← The Rachel Maddow Show
The Rachel Maddow Show
Special report: Maddow shows how Trump abortion bans are hurting women: 'This is the fact of post-Roe American life'
00:36:00
Rachel Maddow looks at how the politicization of abortion has imperiled the health of women in the United States, making all aspects of reproductive health more dangerous, and showing real-world tragic outcomes, and how Donald Trump's continued kowtowing to anti-abortion activists threatens to solidify these harmful conditions.
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- [00:00]
Griffles
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- [00:32]
Ashley Flowers
Podcasts There is no shortage to consume, and if you're like me, you've consumed them all. I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday we cover a case in a way that's not like you've heard before, because I have built a one of a kind team of investigative journalists dedicated to conducting original reporting, making sure that you get the inside scoop. Listen to hundreds of Crime Junkie episodes now, wherever you get your podcasts and.
- [01:02]
Ali Velshi
We all know by now how much we stand to lose that our democracy rests on a knife's edge until Tuesday. But in this last bit of Sunday morning real estate before the final ballots are cast, I want to focus on one issue that represents both the life and death stakes of this election and the potential upset of a great deal of political common wisdom about American politics. And that issue is abortion rights. The constitutionally protected right to abortion was stripped away in an instant with the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, and the upheaval of women's health care, including a gruesome parade of first person medical horror stories that has followed, has reshaped the politics of the abortion fight in ways that could be game changing in this election. And if there's one person in the country who can help us understand what's happening with abortion rights, who can sort the truth from the political spin? Who knows the history and has been reporting on it for decades? It's my friend and colleague Rachel Maddow. After the 2009 assassination of the Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller, Rachel produced a documentary about it that included crucial context about the violent fringe of the anti abortion movement. After that, Rachel continued to follow the threat of violence against abortion providers in the 2000 and tens when Republicans swept state House majorities and began passing unprecedented new abortion restrictions. She was one of the very few journalists in the country to pay constant and unrelenting attention to these efforts to chip away at the rights that were at the time guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. When Roe turned 40 in 2013, the inside of an abortion clinic was rarely ever seen on television, and her show visited five of them in embattled states where abortion had already nearly been eliminated by a combination of hostile state governments, harassment and threats of violence. And in 2019, when Donald Trump's reshaping of the Supreme Court was in progress, she hosted a special hour full of original reporting and historical context that served as a flashing red light of what was to come in 2022. You know that we are deeply committed to covering the erosion of reproductive rights in this country. We bear witness to the erosion of the rights of women on every single show we do, which is why I'm so grateful that Rachel has agreed to join me this morning, playing the role of the amazing reporter that she is and sharing this special report and her own analysis on this crucial and potentially decisive issue. Rachel, this is only the second time we've had this luxury, so thank you so much, because that's how important this is.
- [03:42]
Rachel Maddow
Well, Ali, thank you for giving me this space to do it. I realize this is your final Sunday before the election. This is real estate on your show. I'm really grateful for the chance to talk to your audience about it. We put together this special report, I think, to illuminate something that I think has flummoxed a lot of the political class and the pundit class in particular. But it's easier to see if you take sort of a different lens on it. So in an election in which basically no reputable political forecaster is saying he or she definitely knows how this thing is going to go overall, there is one expectation for the vote this year that forecasters do seem to be pretty comfortable predicting at this point, and that is that there will be a massive gender gap, possibly the largest in history. More women casting their ballots for Democrats, more men casting their ballots for Republicans. Now, on the Republican side, in terms of the campaign, the presidential campaign of Trump and Vance has really leaned into this. They have effectively abandoned any sustained substantive effort to try to appeal to women voters, while they have tried, sometimes quite awkwardly, to up their campaign's perceived machismo or virility or something, Republicans holding up jars of what they said was J.D. vance's sperm after he was selected as Trump's running mate. Yes, that really happened. Trump himself talking about the size of another man's penis. Trump saying his plans for women will happen, quote, whether they like it or not. There was also a long riff from a top Trump surrogate about America being a, quote, very bad girl who is going to get a very, quote, vigorous spanking from Daddy Trump. And