Special guest Megan Burbank tells us about the history, limitations and loopholes of a landmark court ruling. Digressions include Betty Ford, "Maude" and naming conventions for anonymous defendants. The glories of Washington State politics are examined in depth.
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Special guest Megan Burbank tells us about the history, limitations and loopholes of a landmark court ruling. Digressions include Betty Ford, "Maude" and naming conventions for anonymous defendants. The glories of Washington State politics are examined in depth.
Continue reading →
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Roe v Wade
Mike: You're in Seattle, Megan? We could have done this at the Pike Place Market, where all Seattleites go every single day.
Sarah: And then he followed her around Tom Hanks and his child.
Megan: Yeah. I catch a fish and then I'm like, oh, that guy looks nice.
Sarah: Welcome to You're Wrong About the show where we say the word ‘abortion’. And also other words that people tend to sort of dip and get a little, ehh, when they should be saying and ‘say choice’.
Mike: Yes. We make our listeners uncomfortable. That's what we're famous for.
Sarah: We're going to get a lot more uncomfortable before we get comfortable.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall, and I'm a writer in residence at the Black Mountain Institute. And we have an extremely special guest today who's my other favorite Seattle journalist, aside from my co-host, Megan Burbank.
Megan: My name's Megan Burbank. I'm an editor at the Seattle Times and I've been covering reproductive health policy since 2011 for a variety of outlets, including the Stranger, The Portland Mercury, and Teen Vogue.
Mike: Oh, Teen Vogue.
Megan: Yes.
Sarah: Mike, I can see your eyes slowly turning to hearts. So you're like, “Oh Seattle. Oh, weeklies, oh Teen Vogue!” Everything.
Mike: Yeah. Whenever I hear the word ‘vogue’, I always think of it as a verb and not a noun.
Megan: Well, it is a verb.
Mike: And today we're talking about Roe versus Wade, which, uhm.
Sarah: I'm just going to let you hack your way for this one.
Mike: Help me.
Sarah: Well, let's do this, actually. Tell us what is it? What's Roe v. Wade?
Mike: My understanding is that before Roe vs. Wade, abortion was a state level thing and that you had a lot of basically abortion road trips, where people couldn't get an abortion in their state, and they would have to drive to another one.
Megan: That sounds like a really good road movie.
Mike: I learned that term from an Irish friend of mine who talks about it there. You'd have to drive from whatever Nevada to California to get an abortion. It was this huge hassle. And then Roe vs. Wade essentially said, no, states cannot outlaw abortion.
Megan: You're right that Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion. One thing that I think is often left out of that conversation is that before its passage, people did have access to abortion, it was sort of a patchwork of different state laws. And then also we of course have to include class in that conversation.
My mom and I have talked about how she knew women from wealthy families who would just go to Japan for an abortion. And so often when we have these conversations about abortion, it's really about class and economics. Because if you're a wealthy woman, it's unlikely you'll ever actually have trouble terminating a pregnancy if you need to. What ends up happening is we see these sorts of state and federal policies that are not really criminalizing abortion for women like Sarah and I, for example, but for women who are living in low income communities. Particularly communities of color.
Mike: Maybe we should start with just for some of our listeners who might be 36 year old gay men who don't understand how anything works, what are we talking about when we talk about abortion? It seems like at different stages, it's either there is some sort of surgical component, but then at other times there's a pill involved. Can we just walk through what an abortion actually is?
Megan: Yes. A lot of people don't know.
Sarah: A lot of people don't know it's many things and that's an important part too.
Megan: I would probably say that you're thinking of two procedures. You're thinking of surgical abortion and chemical abortion. The surgical abortion is an outpatient procedure. It takes about five minutes. Generally they do vacuum aspiration. I'm kind of disturbed by how much I know about this.
Sarah: I'm disturbed by how much I know about executions, but our wheelhouses chose us.
Megan: So you go in and they remove the contents of the uterus. So vacuum aspiration is there's a machine that you're hooked up to that does it.
Mike: So you go into the vagina with a vacuum sort of thing and suck out the lining of the uterus and that's it. It takes five minutes and you go home that day.
Megan: It probably sounds monstrous on some level, but I don't think it's actually that different from what you go through when you go in to get, say, an IUD inserted.
Sarah: Do you get dilated?
Megan: Yeah. You get dilated. Being a woman sucks, guys. I don't know. So the chemical version, this is a newer procedure. And this is basically you go in, you probably have to talk to a doctor, and then you get a pill. And it's usually, I believe it's usually two pills. You take one and then you take the other one later, and that basically induces like an early miscarriage. So you can have your abortion in the privacy of your own home.
Mike: And I assume that those are dependent on time. So for the first x number of weeks, that chemical abortion works. And then after a certain period of time, it doesn't work anymore.
Megan: Right. Yeah. And abortions do get more complicated the longer you wait. There are providers who will do abortions up until relatively late in the pregnancy, like 20 weeks and beyond, but that is extremely rare. So most of the abortions that you see are pretty early in pregnancy.
Mike: So they're typically before 20 weeks, and they're typically this suction or chemical?
Megan: Yeah. 20 weeks is like, if someone is having an abortion at 20 weeks, it's usually for a pretty heartbreaking reason.
Mike: What's the typical kind of cutoff?
Megan: I want to say between like seven and 12. It tends to be quite early.
Mike: Is it more invasive, it must be a more invasive procedure after that?
Megan: So I will say, later abortions are rare. And that tends to be a procedure that takes multiple days because you have to dilate the cervix. It's a more complicated procedure for the OBGYN performing it. It's a higher risk, too.
Mike: Typically are those women whose health complications have come up or they didn't know until that point? Why are people getting abortions in that period?
