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Episode 45: Why Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free · Political Junkie Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Democrats don't want to see abortion in the seventh month, okay?
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I speak to a lot of Democrats.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: They want a number.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: There is a number, and there's a number that's going to be agreed to.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: And Republicans should go out and say the following, because I think the Republicans speak very
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: inarticulately about this subject.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: I watched some of them without the exceptions, etc, etc.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: I said, other than certain parts of the country, you can't, you're not going to win on this issue.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: But you will win on this issue when you come up with the right number of weeks because Democrats don't want to be radical on the issue.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Most of them, some do.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want to be radical on the issue.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want to kill
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: A baby in the seventh month or the ninth month or after birth and they're allowed to do that and you can't do that.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: What Lindsey Graham has put on the table is 15 weeks and I think if we're looking at 15 weeks what we need to understand is we are not okay with abortion up until the time of birth and so we should at least decide when is it okay.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: In the introduction to this episode, we begin with some false and partially false claims.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: Listeners should know that aborting a viable, healthy fetus in the third trimester is a vanishingly rare event, and that this has never been either best medical practice, nor has abortion been guaranteed under federal law in the United States after 24 weeks.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: And despite a talking point that has been repeated across GOP campaigns, no child is aborted after birth.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: That would be a murder.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: We can also dismiss the idea that the only two Republican presidential candidates still standing just want us all to agree on an arbitrary number of weeks after which the details of maternal and fetal health will no longer matter.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: We'll skip over these things because they have nothing to do with the reality of abortion as those who are pregnant experience it.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: What you hear in these incoherent statements is not policy, but fear and uncertainty.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: Former President Donald J. Trump and former South Carolina Governor and United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley know that their own party's abortion policies have become electoral kryptonite.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: Let's recap how abortion, after almost 50 years, once again became a matter of state law.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States delivered its split opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade, a 1973 decision that created a federal right to abortion at 24 weeks.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_02: A judicial decision that pro-life activists had mourned with a demonstration in Washington every January 22nd was eviscerated.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: Trigger laws and pre-Roe zombie laws stripped women of their right to an abortion and created harsh new penalties for anyone involved in the procedure.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: In the months after Dobbs, abortion services and other procedures that ended a pregnancy that threatened maternal health or protected victims of incest and rape became barely accessible in half of the states.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_02: When clinics closed, both economically marginal women and men lost access to a range of reproductive services.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_02: Although the cost of raising an additional child is one reason why people choose abortion, no state banning abortion has come up with a plan to support larger families throughout the life of a child.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: Furthermore, many physicians are afraid to perform life-saving operations that imperil a pregnancy, out of concern that they will be subject to felony charges and fines.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: As a result, in some states, women have been forced to carry unviable or dead fetuses to term because medical facilities are unwilling to test the law.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: Conservative politicians have claimed that things are now as they should be, since Roe foreclosed states making their own decisions about whether to reform or eliminate their abortion laws.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then a funny thing happened on the way to the 2024 election.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: As it turns out, Americans of all political persuasions want to make their own decision about whether to have children.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: A year after Dobbs, 34% of Americans wanted abortion to be legal in all circumstances, and 51% wanted it to be legal with some restrictions.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: And a great many people in that 85% are the Republican and Independent voters that any GOP candidate will need to beat Joe Biden in November 2024.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_02: They are the voters that the GOP is losing in key elections and referenda.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: Even in Red States
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: But the idea that restoring Roe would also restore reproductive justice relies on bad history.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: The two were never the same, and the right to abortion is just one piece of the puzzle we call reproductive rights.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: To understand that is to understand a bigger failure in 20th century feminism, that mostly white and middle class pro-choice activists failed to connect with the needs of American women, largely poor and of color,
