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Civics & Coffee: A History Podcast
Understanding the Opposition: Amy Littlefield on Killers of Roe
00:55:08
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Civics and Coffee, a history podcast. The show all about United States history delivered to you in the time it takes to enjoy your morning cup of coffee. I'm your host, Alicia, a historian trained in United States history with a passion for telling both the known and unknown parts of America's past. So grab your coffee and get ready for some bite sized history. Hey everyone, welcome back. Today's episode is an exploration of recent history as I sat down with journalist Amy Littlefield to discuss her book that investigates the battle over reproductive health care in Killers of Roe. I hope you all enjoy the conversation. Hello everyone. Joining me today is Amy Littlefield. She is an author and the Abortion Access correspondent for the nation who who has contributed to the New York Times opinion and wrote the Times Sunday Review cover story where the pro choice movement went wrong. She is here today to discuss her recently published book, Killers of Roe. Welcome Amy.
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B
Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure.
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A
Thank you so much for coming on. Let's dive right on in. What prompted you to dive into this story and do this research?
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B
So I had been covering the incremental death of abortion rights in this country for about a decade when it became came clear that the Supreme Court was going to deal the final blow and overturn Roe v. Wade itself in 2022. And so I had been watching state legislatures across the south and Midwest pass 72 hour waiting periods, mandatory counseling, script laws that said clinics had to have hallways that were a certain width and doorknobs that were a certain style. And over time, these laws closed down abortion clinics and they made it harder and harder for people, especially in rural areas and people who didn't have money to get the abortion they needed. That was the story I knew before 2022. And it was really hard to sound the alarm about that because it was sort of a slow emergency, right, that had been happening for 50 years, step by step, incremental cut by incremental cut. When it became clear that this 50 year project by the anti abortion movement was finally going to reach its completion, that, you know, the Supreme Court, which had been stacked with justices put there for the specific purpose of eviscerating abortion rights, was going to do what it had been, you know, set up to do, I really wanted to dive into this world on a much deeper level. I had some questions beyond the daily news reporting that I'd been doing, like who were the people I haven't heard of who are responsible for the death of abortion rights? What motivated them? You know, I had Always sort of been taught to think like that. Anti abortion organizers were motivated by misogyny, by hatred of women, desire to control their bodies. I wanted to know if there was more to it than that, who these people were. And I wanted to dig into the history, you know, the key moments in the 1970s and 80s that I didn't know about. And I wanted to answer another question that I had because the first thought that came to my mind when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and it became clear to me that the Supreme Court was going to have an anti abortion majority that was going to overturn Roe v. Wade. At last I thought, people are going to die. People are going to die. And because I had covered Catholic hospitals where abortion is restricted even in states where abortion is legal because of religious policies, hospitals that make up one in six acute care beds nationwide and operate under religious restrictions, they operate like states where abortion is banned, actually. And so I had been covering cases where women who were suffering miscarriages had gone into Catholic hospitals and had their care delayed very dangerously in some cases. So I knew that that was likely to be the place where people were going to die, because now we have the abortion pill. I knew people were going to be dying probably in hospitals, emergency rooms. And so thinking about that got me interested in going back through history and looking at the women who have died in the 1970s, the 1980s, as a result of abortion bans, and answering the question of why those deaths have not been enough to stop these policies, why the incremental death of abortion rights has continued on, and why it continues to this day. Because, in fact, we know from ProPublica's reporting people are dying, women are dying. And still we have 13 states that ban abortion outright, four more that ban it at about six weeks. And this is the new reality that we are living in.
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A
Yeah. And the book starts with a dive into the Hyde Amendment. So for those who are unfamiliar, what is it and how did it lead to the undoing of the right to abortion?
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B
This is, I swear to you, I've become a Hyde Amendment truther. I am like, this is my obsession right now. Just picture me in a tinfoil hat ranting about the Hyde Amendment. I mean, I don't think I'm alone, right. I think there's a lot of people in the reproductive health and justice space who understand the significance of the Hyde Amendment. So for those unfamiliar, the Hyde Amendment is a ban on federal funding of abortion. It was first passed through Congress in 1976. It went into effect the following year. It has been renewed by every subsequent Congress, regardless of which party is in control. And the crucial thing that it does is that because it bans federal funding of abortion, it means that Medicaid dollars, you know, people who are insured under programs for low income people are not going to get health insurance coverage of abortion unless they live in the minority of states that cover it with state funds instead of federal, right? And so this has created basically two classes of abortion access in this country, right? That low income people who by and large are on Medicaid or might be uninsured, and in a state where it's hard to get on Medicaid and therefore, you know, they have to raise cash out of pocket to pay for an abortion anyway. And those folks are going to struggle to raise the $500 or more later in pregnancy that they might need to pay for an abortion. And then you have folks who have private insurance, folks who are fortunate enough to live in a state where Medicaid does cover abortion, folks who, you know, have a clinic in their community. And those people have access, right? And so right from the jump, you know, three years after Roe v. Wade, there was this dividing line where the same rules that had governed access before Roe v. Wade, right, was wealthy women who could fly to London or leave the country or pay a private provider, you know, their own doctor would probably take care of them in the hospital if they were white and, you know, private insurance patient, those women had access. And those same rules were, you know, put back into place by official policy, right? This the same sort of de facto situation we had before Roe where, where women who were Latina or black who were on public insurance, you know, didn't have the personal connections or the wealth, they died, right? They self induced abortions or they went to unsafe back alley providers and they got very sick and they died in large numbers. And so, so this became a matter of, of federal policy in 1976. And this was like my smoking gun, right? I became obsessed with tracking down the folks who were responsible for the Hyde Amendment, with figuring out whose idea this was, what motivated it? What was it just political opportunism or was there something more to it than that? And then tracing the impact of the Hyde Amendment right, which has shaped the lives of the estimates are about a million people who would have otherwise had an abortion have given birth instead because of the Hyde Amendment right, which is an astounding number of people whose lives have been shaped by this one public policy. And so I found some surprising things when I started to dig into the strange characters responsible for this policy. It was named for Congressman Henry High, notorious conservative figure, but turned out it was not his idea at all.