Megan: Generally it's either maternal indications or fetal indications. So it's often you have gotten a result on a test and your baby doesn't have a brainstem. It's really heartbreaking situations like that. And sometimes it is just because someone was a teenager, didn't know she was pregnant, was afraid to tell her parents.
Sarah: Or conceivably because they live so far from… there's so many barriers between them getting a timely early abortion that they just can't get it together until late.
Megan: Or it's someone who could not afford to get an abortion early and had to fundraise for her procedure. And this is something that you hear a lot, that the thing about having an abortion as the cost goes up the longer you wait. And so what you often run into is stories of women who were not able to pay for their procedures. And then because of that, they had to wait longer. And then the more you wait, the more expensive it will be. And so it just creates this snowball effect. And so that's why I always tell people abortion is an economic issue, because it's really about access for people who don't have financial resources.
Mike: Do you have a sense of the cost of those three options?
Megan: I would say like early procedures tend to be between like $300 and $500, and then the latest procedures get into like thousands. And sometimes you get into multiple thousands. When people try to run legislation around 20 week bans, I find it really repugnant. Because it's like no one chooses to be in that position, and then suddenly we're criminalizing it.
Mike: Right. Things have already happened that have gone wrong if you get to that point, there's really no point in outlying it because it's already a bad outcome.
Sarah: This is touching on one of our themes, which is the legislative responses to people being in positions that no one wants to be in. Like killing your husband who's abused you for years and years, or having an abortion at 20 weeks and their response to that being, all right. We have to punish people more when they end up in this horrible position. And it's like, no, no one, no one would choose this. This is terrible. And both of those misinterpretations center on the idea that women are desperate to commit murder. So that's interesting.
On that note, can we go back in time and hear the story of Roe v. Wade? Let me say something that I know, and I'll start at the earliest possible point. Something that I learned in a book that I read recently about the history of birth control, is that in the earliest civilizations we find evidence of birth control and of women controlling their cycles and whether or not they reproduce.
Mike: How?
Sarah: So for example, using wax or lard or something of a similar consistency, to mold into a cervical cap and sealed seal off your cervix.
Mike: No fucking way. Lard?
Sarah: So from the beginning of time, for as long as we have had fire, for as long as we have had cave paintings, for as long as we have had meat, women have decided when they want to have kids.
Megan: It's true. It goes way back. When we talk about a time before Roe v. Wade, we really are just talking about…
Mike: Human history.
Sarah: Little foot, the Land Before Time. Yeah. Higher primates occasion in selective reproduction. We would have to go back to some before vertebrates to go to a time before birth control.
Mike: Fish, we have to go back to the fish. To tell a Hobbes family story, all I know about the pre-Roe kind of abortion situation is, I have a distant cousin whatever thing. It was a couple, and their daughter was 15 or 16 and she got pregnant. But instead of telling anyone, they took a “summer family vacation” to Florida. And when they came back, they told all the neighbors and everything that it was the mom that had the kid. So they were like, oh, what an unexpected thing?
Sarah: That's what Ted Bundy's family did, that never messes anyone up.
Mike: Totally. I have a distant uncle, cousin, whatever, who I've never met, who apparently grew up his entire life thinking that his mom, who's 15 years older than him, was his sister, because they told everybody that actually his grandmother was his mom. And then when he was 18 or 19, they had to tell him this. But it seems like it's fascinating to me that there was a time in American history where instead of just getting an abortion for your 15 year old daughter, you tell this huge outlandish lie and just live with that lie for 18 years. I don't know if that indicates how hard it was to get abortions or how stigmatized abortions were.
Megan: I do think it goes back to economics, because I would wonder about the cost for that girl to get an abortion.
Sarah: Right. It goes with one of the narratives that we've sort of, not consciously constructed, but that's become the way we think about history over time is that there's no safe access to abortion before we Roe v. Wade, basically. And then suddenly there is. And if it goes away, then the darkness will fall again. But I know that safe, illegal abortions were, I want to say more readily available than we tend to think, pre-Roe v. Wade.
Megan: They definitely existed. And I think also if you knew how to navigate the official channels, you could also get one. I've heard of women coming to go before medical boards and say that they would literally kill themselves if they didn't have an abortion. And then…
Mike: Oh, so there were ways to work the system.
Megan: There were ways to the system, but you had to do that. You have to know what I have to say to the medical board to get them to approve my procedure or who's the doctor that I can go to. And there are lots of interesting stories about the pre-Roe era.
One of my favorites is about the Jane Collective in Chicago, which was this underground network of doctors who provided abortions. You basically got a phone number and you called it if you needed help, and Jane would help you. And I think that was even how they promoted themselves.
Mike: So it was abortion illegal in most states before Roe V. Wade?
Megan: This is something that's always been sort of like there's a patchwork of access, but there are pre-Roe abortion bans that you do see on the books, which is interesting because it would have affected access before 1973. But it's also interesting because it means that if Roe vs Wade is ever overturned, abortion will be illegal in those states again.
Mike: It sounds like what you're saying is that defacto abortion was difficult to get either for legal or financial reasons.
Megan: Right. What I can say is like, it was hard to get an abortion. It was illegal. And if you were somewhere where you didn't know how to safely get one, you're kind of fucked.
Sarah: Pre-Roe it's like, yeah, you can kind of get an abortion. Maybe you can find a way, maybe someone, if you're in a place where it's illegal, maybe you are in a place where it's legal. Maybe you have resources. It's based on privilege, and it's based on luck and none of it is your right as a citizen. You can get it but in the same way that you can get heroin.
Mike: Who are Roe and Wade? How did the actual case come about?