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: Episode 45 Why Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: That story takes us back to the States, specifically to New York, where abortion was decriminalized in 1970, and a state where thousands of women of color in custodial situations, on reservations, disabled, and on welfare were also sterilized.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: It was a state where women mobilized powerfully for the right to abortion, and one where a larger, more diverse movement extended the fight past Roe to fight for the right to have babies.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: It was only after I lost her that I realized how much I had failed to learn from my mother.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: Historian Felicia Kornbluh writes in A Woman's Life is a Human Life, My Mother, Our Neighbor, and the Journey from Reproductive Rights to Reproductive Justice, just now out in paper from Grove Atlantic.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: Why was she so passionate about reproductive rights?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: As it turned out, Kornbluh's mother, Beatrice Kornbluh-Brown, a lawyer, had not only been part of the long struggle to decriminalize abortion in New York State, she had drafted repeal legislation on which the 1970 bill was based and persuaded a lawmaker to promote it.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: That state-by-state campaign long preceded and was prematurely cut off by the decision in Roe v. Wade.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: When Corn Blue dug into parallel political activism to end sterilization abuse and transform a medical system that hurt women, she discovered something else.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: Helen Rodriguez-Trias, the physician who had spearheaded these reforms and founded the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse, or CISA, had lived across the hall in their New York apartment building.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: A Woman's Life is a Human Life tells both these stories in a post-Dobbs world where we are fighting for reproductive justice once again.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: Join Felicia and me for this episode of Why Now, where history and politics meet the challenge of today.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm your host, Claire Potter, Professor of History Emeritus at the New School for Social Research, a contributing editor at Public Seminar, and the author of the Political Junkie Substack.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: This is Episode 45, Why Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: Felicia Kornbluh, welcome to the show.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for having me.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: So Felicia, first of all, I loved this book and it taught me so much about the broader terrain of reproductive rights way beyond abortion.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_02: And I wonder if you could tell our listeners the story of the book as well as how you came to write it.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I'm glad that it said some things to you that were beyond abortion rights, because I think that's what we lose.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_03: The book starts with my relationship with my mother, who was herself an abortion rights activist.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_03: And my mother died in January 2017.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_03: In a very tragic way, she had a stroke during my nephew's bar mitzvah.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_03: And it was at that ceremony that my other family members, especially my dad and my sister, started talking about my mother's role in legalizing abortion in New York State.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: which is something I really hadn't known.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: And it was kind of, it was the worst kind of cosmic joke because I am supposedly an expert in the history of women and gender and sexuality and the history of law and social movements.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_03: And it turns out that my mother who I had just essentially lost, you know, she never regained consciousness after this event, that she was a pivotal player in a particular moment in the history of abortion rights.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_03: So that was the sort of poignant and sad nut of the book, the start of the book.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_03: And then I started to research the campaign that she was a part of, the abortion decriminalization campaign in New York and nationally.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_03: And I also started to research our next door neighbor, who unfortunately also had died by this point.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_03: Our next door neighbor was a woman named Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_03: Who is really an unsung hero of modern American women's history.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_03: She was the leader of the anti-sterilization movement that emerged after Roe vs. Wade when a group of women of color and left-wing women who were in the feminist movement
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_03: Immediately saw that Roe vs. Wade wasn't enough, right?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: That it wasn't enough to protect abortion rights constitutionally because that still didn't cover the needs of everyone, especially the Puerto Rican women and other Latinas or Latinx people and Black women in the South,
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: and Low Income Women Everywhere in the United States who are being subject to sterilization abuse and who also just had bad health care, you know, who had access to only the worst health care.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: So for them, even if abortion was going to be free and legal, it was going to be accessible, it wasn't enough.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a second movement whose story I tell after abortion was decriminalized, there was a national push to change the guidelines around sterilization.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_03: And that becomes a broader understanding of what people really need to have reproductive choices and to have reproductive freedom in a meaningful way.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: I like the phrase reproductive choices and reproductive freedom.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: I want to go back to one of the first words you used, which is decriminalization.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: Can you explain why organizing at the level of the state for decriminalization was a prequel to the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade?
