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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
With Roe v. Wade Under Threat, a New Era in the Battle Over Abortion Rights
00:19:13
With Roe v. Wade Under Threat, a New Era in the Battle Over Abortion Rights
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- [00:00]
A
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B
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, January 24th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. With President Trump's appointment of two conservative justices to the Supreme Court, anti abortion proponents are close to achieving a 45 year goal, the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In the meantime, as the New York Times editorialized this week, the battle is being fought at the state level. West Virginia and Alabama have passed state constitutional amendments that could ban abortion if Roe goes down, and proposals in Kentucky and Florida would ban abortion at around the sixth week of pregnancy. Conservative judges in lower courts are expected to uphold increasingly extreme anti abortion laws, and blue states are undertaking their own measures in the meantime to protect women's right to choose. On Tuesday, Governor Cuomo of New York signed the Reproductive Health act, which codifies in state law the rights laid out in Roe, and he spoke at a press conference about the bill.
- [02:25]
C
That's why they wanted the Supreme Court and that's why we had to pass this law to protect our state. And that's why I believe we have to go even a step further and do a constitutional amendment. So no governor, no legislator, no political swing can ever jeopardize a woman's right to control her own body in this state.
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B
Gia Tolentino joins me to discuss what the polarized politics of the Trump era means for the abortion debate and how activists on either side are preparing for their biggest confrontation in nearly 50 years. Gia, welcome back.
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D
Thank you for having me, Dorothy.
- [03:07]
B
For people used to thinking of New York as a bastion of progressivism, it came sort of as a surprise that the state is only now passing this legislation. Can you just briefly take us back through the history of New York's regulation of abortion?
- [03:21]
D
Yeah. So New York is an incredibly interesting case. New York legalized abortion in 1970, before Roe was passed in a legislature, a state legislature that was, by the way, I think, all men except for two people. But the way that it did so was to make abortion a crime with major exceptions. And then New York swiftly became the most progressive state in the country when it came to abortions. There were four other states that legalized it, but New York was the only one without a residency requirement. So women, particularly women with means, a lot of middle class white women, began coming to New York from all over the country to seek abortion care. And New York in those days was very bold about advertising New York as a safe place to get abortions. There would be billboards and ads, things that we can hardly imagine these days. Then Roe was passed in 1973, and federal law trumps state law. So there was not a lot of political will or capital to update that statute because the idea was that Roe was there, we were fine. So even though abortion was legal in New York and New York is has been a pretty safe haven for abortion since the 70s, there was this lingering statute on the books that regulated abortion in the criminal code. And around 2007, activists and legislators drafted a bill called the Reproductive Health act, which would enshrine Roe's protections in state law.
- [04:44]
B
And is Cuomo right that this new bill corrects that and that this is a giant leap forward?
- [04:50]
D
Yes. So the rha, the Reproductive Health act, takes abortion out of the criminal code finally. And Roe went a little bit farther than New York's law. Roe made it so that you could have a late term abortion in cases of fetal viability, maternal health exceptions. New York's existing law made it so that it had to be a immediate threat to the life of the mother. That was the only way you could get a late abortion in New York state. So it opens up the legality of late term abortion to those cases of fetal viability and maternal health.
- [05:25]
B
The anti abortion lobby has been incredibly effective in getting conservative judges appointed and legislators elected and at harassing abortion clinics. We all know those stories, including deaths of abortion providers. And Margaret Talbot has written really well about this for the magazine, about the hundreds of new restrictions on what is a constitutional right to abortion. We need to remember, from obligatory waiting periods and mandated state counseling to limits on public and even private insurance funding. And she points out in that piece that the cumulative effect has been a kind of mass shaming, that it's transformed the experience of what has been a safe and legal medical procedure into something disgraceful. And I just wondered if you could talk about that a little bit and explain whether the right to life groups have already won the rhetorical battle on this.
- [06:21]
D
Yeah, I remember that piece and I loved it because she encapsulated it so well. Where abortion is not a crime. You know, abortion is one of the safest medical procedures that women have. Abortion is safer than giving birth, you know, statistically, but effectively over the last couple of decades. And, you know, I was raised in Texas. I feel this deep in my heart and bones. Women who get seek abortions are, especially in conservative states like that, made to feel like what they're doing is illegal, that it's shameful, that they are doing something they're not supposed to do. So my interest in the RHA and late abortion specifically began in 2013. There was a documentary called After Tiller, which is a great documentary, and it was about the four remaining doctors in all of the United States that would openly perform late abortions. And I'd never really thought about the subject, and it's a difficult subject. And, and I interviewed one of the doctors, Dr. Susan Robinson from New Mexico, who is now retired. What I found so remarkable about it was that, you know, she spent every day with this, with this question of fetal personhood. She saw all these women coming to her with all this shame and fear on their backs. And, you know, she was often the first person to tell them, you know, like, you're here because of the reasons that you, you have and I. And, you know, you're not here to commit a crime. You're here to do something that needs to be done.