Megan: So the actual case was it was an abortion case, which in itself is super weird because the woman who wanted to have an abortion later turned into an anti-choice activist. It's a very odd transition. I think Sarah, you might actually know more about this than I do because didn't you read a whole lot about Sarah Weddington?
Sarah: Yeah. Well, Roe v. Wade is interesting to me, partly because it is a Texas story. Sarah Weddington grew up in west Texas. She was a minister's daughter, and she has this great quote in her book about how she thinks Texas girls love to ride horses because it's the only time when they feel in control.
Mike: Oh wow.
Sarah: She finished law school. She's brilliant. Her husband openly acknowledges that he thinks she's smarter than him and she can't get a job anywhere because everyone's like, you're just going to get pregnant. And she finally does get a job, but she has the time free to pursue the case that becomes Roe v. Wade, because she's considered unhireable for being a woman and so she's able to work on this case for free. So she's working for a feminist abortion access collective?
Megan: I think so. Yeah, that sounds right.
Sarah: So they're looking for a good test plaintiff and someone working at the collective finds a woman named Norma McCorvey.
Mike: Who is Roe?
Megan: That's Norma McCorvey. Roe is a pseudonym. Jane Roe.
Mike: Wait, what? That's a pseudonym? Jane Roe. I've never heard that. Why isn't it Doe? Is that a Texas thing?
Sarah: No, there was another Supreme court case about a Doe at the time. So it had to be a Roe.
Mike: It’s like naming hurricanes or something. I guess you have to have some system.
Sarah: Yeah. Henry Wade is the Dallas County district attorney. And so Sarah Weddington, because she can't get a real job, finds Norma McCorvey - the artist also known as Jane Roe - a test plaintiff, because she wants to have an abortion. And so they mount a constitutional challenge against Texas' anti-abortion laws saying that they're unconstitutional. So it's Roe v. Wade.
Megan: My favorite thing generally about Sarah Weddington in this book and just like her voice generally is, she just has this tone of like, listen, I was just trying to get a job and then do good work, and I didn't really think that we would get to the Supreme Court first, because there were all of these other cases happening.
Sarah: There was a case in Georgia that was progressing that everyone kind of thought was going to get to the Supreme court first, but then they did. And Sarah Weddington was 25.
Megan: She was a pretty young and inexperienced lawyer.
Sarah: I guess because no one else was bothering to do it because for one thing, there wasn't any money in it.
Mike: And so they won?
Sarah: Yeah. Spoiler.
Mike: So the Supreme Court said women have the right to abortion.
Sarah: Well, they didn't really say that, actually.
Megan: So Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973. And one of the things that I think we don't always talk about when we talk about Roe v. Wade is the limitations that it has. Ruth Bader Ginsburg actually has kind of a checkered past with Roe v. Wade. She did not think it was perfect abortion legislation, and it actually came up when she was being confirmed under Clinton. Her critique of Roe v. Wade is that because it's couched in our constitutional right to privacy, the framework for passing it was sort of based on, I think as she put it, it was a little woman and her tall doctor. It was like you and your doctor will decide what's best. And so it gave too much authority to physicians over women themselves. And so it wasn't so much treated as, this is a fundamental issue of bodily autonomy, it was, well, it’s between you and your doctor. The protection for it just wasn't as strong as she wanted it to be.
Sarah: It does feel as if that Supreme Court decision has this tone throughout of, it's not really our business.
Megan: We don't really want to talk about this. It's kind of gross. I don't know.
Sarah: We’re putting a Tampax dispenser in the Supreme Court bathroom, we would like to hear no more of this subject.
Megan: Yeah. And so it legalized abortion, but in a limited way. It basically sets legal abortion until the period of viability, so until a fetus is viable.
Mike: Which is how long?
Megan: Well, that's the problem. Because viability is something that there's even some disagreement within the medical community of when it begins. And also as their advancements in terms of how to sustain premature babies, as that sort of stuff develops, viability becomes much more mushy and poorly defined.
Sarah: And ultrasounds either barely existed or didn't really exist at that time, right?
Megan: Yeah. So we’re dealing with the science of the seventies.
Sarah: Yes. As we so often are on this program.
Megan: So it doesn't set a very good time limit. And then also it unfortunately includes this language about guaranteeing access, but without setting an undue burden on the women seeking care. I mean, what's an undue burden?
Sarah: I love all the imprecise legal language of these stories.
Megan: Because how do you define a burden is undue?
Sarah: It's a burden! Women are supposed to suffer a little bit, maybe, but not a lot?
Mike: So states can regulate abortion, you're able to regulate it in the normal ways that you regulate any health clinic. But you can't regulate them in a way that makes it harder to get an abortion.
Megan: Sort of, yeah. What it actually does is it opens the door to all kinds of nonsense regulations. Because, how do you say that something is actually an undue burden on a patient. What is an undue burden? Is it that you have to have a 48 hour waiting period? Is it having to drive 700 miles for a procedure? What is an undue burden? And so, because we have this really imprecise language in the decision, you give an inch, and they take a foot. Let's take this little, tiny opening and just see how much stuff we can fit through it. Then that's sort of how Roe has been implemented.
Sarah: I would like to add one of my favorite seventies facts which is that Betty Ford, the wife of Gerald Ford, was a pro-choice publican.
Megan: Oh yes. There are a whole bunch of them.
Mike: Really?
Sarah: Mot that this is as indicative politically. But there's an episode of Maude, which is a seventies sitcom where Bea Arthur plays a tough talking seventies housewife named Maude, who just has an abortion one episode. And you don't see abortions on TV anymore and in the seventies, Bea Arthur had an abortion on prime time.
Mike: Wild. So was there like a glory days period where abortion was not a political issue?
Megan: Women's bodies and sex lives have always been policed to some degree.
