Abortion: The Body Politic, Part 3

we left off. When someone doesn't really know who I am and have heard that I'm a lawyer, but they don't know how much about me? When I'd say, well, have you ever heard of the case of roversus Wade? And then they're usually stunned, because I mean, it's aten still described as the most one of the most well known cases in favor of shouldn't that there is? My name is Linda Nelling. Coffee and Iron, my late friend Sarah Weddington were the two women did that pursued the

case of Roe versus Wade. It's impossible to talk about the abortion rights movement without first talking to Linda. Linda is the last living Road prosecutor after Sarah Weddington died on December Linda knows the case intimately, and at eighty she's witnessed the decades long fight to chip away at Row. She spoke to us from a studio not far from her home, which she shares with her longtime partner Becky Hart.

I had the distinct honor of having a blind day with Lee Cogan December night three, and over the course of a whole evening, she said that she had worked with Sarah Winnington on this Ruby Wade case. I said, well, no, if that can't be, I'm a Dallas side. It was a Dallas attorney named Linda Coffee, and her face fell because she's that introverted. So for thirty eight years we've been together, She's done mostly bankruptcy law, and I've done

different jobs and things. Linda is a lifelong Texan and lives in a small town about eighty five miles east of Dallas. She was born in Houston, graduated from Rice University,

and went on to law school. I went to University of Texas at Austin and there were only about including me, there was only about six women into the class that that I started with, and we all would talk together in the one place we usually could talk and and not have to worry about anyone overhearing us was in the the women's restroom, which was on the first floor of the building. We were coming up at a time

when things were changing quickly for women. That was really excited to think about helping women prepared to gain higher positions and to seek a way of continuing their education and not be compromised or having to worry about being fired if they became pregnant or had someone decided they had to meet children and they might not continue to

do a good job. After graduating from law school with honors in getting the second highest score on the state bar exam, Linda earned a coveted clerkship with Judge Sarah Hughes, Texas is first female federal judge who was best known for swearing and Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force one after President Kennedy was assassinated in nineteen sixty three that I was thankfully once again, here's Becky Hart. It's hard to get a clerk job for the judges. You have

to be intelligent and do very well in law school. Succinctly, Linda's scores were so high that she applied for that job, and she got it. It's an honor, and that's what set the whole ball in motion on abortion rights. The first case that I was aware of was the case out in California in nineteen sixty seven. California Governor Ronald Reagan was among the first to liberalize abortion laws, extending

exceptions for therapeutic abortions. But the case Linda's talking about came two years later in nineteen sixty nine, the People Versus Bellis. The four to three decision from the state Supreme Court declared California's eighteen fifty criminal abortion law unconstitutional. The ruling helped repeal a conviction of Dr Leon P. Bellis, who helped a woman get an abortion. It was a big,

big news deal. So I've just read about the case just in the Dallas Morning News, and then I knew there were some other cases that then followed, like there was a case in Wisconsin, and then there was a case in New York. So that's why I thought that there would be a decent chance to win the case if we filed in Texas. I still kept in contact with some of the with Sarah what Eaton and some of the other women that that I knew in my

class that it graduated. One of the things I did when I decided that I had a sufficient basis was I wrote to Sarah because I had heard she was plady to follow them suit against the Texas abortion Law. So I wrote her a letter and said to see if she was interested in and enjoining me in that suit. They teamed up and on March third, nineteen seventy, Linda filed a suit in Dallas on behalf of their client,

Norman McCorvey, using the pseudonym Jane Rowe. The hearing before the three judge Corey in Dallas went went pretty smoothly. The lower court unanimously ruled in Jane Roe's favor, finding the Texas abortion law unconstitutional because it violated the right to privacy. But when the district Attorney Henry Wade yes that Wade announced he would continue to pursue abortion cases, Linda was able to file a repeal directly to the

Supreme Court. Oral arguments were set for December thirteenth, nineteen seventy one. We here arguments number eighteen against whenever you're ready, Mr Chief Justice, and may have pleased the court. The instant case is a direct appeal from a decision of the United States District Court of the Northern District of Texas, and then again on October eleventh, nine first eighteen to

roll against Wade Yes Lyndon. Sarah had to reargue the case, a rare occurrence because there were only seven justices present the first time. Weddington, you may proceed when here you're ready,

Mr Chief Justice, and may have placed the court. We are once again before this Court to ask relief against the continued enforcement of the Texas Abortion Statute, and asked that you affirm the ruling of the three judge court below, which held our statute unconstitutional for two reasons, the first that it was vague and the second that it interfered with the Night Amendment right of a woman to determine whether or not she would continue or terminate a pregnancy.