it's not going to hurt the daddy at all, but it's definitely going to hurt the girl. And that's a good thing. This was at an official rally for a presidential campaign just days before Election Day. It has all been a little bit weird. And so, yes, the expectation is there will be a gender gap, perhaps like none we've ever seen before. But on the Democratic side, of course, you can see it less in the campaign and more in the campaign's stated expectations. Both the Harris campaign and other Democratic campaigns this year are willing to state they will tell you that they expect more than anything to benefit electorally from the issue of reproductive rights. The question, though, is how much should they expect to benefit from that issue? And there is an underappreciated reason that that even now remains a mathematical black box. It is an unpollable metric. The American public's reaction to the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, the imposition of new Republican abortion bans in 21 states, is not yet in focus in terms of how strong it will be as an electoral factor. And that is because the American public's understanding of what these bans mean is something that is growing and changing every day. And that is because women are coming forward themselves. And in particular, because there is increasingly good and prolific investigative and shoe leather journalism about the real world impact of the Trump abortion bans in America. And it is changing Americans understanding day by day of something that the anti abortion movement fought for years, for decades to keep out of the political fight on this issue. And it is the fact, the contested fact, but the unmissable fact that abortion is healthcare. And you've heard that phrase right for a long time. That has sounded like a slogan to many Americans. For the pro choice side, it has sounded maybe like a branding effort, maybe something that's a little bit hard to understand. Abortion is healthcare. But now we are seeing it in the news, in our faces every day. This raw and now very visceral, undeniable fact that when the government makes abortion a crime, you take away healthcare from American women. That is healthcare. They need to stay alive. Banning abortion hurts and kills women. American women in our generation, in our time. And abortion has always been health care. A midwife from the 1850s knew that as well as any obstetrician knows it today. But the anti abortion movement in this country for decades has insisted on messaging not just that abortion is bad or wrong but more insidiously, they have insisted that abortion is not needed, that it's elective, that it's an indulgence, that it's a sin, that it's not part of health care. And even while we had five decades of federally protected abortion rights in this country, that messaging campaign from the anti abortion side, it seeped into mainstream thinking. Even among people who largely supported reproductive freedom, even reasonable, moderate thinking people started believing that abortion is a marginal thing, that it's at best a regrettable necessity, that it can be severed from women's healthcare without bringing down the whole women's healthcare system. Right? That it can be severed from all these other things that keep women alive, that you can take abortion away without causing needless suffering and preventable deaths among American women. And it turns out it cannot. And ahead of this election, the American public is learning that in real time, broadly and bluntly, seeing in the news now, every day what two plus years of Trump abortion bans is doing to collapse women's healthcare in the United States. And so here it is. This is what women's health care looks like in post Roe America. It looks like Carmen brewster, who spent 19 days miscarrying, bleeding, blacking out from the pain, unable to eat and denied health care because the healthcare she needed is what's known as a D.C. dilation and curettage. The procedure used in surgical abortions. And abortion is banned in Idaho, which is where Carmen lives. Here she is on a hospital bed, literally crying for help. I've been actively miscarrying since the 8th. I have gone to a doctor and this is my second visit to the er. If you're wondering why women's rights matter, I'm just gonna bleed out on this table before somebody comes and actually helps me. This is my life. Nobody actually has come. They're always going to send me home. And now, because of complications from that 19 day ordeal, which could have been addressed with a 30 minute procedure on day one, Carmen Brewster now has an incurable heart condition that she will have to regulate for the rest of her life. Post Roe America also looks like Amber Nicole Thurman, who arrived at a Georgia hospital suffering from a rare but easily treatable complication after taking abortion medication. She also needed a DC. But as reported by ProPublica, because of George's abortion ban, Amber Thurman's doctors didn't feel they could treat her. And so they watched her infection spread. They watched her blood pressure drop. They watched her organs begin to fail for 20 hours before they could bring themselves to operate and by then it was too late and Amber Nicole Thurman died, leaving behind a six year old son and a grieving family.
- [11:16]
Ali Velshi
Did she really have to be the sacrifice? I feel like she had to be the sacrifice for the greater good.
- [11:27]
Rachel Maddow
It hurts so bad because this could.
- [11:29]
Ali Velshi
Have been prevented and somebody has to be held accountable.