Sarah: There’s a thousand years of darkness and then there's Maude and then the darkness comes again.
Megan: Well, and I think there's a backlash. We’re talking about a backlash, essentially. Which is this allegedly great win for women. And who does that mobilize? People who hate women.
Sarah: No, Megan, no. They want to save the babies. It's not that they hate women.
Megan: I think that rhetoric really has served them well.
Sarah: And is that a moral majority rhetoric that we start to see emerging?
Megan: I think that's when we start to see it. I think a lot of this pro-life activism is pretty canny because instead of saying, oh, we want to police women's sex lives, it upsets us that they're having premarital sex. And what's next, working outside the home? Can't have that. Instead of doing that, it becomes what about the baby? Do you guys hate babies?
And I also want to be super clear that, I think it sort of preyed upon a very natural response to abortion. People feel all kinds of ways about abortion. People feel weird about it. People have ethical problems with it, and I think that's normal. I think the problem comes in when we start to use our feelings as a way of passing public health policy.
Mike: Right? Because there's a difference between, I think abortions are wrong and abortion should be illegal.
Megan: Exactly.
Mike: Generally, I feel like people struggle with that distinction.
Megan: I think they do. I think it's like, oh, I feel gross that 20 week abortions exist, so I can see why we would outlaw them. And it's like, I don't know.
Mike: So tell us about the legal backlash. What starts happening after. Roe v. Wade? How do the states respond to Roe v. Wade?
Megan: The opposition begins. We're looking at sort of the Reagan era, the rise of the moral majority, that's what it comes out of. It basically ties back to the undue burden language of that decision. States start placing burdens, because the thing is, they have this ability to regulate abortion. They can't do anything at the federal level, except for cut off federal funding for poor women, which they do. So the Hyde Amendment is a federal provision that bans federal funds from covering abortion for women who are on public health plans. And so that could be women who are on Medicaid, women who are on Medicare, women on Indian reservations who get their coverage from the Indian Health Service. And it also includes women in the military who get their insurance through Tricare, and it includes women in the Peace Corps.
Sarah: Another piece of fewer resources for those with fewer resources already, legislation.
Megan: Yup.
Mike: When did that one pass?
Megan: It was shortly after Roe. In 1976, the legislator who sponsored that particular policy stated very blatantly that he wanted to keep everyone from having an abortion, but that unfortunately he could only target poor women.
Mike: No way! Wow.
Megan: But then at the state level, they start to implement these laws that basically limit access. A very popular one is a waiting period, 24 hour waiting period. Let's bump it up to 48!
Mike: Do you go in and you say, “Hi, I’d like an abortion please.” And they say, “Come back at this time tomorrow.” Is that how it works?
Sarah: Yup. Except it's not tomorrow.
Megan: Not tomorrow.
Sarah: It's potentially in three days, if there's a weekend or a national holiday, then it could be like five or six days. And also before your waiting period starts, you have to do something like watch a video of fetuses or have an ultrasound performed on you. Or, oh Michael, I'm so excited to explain this to you if you don't know what it is. Do you know what a Transvaginal ultrasound is?
Megan: Oh my God.
Mike: I know what one of those words means.
Sarah: Transvaginal? Megan, will you do it? Will you take this one?
Megan: Oh dear. A transvaginal ultrasound is an ultrasound that's performed by probe instead of getting your belly covered in weird lube. And then they push the thing around.
Sarah: Where the lady cries.
Megan: It's not that. It's like they stick a probe inside of you and poke around.
Sarah: And I feel like this was the big trend in anti-abortion legislation five years ago. It was the Call Me Maybe of that moment.
Mike: And is there any medical purpose to this? Is it better than the other kind of ultrasound somehow?
Megan: Not for this. You might have a transvaginal ultrasound if you had an ovarian cyst and your doctor wanted to get a really good picture of it. A trans vaginal ultrasound is not something that you should just be giving to people, it's a diagnostic tool.
Mike: So states are making women get these extremely uncomfortable procedures if they want to have an abortion.
Megan: Yes. So when I was at The Stranger in 2011, there was a bill that was being proposed at the state legislature to regulate, they're called crisis pregnancy centers. I don't know, are either of you familiar with them?
Mike: Yeah. A friend of mine was just driving in Mount Vernon, an hour north of Seattle, and came across something like this where it was a pro-life, don't get an abortion thing, but it was disguised. It was called Pregnancy Choices.
Sarah: And the name is usually a hopey-choicey kind of a word salad.
Mike: Yeah. It has to be something that you could never disagree with. I just want choices for pregnant people. That sounds great, choices. Pregnancy Choices. Awesome.
Megan: They advertise free pregnancy tests. You come in and then you get essentially a lecture on why you shouldn't have an abortion. And I investigated them in 2011. It was one of my first reporting jobs.
Sarah: And everyone else was writing about Yacht that week.
Megan: Yeah. And so it was me and the one other female news reporter, we went around to six of them in the area and presented ourselves as, here we are, might be pregnant.
Sarah: That's amazing gum shoe reporting.
Megan: If anything, it made me realize how well-organized the pro-life movement is. Because my coworker and I, we split up the list of six places. We went to them, and we took pregnancy tests at all of them, and we took notes on everything that they told us. And we also took literature if it was given to us. And it was all the same stuff. The phrasing was nearly identical. We saw the same propaganda video a couple of times.
Mike: So you get a really cheesy instructional video of your abortion and yourself.
Megan: Having seen one of those videos, I can tell you it's actually called Choice of a Lifetime. So they're very organized, and I think that that's something that often we don't think about as much because a lot of what they're propagating is pretty absurd. But they're good at what they do.
