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 seven 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 fifty states worth of patchwork laws, 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.
Chris Charbonneau: Greetings, friends. This is Chris Charbonneau. I’m the host of the Fall of Roe podcast. I’m a 40-year veteran of the pro-choice movement and therefore I’m gonna curate this ride for you.
I wanted to start with my reflections of being a teenager, young teenager, living in Switzerland with my family. We’re an American family but we were living in Switzerland for my father’s job. He was in banking. And we were watching the news and I realized that there was a debate going on and I asked my parents what the debate was about. And they said, “Whether women should have the right to vote”, in elections in Switzerland, 1971.
And all of a sudden it became apparent to me that women didn’t have the same kind of rights everywhere, all the time. And that there was very much a debate going on about whether women should.
And as—I was eleven at the time, actually—and as an eleven-year-old realizing that someone was debating at the level of basically “do you have a soul or not?”, I realized that women had a lot of work to do to make sure that our place in society was secure. And that we were going to be hanging on to our rights—various kinds of rights, and abilities, and the search for equality—by our very fingertips all the time.
It was a radicalizing realization for an eleven-year-old girl who was just realizing her female role in the world. But it made me the youngest Ms. magazine subscriber probably having her magazine sent overseas at the time to learn about what feminism was, and how important it was that people continue the fight for equality in the world and in this particular case, the rights of women.
Well here we are again, my friends.
A few years after that, Roe v. Wade made abortion rights the law in all 50 states. Technically, we would have the right today to claim abortion was safe and available in all 50 states and it would continue because Roe v. Wade still stands in the Supreme Court.
Alas, the Supreme Court now is majority right-wing selected political hacks that are put in those positions in order to overturn Roe v. Wade and give conservative culture warriors a variety of red meat that keep them coming and voting for Republicans in elections. That is unfortunately no longer even debatable. We just know that that’s the truth.
And as a result, we are looking at Roe falling, officially this summer, when the Supreme Court takes up the Dobbs decision out of Mississippi.
Now the difficulty with that is that there are a number of ways they could go on that decision, that sort of might make it seem like it’s not really bad. It’s gonna be bad, no matter what they do. If they were going to leave Roe alone, they wouldn’t have taken the case in the first place. And now we are looking at the actual demise of Roe.
So, what does that mean? I realize that that’s legal terminology and most of us don’t have our heads wrapped around that. But I will say that having been in reproductive health for a long, long time, what the world was like before Roe v. Wade was that abortion was illegal in most states in the United States. And I say “most” because there were a few who had already begun the process of changing their abortion law. Hawaii did it. Washington did it. Both of those by votes of the people. New York also did it. There are a variety of states that claim fame, and rightly so, by having been out front—before Roe—to change these laws because these laws were horrific and had absolutely horrific consequences.
In the early 90s, at one of the first large marches in the United States on the Mall in Washington D.C., I happened to be marching at the tail-end of a group from Planned Parenthood. And behind us was a group called Emergency Room Physicians for Choice. And I looked back, and here were all these men, all in surgical scrubs to make the point that they’re doctors, white men, in fact, most of them, because that’s who doctors mostly were back then. And these gentlemen were saying “we’re old enough to remember what hospitals were like before Roe v. Wade and you do not want to go back there”. So I sidled up to one of these men, my father’s age, and asked him to tell me what he meant by this because while I was old enough by then to be marching about choice, I had not, in fact, being born in 1960, been old enough to be aware - because I was only 13 when Roe came down - be aware of actual people’s lives and what was going on before and how things actually went down.
And he said he will never forget the stench of people dying from septic abortion. Emergency rooms were filled with women who’d attempted to abort themselves, had people who weren’t well-trained attempt to abort themselves, they were dying of one kind of sepsis or another. That’s when you perforate the wrong thing, you get infection raging through the body, and you are just one giant infected nightmare mess. And it begins to take your life.
Some women survived that process, went on to lead decent lives. Many were maimed by those kinds of outcomes. Many ended up in situations where they could never have children again. Many were in pain for the rest of their lives. And many died. There’re really no good estimates for exactly how devastating the pre-Roe scenario was because having an abortion was illegal so a great many people had abortions and they probably turned out fine because nobody ever knew about it. But it’s estimated that some 50,000 women died from illegal abortions over time in the United States. And as soon as abortion became legal and trained people did it, and people had ideas about how to do it well and what kind of protocols they would use, nobody died from abortion anymore!
