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A post-Roe America could become a reality soon, if Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft ruling becomes the court’s final decision. From the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa, Robin Marty tells Andy how the decision would impact her patients from day one, and urges Americans with privilege to consider how far they’ll go to protect the rights of others. Andy asks Columbia Law School professor Carol Sanger which of Alito’s arguments stuck out to her and what people can do today to help bring the right to choose back to states that may lose it.

Keep up with Andy on Twitter @ASlavitt on Twitter.

Follow Robin @robinmarty and Carol @carolsangernyc on Twitter.

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Check out these resources from today’s episode: 

• Order Carol Sanger’s book, “About Abortion – Terminating Pregnancy in Twenty-First-Century America”: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737723
• Order Robin Marty’s book, “The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America”: https://www.sevenstories.com/books/4280-the-new-handbook-for-a-post-roe-america
• Learn about Aid Access, an organization that helps people access abortion pills if healthy and under 10 weeks pregnant: https://aidaccess.org/en/
• Find vaccines, masks, testing, treatments, and other resources in your community here: https://www.covid.gov/
• Order Andy’s book, “Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response”: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250770165

Stay up to date with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @LemonadaMedia.

For additional resources, information, and a transcript of the episode, visit lemonadamedia.com/show/inthebubble.

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Andy Slavitt, Carol Sanger, Robin Marty

Andy Slavitt  00:19

Welcome to IN THE BUBBLE. This is Andy Slavitt. And welcome to our Friday conversation show. So Fridays are going to be a bit more of an informal conversation. The topics will sometimes be serious, as will the topic today. But we’re gonna get into some real dialogue with people who the kind of people you would invite over to your house to talk about this over dinner. You won’t hear as much from me at the top, because I want to really get into these deep conversations about the topics that are worrying us right now. Today, the topic is the draft ruling that leaked out of the Supreme Court that could, in all likelihood, and Roe vs. Wade as we know it. So I’m joined by two guests who are deeply embedded in this issue and have been thinking about this issue. Robin Marty is the Operations Director at West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa. She’s also an author of the book, the New handbook For a Post Roe America. Welcome, Robin.

Robin Marty 

thank you so much for having me on.

Andy Slavitt 

And Carol Sanger, is also an author and a professor of law at Columbia Law School. And she is author of the book about abortion, terminating pregnancy in 21st century America. So great to have you on Carol.

Carol Sanger

Thank you.

Andy Slavitt 

Alright, let’s start with the news. Carol. Can you describe what happened this week? And what? What it was like for you to go through it?

Carol Sanger

Yeah, I guess I can describe it. My phone started ringing like crazy and huge networks were going on, I’m sure among all of us. And someone leaked the draft of the case that everyone has been waiting to hear Dobbs versus Jackson, Women’s Health Organization. And the case was argued in the fall. And the opinion was supposed is supposed to come down be officially announced in either late May or early June. They always put the most controversial cases to the end of the Supreme Court term. And so this abortion always fits in right at the end. But someone and no one knows who leaked it to Politico. And there we now all see it very polished first draft for us to digest. And I mean, Chief Justice Roberts is doing an investigation. Okay, fine. Twitter is full of who could have been but that’s not so important as what the decision the draft says. It absolutely wipes out Roe and Casey, the two Supreme Court cases that everyone has relied upon since 1973, when Roe came down to provide a right for women, in consultation with their doctors to decide to terminate a pregnancy. And that’s where we are and now I’ve been explaining this generally, is to say you write Roe on a blackboard and then you take an eraser and you just wipe it out. And Casey to the case that came 20 years later, we’re back to pre-Roe days, where states can decide whether abortion in their state will be legal or criminal. And if it’s going to be legal, how heavily regulated it can be. So that’s what happened.

Andy Slavitt 

That’s what happened. Well, you know that the court sometimes finds ways to artfully draw a line down the middle and b Give a little something to one side a little something to the other side. That is not appear to happen in this ruling.

Carol Sanger 

no what they gave to both sides was the first paragraph which said, we understand this is a difficult moral issue. And some people support it. Some think abortion is necessary for women’s progress. And other people think it’s you know, the taking of human life. And that was it. Then once there was a gesture towards we appreciate that people don’t all feel the same about this, Alito went right out and said and we’re going to take down Roe and Casey from the you know, from the get go.

Andy Slavitt  04:25

Robin, what about you? Tell me about what you’ve experienced at the health center. The health center provides abortions in Alabama no less. What’s it been like at the center this week since this has been leaked?

Robin Marty

It’s been a lot. When the Politico article first came out the first people that I heard from were actually my staff. We live in a state that not only has a total abortion ban that was passed in 2019 and has no exceptions under any circumstances other than threat of life to a person who’s pregnant. We also our state has what’s known as a zombie law. So we have a pre-Roe ban on all abortion under all circumstances. And according to our legal counsel, and what we have been preparing for is the fact that the literal moment that the Supreme Court announces Roe v Wade is overturned, abortion is instantly illegal. And for that, what that means in our clinic is that if we have patients who have come in to have their counseling, or because we are a state that requires two separate appointments, 48 hours apart, if they have had their counseling, and then come in for their actual procedure, or come in for their medication at that moment, which would be 9AM, our time that the Supreme Court says roe is overturned, that means that we can no longer provide care if that person is sitting in the waiting room having already paid they cannot have care if that person is back with our nurses with a Dixie cup full of water, but has not ingested the pill again, because she’s waiting for the doctor, it does not matter, she needs to go home. If she is on an exam table, already medicated but has not been dilated. That would be considered a legal procedure if we go forward with it. So when my staff heard Roe v Wade was overturned, because that’s what the shorthand was, when this draft came out, they thought that abortion was completely illegal already. We know that it does not go into effect now, abortion is still just as legal today in Alabama, as it was yesterday. But patients, staff, everyone was confused. What’s most interesting, though, is that of the patients who did think that abortion was made completely illegal. They showed up anyway, they showed up and they asked for their abortions. And they said is abortion legal? And we said yes. And they said, I would have done it anyway. Because when you have desperate pregnant people who do not want to be pregnant, they’re going to risk it, they’re going to risk legal action, they are going to risk having some sort of physical harm come to them because the alternative is being pregnant and giving birth. And that’s not something they want to do.