As you will recall there are Linda recalls a few details that stand out about her Supreme Court experience. The closest restroom to where the Supreme Court held their arguments was three three big staircases below. People would probably notice that if they were women, but not not men. And at one of the arguments, some of the justices wives

were sitting in the courtroom. I wouldn't have recognized the wives, but I just told us we were walking in that several of the wives of the Supreme Court were there. So I just assumed that that probably meant from people that had been around more Supreme Court arguments than I had, that that was probably a good sign that that wasn't considered important by the court. While Linda and Sarah split the oral arguments and the lower court, it was Sarah

who presented and the Supreme Court. Linda took notes. She spoke, and I thought she did very well, and uh, it was kind of hard to write everything down, so I tried to just write down the questions because I figured i'd remember the the answers. I think I was probably more nervous that time. I wasn't that nervous before the three judge court in Dallas, but to get it when

you're really going for the highest court in the land. Curiously, the original Road decision was leaked to a Supreme Court clerk shared the court ruling on background to a Time magazine reporter, But when the decision was delayed slightly and Time a weekly ran the story anyway, it appeared in print the day before the actual decision was handed down.

I first read the Time magazine that said the Supreme Court was ready to overrule the Texas abortion law and it was going to be about a serace of seven to vote. So I had read about it, I think

the day before it came out. And Sarah said she found out about it when she heard the decision that was rendered the next day, and that's when she started getting her phone was calling and and at first she wasn't sure what it was, and they were they were saying that we had won, and that was just that was just great because the phones were calling and everything was mostly mostly on the only the people that called were very positive about it. I really thought that was

gonna be it after the first Supreme Court victory. But the afternoon after the decision in Roe versus Way came out, L b J died. The senior partner in the firm that I was with came in and said, well, you've been knocked off the front page because L b J died, And and that's what was the headline and the Dallas Morning News and then our story I think it was below what they called below the fold. Here's abortion legal scholar Mary Ziggler to help explain the details of the decision.

Gen the Supreme Court voted seven to two in nineteen seventy three that that law was unconstitutional and that it violated a constitutional right to privacy that the Court had recognized in earlier rulings on things like marriage and contraception. The Court held that right to privacy was broad enough to encompass the decision about whether to have an abortion, and the Court laid out what at the time was called the trimester frameworks that would be used to determine

if abortion laws were constitutional. The Court also rejected a lot of key anti abortion arguments, like the argument that the Constitution recognized fetal personhood, which would have made abortion unconstitutional nationwide. So, coming out of Row, um, you know, the majority of state laws that were then on the books were rendered unconstitutional. We'll be right back. Well, I think it depends on where you stand and who you are,

whether you think that Row was successful or unsuccessful. Historian Ricky Solinger. When feminists and other women experienced the Roe v. Wade decision in they expected that a nationalization of the right to abortion would lead to a number of transformative

experiences for women in the United States. They expected marriages that were more equal, They were possessors of their own sexuality, that they could have premarital sex without the fear of unwed pregnancy and the shames that that had carried for several decades. They felt much safer embracing their own sexuality

and pursuing it. Then, of course, there were the economic expectations that if you can control your fertility, you have a much better chance of being able to pursue the educational programs that you said before, yourself, making professional choices, being able to get a job, that you can time your maternity according to your professional growth, that you can stay or go where you can be an equal to your husband and also be economically independent, changes the landscape

so profoundly that you're hardly the same person anymore that that has enormous repercussions for what woman means. Other women have been very clear eyed about the limits of the impact of legalization. As Black women, we knew that role was going to be inadequate to protect us from the

intersectional oppression. Activists. Academic and one of the founders of the reproductive justice movement, Loretta Ross, the National Council of Negro Women wrote a statement about that in nine three in response to ROW, when they talked about how role will become just another way to deny Black women are

full human rights, are full right to self determination. And the reason we know that, or knew that well because there were so many way other ways that we had already experienced where Black women's parenting and reproductive options were being threatened, like with sterilization abuse, but more gregious and

more obvious. Was at any time Black women became civically active around voting rights or housing rights or trying to fight violence that was technical any of that time, the first thing the government would do would be to threaten to take our children away, you know, and fighting well abortion rights didn't address that. We always knew that even if we had fully funded abortion services that were totally safe and totally accessible, we still suffer from a racialized

