Hi everyone, I'm Kittie Couric and this is next question. This episode today, with less than a month to the election, is all about abortion because it's playing such an important role in the campaign and the minds of many voters. My plus one today is Cindy Levy, who is a longtime friend of mine. Cindy, thank you for doing this.
I'm so happy to be here. Katie and I thought we should tell our listeners a little bit and some viewers a little bit about how we know each other because we've known each other gosh for a couple of decades now, right, so.
The one hundred and fifty two years is the official count on our friendship.
But how do we know each other? Tell everyone?
Well, I think we first met probably I'm really going to date us in the nineteen nineties. I was an assistant editor at Glamour and you were honored as a Glamour Woman of the Year, and I remember you just being so brilliant on that stage and just so charming and intellectually inquisitive, and I just had like such a friend crush on you. And then we kept in touch through that and there was like even a period I
don't even know if you remember this. You remember the column that you wrote for Glamour.
I was like, to do there.
Yeah, it was really great.
I interviewed Michelle Obama for that column.
Actually, I remember it was incredible. You went to went to the White House and it was in her first year I want to say it was like two thousand and nine, so her first year in the White House, and she just gave like a great and warm and frank interview. And it was in those first days where we were kind of like, oh my god, like, you know, this is what the White House can be.
Well, I always have admired Glamour magazine from the days of Ruth Whitney. That really dates me because Glamor magazine always had a point of view politically and they weren't afraid to weigh into some of these thorny social issues. Cindy of course went on to become editor in chief and do an amazing job at Glamour, and now she has a media company called The Meteor, which really focuses on reproductive rights. Correct Cindy, It.
Focuses on all kinds of content having to do with social change for women, girls, non binary people. We had our first ideas meeting in Gloria Steinem's living room, and she said, this is where MS magazine was made back in the seventies. So what is that for today? And yeah, it's been there's certainly a lot to cover and we're doing a lot in the run up to the election, and especially, as you say, around reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, which matters so much right now.
Well, you're the perfect person to help me interview our guest today, Jessica Valenti. She is a fierce feminist writer I know, a good friend of yours, and she's been shaking things up for years. She's the author of bestsellers like The Purity Myth and Sex Object. But she's also the creator of a newsletter called Abortion every Day. That's right. It comes out every day, people, and it's a wonderful guide for people who want to know what's going on
with reproductive rights in this country. So she's constantly challenging the status quo, getting people to think, and she's got a new book out called Abortion, Our Bodies, Their Lives, and the Truths We use to win. Jessica, welcome, thank you for having me, and this is going to be so much fun. Well, gosh, it's actually I don't know if you can say abortion and fun in the same sentence, but it's going to be so interesting and I think so important. Let's start with your book, and you don't
shy away from the A word. Tell us about the culture's fraught relationship with the actual word abortion and why you put it front and center in this book.
You know, I think it's really interesting abortion in the word abortion specifically has been treated like this third rail issue, like this really controversial, polarizing issue, when the truth is that American's overwhelmingly support abortion rights, have overwhelmingly supported abortion rights for decades, and so we've sort of bought into this myth that the issue itself is controversial when it's not.
And so it was really important to me in the book to sort of take this very rank, candid, unapologetic view of not just abortion and the issues that are happening around it right now, especially, but the way we talk about it.
Cindy, I know, as someone involved in magazines, you've been covering this issue for a long time. Talk to us how as an editor this topic has been fought for you and for readers in general.
Well, it's so interesting because as Jessica says, there's been this impression that abortion is this taboo subject, when in reality it's an incredibly common healthcare procedure that one in four women in this country has chosen or had to
have in some cases. And I remember when I was a kid in the nineteen eighties seeing on the cover of People magazine Ali McGraw, the actress who had been in Love Story in the seventies, very popular, with a cover line saying my abortion story or words to that effect, with you know, as you say the A word. And this was People Magazine, very mainstream publication. But by the time I was, you know, certainly writing, and definitely by the time I was the editor of Glamour, there had
been this kind of chill over talking about abortion. It had gone from being something that you know, was maybe not totally out in the open, but also not completely taboo. I don't think People magazine got ripped off the news stands back then to being something where, you know, if you were an editor you wanted to write about abortion, and your publisher would probably be like, oh, we're never going to get an advertiser to go anywhere near that.
Can't you do something more cheerful. And the reality is, you know, when we did cover those issues, as we did often at Glamour, those stories were incredibly well read. Right, People wanted information about those procedures. They wanted to see other women who were going through the same things that they were, and they wanted to feel normal. This is
a normal procedure. And the fact that it was being talked about in hutch tones throughout a lot of the you know oos and early teens didn't do anyone any good.
