Future of the Abortion Rights Movement

They are really very proactively trying to shift that overton window and get people used to the idea that it is okay to punish abortion patients. If they can't do it with life in prison or the death penalty right away, they'll try to figure out another way to do it. No, they are moving to the next step Jane Coston and this is whatay. The show that's wondering how Vice President JD Vance really felt when his boss declared him the official scapegoat of the Iran warar. President Trump said yesterday that he was going to blame you if the talks of Iran go sideways. Are you worried that he's going to make you the fall guy? No, not at all. mean I think the president was joking Oh, honey Maybe ask former Vice Pident Mike Pence about what a hilarious guy President Donald Trump really is On today's show, we talk to Jessica Valenti about the next front in the abortion fight and the scary state level anti abortion legislation you may not have heard about before we get into All that. Here's what we're following today. Thursday, june eighteenth. So I guess I would say to anybody, any of the critics is number one have a little bit of faith in the presresident of the United States. the idea that he is going to strike a deal that's been bad for the American people, it's preposterous Pp Vice President J Vance has the unfortunate task of spinning the new U. S. Iran Memorandum of undernderstanding, or if you will surrenderndom of understanding And forther alert 's going over well That's because this agreement foresees effectively pumping Iran full of money by unfreezing hundreds of billions of dollars held in foreign banks and letting Iran sell oil right away It does not include a long term resolution to the Iranian nuclear standoff, at least not on paper So we went from we're going to destroy your civilization to and do whatever After days of will he, won't he? The Pident went ahead and signed the MOU during a visit to the French Palace of Versea That makes this the second most important document signed there after the treaty that famously ended World War I and paved the way for World War two Trump's memo of Versailles stops fighting for sixty days, so Vance has plenty of time to scramble for a much better final deal And for Vance's sake, that new deal better be a big improvement, because even Republicans think what Trump just signed is bullshit Fox News host, Trey Gauddy said yesterday he thought he was being spoofed after reading the MOU because of how it benefits Iran better off than they were before the hostilities began And that should not be the consequence of war Another Fox News host, Mark Levin tweeted today quote, The insanity of those defending parts of the MOU or major matters left out of this MOU is truly stunning But it's not just loud mouthed Fox News personalityities slamming Trump's deal In a tweet yesterday, Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy called it the quote, worst foreign policy blunder in decades And in an interview with The Hill, Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz suggested Trump might be getting some quote veryer poor advice on this deal Trump fired back today against, quote, fools who think he hasn't been tough enough on Iran. calling them, quote, either jealous people or stupid As someone who opposes this war and dislikes his administration I'll say I'm having a great time It's rare that I get to say this but the Supreme Court today made a ruling that was both correct and hilarious In a unanimous decision, the court found that the prosecution of a Texas man for owning a gun while also being a marijuana user was not consistent with the Second Amendment. In justustice Neil Gorsuch's majority opinion, he wrote that the prosecution only made sense if you believe that using or possessing marijuana A drug millions of Americans use and is legal to some degree in forty states, gave the government the right to take away someone's secondecond Amendment rights I highly recommend reading the full opinion because Gorsuch included roughly four pages on the drinking habits of the foundounding fathers. This point Despite the fact that Thomas Jefferson drank four glasses of wine a night, no one at the time would have attempted to restrict his right to bear arms And so it goes, according to the Supreme Court with a ten gram gummy And speaking of green Washington, DC is dealing with another kind Despite official claims to the contrary, the Lincoln Memorial's reflecting pool remains emerald colored and filled with algae Yes, Trump promised to drain the swamp Instead, he put one in the reflecting pool. Earlier this morning Department of the Interior tweeted they had solved this problem with And I am not making this up. advanced nanob buubbler technology. Your guess is as good as mine DC correspondent Mett Burg went to look and It's still green guys There you have it Our man in DC on the scene. And that's the news. Let's talk about abortion The twenty twenty two Dobbs decision that reversed Roe versus Wade promised to return the issue of abortion back to the states But for anti abortion activists, state level bans haven't been good enough And more and more states have introduced legislation that would make getting an abortion a punishable crime In Tennessee, a state with a total abortion ban. Republican legislators tried to push the rebill that would have treated abortion like homicide. making abortion patients eligible for the death penalty under Tennessee law. And in North Carolina, a state where abortion