There are, of course, still the exceedingly rare abortion complications. But most abortion complications are minor and managed easily, and to lose somebody to an abortion complication is exceptionally rare.
The same is not true for giving birth. On a good day, having a baby is much riskier than having an abortion.
So let’s be clear that for people who have any kind of complication around a pregnancy, maybe they won’t survive a pregnancy, maybe they need to have access to abortion in order to ensure that they don’t die from an unintended pregnancy, we’re talking about those possibilities no longer being on the table for them. At least not easily, at least not where they live.
So how were people actually going about getting these abortions?
Well, the folks in New York will tell you that there was a brisk business on the East Coast, of people coming into New York state. After a while, clergy were very much involved—in progressive churches—in helping people move around the country in order to get the abortions that they needed.
In Seattle, there was a travel company that would charter—when 747s became available—a 747 every Friday, that would leave SEATAC airport, would fly to Tokyo, filled—you know, there’s some 350 seats on a 747, I think that’s right—would fly filled to Tokyo where people would get abortion, which could be done there by actually trained professionals and folks that would take good care of them, would go to a couple of shrines to pick up some tchotchkes, and would fly home in the next couple of days, talking about the lark of the trip they took to Japan, which was the cover story for this, and those folks would do fine, go on about their lives. But in 1969, doing so costs $2000. [In] 1969, $2000 was half a year’s worth of rent. So that’s what wealthy people did.
People who did not have means tried a whole bunch of things to have abortions. And a lot of them were really dangerous. They didn’t have pills that you could take, like you can now. And people used implements that you wouldn’t want to have anyone use today to insert into their bodies in order to end a pregnancy. People famously used coat hangers. They famously used knitting needles. Not a lot of people know enough about their anatomy to do that kind of thing successfully, and have it not turn into a nightmare disaster.
So kids, do not try that at home.
But it was a disastrous time. And people were having abortions for all the reasons you can imagine. They had health problems; they needed abortions. They had marital problems, they couldn’t afford more children, they had genetic issues, they were in the middle of school, they were the sole support of somebody else who was in school. For all the reasons that people don’t want to become parents in an untimely manner, people were having abortions then. And risking their lives to do it.
So we cannot underscore this enough, that there will never not be abortion. If your goal in life is to make sure there will never be another abortion, sorry about that, we live on planet Earth. There will be abortion.
The only thing in our hands—the only thing any of us can determine—is, is it safe? Do people come through this? Can people survive what’s going to happen to them to either go back to high school, to go through their college careers, or their apprenticeship program, to support who they already have to take care of?
It’s lost on many people that the women that died in the days before Roe, many of them were already mothers. And they left households of motherless children behind when the policies of the government killed them.
So here we are, in 2022, in the United States, arguably the wealthiest and most privileged country on the planet, and a minority of the country would like to see us undo the progress that has been made in these last decades, in terms of women’s reproductive healthcare.
For anyone who was born with female reproductive parts, no matter how they identify now and of course when I say “women”, I’m including girls, as well, so including all of that, all of these folks have relied, for decades, on the ability to get good contraception, backed up with the possibility of abortion if that didn’t turn out. They’ve been able to rely on having abortions in case they were attacked by someone and end up pregnant from that attack. They have relied on abortion to make sure that if anything went wrong with their health in the course of a pregnancy that they could get a “do-over”, that they could have a healthy pregnancy, they could survive to tell that tale and go on to enjoy a life with a family of their planned creation.
And we in the United States are looking down the barrel of a gun pointed at all of us, by right-wing culture warriors who would undo what the World Health Organization has said was one of the big advantages in healthcare in the 20th century. And undo that for what? Because they’re a group of people who don’t think that’s a choice women ought to make. No, no, no. And not only that, it’s a choice that the government should be involved in because look at what’s happening now.
No sooner was Brett Kavanaugh appointed than states began to chip away, not even quietly and a little bit around the edge, at Roe v. Wade. They began to dig at the very foundations of Roe, and do everything in their power to undermine it.
Now in the old days, when they did that kind of thing, some court somewhere would say “Yeah, no. There’s Roe and you’re violating the Roe standard, so that isn’t going to happen so go pound sand”.
So that’s what used to happen. Well, Brett Kavanaugh gets in his seat, and they could smell the blood of American women and people with reproductive capability and so they go on a frenzy to pass all the nuttiest stuff they can think about. And it just doesn’t end.