Yeah, even in the eighties and nineties, Cindy and Jessica. What happened was it Ronald Reagan and the moral majority that suddenly put a chill on these conversations because I've read about Ali McGraw too, and it's really weird that you can't get more mainstream than People Magazine. Jessica. Did things change and why?
I think it really was sort of the eighties and this backlash to the incredible abortion rights movement that led to row And it does feel like whenever women have a huge step forward, there's a tremendous cultural backlash that follows. Right, We've seen it with women in the workplace, and then all of these myths about daycares, and we saw it with abortion, but I think that period lasted for a
really long time. It feels like it really did last until the end of Row, when people started talking a lot more unapologetically about abortion, beyond just abortion rights activists who had been talking and thinking about abortion in this
way for a long time. It really did take the end of Row for people to understand how common this was, how important it was to so many people, how angry voters were about the bands, and so just watching that shift over the last two years has been pretty remarkable. And seeing all of the people who are coming out to share their abortion stories and that they feel so much more comfortable to do that now, I think is pretty incredible.
I will just add that I think it was seeing that it's possible that this rate could get stripped away that did motivate a lot of people, including myself. I'd spent a lot of years covering abortion as the editor of Glamour, and I never talked about the fact that I had had an abortion when I was a freshman in college. That was absolutely something I've never regretted and really important for me being able to chart the course of the rest of my life but you know, I
would give speeches about abortion. I'd always talk about this older female relative of mine who had chosen it. And that was true, but it wasn't the whole truth. And honestly, it was in twenty eighteen when Justice Kennedy announced his retirement and you started hearing people, probably you were among them, just saying, you know, we could lose the right to legal abortion in this country. And I thought, what am
I doing not talking about this? Like if I can help normalized this in any way by just saying, you know, I've made this choice, and so many women I know have, then why aren't I doing that? So I think the danger kind of prompted the openness.
Were you scared after you wrote that? It was in the New York Times, It was an op ed in twenty eighteen. You wrote, as usual, really moving story Cindy about chasing this guy and having unprotected sex after drinking too much. I mean, it was sort of a very.
Really yeah, had to pull that detail, sorry, but it was a very familiar story, you know, for somebody in college, and you know you talked about your decision.
Did you get much backlash? Did you get much hate after you wrote that? Column.
I didn't. I mean, I got you know, you can't write about these subjects, and I would never even complain in front of jess who just gets such hateful stuff all the time and has written very eloquently about online hate. But no, I mean, the vast majority of comments I got were thank you for writing this. Me too, I've
had this experience as well. I got letters from people who mothers and grandmothers who said they were going to sit down and tell their children about abortions that they had never had, which I think is really important because especially because there's this sort of stereotype of people who have had abortions as being like unmotherly, when the truth is most women who have abortions I wasn't in this category, but most women who have abortions already have at least
one child, and I think it's really important for children to understand this as part of like how mothers chart their course in life. And so No, the vast majority of comments I got were just like love and gratitude, and if anything, I felt a little ashamed that I hadn't written it sooner.
And Jessica, you were very honest about your own abortion when you were twenty eight.
Yeah, you know, it's really interesting. I was just thinking as Cindy was talking about her abortion. I've had two abortions, and the one I talked about first and talked about most was one that I had when my daughter was three because the pregnancy was putting my life at risk. I got very ill with my daughter with something called help syndrome, and she was born three months early.
I nearly died, she nearly died.
It was terrible, and doctors told me, if you get pregnant again, chances are this is going to happen again, and it'll be even more dangerous. And so it was a very it was a sad decision because I wanted to have another child, but a clear cut one because I didn't want to put my life at risk and
leave my daughter without a mother. And that was always the abortion I talked about, and I didn't really talk about the one when I was twenty eight because it didn't have that sort of I don't know, it didn't feel as important, which I think is really interesting and troubling. Even as a feminist writer, I had sort of internalized that stigma, right. But the abortion that I had when I was twenty eight led me to the life that I have now. Three months later I met my husband.
Three years after that, we had our daughter. And so it was that abortion that really helped me to build my life, build my family, builds my career. But still I have that internal stigma still going on.
What you're talking about, Jess makes me think of the piece that was in the New York Times last weekend by the woman who was writing about how she had had two abortions, and one of them was one of these, as you would say, like good abortions where she was even though it's anything but good to the person who's going through it, where she had a a health complication, pregnancy complication, had to end a very wanted pregnancy under difficult circumstances, and those are the kinds of stories that
we're hearing now after the fall of Row. But she also had an abortion earlier when she was a single mother and simply could not imagine raising another child, And both of those abortions are equally valid. And I think all the stories that are coming out now of women being turned away from hospitals going into sepsis because they're having complications with very wanted pregnancies are incredibly important stories
to tell, and you're telling them literally every day. But the stories of abortions that were chosen simply because a woman didn't want to be pregnant are valid as well.