gender oppression that we had to fight. The leaders of Reproductive Justice point out regularly that abortion has been legal for fifty years, but how accessible has it been two

women without resources to be adequate consumers. So we know that Within two years of ROW, the Congress worked very hard to pass the High Amendment, which by the by the was complete, which said no federal funding for abortion the one medical prostidure that was singled out to be excluded from federal funding um under the Medicaid Act, and

that meant that poor women were poor choicemakers. The pro choice framework assumed that you have choices, it's a marketplace idea, when actually the marketplace doesn't work well for people who don't have you know, the currency or the privileged as a marketplace doesn't the same way the SBA. The Texas abortion ban is not gonna fall most heavily on women with the means to go to another state. It's gonna fall it was heavily on the people who are trapped,

who can't go anywhere. The Norman G. Mccorby's of the world, the original Rose who idonically was from Texas. Loretta understands this all too well. She's the survivor of sexual violence and sterilization. You might recall some of Loretta's story from episode two, but how a university while I was a student there, I accepted implantation of the i U D called the Dalkon shield in despite her i U causing acute pelvic inflammatory disease. A doctor refused to take out

the device and her fallopian tubes burst. I didn't enter this movement fighting for abortion rights. I was into the movement fighting for the right to have children. And it wasn't until I got into the work that I saw that they were two sides of the same coin, and it's all about denying women the right to con to make our own reproductive decisions, whether to have a child

or not to have a child. And then when you intersect the sexual violence I had been through, then I knew that we needed a larger framework than what the current discussions were paralyzed by that pro life pro choice dichotomy, which was so inadequate for describing my lived experiences. And so how reproductive justice developed was at a conference organized by the Illinois Pro Choice Alliance in June in Chicago. On the first day of the conference, we heard a

presentation by representative of the Clinton administration. Hillary Clinton had been put in charge of the Clinton administration effort to do health care reform, but this representative said that they knew was going to be a fight to get healthcare reform past the Republicans, and so they conceptualized that if they omitted or at least reduced all references to reproductive healthcare, that that would increase his chances of passage. There were

twelvels black women who were at this conference. The prefer might have been even more but able. Mabel Thomas, who was a Georgia state representative at the time, called us together in her hotel room that night after we heard this presentation, and she's like, this doesn't make any sense. Why would they come to a feminist conference, a pro choice conference asked us to endorse a healthcare plan that

omitsreproductive healthcare. That's like the most male centric health care plan you could think of, because reproductive healthcare is what drives women to the doctor. That was the night in which we conceptualize to reproductive justice because the other thing that we realized was that we were dissatisfied with how abortion was always isolated from social justice issues, and that

isolation wasn't doing us any good. Are representing what black women went through because any time a woman is pregnant, oh well, let's put it this way, she doesn't even have to be pregnant. Any time her period is just late, she has what we call all these oh my God conversations, Oh my God, am I pregnant? Oh my God? What am I gonna tell my mom? Or what am I gonna tell my partner? Am I gonna keep my job? Or can I stay in school? Or do even I'm

in bedroom to put this child in. So she's got good answers to the oh my God questions, This is gonna turn an unplanned pregnancy into a wanted child. But if she has bad answers to the oh my God question, she may even turn a planned pregnancy into an abortion. And so for the pro life movement and the pro choice we with the both start with the pregnancy is

starting too far downstream in our opinion. If you really want to quote reduce the need for abortion, really talk about how actual human beings make decisions and address those things that discourage people from becoming parents. And so we spliced together social justice and reproductive rights to create the term reproductive justice. We define reproductive justice as the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to raise your children in safe and

healthy environments. And then that was how we articulated in a but by two thousand and four, a new generation of activists were coming up Black women in particular, who are arguing that the original three tenants didn't include gender not conforming in LGBT people, and so they added a fourth tenant to talk about the right to gender identity, sexual pleasure, and self determination in terms of one's reproductive

options and choices. I'm pleased to say that even though we didn't intend it to move so successfully from the margins to the center, it has done that, and it is supplanted how people talk about reproductive politics moving up beyond that pro choice, pro life. Binary people have realized that that framework, that limited framework, has outlived it's useful this.

My name is Laurada Lee Wallace, and I am a organizer based in othern California, and I am work with our statewid abortion front here in California called Access Reproductive Justice.