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A
Yeah, my, my background and, and my, my research interests lie in the evolution of the social safety net. So I was particularly thrilled. Is the wrong word to use here, but from a research standpoint, I was very happy to see this inclusion because I do think it is one of those esoteric thrills things that people just don't understand and aren't necessarily aware of and don't, don't and therefore don't understand how it impacts so many people and had such downstream impacts. I think so many people thought Roe v. Wade, okay, abortion is legal and kind of almost immediately, as your book demonstrates, very quickly for so many. No, actually it wasn't. And so I thought it was a very good chapter.
- [09:17]
B
So thank you for saying that. I'm so glad you are in the wonky weeds as well with this stuff. I mean, it's, you know, it is, it's hard, hard to understand and it takes time to unpack and therefore, you know, there isn't a lot of public understanding of a lot of these safety net programs and services. Right. But, but quietly, over time, you know, they, they shape the lives of, of millions of people. And you know, it started to sound like such an obvious thing in our politics that taxpayer funding shouldn't cover abortions. You know, but my tax dollars shouldn't go to pay for this. And it's something such an American idea. It is such a, you know, Reaganomics kind of. And this was right on the edge of the Reagan era, right? When the whole idea that we shouldn't have to pay for things that poor people need, you know, we're about to get their moment in the White House. And, and we've been living in Reagan's America ever since, right? Living with that idea that quote, unquote, taxpayer funds shouldn't go to the things that poor people need. And of course, though, that's same logic can be used to take away autonomy for low income people of color who want to have families, right? Because the argument is, well, those kids are going to end up on welfare and my taxpayer dollars shouldn't go to pay for those kids. And so you see the same logic being used in U.S. history to discourage or forcibly sterilize people who are seen as, you know, their children are seen as undesirable because our taxpayer funds are going to have to pay for their health care services or their food or, you know, this is the logic of white Christian Men being in control of, of property and dollars. And I don't have to explain this to you, it sounds like, you know, this is the root of, of both anti welfare sentiment and also misogyny and racism. Like when those three things come together, you know, we get the Hyde Amendment and we get, you know, Reagan's America where, where unfortunately we all live today.
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A
Yes, well, and as you mentioned, the Hyde Amendment is, is named after, after the, the gentleman whose idea it wasn't, it wasn't even his, his, his brainchild. So you introduce a lot of characters in this book, one of whom is a gentleman named Paul Herring. So who was he and what was his role in the anti abortion movement?
- [11:43]
B
So I spent more time with Paul than I think anyone else that I interviewed for this book, which is kind of wild because he's probably the least famous person that I interviewed. Right. He's someone nobody has heard of. He was an early leader of a group called Americans United for Life, which is now one of the most influential anti abortion groups in the country. It writes a lot of model legislation that gets introduced at the state level. Back then he did the job for free as a volunteer and his day job was working at the IRS as an attorney, which he did for his entire career. He was a, he is a devout Catholic. He was raised by a mom who took him to church twice a week. You know, raised to really believe in the teachings of the Catholic Church. And he went to law school and then very quickly began using his law degree to act out the teachings of his church by waging these creative long shot lawsuits to try to stop abortion. And what was fascinating historian I, I, I talked to named Sean Kelly had found this incredible document, this memo in the archives of the Catholic bishops that documented a meeting between the representatives of the Catholic Church and Paul Herring who is trying to pitch them on this wild idea that there should be an amendment to the appropriations bill that would restrict federal funding of abortion. And the bishops, the notes are like, this idea isn't going to work. The political strategists think it's going to fail, it's not going to work. And then we're going to have to chalk up one more loss. And our real goal is to get to a constitutional amendment banning all abortions. And this is just, this is not going to get us there. And so they dismiss this idea. Right. And you know, I was reading this document thinking, oh my gosh, if only they had been right about that because two years later, of course the Catholic Church is all in on this Policy. It's been introduced under the popular jovial 6 foot 3 Congressman Henry Hyde's name. And all of a sudden it's like, oh, of course we should have this policy. Taxpayer funding and Democrats are on board and it gets through a Democratic majority Congress. And the Catholic Church plays a crucial role in swaying the demo, influential Democratic congresspeople that they need to move in order to get this. And, and I mean, there's some amazing stories that I tell in the book about how they did that. Right. Flooding, you know, congressmen with letters written by, you know, Catholic leaders in the district and so forth. And so Paul was sort of one of these hidden figures, one of these people behind the scenes, Right. And since, you know, the book takes on this, this tone of a real life whodunit, you know, he's this sort of quiet suspect that you don't notice until the end. And then it's like, oh, my gosh, with, you know, 50 years of retrospect, it turns out quiet figures like him, who no one's heard of, often play a pivotal role in history, you know, which can be an encouraging thing when you think about how there's, you know, folks who, who meet that description on the right side of history as well.
