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What if I told you you only have 12 hours to legally have sex?
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To finding true love or just like
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a good guy from the director of Easy A and anyone but you.
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This whole thing is nuts.
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There's nothing traditional about this lane.
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On August 7th, the clock starts on the summer's biggest rom com.
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I'm Owen. Allie.
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What about you and me? Monica Barbaro.
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Callum Turner.
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I've been told I'm a seven.
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By who? Your mom?
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No, she thinks I'm a ten. One night only.
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We only in theaters August 7th.
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In February of 2024, the Supreme Court of Alabama ruled that a frozen embryo stored in a fertility clinic freezer is a child legally indistinguishable from a toddler in a car seat or a teenager at the dinner table, and that a couple whose embryos were accidentally destroyed could sue for the wrongful death of a minor. In LePage versus the center for Reproductive Medicine in 2024, the Chief justice of that court, a man named Tom Parker, wrote a separate opinion on his explained reasoning not through the statute or precedent, but through the Book of Genesis, the theology of Imago DEI and the conviction that human life, quote, cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God. Which is a remarkable thing to find in a legal document in a country that has spent its founding decades insisting on a wall between the separation of church and state. Well, really, until recently. But now the Overton window has moved. We see conservative talking heads and influencers online now saying that life doesn't begin at conception. Not biblical, by the way. The Bible heavily emphasizes that life begins at first breath, but that now life begins at fertilization. Which again, only impacts a woman and her body and choices, doesn't seem to ever impact the fathers of those potential children. Within days, fertility clinics across Alabama stopped their work. Couples in the middle of treatment, people who had spent years and fortunes and enormous reserves of hope trying to become parents, the people who desperately want children the most, suddenly closed out. Suddenly they found the doors closed because a court had decided that the very technology designed to create had become too legally dangerous to practice. So ironic because it is the thread that runs through everything that we're going to talk about today. The same political movement that spent 50 years telling us it was fighting for babies had just made it functionally illegal to help people have them if they are struggling with infertility and this was not an accident. Nor is it an accident that they're now saying that life begins at fertilization or that they are spending millions of dollars on campaigns across social media to demonize birth control. This is not an overreach that the movement quietly regretted, but a logical point of a project that has never actually been about protecting life. It has been about deciding who gets to reproduce, on whose terms, under whose authority, and when you got to get them white babies. You can see the same project everywhere. Once we actually talk about it, once we draw the through line and you learn how to recognize it, we see it in the vice president who muses about giving more votes to people with children, less to those of us who don't have children. In the cabinet, officials who hosted natalist conferences and warned about the birth rates in the same anxious register that a previous generation of eugenicists used. And the influence influencers who have rebranded wifely submission as a lifestyle aesthetic and in the steady drumbeat of propaganda that recasts hormonal birth control not as one of the most liberating medical technologies ever invented, but as a poison, a plot against women, a thing that unnatural women take to defy their design, a thing that women must be protected from because we're just here to protect women from making mistakes or having autonomy to choose or. Or maybe they might make the wrong decision. No such urgency is given to the decision and the mistakes of men who allowed to grow and make choices and make mistakes and deal with the consequences as an autonomous human being. The IVF ban and its continued expansion. Ken Paxton, running in Texas for Senate, has now said there should be restrictions on ivf. The Republicans as a whole have added a total statewide ban to their platform. And the war on the Pill are not two separate stories. These are the same story told at two different points on a single timeline that does not begin in 2024. And it actually does not begin with Anthony Comstock that we're going to talk about in 1873. It begins about 10,000 years before this in dirt with a plow and a fence and a question that never needed asking before. Whose child is this? And who gets my wealth when I die? We're going to talk about the origin and invention of virginity, the impact of Abrahamic religions on this concept, the way that it was used to propatize women and turn them into chattel that could be bought and sold by the highest bidder with no autonomy, no ability to give or refuse consent, and no means by which to vote to represent themselves to own property. And we're going to trace that all the way into the modern era. The fight against birth control, reproductive rights for women and now IVF today on Flipping Tables. Hello everybody and welcome or welcome back to Flipping Tables. I am Monty Mader, I'm your host. You've probably found me online in the past. I am a former far right Christian nationalist who spends a lot of time talking about the news, American history and deconstruction of religious legalism and extremism. And it's actually kind of the best job I've ever had. While it's really stressful and it's a lot of work work, I'm very, very grateful for it. Huge thank you to my Patreon supporters for supporting me, making this possible. Your support on that page has been just invaluable. And if you are someone who you're feeling a little overwhelmed by some of the social media platforms and a couple people message me, they're like, oh, I like this platform so much more. It's quieter. That is a great option. So I just wanted to mention that to you. Patreon.com Monty Mater There are both free memberships as well as paid memberships for different perks and benefits. If you are in the top two tiers of Patreon, you will be getting your gift boxes very, very soon. Shipments came out at the very end of June. Plus we have the holiday, so expect those more towards the middle of July. Just wanted to let you know also a little bit of a new direction for the show. As I've been watching what's playing out in the world, I'm going to veer a little bit more moving forward into a little bit more personal deconstruction, a little bit more really focusing on Christian literalism, fundamentalism, how it affects us here in the I'm going to keep the history lessons that are really news relevant, that are really relevant to current current events or current topics. We'll probably do one, for instance, on Bill Gothard since he's in a coma and his IBLP had such an impact culturally on the Duggars and the Tradwife movement. But I'm also going to to veer a lot more into talking about the really practical steps of deconstruction. What does it look like to be a person of faith in this sphere, separating yourself from Christian nationalism? Or what does it look like to contextualize that as someone who has left the faith and interest in being part of it? Maybe a balance of the two. I've just really felt that going into the personal weeds of issues, really talking about what does the Bible actually say? Like what does it actually say? And really diving into those issues as well as what does life look like when my worldview collapses under my feet? And now I have all these questions, I have all these things I have to reconcile and I have to evaluate the belief system that I've held since I was a child. So I'm going to shift all of my content kind of that direction, but especially the podcast, because I think that's where the most need is. Based on the questions and emails I've been getting. I'm also trying to coordinate away with my team. We haven't figured it out yet. It'll probably be after my personal studio is built to do a call in show where we can do a show once or twice a week where you can actually call in with questions and I can try to answer and talk through those things with you. But we're working on the details and the weeds of that. So the way I'm gonna go through today, we're really gonna talk and this is somewhat briefly about the invention of virginity. Virginity is a social. It is something that did not always exist in human communities. It became much more important after the agricultural revolution. Now a lot of this we are making, this is a lot of ancient history. We're making best guesses based on available information. So we're doing this based on anthropological evidence, archeological evidence, what changed in societies, what changed later on in literature, how we went from egalitarian kind of hunter gatherer societies to very much unequal societies after the agricultural revolution. And we're going to trace that through line all the way into the modern era. Because right now, as you know, and if you listen to this show or you listen to me, we know that the bans on abortion are not about lives. We know that because if people were truly genuinely pro life, maybe they would vote for an abortion ban, right? If they truly have this deeply convicted belief that life begins at conception, which again is not a biblical concept, but you can still absolutely believe it if you want to. But if they were actually pro life, then they would also say, yes, but when they're born, we're going to make sure SNAP and WIC and Medicaid are available for kids. We're going to make sure kids get fed at schools. We're going to put a bunch of money into public schools so we make sure all these kids get a great education so they can, they can go to school and they can get good jobs and they can have a successful life. And we're going to make sure that there's always protections for doctors if they need to intervene. For the mom, we're going to make sure that her health takes precedence because she is a person, a life that is already here, already fully autonomous and conscious. And all of those things would be part of it if these abortion bans were actually done for the purpose that they say they are. But they're not. And we know that. And we also know that the, the movement now to fertilization, saying life begins, human life begins at fertilization, is crazy work, crazy work. And that is nowhere, not even close. In Scripture. There's not even a verse you can pull to manipulate into that. But it's all about moving the Overton window and forcing women, especially white women, to have more kids. Because educated white women are not having as many children. Hence the attack on ivf. Because IVF allows for women to delay pregnancy, right? If they have fertility issues and they're in their late 30s, early 40s, they can use IVF to have children at that time, once they've established themselves. And if you remove IVF and birth control, then many Christian nationalists believe that women should be punished for having sex outside of marriage or even in marriage, honestly. And that punishment should be their suffering in childbirth. So they think women are getting their just comeuppance, but they also get to increase the teen birth rate that they're so worried about. Remember that Katie Miller posted a. A post about, oh, my God, we're supposed to, you know, teens aren't having sex or aren't. Teens aren't having babies anymore. And this is our biological duty. And keep in mind, Katie Miller has worked since she was 20. She is not. She is not some trad wife, stay at home. She is educated. She works. But it's this panic and this fervor around teen pregnancies, which I, I grew up in the 90s and the early aughts. I don't know if y' all remember, but, man, being a pregnant teen was the worst thing you could be. You'd be ostracized. You'd be, like, kicked out of the school or the church, depending on where you lived. Like, it was not. And now they're complaining about it. Because the goal is, if you really believe that, one, you want more white babies. But two, you also think that women shouldn't be in the workforce and in education, but you can't make laws like that, right? People would actually freak out if you started to pass laws banning women from education in the workforce. Well, one of the ways that you can do that kind of naturally is by making sure that teen girls get pregnant. Because if she gets pregnant and you force people to get married, you take away no fault divorce. She's very unlikely to pursue an education or a degree because. Or a work, because she can't. And then if something happens or she is working, it's