So my first abortion, the pregnancy test came back positive, and before I could even get off the toilet with the pregnancy test in my hand, I had messaged one of my friends who I knew was very active in the reprosidais and was also on the board of our abortion from back home, who was also like my supervisor at the time at the Reproductive dresses order that I was working with. Um, it was like, Hey, I'm pregnant,

don't want to be what do I do? Like verbatim, And she was like, perfect, you came to the right place. We'll get you squared away. Like what do you need? And I'm like, I can't afford an abortion. First and foremost, I was a Medicaid recipient, and we know because of the High Ammendment that you can't medicate recipients, can't you know, use their Medicaid to provide to cover abortion costs. It was also a full time student at the time a

couple of years emancipated from the foster care system. So I was essentially like on my own, um, and I have messaged her and asked her like, I don't know, I don't really know what I need right now, um, but I just need the money. UM. So I was able to pledge maybe like a hundred dollars to my abortion at the time, but that was all I could

do and the Abortion Fund covered the rest. But as I was in the clinic, I was like watching a bunch of news coverage around the murders of Brianna Taylor in the mad Aubrey as I'm sitting in this abortion clinic as I'm also thinking, like I hope I don't get COVID, and also as my support people can't come in with me to the clinic because of COVID. So I'm like sitting here in this clinic for like I have like three appointments, like two and a half three hours at a time, um if like peak covid. Um So,

I was able to get my abortion medication. But I had my appointment on a Friday, and because the clinic wasn't open on Saturday or Sunday, and there's that twenty four hour waiting period. Even though I had had them my ultrasound and like everything was good to go, I had to wait until that following Monday to then get my medication. But then I had to wait another two and a half hours after the doctor got done seeing

everybody to just to get my medication. UM So I was able to get you know, my medication and go home and you know, finish my abortion and went back a few weeks later to make sure that um I didn't have like any retain products um of the pregnancy, and I didn't, so I was fine. Um but I did like the cart was outside of the abortion clinic. Was so happy that it was finally over because I knew immediately when I was pregnant that I wanted to have an abortion. There was also no shame in it.

I was actually also very empowered that for the first time in my life and realizing, you know that this is a decision that I'm making for me and historically, you know, black women and them have not been able

to make their own reproductive decisions. And also as someone who has essentially been a word of the state, you know, being owned, you know, by the state as a foster, as the foster care youth, it made all the difference for me because I'm like, Wow, this is like one of the biggest decisions for me, um in my life that I'm going to going to make or to not make right regardless of what happens, is going to impact

the trajectory of my life forever. So being able to make that decision as a black person first and foremost um and also for myself made all the difference for me. When we come back how abortion got politicized before Roe v. Wade, the pro life movement was not partisan. Daniel Williams is

a historian and author of Defenders of the Unborn. The pro life movement before Roe v. Wade, if one had to describe it as associated with a particular ideology rather than the other, it would be more accurate to describe it as a liberal political movement than a conservative one, because the majority of pro life activists before Row were for the most part Democrats who believed in the principles

of an expanded social welfare state. The pro life movement was overwhelmingly Catholic before Roe v. Wade, and most Northeastern and Midwestern Catholics had in the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies been shaped to at least a certain extent by the assumptions of of New Deal liberalism, the assumptions that the state had an obligation to care for the less fortunate. A number of pro life activists in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies were also hosted

Vietnam War. The number were very liberal Democrats. UH number head concerns about capital punishment. UH and some of the pro life organizations at the time advocated expanded a maternal health insurance, subsidized daycare, other ways to to encourage women to not have abortions and to empower them to make the decisions not to have abortions. What I call the abortion myth is the fiction that the religious right galvanized as a political movement in response to the Roe v.

Wage decision of January twenty two, nineteen seventy three. I'm Randall Balmer, John Phillips, Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College, and my most recent book is Bad Faith, Race and the Rise of the Religious Right. To understand the context, you have to understand that for roughly fifty years before that moment, evangelicals were not engaged politically, certainly not in

an organized way. Many were not even register devote, and so there emergence as a political force in the nineteen seventies was a major event, and as we see now, it really began the reshaping of the American political landscape on the subject of abortion, and eventually row evangelicals were actually supportive in Christianity. Today magazine, which is the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, conducted a conference with the Christian Medical Society.