- [11:35]
Rachel Maddow
Post Roe America also looks like Nevaeh Crane, whose story was just reported by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune. She died six months pregnant after trying to get care in three separate visits to Texas emergency rooms. Turned away twice in worse shape than she arrived and turned away a third time after arriving too weak to walk, feverish and vomiting and blood staining her thighs. She was forced to wait two hours for treatment while doctors confirmed that her fetus didn't have a detectable heartbeat. And by then it was too late. Her blood pressure had dropped, her organs began failing and hours later Nevaeh Crane was dead. Post Roe America looks like Giseli Barnica, whose story was also reported this week by ProPublica. She was 17 weeks pregnant when she learned her pregnancy was not viable. She started to miscarry at a hospital, but doctors told her it would be a crime to speed up the delivery in order to stave off a possible infection. Her husband told ProPublica, quote, they had to wait until there was no heartbeat. So Giuselli laid there in agony for 40 hours while her uterus was exposed to bacteria and three days later, predictably, predictably, she died of an infection, leaving her husband to raise their four year old daughter alone. It is hard to imagine doctors letting this happen to their patients, right? But you should know that this system was designed deliberately by anti abortion politicians and it is being deliberately upheld by them every day in the face of outcomes like these, which are now well documented and publicly known in Texas in particular. Texas abortion ban it promises prison time for any health intervention that ends a fetal heartbeat, one health law expert from Georgetown told ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, quote, pregnant women have become essentially untouchables. Quote in states with abortion bans, patients who have complications in their pregnancies are sometimes bounced between hospitals like hot potatoes, with health care providers reluctant to participate in treatment that could attract a prosecutor. In some cases, medical teams are wasting precious time debating legalities and creating documentation, preparing for the possibility that they will need to explain their actions to a judge and jury. And that is not paranoia. It's not an unfounded fear. Here's the situation in Texas so there are federal guidelines in the United States of America that Require hospitals if a pregnant woman shows up in an er. Federal guidelines require hospitals to stabilize or transfer any pregnant woman who shows up in an ER needing help. But the Texas State Attorney General fought in federal court to be able to force Texas doctors to disregard those federal guidelines. And in court he won that fight. So it is not a surprise that women are dying here and it is not mysterious why it is happening or who is causing it. I mean, in Texas, that same state attorney general has intervened himself to stop life saving care for individual Texas women in crisis. For example, Kate Cox, a 31 year old mother of two, she was told her pregnancy was not viable. She was told she needed an abortion to preserve her own health and her future fertility. She had to get court approval for an emergency abortion and she did. But even once she did that, that same Attorney general, his name is Ken Paxton, intervened personally in her case and threatened to prosecute her doctor anyway. Even with a court order allowing the abortion she needed, she still had to flee the state in order to get it. This is a fact right now, this is not a threat. This is the fact, the lived fact of post Roe American life. The top law enforcement official in your state can deny you healthcare and threaten your doctor. Incredibly, and this is something I think most people do not know, the crisis here that we are already in reaches also into postpartum care as well. By which I mean the Trump abortion bans are hurting American women after they give birth as well. Take Caitlin Cash. She needed a DNC to resolve a dangerous complication after she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. But because she gave birth in post Roe Texas, her life was also endangered because the postpartum care that she needed used the same tools as an abortion.
- [16:23]
Ali Velshi
After my daughter was born, I had a retained placenta.
- [16:26]
Rachel Maddow
The standard of care treatment for that is a D and C to remove the tissue.
- [16:30]
Ali Velshi
And the standard of care is to.
- [16:31]
Rachel Maddow
Make sure you are having that procedure within 30 minutes of birth.
- [16:34]
Ali Velshi
I waited an hour and 49 minutes.