So we have Texas, now, with its vigilante law coming through the court system, and they said, “It’s not the state of Texas actually trying to prevent women from getting abortions, no, no, no. We know that that would be full-frontal, and some court would strike it down. So we’re going to create this situation where third parties who are entirely unrelated to a pregnancy issue will suddenly be able to put themselves in the middle of a situation where someone has a pregnancy, maybe, and you can allege that she went into place X and she was pregnant and she came out of place X and she wasn’t, and that means you’re entitled to $10,000 for being a snitch”.
That kind of thing used to be struck down and considered ridiculous on its face. And today, that is upheld. That is upheld in the presumption that coming toward us, at lightning speed, is even worse than that.
Now, when Ruth Bader Ginsberg passed away - may her memory be a blessing - all of us shuddered inside because we knew that not only do we have the other three or four—or however many might actually, in the end, end up dumping on Roe—but they were going to import a fifth now. And we knew that all the McConnell things about “you can’t appoint anyone within a year of an election” and all that, we knew that was garbage. We all knew that was political hackery. And that the person that they were going to appoint was going to be equally a political hack.
And sure enough, to disappoint not, we got Amy Coney Barrett, who has exceptionally thin credentials, in many ways. But she checked the box of being an anti-choice zealot. And a knowable one. She had been very vocal on these issues in her time in Indiana, and we have Amy Coney Barrett, a reliable strike-down Roe vote, joining the court as a woman. And I would almost lay bets they’re going to let her author this opinion because if you’re going to deprive millions of women of a right that they’ve had for their entire lifetimes—because you have to be older than me to ever have experienced pre-Roe times as a person of reproductive age—you’re going to need a spokes-vagina to tell you that, right? I mean, you know, having the men author this opinion, while that would be a feather in any of their caps, it needs to sort of pretend that it has some sensibility toward women. Although, I think the gesture will be wasted on many of us because we don’t, for a second, believe they care about that.
So we’re looking at Roe falling. And falling in an extreme way. But now we have generations of people who have expected to be able to do this. The American public is outrageously pro-choice. They don’t want changes made to Roe. A good 75% of them say so, over and over again, when asked. And yet, this is what we’re going to be left with in very short order.
I would argue that this situation has been worsening for the better part of 15 years. After those gentlemen that were marching, that were the Emergency Room Doctors for Choice, after that march, those gentlemen began to retire because, you know, they got to be old enough to retire. And when they did, there was a lessening of the number of people who did abortion care around the country. There was something of a shortage of doctors. And though many universities and other people scrambled to try to make sure that people were taking over, the anti-choice movement did a lot of work at that time to make the abortion space, and provision of abortion, violent and unpleasant and over-regulated and dangerous. And they attempted to make it socially ostracizing for providers that worked in that space.
As one of my colleagues said to me one time, she’s an M.D. with a Harvard degree, and she said, “You just never hear people say, ‘there goes Dr. Jones, eminent abortion provider’.” There was a lot of, sort of, “it’s not complicated enough to be, really, an honored doctor job”, and “it’s got politics to it”, and “I don’t know if I want to get my hands dirty”. I suspect a lot more doctors and nurse practitioners and PAs would have been in this provision of care if there had been more set up to make it a little easier for them to do. If they didn’t have to convince lots of people in their practices, if they didn’t need to register themselves at the FDA to hand out abortion pills, that kind of thing, it would have been a different kind of way to step in. But we were handed what we were handed, the political environment we were handed.
Based, by the way, not really on religious views. A lot of people will say, “Oh there are very sincere religious beliefs on both sides”. No, there really aren’t. I would argue that in my 40 years, I did not ever see a legitimate religious argument for why you would take away the personal decision making and agency of anyone at the level that intrudes in their life like this. Most religions will argue that the point of religion is to have a belief and then to exercise those things as a conscious, deciding person. And not to have a bunch of finger-wagging hypocrites tell you what it is that you have to do.
And, by the way, there is so much hypocrisy in this movement that I am going to do an entire podcast on the hypocrisy of people who are anti-choice, with examples, so that we can all be very clear on who the opposition to people having choice is.
We all need to be very clear on the opposition and who is opposed to women having the choice that they can make themselves. Because among them, there are plenty of people who get elected on a “pro-life platform” who then turn around and, you know, doctor their mistresses’ drinks with abortifacients and, you know, shenanigans that we’ve all read about in the paper and many that I’ve heard about in the health centers that I have run.
