Hi, I'm Molly john Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Elon Musk, who is not a secretary, will attend the first Trump cabinet meeting with all the secretaries. We have such a great chow for you. Today, The Atlantic's George Conway talks about illegality in the Trump administration
and how it will continue to dog them. Then we will talk to Pro Publica's Lizzie Presser about the horrifying rate of sepsis in women in Texas in the years since Texas enacted its abortion ban.
But first the news.
So last night, Mollie, the Republicans in Congress first didn't do so hot at passing their budget, but then got it through. It looks very bad.
I mean, they're so excited that they got something past. And look, let's give them a minute here. If Mike Johnson is very bad at math and his vote counting, he's not known as a whipper versus Nancy Pelosi, so it is kind of incredible that he got anything done.
So perhaps that's something.
Of course, he did make almost every Republican, with the exception of Thomas Massey. Welcome to the resistance, Thomas Massey, and I'm kidding that's ironic. Vote for eight hundred and eighty billion dollars in Medicaid cuts and two hundred and thirty billion dollars in cuts two food stamps. So, yes, they did make a lot of cuts. That means that people like everyone's favorite Republican Mike Lawler, who thinks he's going to be governor of New York, he.
Just had to vote for an eight.
Hundred and eighty billion dollar cut to Medicaid. That means hospitals, nursing homes, poor women who they don't even need to be poor, right, women who don't have the insurance, can't afford insurance, or can't afford insurance on the exchanges.
These women, why should they.
Have anything less than what Trump has wanted for them. So this is House Republicans, and they are trying to cut a little bit from the budget so that they can keep these tax cuts in place.
Representative Drypole tweeted.
Last night after this past ninety nine percent of House Republicans voted to gut Medicaid so they can lower taxes for the richest one percent. Yes, I am shocked to know that an administration almost entirely stocked with billionaires and trillionaire you know, and millionaires that that crew voted to keep their own taxes down. And you know who's going to suffer MAGA voters.
Yikes. Yeah. I particularly appreciate how Thomas Massey came out of the first vote and dog did talked about how much it's adding to the debt, and then look at that they got it done.
Ah.
Yes, I am very imp and not very surprised.
So now in every one of these we turned to the bizarre, which was Trump posting an unhinged AI video of his vision for Trump Gaza, which included bearded ladies, which I did not think that the Republican constituency was a big fan of.
Yeah, so let's talk this through for a minute.
He is saying that he's going to make Gaza a trumpy development.
There are many reasons why this is bad.
I don't think we should even I mean, like, obviously there's no world in which this is actually going to be happening. But I think there's a real game of chicken here that Donald Trump is engaging in. I think it's worth remembering for a minute that there were a lot of Democratic voters who did not come out, including like Muslim voters in Dearborn who voted for Trump with the thinking that Trump would somehow be better on Gaza than Democrats, And well, the Democrats made a lot of
mistakes when it comes to Middle East. I think it's hard to imagine anything a Democrat cooked up being as batshit as this. You know, these people live there, and Donald Trump is sort of pitching this idea of just completely kicking them out.
Yeah, nice stuff. So Maai, it's beginning to look a lot like recession. According to some economists who are starting to seriously worry about Trump's actions on the economy.
A really good example of this is just like the NIH cuts right Alabama, red state filled with trumpers, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, biggest employer, the University of Alabama system in the state. They're cutting NIH funding. Those NIH funds will be cut. Where we'll see this is that there'll be less money flowing into red states like Alabama. Then you cut Medicaid, so you're going to cut more
funding that goes into these red states. Then you cut food stamps and snaps, you cut like these people have less money to spend on food, Like, I don't think that. One of the things that I'm not sure Elon understands about how the economy works is that if people have less money to spend, they spend less money. And if they spend less money, less money goes through the economy. And if less money goes through the economy, the economy starts to get smaller. And when the economy starts to
get smaller, the GDP goes down. And when the GDP goes down, you end up in a recession. Right. This is a question of a growing economy versus a stalling economy. And when you start cutting government spending, that's where you go. And look, you know a lot of people are scared of Trump, so they don't want to say the truth. One of the interesting things is there's a hedge fund
manager called Steve Cohen, and he's very, very rich. Probably I would have a hard time imagining he's a Democrat, but maybe who knows owns The METS warns that TARA, slowing immigration, and cost cutting could lead to a market correction and or solar economic growth because cutting tears make things more expensive, slowing immigration makes labor more expensive, so goods are more expensive, labor's more expensive, and the government is spending less money, all of which mean that the
economy will shrink. He suggests that while tariffs and government inefficiencies post risks, their ultimate impact depends on execution. And you know, the guy with the chainsaw, he may not be so incredibly careful when trimming the federal budget.