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B
And also, it's worth noting that late term abortions are quite rare, and that's something that gets lost.
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D
Yeah, late term abortions, it's about 1% of all abortions and 90% of abortions I believe, take place before the 14 week mark.
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B
And yet, interestingly, in this piece you wrote this week on the New Yorker website, you wrote that you now think that understanding late term abortion is the key to understanding the issue in general. Why is that?
- [08:13]
D
Well, so I think that the ability to decide if and when you become a mother is related to a long spectrum of reproductive access that starts with birth control and ends with late abortion. Right. Restrictions on contraceptive access. You know, if you have to jump through hoops for your insurance, if you don't live near a clinic that will prescribe birth control, those restrictions create more unwanted pregnancies, which arguably, and I would argue it increases the demand for abortions. And then restrictions on abortions like the ones you were talking about in the there have been hundreds of restrictions on abortions that have rolled out at the state level that are ostensibly there to stop women from getting abortions. Many would argue, and I would argue that they just push abortions later and later. And one thing that I find interesting about and really vital about late abortion, something that people don't talk about because the subject is so difficult, is that people seek late abortions for the same reason that they seek abortions in general. I spoke to a researcher, Katrina Kimport, at the University of California, San Diego, who has been doing this vital research on who seeks abortions after 20 weeks. And it's women who wanted to be pregnant and then found out a piece of vital information about fetal health that made that change. Or on average, women who seek late abortions found out that they were pregnant at 12 weeks, whereas women who seek abortions within the first trimester, they find out that they're pregnant an average of five weeks. I also think that late abortions illuminate something really central about the question of abortion, which I think that the anti abortion lobby has, has set the terms of the conversation in a way that blue states are now going to have to fight actively now that Roe is seriously under threat. One thing that I found interesting about writing about this subject so much over the years is that we think of abortion as sort of a deadlocked social issue. We think of it as something we couldn't possibly change anyone's opinion on, especially these days when who's changing anyone's opinion about anything. But I have found that on abortion and specifically on late abortion, by far this is the subject that I've written on that I've had the most people who disagree with me fundamentally in terms of political values say I'm thinking about what you wrote And I disagree with you. I'm pro life, but I'm open to this dialogue.
- [10:37]
B
Well, and I think that's because you wrote so compellingly about the experience of these women who have to make this decision. And it is, you know, totally an anguish, terrible thing for anybody to have to go through. And I think that's the part of the debate that gets lost.
- [10:52]
D
Right. Well, one of the ways that I think that anti abortion lobbyists have cornered the conversation is they've made it about the abstract fetus and the abstract mother. Right. And both of those redound to a conservative idea of, you know, a woman who is on this earth to be married and have a baby and then this sort of glorified fetus. And when you get into the real experiences, I mean, so little writing about abortion features actual experiences from women who've had them. So in 2016, a woman named Erika Christensen reached out to me. I was working at Jezebel at the time, and I had, you know, been sort of covering abortion. And she had had to leave New York and get an abortion at 32 weeks. She was married. She desperately wanted this child. They had been getting sort of inconclusive news on ultrasounds throughout the pregnancy, but they had named this baby Spartacus, you know, because of how hard he seemed to be fighting. They really, really wanted this kid. And then at 31 weeks, she was told that the baby was, as the doctor said, incompatible with life, that he would not be able to breathe or survive outside the womb. And so she decided immediately to get an abortion. She thought, you know, if this child is born, he'll suffer. And I want to minimize that to the extent that I could. And that was when she found out that she would have to leave the state. And Gina, she had to scrounge up more than $10,000. She had to go to Colorado. Everyone, even people in pro choice liberal New York were like, oh, so you're doing the shady thing. You got to get out. And she was like, this is the medical recommendation that my doctors made, and I'm doing it legally. And she came back, and then she found out about the rha, and then she ended up becoming an activist for the rha. And she was saying, you know, her cases, her case led itself to sympathy to a large extent. Right? She was this middle class white woman that wanted to be a mother. And she had gotten an abortion at 32 weeks. And when I wrote about, got this huge, huge response, and one of the common responses actually was, well, that's not an abortion. And I think People just don't know that that is one of the things that late abortion looks like. It's people who want a baby and have found out some, you know, incredibly painful news about the fetus that they're carrying.
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E
What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial Director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new POD series, the Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun. I want a shark that. That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me. One day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
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B
You know, the bigger argument here, too, is not just about abortion. It's about sex before marriage. And the Trump administration is a big proponent of abstinence only programs in schools and doubtless more money than is going to be going into those. So, as we've been discussing, many liberals argue that ceding any ground in this fight won't bring us to a compromise, since evangelical conservatives, in this case, want to ban contraception outright. So how has that shaped the debate?
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D
Well, I went to a school with an abstinence only program, and I can testify firsthand to the degree to which it doesn't work.
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B
Oh, as a student, you were there?