Mike: But it's all tentacles of the same beast. So they're using the same messages, the same talking points, the same statistics. And also there has to be some coordination going on.
Megan: But if you look into the studies that they use, because they love to cite this one debunked study on a link between abortion and breast cancer.
Sarah: All right. Let's get into the debunk bed.
Megan: So it basically came to the conclusion that there was some sort of link between having an abortion and later developing breast cancer.
Mike: So if you have an abortion, you're more likely to get breast cancer later.
Megan: So if you are trying to get a woman to not have an abortion, great. That's good news, right?
Sarah: It's a nice scare tactic.
Megan: Generally what we see is these sorts of trumped up scare tactics around it. So we're going to look at the one discredited study that links abortion to breast cancer. We're going to talk about how you will probably regret it, statistically that's not actually true. Most women do not feel regret after having an abortion. And also, we don’t legislate regret anyway, if they did.
So then I think that the most chilling thing that I encountered, a statistic that was parroted to both of us, was that your chance of dying within a year went up if you had an abortion.
Mike: Sounds legit. Sounds good.
Megan: Right. And they also have this sort of made up syndrome that is sort of like a Frankenstein's monster of PTSD and shaming women for being sexually active, which is called like Post-Abortion Stress Syndrome. That's not recognized by the DSM-IV.
Sarah: Calling something a syndrome really is a legitimizing move.
Mike: As we had learned.
Megan: So then you're going to have an abortion and then you're going to have severe mental health consequences for years after. Are you sure?
Sarah: That’s interesting language to use, because it feels as if so much of what this is playing on is the idea that women need to feel guilty for choosing to terminate a pregnancy. And that not getting depressed, not becoming suicidal, not having some life derailing, emotional consequence from getting an abortion, is proof that you're a monster. And that's just in many ways not true. And I would say most objectively persuasively it's just statistically not true at all. And it feels like inventing a syndrome it feels like people struggling with that. And maybe statistically it's not true, but it shouldn't be. People should be destroyed by remorse, even if they're not right.
Mike: And how many people would regret getting a tattoo, but we don’t legislate that either.
Sarah: And how many people regret having children.
Megan: Well, and that's a huge question.
Sarah: Yeah. I feel like to me, the big counterargument, I took a class once from a professor who wrote this Washington Post piece about carrying a pregnancy to term and then having a child is way more physically traumatic and then life changing than abortion. And we should question women, really, you really want to get pregnant? Do you know what that whole situation is about? Do you want to see some videos?
Megan: Yeah. That's the higher risk thing. Having an abortion is a very low risk procedure. It is akin to having to go in for a colonoscopy, it has an incredibly low complication rate. A lot of what they do is they couch their anti-abortion legislation in this sort of language of medicine and science. So a very popular route is something called Informed Consent. So they pass informed consent laws, which sounds great.
Mike: Who doesn't want informed consent?
Megan: So the thing about that is, when you go to the doctor for an abortion, you probably already have to sign consent in some form. There are already mechanisms in place to do that.
Sarah: Doctors are into that as a general thing.
Megan: So what informed consent does is it basically gives doctors a script that they have to say to their patients. So that's where the debunked breast cancer study comes back out of its horrible shell. And they say, oh, so you might regret it, you might get depressed, you might get breast cancer, and now we have to watch a video of your baby.
Sarah: It feels like it's based on the idea that women will not be thoughtful about having an abortion unless they're sat down and lectured into doing it by a medical professional.
Megan: I think most of the providers when you go in, they do ask you if you're sure and if this is what you really want and is someone else making this decision for you. Those are standard questions that are asked. So we don't need a law stating that they need to do something. And they're not stating that they need to do that, they're stating that they need to do this weird song and dance with some made up stuff.
Mike: So it’s very prescribed what they have to actually say.
Megan: Yeah. It's basically, there's not a problem, but let's legislate it anyway.
Mike: It feels to me like the strategy is basically the same as right when DVD players came out, and they would say DVD players at Radio Shack only $29.99. But then it turned out it was actually like $100, but there was like a $70 rebate, but you had to mail off for the $70 rebate and they'd send you a form and you'd fill it out and you'd have to send it back. They know nobody's actually going to do all that rigmarole.
Sarah: Yes. That's exactly like getting a rebate.
Megan: I think that is a good analogy. But instead of a rebate, it's that something horrible has happened to you and you're just trying to survive.
Mike: Yeah. It's a weird divergence between the states too, that there are places that are doing this, but then there's also states that are super chill. Right?
Sarah: Kind of, yeah.
Megan: I would say more proactive than super chill. So there are states that have protections that are built into their state policies. So they actually are bucking the national trend. Washington is one of those states, Oregon is one of those states, California, and New York.
Because the thing about that little door that was left open in Roe v. Wade, is that people on the left can use that, too. And so one thing that we've seen is protection for Medicaid coverage of abortion. So the Hyde Amendment that we talked about earlier is a federal policy, but states have their own Medicaid funds that they can do whatever they want with.
And so in Washington, you actually can get a state funded abortion. And Oregon has a similar policy. I think California has one, too. So there are these state policies that can be implemented that actually improve access. If you have the votes in your state legislature, you can do things like that. And also in Washington, we have an amendment. We had a statewide initiative that was passed in 1991 by a vote of the people that legalized abortion. And that was actually pioneered by activists who are really frightened of the prospect of Roe v. Wade being overturned. They'd seen sort of the rise of Reagan and the moral majority. And so Washington state essentially has abortion access codified into our legal structure.
Mike: Crushing it.
Sarah: Settle down.
Megan: So because of that, it means that if Roe is overturned in Washington state, people will still have access to abortion.
Sarah: Can you talk about when we started to see anti-abortion terrorism?