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_03: So what happened in America was that in the 17th century when we were still dominated by the British, still a British colony, and even into the 18th century, even after the American Revolution, there was no legislation at the national level or at the state level that governed abortion.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_03: It just wasn't in the legal code at all.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_03: The only law that there was around abortion was what's called common law, which was the body of law that was inherited from England and then changed
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: Abortion alone does not make women free
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_03: That someone had had an abortion after quickening because the whole idea of quote-unquote quickening, which was that the pregnant person could feel the fetus move to be quick within their body.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_03: And so it was up to that person who was having the pregnancy to say, yes, it moved or no, it didn't move, right?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_03: So common law, you know, was pretty generous.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_03: There were no state laws or federal laws, but in the 19th century, it gradually became a crime.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_03: There was a process of criminalization, and that happened at the state level.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: And New York State, which is the state I focus on the most, although not exclusively, that was one of the very, very earliest, right?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_03: It was at the end of the 1820s that New York turned what had never been a crime before, never a legislative crime, turned it into a crime.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_03: And then when people started organizing after World War II, when they saw some of the really tragic events
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_03: Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_03: Why Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: And that's really the vehicle that puts the abortion issue on everybody's radar and ultimately leads to the pressure that causes the Supreme Court to rule in Roe vs. Wade and say that abortion in at least most of a pregnancy is constitutionally protected.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I want to emphasize for our listeners that decriminalization is different from a right.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: That to say something is a right means that people actually have access to it.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_02: But I also want to emphasize for our younger listeners that there's this sort of common belief that wealthy people could get abortions and poor people couldn't get abortions.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, your book really shows that
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: Lots of people could access abortions but they weren't necessarily safe and they weren't necessarily affordable.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: Could you talk about how women got abortions before it was decriminalized?
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_03: There were a variety of ways and
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_03: I think sometimes, sometimes we overstate the impact of the law or the law alone, because there were people who provided abortions that were illegal or were sort of in a gray zone between legal and illegal, who were very skilled.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_03: Right, and we know from people's memoirs and from other kinds of records that there were abortion providers, some of them were midwives, some of them were medical doctors, nurses, others, who were providing abortions all through the period when it was a crime, from the 19th century into the middle or late 20th century.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_03: And there were people who were not skilled.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_03: um who were hurting people they were just trying to make a buck or they just didn't know what they were doing and so um we see both of those things happening on both sides of the line whether whether legal or illegal the abortions that were legal were ones that were provide under what were called therapeutic exceptions so if somebody could make the case to their doctor and the doctor could in turn make the case
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: to the hospital governing board that somebody really needed an abortion for the purposes of their physical health or their mental health, then it was possible to get a procedure, an abortion procedure that was legal.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a much larger group of people who were able to have those legal procedures than we usually think, right?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: Even at the height of the so-called illegal abortion era, there were people who were having abortions.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I would just say, you know, the footnote to that is that it's kind of like what we see today, at least in theory, except today in a state like Texas, you know, they have this exception that in theory, you can get an abortion if the pregnancy is really endangering your health, but that is not working at all.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: It seems like in the current situation, you know, the states that are criminalizing, re-criminalizing abortion are basically finding no meaningful exceptions.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_03: So we may even be worse off today than we were in the 60s.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_02: There was a real emphasis prior to Roe to not criminalizing women.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: You could go after the provider, but you shouldn't go after the woman.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I also just want to add, you know, I was in the Susan Brownmiller archives because I'm doing a biography of her, and I found a scrap of paper in which she listed the cost of the various things that she would have to pay for to get an abortion in Puerto Rico.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_02: Women went abroad to get abortions too.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I added it all up and it came to about $700.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: And then I put it in Google, like, what is $700 in 2023 dollars, and it came to a little over $2,000.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_02: So even a professional woman would have difficulty paying for a legal abortion out of the country.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_02: So let's roll this back a little bit.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: There's this movement in New York to decriminalize.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: Can you describe what it meant to decriminalize in New York State?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_02: Who drives that?
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: What's the role your mother plays in it?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: And how does it pass?
