There are also a couple of elected officials in Nebraska at the top of the leadership there, who are Democrats who are also disgraces.
I think that the time for checking that box, as you pointed out, Allison, is over. There needs to be accountability. Any party that would sign on to that, forget it. I have said to this listening audience before, you cannot give to the DCCC or to the Democratic Senate campaign committee if they will not commit to not funding candidates that are anti-choice because we're past the Roe protections now – gloves are off.
Allison Fine: Well, and by the same token, Chris, we need the administration to fight harder, right? I have been running a campaign to get the FDA to lift the restrictions on who can prescribe abortion medication. I still can't get an answer as to why they won't do it. There's apparently some lawsuit somewhere that is stopping them from doing this. But you have the wind at your back right now. You should be doing absolutely everything you can to make access to abortion medication easier for people and I think they're being way too timid. They're being too legalistic about all of this in a way the antis never would be.
Chris Charbonneau: No.
Allison Fine: Every possible avenue for protecting women, for providing access to reproductive health care, and move out, right? They weren't ready and they were not doing enough.
Chris Charbonneau: Absolutely! Well, I feel like there are judges all over the place just waiting for a case to come in front of them so that they can be helpful here. I have been very impressed by parts of the judiciary I didn't have a huge amount of faith in who have taken a look at many of these cases and who have said, ‘Yeah, no, that ain’t going to happen.’
And so, that has also provided us a little bit of relief on our 25-state list. Judges who've said, ‘We will not resurrect zombie law X, and no, you cannot do X thing.’ And so, I think, the other side would just throw everything in the world at it and see what stuck and it's time for that approach here. We are literally talking about the lives of your nieces and daughters and other folks that can get pregnant. Fun time is over.
I sort of am a little bit shocked, Allison, that we've been yelling about this for decades and Dobbs happens and people go, ‘We really ought to start thinking about what we do about that.’ It's like, what? We have been assured for decades that given the chance they would do everything in their power and now we want to see it, am I right?
Allison Fine: I'm just confounded, not by people who, this isn't their job. They're not following it every day like you and I Chris. I get that, you know, that they're shocked. But for the administration to be as unready as it appears that they were, for there not to be a 5-point memo ready to go on the day that Roe was overturned up, like,’Here are 5 things we're going to do next.’ I don't get that. I really don’t..
Chris Charbonneau: I agree, I would have said a 12-point plan, but the same kind of concept, it's like, how did they not have task forces because we gave them lists of things that we thought they ought to do. Let's start vetting it the day after Dobbs comes down, not even the leaked opinion – come on!
So, I think we are sharing the frustration of millions of people who are saying, ‘We adore much of what this administration has achieved and there are serious accomplishments to be lauded, and there's only one way to vote, and these people are all believers with us, like, we shouldn't have to convince anyone that they need to be on this as topic A.’
Allison Fine: Yeah. But I think if you look at who's in the room, Chris, when this administration is talking about, is figuring out its priorities, right? Who's in the room for that conversation?
I don't think that there have been enough people like us who put this at the top of the list, right? It's on the list but it's way down at the bottom. I think that who makes the list is a reflection of who has the power. We still don't have enough and we need more, right?
Chris Charbonneau: We do need more.
Allison Fine: At the end of the day, it's always about power.
Chris Charbonneau: It is and we need to be able to wave that one and have some good things happen for people.
So, you wrote a column that absolutely brought joy to my heart when I read it, which is all the reasons you're hopeful about this? Could you just give us some highlights of those things? We will list directions to Allison's column where we list things on the show notes. So, Allison, talk to me about your thoughts about why you're so hopeful about ultimately this turning out?
Allison Fine: So, we're in such a different place than 1973 when Roe was passed, and I think the two biggest differences right now are the existence of the internet and abortion medication. This is why we're not going into back alleys. The fact is that you can get any information you need online, and we've talked about the need to make yourself safe in doing those searches, and then you can actually access a clinician, access an online pharmacy like Honeybee Health have the medication mailed to you, nobody needs to know.
The idea of moving past the chapter in reproductive health care, Chris, where people had to basically raise their hand and say, ‘I am going into a clinic’, and have to go through those feelings, through those lines of protesters is over, right? We don't need to do that anymore. That makes me really hopeful.
The other thing is, and we've talked so much about it on this podcast, is the clarity of this moment, right? I thought they were going to keep chipping away and the chipping away made for a very muddy landscape of, ‘Well, they don't really mean it and it's 15 weeks, it's 20 weeks.’
No, everybody's cards are on the table right now. You want to ban abortion. You want to make women's bodies to be of servitude to your state. You want to create a theocracy. It is so fundamentally un-American in so many ways.
So, I think that the technology and the clarity give us an opportunity to create a new chapter that in particular, the young people are going to create, Chris, they're just going to make it, right? Whenever I talk to them, I'm very, very hopeful.
Chris Charbonneau: Me too. I saw them first at the big march after Trump was elected. I think they were seeing the writing on the wall. They're creative and they're brilliant. We've got nothing to worry about the next generation in terms of this kind of thing.