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A
Well, and another gentleman that we're introduced to in the book is Bob Bowman. And so how does he play into the story of anti abortion history?
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B
Yeah, he was another person who I was fascinated to find. Right. And he wrote a memoir. He is a former congressman from Maryland. Grew up, he was adopted. Grew up, had a kind of lonely childhood. He, his beloved stepmother passed away. He was sent off to military academy and he was closeted and gay. And so he develops an interest in politics through an obsession at a young age in Abraham Lincoln and goes off to congressional page school where he learns all these intricate and wonky details about congressional procedure. And then when he gets elected to Congress as a representative for Maryland, he's able to use that knowledge to really stall things in Congress and get under people's skin and bring these minute procedural points. And so he drives everyone nuts and nobody likes him. And he, like, he admitted this, right. He's like, he knew especially the Democrats were going to reflexively vote against anything that had his name on it. And he was among one of the most conservative members of Congress. In the evenings, you know, he's cruising the streets of Washington D.C. in a car or Lincoln Continental with congressional plates, picking up men and paying them for sex. And eventually that would lead to his downfall. The FBI notices that this is going on, you know, it's not great for someone in a position of power to be. Do some doing something that could get them blackmailed, for example. And so he basically, his political career ends in scandal right on the eve of Reagan's election in 1980. But the crucial. And this is why no one's heard of Bob Bauman, right? Unless you've read my book, however. Except that he wrote this memoir, which is amazing. He wrote this memoir because after his period of disgrace, he needed money. And so he says in the beginning of the book, I didn't want to write this book. I wrote this book because I needed money. I guess this is back when books made money. So that's what he was doing. And so I had all this fascinating detail about his life from the book. And then I was actually able to speak with him. Now, why do we care about Bob Bauman in the context of this history? He's the one who put Henry Hyde up to the task of introducing the Hyde Amendment. So he attempted to introduce a version himself the year before, and it didn't go anywhere. Why? He thinks it's because he was unpopular again. Democrats who had the majority in Congress were like, oh, it's a Bauman thing. You know, everyone leave the room or thumbs up, down or, you know, whatever. They just were not. And so he walked up to Henry Hyde one day and he was like, henry, I think maybe you should do it. You're this kind of charming. You're like the new guy in town and you're charming. And even some of the Democrats like you, you're jovial. You know, he was. Henry was really tall and Bob was really short, which in Bob's mind, I think was like a significant thing. You know, Henry Head was this, like, bear of a man. He was like. And so he had this commanding presence, I guess, and people listen to him. And so that was the final step. And Henry Hyde introduced it with his name on it. It was this sort of backdoor measure, right? It was a rider on appropriations bill. It wasn't like they said, okay, we're going to introduce this bill to ban abortion funding. You know, it was a sort of wonky, procedural thing and it passed. And it became very quickly seen as this compromise, as this middle ground on abortion that Democrats supported, that anybody who was sort of in the center of American politics could get behind the idea that our taxpayer dollars shouldn't have to go to abortion, even if they could still call themselves pro choice. Folks like Joe Biden supported the Hyde Amendment for many years, right? Until Politically, the reproductive justice wing of the pro choice movement got strong enough to say, you can't do this and try to convince us you're pro choice. Your right to an abortion should not depend on how much money you have. And, and by supporting this policy, that's what you're saying. So some of these fascinating figures were involved. And what was fascinating, when I talked about Bauman, he told me, I didn't think this was going to last for this long. We didn't think this thing was going to be this big of a deal. We just had this wild idea to do this as a procedural rider on an appropriations bill and we got away with it. And now here we are. The ban has outlasted Roe v. Wade.
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A
Yeah, well. And so you also share stories of the women who were impacted by these policies. And one of those women is Rosie Jimenez. So who was she and how does her story really illustrate the unintended consequences of something like the Hyde Amendment?