You know, it is interesting, Jessica, isn't it that we kind of rate them like this was not so much a good abortion, but this was an understandable abortion. But this was a selfish abortion.
Right, And that's of course really deliberate, and that's what conservatives and the anti abortion movement have set out to
make happen for a really long time. And it made me think about I wrote about this at the Newsletter a little bit Kamala Harris's speech in Georgia after two women were killed by the abortion band there, and how important it was that she talked about Amber Nicole Thurman's life and her abortion in this very normalizing way where she said she had a plan, she was going to nursing school, she had gotten this apartment, she had a
plan for her life and it was her plan. And then she got pregnant, she didn't want to be and she had an abortion, and just talking about it in this way, which seems sort of unremarkable, was actually quite radical for a politician to talk about abortion in this very normalizing way, and it made me realize how much progress we really have made when it comes to stigma and the culture.
Well, it's no coincidence that you took a woman to talk about it in a normal way, because in the State of the Union earlier this year, President Biden skipped over the word abortion in his prepared remarks and replaced it using phrases like reproductive freedom or freedom to choose. And I think that it has taken a woman to talk honestly, in a forthright manner and just say abortion.
It's also because the media has treated abortion as a political issue. If you look at studies on where and how abortion was covered in newspapers, for instance, and digital outlets over the last ten years, it was overwhelmingly in the political sections, and the people who were quoted were overwhelmingly politicians as opposed to doctors, and definitely as opposed
to actual humans who had chosen abortions. So if we think of this as, like, you know, a political thing, as opposed to a healthcare decision, it's partly because it's been covered that way.
If you want to get smarter every morning with a breakdown of the news and fascinating takes on health and wellness and pop culture. Sign up for our daily newsletter, Wake Up Call by going to Katiecuric dot com. Well, let's talk about abortion every day, because this is a newsletter. Jessica, you started after Roe was overturned, and you've written about abortion for about two years now or over two years.
Can you set the table for us and just tell us kind of what has happened in this country since the overturning of Row, because honestly, it's hard to follow state by state and every legislature what's happening and all these different referenda that we see surfacing all over the country unless you're Jessica Valenti.
I mean, this is what's so hard about it, and this is why I started the newsletter, because the attacks are so unrelenting. There really is something new every single day, and so I'm just trying the best I can to provide a little bit of border to that chaos. I think we've seen a lot happen. We've seen the rise of pro choice ballot measures, which has been incredible, and we've seen that when people get a direct say on abortion rights that they overwhelmingly choose to protect abortion rights.
We've seen the horror stories.
I think that is the thing that sticks out to people the most, is just story after story of people being denied here. But then the other thing that I'm trying to make sure to cover the newsletter that doesn't get quite as much media attention is the ripple effects that we're seeing right the doctors, the obgims leaving anti abortion states, the maternal health care deserts that that then causes in these counties, that increase in maternal death rates,
that increase in infant death rates. Abortion really is one of those issues that touches every single thing, and I think over the last two years that's what we're starting
to see. And then the other thing I've covered quite a lot that I think is really important, especially as we get so close to the election, is anti abortion is strategy and conservative messaging around abortion, and the way, as overused as a word as gaslighting, is the way that they have gaslt voters and Americans into believing that the consequences of abortion bands are not as bad as
we can see they are every single day. And that is something that I'm just really really determined to make sure, little light stays shined on there.
It's amazing to me how many people feel comfortable with Republican messaging of leaving it to the states. That seems to be the fallback position, Like, what's wrong with leaving it to the states? Can you explain what's wrong with leaving it to the states?
Jessica, Yeah, absolutely, it's a really interesting it's leave it to the states. And the will of the people is the other term that they're using a lot, And what I find so interesting about that is that they're using that specifically to make it seem as if this is a people powered voter decision abortion bands right, because in truth,
vast majority of voters do not like abortion bands. They want abortion to be legal, and we're talking about a small group of extremist legislators imposing their will on the vast majority of voters. And so it's really important for Republicans to frame this as something that is up to the.
People, as if everyone's voting on it, as.
If everyone's voting on it, and of course, when people are trying to vote on it, like in the ten states where we're going to see in November that have ballot measures about abortion rights, Republicans are trying every single dirty trick in the book to stop voters from having a say, to get those issues off the ballot, to remove voters from the roles, to trick voters about what
the ballot measure says. And so it really is quite an obscene line to say that this is an issue that they've given back to the people, when in fact they have worked so incredibly hard to make sure that voters cannot touch abortion rights.