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_03: First of all, I'll just say it's a historic bill and it was only one state, but it was a state where even more than today, all of the nation's media were headquartered.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_03: So everything there was covered to the max.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody around the country knew that this was happening.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_03: And this is a campaign that spurs national organizing.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_03: So the organization that used to be known as NARAL, which today is called Reproductive Freedom for All, NARAL comes right out of this fight.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: The original name for NARAL is
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_03: Abortion Alone
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: I would say three different but related sources.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_03: One is there's a liberal movement, much like today, that's within the Democratic Party and trying to pull the Democratic Party to the left and make it sort of true to its claims of being a liberal party, sort of trying to bring it back to the era of Roosevelt in the 30s, pro-labor, pro-civil rights, including black civil rights in the South, and pro-women's rights.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_03: So that's happening.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_03: There also is a group of people who I call population control advocates, people who favor legal abortion and also favor contraception for reasons that today I think we would find problematic.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_03: They are people who are also looking abroad at poor countries and trying to provide contraception for people who have very low incomes abroad.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_03: They see abortion as a way to help poor people, yes, but also to prevent more poor moms from having more kids and they have a kind of, I would say a racist or racial list.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_03: Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_03: Episode 45 Why Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: How does the legislative session go?
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: Because I mean, this is sort of the big fork in the road that, you know, abortion gets legalized around the nation or decriminalized around the nation because of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: But there's this other path it could have gone, which is a state by state battle, which is kind of where we are now to decriminalize.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: So what was the strategy and why did it work?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_03: I see it as a do-everything strategy, really.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_03: And I should say that in addition to the liberal feminists like my mom, there were also more radical feminists, people who were engaging in the kind of direct action that we sometimes associate with the 1960s.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_03: They were shutting down hearings, they were shouting down procedures in courtrooms when doctors were actually being prosecuted for providing abortions.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_03: They were marching through the streets of Manhattan
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_03: It was a do-everything strategy.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_03: So there was lobbying, there were petitions, there were hits on local legislators.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_03: When they came to talk to their constituents, there would always be an abortion advocate there.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_03: There were demonstrations in Albany, which is the New York State Capitol, where the votes were going to be.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_03: There were demonstrations in Manhattan, where there was a critical mass of people who were in favor.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: There were speak-outs where people were finally telling true stories about their own
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_03: experiences of abortion whether legal or illegal they did everything used all available strategies and built a coalition with anyone who was willing to be part of that coalition the clergy and religiously motivated people who had a humane objection to some of the effects of the criminal abortion laws and so on and what they managed to do was to transform the democratic party just enough
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_03: Right, so there were just enough Democratic Party legislators who were willing to vote in favor of new abortion laws and were able to defy the very powerful Catholic Church.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: Right, plus some liberal Republicans who had been there all along favoring this.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_03: They won by one vote.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, they were deadlocked.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_03: And finally, one member of the state legislature, a guy named George Michaels,
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: Why Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: Because he had been pressured by a liberal Republican feminist.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_03: You don't see those very much anymore.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_03: He had really been pressured and put to the line by her and also by his own family, who said, look, you can't be the guy who makes this fail.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_03: But Mr. Speaker, I say to you in all candor, I say this very feelingly to all of you,
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_03: What's the use of getting elected or re-elected if you don't stand for something?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_03: So he did change his vote and he did lose his seat and yet the abortion law in New York was signed by the governor, Republican governor, Governor Rockefeller.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_03: It came into law, it was enacted and despite the efforts of anti-abortion people it remained good law.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_03: Until Roe vs. Wade
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: Poor women could not get birth control and so they were sometimes going in to have babies and then the doctor would sterilize them.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: And there are all of these circumstances in which largely women of color
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: um are being sterilized without their consent.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: I think one of the things this book does really well is talk about the ways in which disabled people were being sterilized without their consent.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: So there's this much bigger problem than abortion alone which is under what conditions does a woman have the right to choose to have children as opposed to not have children?
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk about
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: How That Movement Takes Off and How It Rubs Up Against the Abortion Rights Movement
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_03: A Political Junkie Podcast
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_03: or whether we're talking about women on Native American reservations, or whether we're talking about people who were in some kind of custodial situation, an institution for the disabled, or in jail or prison.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_03: All of those groups of people were subject to either involuntary, like totally not wanting it, sterilization, or what activists at the time called a coercive sterilization, where the doctor would suggest, maybe without exactly saying it in these words,
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_03: You know, maybe you were going to lose your Medicaid health insurance if you didn't agree to the sterilization, or maybe you were going to lose some other welfare benefits that you really, really needed.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_03: So this was happening all the time in the 60s and early 70s, and was sort of the troubling side of the increase in access to contraception under the federal government's Title X program.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_03: The people I'm writing about, because they were Puerto Rican, primarily, my neighbor was a doctor who had been raised both in New York City and in San Juan, because they were Puerto Rican and they were coming out of the Puerto Rican left, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, they knew all about this issue.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_03: And people like my mom, who were white and middle class,
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_03: And who generally had, you know, relatively good experiences with their healthcare providers, they just had no idea that it was happening and sort of didn't believe it.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_03: So whereas for my mother, abortion was the outlier, right?