- [16:37]
Rachel Maddow
I nearly bled out because they couldn't get me the equipment that they needed. And that was three years, two years after SB8 had gone into effect. Post Roe America also looks like Kylie Thurman who had an ectopic pregnancy. An ectopic pregnancy is when a fertilized egg grows somewhere outside the uterus. It is non viable. An ectopic pregnancy is never a viable pregnancy. It is a deadly threat to a woman if untreated. And the only treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is abortion. And yet Kylie Thurman was Initially denied care because of Texas abortion ban, by the time doctors agreed to give her an injection to end the pregnancy, one of her fallopian tubes had ruptured. I want to have kids and I wanted to keep my fallopian tube. But now it's gone. A piece of my womanhood was taken. Post Roe America also looks like Deborah Dorbert, who was five months pregnant when she learned her baby would not survive. But because of Florida's abortion ban, Deborah Dorbert was not even allowed to have labor induced before carrying her pregnancy to full term. Which is to say she was forced by the state of Florida in her grief to carry on that non viable pregnancy for three more months, knowing she would be forced to give birth when and only when the state decided it was okay. And then she would be forced to watch her son die with no help. I remember my OB handing me a baby boy that was blue and cold, gasping for air for 94 minutes and I just held them. We just watched our son suffocate. The trauma I went through, I wish it upon no one. And because abortion has not just been banned, it has been criminalized. This is also what post Roe America looks like. It looks like 22 year old Amari Marsh. She suffered a miscarriage in the second trimester of her pregnancy. The state of South Carolina then charged her with murder, homicide by child abuse from miscarriage. She spent three weeks in jail and another 13 months on house arrest before ultimately being cleared by a grand jury for a miscarriage. When abortion is a crime, every miscarriage is a potential criminal investigation. This is what post Roe America looks like. And if Americans had never truly understood before that abortion is healthcare. If you thought that was a slogan you didn't quite get from the pro choice side, we are now learning it in the hardest and most emotional possible way. Since the onset of the first Trump ERA, abortion bans, 1 in 25 obstetric units in the United States has shuttered. That's according to the March of Dimes. 35% of all US counties are now considered maternity care deserts. 35% without a single birthing center or obstetric unit. And this collapse of women's health care in our country in our time, it can be seen in the infant mortality rate as well. It's on the rise nationwide. It is concentrated in the very states that have Trump abortion bans. Take a look at this, look at this on the top here. This is a map of abortion restrictions in the states. The red states are the ones with abortion bans. But now look on the bottom. This is a CDC map of states with the highest infant mortality rate in the darker red. The relationship between these two maps is not a coincidence, right? This is a policy decision and it's costing lives. Women need abortions for a whole host of medical and personal reasons. There is no credible medical or scientific organization that suggests otherwise. We have been so steeped in the idea that abortion is a controversial topic for so long that it's only a necessary evil, that it's something separate and apart from health care, that we've forgotten that it's healthcare in this country. Abortion began to be criminalized in the last half of the 19th century as a male dominated medical profession started to overtake the realm of women's health that had previously been the dominion of women, of midwives who regularly helped women terminate pregnancies. The Catholic Church didn't start to condemn abortion until the 1860s. It wasn't until the 1970s that it became a partisan issue in this country as the Republican Party under Nixon's leadership, took up anti abortion positions, really for the first time as a political strategy to try to create a wedge issue to deliver Catholic votes and socially conservative voters to the gop. We also know that Richard Nixon's personal take on abortion was much more ambivalent than the message he projected to try to win over religious conservatives. Thanks to his very ill advised Oval Office tapes, we know Nixon's take was quite ignorant and quite racist on the issue of abortion and quite different than what he was saying in public. I will show you how we know that the day after Roe vs. Wade was decided by the US Supreme Court in 1973. This is how Nixon discussed abortion privately with his staff.
- [22:13]
Ali Velshi
There are times when abortions are necessary.
- [22:15]
Rachel Maddow
I know that you have a black and a white like Richard Nixon before him. No one believes now that Republican candidate Donald Trump has a particular interest in abortion beyond politics. He promised to appoint anti abortion justices to the Supreme Court. He made good on that promise. He thereby brought this health catastrophe down upon this country. But did he care about what it would do to American women? Did he care about who it would kill? On that front, Trump told on himself, not in a secret recording like Nixon, but in a town hall interview with Chris Matthews in 2016.
- [22:59]
Ali Velshi
Should the woman be punished for having abortion? Look, this is not something you can dodge. If you say abortion is a crime or abortion is murder, you have to deal with it under the law. Should abortion be punished? Well, people in certain parts of the Republican Party and conservative Republicans would say yes, they should be punished. How about you? Do you believe in punishment for abortion? Yes or no? As a principle? The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment for the woman. Yeah, there has to be some form.