I'm going to just go deeply geeky for a second, but Jessica, as the author of Abortion every Day the newsletter, you definitely appreciate a good abortion geek out. The states with the highest levels of jerrymandering, which is the redistricting of usually legislative districts so that one party can protect its edge even if people in the state have beliefs that are different. The states with the highest levels of jerrymandering were also some of the quickest to pass abortion
bands after the fall of Row. And so this idea that like, we're just going to hand it back to the states and everything will be fine, Well, if voting is not fair in those states, you know, then then it really doesn't work. I realized that nothing makes people go to sleep faster than saying the word jerry mandering. So I will conclude by a side, but it really is so important, No, it's so important.
It is so important, so important.
Yeah, Like I feel like there was this moment also after the fall of Roe, when all of a sudden, you know, people were calling me and I'm sure Katie you were hearing this from your readers and viewers too, and saying like, how can this be? Everybody I know feels that this should be the law of the land.
And similar to gun issues, you know, the vast majority of people in poll after poll after poll believe that there should be, you know, some common sense measures to try to reduce the levels of gun violence in this country, and yet our laws don't say that.
Why is that?
And it kind of has been this like crash core in democracy for so many of us.
People have become so invested in why they can't vote on this issue. In states where there are no citizen led ballot initiatives, people are suddenly who have never thought about ballot initiatives before in their life are asking, well, why can't I vote on this? Right? There is this real interest in activism, activeness around abortion and democracy now.
I think, which is adding, I think to the gender gap. But let's get back to the way the Republicans are framing this conversation, because I think they're doing it pretty effectively in some ways. For example, at the recent vice presidential debate, jd Vance said the following.
First of all, I never supported a national ban.
I did during what I was running for Senate in twenty twenty two, talk about setting some men in a national standard. For example, we have a partial birth abortion ban in this in place in this country at the federal level. I don't think anybody's trying to get rid of that, or at least I hope not, though I know that Democrats have taken a very radical pro abortion stance.
But Nora, you know, one of the thing that's that changed is in the.
State of Ohio, we had a referendum in twenty twenty three, and the people of Ohio voted overwhelmingly, by the way against my position.
Jess, what did you think of jd Vance's comments during the vice presidential debate? So confusing that one undecided voter said she was surprised at how progressive he sounded on women's issues.
I jumped out of my seat. I'm surprised you guys couldn't hear me yelling from Brooklyn. I was so I mean, I knew that that line was coming. I had been predicting and writing about this line. National minimum standard, minimum national standard for a very long time. I was so frustrated. People don't know that those are the same thing. An abortion band and a minimum national standard are the same exact thing.
Explain.
So what Republicans have.
Done, what the anti abortion movement has done, is internally redefine ban. They say that ban only refers to a prohibition on abortion with zero exceptions, not even for women's lives. And so under that definition, there are no abortion bans in America. But something like what we would consider an abortion ban, like what Lindsey Graham has been pushing, a fifteen week ban with rape and incest exceptions. They're saying
that's a national minimum standard or a federal restriction. Right, So they're deliberately skewing what the word ban means so that voters are completely confused and that they don't understand that. When Trump says, oh, yeah, I would veto a national abortion ban, what he's really saying is I would veto a total prohibition on abortion with zero exceptions. But Republicans
aren't proposing that. Republicans are proposing twelve week bans, fifteen week bans, the things that they are calling restrictions and standards. And it's been so frustrating to watch sort of mainstream media outlets not pick up on this. Ask the Trump campaign what is a federal standard? What is the national minimum? National standard? So I've just been really harping on this one for ast time.
Literally when he said that during the debate, I was like, just called it because you've had you had done a video about exactly exactly that.
Well, can I ask a devil advocates question to both of you all? So I get people's frustration and anger at like a six week ban, right because oftentimes women don't know they're pregnant, right, and that is just sort of impossible, and don't be mad at me, ladies, But a fifteen week ban, so that is somebody who is almost four months pregnant, right, Why is that problematic? Because I think a lot of people support abortion, and even Roe V. Wade has a stipulation about the third trimester.
Now that's much later than this fifteen week ban. But why is that not acceptable? And help me understand why this is wrong.