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_03: That this was the one place where her healthcare rights, her reproductive rights were being violated.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_03: But for Helen Rodriguez-Trias and the women she knew in the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, it was a much bigger problem.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_03: And so they started with this issue of sterilization abuse and really going after the public hospitals in New York City that were sterilizing people and forming common cause with Mexican and Mexican-American women in LA and Native American women on the reservations and many others around the country.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_03: So they created a national network against sterilization abuse.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_03: And they also started to theorize reproductive rights in a much bigger way.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_03: And to think in exactly the way you were talking about, okay, what is it going to take for somebody to really have a choice, not just the choice to not have children, but also the choice to have children under some kind of reasonable, decent, dignified circumstances.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I just want to emphasize the layers of dishonesty in this for my younger listeners.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a way in which poor people are still very suspicious about medical care with good reason.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: Some of the women in your book were told
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: Why Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: And it broke her heart when she found out that without her knowledge this thing had been done to her.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot of trauma associated with involuntary sterilization.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: Can you talk about how Rodriguez-Trias and her organization
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: Why Abortion Alone Does Not Make Women Free
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_03: What they get instead is a series of wins that are sort of on the regulatory or administrative end of things, but they're still very significant legal victories.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_03: So in New York, first they get the public hospitals to agree to new sterilization procedures.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_03: And they build this really wonderful campaign, what they call it an inside-outside campaign,
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_03: Where they're doing grassroots demonstrations in the neighborhoods, but they also have people who are on the committee inside the governing board of the public hospitals.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_03: And then they go from there to the citywide level and they get legislation through the city council to change the guidelines for every healthcare facility in the city of New York.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's millions and millions of people, right?
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_03: Very important healthcare system in the United States.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_03: And then the Carter administration, the Jimmy Carter administration picks up on this and says, okay, well, we're interested in doing this at the federal level, but you have to organize the campaign to make it possible.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_03: So then they organized a national campaign, working again, with all these allies from the reservations and from LA and, and the Mexican American movement and everywhere.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_03: And
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_03: They have their regional hearings all over the country and they bring people to every single one of those hearings and they testify and protest and do petitions and letters and everything they have to do.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_03: And they get the Federal Department of Health Education and Welfare, today it's HHS, they get that agency to issue new guidelines for all of the healthcare facilities in the United States, all the ones that get federal government funds, which is basically all of them, right?
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_03: And that's how they achieve this enormous, enormous win, even though they're not powerful enough to get a bill through Congress, they're not powerful enough to get the Supreme Court to really acknowledge their rights.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: And that's enough, right?
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_03: That's enough of a win for them.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's a very significant win.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_02: It is a very significant win.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_02: And it also, in fact, brings up the question of what kind of healthcare more generally poor women have access to, right?
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: It does and Rodriguez-Trias was really an extraordinary figure and I think you know we could all read her her speeches and articles today and still and still learn something and still notice that her agenda is unfulfilled.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_03: What she said in in the last of these of these hearings for the new sterilization guidelines in Washington D.C.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_03: was that there are many forms of coercion and economic inequality and poverty is itself
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_03: A Conversation for Political Junkie
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_03: to us really having reproductive freedom, that we would really have to do something about economic inequality, that we would really have to do something about domestic violence, and the vulnerability of many people, including many people who parent, to intimate partner violence, unsafe neighborhoods, police abuse, all of those things, in her imagination and the imagination of the people she came to work with, were violations or potential violations of our reproductive rights, our reproductive
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: Part of what I was thinking about as I was reading your book is that the idea of what reproductive justice is emerges around Rodriguez-Trias' campaign, but that really there's a history to it and that as history moves forward beyond Roe,
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: The idea of what reproductive justice is has to change to meet new circumstances.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: So today we might say one aspect of reproductive justice is the right to see your child grow up to adulthood and not be shot down in the street.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: How would you define reproductive justice today?