They grew up in a way we did not, believing that some of these things were birth rights. They won't be re-stigmatized. They can see someone trying to guilt trip them from 10 miles away, and they're having none of it. I love that about the confidence of these folks.
So, I too believe that we ultimately have the winning hand. I think that the pro-life people have now disgraced themselves beyond redemption. People used to say to me, ‘Well, there are good people on both sides of the issue.’ No, there really aren't. There are people who make their own decisions about whether they want to have abortions or not for their own religious reasons. All the rest of it, the public square part, that is about terrorizing other people. It is not any kind of noble and I think it just won't stand. So, I am thrilled that we're going to be in a different spot.
It sounds like we have things to be hopeful about. It sounds like we have voting to do, obviously. It also sounds like we have some care to take of ourselves and maybe younger people in our lives, about making sure that they know about the surveillance state, and what they can do to protect themselves in the meantime. And it sounds like we all have to get a lot more comfortable with living in ambiguity around how we help people in these circumstances, knowing that in all likelihood, we're quite safe, knowing that there are people in other houses and other rooms doing exactly the same thing by the thousands. And we are in no way equipped to arrest everybody for all of this.
So, I think we're in actually decent shape. And I know that there are legal defense funds, helping the people who get caught in the ambitious politician web. And so, I think that we have things to look forward to, but a whole lot of work to do right coming up.
Allison Fine: I think that's just right. We need to elect more women everywhere, at every level in every state. We need to hold politicians' feet to the fire in terms of protecting people and making health care available and affordable for everybody. We need to make sure that we talk about abortion more, Chris, right? We have to talk about it.
When I started on the board at NARAL, we couldn't get politicians to use the word. Now, Kamala Harris is very comfortable using the word. But we need to talk to people. I talked to a family member last week, and he asked me about what the right number of weeks should be. Should it be 16? Should it be 20?
I was so surprised. I'd never thought that this person would be interested in this topic, and I fumbled the answer. And then, I went back later and I thought you know what he was asking a thoughtful question and I needed to answer it properly. I told him that the problem is that you and I, and a politician in South Dakota and a talking head on the radio should not be making health care decisions for anybody else. This is how and why the issue is politicized versus being a medical issue, which is what it is, right?
That the medical profession ought to be telling us what the standard of care is because that's what they do. They do it on life and death issues every single day. The fact that the state senators in Kentucky are telling women when and how they can have health care is why this issue has gotten so awful for so many people.
And so, we need to talk about it with people. We need to be armed to tell people why it's not scary and it's not rare, and it's perfectly safe, and it's available to them. That's our job.
Chris Charbonneau: Absolutely. I go back to the Roe standard, which I think worked really well for us for decades and decades. And the Roe standard, being a person who counseled a lot of people who are coming in, really didn't trip up too many people in terms of what they needed to do. It didn't scare doctors out of taking good care of people while they were doing it.
I think that we now have the worst of all worlds in which we've got all kinds of people debating other people's health care without any frame of reference or scenario that they're dealing with.
I think if the neighbor down the street had to be the one to make the call and they actually were read in on all the facts of what people were considering, they'd probably be way more lenient than other people have been. This is where we just want to avoid putting ourselves in other people's shoes like that. You don't want to tie someone's hands and you certainly don't want to create an environment where doctors don't feel they can take care of anyone without risks to themselves.
That's how you get an entire state with no medical practitioners working there at all. I mean, I don't know why if you were graduating from OB-GYN, you'd consider moving to Louisiana or Mississippi. You don't.
Allison Fine: You don't. That’s why they have a shortage of doctors.
Chris Charbonneau: That's right. That means people can't safely have babies in those places either. So, that's the world that we don't want. Thanks to Allison Fine, we have a much better sense of the world that we do want. Let's keep those technological giants accountable to the community that they work in.
Maybe people who put in legislation look to the European Union for a GDPR similar solution. Everybody makes sure that the young people know that you're there and that you will embrace them not only with your loving arms but with your superior level of information, and we can get through this without too much damage.
Allison Fine, thank you so much for being a guest on Fall of Roe today. Thank you for your wisdom and I'm so glad that people like you are involved in the tech industry and all that. Keep us posted about what we need to be helping lobby for. ‘Who needed privacy anyway, right?’ They said it in the age of big tech. Are they insane? I'm like, leave abortion aside, why in the world would you do that? But they have done it and now we're in it. We're in the soup and what we need to do to get ourselves out.
Allison Fine: Thanks for having me, Chris.
Chris Charbonneau: Thanks to Allison Fine for being on. Allison, it was great to see you. Listeners, keep heart - we will get through this all of us together and go vote. It's about that time.
Thank you for listening, friends. This is Chris Charbonneau. It's been my pleasure to host this broadcast for you today. If you'd like to hear more, please subscribe to Apple podcasts or Google podcasts and give us a 5-star review. If you'd like to connect with me in some way, please go to FallofRoe.com for information. Thank you!