minimum wage because she only has a high school diploma. If her husband passes away, she. She's stuck. She has no work history, she has no education. She'll be dependent on marrying another man or starving. Especially if you have voted away, to take voted away any social services that could have taken care of her and those children you insisted that she have. It's really about. We've talked about with Christian nationalism before. It does not care about your conversion as much as it cares about your compliance. So if this is what they believe about women, they will create a society where that is your only option. Where you as a woman may not believe that that's the case, but you may not have options, which is why these. These abilities to have decisions about our bodies. Even around sterilization. Here in Tennessee, there was a woman who was scheduled for a sterilization surgery. She'd gone to the doctor, she got all her checkup. She was in the bed in the gown, ready for surgery. And they canceled her surgery because they couldn't, quote, take away her divine birthright or birth ability. I can't remember how they phrased it. Crazy. Crazy. If a woman wants to get sterilized. Yeah. Have her sign a waiver saying, hey, if you regret this, you can't sue us. Okay, cool. But she should be able to get a sterilization surgery without permission from her dad or her husband or some future man she's never met. But this is all about controlling birth, because when you control birth, you control wealth. So let's dive in. For the overwhelming majority of the time that anatomically modern humans have existed, which is somewhere north of 2,200,000 years, our ancestors lived in small, mobile foraging bands. And archaeological and anthropological evidence increasingly suggests that these societies were far more egalitarian than the ones that would replace them. That they distributed food and status with less regard to sex that we have been trained to assume. And that the rigid, sweeping subordination of women and later cultures treated as the natural order of the universe was not in fact natural or original or written into the species. A woman in a foraging band who gathered most of the calories that kept the group alive was not A dependent. We now know that these women also hunted in groups and that they were very effective. If you were capable, you went out and you hunted or you foraged. If you were elderly, man or woman, you stayed behind, you helped the village, and you took care of the children. A woman who's going out foraging and hunting is an economic engine. And her children belonged in every meaningful social sense to her line and her kin. Because in societies without heritable wealth, there is very little reason to obsess over paternity. Nobody polices the ancestry of a child who will not inherit a plot of land or a title or a herd of cattle, because there isn't one in a hunter gatherer society. These were matrilineal lines. Children were traced through the lines of their mother. And also religiously, there was always divine feminine goddesses that predate all Abrahamic religions by thousands of years. Then, roughly 10,000 years ago, in several places around the world, and most consequentially in the river valleys of the ancient near east, sometimes refer to that in this episode as the N A N E, human beings learned to farm. And everything changed, and most of it changed for the worst. If you happen to be a woman. Agriculture produced, for the first time in the human story, a surplus of food. The surplus produced property. The property produced single most disruptive question a species had ever had to answer, which was the question of inheritance. Who owns this land, these animals, this grain, when the man who cleared the field is dead? The answer that patriarchal agricultural societies arrived at over time. This didn't happen right away, it happened over time, was that property would pass from father to son. And that the answer created a problem so obsessive and so enduring that we are still living with the consequences of this change in human history. Because a man can always be certain who his mother is, but he can never be certain in a world before genetic testing, who his father is. A system of inheritance that runs through fathers is therefore only as secure as its ability to control the sexual and reproductive lives of women. So now we see this switch. Agricultural revolution hits as we start to obtain property. Now there's towns, now there's wealth. Greedy people who have strength say, okay, how do I keep all this for myself? How do I keep it in my family? How do I make sure that it doesn't go away from me, that it stays mine or it stays an extension of me? Which is what most, most men like this consider their children to be. Well, you have to control birth. This is the moment that historians of gender, from Frederick engels of the 19th century to Gerda Lerner of the 20th century to Angela Senay. Excuse me. Sinai in our own have identified as the great hinge. It's called the world historical defeat of the female sex, as Engel called it, with, you know, a little bit of meridrama melodrama, but it's pretty accurate. Descent that had often flowed through the mother's line was rerouted through the fathers. Kinship systems that had been organized around women and their children were organized around men and their heirs. Because again, these side these societies used to protect the children as our children. These are our children, this is our tribe. The women were part of that. The women were also leaders. They were healers. They were spiritual counterparts to male spiritual leaders as well. Then it becomes. It's not about it being our children, it's his heir. And the female body, which had been an economic and social asset in its own right, was reclassified as property. Valuable precisely because it produced the legitimate children through whom the land and wealth would descend, and dangerous precisely because that value could be spoiled. Because if. What if she slept with someone before? How do I know it's my child? Virginity as a fixation, as an obsession, as a thing to be inspected, garden priced and mourned is a product of this historical transition. This is not some timeless spiritual truth handed down from visionaries from the beginning of the world. It is an accounting technology, a way of guaranteeing that the son who inherits the farm is actually the farmer's son. It is part of the human obsession with immortality. My legacy. All those ideologies that we still hear from the manosphere come from this. The anatomical mythology that grew up around virginity and the belief that an intact hymen is proof of purity and its absence is proof of ruin, has absolutely no basis in actual biology of the female body, which is variable, elastic, and stubbornly uninterested in advertising a woman's sexual history. A daughter's virginity became a father's asset to be transferred at marriage to a husband. And the whole apparatus of the bride price and dowry and honor and shame that developed around it was at the bottom of it, a system for managing the anxiety of paternity in a world where land was the only wealth that mattered and sons were the only vessels through which it could legally flow. Remember, many women are not born with hymens. Some have partial hymens that are never. It's not like it's something that's fully sealed that you break open. That's actually extremely rare, extremely painful for those who have it. And many times in modern society requires surgical intervention. If you do have a hymen, it can break because you're riding a horse or you fall or it can break over time. Also, contrary to the manosphere's conversation about anatomy, they don't understand women. Don't. You don't stretch out, right? You can't sleep with a woman and know how many people she's been with. You actually don't know that. And also, it's hilarious to me that men walk around like screaming that because women push babies out of their hoo ha. And that snaps back. Are you, sir, telling me that you have a larger girth than the head of a baby? I think not. I think not, my good man. It seems like thou art making things up because you are insecure. The Abrahamic religions did not invent this arrangement, but they inherited it. They made it codified and they made it sacred. Carried it across three continents and 4,000 years with a durability that no empire has ever matched. Understand that the protection of wealth is the reason for subjugation that the Taliban executes on women. It's always been about money. It is the reason for the rollback of women's rights in the us the legal codes, codes of the ancient near east, the household rules of the Hebrew scriptures, the honor culture of the late antique Mediterranean world into which Christianity would be born, and the jurisprudence that later Islamic and Christian societies built on top of. It all share a common structure, which is the regulation female sexuality in the service of orderly patrilineal inheritance. Adultery was not a sin against your spouse, a harmful thing you do. It was a property crime against whatever man owned her. The stoning of an unfaithful wife and the untouched value of a virgin daughter are two expressions of the same underlying arithmetic. This is the reason in Genesis, when Lot offers his two daughters to be gang raped in Sodom, and he's never condemned for this because it was his right. They were his property. Their virginity was his property. So he was allowed to do that. So again, when people argue for the. The divine inspiration of the Bible, again, which comes from a book of a guy, from a guy who wrote that he was Paul when he wasn't. So he was a liar, so we probably shouldn't believe him. But if we actually wrestle with that question within some of these ancient texts, then we have to wrestle with these questions of, well, these texts allow slavery. Do we believe a good God wrote that, or do we believe a man wrote that? These texts allow for a raped virgin to Be sold to her rapist. Do we believe that a good God wrote that? Or do we believe that a man wrote that? These texts allow for a man to attempt to give his daughters over, to be gang raped all night and is never condemned. Do we believe a good God wrote that? Or did a man who believed women were nothing but property write that? The theology that developed to explain and justify these rules, the theology that told women their subordination was ordained in Eden, the doctrine of Eve, right women are responsible for all sin. We're not not. Was the demonization of women to justify the subjugation that was already going on? How often theology gets manipulated to justify what our sword is already doing. Also they use the apple, the serpent, the symbols of the goddesses to defile them. The symbols of ancient divine feminine that were now demonized, vilified in order to justify this, the subjugation of women. It was built brick by brick on the foundation that agriculture had poured. Again. It's about wealth and its deepest, most unchanging commitment. Beneath all the language of love and family and divine order. And we're protecting these women. Has always been this, that the authority to decide whether and when a woman becomes a mother belongs to someone other than herself. This belief system creates the idea that a woman inherently does not have the right to consent. She can't consent yes, before she's married. Right, because she's owned by her father. Her virginity is owned by her father. Now we would see that more. Your virginity is owned by God. Your body is your husband's. Right. We've heard this language before. And then many of those same people don't believe that she can say no when she's married because now her body is owned by her husband. At no point in this trajectory does the woman have autonomy. She never has the right to give consent, yes or no. And also these same people believe that she does not get to decide when she gets pregnant and she does not get to decide how many children she has.
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Has.
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We hear this from Erica Kirk, Isabelle Brown. Have more babies than you can afford before you're ready. Which is a foolish decision if you actually care about children. But it's a great one if you care about keeping women dependent. Everything that follows. Every clinic and courtroom that we're going to talk through this history is a variation on the theme that was set down when the first fence went up around the first field. The players change, the technology changes. Of course we're going to go through so many rebrands. The scripture gets quoted, re quoted and reinterpreted but the question never changes. The the question is always about control. And the answer that women have spent 10,000 years trying to give, sometimes in whispers, sometimes in the streets, is that control belongs to them. And before I get into the English colonies, we are going to take our first of two mid show sponsor breaks again. If you would like these episodes ad free or you just want to support my work and my effort, you can sign up on patreon@patreon.com Monty Mater this summer.
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C
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Everything is just not enough. You're a little bit crazy.
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I don't know what's gonna happen.
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I want my fairytale ending.