I mean, I think you can come at it from two different ways, Like there's the ethical and then there's the logistical political. From an ethical point of view, you don't lose bodily integrity at a certain point, right, you don't stop being a human being at twelve weeks of pregnancy or fifteen weeks of pregnancy. You should always have to say over your own body and what is happening to you. And so from that point, I'm just all
on board with that. Ethically, from a sort of real life point of view, a lot of people won't know they're pregnant. A lot of people don't have access to
great healthcare, sex education. I mean, this is one of the things that's really so frustrating about a lot of Republican policies is that they're passing these abortion bands and saying, well, someone should know they're pregnant by then, But then they're getting rid of sex education and they're getting rid of birth control, right, And so if you're creating a world where people don't have access to birth control, they don't know anything about their bodies, they don't have affordable health
caare you're making it very, very difficult. And then of course all of these hurdles. Let's say you say, okay, well abortion is legal at fifteen weeks, but up until then you need to have a waiting period and you need to travel out of your county. Well, how many people can afford to take two days off of work and get child care right? And so it all sort of combines into this big hot mess that I think makes it just politically ontonable as well as ethically.
I guess I also just think about, you know, what is real and what is imagined? Like I do think that anti abortion folks have done a really good job of making us picture that woman, usually hypothetical, who's like terminating her pregnancy at thirty weeks, thirty two weeks just because she doesn't feel like having a baby, and that's a terrible thing to imagine. But that feels very imaginary to me. And what's real are these real human women who are coming forward. Like Amanda Zerowski in Texas.
I was eighteen weeks pregnant and on August twenty third, I went for a walk and I could tell that something was wrong. I messaged my ob She discovered that I have or had something called an incompetent cervix, which basically means that I had dilated obviously way too early, and so she informed me that miscarriage was inevitable.
Both of us.
Wondered, like, if this is inevitable, what's the next thing for us?
What is our next course for healthcare?
We asked our doctor, and we asked the MFM. We asked all the nurses, you know, isn't there something you can do? And they said no, I couldn't make the decision for myself. We couldn't make the decision.
For our daughter.
Our doctors couldn't make the decision. I mean, they were just as furious as we were because their hands were hide I mean, had they acted, they would have been charged with a felony.
Tell us about Amanda's story, Cindy.
So Amanda for those who don't know, and at the Metia where we had the honor of helping her tell her story for the first time. Back in the fall of twenty twenty two, she was eighteen weeks pregnant. She was in a situation that now has become very familiar to us. But she was one of the first to come forward wanted pregnancy, and she and her husband Josh got the terrible news that something had gone wrong. She
was feeling terribly. She went to the hospital and they basically told her, your baby's not going to make it, but you are not sick enough yet to have this termination, and so they sent her home, and to no one's surprise, she developed sepsist spiked a fever, was feeling terrible, ended up losing the baby, of course, but additionally in the ICU, really afraid for her own life.
Why did they tell her she couldn't get the abortion then and there.
Because it wasn't clear that she herself was going to die. And I think what happens in these situations, and we've seen this again and again, is that individual doctors in a state like Texas, like Alabama, where you have these attorney generals who are just making their names and making their careers on prosecuting doctors, prosecuting anybody they see as trying to aid in a bet and abortion, it's very very hard for an individual doctor to go up against that.
And so you're talking about lawyers on a hospital's review board. It's a complicated process. And by the way, when people say, why don't individual doctors just take this on and do these abortions themselves if they're this upset about not being able to help women, you can't do that, not in
a hospital setting, not in twenty twenty four. So I think you know the important thing, getting back to your question, Katie, is that a woman like Amanda who almost lost her life and now doesn't know whether she's going to be able to have a child again because of the way her fertility was compromised, because of how long this was allowed to go on, She's a real woman, and I would put her life and the life of so many
other women like Kate Cox and Nancy Davis. I would weigh those above this imaginary person who's supposedly making these very selfish late term choices.
Another way, this whole conversation, Jessica has been framed is, and we've heard it again and again from the Republicans, is this whole idea of abortion after birth, which of course conjures up these terrifying images for people who feel uncomfortable with the idea of a quote unquote late term abortion,
which is also not really a thing. Can you talk about that because I don't feel that the Democrats have explained that Kamala Harris didn't respond to like do you favor any restrictions during the debate, and I think people are left with this image that really distorts the whole issue. Can you talk about that?
Yeah?
And I think it's what Cindy said right, like, it's not based in reality. We're not talking about real people there. And the post birth abortion message has been just infuriating to watch takeoff, and it's been really scary because I've seen it make an impact, you know, I'm trying to pay attention to forums and seeing what people are talking about, and it is making an impact. People do believe that doctors are executing babies a week after birth. It's really
really terrible. But what Democrats have an opportunity to do is to tell voters what they're actually talking about when they say post birth abortion, and what they're actually talking about. The laws they're actually talking about are palliative care for fatally ill newborns. So if a baby is born too early to survive, if a newborn has a fatal condition and they're only going to live for a few hours, parents can make the decision to decline painful, medically invasive procedures,
have a few moments alone with their child. You know, the nurse will set up a private room in the nick use so they can say goodbye while the baby passes away. That is what they're calling post birth abortion. That's what these laws, that's who these laws protect, and that's what they're calling post birth abortion. And it's so important.