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D
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I went to a Southern Baptist private school, and abstinence only all the way, and people just have sex. And the way that this plays into the debate is, you know, even when I was writing about Erica's story about her late abortion, even when I was interviewing Dr. Susan Robinson in 2013, I can feel in my head the conservative voice that I grew up around, and I can feel myself. It's something that I've had to fight in writing. I can feel myself trying to present abortion as sympathetic. And look at this case. Surely you must understand why this woman. I can feel myself conducting the discussion on their terms. And one of the things that the last year has really made me start thinking about is as one of the women that I interviewed for my piece said Katie Watson, who teaches at Northwestern, this is a moment to stop moving from the politics of sympathy, which is terms set by conservatives, to the politics of respect. Right. That it's not about when abortions are justified or virtue or morality. It's about a woman is an independent subject that deserves political equality, and she makes an abortion based on her judgment of her pregnancy and the moral weight she assigns to her fetus. And she can choose to continue her pregnancy or not because she is an independent subject. And it. It has nothing to do with sympathy or virtue.
- [16:30]
B
And again, as you pointed out earlier, this is a medical procedure.
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D
It's a medical procedure.
- [16:36]
B
Have you seen any blowback yet to the signing of the new law in New York?
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D
Yes, absolutely. So one of the Catholic bishops came out against it. There have been lots of op eds written in a lot of upstate areas, especially about this, effectively permitting late abortion on demand. And again, even that language we don't speak of getting knee surgery on demand. Right. I mean, there are people who oppose it because it takes away the state interest in fetal personhood, which they see as a bad thing. Right. I mean, there was a case in Long island where a woman got into a car accident, she was pregnant, and she was charged for manslaughter of her fetus. This is the kind of thing that the RHA removes as a legal possibility, which to many people is seen as a bad thing. To me, it seems like a good one.
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B
I saw that the city lit up the spire of One World Trade center, which is where we're sitting right now.
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D
I didn't see that.
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B
Yeah, in pink. And then, you know, Cuomo said it was to celebrate. A Jesuit priest tweeted a response that went semi viral. He said, I'm pro life, and I have many friends who are pro choice. I try to understand their experience and reasoning as they try to understand mine, but I cannot imagine anyone wanting to celebrate more abortions. Do you? Is there some merit to that?
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D
Well, the need for abortion doesn't decrease when you make it illegal. And if we want to minimize the number of abortions and we want to make sure that abortions are done as early as possible, the way to do it is to make contraceptive access easy and free and to regulate abortion like any other medical procedure. And then there will be fewer abortions. And certainly There will be fewer late ones, and there are already, relatively speaking, so few. And there are. You know, there's a case that abortion is an essential part of respecting life in a way, the permitting people to become parents when they want to be. And, you know, When I interviewed Dr. Robinson, she grew up Catholic. This is the provider I interviewed in 2013. I mean, she would. She would cry with her patients, she would pray with them, you know, for patients that were there because it was six months into their pregnancy, they found out their baby was missing three quarters of their brain. You know, she would ask them if they wanted footprints. She understood the claim to personhood that a 28 week old fetus had. And she was there to provide this service that. I found it genuinely saintly. You know, she. Her whole home was walled in bulletproof glass. And she was there to listen to women and to help them through this thing that is incredibly difficult and that they're shamed for. And she was there to tell them, you're not a monster for being here. And I found that incredibly compassionate in a way that kicked into my earliest beliefs what I was taught as a child about godly principles.
- [19:36]
B
So abortion, it has become this litmus test for the left and the right. What should the position of the Democratic Party be? Should the party make room for people like this Jesuit priest? I mean, it seems they should be welcoming more people into the party and not make it this kind of, you know, either or.
- [19:56]
D
I think state by state, the cases vary. In New York specifically, I do think that there's political will on the left. You know, I think it starts at a rhetorical level with us, actually with voters. Right. I think that if there is a broader discursive shift among pro choice people, that if we trust women, we trust them, and if we trust doctors, we trust them. You know, we ought to be able to trust that. Essentially, no woman is walking into a doctor's office at 36 weeks and being like, I'm tired of being pregnant. Will you get rid of it?
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B
But at the same time, pro choicers should be willing to talk to and listen to. Right? To lifers who want to be members of the Democratic Party.
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D
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, I think that they do in general. I think that the left is much more receptive to pro life people who are willing to engage in an honest debate than the right is. But, yeah, that's absolutely true.
- [20:51]
B
Thanks so much for coming on, Gia.
- [20:53]
D
I'm so glad to be here.
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B
Gia Tolentino is a staff writer. Her first collection of essays Trick Reflections on Self Delusion will be published this summer. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program is produced by Alex Barron and Hannah Wilentz. For newyorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickend.
- [21:35]
D
Foreign.
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E
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director. I'm Michael Kolori, Wired's director of consumer, Tech and Culture. And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show Uncanny Valley is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics. Right? So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
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D
From PRX.