Twenty three heavyweight theologians from the evangelical world showed up and over several days debated the morality of abortion. At the conclusion of that meeting, they issued a statement saying, we can't decide whether or not abortion is a moral issue,

but we think it should be available. In seventy one, the Southern Baptist Convention, not known as the redubt of Liberalism, passed the resolution calling for the legalization of abortion, which they reaffirmed in nineteen seventy four, the year after Roe v. Wade, and again in nineteen seventy six when the Roe v. Wade ruling was handed down. Several evangelical leaders praised the Roe v. Wade decision. The mobilization of evangelicals as a political movement did start with a court ruling, but it

wasn't row. It was a ruling on segregated private schools that came out of a district court in Washington, d c. And on June thirty nine, seventy one, the district court ruled that and the organization that engages in racial segregation or racial discrimination is not, by definition a charitable institution, and therefore it has no claims on tax exempt status. As the Internal Revenue Service began to enforce that ruling

over the course that I seventies. It got the attention of places like Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, a fundamental school that had segregation virtually written into its charter, as well as people like Jerry Folwell, who had started his own segregation academy in Lynchburg, Virginia in nineteen sixty seven. It's time now for the Old Time Gospel Hour with Jerry Folwell, master of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia.

We are not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. That is what proved to be the catalyst for the organizing surrounding the religious way. So how did the evangelical movement go from supporting school segregation to the powerful conservative force in American politics that it is today. The answer a man named Paul Wyrick. Wyrick was clever enough to realize that organizing a political movement to defend racial segregation was not likely to generate a huge grassroots audience, so he

made two moves. The first move he made was to say, no, we're not defending racial segregation. We are defending religious freedom, which is writing a page from the current current religious right Republican Party playbook his second move really fell into his lap, and that was the abortion issue, and that happened. In the midterm elections. Wyck determined, according to his own account, to go out at elect some improbable people in He focused on four Senate races, and in all four of

those elections. The final weekend, pro lifers leafletted church parking lots, and two days later all four favored Democratic candidates lost to anti abortion Republicans. He finally had found the issue that he could use to mobilize grassroots evangelicals. Abortion is

a very fairly low cost political issue. The fetus does not demand healthcare, a fetus does not demand an education, and so the adoption of abortion as the central plank of the religious right early in the nineties really it didn't didn't cost them much in terms of a political price. In the ninety six presidential election, evangelicals voted for one of their own, Jimmy Carter, a proud born again Christian.

But ahead of the nineteen eighty election, evangelical leaders openly targeted the Democrat and sought to find a candidate who would do more for their cause. They began sort of canvassing the Republican field, looking for a challenger two, Jimmy Carter, and finally, of course, they settled on Ronald Reagan, an unlikely choice because here you had governor of California, Hollywood actor.

Hollywood was not exactly known as a province of piety to many evangelicals, and somebody who had been divorced and remarried, who in nineteen sixty seven had signed into law of the most liberal abortion bill in the country. And nevertheless, the religious right decided that Reagan was going to be their political messiah. In night, I came across a memorandum from within the Reagan Bush campaign, and I don't remember the precise state, but I believe September of nine, and

the internal memorandum said, we're in trouble here. Uh, we're not pulling away from Carter. We have to somehow rejig our message. And one of the recommendations was to start talking about abortion. If there's even a question about when human life begins, isn't it our duty to err on the side of life. We must not rest. And I a pledge to you that I will not rest until a human life amendment becomes a part of our constitution. With a so called pro Life President in the White House.

Thanks to his evangelical base, the anti abortion movement gets to work once again. Legal scholar Mary Ziggler. Initially, the anti abortion movement focused its attentions on a constitutional amendment that would have not just overturned Robe, but banned abortion coast to coast. By the early eighties, it was becoming

increasingly clear that that just wasn't going to happen. So then the movement kind of changed its focus, and its inspiration in part came from Supreme Court decision where Ronald Reagan's first nominee, Sandra Day O'Connor writes this descent, essentially suggesting that Rod doesn't make a lot of sense. And so the anti abortion movement looks at this descent and says, you know, more people like Sandra Day O'Connor on the court.

We might not be able to get abortion banned nationwide, but we could at least get real overturned for groups life. The National Right to Life Committee overturning Roe v. Wade has become the Holy Grail, has has become the race on detra of the pro life movement, which it never

originally was. Again Daniel Williams and once the strategy shifted to that as the goal, then it became very difficult for any pro life activists to imagine supporting Democratic presidents or Democratic senators who would not want to see the Supreme Court shifted to the right on this particular issue, And similarly, with the Republican Party, became more and more difficult for most pro choice Republicans who care strongly about the issue to imagine staying in a party that was

moving so decisively toward making Row a thing of the past. If the goal is to appoint particular Supreme Court justices, then the situation that we're in today is one where Republican presidents are going to make sure that the justice that they appoint is going to likely vote overturn Row, and Democratic presidents, on the other hand, are always going to try to appoint a justice who supp courts abortion rights,