- [23:29]
Rachel Maddow
Punishment for the woman. That's what Donald Trump promised at the outset of his political career. That is what he has delivered as he is now asking for another term in the White House. As we head toward Election Day on Tuesday, Republican candidate Donald Trump does seem to understand that this has been a deeply unpopular thing that he has done. You will hear him talking now about turning abortion over to the states as if it had nothing to do with him. You'll hear him talk about all the exceptions to the abortion bans. But the American people know now, in particular from the wave of journalism we have had about the practical impact of these bans in the last two years. We know that the bans are in effect because of him. We know they are in effect in the places where Republicans have political control. And we know that the supposed exceptions don't work at all to keep American women alive in the face of these bans. The American people now know that the Republican Party is actively and openly planning for a fully national abortion ban and to reverse the 20 year old FDA approval of abortion medication. We know all of that. And the reason nobody knows what the electoral impact will be of the Trump abortion bans is because it is really only, only now that we have this new understanding that we have two years of journalism, two years of testimony, two years to start to see the accumulating faces and stories and frankly, the obituaries for what it means to take this kind of health care away. Americans are not voting in this election on a slogan, on an abstraction about our rights and our freedoms. We are voting, too, for the first time ever for these women and for every other American woman who these bands are going to kill and maim. And honestly, the big electoral black box in this election is that nobody yet knows how the power of that will manifest at the polls. Not yet, Ali.
- [25:29]
Ali Velshi
As comprehensive as that was, that's eight faces. And we know of so many more.
- [25:33]
Rachel Maddow
Yeah.
- [25:34]
UNHCR Representative
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- [26:35]
Planned Parenthood Representative
This podcast is supported by Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Planned Parenthood Federation of America exists so all people can get access to the sexual and reproductive care and education they need. Planned Parenthood organizations advocate for health equity and policies that allow people the freedom to control their own bodies, lives and futures. More than 2 million patients a year rely on Planned Parenthood Health center services like STI testing and treatment, birth control, gender affirming care, abortion, cancer screenings and more. Reproductive health care and rights are under attack from public officials who are out of step with the will of the vast majority of Americans. The constitutional right to abortion has been stolen and politicians in 47 states have introduced bills that would block people from getting the sexual and reproductive care they need. Planned Parenthood knows that equitable access to health care, including safe, legal abortion, is a human right. Right now, Planned Parenthood needs your help to protect access to healthcare. Donate today by visiting plannedparenthood.org protect if.
- [27:37]
Griffles
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- [28:10]
Ali Velshi
All right, we all got to take a breath and refill our water. Our coffee. Rachel is back with me now to dive into this issue of abortion. Thank you again for being here.
- [28:19]
Rachel Maddow
Yeah, thanks for letting me on.
- [28:20]
Ali Velshi
One of the points that you made several times here is the idea that the concept that abortion is healthcare, if we say it that way, some people feel that's politicized. Yeah, but it's not. And I think we've tried all the ways to explain to people it's not. We have to get this out of the realm of being an us versus them conversation it's an all of us conversation.
- [28:38]
Rachel Maddow
Yeah. And I. And I think that, you know, I. We all follow, like, political tactics and political strategy, and we see the way these things evolve over time. And a lot of it is language. And I think that phrase abortion is healthcare has struck a lot of people as a slogan.
- [28:52]
Ali Velshi
Right.
- [28:52]
Rachel Maddow
Oh, you don't want it to seem controversial, so you're gonna call it healthcare. But we all know it's something separate. And people who came up with that idea and sort of sloganed that idea to try to make people understand it that way were coming from a position where they actually knew what they were talking, talking about. It was abortion providers and people who had worked on this issue with the women who it was most affecting for years and who could foresee what was going to happen if abortion rights were taken away. And now I just think that the American public is getting that like a bucket of cold water in the face. If you take away abortion as a right, if you take away the federally protected right to it anywhere Republicans are in control, they are going to ban it. That includes national. If they are in control of the federal government. And when you take away abortion as a right, when you criminalize it, women die. Yeah. And it is not a. It is not. It's not an esoteric thing. It's not an inchoate idea. It's not an aspirational thing. It's the lived reality, and in some cases now, the reality of the dead women that we've got in this country because of these bans.
- [29:54]
Ali Velshi
Is there a distinction between saying, hey, abortion is something that should be decided by the states? It's sort of abstract versus the criminalization of abortion. Because what we're seeing now is the criminalization of abortion, the criminalization of a miscarriage, possibly the criminalization of pregnancy.
- [30:09]
Rachel Maddow
Yeah.