Yes, you know how chainsaws are known for their calculated cutting and really precise, So as I would imagine what happened, I could have predicted this headline after last week Friend of the Show John Allen is reporting that House Republicans have hit the brakes on town halls after blowback of Trump's cuts.
Yes, who could have seen it coming, certainly not me. Turns out, if you go and you protest, and these are organic protests.
Some of them are organized, but a lot of them are organic.
It turns out that a lot of these members of Congress don't like it when you scream at them. And you know, this is what happened in Trump one point zero was that they had these town halls and people came and screamed at them, and they did not like it.
And now we're seeing it again.
Kind of seen it coming.
George Conway is a contributor to the Atlantic.
Welcome to Fast Politics, your friend and mine, George.
Conway, I I'm back.
So here's my question for you, Legal or illegal?
Illegal? I just play percentages. I don't have to hear the question. I mean, I have my own podcast and we used to call it the latest in the legal trunk legal news, but it's now we call it the latest in illegal news because Pat covers it mostly.
So let's talk this for so nih fund freezes legal or illegal.
The only way to know exactly whether something is illegal or legal is to actually go to the appropriations bills and see to what extent any of this you know is discretionary in unwers. And I've never been working in Congress,
and I never read an appropriation's bill. But generally speaking, if Congress has allocated money for a specific purpose, and the language is such that it can be determined that it is that a reasonable reading of it is that it's mandatory that the government shall spend X, then the government shall spend X. And it's not for the president to say, well, you say I want to spend X, but I don't want to spend X, I don't want
to do that, and you can't do that. And there's a there's a nineteen seventy five I think, a Supreme Court case called Train versus New York, where the Supreme Court basically says, look, if the statute says the president has to spend money, the president has to spend money. And then on top of that, before Train versus the
United States, this law didn't apply to Train. But there's something called the Impoundment Act that Congress passed to respond to President Nixon's refusal to spend money on various things, and it says, it's very very specific about the conditions and procedures by which the president can decline to spend money. He has to jump through lots of hoops, and as you know, he can't jump very correct. Also can't read.
Wait say more about how Donald Trump can't read?
Well, what's there to say? I mean, he can't spell, he can't read. He's got a lot of problems, but thankfully he's got somebody who can tell him what to do. A genius who is that? Maybe?
Long?
What do you think you know all of these people, or at least you know some of these people?
It seems like the.
Big conflict right now is the law versus Donald Trump, and more specifically the judges and the courts.
So I want you to sort of talk us through.
Where we are here with like they keep going to the courts, they keep losing. We're seeing Mike Lee and Charlie Kirk and some of the Rain Trust saying like, you have to go against the judges, you have to impeach the judges, you have to fight against the law. Play this out for me.
All right, here's my take on this. I mean, generally speaking, there are always going to be inter ranch conflicts. There are always happen There would be going to be circumstances where an administration pushes an interpretation of the law that others may not share and that the courts may not
ultimately share. And there's that that's a natural push and pull between Congress, who writes the laws, the President, who administers the laws and to some extent interprets them, and then the courts, which end up have always been since Barbary against manisl which we all learn in.
In law school. I learned about it in law.
School, Oh, high school or earlier.
You speak for yourself, learned about it in law school. Go on, did you run law school?
I didn't go to college. Oh I'm a degenerate gangster.
But yes, continue, okay, all right, yeah, you just drove around in your limousine.
Liberal I mean.
Limits, I'll have you know.
I have a master's degree.
Like, let me know, Europe, you're a very liberal person. You have a book coming out, but everyone, absolutely everyone should buy it.