So this is gonna happen and in some places this is happening now, but as I said, this has been underfoot for about 15 years.
When John McCain was running for his presidential campaign, it was, even then, a mainstream Republican thing to want to do, to appoint anti-choice judges to all of the spots that they could appoint anti-choice judges to. And pepper them through the state courts and the federal courts and, of course the Supreme Court. There’s just nobody who didn’t pledge their soul to making sure Roe went down, that ever got a hearing on any kind of Republican docket.
And so that has been happening for a long time. And we expected that it would then. And so as we began to investigate what’s going on today, and what do we need to mitigate that situation, study every possible permutation of how that could all unroll, we discovered that, in many rural places, access had become so bad that we actually had a fair number of women that felt that they had no other choice but to do their own abortion.
Now keep in mind, there’s also a progressive movement of women who believe women ought to be able to do their own abortions and they have websites for that.
But these are women who weren’t necessarily intent on—for political reasons—on doing their own abortions and they were doing that because they couldn’t commute hundreds of miles to the next place they could get one, they couldn’t take time off jobs that were paid by the hour, they had other people to take care of that they couldn’t necessarily leave, they could’ve been young enough not to have an excuse to not be at home or to be away for long periods of time, just any myriad of reasons.
And one young woman in Montana came to our attention when she bought one of the abortifacient regimen pills, mifeprex, from one country and the other, misoprostol, from another country, online, in the correct doses. She apparently got real drugs because she successfully did this procedure on herself—swallowed the right things in the right order—and it actually worked. And only showed up in the health center to confirm that she was OK.
Now why would someone do that if they could show up in a health center? And I would just tell all of you, in case you don’t know this, a lot of people really don’t understand the legal boundaries of choice. They don’t know that technically abortion should still be legal in all 50 states, you should be able to get it, and you shouldn’t have to travel out of where you could spend the night in your own bed to do this. But a lot of people, when they hear the debates that go on, they hear the conversations, they see the shenanigans coming out of a number of states, they freak out and they decide that abortion’s already illegal and that they’re in danger asking anyone if it is or isn’t, and then they go ahead and do the work of figuring out how they’re going to do these things on their own. And we find out about it later.
So there’s huge danger, friends, in just having this conversation out and about. You don’t know what young person is hearing, whatever they’re hearing on the news, and finding themselves isolated in the depths of despair and feeling like they have to take action and they don’t know what to do, and desperate enough to try anything.
This case of this young woman: she actually figured out what drugs she needed and got real ones and was able to take them and affect the changes that she wanted in her life. But will that happen over and over again? And can we count on that all the time, to be something that people can do?
Last week in Texas, a young woman got medications from Mexico. They appeared also to be real, and took them and then was reported, as I understand it, in the media reports, by someone in the hospital that she ended up in. And I’m not sure why she ended up there, but they outted her. And she ended up with her name in the newspaper. I won’t repeat it here, out of respect for her and her privacy. But her name is knowable, and they outted her for self-abortion, which is not illegal in any but, I believe, two states right now.
It was not illegal in Texas, and I would think whoever the legal counsel is for this hospital either got ignored or should be fired forthwith for not advising the hospital that you don’t have the right to violate a HIPAA standard for a law you’re making up in your own head. Something actually has to be illegal for you to claim that it’s illegal. And there’s no excuse for just rampant incompetence.
So, I think the Biden administration people who implement HIPAA, and who hold people accountable—I realize there are only a handful of fines that get given out for HIPAA violations every year—but I think that a hospital that had people in it who wanted to make names for themselves and be sure they outted their patients before anyone else could out them, even for things turned out not to be illegal, ooopsie! I think that’s something that can’t be mitigated for. They have now smeared that woman with a stigmatized service. If she ever had dreams of running for Congress, for example, I assume something like that would come up as a story. And so I’m not sure how they put that genie back in the bottle. And putting the genie back in the bottle is part of the HIPAA standard when fees are levied. So, whoever’s in charge of that, I think people making hay out of other people’s misery, for political purposes, ought to be something that the HIPAA standard would be applied to prevent.
It's not only about computer breaches, please. Like, you know, do your job. So anyway, that is what we are looking at.
I wanted, though, to talk also about things that make us more effective as a pro-choice community and things we can do about this now that this is happening.