is still legal Republican legislators recently proposed a bill that goes even further. It's clear that anti abortion activists want to see women who get abortions imprisoned. Or worse And with the number of people who have gotten abortions only increasing over the last year, That's a lot of punishment they want to meet out. Jessica Valenti writes a substack abortion everyvery day She has been tracking abortion rights for more than a decade. We talked about why the anti abortion movement has gotten more extreme and what we can do about it Jessica, welcome back to Wdayay Thanks for having me So North Carolina has been considering a bill that would let voters amend the state Constitution to say that life starts at the moment of conception And it would equate abortion with murder. There are a lot of layers to how bad this bill is. Can you give us a quick explainer Sure, yeah, there's a lot going on there. It, as you said, would classify abortion as murder in the criminal code, not just for abortion providers, but for abortion patients. In every state that has an abortion ban, they generally prohibit the prosecution of abortion patients. This would allow the prosecution of abortion patients. The way that they define abortion and life would make it questionable on birth control and whether certain forms of birth control like IUDs and the morning after pill would be considered abortions and therefore punishable with life in prison And then there's a really Interesting, it is not the right word, but a really troubling section that allows for the use of deadly force in defense of a fetus embryo fertilized egg Meing you could kill an abortion provider, and that would be legally justified. and the language as if that wasn't bad enough. The language is so broad that you could also make the argument that killing someone who is driving a person to an abortion clinic, who is lending them money is being done in defense of a fetus. And so it's prettyre much about as extreme as you can get But I would just say unfortunately, we're seeing a real rise in bills like this, right? Like they're no longer anomalies Right. Yeah. I think I've seen bills like this in Tennessee And in Louisiana, what other states have tried to pass legislation that would make and abortion the equivalent of committing murder I mean, pretty much every anti abortion state has seen a bill like this. I think at last countount, it was over a dozen. They're called equal protection bills because the idea is that fetuses embryos fertilized eggs deserve the same level of protection in the state Constitution as a human being And they're being pushed by this really radical group, this sect of the anti abortion movement called abortion abolitionists, which is just problematic for all sorts of reasons They are gaining power, like culturally, politically, they have a really unfortunately good political ground game. They have candidates who are running for office. they have folks who have been elected to office. And so this is, again, it's not an unusual bit of legislation anymore. We're seeing it every legislative session. and every legislative session, these bills are getting more co sponsors We'll get back to my conversation with Jessica Lenti in a moment with more troubling ideas that, unfortunately we still have to talk about But if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five star review on Spotify Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. What today is brought to you by Zebiotics Let's face it After a night with drinks, I don't bounce back the next day like I used to I have to make a choice I can either have a great night or a great next day. That is until I found pre alcohol Zebriiotics pre alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking Here's how it works. 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P participating atconal' for limited time Wh while suppies last All rights reserve twenty six McDonalds FF Wor Cup twenty Let's get back to my conversation with Jessica Valanti Now, Realistically, this North Carolina bill will not pass. Yes. I think it's interesting because you keep having these moments again, interesting, not in a good way. You keep having these moments where these bill is suggested And then the legislators clearly get yelled at just enough that they're like, oh, well maybe it's not such a good idea. I think my favorite example of this was a Tennessee legislator who put this forward. His argument was, well We don't execute that many women anyway. So it's not really that big a concern when you know that bill was put forward in Tennessee. Yeah. in a moment in which there are moreore than a dozen states with total bands This tells me that the state of the anti abortion movement is more extreme than ever. You, we heard for fifty years or so, o, just send it back to the states and let states make a decision And then Fpreme Court did that And it wasn't good enough for them No, they are moving to the next step. This is something that I've predicted, it's something other feminists and abortion rights advocates have warned about that they are really very proactively trying to shift that overton window and get people used to the idea that it is okay to punish abortion patients if they can't do it with life in prison or the death penalty right away They'll try to figure out another way to do it. There was a bill in South Carolina, I believe, that would punish abortion patients. Their compromise was to move it from life in prison execution to a couple of years in prison, like