I think that Democrats are making that clear to voters that in fact, what the talking about is a really important, vital service to parents who are greeting and dealing with an awful, terrible, tragic situation.
They're not really doing a very good job of talking about that is that because they're afraid the imagery is just too painful. But it's so critically important, it's so important.
I think that there has just been this fear for so long to talk about abortion later in pregnancy, and I think they feel like if they even go into that conversation just a little bit, that they're going to be dragged into it. But I actually do think that I've said this quite a lot. I think it's one
of our strongest messages. You know, when you look at someone like Amanda Zarowski, when you look at the stories of people who have come out since row is overturned, these are overwhelmingly people who were later on in their pregnancies. These are not people who are six seven weeks pregnant, right, Like, the reason that they were in these terrible situations is because they were later in pregnancy. And so those are the stories that we need to be telling and sharing.
Jess in that debate, in that moment when Kamala Harris is asked, well, don't you favor any restrictions and what about nine month? What should she have said?
If she still favors restrictions, then she's going to have to support that. I mean, I think that this is part of the issue, right, is that right now the Hairs campaign has made clear that they want to restore row right, and so Roe does have restrictions, and so if that is what they're pushing for, then she needs to sort of back that up. If it was me, and because I don't support any restrictions, I think you have to say there's no point in pregnancy where a
woman stops being a human being. Let's talk about the real women we know. Let's talk about Aman Jazerowski. Let's talk about Kate Cox, Let's talk about this imaginary threat versus the real women that this is happening to.
Let's talk about when somebody would be doing this, and what the circumstances are right.
And what the circumstances are, and let's talk about what a later abortion looks like, because you're talking about something that only a few clinics in the country offer, that can be ten twenty thousand dollars, That is a multi day procedure. That is not something that anyone is going into willy nilly. This is not something that someone just wakes up and decides to do.
Right.
And I think if voters understood that and knew that, and I think if she had said, let's talk about quose birth abortion, Let's talk about who you're talking about. Such and such family had this situation and they got to say goodbye to their son. That's who you're calling executioners. Because that's the truth.
Jess.
We have you here. Just a day or two after the news broke that, Milania Trump, in her upcoming book, says that she is fundamentally and forcefully for a woman's right to choose, that it's a really, you know, sacred thing, and she supports it wholeheartedly and fact Sandy, after that story broke, she issued the audio of that portion of it.
Let's take a listen.
Individual freedom is a fundamental principle that I safeguard without a doubt. There is no room for compromise when it comes to this essential right that all women possess from birth individual freedom. What does my body, my choice really mean?
So, jess what is going on here?
Am I allowed to curse? Am I allowed to drop? I mean, it's a crock of shit. It's a total crock of shit. Like, let's be serious. Her husband is down over twenty points with women. There are stories of women dying. You know, in the national conversation. A version is the political issue that is driving voters right now. And it is not a coincidence that she is coming out with this statement right now.
I think it is.
It's one of the more craven things I've seen in a long time. And you know, in addition to the audio, she actually also put out a video with saying these lines, and at the end of the video there's sort of like a picture of her book and a prompt to go buy the book. And I can't help but think that she is, you know, hawking this forty dollars book on the backs of dead women. That's really what's happening. She knows that this is a popular issue. She's not
I just wrote an article about this. She's not pro choice, she's pro Millagna, right. I think it's both that she can see the writing on the wall and she can see how popular abortion rights are and this is a way to sell her book. But it also certainly helps Trump if Republican women.
I was going to say, is this effective? It may be craven, but does it work?
I think so, because I think for Republican women, the ability to further fool themselves and say, oh, while his wife is going to have some influence on him, and if his wife believes this, he would never fully ban abortion, right. I do think it will work to some extent. I am really concerned about it.
But do we have any proof that he has ever taken her feelings or wishes into account in the past.
No.
I mean, but I think at the point that you're a woman voting for Trump anyway, there's so much like delusion involved regardless that I think it's just one of those things. It's almost like it's an excuse right, Like if you're a Republican woman and your pro choice Malanya saying this Trump saying, I'm giving it back to the people. I'm going to be too, a national abortion ban.
And I support IVF. I'm going to give it to people for free right.