Megan: Oh, it's been going on forever. I think it really took off, ugh gross, in the early nineties.
Sarah: I know we're talking about these trends in American violence, and the only language we have is the same language we would use to talk about boy bands. Terrorism is having a moment!
Megan: But it is! And it has been. You see it happened in the early nineties. There are some pretty high profile attacks on clinics. There was a really bad one in Pensacola where a doctor was shot and killed. There was actually a really relatively recent one in Colorado that happened, but that starts to happen in the nineties, and it coincides with this increasingly violent rhetoric on the side of pro-life activists. And they basically do things where they will list doctors names and addresses publicly. Something that is worth remembering is the language around abortion is really, for them, it's really violent. It's murder. It's like we’re equating this with murder, here are some terrifying blown up images of fetus parts.
Sarah: There's always the image of the pink, tiny, fetus hand, you know, next to a quarter for scale or something like that. And I can so imagine being inflamed by that rhetoric and just absorbing this feeling, staring at those pictures and feeling I have to protect this innocent, mutilated life.
Megan: Yeah. And if you look at those images, they don't bother to tell you how many weeks gestation those fetuses are. They don't include a lot of factual information. And I think when you are pushing rhetoric like that and images like that and framing like that, it should come as no surprise that certain people are driven to violence because of it. This is really getting a little bit into the weeds. Dr. George Tiller was an abortion provider who was assassinated in his church.
Mike: Oh, wow.
Megan: In 2009, this was in Kansas. And if you've ever heard the sort of saying, ‘trust women’, this was something that he pioneered.
Mike: Did someone just walk up to him and shoot him in the head? How they actually do it.
Megan: I think, yeah. I think that he was. He was killed by Scott Roeder, who was an anti-abortion extremist. I think one of the most chilling details of this is that on the dashboard of the shooter's vehicle, of Roeder’s car, was the contact information for I think the communications director for Operation Rescue, which is this crazy, militant, anti-choice group. I believe at the time they disavowed it, but the facts in themselves are pretty damning.
Mike: So you're saying the institutional abortion opposition started to blend with the extreme abortion opposition, the lines between these two things got blurrier.
Megan: It is blurry. I don't know a lot of anti-abortion activists who are doing things like pushing for policies that would actually make abortion less necessary.
Sarah: Yeah. And what would that policy look like?
Megan: Birth control coverage. Better maternity leave and maternity policies.
Sarah: Making it financially possible to be a mother seems like something that should be able to get bipartisan support.
Mike: So what's going to happen if Roe gets overturned?
Megan: So I want to preface this by saying I'm not a lawyer. I have spoken to lawyers and that's how I have come to this conclusion.
Mike: So don't sue Megan, sue the lawyers she’s talked to.
Megan: The Supreme Court is not looking good. It's probably not going to just be, “now Roe v. Wade is overturned”. It would be very unlikely to go back on settled law and to just kind of like undo it. The thing that we'd be more likely to see is that there are any number of abortion related cases making their way through the court system right now. It could happen that we do see a reversal on abortion access, but it probably won't involve Roe v. Wade specifically, it's more likely to involve one of those cases.
Sarah: Are there cases currently that would potentially open the door to a decision that would then be a federal reversal on abortion access?
Megan: You do see things like parental notification laws. So there are abortion provisions that are making their way through the system.
Mike: These undue burden things, these little rebate on your DVD player, style barriers in front of abortion access could get much more stringent and the court could just keep saying, that one sounds fine.
Megan: I think that could happen. I also think we could see a case like the one that we saw with the undocumented teenager who was seeking an abortion.
Mike: What's that one?
Megan: This was an undocumented teenager who was seeking an abortion and she had to petition for one. In states where there are parental notification laws, sometimes people will have to seek something called a judicial bypass. So, if you are say like 13 and you need to have an abortion and you can't tell your parents for whatever reason, so you actually have to go to court to get clearance to get an abortion.
Mike: Who even does that? It's such a disincentive.
Megan: Exactly. It's working the way it's supposed to.
Sarah: In Alabama they made it so that you can't do this anymore, but for a long time, if you appeared before a judge and a judicial bypass procedure, the judge could appoint an attorney to argue on behalf of your baby for its right to live.
Mike: Oh fuck.
Sarah: And that position was one that was funded by the state in Alabama, which is a state that only has public defenders in a minority of its counties, but they would publicly fund a fetal attorney.
Megan: I have definitely heard of pro-life activists speaking on behalf of fetuses, or like, we're going to have a fetus testify at this hearing. Almost like performance art stuff.
Sarah: Tiny fetus and dead white women are two of the best legal proxies you can really ask for in terms of like someone to speak for in order to pass legislation that's really abusive to politically unpopular groups.
Mike: What happened with the undocumented teen?
Megan: So the Trump administration was trying to prevent her, she was in federal custody, they were trying to prevent her from having an abortion and a judge ruled that they could not do that.
Mike: That she was legally entitled to get an abortion.
Megan: But that was, that was a ruling that a judge needed to make. And that was a ruling that happened in a lower level court.
Sarah: And this is also again, another very useful slimy, legal tactic that we see across the board and appears here as like, you can always just make somebody wait it out if they're poor. If they're pregnant, which is a timely issue. Norma McCorvey didn't end up having an abortion because of Roe v. Wade, because that pregnancy came to term before the case went to the Supreme court. Because the law is slow, and pregnancy always takes the same amount of time.
Megan: And actually time is one of the biggest weapons in kind of the war on access to abortion, because you can make somebody wait to have an abortion the longer you can get her to wait, the less likely she is to be able to have that abortion.
Mike: By the time she's able to get the legal right to get it, it's already 26, 28 weeks into the pregnancy.