Yes, people love that book. Do you want to outsend you a PDF if you want by?
I would love to. I would would It would make the adat Okay, So to go back to that, I mean so there's always been this push and pull. But the bottom line is what has kept us going as a constitutional republic for now, well for two hundred and what thirty seven years or so whatever it was in seventeen eighty nine, is that, ultimately, when the court say
the law means ex the president has complied. There have been circumstances where presidents have threatened not to comply, like Andrew Jackson saying let those courts enforce their rulings, But generally presidents have complied. The executive branch has complied with four orders. Now you have a president and an administration that does not appear to give much of a shit.
Is an important legal term about following the laws or following what Congress has said, and a perfect example of that are these spending cases that you started the discussion with. Another example is doge, which relates to that, but also writes the more fundamental notion about whether or not somebody with the power that Elon Lusk is exercising is someone who has to be appointed to an office that is
created by Congress. And since he's basically running around as essentially the chief operating officer of the United States, telling cabinet agencies what to do, the Constitution requires that somebody exercising such authority, as essentially he's ahead of the reports to nobody else but Trump. If anything Trump may report to him, that person has to be sentate confirmed. And
they're ignoring that very basic element of the Constitution. They are running roughshod over laws to see what they can get away with, and see what they can get away with before courts tell them to stop. And they're doing it with such frequency and such alacrity that you have to wonder why should they obey a court oral if they don't care about what Congress has to say if
they don't care about the laws and the constitution. And the constitution for example, a great example of that is Birthright citizensp, where a constitution says, in words of one syllable, but if you are born or naturalized in the United States of America, you are a citizen. And there are no exceptions to that other than four children or foreign diplomats. They don't care about the law. So what does anyone
believe that they are going to obey court orders? And when you add to that the nuts and bulls how court's orders are enforced, it becomes even more showing. Because courts do not have their They do not have soldiers, they do not have police officers except for the Supreme Court, which has police officers who patrol the plaza to make sure there are people don't throws eggs at the court. But they have no independent way of enforcing their orders.
The way that an order gets enforced is let's say I assue you and the court orders you to stop doing something, whatever it is, and you just keep doing it, and so I file emotion saying, hey, Molly's not obeying
your judgment. And if you don't obey the judgment, the court can hold you in what's called civil contempt, meaning the court can incarcerate you until you comply with the order, or can find you one thousand dollars a day, and sometimes they even have these exponentially increasing fines two thousand to second day, four eight and so on to compa tell you to obey the court order. But here's the rub.
What mechanism does the court use to enforce those orders to haul you in, to arrest you on the street or at your house, or to attach your property. It's something called the United States Marshal Service. And they are fine people, and they are sworn to uphold the law and to obey the court orders and to assist the courts. But they are an agency of the United States Department of Justice. They are part of the executive branch. The President gets to say who the head of the United
States Marshall Service is. Then the Attorney General gets to tell the head of the United States Marshal Service what to do. So what if the order comes down saying that any court orders that are directed at or contempt orders whatever that are directed at members of this administration shall be referred to the head of the United States
Marshall Service. And I suppose, you know, the head of the United States Marshall Service is a you know, a friend of Cash Bettels and Dan Bungino's and completely beholden the Trump and he decides, oh, here's a nice contempt order against Elon Musk. I'm not going to give it to a United States Marshall to go out and force and to arrest must Okay, So there is no mechan no now, and it's going to be hard now. Obviously the point that others have made, I've been having this
discussion of a lot of ladies as well. The marshals really want to obey orders. They want obey they have they've sworn to all the constitutions. But but if nobody tells them, here's the order you're going to enforce, and nobody gives it to them, who's going to tell them,
who's going to go out there and do it? They're just there is no mechanism by which we can force the government, the executive branch to obey court orders at the end of the day, which is why if they don't obey the courts, the only thing that we've got going for us is to flood the streets with people.
What does it mean to flood this treats?
So when will we know, because what you're talking about is a constitutional crisis. We're not there yet, but we probably will be soon. So when will we know we.
Are in a constitutional crisis?