It gives you this excuse and commission to vote for him, even against your own morals. And it's ridiculous and none of that is true, but I do think for some women voters it will work.
Unfortunately, let's talk about sort of the bigger picture, because you believe right wing extremists don't just want to see abortion outlawed a national ban, but they this is part of a larger effort to gosh. I don't think it's marginalized, but to take women back into the nineteen fifties and to remove so many rights. I saw a video about these THEO Bros saying they want to get rid of the nineteenth Amendment.
So the THEO Bros are a group of mostly millennial Christian pastors and influencers, many of them, most of them even will tell that they are Christian nationalists. I think it's important to say that not all of them hold every belief that being said, I think some common beliefs that I have encountered are that we should be repealing the Nineteenth Amendment. They'll talk about the dead Constitution and how the Ten Commandments should take its place.
I want a Christian nation more than a republic. I mean, talk about this less than underground movement that is bubbling up that is really attacking women in general.
Yeah, this was never just about abortion. Abortion to me was a means to an end. I think this is about reinforcing traditional gender norms, erasing women from the public sphere. What better way to do that than ensure that they are forever pregnant. It is not a coincidence that the same people who are pushing these bands are also pushing birth control restrictions. Whether they're open about it or not, that is what's happening.
You know.
People ask me, well, are they going to go for birth control next? And I say, you know, it's already happening. We're already seeing attacks on birth control. That's here talk about that.
What are the attacks on birth control?
Well, I mean it's another one of these language games that they're playing where they say I would never ever bean birth control. I just want to be an abortion. But it just so happens that for the last ten years they've been laying the legal groundwork to argue that iud's an emergency contraception, are abortions, right, And so when they go to restrict IUDs, when they go to a restrict emergency contraception, they can just say those aren't birth control, those are abortions.
To take it a step further, you have all these quote unquote wellness influencers on TikTok talking about the dangers of regular old birth control and what hormones will do to your body, which is basically birth control, not emergency birth control, right, not the morning after direct anything like that,
just regular old birth control. How much of this is demographic fear that white people are losing their place in societ and this idea that white people must go forth and pro create because the birth rate is declining in this country.
I think that's a huge part of it. I don't think it is a coincidence that the people, the wellness influencers that we see promoting these messages are also there's a lot of intersections with the tradwife movement, right.
There is this very racist.
Component to all of this that's like, we need more white babies, we need more white women in the home producing white Christian children for America. That is very much the center of this movement, whether or not they're explicit about it, that is absolutely what's happening. And in addition to birth control, attacks on birth control, the fact that we're seeing attacks on women's right to travel also not a coincidence. Right, Another way to trap women in anti choice states at home.
At tax on the right to travel. Is that about the trafficking laws? What is happening there?
Yeah, I'm talking about what they call the anti trafficking laws. So in Idaho and Tennessee they have passed what they call anti trafficking laws that say you can't bring a minor out of state for an abortion with that parental permission, which sounds sort of semi reasonable on its face, but in fact the law is written in such a way that if you give a minor money gas money to get out of state, you're an abortion trafficker. If you send them the URL to an abortion clinic, you're an
abortion trafficker. And now in Texas they're passing these laws as local ordinances for women of all ages, not just teenagers. And this is why I write in the book what Happens to teens one day comes for us all the next where they're trying to make people civily liable for taking women out of state to get abortions. And so this is sort of already happening. And I wrote in
the book about the Alabama Attorney General, Steve Marshall. He argued very in a legal brief that if they want to, they have the right to restrict pregnant women's travel in the same way that they have the right to restrict the movements of a sex offender. Because the state has a vested interest in protecting potential sexual assault victims. The state has an interest in protecting a fetus from a woman who wants to leave the state to have an abortion.
And so we are on the precipice very much so of being told that if we leave the state while pregnant, we are trafficking our own fetus. Like this is here, it is, it is happening.
Yeah, comparing pregnant people to sex offenders is pretty chilling.
Yeah, it is.
And the whole thing about rape incest in the life of the mother. Even the most conservative anti choice people it seems to me in the past have made those or understood or promoted those exceptions, but now increasingly they're not so. So that's when you hear about a ten year old or a twelve year old raped by an uncle or a stepfather, basically being told you have to carry that baby.
Yeah, and they're getting much more radical.
It's not just the lack of exceptions, but the rise of they call themselves abortion abolitionists, who believe that women should be tried as murderers for having abortion. And we're seeing more and more of these bills proposed in different states. I wrote about one in South Carolina where it was something like two dozen Republicans co sponsored the bill. This is not some fringe movement. This is something that really is gaining a lot of steam. And so they're going
full force ahead. While the rhetoric has softened, Right, they know that publicly they can't say, right, they're what they're actually doing because Americans are so angry. But while the rhetoric has softened, their politics have gotten much much more extreme.