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When the English colonists carried their law across the Atlantic, they carried this inheritance with them. They wrote it into the legal bones of the country that would become the United states In the form of a doctrine called coverture, A word most americans have never heard and every American woman lived under for the better part of two centuries. Understand, the United States is not the land of the free originally. It still isn't, arguably, but it was never written to make sure that everyone had representation and access. Only land owning white men. But let's talk about coverture. As the english jurist William blackstone explained in commentaries that trained generations of American lawyers held that, quote, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband. Husband. So that the husband and wife were one person in the eyes of the law, and that person was the husband. Remember, she's like, it's not a new person that they're both half and half of. It's the husband. She is absorbed into him. She literally has no legal existence anymore. A married woman could not own property in her own name, could not sign a contract, could not keep her own wages, she could not sue or be sued, could not write a will without her husband's permission, and in most practical respects could not exist, exist anywhere in the legal system as a distinct being at all. She was covered, completely disappeared. Her identity was folded into a man's the way a stream is folded into a river. Everything she had, including her body and children, belonged to him. This is the water the country swam in. Like, this is not some fringe ideology. This was the law of the land. It shaped everything, including the way the founders talked about liberty while denying it to half the population without appearing to notice the contradiction. Again, do we believe that a good God created half the human race to subjugate them, to sacrifice their dreams, their lives, their well being for the benefit and dreams and pursuits of the other? I certainly don't. Again, seems like a man wrote that. That seems like something a Dude wrote. In 1776, as the men of the continental congress prepared to declare that all men are created equal, Abigail adams wrote to her husband John and asked him with a mixture of wit and warning that actually aged extraordinarily well. She said, quote, remember the ladies in the new code of laws, because, quote, all men would be tyran if they could Bam. And if women were not attended to, they would foment a rebellion of their own. And, quote, not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation. I just want to say I love her for that. I'm going to read that kind of those, those pieces of her quote Again, remember the ladies. All men would be tyrants if they could. And if women were not attended to, they would ferment a rebellion that would, quote, not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice. Or all this conversation in the conservative realm about taking away women's right to vote. Listen, first of all, you will have a rebellion on your hands. Second of all, I am not paying for taxes. No taxation without representation, right? John Adams laughed it off. What a guy, he told her. He could not help but laugh at her saucy letter. Oh, you're so cute when you're mad. And the ladies were duly forgotten. And the republic was founded on the promise of consent based government that did not apply to women who cooked the meals, bore the children, were U.S. citizens figuratively, and kept the farms running while the men argued about tyranny. The men themselves became the tyrants they claimed they were fighting against. The 19th century is the story of women slowly, painfully, and against ferocious and violent resistance, prying the doctrine of coverture off their own lives. It began, appropriately, with property, because property was where patriarchy had always kept its accounts. Starting with Mississippi in 1839 and gaining real momentum in New York's Married Women's Property act of 1848, state after state began passing laws that allowed married women to own property, keep their wages, and control assets in their own names. While these reforms were often less motivated by feminism than by fathers who did not want their daughter's inheritances swallowed by a son in law. Again, Dad's being like, what about my legacy? But at least you know, we'll take, we'll take the wins where we can get them. The effect was to begin dismantling the legal machinery that had treated wives as property rather than people. People. And in 1848, the same year New York cracked the property law, is also the year that a few hundred people gathered in a Methodist chapel in Seneca Falls, New York and did something that had never been done on American soil, which was to hold a convention for the express purpose of demanding the rights of women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had helped organize it, stood up and read a document she deliberately modeled on the Declaration of Independence called the Declaration of Sentiments. And it opened by announcing that all men and women are created equal. And then laid out grievance by grievance. The full architecture of women's subordination, that women could not vote, could not keep their wages or their property, were civilly dead upon marriage were denied education and profession were held to a moral code that excused the men who Broke it and were, in the words of the document, subjected to systematic effort to, quote, destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self respect and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life. The resolution demanding the vote was the most controversial item on the agenda. It passed only narrowly and only after Frederick Douglass rose to argue for.
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For it.
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The newspapers mocked the whole affair mercilessly, which is, you know, the surest sign of American history that something important just happened. They're going to mock it, they're going to make fun of it, they're going to. It's the equivalent of now, like, oh, you're stupid, old and fat. Get back in the kitchen. They were doing the same thing back then. What followed was a 72 war of attrition. 72 year war of attrition for the ballot waged by women whose names most Americans could not summon under oath. Because we don't get taught the depths of suffrage, right? Why would we want to empower women and remind women what this fight was actually for? 4 and it intersected constantly with another great moral struggle of that century. Because the abolitionists and the suffragist movements grew up in the same parlors, but split in the same rooms. Because we can look at people who did incredible good, right? Suffrage, other acts. We can even look at the founding fathers and say, there were some things you did. You got real right. Separation of church and state being one. But the suffragists also, by and large, were extremely racist. They were fighting for white women's right to vote, not for black women. Sojourner Truth, who had been born into slavery in New York and freed herself before the state got around to it, reportedly stood before a woman's rights gathering in Ohio in 1851 and demanded to know why the delicacy and helplessness that white men claimed as reasons to deny women rights had never once been extended to her right. Because one of the kind of claims of this time period in white. For white men and white women, white men will be like, oh, women are just too, they're just too delicate for politics. You should. Oh, you sweet, you sweet, frail child.
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You.
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You shouldn't need to worry about the, the dirtiness of politics. It's difficult and it's just, you shouldn't be managing money. We're here to protect you. You're just, you're so frail and fragile. You just, you just need to be in the house and you just, you just rest and, and you know, yeah, you don't have any rights and you have no autonomy. And I can abuse you however I like, but we're just, we're just protecting our, our delicate white women. But that same same belief was not extended to black women. In fact, the, the transvestigating that so hap often happens for black women. We saw this recently with Michelle Obama, with the fight on the White House lawn where the fighter was like Michelle Obama's a man. This is carrying from this tradition. The transvestigation or the masculinization of black women was done specifically so that you could justify subjecting them to extremely harsh labor outside. You could subject them to beatings. You could subject treating them like men. You could also subject the sexual assaults of them because. Because none of the protections that were given to women because of their frailty were extended to black women. That dehumanization served the purpose of abusing them by claiming they weren't really women. This is also why when we look at like trans bands and sports, typically the women who get caught in that are not trans athletes, it's black women, by and large, who tend to be. They're more muscular, they're better performers, they're taller, they're stronger, they're faster. They are the ones who get undercut by these investigations. And as far as in the. The world in Olympic stages, the athletes who have been forced to take medications to reduce naturally occurring, naturally occurring testosterone, which happens in a lot of male athletes too, had to take it to push their testosterone down. It has only been to women of color. That has never happened to a white female athlete ever, not one time. And again, no man, because he's a super good performer, gets his testosterone tested. And if it's off the charts, he has to take medication. That's really what this was about. But so Turner Truth was trying to address this. She said that the delicacy and helplessness that white men claimed as reasons to deny women rights had never been extended to her. She had plowed, implanted, she had been whipped, watched her children sold. And if a woman was too weak and too precious for the vote, then what exactly was she in her famous speech, ain't I a woman? The reproductive dimension of this history is so big. Enslaved women in the American south were for two and a half centuries subjected to the most total reproductive control imaginable. Their fertility was treated as capital. Their children became inventory. Their bodies were breeding stock in an economy that ran on human beings. Which means that the American conversation about who controls a woman's reproduction did not begin with birth control or even Anthony Comstock or Even coverture. But it also began at the auction block of a slaveholding republic. It took until 1920 that the ratification of the 19th amendment. I think I said. Did I say 20th amendment earlier? I was probably thinking 1920, and said that the 19th amendment for the American women to win the vote, which is to say the country was 144 years old before it allowed the majority of its adult female citizens, again, the white ones, to help choose government that represented them. And even though, again, that victory was partial because black women in the south remain locked out of the ballot box by the same machinery of terror and legal trickery that had disenfranchised black men and would not have their votes meaningfully protected until the Voting Rights Rights act of 1965. That's less than a hundred years that black women have had their right to vote protected. This is the ground on which everything else in this paper, in this episode, if you will, stands. By the time the fight over contraception reached the Supreme Court, American women had spent a century and a half establishing, over strenuous objection of the men who ran the country, a single radical premise that a woman is a person. American women, women of the suffragist movements, had to first convince the country that women are people. The battle over birth control is what happens when that premise finally reaches the one territory patriarchy had guarded most jealously and the territory it had been fortifying since it first held the fence, the womb. The womb is always the center of control. The year that unmarried women in the United States were legally guaranteed the right to use birth control was 1972. 