who wants to leave the parameters of route intact. It was not clear until the early at least that Supreme Court appointments would decide the fate of Row. The Supreme Court, it's what it's all about. The justices that I'm going to a point will be pro life. They will have a conservative bent. I think the case that most people are thinking about right now, in the case that every nominee gets asked about, Role v. Wade, Can you tell

me whether Roe was decided correctly? Center Again, I would tell you that Roe versus Wade decided in seventy three as a president United States Supreme Court, it has been reaffirmed well as a general proposition. I understand the importance of the precedent set forth in Roe v. Wade. But again, I can't pre commit or say yes, I'm going in with some agenda because I'm not. I don't have any agenda. I have no agenda to try to overrule casey um. I have an agenda to stick to the rule of

law and decide cases as they come. We'll be right back. Even if evangelicals didn't rally around the anti abortion movement until the late nineteen seventies, the anti agitation started almost immediately after row Here's sociologists Carol Joffey Roll versus Wade

was decided in January nineteen seventy three. Literally four days later in Congress Um there's a resolution introduced the so called Church Amendment, named after Senator Frank church A, that no entity would lose any phones if they refused to perform abortion. So it was clear to me that this was going to be an issue that was very divisive.

They called me and they said, would you be willing to help but start UH an outpatient abortion clinic in Boulder, And I said, yes, I think that would be an important thing to do, because I thought that that we mean implementing the roll versus way decision, which wouldn't mean anything unless doctors were doing abortions. Dr Warren Hern is a physician and director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic in Boulder, Colorado. He specializes in abortions that are harder to get, the

ones later in pregnancy. He's been doing this work for more than fifty years. I thought I would do this for a year or two then go back to school. I helped start this clinic. I was the founding medical director. I set up the clinic, I got the ments in the equipment, I wrote the protocols, I devised the whole system, and then I was performing all the abortions there. And by the end of that first year, it was clear to me that the performing abortions was the most important

thing that I could do in my medical career. Immediately, I became the target of very vicious attacks by the anti abortion people. I started getting obscene death threats in the middle of the night two weeks after we opened the office. There was a lot of hostility among in the medical community. There were some doctors who supported what we were doing, but it was very tense and very difficult.

It became clear to me that the resistance of this was really fanatic, but the anti abortion people were really frightening. They were threatening me and other people, and I couldn't understand why this was so controversial because we were helping women. There were five shots fir the front windows of my office. One of the bullets just missed a member of my staff.

I had just walked through the front room. I really expect, have expected for all this time to be assassinated at any time, So when I'm leaving my office, I checked the perimeter to see if they're out there. I cannot use the front door of my office when the anti abortion people who are demonstrated are out there, because I have to assume that they're armed and they will kill me at the first opportunity. Five of my medical colleagues

have been assassinated several at point blank range. I have received letters from the anti abortion fanatics saying, don't bother wearing a bullet proof vest. We're gonna go for a head shot. And that's what they did to Dr Tiller. One of the nation's most well known late term abortion doctors, Dr George Tiller, was and killed in church yesterday on me the thirty first, two thousand nine. Doctor George Tiller was was an usher for his Lutheran church in his

wife was singing in the choir. Dr Tiller was in the foyer of the church. Uh Scott Rhodor walked up to Dr Tiller and shot him in the head, assassinating him. To the abortion providing community, Dr Tiller was a saint, I mean, and they literally referred to him as Saint George. To the anti abortion community, he was this egregious murderer. Once again, Carol Joffe. There's only a handful of clinics in the United States where people can get later abortions

later here, meaning post twenty four weeks. Doctor Hearne for many years, has been one of them. He's been targeted for years. Dr Tiller in Wichita, who was a very close friend of of Dr Hearne. He for years was targeted. Um Bill O'Reilly when he had his Fox News show

repeatedly referred to him as Tiller the killer. Later that week, the week that Dr Tiller was assassinated, I was invited to speak at the Temple Manuel in Denver by the rabbi and the head of the religious Coalition for Abortion Rights. I was there taking there in an armored car by the the US Federal Marshals. My family was not allowed to be with me. They got there by other means, and there was a large group of people in the temple. It was a very very emotional situation to talking about

my friend who had been assassinated. And and so we're surrounded by armed officers. And at one point our son said to his mom, Mommy, are we the good ones? Are the bad ones? On several occasions when Dr Tyler was assassinated, I was put under the twenty four protection of US Federal Morrison, who were heavily armed. And one of the things they said, you may not sit with