- [30:09]
Ali Velshi
I mean, that's the criminalization of contraceptives. There are some people who are actually looking to go down that road. The criminalization of ivf. I think when you are. When a voter is presented with that idea, are we actually going to do what the Handmaid's Tale did? Are we going to actually criminalize women? Do you think that changes the way they think about it?
- [30:26]
Rachel Maddow
I mean, yes. I also think that people are now realizing that in these states where you saying, oh, we're not going to prosecute the woman, we're only going to prosecute the doctor.
- [30:36]
Ali Velshi
Right.
- [30:36]
Rachel Maddow
Oh, only going to prosecute the doctor. Well, what that results in is dead women under.
- [30:40]
Ali Velshi
The doctors go somewhere where they're not going to get prosecuted either doctors or.
- [30:43]
Rachel Maddow
They don't do it, or they refuse or they feel like they cannot. And in Texas they've been told they cannot provide life saving care for fear of going to prison. I mean, you can't blame doctors here in these situations for not knowing what they're legally allowed to do because these laws are vague. They are designed to be threatening both to women and to doctors. And the result is that women die. And I just feel like whatever you believe about your own personal decisions that you either have made or might hypothetically ever have to make about whether to terminate a pregnancy where you had an elective choice about it, I think people are now realizing that a lot of this is just not about elective choice. It's just about whether or not you're going to take off the table, take out of the doctor's armamentarium something that is a basic part of healthcare that literally we have done as a people for thousands of years and say for political reasons we're not gonna do it. It just all of the little nuances, all of the little, you know, the exceptions, oh, we're not punishing the woman, we're punishing the doctor. All these little fine lines don't matter. When you ban abortion, women die. And we're living through that now. And we're seeing these women's obituaries and we're hearing from their families, we're hearing from their widowed husbands who are taking care of their surviving kids. And it's just, I just feel like it has swept away a lot of the political nonsense and small talk we've had on this issue for a long time. And that's why I feel like the electoral impact of these bans is, is a real black box. Ali. I don't think that it's pollable because I don't think people know how viscerally and gutturally this is affecting people's understanding of what's at.
- [32:20]
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- [32:34]
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- [33:05]
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- [34:07]
Ali Velshi
Started reporting this story? You reported it well while Roe was there, and while it wasn't clear that Roe was going away, challenges to abortion. Abortion were alive and well in the states, which came up with all sorts of weird rules about abortion clinics and how wide the hallways needed to be and the doors and things like that. You saw that movement underway. What's changed since you started reporting on this?
- [34:27]
Rachel Maddow
Well, I mean, sadly, what happened while we still had Roe was that the courts were a refuge, an increasingly unreliable refuge, right, But a refuge for women's rights. And so you'd see Republicans again, everywhere, Republicans have control, push it as far as they could in terms of restricting these rights, in terms of making the practical necessities of how to access abortion care and related services, making those things impossible to get. And you saw so many states go down to one and in some cases no clinics. And the courts were a refuge that was increasingly unreliable. And now, of course, the courts again, wherever Republican appointees are in control, are hostile. And so the ways that we protect women, the best we can now are in some ways outside the legal system. It's supporting abortion funds, it's trying to make sure. That people can access abortion medications even in places where that's threatened to be illegal. It's taking stuff essentially outside the legitimate licit system of how we protect one another. And women are trying to take care of each other off the grid. And that's just a very, very dangerous and very liminal way to do it. And to know that your country, again, everywhere Republicans are in control, your country is trying to hurt you. Your country is willing to see you dead in order to keep one of these bans in place puts women in a very adversarial relationship with democracy and with this country. And I think that is a radicalizing thing. And I think women want to go back to feeling like our government actually wants to keep us alive.
- [36:00]
Ali Velshi
So you've got a situation where your government might actually be the one who's killing you. You also have a situation where all of the political violence that we're talking about, that you hear Donald Trump talking about these days, the dry run, was with the anti abortion movement. Yes, there was political violence that was given cover by authority for a long time in this country.