2. Not during the Civil War, not during the Roaring Twenties, not during the Depression, when, like, having another child could completely starve your entire family. Or the decade of Elvis, the polio vaccine, the interstate highway system. But 1972, the same year Richard Nixon would be running for reelection, the Watergate burglars were getting caught with their hands and filing cabinets, the Godfather was in theaters, and human beings had already walked on the moon and come home three years earlier with a computer less powerful than the phone in your pocket. Pocket. Yeah. When we put this in the context of timeline, it gets real scary about how far we haven't come. Because now, 1972. So 50 years later, we are now talking about states and agencies that want to limit your access to birth control. The history of birth control in America is not this gentle arc of progress. Neither is women's rights. Like, there's kind of this language around women's rights of like. Like, women protested and they organized and they, you know, they just convinced people to do the right. No, they didn't. Women were charged with horses, they were beaten by police, they were arrested, they were force fed and they died because they believed in this so much. Every step, you look at any revolution that was counter to whatever the status quo was. People got hurt, people died, people didn't. Women did not have their rights given to them. They fought and earned them over the bodies of the women who, who came before them. On rare occasions, when we think about it at all, and most people, I don't think, really sit with this, the right to decide whether to become pregnant feels so fundamental, it's so obviously yours, that the notion that it was ever in question feels so distant. Right? It feels so different. Why, why would they not let people take birth control? If you don't want unwanted pregnancies, you don't want abortions, then why would you, you know, why would you ban birth control? Because it's not about that. Here's the thing, and I tell people, I was like, I would love for abortions to cease to exist. Exist. I would love that. I would love that no elective abortions happened because that also means that we've eliminated fatal fetal abnormalities. It means that we've eliminated risk in pregnancy for women so they're not dying. It means that there's no rape and there's no incest. It means that everyone has access to contraception and OBGYN health care. Those are the things or. And comprehensive sex education. So they know how to engage in sex safely. Or if they're married and they don't want another kid, they know how to prevent them. That I'm all for that I'm not all for doing it by taking people's rights away, because ultimately, since Dobbs, abortion rates have gone up, they're not going down, they're going up. So this is. It feels so distant. And it is a story from another century. It is also, as the legal scholar Dorothy Roberts in 1997 has spent a career arguing, a story whose chapters are still being written on the bodies of women with the least power to hold the pen. And boy, boy, did that prediction come True. True. In 1873, the same year Levi Strauss began riveting copper buttons into the pockets of blue jeans in San Francisco, Congress passed the Comstock Act, a federal law that made it a crime to send contraceptives, or even information about contraceptives through the United States mail, treating birth control with the same legal severity as pornography and classifying a woman's desire to control her own fertility as an act of obscenity punishable by fines that could ruin a family and prison sentences that could swallow a decade of life. They were going to send people to jail, jail for 10 years for getting birth control. And also current events little insert here with what they're doing. Trying to prevent abortion medication from being sent across the nation is not about the abortion bans. It's about trying to reinstate the Comstock act and trying to be able to also say, well, if I can say that you can't ship abortion pills, then I can also say that you can't ship birth control into this state. State. The law was named for Anthony Comstock, a former grocery clerk and self appointed moral crusader. Aren't they all from Connecticut, who had convinced himself that contraception, like dirty novels and those French postcards, would unravel civilization. Who had spent the rest of his career proving that a man with a small amount of power and a large amount of misplaced certainty can do an extraordinary amount of damage, personally overseeing thousands of arrests and bragging publicly about the hundreds of tons of books and pamphlets he had fed to the incinerator. Dude was like OG wrestling red pill. The weight of that timeline becomes extremely real when you laid against the landmarks Americans have used historically to measure our own history. A lot of these you'll know. So the Comstock act was passed eight years after Appomattox, and it was still the law when women won the vote in 1920. Still the law when the market crashed in 1929. Still the law when American soldiers stormed Normandy in 1944. Still the law when Rosa Parks kept her seat in 1955. Still the law when the Beatles landed at JFK in 1964. And still shaping prosecution in the year Neil Armstrong pressed his boot into the dust of the Sea of Tranquility because a woman could watch a man walk on the moon in 1969 and still be unable to walk into a pharmacy and buy birth control unless she was married and her husband gave his permission. Yeah, property again. These. You can trace this line of women being property because can you imagine insisting any medication or procedure that a man get done has to be approved by his wife. Can you imagine anybody ever enacting a law like that? The dam did not crack until 1965 when the Supreme Court ruled in Griswold vs Connecticut that married couples had a constitutional right to privacy. That included the decision to use contraception, a right Justice William O. Douglas located not in the explicit text of the Constitution, but in what he called the pre numbers and emanations of the Bill of Rights. Which is a beautiful and slightly mystical way of saying that the founders never wrote down that the government cannot post a police officer in your bedroom. But they meant it. And any honest reading of the document confirms it as much want you to understand that one of the many, many Supreme Court cases as we watch SCOTUS shred centuries of precedent, I mean, recently they just, they overturned campaign finance regulations, which gives Republicans an endless slush fund to buy elections, to manipulate elections through coordinated political campaigns. We have watched them. I mean, not just Dobbs, but they will be coming after Obergefell, right? But they will also be coming after all of these that are based on the right to privacy. That's what Roe was paying based on. Roe was based on the right to medical privacy. So if they can overturn these there they will come after Griswold, they will come over after Obergefell, they will come after Lawrence, and they will also come after Loving. And yes, Clarence Thomas will absolutely vote again, vote to bring down Loving, even though he is in an interracial marriage, because he seems to think that he will be immune. The goal of these, if they can take away the, the foundation of the right to privacy of all these rulings things, then they can break any of these laws and claim that it's a state's rights to choose what you can do in your bedroom, who you can marry and whether or not you can have contraception. And then they will do the same thing they did with Dobbs, where they'll say it's a state's rights issue. And then they will try to add it to their national platform like they did in 2024, and try to institute national bans. It's always about control. The case was engineered by Estelle Griswold, the executive director of Planned Parenthood in Connecticut, who deliberately opened a clinic and handed out contraceptives to married couples for the express purpose of getting arrested so she could Dr. The state's Comstock era law before the highest court in the country, which is kind of the strategic disobedience that has made a lot of change in our country and given us a lot of rights. But Griswold covered only married people and the unmarried women of America, the college students, young professionals, women who just simply not gotten married. Waited seven more years for Eisenstot vs Baird, a case that began when a man named Bill Baird stood before 1500 students at Boston University and handed a young woman a single condom and a package of Contraceptive foam during a lecture for which he was arrested. Arrested. He literally just handed them to her. He's arrested, convicted as a felon, sentenced to three months in Charles Street Jail. The same amount of time that Brock Turner spent in jail for actively raping a woman and getting caught doing it, while his lawyers carried the case upward until the court finally held that the right to privacy belonged to individuals. Marriage certificate or not. Yeah, for conservatives that are running around being like, I believe in small government. Me too, dude. But small government doesn't mean deregulating corporations so that they can abuse their workers and steal your money, including your tax dollars dollars. Small government means that the government's job is to protect my civil rights and protect us from enemies both foreign and domestic. And then outside of that, it is to mind its business. It has no business telling me how I can look, how I can identify who I can love, how I worship, what I do with my life, if I go to school, if I don't go to school, if I get married, if I don't want to be married anymore. The. If you believe in small government, the government should have no say otherwise. You don't believe in small government at all. You believe in the government legislating your belief system, which is a violation of the religious liberty of others. Justice Brennan, writing for the majority, laid down a principle that should have been obvious. If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into a matter as fundamental as the decision of whether or not to bear a child. The pill itself has been approved by the FDA in 1960, but the legal right to use it and practical ability to get where two different things in a country where state laws varied widely. My rights, if we're talking about equality here, my rights should not vary based on what state I'm in. I'm looking at you, Tennessee, that I live in right now because I'm trying to fight for the good here. Where doctors could be prosecuted for prescribing it, or the long shadow of Anthony Comstock's obsessions with other people's reproductive organs fell across pharmacy counters and examination rooms from coast to coast for decades after the man himself was in the ground is literally one dude throwing a tantrum about women having the freedom choose. Just like we're seeing now that caused all this problems. We got to start silencing these men. Stop giving them microphones and stop giving them a platform. Laugh at them, identify them for what they are, which is insecure little twats and send them on their way. And women, if you've seen anything recently, look at the women who are making such a difference. Like, like progressive candidates that are running and overturning things. We have this female and I just lost her name. It was just in my head. I'll probably think of it later in the episode, but she's running against a Greg Abbott in Texas. She is a beast. East do not tolerate. No, do not think that you don't have the power to create change. Revolution happens when you fight for it. The science was there and the demand was overwhelming. What was missing for millions of women trying to plan their lives was the law's permission to use what science had already made possible. This is the unstable foundation on which every subsequent American fight over reproduction has been built. Feels like a foundation that could shift any moment. Again, these are founded on the right to privacy. If the Supreme Court court can overturn the fundamental right to privacy, all these laws disappear. All of them. Because the Comstock act, which most reasonable people assumed had been buried alongside witch trials, is at this moment being discussed by serious people in serious positions as a live mechanism to restrict mailing of reproductive health products in the United States in the year of our Lord 2026. The Ghost of Anthony Comstock is not, is not resting in peace. I hope. He's resting in misery. But he's not dead. People are keeping him alive and they are running spirit for office and voting him in. And before I keep going through the rest of our timeline, I'm gonna quickly take our second of two mid show sponsor breaks so we can stay in the story for the rest of the episode again you can get these early and ad free as well as exclusive pop ups with me all my written work, all my Yesterday's news@patreon.com montemater I wrote a little song to remind you. Choice hotels get you more of the experiences you value. The Cambria Hotel's got it all. A rooftop bar. Have a ball. Cocktails up here feel just right. Ms. Cambria. Amazing. All right. Bring a date, your teen or even your mom.