Aren't they actually calling for the death sentence in South Carolina? Yeah? That was that was part of I believe what I read an abortion every day.
Yeah, they were calling for the death sentence for women who have abortions. It stands to a reason, once you say that abortion is murder, right, you can't separate the pregnant person out from that criminalization right. And that's the reason we're already we're seeing people get criminalized for miscarriages, for stillbirths. We saw Brittany Watson, Ohio get arrested for abuse of a corpse, for flushing a miscarriage. We saw a woman in South Carolina arrested for the end of
her pregnancy for murder. They are very eager to punish and to criminalize.
Let's look at the future, Jessica and Cindy, what do reproductive rights look like? If Donald Trump is elected in November? What more could be done to affect this issue?
I mean really overnight. He could enact an informal national ban. He doesn't need to pass a national ban through Congress, and they have plans to do this. They've been very explicit about this, that they would replace the head of the FDA so that they could repeal approval of abortion medication, which sixty three percent of people who and their pregnancies use.
They would enforce the Comstock Act, which is this very very old obscenity law that makes it illegal to mail to ship abortion medication, tools for abortion, birth control, anything that they could label obscene. And so really overnight, all of a sudden, no matter what seat you live in, it's not possible to have an abortion, and that is their plan.
First of all, the just just laid out an incredibly chilling picture. I know, sorry, no, no, I mean, I think one important thing to keep in mind is that even if there is not a Trump residency, you know, even if Kamala Harris is able to win in November, the situation in a lot of states is really really dark,
and it's not going to change immediately. And I have really kind of come around to agreeing with the activists and the advocates who say we need something better than Roe v. Wade, because I talked to someone in Alabama who said, you know, the Dobs decision didn't make a difference to us. Women here didn't have access to hospitals where they could get care. You know, there's a ban on using Medicaid funding for abortion, which means that if
you are without resources, you often couldn't get one. Even when it was legal. I just think we need a much better system that kind of takes the politics out of it and leaves women's healthcare in their own hands and gives them the support that they need to make decisions.
One interesting note is that for women under the age of forty five, this issue has trumped excuse the word the economy, Beyonce.
We like to say it's Beyonce.
Beyonce, the you know, the economy in terms of their motivation for voting. So how much power will Kamala Harris actually have to turn things around? Because some of these things are kind of set in stone the Supreme Court, for example, some of the changes that have been made in states. Whether she'll have enough votes to make abortion legal across the land? So what are her options if she's elected?
I mean, in the same way, she'll have power over these agencies, right, and the ability to work with the FDA to reduce restrictions on abortion, medication, to increase telehealth. Asindy said, nothing is going to change overnight. There's not
like a magical thing we can do. Unfortunately, things this is a long fight, right, we have to sort of like settle in and be prepared for a multip your fight, but there are things that you can do to make things a little bit easier on the ground, to give more support to governors, to give more support to activists, and frankly, I think even just having a president who is comfortable using the word abortion, talking about abortion, talking
about what's happening with abortion rights as a national health emergency will light a different sort of fire under people than we've seen under Biden.
And you've said that you at some point would like to stop writing the newsletter Abortion every day, right, Like, at some point do you get a weekend back?
At least maybe I could pare it down to abortion every week at some point. That's my retirement plan.
Well.
I love talking to both of you about this really important issue. Jessica. Thank you for all the work you've done. It is really probably challenging to write about this every day, and I'm sure you get pretty depressed, but I know readers like Cindy and myself really appreciate your work, and you appreciate you writing abortion, our bodies, their lives, and the truths we used to win. Thank you both so much for being here. Cindy, thank you for being my co host. I loved it.
I loved being your co pilot, Katie. And Katie also thank you for giving a platform to these issues, because even though, as Jessa said, they're so popular with people, they're not always popular with media outlets. And you've always just, you know, encouraged frank conversation and I think we're grateful.
Thank you both. Thanks for listening. Everyone. If you have a question for me, a subject you want us to cover, or you want to share your thoughts about how you navigate this crazy world reach out. You can leave a short message at six five one two five five five, or you can send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. Next Question is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Couric Media. The executive producers
are Me, Katie Kuric, and Courtney Ltz. Our supervising producer is Ryan Martz, and our producers are Adriana Fazzio and Meredith Barnes. Julian Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my newsletter, wake Up Call, go to the description in the podcast app or visit us at Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me on Instagram and all my social media channels.
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