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B
Yeah. So Rosie Jimenez was a 27 year old Mexican American woman. She lived in McAllen, Texas, near the Mexican border. She was the child of migrant farm workers and she was studying to be a teacher, putting herself through school, cleaning houses on the weekend along with her friend. And she got pregnant and needed to end the pregnancy. And she had had two previous abortions before that were covered under Texas Medicaid, meaning she could get them paid for by her insurance. But unfortunately for her, in October or September of 1977, when she needed her abortion, the Hyde amendment had taken effect. Texas had cut off Medicaid coverage of abortion. And so that Medicaid card was not going to do her any good. And so instead she went to an unsafe provider. She went to a lay midwife who inserted a piece of rubber tube in her cervix under unsanitary conditions. She contracted a horrific infection and died in agony eight days later in a hospital while doctors were hounding her to talk about the abortion, left behind a four year old daughter. And in the book, I write about the first death of Rosie Jimenez, which never should have happened, right? It was a death by public policy. And then I write about the second death of Rosie Jimenez, which is the death that happened when the abortion rights groups, the Democrats, the folks who were calling themselves pro choice and should have been charged with repealing this policy that had killed a woman, moved on, you know, and some of that was by necessity. It was complicated. Right. In 1980, a man comes in who's, you know, dubbed the first pro life president, and all of a sudden, you Know, the anti abortion movement has their guy in the White House and there's a lot. Right. There were a lot of tough decisions that had to be made by the pro choice movement, all of which I untangle in the book. But I think Rosie is really emblematic of so much and understanding her story, understanding how she died, and then also why it didn't matter in the grand scheme of American politics. And then finding, you know, spoiler alert as I get to the end of the book, finding the folks, the true believers in the abortion rights movement, for whom Rosie's death did matter. Right. Because it does matter. And her legacy is being kept alive by some folks in the movement. And so there's hope there as well.
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A
Yeah. That brings me to the other question that I had for you, which was, you know, we have this death very shortly after the Hyde Amendment goes into effect. And, you know, I kept. It's something I've always wrestled with as somebody familiar with this history, is why wasn't Rosie's death or any other woman's death enough to effectuate policy change when it came to abortion access in the United States?
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B
States.
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A
It's a big question.
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B
Exactly. It's a big question and it's timely. Right. It's not like this is just a historical question. Right. We just had a presidential election in 2024, right. Where we had documented cases of women dying as a direct result of abortion bans, where ProPublica's reporting right, on the eve of the election was saying, listen, these women died because of abortion bans. Portia Ghomesy, like, look her, her son chases after women whose hair looks like hers on the street, shouting, that's Mommy. Because his mom died because she had a miscarriage and doctors in Texas were afraid to treat her under the state's anti abortion law. Look, how do we allow this to happen? And how can you vote for the man responsible? Right? And so this mystery at the heart of our politics, the fact that dead women, especially when they're women of color, seem to not matter in terms of the way that the country vot in terms of the way that policy gets made, that was the question, the poignant, the enraging question at the heart of this book. And I follow it through Rosie Jimenez's death and then Becky Bell, a white teenager who died in the 1980s as a result of a parental consent law. I talk about the people who are gunned down in the parking lots of abortion clinics. Right? This is another part of the violent and deadly history of this struggle. And asking the question of how it is, because if a movement is organized enough, if the pieces are there, right? We have seen cases in American history and around the world where one person's death is enough to change the landscape, is enough to repeal the policy, is enough to sway people to change their minds, right? And yet time and time again, on the abortion issue, we find that the anti abortion movement is able to do this sort of math problem where they say, well, one woman died, but think of all the babies we've saved, right? And the number of fetuses that they can conjure up and say they've saved is always held up as more pure, more worthy of saving than the women who have died as a result of these policies. And so this is this sort of sleight of hand that the anti abortion movement has used time and time again to try to dismiss or justify these preventable deaths. And so it's incumbent upon us to remember these names, to keep these names alive, to understand that they're only a drop in the bucket as well. I mean, this is what's so astounding to me as I trace this history, right? The fact that we even know Rosie's name is only a result of an activist named Francis Kissling, who I interviewed in the book, and then a journalist named Ellen Frankfurt, who died many years ago. The two of them went on this journey to try to find out the name and the story of a woman who they had heard had died as a result of the Hyde Amendment. Now, her story was being totally misrepresented in the media at the time. People were saying, oh, she just went to Mexico and got an abortion. Because Latina women like to do that sometimes, right? I mean, the people who had known her were just distorting her story, right? Oh, questions are being raised about whether she even, you know, blah, blah, blah. You know, all of this misinformation was swirling, right? And so Ellen Frankfurt flies to the airport, you know, and flies into McAllen, wanders around in this cemetery near the airport, sees a grave that looks like it might be the right age, and there indeed is the name Rosora Jimenez. And so she tracks down Rosie. She finds, you know, the medical professionals, the people involved are useless, right? But she manages to find her way to Rosie's friends. And Rosie's friends are like, we'll tell you what happened. She couldn't get her abortion paid for under Medicaid, and so she went to this midwife and she died, you know, and if that, you know, on the ground reporting hadn't been done. We would never, you know, we wouldn't know the story. We wouldn't know Rosie's name. The same with these ProPublica stories. Think about the amount, the sheer amount of time and energy that went into proving the connection between a public policy and the death of a woman like Giselle Barnica, the death of a woman like Portia Gazi. The deaths of these women that we now know about. And that should be household names. You know, we, we only heard about them because of an enormous amount of energy and attention. And that's why we know there are more people, more stories out there that we haven't heard.
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A
Well, and his name has come up already in the conversation. But no story about abortion is complete without President Ronald Reagan. So how does he factor into your narrative?