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every home all right, let's talk about Margaret Sanger. So we can't have a history of birth control in America without including her. And we also can't be honest about Margaret Sanger without go without talking about the contradictions at the center of her legacy. Again, when we look at a of lot lot of these heroes of movements, right, who maybe accomplished really great things and that could be abolition, civil rights, the founding of the nation, we have to be honest about who they were because none of them were perfect and some of them had really problematic parts of their life. And lying about it doesn't do us any favors. She did more. Margaret Sanger did more than any single person to put contraception within reach of American women. White women also comfortably moving in circles of American eugenics movement. Yeah, she was a eugenic eugenicist, published eugenicists in her journal, spoke their language very well. That went well. It wasn't just political convenience and maneuvering. It was a belief system. And she designed a project that targeted black communities in ways that cannot be scrubbed clean of the racist assumptions of her era. So while we can read this and we can understand her work in contraception to make that available for women, we also have to understand that she was a racist piece of eugenicist trust trash. Two things. Sanger was a nurse who had worked in the tenements of the Lower east side in the early years of the 20th century where she watched immigrant women worn to the bone from bearing child after child in Apartments barely fit for habitation die from self induced abortions and from the accumulated toll of pregnancies on their body that their bank accounts could not sustain. And it was that firsthand encounter with the brutal intersection of poverty and fertility that set the course of her life. Because there is a direct correlation between poverty and an increased number of children, they don't have access to birth control, they don't have access to ways to prevent this. This is another thing about if you want to keep people subjugated and dependent, especially women. Women in the last 50 years that we have had any kind of financial autonomy are kicking ass. We have taken over entire professions. Women are making money. There are already women millionaires and billionaires, right? In 50 years, we are killing it. This is another part of the thing. Men notice that women are doing financially really well. We are smoking them in education. We are doing extremely well. And if you want to reduce a woman's resources, maybe you're jealous that she has it, maybe you're mad that it's no longer a provider system anymore that we live in and you want to take that away from her. Poverty and, and high birth rates go hand in hand. What a great way to keep a woman crippled. Force her to have kids young, more than she can afford, and then tell her to be grateful for it. It's going to be the best thing of your life. One of the biggest predictors of elder poverty in women is being a stay at home mother. Being a stay at home mother is a beautiful calling, but it does put you at risk, especially when you're not having conversations with your partner about, hey, what about my retirement? Hey, do we have life insurance if something happens to you? Hey, what do you think about me getting this education in case I ever need to go to work? Work? Interesting. In 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in America in Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, a storefront that served workingclass immigrant women that lasted exactly 10 days before police shut it down and arrested her for violating the Comstock act, sentencing her to 30 days in a workhouse for the crime of telling poor women how to not die from having too many pregnancies. Or the crime of like, trying to prevent children from starving, from having families too big, they couldn't afford to feed them. She coined the term birth control, founded the organization that would later become Planned Parenthood and spent decades in courtrooms and on lecture stages fighting for the principle that a woman should be, as she put it in the woman rebel in 1914, quote, the absolute mistress of her own body. Amen. And Amen. And she also did this in 1939, Sanger and her colleagues at the Birth Control Federation of America launched what they called the Negro Project, a campaign designed by white reformers and aimed at production predominantly predominantly black neighborhoods in the south, recruiting African American ministers and community leaders to serve as the public faces of the program, whose internal documents reveal the assumptions about black fertility ranging from patronizing to quite disgusting. Okay, and this is another thing. We've talked about this in other episodes that especially in Protestant Christianity when a lot of these anti union movements or opposition to birth control or any kind of any kind of new thing they were trying to infuse pews. Ministers and community leaders were always recruited and paid very well to indoctrinate the people in their pews to fall in line with all of this. America's shift from fighting for the worker to defending the corporation and licking the boots of a trillionaire was paid by corporations who sent pre made sermons to ministers who took that money and taught it. This is something similar. The founding report described black Southerners as a population that that quote, still breed carelessly and disastrous monstrously. Yikes. A phrase lifted from a 1932 article by W.E.B. du Bois, but stripped of whatever nuance he intended. And Sanger's own correspondence included the now infamous 1939 line to Clarence Gamble, quote, we don't want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. And the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members. Eek, eek. Right. We, well, we gotta sit with it. We gotta let it be messy and uncomfortable. We got to tell the truth of who people are. Sanger's defenders argue with some justice that the sentence read in full describes a fear of being misunderstood rather than a confession of genocidal intent. And that her aim was to bring black women the same contraceptive access white women were beginning to receive, not to engineer a reduction in the black population. They point out that black prominent leaders of the era, including du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune and Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Supported the Negro Project and took part in it willingly. And that Sanger spoke at black churches and collaborated with black physicians. And that the black press praised her efforts to bring reproductive health care to communities that had been shut out of it. I. And maybe there was some of that. Maybe she was worried about being confused. The issue that I have with that is there's a broader pattern that emerges when you step back and look at her whole career and the company that she hung around. She published the Birth Control Review and its par pages carried articles about eugenicists who argued open openly for restricting the reproduction of populations they deemed genetically inferior, such as people of color, lesbians, people with disabilities. It lends a veneer of respectability to these ideas of people that especially in the early 20th century, the forcible involuntary sterilization of Native American women was catastrophic. Like it was done with the intent, intent to erase native women people. And she. And she platformed a lot of. Sanger, platformed a lot of these people. In keeping with the framework of the Supreme Court blessed In its appalling 1927 decision in Buck Vers Bell, she endorsed the sterilization of people classified as, quote, feeble minded, a diagnostic category. It's so vague and so open to racist application that it functioned in practice as a license for the state to sterilize the poll poor, the disabled, the incarcerated and the non white without meaningful consent. And you didn't have to prove anything. What the hell does feeble minded mean? She may not have been a white supremacist in the sense that we understand the term today, but she worked inside a movement that was pretty. It was like a tea bag soaking in white supremacy, especially around assumptions of whose children were desirable and who were a burden. She did not resist those assumptions, especially with. She had so much passion and vigor and moral clarity about the fight for contraception itself. Again, maybe in that letter and her work with the Negro Project, maybe she truly was concerned about it being misrepresented because she was so passionate about contraception. However, even if that's the case, there is a lot of evidence that she supported eugenicist movements, especially for sterilization of people that were deemed less, less than. So we have to balance those two things. Planned Parenthood has begun to reckon with this. They moved removed Sanger's name from its Manhattan headquarters in 2020, acknowledging publicly that the founder's vision, revolutionary as it was in its insistence on women's autonomy, was entangled with ideas about who should reproduce and who that are incompatible with reproductive justice as we understand it now. Correct. Because remember, like black women are still three times, three times more likely to die in childbirth than white white women because of denial and inadequate care. Sanger opened a door that millions of women have walked through. She deserves credit for that. But we do not have to pretend that she built that with clean hands. We can be honest about it again. We can. We can hold people in. In this space of, yeah, there's a lot of really incredible people in the world. There's a lot of them that are really evil, too. And there are some people that did great things that also did really horrific things.
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Things.
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Let's talk about the life of Fanny Lou Hamer. If Margaret Sanger is the name most Americans attach to the birth control movement, the one that turns up in textbooks and documentaries and, and probably some trivia nights, is the name they should know and almost never do. The name that belongs to the center of this is Fanny Lou Hamer. The story of who she was before she became a symbol and her ordinary life before extraordinary violence was done to her body is the story that makes everything after it even more important, even more poignant. She was born on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, the 20th child, Jesus Christ, of James Lee and Ella Townsend, sharecroppers who picked cotton on land they would never own in a state that treated their labor as a natural resource and their humanity as an inconvenience. 20 kids. Oh my God. Quick math. Does anybody know how many years pregnancy? No. The family moved to Sunflower county when she was two and by six she was working in the fields as a six year old, dragging a sack between the rows under the sun that made no distinction between the backs of children and the backs of adults. She went to school when the fields did not need her, which was rarely, and left after the sixth grade, not for lack of intelligence or ambition, but because the economic machinery of the Delta needed the hands of black children more than it wanted them literate. Also much easier to control an uneducated population. There is a reasonable reason why certain movements who shall remain unnamed really like the uneducated and attack education with such fervor. Much easier to control an illiterate, uneducated population. The families who own the land had no interest in producing black citizens who might one day read the Constitution and wonder why the promises did not apply to them. She married Perry Hamer in 1944 and settled into life. The Delta offered a black woman of her generation work in the fields, work in the house, church on Sunday, and the grinding, grinding endurance of a system built to extract maximum labor from her body while granting minimum dignity to her as a person. Again, I want to revisit that. Women have always worked outside the home. Poor women. The only women who weren't working outside the home didn't have professions, careers and education, and even many of them were privately educated were middle class and rich white women. You. You. Those women were never at home by themselves, taking care of all the kids in the house, they had hired help.
- [63:00]
B
All of them.
- [63:01]
C