Well, we are in a constitutional crisis in a sense already. It's kind of like you're going from defcon. Was it five to one or one to five? I don't know what order it is, but we are in the early stages of this, and I do believe that the government is already not complying with court orders by saying, oh, gosh, we don't know who's running doors. They did they play a game for a few days, and they are saying, Okay,
we're going to obey this court order. And then it turns out the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, and they say, ooh, somebody else was doing this. We weren't able to turn that off. They're using the fact that the government is big and balky to kind of, you know, play like a four corners defense on the courts, which is a dangerous play because it really pisses off federal job is. We're at that level of potential defiance, which can be a mistake for incompetence,
but also it's not like they're trying that hard. The true constitutional crisis that you're asking about occurs when the executive branch basically says, fuck you, okay, we don't agree with that order, and we think that's an incorrect interpretation of the law, or we think that's an incorrect interpretation of the constitution, or the president, because he's president, is the ultimate arbiture of what the constitution is, not the courts.
And this is something that we are starting to hear people in and around the administration say, for example, J. D. Vance said just the other day, basically, we should stop obeying court orders and basically doing Andrew Jackson sentence, tell the courts that you go force your awarders. And I think the degree first of all, psychologically, he doesn't have any respect for the law.
Trump right, No, No, Certainly.
Musky's going out there now threatening saying these judges all need to him be impeached. So they're threatening the judges. And Trump hates the judicial system because the judicial system, you know, puts people in jail who are criminals, and he is a criminal, and he almost got put in jail. He would be soon in jail if he hadn't gotten that lucky draw in Florida with that crazy judge, Judge Cannon. So it is difficult for me, and I hope I'm wrong. I've never more hope to be wrong than I am
now about what I'm about to say. But I believe that it is inevitable that this administration will openly start to find court orders, and once that happens, we are lost. As a there is no rule of law. If the government can't bail, why the hell should anybody else? Why should we pay our taxes? Right, that's the problem we face.
And let's go down this road for a minute.
Because Janet Mals, the governor of May, in a meeting with Trump and the governors, and he said, you know you're not going to get federal funds if you let the one trans kid go in the sports.
Then we know that there are any trans kids in the state of Maine playing like college and Caa says there were only six in the entire country playing NC.
Probably not, but anyway, the point is, so he says, you're not going to get any federal funds, and she actually said some the effect of, like, maybe you're not going to get any federal.
Funds, she said, she said, we'll see you in court.
Right, she said that.
But she also said later on, like the question of like, should we all be paying federal taxes if the federal government is going to withhold aid, that's a road that we could be going down.
Yeah, I mean, I certainly would not advocate that that's a massive violation of law. But on the other hand, if you have a government that has basically forsaken the rule of law, and like, you know, if tomorrow the government said we will have no further elections, wants to destremantle the irs, who's going to fucking after anybody? And when that happens, not only do you have a collapse of the civil order, the economic effects will be absolutely
devastating to the world. Who's going to buy a United States Treasury bond?
Yeah, well that's a real question.
We don't know how bad this. I mean, this could get really really bad unless somebody over there wakes up and realizes that they're playing with fire. But they're all you know, these people are psychos.
So are there any grown ups in the room?
Is there anyone in there who would say, maybe we don't want to crush the federal government.
There may be this fellow Scott descent is by all accounts, maybe there's more to him. I mean, anybody who takes a job in this administration you have to have some doubt on it. But the guy understands how the financial markets work and the global economic system works. By all accounts,
he's a very intelligent. But you tell Trump this, and Trump's gonna say, well, you know, Trump doesn't think he has to run for anything anymore, even like to serve a third, four fifth, sixth, and seventh terms illegally, as I keep saying, And some people think I'm out there, but the shrinks all agree with me and the people who have been listening for a while. And he is
a malignant narcissist, a narcissistic sociopath. In deep down, they want vengeance over everybody and everything who has that has wrong them. They want to exercise their control and power over the world. And one way they get to do that is to create destruction. Okay, I think of Hitler's neuro order, think of there are so many examples these people think of Pouted, the amount of damage he's caused to his own country by this senseless war in Ukraine.