your back to the window. So when I'm out with friends or my family, you know I'm in a wresting, I I don't sit with my back to window at home, we will not leave the window shades up at night. We closed the window shades. Where else an American medicine would we tolerate. This very important concept for me in my work on abortion and trying to understand it is the idea of abortion exceptionalism and the idea that abortion is treated like no other aspect of of the health

care system in America. It's a common procedure. Uh Women who have babies at different time in their lives have abortions, um Sometimes they have babies first and then an abortion. Sometimes have an abortion and then have babies when they're more ready to have children. A very common procedure. But where else do we see pickets? Do we see blockades? Do we see shootings? Do we see regulation that that exists? No? Nowhere else? I mean the state legislators over a thousand

restrictions passed over the years. I mean, just regulating in ways that are inappropriate. I will never forget the young woman who was a teenager in high school from northern state and she looked at me said thank you for giving me back my life. Well, you know, nothing takes the place of that another young woman. The first year

I was doing this told me how she felt. It makes me choke up every time I think about it, and and she said, he's going ever stopped doing this, So you know this, This moves me fifty years later, okay, to think about it. So I think that it's very important to concentrate on this human interaction, this human process of one person helping another person. That's what the practice of medicine is. To be an abortion doctor then and

now takes a particular type of person. We wanted to learn more about the people going into this profession in the midst of all this controversy. I think I was attuned to the need to fight free to reproductive freedom because I was born at home and home birth is also very controversial, so when I was born in Connecticut, it wasn't legal. So I feel like I came into this world being like, Yeah, you need to fight for

your bodily autonomy and for your reproductive experience. I'm Caitlin Gregory Davis, and I am a medical student at UVM Larner College of Medicine from a fourth year and I'm going into O b G I N at Brown. So I really always wanted to be a midwife. That was what I wanted to do when I was younger, and so to get involved UM, I first became a duela UM, which is, you know, a non medical labor and pregnancy

support person. I got trained with the DULA Project of New York City, which is actually an organization that does birth dualer services, but it also does abortion dualer services, and I ended up absolutely loving my abortion dealer shifts UM. I would go into the Planned Parenthood and up in the Bronx and also in Brooklyn UM and would just

be with people through their abortion. And so from there I decided that I wanted to be an abortion provider UM, which kind of steered me into a different path than midwif free UM in part just because you know, nurse midwives can do abortions in some states, but it's a little bit limited. And yeah, I didn't want to be limited by anything, and I knew that, like politically, things could always change, and so I felt like I needed to get a degree that would be the most likely

UM for these procedures to be accessible to me. So, in terms of abortion training, I think there are a lot of places, and especially now as laws are going to change, if a hospital is not able to do abortions, then like nobody can get trained, right, Like there needs to be the procedures in order to train the next generation. So if a hospital or a state UM decides that it's illegal, then like no students in that state are going to be able to get trained. I think it's

probably already happening. I know it's been a big issue in Texas UM since SP eight, and that has had a big effect on where I applied to residency UM. So I was applying in this this past fall. UM. You know, sp A was under way, and I pretty much did not apply or at least an't interview UM at any states where I felt like if Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortion would become illegal. I came to

medical school so that I could do this work. I didn't come to medical school to like be an m D so that I could deliver babies all the time, although that's great UM, and so I have had the thought like, oh my gosh, what if this becomes like entirely illegal, And then I went to medical school and can't do the thing that I wanted to do UM and so that feels really kind of like an uncertain future. UM. But it also just inspires me to do everything I can to keep this accessible and also to get all

the training that I can get. My name is Dr Bob and Kumar use he him pronouns, and I'm a family medicine physician working at Plant Parenthood, so I provide abortion care here. I'm also the medical director for Primary and trans Care, so provide some primary care and gender care as well. Um and I've been in Texas for

about seven years now. For me growing up in Corsicana, being we were undocumented at the time, and then being you know, brown skinned, gay, and then experiencing UH in that town and the over racism and really recognizing what life is like for people like me compared to other people. And then once I was in medical school, I was pro choice, had no sense of, you know, wanting to become an abortion provider, but then learned about how safe it is, how common it is, how few providers there are,

and what a drastic difference it makes. Recognize that there's a concentration of abortion access among folks of color, that most people are low income or poor, and it just was like, you know, of course, if I want to help people like me, even though I can never become pregnant, then the best thing I can do is the doctors