Them did this. Women have always worked. Women fought to get paid and be treated fairly. If you were a lower middle class or a poor woman, you worked all the time. She and Perry wanted children. They tried for years. They adopted two daughters, Dorothy Jean and Virgie. Re girls whose own families could not care for them. And they loved and raised them in a small house on a plantation in ruralville, where Fanny Lou worked as a timekeeper and a sharecropper. And the rhythm of her days was dictated by the seasons, the cotton, and the will of the white man who owned the co ground. So this is who she was. So she doesn't have a formal education, she doesn't have money, no connections, doesn't have any of the credentials the world usually demands before it'll agree to listen, especially to a woman. How many of us women get credentialed when a man could spout off about like colloidal silver and he'll be believed just because he was born with a wiener? A woman who sang hymns in the church, with a voice so powerful that people heard it decades later, long after she was famous and described it as the kind of sound that made you believe God was paying attention. Attention. And a woman whose reserves of courage ran so deep that when violence was done and the choice was set in front of her, she did not flinch. And she is one of my favorite women in American history. Let's get into it. In 1961, Fanny Lou Hamer walked into the North Sunflower County Hospital to have a small uterine tumor removed, a routine procedure that should have left her body intact, her future open. When she woke from anesthesia, she discovered that the white doctor who operated on her had performed a complete hysterectomy without her knowledge, without her consent, without any medical justification, taking her uterus, and with it any chance that she and Perry had that they would have kids of their own. The procedure was so common among black women in Mississippi, so it was so routine that the community called it the Mississippi appendectomy. Because white doctors sterilize black women with the same frequency and the same indifference that they might remove an appendix that is an organ we don't use. As though a woman's capacity to create and carry and deliver a child were an inconvenient piece of equipment they wanted to to get rid of. Hamer would let her tell a Washington audience in blunt and unflinching language that became her signature. That in the North Sunflower County Hospital alone, she estimated six out of every 10 black women who came through the doors for surgery were sterilized while they were unconscious, their tubes tied or their uteruses removed by physicians who had decided that these women's fertility was a problem. Horrific. What a stain on American medical practice. The practice was not confined, of course, to one hospital, The Southern Poverty Law center documented in 1973 that between 100,000 and 150,000 poor Americans were being sterilized every year under federally funded programs. The weight of that violence fell overwhelmingly on women who were poor, black and indigenous women who lacked the resources or the standing to fight back against a medical establishment that essentially at this point owns their fertility. And what a contrast we see to white women who try to get sterilized, and we're told that we can't. That should tell you a lot about the motivations of these movements. In Alabama, two black girls named Minnie Lee and Mary Alice Ralph, 12 and 14 years old, were sterilized in a family planning clinic after their mother, who could not read, was deceived into signing documents she believed authorized birth control. And instead it ended her daughter's ability to ever have have kids. So this is, this is the other side of the birth control story, the side Sanger's complicated legacy makes visible. And mainstream reproductive rights movements were really slow to acknowledge and still sometimes don't fully acknowledge. For black women in America, the fight was never simply about gaining access to contraception because the history of contraception in their communities was inseparable from the history of coercion, from a centuries long project of controlling black women's bodies that began on the auction block and in the field fields ran through the forced breeding of enslaved women and persisted through the eugenics movement carried forward into the federally funded sterilization programs of the 1960s and 70s that treated black motherhood as a social, excuse me, social pathology rather than a human right. Hamer's experience on that operating table became one of the catalysts that drove her into the civil rights movement. With a fury that no amount of violence, arrests or intimidation could put out, she co founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. We talked about her in the civil rights episode and challenged the segregated all white delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. In a televised speech so powerful that President Lyndon Johnson reportedly called a hasty press conference just to get the cameras off her. She organized Freedom Summer alongside student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She co founded the National Women's Political Caucus with Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm. She endured beating so severe that they left her with permanent kidney damage. She was shot at, she was jailed. And through all of it she kept speaking because the woman who had been violated on that operating table had decided she was, as she put it in the phrase that became her own anthem and part of the movement's anthem that you've heard before. You maybe didn't know this was her phrase. She said, I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. And she was not going to be quiet about it. The legacy Hamer planted in the soil of the delta took root and grew into a movement that would reshape the framework through which Americans understood reproductive freedom. In 1983, a health activist from Deland, Florida named Biley Avery who had watched a young black woman die from self induced abortion because she could not afford to travel to a state where the procedure was was legal. We are dealing with that now. Who had co founded the Gainesville Women's health Center in 1974 to prevent exactly that kind of death. We, we will never know the numbers of women who died from abortion not being legal. We'll never know the. The amount of women who are dying now because of that. Because places like Texas got rid of their maternal mortality words because they don't want to report the numbers like it kills women again. You can't say you're pro life and and not look at this issue in its entire entirety and watch how it affects women, whether it's from a botched abortion or an ectopic pregnancy or a fatal fetal abnormality or a stillbirth. If sepsis is the point at which you try to help a woman, then you're not pro life. She's too far gone and her risk of death goes up exponentially. So Biley Avery, who had co founded the Gainesville Women's Health center, also founded the National Black Women's Health Project, the first national organization dedicated specifically to the intersection of race, gender and health in the lives of black black women. An organization that grew into an international network across 22 states and six countries and is known today as the Black Women's health imperative. In 1989, Avery joined Shirley Chisholm, Maxine Waters, Dorothy Heights, Fay Waddon and other black women to issue a and sign a public statement titled We Remember African American Women for Reproductive Freedom. A document that drew an explicit line connecting racism, poverty, violence and reproductive health outcomes of black women that was reprinted and circulated more than 250,000 times, times becoming one of the foundational text of the movement. The name arrived in 1994 when a group of black women gathered in Chicago hotel room on the eve of the National Pro Choice Conference and coined the term reproductive justice. A framework that pushed the fight far past the narrow question of whether abortion should be legal to encompass the full range of conditions a person's need. A person needs to make genuinely free choices about their body, their family, their future. Things like access to contraception, access to safe pregnancy and childbirth, the ability to raise children in environments that are safe and adequately resourced, like medicine and food and public school, the freedom from coercive practices that haunted black and brown indigenous women's reproductive lives. The term was developed by women, including Loretta Ross, who had become one of the movement's most important public intellectuals. And it was born not from a rejection of mainstream feminism, but from a clear eyed recognition that a movement led primarily by white women and focused primarily on the legal right to abortion was insufficient to address the layered intersecting realities of reproductive productive life for women of color, poor women of all colors, queer women of all colors and disabled women, incarcerated women, etc, and everyone whose body had been managed by systems that never asked permission. So it wasn't too. It wasn't a rival to feminism, but it was an acknowledgment that again, feminism was really for white women. And that is something that feminist organizations have to really think about and address to make sure we address all these issues. We can't address reproductive justice without addressing poverty. Poor women of all colors kind of end up in the same boat. We have to address all the issues at once. Dorothy Roberts, the legal scholar and MacArthur fellow whose 1997 book Killing the Black Body, documented in devastating detail the history of reproductive control over black women from breeding farms of slavery, through sterilization programs of the 20th century and the crack baby moral panic of the 1980s and 90s articulated the principle that connects Hamer's stolen uterus to Avery's health centers, to the hotel room. And she Chicago reproductive freedom is not meaningful if it exists only in law and not in life, if the right to choose is guaranteed on paper, but undermined in practice by poverty, by racism, by a health care system that charges one woman $500 for an IUD and sterilizes another without asking, or by a political culture that treats some women's fertility as precious and others as a problem to be managed, regulated and eliminated. Eliminated. Margaret Sanger opened the first clinic and that matters. Fannie Lou Hamer named the wound that matters even more. In my opinion, Biley Avery built the infrastructure and that matters. And the women of the reproductive justice movement built the framework that finally makes it possible to hold all of these truths in the same conversation. And let's go a little bit further now. Let's lean into how. Especially because. Especially because we're seeing Christian nationalism and reproductive justice at odds with each other right now. The church was also involved in this movement, and not always in a good way. If you grew up in a church in the south or kind of anywhere in the rural United States, especially in one of the churches that line the highways and fill strip malls and anchor suburban intersections of places like where I live in Nashville, you may have absorbed the impression through sermons or Sunday school or, you know, kind of the general atmosphere of moral certainty that hangs over the SBC in particular, that Christianity has always and everywhere been opposed to reproductive job justice and maybe even birth control. That has started to enter the vernacular again. And that the Bible is. Is clear on the subject. This is open and shut. It's black and white that any openness to preventing contraception, excuse me, any openness to preventing conception represents a failure of the faith. We see this especially in Catholic faith as well. But it's becoming more and more dominant in evangelical belief as well. And there's been waves of this. So evangelicals and Christian people were very opposed to it because they were worried about white replacement even back then. And then it would fall out of favor and it was fine. Women should get to right to choose. And then they fluctuate. And now we're back in the pendulum swing of opposing a woman's right to control when she has birth and how many kids she has. The Bible doesn't talk about this at all. Obviously, birth control didn't exist. They didn't know that that was a thing that could ever exist. Wasn't a question. But it really comes down to. It's not the belief about whether you believe a woman should be able to decide. It comes down to the belief of whether you think that a woman is a person, is she property, or is she as a person. Because if she's an autonomous person, then she gets to make that choice. It's her body. So it is true that before the 20th century, the major branches of Christianity, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant, generally regarded artificial conception with deep suspicion or outright condemnation, drawing on the early church fathers, including Augustine. I just need to do a whole episode on him. He's such a problem. Who cited the story of ONAN in the 38th chapter of Genesis as evidence of divine displeasure with any act that frustrated the procreative person purpose of sex. Man, I will say this about Christian religious leaders. They are so obsessed with sex. Like, so obsessed. They're obsessed with genitals and sex and sexuality. I swear, it's all they think about. And they've created this, like, circle that they live in where it's all they obsess about, it's all they think about, it's all they talk about, and then they condemn it, and then there's all this shame, and then that pops up, and then people act out and people get weird, and we see all these scandals come up. It's like, dude, just treat it like a normal. It's a normal. A normal thing. Stop obsessing about it so much. Stop demonizing it, Stop repressing it. That's when weird happens, though. Whether that ancient and kind of weird story is actually about contraception as a general principle or about Onan's specific refusal to fulfill a family obligation to his dead brother's widow is a question of. The theologians have debated. So if you're unfamiliar with this story, in the Old Testament, if a. If a man dies and his brothers are still alive, life, the one of the brothers is obligated to go impregnate his wife, and then that child will be considered in the line of the dead brother, so that his line would not vanish. In the story of Onan, he would go in and he would sleep with the wife, but he didn't want to impregnate her. He wanted all of his children to be his. So he would pull out and spill his semen on the ground. And so that has been used by some people to say, see, God doesn't like you interfering with conception. Which is kind of a wild take. It was really about violating the law that existed that denied your brother access to a lineage. Again, so obsessed with lineage, my legacy. I think that calling that a rebuff to contraception is a wild stretch. But the first real crack in the wall of unified Christian opposition came in 1930 when the church of England convened in its Lambeth Conference, and after a bait. After a debate that every account described describes as agonizing, issued a resolution permitting birth control when, quote, there is clearly a felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood where there is a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence. I would dare say, right, because we're still going. Again, this is a church organization, so they're arguing for abstinence only. But, yeah, I would say there's a moral obligation to limit parenthood to, I don't know as many kids as you can feed and adequately take, take care of. I would say that's a moral obligation. I would say there's far more moral reasoning to take birth control to limit how many kids you have than to not do it. The language was cautious, kind of apologetic, but it did open the door. Within 30 years, virtually every major Protestant denomination in the Western world had walked through this door. By 2005, a Harris poll found that 88% of non Catholic Christians who describe themselves as very religious supported the use of birth control. Obviously, the Roman Catholic Church did not follow In 1968, Pope Paul V6 an encyclical human vitae, reaffirming with absolute clarity the Church's prohibition on artificial contraception. The backlash was immediate, global, never fully subsided because survey after survey in the decade since has shown that the overwhelming majority of Catholic women in the United States have used contraception, with research finding that 89% of American, American Catholics consider birth control morally acceptable. And 98% of sexually experienced Catholic women have used some