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think it's really that different from what they were saying in the 1970s.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_03: Because already then people were experiencing police violence and the kinds of excesses that we've seen more recently.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_03: There was no Black Lives Matter movement, but there were a lot of pushbacks against the kinds of excesses of police violence in people's neighborhoods.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_03: So I think that reproductive justice means, it means roughly the same thing as what these folks call reproductive freedom.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_03: And it does mean that we need the whole thing.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_03: If people are really going to make free choices and fair choices in the area of reproduction, then we need a world
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly, in which children can grow up in safety and dignity.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_03: And that means that no child should ever be hungry.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_03: And that means that we need to have massive investments in equality in our K-12 public educational system.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_03: And it means that higher education needs to be accessible despite people's disparate incomes, right?
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_03: It means we need safe neighborhoods and decent housing.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_03: All of those things impinge on people's ability to make something like a free choice about when they're going to be a parent, whether they're going to be a parent, with whom they're going to parent, right?
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_03: Those are very personal decisions, but they're entirely shaped by the social and political and economic context that people are operating in.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_03: The one thing maybe that reproductive justice today really adds, which is important, and several of the people I interviewed said this, is that it's that element of justice.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I think there's also an idea today, which maybe folks didn't have in the 70s, but it's very important that something was taken away, especially from communities of color, right?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_03: And that there's, there's an element of, of redress, or reparation, you know, that has to be taken into account.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_03: So it's not just that we're all starting from the same place.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_03: And we need to, you know, create a world in which we all have the same choices.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_03: But there's also an element of, you know, some people have really been meaningfully deprived of the opportunity to make to make real choices in this area.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, there's an obligation, there's a governmental obligation around that.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: You know, one of the things that I've seen, I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, it was a mostly white area, that the big shift into the Democratic Party for my mother's generation really was around the threat to abortion rights.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_02: and that really the next stage of that is for the Democratic Party to expand that vision today and say your abortion rights in the Philadelphia suburbs are actually linked to the reproductive rights of women in North Philadelphia and that that requires an infrastructure that cares for everybody as if all human lives mattered.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely, absolutely and I think
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_03: I believe in national health insurance anyway, for a lot of different reasons.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_03: But I think that when we ground it in thinking about the options that are really available to people,
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and what happens when somebody is making a discreet choice?
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_03: You know, should I abort?
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_03: Should I not abort?
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_03: Should I have a sterilization procedure or not have a sterilization procedure?
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_03: Because I'm so scared that I might get pregnant and not have access to abortion or, you know, not be able to raise the child.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_03: When we can think about that, I think it's a deeply grounding way to understand progressive politics, right?
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_03: If we're really thinking about individuals who are making these choices,
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_03: and who needs a social infrastructure that allows them to make these choices.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's a way for all of us to understand why that social infrastructure is so vastly important.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_02: Felicia, this is my last question.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: Why should our listeners read this book now?
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_03: I think people should read this book now because reproductive rights are the centerpiece of our domestic politics and
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's vitally important that we understand both sides of the story that I tell in this book.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: On the one hand, the campaign for abortion decriminalization that started at the state level and then moved to the feds.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_03: I think we desperately need to understand how to organize effective campaigns like the ones in the 60s and 70s.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_03: And to some degree, this book provides a guidebook for how to do that.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_03: And maybe some inspiration, I hope some inspiration and some comfort.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_03: And then secondly, because we still haven't fulfilled the promise of reproductive justice or reproductive freedom.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that a movement for reproductive rights will only be more powerful when it understands that it's situated inside this wider agenda.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_03: And when it is
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_03: Calling for not only abortion rights, but also all of the other things that people need to make genuinely free choices in the area of their reproduction and their intimate lives.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that's it for today's show.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening.
• 38:49
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• 38:53
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• 38:57
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• 39:06
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• 39:21
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• 39:25
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• 39:31
  SPEAKER_02: Why Now and Political Junkie are written, recorded, edited, and produced by me, Claire Potter.
• 39:38
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• 39:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's all for now.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: See you next time.