to provide abortion care. The abortion care that Dr Kumar had wanted to provide has been severely restricted since September when Texas enacted Senate Bill eight, which effectively prohibits abortions after six weeks. So we went from providing care up to um twenty weeks of conception, which we were able

to see the vast majority of folks. Now with Senate Bill eight, I would say we're seeing about a third two a half of the patients that come into our clinics and providing an abortion for them, and the rest of the patients or folks that we're seeing where instead helping them figure out how to get out of state so that means travel, um taking time off of work. About sixty folks that access abortion in the country already had children at home. We're spending a lot of time

navigating that. There is a lot of anxiety stress that is new and different from what I've experienced in the last seven years providing abortion care among people and also staff, because I think for me and the staff that I work with, we all show up to help people. They're pregnant, they know that they can't be pregnant. We can make them feel better, we can help them with that. That's what our job is, and that's been taken away from us. And now we're in crisis with our patients and they're

asking us, am I going to get there? What if the clinic closes, what if I don't make it, what if my car doesn't make all of these questions, and it's like, oh, we can't help you when we feel their stress. So it is I think even as I'm talking, I'm feeling the stress of my neck was like, because it is every single day for the last eight months of seeing so many patients that we're not able to help, it is just very very heavy and traumatic, I think

for all of us. So last summer, my husband and I found out we were pregnant with our first child um and after being cautiously optimistic through the first trimester, doing a variety of testing and sonograms, we believe we're in the clear and began to share the news with our friends and our family, and at around thirteen weeks we had a routine sonogram where the doctor suddenly saw a thickened band behind the baby's neck, flagging us to go get additional imaging by kind of assuring us that

it was probably nothing to worry about. A week later, the fetal medicine sonographer was able to get a clear picture and see a variety of health issues with our baby.

And following that sonogram, we went and sat in this room and heard a group of doctors and geneticists explain the findings and let us know that it was unlikely that our baby would survive past birth, and their recommendation was to do a CBS test that day to try to define what exactly it was which they were thinking was likely chromosomal, and unfortunately the results of this test

can take weeks to get back. So we went home that day knowing that our pregnancy likely would need to be terminated, but with no real clear answer on when we would know exactly what was causing the issue. So over the next several days we deliberated over what to do. And with something like medical termination, the doctor cannot explicitly tell you what to do. But with nothing but the sonogram findings, that's all we really had to go off of.

And so you know, I spent a lot of time talking about what our options were, and I just couldn't bear holding our baby for weeks as my belly began to grow, knowing that it was only really a matter of time until we would have to end the pregnancy, and so we ultimately decided to end the pregnancy with a DNA procedure, which is UM a surgery that it's done when you're in your second trimester, so it's a

little bit more involved. And so as soon as we made the decision, it quickly became very cut and dry, UM, and it was it was pretty void of emotional support from that point on, and my doctor or the doctor who was performing the surgery actually had to meet with me UM to confirm that I understood what this decision meant UM, and that this was something that I wanted to do UM, which you know, obviously this was the

furthest thing from what I wanted to do. I was given medicine a few hours in advance of the surgery to begin the process, and as I drove to the hospital with my husband, I you know, started to experience tremendous physical pain as the process slowly was starting, and prior to the surgery, as I led in the hospital bed waiting to be wheeled off. I was asked countless time what I was there for, forcing me to repeat over and over that I was there for d n

me to end my pregnancy. The physical emotional pain of this day, these weeks, and the pain that I continue to carry from this experience will stay with me forever, and they continue to have lasting impacts on so many parts of my life. And so I just think that until you've gone through something like this, you can't not imagine the trauma and sadness of these moments that I'm describing. UM. And you know, this was such an isolating experience, UM

more than I ever imagined it would be. Yet the more I speak about it, the more I realize how I'm not alone. UM. As I've shared my stories are looked for support. I have found people that have gone through what I've gone through and realized that while we are a very small percentage UM, there is a community

of us out there. I wanted, and I still want nothing more than to have a baby, and so terminating this pregnancy was the hardest decision of my life, and it was not something I could have ever imagined or wanted. And I feel thankful that I live in a city where I did have access to incredible health care that would allow me and only me, to ultimately make this decision abortion. The Body Politic is executive produced by me Katie Couric and was created by small team led by

our intrepid supervising producer Lauren Hansen. Editing and sound designed by Derrick Clements and Jessica Crime Chick, Production help from Julia Weaver, researched by Nina Perlman, and a special thanks to Case and producers Courtney Litz and Adriana Fasio