- [36:18]
Rachel Maddow
Yeah, I think that is underappreciated, Ali. I mean, when we did the documentary about the assassination of Dr. Tiller, one of the things that was so unsettling there was that not just you had the murderer, but you had a movement, a pro murder movement, out of which that assassin came, that celebrated and lionized the attempted assassination of Tiller and then the successful assassination of Tiller in the radical anti abortion movement which has now taken over the Republican Party and has now succeeded in putting Trump abortion bans in effect in 21 states. You had a movement that said it was moral to kill people who were involved in the provision of health care to American women. And that justification of violence toward our fellow Americans for supposedly moral reasons has echoes in what you have seen in terms of the violence and the threat and intimidation that has been trained against election workers, that has been trained against secretaries of state, that has been trained against, you know, Democratic political opponents, of Republican, of Republican officials. And the idea that violence is going to be the way that you stop the certification of the election, or that violence is going to be the way that you, you know, stop the vote counting in Philadelphia or in Detroit or one of these things. There was a dry run for that in this country over decades that I think gestated in the anti abortion movement that celebrated the murder of American doctors.
- [37:42]
Ali Velshi
One of the things you talked about was the fact that we now have some very good journalism on this. But we did have it with you back in 2013. On the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, you showed five embattled abortion clinics you went around the country with. Now, my executive producer, Rebecca Dryden. Rebecca Dryden. And I want to play a little about one of the interviews, what you heard from an abortion provider talking about this harassment that they faced.
- [38:07]
Rachel Maddow
Okay. When you're the only provider in a state, you become a target for both your local people who disagree with the services you offer and on. You get put on the national radar and you get put on the national map. It doesn't happen in any other business where people are allowed to act like stalkers and use your first name and, you know, try and intimidate you on your way into work. There's no place else where you would work where somebody would be allowed to act that way. Do you ever worry about your safety? I always look around before I step out of a door. But again, I'm on Social Security and Medicare and have had a good life and, you know, somebody's got to do this and I won't be intimidated.
- [39:03]
Ali Velshi
Somebody's got to do this, and I won't be intimidated. I am fascinated since the fall of Roe when I started speaking to some of these people, what motivates them. It's amazing. These people literally do it at risk of life and limb to help others and in some ways to uphold the democracy that we all believe we share, that all of us should have the same rights, which we do not have in this country anymore.
- [39:23]
Rachel Maddow
I mean, the amazing thing about going into the clinics, and again, this is before Trump overturned Roe in these embattled clinics in Republican controlled states. Once you get through the gauntlet and the radical anti abortion protesters and all of the security challenges and the legal harassment and all the other things, once you got inside those clinics, what you found was providers who were not at all radicals, providers who had incredible job satisfaction, because once they're in there providing health care to their patients one to one, they know they are saving people's lives. They know they are giving people care that they desperately need. And they know that if they don't do it, they're not sure anybody else would. And that sense of being needed and providing something important made for these very surprising interviews, I think, where they're talking about the incredible threat that they're under, but also no question that they will continue doing the work. And that, I think, was inspiring to me. In terms of all of us as Americans in a time of repression, the thing that keeps you going is not necessarily just, you know, having guts and being willing to gut it out, but being needed, making sure that you're doing the things that you can do that maybe other people can't do. Being needed. And that gives you not just a righteous place in history, but it gives you a righteous life and a lot of satisfaction and I think the love and respect of the people who you're helping.
- [40:47]
Ali Velshi
And this week, people are needed and people can do something to help their fellow Americans. You are a great friend and a great cause.
- [40:54]
Rachel Maddow
Thank you so much. Thank you.
- [40:54]
Ali Velshi
You're busy enough to not have to come in here on a Sunday morning.
- [40:57]
Rachel Maddow
I'm really grateful. I mean, I know this is again, this is crucial real estate on the Velchi show and I'm really grateful to be here.
- [41:02]
Ali Velshi
Alex, we love having you here. And a special shout out, of course, to our mutual friend and colleague Rebecca Dryden, who helped put this all together. One day I will get her on tv. Thank you to Rachel Maddow, the Emmy award winning host of the Rachel Maddow Show. Thanks for all the important work that you do and for joining us this morning. We'll be right back. That was outstanding. Thank you so much.
- [41:23]
Ashley Flowers
True crime podcasts. There is no shortage to consume. And if you're like me, you've consumed them all. I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, we cover a case in a way that's not like you've heard before because I have built a one of a kind team of investigative journalists dedicated to conducting original reporting, making sure that you get the inside scoop. Listen to hundreds of Crime Junkie episodes now, wherever you get your podcasts.