contraceptive method. Which means the gap between official doctrine and actual practice is real big. It's in. That gap is so big you could park a cathedral in it, let's put it that way. And again, it's such a, it's such a weird moral argument for me because how are you going to say that this is somehow immoral when making that decision is responsible and protects the family that you, you already have. But here's where it matters. And we've, we've lightly touched on this in other episodes. We've been mapping this since Reagan episodes in particular, the current evangelical skepticism toward birth control is historically recent, very newer than the pill itself. It did not descend from heaven. It's not some fresh theological revelation. It emerged from the political realignment that fused evangelical Christian identity to the Republican party and its social conservative agenda and their adamant belief in parroting of white Republican placement theory. Evangelicals in 1960s and 70s were pretty open about family planning abortion as a responsible dimension of Christian stewardship. Don't bring a child into the world you can't afford. And again, we talked about this, I think last week actually the Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 passed a resolution re. Reaffirming the. Excuse me, pass a resolution affirming they would later reaffirm this, the legitimacy of abortion in cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity and threats to the health of the mother. Which is like, yes, that's just common sense. I, I don't. We know that this is about political power because it makes absolutely no sense. The shift came when birth control became entangled with, quote, family planning and family planning with Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood with abortion. Abortion is a very small percentage of what Planned Parenthood actually does, especially for impoverished women. This is where they can get birth control, right? Prevent those unwanted pregnancies in the first place. This is where they can get a Pap smear or a mammogram or a visit to do a, like a yearly checkup. That's the bulk of what they do. Taking away Planned Parenthood's funding is not defunding abortions. You're defunding women's health care. Because abortions is a very small percentage of what they do. And this is. This marriage was constructed again by the Paul Wyricks and the Jerry Falwells that wanted a way to take women's rights off the table because of. If we can roll all of this back, what can we do? We can claim there is no separation of church and state and I have the religious freedom to segregate my schools. Right? Remember that. That's the foundation. So if you've listened to the Reagan episodes, you already know that his presidency was defined by budget cuts, especially on programs serving women children in the poor. But we're going to cut this. We're going to trace this a little bit more line to line from those cuts to the pharmacy counter where a young woman discovers she can no longer afford the prescription she's been filling every month. It how deliberately and surgically those reductions targeted exact mechanisms through which low income Americans got breast birth control to help them plan their families, finish their educations, keep their jobs and, like, be able to have a road to the American Dream. Title 10 of the Public Health Service act, signed into law in 1970 by Richard Nixon. Nixon, who, like, is not somebody I would confuse with, like, a champion of women's liberation, but who possessed the practical sense to see that family planning was sound public health and sound fiscal policy. Because it is. When you let people plan their families, it is much less burden on the economy. Like, it's just common sense. Was the primary federal program providing contraception, cancer screenings, STI testing, and basic reproductive health care to Americans who could not otherwise afford it. Nixon's message to Congress declared that, quote, no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition. Yes, because, you know, it's much more expensive than making sure a poor woman can get the pill. Her having six kids, that's more expensive. But also, there is this thing with, like, especially Christian nationalists that they truly believe women should suffer for having sex. They really do. They have this belief, and it comes from the doctrine of Eve. But they believe that if a woman chooses to have sex, and God forbid she enjoys it, they're really. They are so much more turned on by a woman who doesn't want it than they are by a woman who does. Says a lot about the culture there. But if this belief system was accurate, they actually believe that a woman deserves to say, suffer poverty. She should be in pain. Like some Christian nationalists are opposed to women having painkillers during birth because they believe that she should suffer because of the sin of Eve, which is insane. That's nuts. But again, Nixon, again, no moral crusader here had the common sense to know that family planning assistance was good for women and good for the economy. It is for both. It also helps eliminate poverty. Reagan did not eliminate Title 10. Did I say Title X? I should have said Title 10. Apologies. Reagan did not eliminate Title 10 directly, but he achieved a devastatingly similar effect through the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation act of 1981, which tightened Medicaid eligibility so severely that more than a million Americans lost their health coverage in the administration's first two years. We are witnessing that right now that's happening. Among them, hundreds of thousands of women of childbearing age who had relied on Medicaid for contraception, prenatal care, cancer screenings, and the full range of reproductive care that stands between. Between a woman and the consequences of being unable to afford a doctor. He simultaneously imposed what became known as the domestic gag rule on Title 10 clinics, barring providers who took federal family planning dollars from so much as mentioning abortion as an option to their patients. Sounds a lot like right now, doesn't it? And this is why progressive candidates are winning across the country, by the way, because everybody's obviously sick of the Republican GOP moral majority, whatever this is. We're also sick of establishment Democrats, Democrats who honestly, in my humble opinion, are just GOP light most of the time, who they take money from the same people. They line their pockets. They do a lot of performing and not a lot of doing. And these progressive candidates who are coming out and saying, hey, dude, I believe you should be able to worship however you want, but also, bro, you should be able to go to the doctor. And Americans, even conservative ones, are like, you know what? Yeah, maybe my tax dollars should actually help me go to the doctor. Again, you're not mooching from the government. You're paying for it. Your taxes are paying for it. I. I would Much rather have my taxes go to health care and for my friend's kids to have a good public school, which Tennessee is doing everything it can to privatize public schools. But I would much rather my money go to that than go to Israel or go to bombing other countries or go to line corporations pockets that do not need my tax subsidies. If we want to talk about wealth. Fair queens. So the cruelty of Ronald Reagan's landscape was circular in a way that's impressive. If you're designing a dungeon cut. The programs that prevent pregnancy watch unintended pregnancies rise among the populations that can least afford them, point to those pregnancies as evidence of the moral failure that justified the cuts, deploy the welfare queen narrative to aim public anger at the pregnant women rather than the policies that made their pregnancies more likely and repeat until the logic becomes self sustaining. Does that feel, feel familiar? Yeah. It should be said that many Americans who supported Reagan's domestic agenda did so out of sincere moral conviction. I really do truly believe that it wasn't so transparent as it is now. What this movement is out of a genuine belief that life has sacred value from conception. And I do think that truly moral people can come to that conclusion. Right. Truly, truly moral kind people can come to that belief which you have the right to believe. The, the problem is, is when you try to legislate your religious belief belief on other people, when you try to legislate that belief on other people, when it doesn't align with science and it doesn't align with the belief that all persons should have, all persons should have complete bodily autonomy, that's when we start to get into the weeds. So they, some of them do, though, out of a genuine belief, life has sacred value from conception. Now again, they're moving it to fertilization. Now the problem is, and it's a stubborn kind of mathematically irrefutable problem, is that the policy machinery built to serve that conviction did not and could not distinguish between abortion and contraception. Well. Right. These things weren't well thought through. We're watching this now where these blankets of control are being covered over all kinds of reproductive care. Contraception because birth control prevents pregnancy, it doesn't end pregnancy. But now we hear a lot of arguments that birth control is bad because it causes abortion. Abortions, it doesn't. And that's where we get into the weeds. When you have a religiously motivated argument that you're trying to legislate with, you start to bend the rules a little bit. Right? You start to Kind of stretch it and you justify it to yourself by saying, well, it's God's will. In March of 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act into law. And tucked inside that huge statute was a provision that would do more to change the material reality of contraceptive access than any single policy since Griswold 45 years ago. Earlier, the ACA required most private health plans to cover all FDA approved methods of contraception with no out of pocket cost to the patient. Amen and amen. Listen, if you're against abortion and you don't want to see elective abortions again, I would love to see elective abortions disappear. But in order to do that, I know that the top two things that reduce that are contraception and comprehensive sex ed. I want people to have all of them. You cannot make an argument argument to me for private health plans to cover Viagra with no out of pocket cost, but not contraception. You can't. That's not an argument that works. The impact, of course, is immediate. American women saved an estimated $1.4 billion on birth control pills alone in the first year. The share of women paying nothing for oral contraceptives jumped from 15% to 67%. The out of pocket cost of an IUD, which could run 500 to $1,000 if you're uninsured, dropped the to zero. The mandate also became, of course, bitterly contested, culminating in the 2014 Supreme Court decision in Burwell vs Hobby Lobby Stores, which held that closely held for profit corporations could claim religious exemption because of course, allowing some employers to deny their employees coverage for IUDs and emergency comp contraception on the basis of medically inaccurate belief that those methods cause abortion. They don't. They don't. The decision, of course, carved a theologically motivated hole in the mandate. Again, I don't see any of these people arguing that like an unmarried man shouldn't have access to Viagra, which is technically against their belief. Right? But if the mandate survived, the public health data told a story that's super consistent. When birth control is free, more women use it, more women choose the most effective men methods. Unintended pregnancy rates fall and so do abortion rates. What a concept. Colorado's Family Planning Initiative, which provides free IUDs and implants to low income women and teenagers, started in 2009, cut the state's teen birth rate by 54% and its teen abortion rate by 64 over eight years. That's enormous. Again, you want to get rid of abortion Cool, let's do this together. But we can do it without taking away a women's right to their own bodies, a woman's access to reproductive freedom. And we can also do it without deep funding care that gives women a yearly checkup. It's possible from a pro life perspective, from the perspective of anyone who sincerely wants fewer abortions. That data, I would think would sway you, right? If that's truly your motivation and it's not condemnation of women, it's not restricting the sexual freedom of women. Right. Because again, if you have that religious belief, that's great, that's fine, you don't get to legislate your religion on a other people. That's the difference. Accessible, affordable birth control is the single most effective policy instrument available for reducing abortions, number one by far. If you've been paying attention since The Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dos vs Jackson, a women's health organization which overturned Roie Wade and returned the question of abortions legality to the states, you've probably noticed, noticed and maybe been alarmed by that. The conversation has spilled way past abortion now, right? It was, oh, you know, they're going to have exceptions for rape and incest. You're still going to be able to travel to another state. You can still get abortion pills. We're not coming for ivf. We're not going to come for birth control. Okay. The advocates who warn they are coming for birth control next are kind of being proven accurate. IVFS on the block. Block now. And now we're watching the it will. That Overton window will continue to shift since Dobs pharmacists in multiple states have refused to fill lawful prescriptions for contraception. Hospitals have declined to provide emergency contraception to patients, including survivors of rape. And the state legislatures have introduced bills that deliberately blur the scientific line between contraception and abortion. Again, a lie not true. In ways that threaten access to IUDs, emergency contraception and other widely used FDA approved approved methods. In Indiana, Republican lawmakers stripped IUDs and condoms. I don't know how you can, you can spin a condom into being an abortive fashion, but they have stripped IUDs and condoms from a state program built to expand birth control access for low income Medicaid patients and replace them with fertility awareness brands. Which means. Or methods. Which means you're tracking your menstrual cycle on a calendar and praying that you, you get it right. Condoms. Come on, man. You're not interested in reducing abortions?
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A
Can't.