Megan: Yeah. And then her procedure is $13,000 and it's like, who's going to do that.
Sarah: You know, American John Wayne Bobbitt coming into the emergency room with his penis on ice, you know, and they're like, okay, well maybe you should sit and think. Are you sure you want it back? Have you seen the video?
Megan: Is your mom with you?
Mike: It seems like the most logical scenario is that it would just create a huge divergence between the states. That if we have more of these burdens placed on abortion access, it will probably become easier in Washington, and California, and these other usual suspect states, because there will be a left-wing backlash in those states and they'll be like, dammit, let's make abortion as easy as possible. But then in Mississippi, it's going to get so hard. It's going to be the return of illegal abortions and it's going to be the return of abortion road trips.
Megan: I have bad news for you, Michael. We're already there.
Mike: Is that already the situation?
Megan: We’ve been there for a while.
Sarah: And then the good news is that we’re already used to living in Mad Max world and we are learning how to drive our big guzzling rigs.
Megan: This is like the bad news, good news. Right? The bad news is that I see people who are like, we've got to prevent the Handmaid's tale from coming true. And I'm like, well, there's already fetal burial laws and shit. It's over.
Mike: There's fucking fetal burial law?
Megan: The corollary to criminalizing abortion is, you guessed it, criminalizing miscarriage.
Mike: No way. What? Wait, what? How? I don't-
Sarah: Must be nice. So this was in the last Texas legislative session. This was one of the big news grabbing things. There were two, maybe even three different pieces of legislation attempting to illegalize the non-funerary disposal of fetal remains that had come about through either abortion or miscarriage.
Mike: No fucking way.
Sarah: It never actually passed because it was clear that the people involved in trying to push it through the legislation, they did that thing you hate the most, Michael, which is not thinking through a plan that they had. Because it was like, well, how is this going to be cost-effective? How is this going to work? And they're like, well, you know, we can freeze the fetal remains until in the aggregate. We can bury a thousand of them altogether in a large fetal Popper's grave. And it's like, I don't know how that's better. And I was just reading a thing about a protest fetal barrier being done in Michigan, by a pro-life group.
Mike: So this didn't pass, thankfully, but it's now in the realm of possibility.
Megan: It's out there. Yeah.
Sarah: It soaked up a lot of media attention during this legislative session, which means that you can have a stupid anti-abortion on the floor that diverts attention from some of the less obviously ridiculous stuff that you're doing, but that also screws things for women.
Megan: It makes a great foil because it's like, well, at least we're not the crazy, fetal remains people. Let's get this parental notification law through!
Mike: I have unsuccessfully been pitching for years, an article called the Dictator's Insight about what authoritarian regimes have realized in the last couple of years is that the way that you restrict rights is not actually by passing laws restricting them, but by passing laws, making them an administrative burden. If you want to correct that in civil society, you don't say we're banning free speech, we're banning Amnesty international. You say, oh, you have to register, and you have to do it in person, and you have to do it on paper. And we need three copies of it, and you have to reregister the first of every month. You make it seem like these normal, just, you know, making you register, pay your taxes kind of laws, but you make them so burdensome that nobody's actually going to do it. And that way you have the pretense to say, oh, we're not cracking down on civil society, we just want them to register. And it's sort of the same kind of thing here, where if you want to make abortion illegal, you don't actually make it illegal, you make it a pain in the ass and just really difficult to the point where no one's actually going to do it. You have this plausible deniability the entire time when really your project from day one has been to make it so that zero abortions happen in the United States. But this way, moderates support what you're doing and kind of turn it into both sides or a quote unquote debate. A huge chunk of the political middle is going to go well, you know, it does sound kind of reasonable.
Megan: Yeah. And I think that's what has happened. We have Roe v. Wade, technically it's legal, but you can legislate the shit out of something that's technically legal to the point that its legality is basically symbolic.
Mike: Right. Other than just being super depressed, what are our takeaways here?
Sarah: What can we do? What are the little specific needs?
Megan: One of the things that I did when I was at the Mercury was I did it story on the Northwest Abortion Access Fund, which is the largest abortion fund in the country and it spans Oregon, Washington and Idaho, their service area. They have line that is staffed by different volunteer every week and people who are getting an abortion and need help covering their procedures, or don't know where to go, can call that hotline. And they have a certain amount of money that they start out with at the beginning of the week. And they just like fund and fund and fund and fund until they run out, basically. They also have a practical support network. The people that I talked to that run that network report that most of their calls come from Idaho, because Idaho has an access problem and Oregon and Washington both have public funding for abortion.
Sarah: That reminds me that there was also a case in the news a few years ago, about a woman who attempted to have an at-home abortion in Idaho and self-induced and was prosecuted for manslaughter.
Megan: Oh yeah. There was a case in the south I remember hearing about a woman who had done cocaine once during her pregnancy. So she delivered a stillborn baby, which had nothing to do with cocaine. Actually it turns out cocaine is not that harmful.
Sarah: As discussed on previous episodes.
Mike: Oh we know.
Megan: Yeah. And this was a low-income woman, a woman of color. And she was effectively criminalized for having a history of drug use and having a poor pregnancy outcome that wasn't related to her drug use. So you see a lot of that. But if you are concerned, I think something that people can do that is pretty low cost on your time is there are networks of people who are funding abortions for those who can't afford it. And it's really easy to find those in your area. You just have to search. It's the National Network for Abortion Funds, I think is what it's called, and you can sort of do a search and find the one that's active in your area.