The hundreds of thousands of them Russians or other people who are you know who have died? These people that they are the worst of the worst. Trump has every fits the psychological profile of somebody who is associopath and a sadist. I don't think he cares. I think this
is his chance to seek. Everything he wants to do is vengeful, everything from the trivial like the takeover of the Kennedy Center to the destruction of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which I think the Europeans have to face up to the fact there is no more NATO. I don't know that he's going to all of a sudden wake up one morning and say, oh gee, maybe I shouldn't have Elon Musky shutting down the government because people are going to get mad. I don't think he gives it, damn.
I think all he cares about is doing harm to the people he feels have disrespected him, which is basically everyone higher world.
Game this out for me. How do you think this goes?
You think somebody eventually says like you got to stop doing this, or you think he just keeps going and then they.
Are going to be some cases he wins, They're going to be some cases he loses. They're going to be some cases he wins at the early stage. Like there was this case the other day where a temporary restraining order was denied. I think it was one of the Doge cases. But I think he's ultimately going to lose that case. I think he's going to lose most of these cases, not all, so you know, are like I think the Hampton Dalladier case is one he's going to win, but he's going to lose a bunch of these cases.
And he's going to lose the Doge cases I think in particular, and the Doge case is going to be He's got two choices there. One is he can just comply with it on the theory that Doge has done enough damage already that it's done his job, so who cares? Or he could say no, Elon's going to keep doing what he's.
Doing, right, why do I care?
No, we don't know which case it's going to be, but there are so many of them that I can't help but think that a man who is showing and an administration that is showing, and you know, You've got JD. Vanc yea law school graduates, saying this should happen. I think that at some point they're just going to say we're not going to agree with the courts. And some people says, well, we know the real problem is the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court's going to do ruin
his favor, saying I don't think that's true. I think they're going to rule against him in some significant cases and he's going to tell them to go pounce in too. And once that happens, once he is in open defiance.
Right, that's when you have to take to those trades.
That is when we moved from Poland to Hungary to Russia.
Thank you, George, thank you. Lizzie Presser is.
An investigative reporter for Pro Publica. Welcome to Fast Politics, Lizzie.
Pressler, I'm happy to be here.
Molly, please talk to us about what's happening in Texas.
We analyze seven years of hospital data in the state of Texas, and what we saw was that when we focused in on the second tremester and looked at women who were experiencing miscarriages in the hospital, their rates of sepsis spiked fifty percent after the first abortion band has put into place in twenty twenty one. And it's this kind of crazy chart because the rates of sepsis are really quite steady previous to the abortion law among this
Paesian population, and then almost immediately they shoot up. So a lot of doctors who looked at the data and talk to us about our methodology said, this is most likely an indicator that these women are experiencing really dangerous delays in the hospital when they show up experiencing a miscarriage.
So I want you to stop and explain to our listeners what sepsis is. Talk us through kind of why you think that there's such a rise in sepsis.
So, sepsis is the body's reaction to an infection. It's super dangerous. It can damage permanently every organ in the body. It can lead to apartment can need damage, permanent brain damage, It can rob a women of her ability to bear children in the future, and it can rapidly lead to
a dangerous drop in blood pressure and death. And what we are hearing from doctors across the state is that when a woman is experiencing a miscarriage and her water breaks early or her cervix is dilated, she's at a much higher risk of contracting an infection, and if that infection is not treated properly, the risk is that it
will develop into sepsis and ultimately septic shock. And doctors when they are seeing these women, because of the law and their interpretation of the law, are being asked to wait for one of two things to happen. Either the fetal heartbeat needs to end and they need to be able to document that, or the patient needs to show
signs of a life threatening condition like sepsis. We're hearing from women who are saying that they're doctors who they trust, are saying to them when they come in miscarrying, I'm so sorry, but I can't touch you. I can't do anything for you until you can track sepsis, which is
quite likely to happen if I don't treat you. And so these women are being asked to wait until their bodies develop a condition that could threaten their lives, and their partners are being asked to sit by them and wait for this to happen as well.
Sepsis is an infection of the whole body, and to a certain extent, if you get far enough along in sepsis, you can die, right, So you're asking these women to roll the dice at dying because Republicans are so incredibly anti choice. There's no good outcome from sepsis, right, Like, talk me through this.