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C
You can't don't lie. Lying is also a sin, dude. And this is also these, these methods also assume that a woman's always going to have a regular period and that, like, stress and other things don't get in the way. At the federal level, the Trump administration's proposed budget for the fiscal year 2026 funded Title 10, the nation's foundational family planning program, at $0 dollars. That's an outright elimination of a program that Richard Nixon created in 1970 that has provided contraception and reproductive care to millions of Americans across more than half a century. I'm, I'm, I'm. It reminds me of a quote Martin Luther had where he said, let them die in childbirth. That's what they're here for. And this is very much that energy. This is very Taliban energy. Yes, we're going to force you to get pregnant, but you know what you with if you die or get cancer or have a disease or you need like, you know, Nope, you're just here to reproduce for us. And when you die and you're done, well, we'll just discard you because you're not actually a person. That's the vibe. That's the energy of this. The budget reconciliation bill Congressional Republicans passed in 2025 included provisions to strip Medicaid funding from Planned Parenthood clinics. Again. They serve 2.4 million patients a year. Abortions are a very small percentage of that. But they've been able to propagandize Planned Parenthood being equal or the same as abortion. It's not Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's detailed policy blueprint, laid out a roadmap for systematically weakening the ACA's contraceptive mandate by removing credentialed medical experts from the panels that decide which preventative services must be covered, by expanding religious and moral exceptions until the exceptions swallow the rule, and by reclassifying certain methods of emergency contraception as potential abortive fashions, despite overwhelming scientific consensus that these methods prevent fertilization rather than end an established pregnancy. It is a freaking lie. And in perhaps the single most symbolically devastating moment of the entire post Ops era, the administration physically destroyed roughly $10 million worth of contraceptions purchased with federal funds intended for women in low and middle income countries, justifying the destruction by falsely labeling birth control as an abortive fashion. It was already paid for. They literally just destroyed 10 million, $10 million worth of stuff over a lie that could have just helped poor women. For pro life people. Again, I know that the pro life community is not monolithic and that often the most extreme voices are the loudest. I have a family member who is pro life, who is also pro choice, who believes on a personal level that she could never get an abortion due to her own beliefs, but who does not believe in the legislating of other people's religious beliefs so those things can be held. I know that it's not a monolith. I know that there are organizations and individuals who actively support contraceptive access. And the reason I'm making that distinction is that you need to be really loud right now, because the movement that is hijacking your belief is trying to take these things and attack these, these things. The problem is that the political machinery claiming to represent the pro life conviction is being steered by its most extreme faction. And unfortunately many of the people who are not so extreme are being really quiet until recently. And let's, let's kind of name the enormous and awkward male shaped elephant that has been standing in the corner of all these conversations. The pill was invented in 1960, right? If this country is serious about preventing unintended pregnancy or about reducing abortion, serious about the health of women and children and families, why does every conversation on the subject about pregnancy come like it? It arrives as if it's something women do to themselves, as if it's some like immaculate conception act of biology. As though the entire burden of prevention should fall exclusively and permanently on half the population that does not produce the sperm that pregnancy requires. Why is it always on women? The blame is always on women. The responsibility is always on women. But you won't give women the autonomy to be responsible and have decisions. A vasectomy is a 15 minute outpatient procedure done under local anesthesia. It is safer than a tubal litigation. It's more effective than almost every form of female contraception on the market without side effects. It's cheaper than a lifetime supply of pills. It's reversible in a substantial amount of those cases, though reversal is not guaranteed. I will say that in 2023, the vasectomy rate rose 177 per 100,000 men, a 13% increase over the pre Dobbs baseline. The men showing up for consultations were younger than the historical average, with the median age dropping from 38 to 35 and the proportion of men under 30 nearly doubling from 10.3% to 23.9%. In states where abortion became illegal or severely restricted. After Dogs Dobbs, the rates climbed even higher, with Missouri leading the nation at 42% above the national average, followed by Tennessee Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Idaho. And for the men who did that, and I have several friends who, as soon as Dobbs happened, they were like, nope, we're getting back. Thank you. Thank you for being responsible in taking part in protecting women. Thank you for manning up and saying, I'm gonna go do this 15 minute thing and be a sore for a couple, couple days so that the woman I love or the woman I may love or the women I want to have sex with don't have to bear the consequences and responsibility to the detriment of their own life for that decision. Men in states where their partners can no longer access abortion in the event of an unintended pregnancy or a non viable pregnancy are making a rational, responsible, long overdue decision to shoulder a share of the reproductive burden that has been resting almost entirely on women's cabinets, bloodstreams, uteruses and political organizations, organizations since the approval of the pill in 1960. And while it's tempting to celebrate this as a sign that the culture is shifting, I do think there is some of that for some young men. It's worth talking about that it should not have taken the supreme court eliminating a 50 year old constitutional right to prompt men to engage again. I'm glad you are. Thank you. But also, let's expand that to other areas before the laws came changed any national conversation about reducing unintended pregnancy, reducing abortion, reducing economic devastation of unplanned parenthood, and building a society where every child arrives into circumstances that give them a real chance. Any conversation that does not include a serious, sustained, adequately funded, culturally normalized discussion about vasectomy and male reproductive responsibility is not a serious conversation. It is a performance, if you will. Because if we're not talking about men's role in it, then we're not actually addressing the problem. The legal right to birth control in America is 54 years old for unmarried people and 61 for married couples, which makes it younger than the interstate highway system, younger than color television, younger than the polio vaccine, younger than what many people consider the king of rock and roll. I would argue on that, but you get my point. And younger than most of the people currently making policy, appointing the judges writing the legislation that will decide whether survives the decade. Especially since we are in a country controlled by near dead geriatric patients at this particular moment, it is less secure, less stable, and more actively under threat than at any point since Estelle Griswold stood in a Connecticut courtroom and insisted that the government of the United States did not belong in her patients. Bedrooms, which they don't. And ultimately, this is not a story about pills and prescriptions and insurance mandates and funding formulas, that those things matter enormously to women and families that depend on them. But this is a story about power. Who gets to decide whether and when another human being becomes a parent or whether they never at all become a parent. It's about the political, religious, economic and racial forces that have fought over that authority for a lot longer than this country has existed. Again, we go all the way back to the English laws of coverture and the agricultural revolution. It comes all the way from the question of, well, this is my land now. How do I make sure my legacy inherit my land? It's always about power. It's always about money. It's from. It's a story from Fanny Lou Hamer's stolen uterus in a segregated hospital to a Chicago hotel room where black women coined the term that would cover reproductive justice in its entirety. Where Ronald Reagan signed a bill that took the pill off the table for women who need it the most. The supreme court chamber where five justices decided in 2022 that a half a century of settled constitutional law was not settled. And into Alabama courtroom where a chief justice re reached past the statutes violating the wall of the separation of church and state. Reaching into the book of Genesis to declare a frozen embryo a child. The programs that provide contraception to low income Americans are being defunded. The insurance mandates that made birth control free are being challenged. The scientific line between contraception and abortion is being deliberately smudged so that they can come after birth control. Birth control and the Comstock Act. The law Anthony Comstock wrote in 1873 to punish women for wanting authority over their own bodies. How dare they. The law that sent Margaret Sanger to a workhouse and Bill Bard to Gerald Bill Baird to jail. The law most Americans assumed had been buried with him is now being brought back. That would be the our ultimate goal, wouldn't it? They could take all choice away from women. And I'll tell you, for me personally, I, I ask myself, I a lot with what's going on in the States. What's my line? Like, what's my line to where I would leave the state of Tennessee or leave the country? Birth control is my line. If they ban birth control, I'm out. That's nope, that's enough for me. As someone who has pcos and extremely irregular periods in past years. I've been on an IUD for about 10 years that treats nine. Just my really painful symptoms that were really Crippling, but my chronic consistent acne that I had as a young adult and that I have every right to freaking use if you take that from me. Nope, I, I am not gonna, I'm not gonna do that. For the pro life voice that insists every child is sacred, that life has intrinsic, inviolable value from conception, that creating a human being carries moral weight. Governments and individuals should not treat casually, which is. I agree with, I agree that it's a moral and philosophical decision. Agreed. Right. I believe that you should be responsible if I find out someone's just willy nilly going out there, not having protected sex and using people. First of all, people aren't using abortions as birth control, which is a myth that the, the right perpetuates. Abortions are expensive, they're inconvenient, you got to take time off work. It's emotional, it's embarrassing. People are not just willy nilly doing this. Right. People are also not having late term abortions. That was something I believed when I was young, that people were just coming in six, seven, eight months being like, just kidding. No woman's gonna do that, right? She's not gonna carry for seven months and be like, you know what? Just kidding, just joking. No, that's gonna happen when she finds out there's a fatal fetal abnormality or a cancer diagnosis or there's a stillbirth. Because remember that abortion is not just a woman going into a clinic early in her pregnancy to, you know, have a pill abortion. It is all also a dnc. It is also clearing a partial miscarriage. Also miscarriages themselves are called spontaneous abortions. All of those things are covered in abortion care. When you ban them and you threaten doctors with jail time, you put people at risk. And so I want to acknowledge that, yeah, this is this moral and philosophical decision for me. Ultimately, someone's organs and their rights to, to life is the ultimate decider of that question. But yeah, it is. It is a moral decision. And if we, and if you have that conviction, right, I don't want to discredit you and I don't want to also classify you with the extremists that are at the wheel right now. As much as sometimes it feels like everyone is. If we're raising children and serving our communities and praying for a world that is better, right? Where every child is wanted, they're not just property of one political party, party. Single parents are not demonized for being the parent that stayed or brought the child into the world. But that seat comes with obligation that we look at the evidence and actually reduce abortions in the real world. Like look at the data. If you want abortions to go down, look at what actually works and push for those things. Make sure that people are educated, make sure that people have contraception. Because guess what? You're not going to stop people from having sex. That's not never going to happen. If you also believe in a world where parents are responsible, then married people need to evaluate how many children they can afford to feed. If this is truly your morally held belief, I am begging of you to sit with the science and the numbers. We can reduce abortions. Prior to Dobbs, abortion was at its lowest rate since the passage of Roe. If you truly believe that we can reduce that without putting women's lives on at risk, without threatening doctors careers, and without bringing children in the world to starve or be abused or neglected, all of those are achievable. So if that is your deeply held belief, I challenge you to look at the numbers and the science and what actually works and advocate for those things. For the women and men listening in Nashville, across the south, across the country, still trying after all these centuries and all these court cases and all these sermons to figure out what it believes about bodies and choices and freedom and faith and who get to make the most intimate decision a human being ever faces. This is the invitation of this podcast, is for us to evaluate these long held beliefs, these things that were taught as absolutely black and white, absolutely certain, they're not certain. Look at the evidence with open eyes, listen to the stories of people, listen to the women who are coming out in wake of these bands who have lost their families, fertility, almost lost their lives. We can honor that this is a moral and philosophical choice and honor the complexity of the issue. We can sit in a room with discomfort and we can refuse easy answers that serve powerful people at the expense of the vulnerable. And we can flip the table on every person, any institution, any politician and every possible policy that tells you that questions are too dangerous to ask. Questions are the point. Questions are why we're here. We can actively choose that instead of being polarized into one issue, voters into black and white thinking. To sit in a room with nuance and honor and scope and data and make an informed decision from there. Questions are the best thing that we can give ourselves. And I will see you next week on Flipping Tables. Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer? May I suggest your big wireless bill? It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat emotional arc and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time. Fortunately, though, Mint Story is better.
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