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B
Oh, my gosh, this guy. Isn't it fascinating how, like, Reagan is one of these historical figures that gets, like, totally, like, sugarcoated in retrospect, where it's like, people like, I feel like even liberals, right. Will like, yearn for the good old days of this. Like, you know, and then when you look at what he actually did and what he actually stood for, it's like, wait a minute, you know, Project 2025, for example, which got extremely famous right, in the lead up to the 2024 election. This heritage foundation blueprint for, you know, authoritarianism on every level in American society, right. Was based on. On a plan that was presented to Ronald Reagan and which he carried out fairly effectively, right? And there were a lot of Reagan alums who were involved in this project. And so everything that sort of feels new and different and totally destabilizing is actually, you know, a lot of it is baked into our history. And so Ronald Reagan, you know, what's interesting about him, of course, is he starts out as governor of California, signing a law that liberalizes the state's abortion restrictions. Now, it's far from perfect, right. But it was seen as sort of a pro choice law. And at the time, and, you know, he would later come to regret it, but it sort of shows how, like a lot of influential people in this story, he flips from one side to the other. He sort of changes with the political winds because, of course, his ultimate agenda is to become President of the United States and remain President of the United States. And that's what motivates him. And so he gets elected with a lot of support from the anti abortion movement. And one of the most fascinating little rabbit holes I climbed into reporting this book was looking at the correspondence between Reagan's reelection campaign and anti abortion organizers and how they were, you know, pulling out all the stops to create what they called this sort of parallel campaign, you know, to get him back in the White House in 1984. And he gets, that's, you know, what's interesting is that historically now we think of him as the first pro life president, right. He, he comes into power, one of the first things he does is, is sign legislation that removes the rape and incest exceptions that had been added to the Hyde amendment in previous years. He, he passes the global gag rule, which is another policy we take for granted. Right. That prevents organizations abroad that receive US Funds from so much as referring to abortion providers. Right. I mean that along with the Helms Amendment, another global anti abort result in thousands of preventable deaths abroad that we have not even talked about. But the most influential thing Reagan does is to talk with conviction about anti abortion politics from the presidential pulpit. Right. And he deploys this strategy that's sort of a signature of the anti abortion movement overall, which is to steal the language of the civil rights movement and then reverse engineer it to attack women's rights. And so he talks about abortion and the conscience of a nation. He talks about the right without which no other rights have any meaning. Well, that's really convenient if your goal is to eviscerate everyone's rights except for the fetus. Right. Like if you're going after women, you're going after people of color, you're going after the poor, you're like, you know, the whole thing is we have, we shouldn't have to pay taxes, not just for abortion, but for anything. Right? Let's take that to its logical conclusion. We shouldn't have to pay for any social services except maybe, you know, war with the communists abroad. Right? So, so that, you know, the anti abortion movement had been using that kind of language. They've been using this social justice sounding language. They talked about the right to life. You know, they really use this moral frame of, of the civil rights movement and stole it and said we're going to use that to champion the rights of the fetus who we're always going to imagine as, as white. And, and you know, so that's part of this backlash against civil rights, backlash against feminism, backlash against the New Deal, the expansion of the social safety net. All of these sort of gains that, that Reagan's presidency, you know, rises on this sort of conservative wave of opposition to, to all of these things, the social issues, abortion, you know, opposition to LGBTQ rights. These are sort of thrown into the mix along with, you know, economic austerity and hawkishness abroad to sort of create this coalition that, that helps to bring Reagan to power. And it pays off in a big way for the anti abortion movement. Although what's interesting is that like Trump now, right. Reagan didn't do everything they wanted. Right. They were not happy, for example, with Sandra Day o' Connor's appointment to the court. They were not thrilled with some of Reagan's choices. But in retrospect, it was to their benefit to champion him as this, you know, president who they had a close relationship with, because, of course, that made them look more influential. And so, yeah, so I got obsessed with Reagan. I went to the Reagan Presidential library while I was reporting for this book. One of the most upsetting places I had, I had to go, there's a hologram of Reagan there. So I met Reagan's ghost. Oof. And then I had some really surprising encounters with women that I met at the Reagan Museum that I think, you know, have some relevance to our politics today as well.
- [33:20]
A
Yeah, those were some very interesting vignettes that you included in the book. So definitely a highlight for readers when they pick it up.
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B
Oh, I'm glad you thought so. Yeah, I'm glad I went. Even though it was a lot to handle, there's a lot of statuary and imagery of Reagan and a lot of people who really love him there in that building.
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A
Well, and shifting gears a little bit, I'm. I'm wondering, can you talk about the quote, unquote, rescue movement and its fluence and impact on abortion access?