There's only danger and there's only risk when it comes to developing sepsis. I mean, I think the other thing that's important to know is that doctors will tell you that it's extremely difficult to get ahead of sepsis once it sets in. So as soon as you document this life threatening condition, you're on a back foot as a doctor.
You're trying to make sure that it doesn't kill your patient. So, I mean, we wrote about one girl last fall, Nadia Crane, who was eighteen years old and kept showing up to the hospital because she was sick and developing and infection and kept getting turned away, and on her third visit she had sepsis and she looked like she had sepsis.
But you have to wait for those labs to come back before you say this is definitely sepsis, So you have this waiting time, and in that waiting time, the doctor said, we're not going to do anything until we can confirm fetal demise, and he made this eighteen year
old girl who was extraordinarily sick. And the doctors from the me medical notes know that this looks like sepsis, right, wait an hour and a half for a second ultrasound to confirm fetal wize and but by the time that they confirmed it, it was too late to rush her to the operating room. She had already developed such intense internal bleeding that they couldn't operate, and she died with her baby still in uterow Jesus, So, this is the risk of sepsis. It is such a rapidly developing condition
that you're asking women to gamble with their lives. And you're also asking doctors to wait until your patient is so sick that you could lose them. It's moral hazard for them as well.
It's so this is just such an insane way to practice medicine in this country. I mean, we shouldn't be shocked because this is what we knew was coming. Just explain to us, like, how sort of outside the norm this is.
This shouldn't be happening. Molly and I think that when we were writing these one off stories where we were investigating deaths of pregnant women who were dying after they experienced delays and care that followed the abortion bands. You know, people would come back to us who didn't believe that this was a widespread issue and say, you know, maybe these are isolated events, Maybe these are bad doctors, maybe
this is malpractice. And so to see these numbers and this data across the state of Texas at a time when no state officials in any state that we know of is doing work to identify the health effects of these bands, and to have to confront that this is not isolated. This is a state wide trend where the danger for these women of being pregnant is rising dramatically.
It just adds to a body of evidence and to a lot of anecdotal reports just how much we are asking the women of this country to suffer, to gamble with their lives when they get pregnant.
It feels to me like a lot of this is about delaying treatment so that these women they sort of have to prove that they're going to die by the time you get to that moment.
A lot of times it's too light a miscarriage.
It's a process. That process can be hours, it can be days, it can be weeks, but it.
Is not one moment.
So women are coming to the emergency room or they're going to a beeze means sent to the hospital, and they their water has broken, or their cervix is dilating, or they're experiencing bleeding. And whereas before these bands, the standard of care would have been that these doctors who they're seeing would say to them, Okay, you have three options, wait and see what happens, and here are your risks
based on your condition. I can give you medication that will help speed up the process of emptying your uterus.
And those medications are very wildly available, usable and have been on the market for many decades and.
Are very safe.
Yes, I can give you these medications that will help speed up the emptying of your uterus. Here are the risk of benefits. Or I can do a procedure like a even an induction, and here are the risks and
benefits of that. What we are hearing is that in states like Taxis and other abortion band states, that option of number two at number three, here's medication and here's a procedure, many doctors don't even want to mention it because they can't provide them untail they can document either fetal deay or a life threatening illness, and so they're just asking women to wait and see until they get
extremely sick. I mean women. They're telling women, go home and check your temperature every two hours and if it hits one o'q one, come back in. Go home and wait for your discharge to smell so rancid that you want to vomit. When doctor told a patient I spoke to, it's just horrible like that, It's horrific to imagine being the person I spent to. One person who is sitting in a hospital room with amiotic fluid is leaking out
onto her thighs, right, which before fetal viability. What your doctor is telling you is your feets will not survive. Their lungs are relaxing, and I can't do anything for you, even though I know that what's going to happen is you are going to contract an infection.
Right, that's it. Texas is the first state that had an abortion ban. It had a year before Roe was overturned. It had SBA. So it really is the state where we are seeing all of this happen first, right, because it's had an abortion ban for longer than other places. So you're seeing more and more of this in Texas because A it's a really big state and B it's because they've had a ban for longer. Now we're going to see this in other states.