First thing is: in the states that are red, where they are beginning to fast and furiously pass legislation about all the various things that you can do to women because now you have control over them and you can exorcise your every internal demon about women’s rights, in those states, folks, buy early, early pregnancy tests. They are available in pharmacies. They can often tell within 10 days of a missed period that there’s a pregnancy happening. In many of these states they’re still allowing for a couple of weeks’ possibility of having an abortion in-state without having to leave. But only, only, only if you know it early, early, early. And probably even before a missed period.
And so get some of those tests if you have any young people of reproductive ability in your life. And figure out what you’re going to do to make sure they know that you’re a safe place to come in the event anything like this happens.
Second, in both blue and red states, it would be incredibly beneficial, young people with uteruses, if you were to go on very highly effective birth control methods, for a number of reasons.
First of all, they are really very effective. And if you’re not planning a pregnancy that you’re dying to have, then everyone needs to be contracepting. Because luck isn’t gonna cut it. And in this case, if you’re in a red state and you’re counting on luck and you’re wrong, your life could be in danger.
If you’re in a blue state, your life isn’t going to be in danger because you could, if things didn’t go well, back up your contraceptive failure with an abortion. However, we are going to need the space in every clinic with the capability to do abortion care. We are going to need the space for people coming from the red states and so anyone that we can see in a blue state, for a contraceptive method that needs very little maintenance—those would be the insertables: the IUDs, the implants, even the pills and that kind of thing as long as they go well, but that don’t require multiple, multiple, clinic visits—anything that would keep the professionals that are capable of doing abortion for the out-of-state people and the in-state people at the same time, at their jobs. You could help make room if you go get effective contraceptive methods.
And so, first two things, folks, to be on the team: get some pregnancy tests so that you could intervene early in the event that that’s required. Second thing, everyone should get their hands on the most effective contraceptive methods that they possibly can because it’s never been [more] important than now.
Now those of us who organized contraceptive supply issues across the United States saw this one coming, so unlike many things that there are shortages of right now, we have put a lot of effort into making sure that if you all decided to get the most effective contraceptive method available on the market today, that whatever one you chose would be available for you. So they are there, ready, go get them. Help us be on the side of helping the other people who don’t have as many options as you do. And we will do our utmost to take care of all the folks in this movement that need help in one way or the other.
Now a lot of people ask me, “How in the world do I invest in a disaster like this?”. So this is happening and there are communications needs and there are needs to move people around. And there are needs for people to have safe places to stay. There are needs for people to have transportation. People need information about where they can go and how that can work and there are a good many resources in all of those directions to deal with that. But in order to help the donor community figure out how to maximize their donor dollars in this, I have written a Donor Guide to the Fall of Roe. And that is available for free, for people to download from the Fall of Roe website.
So look for thefallofroe.com and follow that link to download your Donor Guide to the Fall of Roe. And I hope that that’s helpful for you.
Also, you can contact me through that site and give me information about things, tell me about things you would like to hear on this podcast. We could work together to get good and accurate information out there. If you know of things that are happening in your state for people, then it would be incredibly important that we know about it.
I am going to do a podcast on how we can actually follow the numbers of what is going on for people. A lot of times, these epidemiology-type numbers take a year or two years to come out. By then, a lot of things have happened and we’re just not all that aware of them, but I think that it will be very important that we have good and accurate information about what in the world is going on so that we can hold people accountable.
So holding people accountable. Important, important topic, especially if you’re going to talk about people who have committed an unforced error, people who took a medical disaster that did not exist and have created it and shoved it down every American person’s throat. We need to ensure that the people who have created this situation ultimately get defeated at the polls, and that people who are more caring about actual life issues, for the people in their states, those people get elected.
That the people who defend other people’s freedoms—reproductive choice, LGBTQ community, people who are interested in ensuring that inequality in all of its forms gets managed - those are the people who need to be re-elected. Because in a pluralistic society we don’t get to just vote in a bunch of theocrats and have them shove their deal down our throats.
So we’re all gonna have to decide that we no longer will vote for anyone from a party that has a position like this because we are now at the point where people sort of said, “Well, I like them on this and not on that,” like, we’re not in that position anymore, friends. We are in the position where these people, once just were people who talked. They jaw-boned about abortion, what a travesty it was for all these years, and we all sort of shrugged because there was nothing they could do about it.