- [33:58]
B
Yeah, so, I mean, the rescue movement grew in part out of frustration with Republicans like Reagan. And then of course, you know, George H.W. bush, who were seen as not doing enough on abortion. It was the radical militant wing of the anti abortion movement. Interestingly, like a lot of things, it started out with people who are not famous today. Some of them women who were leading these sort of civil rights style again, another, you know, notch in this pattern. Right. Stealing the, the tactics of the civil rights rights movement. They were doing these sit ins, they were even rewriting civil rights anthems like We Shall Overcome to give them anti abortion lyrics. And then they would go sit in, in an abortion clinic and sing these anthems and they would get arrested, they would go dead weight, they would be carted off to jail. Right. I mean, so there's, there's this like imagery of these white people mostly, you know, co opting these tactics of the civil rights movement and, and the, with the sort of imagery we see in Selma, Alabama, you know, minus the militant police response, right. Happening in. In the lobbies of abortion clinics. Right. Pretty hard to stomach, but that's what it was. And then into that fray comes this man named Randall Terry, who's a used car salesman who has a conversion, you know, to devout Christianity as a young person. He is very charismatic, this fiery speaker. He starts riling up evangelicals to get out into the streets and he forms a group called Operation Rescue. He does so because he believes that God himself has, you know, selected him as the person who is going to do this. And he has a vision of himself leading people into abortion clinics to shut them down. My favorite part about Randall Terry's vision of himself as this leader is that it included him on the Phil Donahue Show. And then it's like, I mean, he, he manifested it and made it happen. Like he was on the Phil Donahue show. He was on all the nightly news show, you know, when Operation Rescue was at its heyday. But what they did is blockade abortion clinics so they would go into the clinic parking lots. You know, some people might have seen this footage, but it's, it's amazing. I mean, hundreds of people laying down in clinic parking lots, chaining themselves to the doors. You know, often they would try to get into the clinic and destroy equipment, right? And so this really militant, and it was widespread and there were thousands of arrests, and it was this huge, you know, movement that really made it quite frightening to get an abortion or to work in abortion care. Now it really gets sort of shut down with the passage of the FACE act in 1994, which comes about after, you know, the most extreme sort of adherence to the logic of Rescue, which is abortion is murder, act like it's murder. Right? That's Randall. Randall Terry's rallying cry. Some people, you know, who were extremists took this to its logical conclusion and killed abortion providers and killed clinic experts, escorts and, and killed people, you know, in waiting for. For friends who are getting abortions. Right. This is part of the deadly legacy of the anti abortion movement. And, you know, this is something we need to keep in mind today because, of course, President Trump has basically said he's not going to enforce the FACE act except in extreme circumstances. He's pardoned a whole bunch of people who had gone to prison under the FACE Act. And so this is another part of history that we need to understand because it's coming back into our politics today. So I did spend a few hours with Randall Terry in A very sweaty tour bus in Washington, D.C. and I did that for you. So buy this book and read it. No, it's very insightful.
- [37:51]
A
And, yeah, no, kudos to you because you spent many hours, I can tell, with a lot of individuals with whom you vehemently disagree with, and. And you were able to pull back the layers and get to the heart of the matter. And so I think people get a new perspective and a new understanding of what motivates these individuals, and I think it contributes to the overall understanding and historical impact of who these people are, what motivated them. So I thank you for doing the work.
- [38:26]
B
Thank you for recognizing that. I sometimes have to give myself a little pep talk before these interviews where I'm like, Like, this is your job. This is, like, the one thing you're good at. Right? You can talk to these people and listen to them, and then you can write about it. And so, like, some people have way harder jobs than you. Like, suck it up. Get on the tour bus. Like, you can sit with Randall Derry for a couple hours while his breath smells like stale coffee and, you know, his running mate is sexually harassing you. Like, you can handle it. Oh, geez. So I did. But, you know, buy the book. Make it worth it.
- [38:57]
A
Yes. Yes, indeed. Well, and then your investigation brings readers up to recent history, including the debates over the Affordable Care Act. So can you talk about the politics that went into passing the ACA and how this had unintended, yet perhaps, maybe in hindsight, foreseeable consequences on abortion access?
- [39:20]
B
Yeah, thank you for asking about that. I mean, this is one of these. I feel like it just happened yesterday somehow. It was actually, like, kind of a long time ago. I know.
- [39:31]
A
I feel the same way.