two years in prison. And for the first time, a major national anti abortion group students for life endorsed legislation Right? So we are really seeing like the so called mainstream anti abortion movement get on board I reported, I think it was a week or two ago, the Texas Republican Party explicitly publicly praised and posted about on their social media accounts abolish abortion, Texas, an abolitionist group. They have abolitionist language in the Republican Party platform. And so this is happening, even if these bills don't get passed right now they are certainly making moves towards that eventual end. and I think that We're moving a lot quicker than some people probably realize Something that I noted in coverage, local coverage from Tennessee and from North Carolina is that the people who are advocating C theseese types of legislation are generally meant And the people you see online who are screaming at the women who kind of lead the anti abortion movement, the mainstream It's mostly men saying We need to punish these women. They are committing murder. You punish murderers by putting them to death. And when anti abortion activists who are women push back, there's basically this kind of like this weird You're not going far enough. you're just, you know a simple, stupid woman. You don't understand what we need to be doing Is that something you're seeing as well? I mean, obviously I think misogyny is the underpinning of so much of the anti abortion movement itself. but there's also a misogyny within the anti abortion movement towards People fighting abortion Absolutely. Your read on it is one hundred percent correct. These guys are misogynist, ultra right wing Christian nationalists, right? Like they have a very specific idea about what women's place is. These are the same guys who don't want women to vote. They are certainly not interested in listening to a female leader of an anti abortion group I have heard stories from women who tried to join the abolitionist movement just to be sort of mistreated and shunned like they think women are people, and so it's not hard to imagine that they're not incredibly interested in working with women, having conversations, having political conversations with women, they think that we should be home having babies You've written that the abortion rights movement spends a lot of time responding to emergencies, kind of being like, oh, this is happening right now. We got to fight it But it doesn't plan ahead in the way that anti abortion activists do. So if the anti abortion movement is moving towards abolition Where does the abortion rights movement need to go? Part of the problem is that For way too long, you know, the mainstream abortion rights movement mainstream Democratic legislators, they don't take these kinds of things seriously. They think that these are outliers, they think that these are extremists, like nothing is ever going to happen with this We need to start taking them really seriously. And as you said reallyally looking ahead ten, twenty, thirty years and doing political work that is thinking decades ahead. I think part of that is really holding Republicans to account proactively and putting them on the record, you know, like pass a bill that says we will introduce a bill In your state, in the federal government that says, we are never going to punish abortion patients. Surely we can all agree on that. Democrats did something similar with codifying the right to contraception, right? They knew it was going to pass, but they got Republicans on the record saying that they don't want to codify the right to contraception I think the more that we can be talking about this and holding their feet to the fire, the better. And again Taking it seriously. I understand, I think that there's always a fear of you don't want to scare people, right? Eespecially when there's so much confonusion and misinformation going around about abortion and what's legal and what's not. You never want to send the impression that you know a bill is somehow a law. like there's a lot of confusion there for people in these st states where they think, if you make a video, about one of these bills, they think, oh my God, can I go get an abortion or am I going to be put to death by the government. So it's incredibly important that we're taking that into account But This is an emergency, right? Like this is happening now and this is happening very quickly. They are electing these guys to office. the sooner that we can like really get on board and make this a central piece of the movement, the better Jessica, as always, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me That was my conversation with Jessica Valenti, founder of Aortion Everyday We'll link to her substack in the show notes Before we go Over on the Love it or Leave it channel this week, they're hosting a two part Pride special with a few of the most fabulous queer comedians in LA Drag race winner Mikey Meeeks, stand upp superstar Ozuko Okotsuka, and the legend himself Bruce Valanche, plus many more Check out, Love it or Rleave it every Wednesday and Friday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Crgratulate former President Barack Obama, and tell your friends to listen And if you're under reading, and not just about how the Barack Obama Presidential center. which features a library, park, museum, basketball court, and gardens officially open today like me. Waterdayay is also a nightly newsletter Check it out and subscribe at crookut d. com slash should subscribe. I'm Jane Koston