Mike: Do you have any theory on why this got so extreme? I can sort of see wanting to make abortion illegal after 20 weeks, that to me makes some sense. I don't agree with that position, but I can see it. It's all about where you draw the line of when a fetus becomes a living being, right. And I can see, look for me, 18 weeks, whatever you want to pick the line at, for me, that's a baby at that point. I really don't think we should be doing abortions after that. That makes sense to me as a defensible position. But what's interesting to me is that that position has become more and more radical over the years. It seems like, okay, I don't want to have abortions after 18 weeks then became, none after 15 weeks, none after 10 weeks, none after one week, none after even these Plan B things that are the day after people are going out when it's a fucking zygote. I don't know what a zygote is but it’s something very small.
Megan: Super cute blastocyst.
Mike: What's so interesting is how this position got so extreme over time, rather than somebody drawing a line. Look, 18 weeks is bad, but before 18 weeks, let's just leave that between a person and their doctor. That creep is very interesting to me.
Megan: I think if you're trying to push antiabortion legislation, you don't start with seven weeks, right. Because that makes you sound crazy. So you start with 20 and I think to your point, your point's really well taken, that it makes sense to feel a little weird about that if you don't know what the circumstances are. I write about this stuff all the time, and I totally understand why someone would be like, I don't know, 20 weeks seems late. I don't feel okay about that. It's pretty easy to make that case and so I think if you are pushing that agenda, that's where you start, you start at the point where someone who would not have a lot of information about the issue would start to think that, okay, maybe some regulations do make sense. And then from there you can kind of pull in like, okay, well, why not 14 weeks? We're at 14. Now we can go to seven. So I think the end game of course is like, what did Mike Pence say? It was, abortion will be relegated to the ash pile of history, whatever. The idea is to get rid of abortion altogether, actually that means, let's get rid of safe abortion.
Sarah: You know, the destruction of abortion access, I think has always been one of the political goals of that cultural revolution that the Christian right sees itself undertaking and has been very strategically undertaking for 40 years.
Mike: It is just weird in that, I think that marijuana legalization is a good policy, but if somebody then said to me, well, now that we've legalized marijuana, let's make PCP and heroin legal. I'd be like, eh, different things are different and I'm not comfortable with the line moving that far. What's interesting to me is that no one, even within the Christian right was like, you know, maybe 18 weeks is fine.
Megan: Yeah. I also think it has to do with the way that abortion is stigmatized more broadly. If you make abortion something that people don't feel comfortable talking about, then it's easier to get away with those things. There's recent polling that suggests that something like 70% of Americans actually support access to abortion. It's interesting that when we talk about the way that we see abortion depicted in pop culture, Maude was our high point.
Mike: Yeah. 50 years ago as Maude.
Megan: Yeah. Yeah. I do think that when you have something that is so stigmatized, it creates this mystery around it, and it makes it easier to do things like try to legislate it out of existence.
Mike: What percentage of women have had abortions?
Megan: One in four.
Mike: One in four, which is massive. That's way more than there are left-handed people.
Megan: It’s very common. You probably know someone, you probably know a couple people.
Mike: I'm 100% sure that I know people. Yeah. And it is weird to me that no one has ever actually told me that they've had an abortion. I hope I give off a pretty like with abortion vibe, but nobody has said, oh, I happened to have had an abortion when I was 21. It's still something that clearly on some level we're not comfortable talking about.
Sarah: Yeah. Abortion is invisible. A quarter of women have had abortions, but a lot of them don't talk about it. A lot of conservative women have had abortions that I'm sure the men in their lives don't know about. Conservative men just also don't understand how the female body works in any real way.
Megan: I think that it does have a lot to do with that. There have been cases where abortion has been an issue that's been deprioritized.
Mike: What do you mean?
Megan: There was actually a pretty fierce schism between high-profile feminist activists like Gloria Steinem and I believe it was George McGovern. It was at the DNC and there was this understanding that abortion would be an issue that was prioritized in their campaign. And then through some sort of backdoor deal-making, it was deprioritized, and it was taken off the agenda and people were really upset. And we've seen that happen because abortion is treated as this kind of fringe issue.
Mike: Totally.
Megan: That's a thing that crazy feminists worry about.
Mike: It's only women, it's only 52% of the population that are affected by this issue. It’s a niche thing.
Megan: Abortion access is an indicator of where we are in terms of how our country values or does not choose to value poor people and people of color and people who do not have crazy resources.
Mike: It's interesting that this issue has not caught fire for straight men, because I don't know all of the child support laws, but it seems like if you get someone pregnant and then they stay pregnant, then you have to pay a bunch of money for 18 years. You think just out of sheer selfishness, men would have taken this up and been like, let's make abortions everywhere! Let's make abortions at CVS.
Sarah: Yeah. The secrecy seems like such a big part of why it's not a conversation that men are more a part of because I feel like men probably don't hear about abortion nearly, in a way that's proportional to its actual existence in the world. That just seems impossible.
Megan: I think you're right that this is an issue that men should care about because if you're a heterosexual dude and you want to date women, you have to be pro-choice. I’ve felt that way forever. It's just like, sorry. This is who you are. This is your situation. You have to care about this issue. I think that what we cultivate empathy for is based a lot on the happenstance of what is introduced into our lives or what we see arbitrarily as affecting us. But everything that happens to everyone else affects us personally, because we're all part of one huge organism.
Mike: Are we ending on a Mother Gaia note? Is that where we are?
Sarah: I see it more as like we’re all part of the same, huge, disgusting gut flora culture, and we're all in it together. It doesn't have to be nice, but we can't leave
Mike: . It's not beautiful, but we're all here.
Sarah: It’s like with Roe v. Wade, the thing we’re most afraid of happening has already happened, moral. I really liked that moral because it's better to be picking up the pieces one little piece at a time than to be sitting tensed and in anticipation.
Mike: I thought the moral was Maude was right about everything.