- [39:35]
B
Almost 20 years since Obama was elected. But. Yeah, so we'll just. We'll. We'll breeze past that as quickly as we can. But. So you know the Affordable Care Act, Right? Of course. Obama's signature health care reform law, something that, you know, is his priority when he comes into office. Right away, Obama starts to sort of disappoint the pro choice movement because he has promised to enshrine Roe into law as one of the first things he would do as president. And then when he gets into office, it's like, not a priority anymore. You know, his priority is healthcare reform. Right. And so it became clear pretty quickly that the Affordable Care act was not going to attempt to repeal the Hyde Amendment. Right. That at the very least, it was going to leave the status quo when it came to Medicaid coverage of abortion, which was very disappointing for reproductive justice groups for abortion funds that were raising the millions of dollars it takes to pay for people's abortions to crowdfund basically because the federal government has defaul defaulted on that responsibility. And then what happened is that even that surrender right was not enough to keep abortion from basically being scapegoated throughout the whole process of passing the Affordable Care act. Right? And there's all this sort of fascination with exactly which tax dollars are going to go where in this whole idea that our taxpayer dollars should not fund abortion, right. Which has been this perceived as this compromise, this middle ground position comes back to bite everybody because all of a sudden it's like, well, you know, but if private plans on the Obamacare exchanges and you know, they're getting taxpayer subsidies that aren't our taxpayer dollars funding abortion, right? And so what ends up happening is there's, you know, a Democrat named Bart Stupak who's anti abortion, he introduces this amendment that would effectively restrict, introduce new restrictions on private insurance, you know, policies under these exchanges. The pro choice movements up in arms. And we really start to see divisions here within the abortion rights movement in terms of what is a perennial question, I think for defenders of abortion rights. And that is, do you try to ensure everybody's access at once or do you only protect some people's access? Because that's what seems politically possible. And you know, I document a few different times when that happens in the book, including in the 1990s under President Clinton, which is another sort of opportunity to, to quote unquote, codify Roe into, into law and why it doesn't happen. But so what ends up happening is that the Affordable Care act is seen as really a step backwards in some ways on abortion because of the compromises that end up being made in order to get the whole package through. Now of course it extends health insurance coverage to millions, it saves lives, it ensures no cost birth control with a lot of, you know, fighting after the fact. It's a hugely influential and important public policy. But for the pro choice movement in particular, it was a really bruising fight because abortion got scape goaded along the way. And the, there weren't gains specifically for abortion access. In fact, it allowed states to go ahead and ban abortion coverage outright, which many states went in their, in their private insurance exchanges, which, which many of them did. And so in the wake of the Affordable Care Act's passage, something interesting starts to happen, which is that abortion rights groups, especially organizations led by black women who have always been sounding the alarm about the, the Hyde Amendment and then abortion funds, which are groups that raise money to pay for the AB that the Hyde Amendment won't cover. They start to get together and to say, you know what, we, there was no, no point in compromising or trying not to fight the Hyde Amendment here because look what's happened. And we want to, you know, make this large scale push to, to repeal this legislation. And a lot of pro choice Democrats were like, what are you talking about? Like, we just got this whole law through by saying Hyde is the law of the land and no taxpayer funding for abortion. And fine. And now you're going to step in and say we should have taxpayer funding of ab? Like you're crazy, we can't do that. And these, these activist groups were like, yeah, no, this is what's right. And therefore this is what we're, we're going to fight for, right? And so they start to coalesce into a campaign that is eventually called all. Above all, it's a campaign to repeal the Hyde Amendment. And they are sort of this, this scrappy coalition that manages to get a lot of funding, manages to get a lot of attention. At one point they went around the country with a bus that had like lime green, you know, like graffiti on the side, which was, you know, kind of representing their like outside scrappy, you know, grassroots status. And they managed to introduce legislation that gets dozens of co sponsors to repeal the Hyde Amendment. It's introduced by Barbara Lee, a black woman, of course, pioneering congresswoman who had an abortion story of her own. She'd had an abortion prior to Roe v. Wade. She'd had to go to Mexico. And so, you know, I tell that story as a hopeful note, right? As this long shot campaign that put what was right at the center of what they were doing instead of what was possible. And then something amazing happened which, which is that they managed to make the thing that was right, right, that everyone should have access to abortion. They managed to make that feel possible. Now it's still not a reality, right? We have a long way to go to uproot 50 years of no taxpayer funding of abortion, quote, unquote. Right? But they made it feel possible. They changed the conversation. They swayed Joe Biden, right, who's on the campaign trail. He's been saying for years, you know, that he supports that and all of a sudden he has to, oop, okay, I guess this is not okay to do anymore. I better start using their language and saying, you know, your access shouldn't be determined by your zip code, code you know, and so we start to see these remarkable incremental changes. And you know what, we've got to claim those victories because that is how the anti abortion movement did it. They did it step by step, cut by cut, stab by stab, until they killed the whole thing. And that's the way that change often happens. And so I tell this as what I really think is an encouraging and an uplifting story, even though, so, you know, the victory has not arrived yet.
- [45:53]
A
Which actually leads me to my next question, which gives you a chance to expand on that, which is what do you hope readers take away from this book?