With the overturning or dismantling, which amounts to the same thing as overturning, of Roe, coming likely in the summer, we are now in the position where we are going to not have choices about who to vote for if they are on the anti-choice side of the aisle, unless you’re just gonna be unapologetic and go with “I don’t care enough to deal with this”. And I would say, if you’re not, I hope you’re a kajillionaire and that you’re prepared to fund what needs to happen then, to prevent people from dying the way they were in a pre-Roe environment because we no longer will have the same country that we had the day before this happens.
Another word to companies: you aren’t going to be able to recruit talent into these states because either they are executives who fear for their own reproductive health or they’re people who have children that they fear for, or they’re people who just think that the whole thing is just so distasteful that they can’t imagine moving their A-level talented selves to places where this kind of thing passes muster. You’re just not gonna get the A talent and I observed Citigroup saying, “We’ll pay the freight for all our employees who want to fly out-of-state and get real care somewhere else”. It’s like, I don’t know, Citigroup. At some point you might have to decide that there are places where you just can’t do business anymore.
So we have a whole lot in front of us and things to cover. I am eager to get started delving into the various pieces of this, talking about what’s happening in the various states. I hope to make short podcasts detailing what the story is in various states. These things move rapidly, though. We’re in the middle of a whole cluster of states that are competing to be more awful than the other state.
Not leaving well enough alone, Idaho, now, is making it possible to be a vigilante and get even more money than Texas. So, you know, if you’re a vigilante don’t bother with Texas. Turn your eyes to Idaho, ‘cause if you snitch on people you don’t even know there’s a lot more money in it for you.
And states where they’re shutting down abortion care entirely. The state that I used to run when I was at Planned Parenthood, Kentucky, now suddenly it’s like, “You have to fill out 87,000 pieces of paperwork in order to do this as a provider but hey, we haven’t designed that paperwork yet so, oh well!”
That kind of thing, that sort of too precious and cute for words, that that is upheld in a place that says it respects the rule of law: absolutely disgusting. Absolutely disgusting! So we shall see what the courts in Kentucky do with that. But if they let it go, they might as well just say, “Yeah, we’re the wild” …I guess they’re not the west, I guess they’re the east… “we’re the wild east now. And we don’t actually care, so, you female people, you people with reproductive ability, you’re on your own.”
I hope that that is not where we are, but when the Supreme Court goes down it means that we no longer have the courts to rely on to protect us. It’s going to have to be state by state in our politics and all that.
Just one clarifying note, what the court is not going to do is say, “Hey y’all, now abortion is illegal in all 50 states. We suddenly have found an argument in the law that says we get to decide at the Supreme Court that abortion is illegal anywhere”. No. No, no, no. They’re not gonna do that. They’re going to let 50 states decide their own thing and so states like Washington and Oregon, California and New York and Vermont and Maine and up in the northeast corner up there, and Illinois and a variety of other states, they’re going to decide that they’re pro-choice states and they’re gonna stay that way.
The warning I would give you about that is if Republicans win both houses and the presidency, at the Congressional level, ever again, that they will pass a law that makes abortion illegal in all 50 states. And if Congress does it, and they have enough of a majority in the Senate to do it—which is, at this point, 60 votes—then it’s over for all the states. California and New York and all the places where people feel like, “Well, I’m safe because I’m here", oh no! Oh no, no! It will matter entirely who gets elected in all of the states where you don’t vote. So be thinking about who needs to be elected where and what we are all gonna do to make that happen because we cannot afford to have a right-wing Congress overturn the last remnants of safety everywhere in the country. We can’t afford to have every state become Alabama. That would not work for us. As much as it doesn’t work to have half the states become Alabama.
So, nothing about Alabama except their political thing, because Alabama’s obviously a beautiful place, but they tend to have very conservative leadership as they do in all the red states - the firmly red states in the United States.
So stay with me, friends. We’ll talk about solutions, we’ll talk about problems, we’ll talk about what’s really unfolding as it unfolds, from the healthcare perspective, from the actual services perspective.
There are a great number of podcasts, one-off episodes and various things that people are doing on the legal arguments. That’s not what I’m going to address here because my expertise is actually in the services and provision of abortion and reproductive healthcare side. I would just say, I hope you join me for this journey. I think it’s gonna be a bumpy road, but a well-informed group of us could make all the difference.
Thank you for listening. I hope to see you back in episode two.