Right, we have no reason to believe we won't. And that's exactly everything you're saying about Texas is part of why we focus some of our attention there. A lot of the laws in you know, the thirteen other states that have abortion bands, maybe it's fourteen now, including Florida that's six weeks or before, are written like nearly identically, So we don't have any reason to believe that the outcomes we're seeing in Texas are substantially different from outcomes
that we might see in other states with bands. Now, I will say that there's a piece of this that I think really warrants further investigation, which is how the hospitals are responding to legal risk. And even in Texas, We've spoken to doctors across the state, and some doctors will say, oh, our hospital allows us to intervene in a case like a condition called p PROM for example, which is pre viable premature rupture of membranes, your water breaks early before viability.
That's a situation where there's zero chance that you will produce a viable fetus.
There's very minimal chance, and even if you were to have a live birth, the chances that that child would survive very long are extraordinarily So some doctors are saying, our hospitals have said, we'll protect you. You go forward with the standard of care, We'll protect you. And other doctors have said that their hospitals have said, I can't protect you. We don't feel comfortable as a legal team to protect you, so don't go forward with that. What is so troubling to me as a reporter is that
there's no transparency around this. And even when we as journalists reach out to hospitals across the state, asked and for their policies, they don't want to give us anything.
Yeah, because they're scared.
And how are as a patient, how are you supposed to know you're playing Russian rulette with your life? How do you know what hospital to go to and who's going to treat you and who's going to give you the standard of care and who's going to withhold it.
Yeah, it's such a good point.
So I'm curious when you talk to these women two three years ago, we didn't have horror stories like this. What is their take like, are they like, we're going to go to blues states? Are they like, we're too poor to go to blue states? I mean, you have women who can't get medical care. I mean, like talk us through sort of what their take on this is. Do they feel like Texas is the rest of the world. Do they understand that they're being penalized for like political beliefs?
I mean, do they get sort of how unusual this is and if they lived in a normal state or a normal country, they wouldn't be asked to make these kind of choices.
Anyone I've spoken to who has been put through this in Texas is deeply alarmed, deeply angry. But many of them going into the experience hadn't ever considered how these laws would affect them. They had wanted children, These were wanted pregnancies. They never wanted to lose the pregnancy, and so the first bit of news they're getting when they go to the doctor is you're losing something that you have dreamed of, and so they're kind of in grief. Layer it on top of that is this shock that
they can't get the help that they need. And many of the women I've spoken to who have gone through kind of horrific experiences like the ones I'm describing have either left the state or are saving up to leave the state. Certainly they're trying to think about what to do if something happen, like what do you do if you live two of hours away from a good hospital system? Trying to be more proactive.
Yeah, are you seeing prosecution of doctors or are they just sort of complying in advance? And obviously I'm not saying this, you know, I know that this is a lot of pressure on doctors and that they are in a terrible position, but I'm just curious, like what this sort of like, are you seeing people get prosecuted?
What are you seeing there?
We've see no prosecutions of doctors in.
Texas, so it's just they're just scared that they might get prosecuted.
But let's just be clear, this isn't a compliance in advance. It is illegal for them to intervene in these miscarriacs unless they can document. One needs to be document according to the law.
Yeah. So interesting and also so profoundly important and terrifying. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
No pecto Jesse Cannon.
Hi junk Fast. Ever since Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Cogan's casingg In Schwalker, we kind of knew the Republican playbook would be to try to sue media into silence and compliance. And sure enough, we got some comments from Trump this week that show that's where the way this is headed.
Yeah, he's not a fan.
The ironic thing here is that while Trump hates the mainstream media, he also is obsessed with the mainstream media. So he's saying that he wants to end anonymous versus. These guys love the Second Amendment, but wait till they hear about this First Amendment because it's going to blow their minds. Now, look, it doesn't involve guns, so that's very sad. But my guess is that this is not going to fly. But you know, look, they're going to try everything right, and even if they just get some
of it through, they're going to be happy. So you should not be surprised when you see more and more anti democratic language coming out of this admin.
It's a feature, not above.
Yep, that's how it is.
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