- [46:02]
B
Oh, thank you for that question. Oh, I hope that they learn something about the importance of understanding your enemies. Me. Right. I think especially in this moment where every single day we see just horrifying, you know, racist, misogynist, authoritarian, you know, attempts to undermine our democracy, corruption, you know, it's just endless that. Trying to understand the people who on any level support what we're seeing is very, very hard. It's hard to sit with opposing views in this moment. I get that. But I think it's important. And I think a big part of why the anti abortion movement won is that they were obsessed with the left, right? They studied the civil rights movement and then they stole those tactics and reverse engineered them, right? They were reading like Rules for Radicals, right. They were reading the less organizing handbooks and then, you know, deploying them to use for evil, in my view. Right. And I think too often we put everybody over there in the same bucket, right? Whereas you have to actually understand sometimes the Catholics, the conservative Catholics think this way and sometimes the evangelicals think this way and there's actually divisions between them. And if you're building a social movement, you can, can exploit divisions, right? They're very good at doing that to the left. And so understanding that these fissures exist, understanding the salt tualties, the motivations, right? The motives, the why, like why did they do it, to me is really important in terms of how we recognize the humanity of the people we disagree with and then recognize that if they're human and human beings did this, then human beings can fix it. Human beings can turn back the tide, right? And so that I think is ultimately the hopeful message of this book. I mean, I also hope that people enjoy the stories, right? I think like, people are just like really complicated. And my book digs into the complexity, right? I'm a murder mystery nerd. And so the book is a real life whodunit and it's informed by the Best part of a murder mystery, which is that people are so complicated and it turns out everyone has a motive. And you can suspect every single person of murder, even, like the quiet old lady or like, you know, it's like anyone could have done it. And so I think people will meet a lot of really complicated figures, like Bob Packwood, right? Abortion rights champion, pro choice Republican senator who, you know, gets accused of sexual misconduct by close to 50 women. Right. So how do you wrap your head around someone like that? An opportunist and also a true believer and his role in this whole history. And so. And I also hope that people laugh, right. I tried to. To bring some moments of levity towards a very serious story, Right. This is a story about women dying preventable deaths at the hands of men who believed that God himself was talking to them. Okay. It's pretty tough, right? It's not. It's not easy to confront. But I did try to bring some humor into it. I tried to make it very readable. You know, my favorite reviews that I've gotten call it a page turner, call it something that's fun to read. And people are like, okay, yeah, like, I don't know if I could stomach another history book, but, like, this is one was. Was readable. And so I hope that it's. A lot of times people say to me, they're like, oh, I don't want to say the book was fun, but it was kind of fun because it is a serious subject matter. And yet, you know, there are some pretty amazing stories that are surprising and that I think are. Are kind of fun and also important to hear.
- [49:56]
A
Yeah. Well, and where should people go when they finish your book and they want to learn more about you and the work that you.
- [50:03]
B
You do? Yeah. So you can find me on Instagram at Little Amy Field. I'm also on Blue sky with my full name, Amy Littlefield. Amy Littlefield.com is my website. And, yeah, I hope they'll reach out and engage with me. And I'm going to be doing some fun events coming up with abortion funds for the anniversary of the Hyde Amendment, which is going to mark its 50th anniversary in September. And so, yeah, I hope people will reach out and engage with the book and let me know what you think.
- [50:37]
A
And before I let you go, is there anything that we haven't discussed yet that you want to make sure future readers know?
- [50:45]
B
I think you've been super comprehensive with your questions. I really, really appreciate it. I guess the one thing that I want to mention is about our current moment, right. We're in this moment now where abortion is sort of back before the Supreme Court. But I wanna recognize that the abortion rights movement has learned a lot since the Dobbs decision in 2022. And one of the pieces of history I tell is about how unprepared the abortion rights movement was for the courts, which had been there, their primary, you know, firewall to keep Roe v. Wade in place for so many years. When that finally failed, I think the abortion rights movement really wasn't prepared. I think it had been led for many years by lawyers. The strategy was, you know, the, the anti abortion laws come through state legislatures and then we fight them in court and sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. But like Roe v. Wade stands. And that had been the case until it wasn't. And I think there was a lack of preparedness there for the court courts to fail. And that's maybe one of the major downfalls of having a white led movement where people trust the system a little too much. I think that's changed, right? I think in the wake of that, and we saw this recently, we had a temporary situation where mifepristone, because of a federal court ruling, mifepristone was not supposed to be made right. And what we saw is pretty quickly telehealth abortion providers pivoted to providing a different regimen for abortion medication. And they seem more prepared to deal with a situation where there's an adverse ruling from the courts. Or, you know, we could also see this down the line from the Trump administration. And there is a really stunning statistic that I try to mention every single time I can, which is that the number of abortions has gone up, up since the Dobbs decision. It's gone up. And that's happened because of brave abortion providers in blue states who are protected by these innovative shield laws and that have been passed. You know, this is part of the abortion rights movement adapting to a scenario where the courts are not on your side. And so these clinicians are mailing, you know, thousands and thousands of medication, abortion pills, kits into states where abortion is banned. And in some ways, even though we know that women are dying, even though we know that clinics are further away than ever for people who live in Republican controlled states, oftentimes in some ways, abortion access is more available, is more affordable, is more accessible, if you can qualify for abortion pills by mail and you know where to look, which if you need to know where to look, look, It's Plan C, Pills.org, abortion Finder and I need an A. And I think that's a huge hopeful note, right? This is not the system that anyone would have imagined or designed from scratch. But I think there have been some successes, some innovations. And finally, I think the abortion rights movement is starting to learn from history and starting to learn from its own failures and confront them head on. And I think that's really important and really encouraging.
- [54:06]
A
Wonderful note to end on. So for the listeners out there, if you want to know more about some of the individuals who influence reproductive rights in the United States in a way that I would qualify as engaging yet thoughtful, consider grabbing yourself a copy of Killers of Roe. Thank you, Amy.
- [54:25]
B
Thank you so much. This has been so much fun.
- [54:28]
A
My thanks again to Amy for spending her time with me. Me. Killers of Roe reads like the most frustrating detective novel, but Littlefield does a commendable job in reframing our understanding of how exactly reproductive health care became such a contentious issue. And it's a book I'd recommend for anyone interested in feminist or oral history. Thanks, peeps. I'll see you next time. Thanks for sitting down with me as I explored this channel chapter of American History. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and share with your friends. I look forward to our next cup of coffee together.