Andy Slavitt 

Well, let’s go through Alito, its arguments. Because, Carol, you know, he’s effectively overturning 49 years of precedent, and as you said, reinforced by yet another case, in the 90s, the Casey case, whatever is already within an on the merits, what do you think of the arguments he’s making?

Carol Sanger

Well, he takes down every argument that was made in favor for the constitutionality of finding a right to choose. And he then add some more and in case anybody’s thinking of attacking this from another angle, which we can come to in a minute, but he says there is most of the arguments against Roe having no foundation in the Constitution, start out with privacy is not mentioned in the Constitution. But he goes one better, and he says many times abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution. Well, of course, it’s not mentioned in the Constitution, because the Constitution doesn’t deal with the details of medical care in such a manner. But he’s expanding people’s notions of why this is so bad. And what if I could just add one thing, one of the things that upset me about the leak was that all we have is an Alito’s really strident opinion. And we don’t have the dissents, which is often very useful when you get a case. And you can see, well, that’s what they say. But then when the side we have the people are telling us, those arguments aren’t right. He’s wrong about the facts. So we’re reading it kind of in isolation. And I think that gives it sort of more authority for ordinary people to read. And we’re waiting for that.

Andy Slavitt  09:05

What will be the main argument that the dissent in your view?

Carol Sanger

That there’s a complete disregard for precedent that we have, as you said, 49 years of legal abortion, and he distorts, I think, quite strongly. So precedent and is part of the doctrine of stare decisis, which means when the court gets a decision, it’s supposed to look and see, have we had a decision like this before? Have we ruled on a decision like this before? And if the answer is yes, then you follow that decision. And the idea behind that is it gives people security to know that just because the judges on the court may change, we know we have three new judges in the last few years and a fourth coming up. The law doesn’t change. You can count on the rule of law. And that’s following precedent. And you have to have very strong reasons not to follow precedent. But there are a few exceptions. And I’ll give you one that he uses, which I think the dissents will definitely talk about, he’s one of the issues you look at, is have people gotten used to the law that you’re thinking of overturning. And if they have, they come to rely on it? And in Casey, the court was very clear about this, that’s they have the Casey, they say, an entire generation has come of age, knowing they can rely on legal abortion, in case their contraception fails. And by now, it’s two generations have come to age thinking that something goes wrong. If whatever goes wrong, and you’re pregnant, you have an unwanted pregnancy, you can rely on the law, it’s in the background. It’s there for you. And he denies this completely, and Alito, and says, there’s no such reliance here. People don’t rely on law when they’re having sex, but people do.

Andy Slavitt 

I have a question for you. And also for you, Robin, I was talking with Lana, my wife, about this. And she has to be the very interesting question, which I don’t have the expertise to answer. But it made a lot of sense to me, which is why is this even a constitutional question? To begin with? I’m gonna read you some statistics. So the US maternal mortality rate is increased from 2018 to 2020. So in just two years, by like 40%, it’s the highest of any developed country. That’s according to CDC data and Black women, as last week show indicated, more than twice as likely as White women to die in childbirth. And I think the question that I think this begs is, why is this even a legal issue to force somebody to go through an operation of procedure, something that is potentially dangerous to them? Where is it that the Supreme Court has to essentially say that that’s to protect protected from that question to begin with? What other things in our life can we be compelled to do that are dangerous like that?

Carol Sanger  12:15

Do you want to go ahead, Robin, or?

Robin Marty 

I do not. I have no answer for this. Because I have the same question.

Carol Sanger 

Well, if we how, if you take your first to take by mouth question, how it why is this a constitutional issue at all? It needed to have been a constitutional issue. And in other countries, the legality of abortion is not achieved through the courts. But it is achieved through the legislature or parliament. And so they decide just with like the regulation, because all medical procedures are regulated by some governmental authority, you know, doctors have to be licensed and so on. But what happened at the end of the 60s was kind of the reverse of the problem you’re describing now, with maternal mortality, there were huge numbers of women appearing in emergency rooms with perforated uterine, with infections. There were a lot of illegal abortions going on that were not safe. They’re not legal, and they were not safe. And so the AMA, the American Medical Association, for one said, we haven’t, we kind of get into here and start working on abortion law reform. And it was law reform, not medical reform. That got us into court. And then when you’re in court, you have only you only have the ammunition that the Constitution provides you. And here it was a very, newish argument to use privacy to cover the idea that a woman should be able to decide to have a child or another child that’s protected by a zone of privacy, which covers other intimate decisions that people make, like who to marry, or whether it needs contraception or not. So that’s how it got into court. And of course, one of the things that’s argued is the court had no business hearing this question. I mean, Alito says that as well. We’re returning this to democracy. We’re returning this to the States. I think he says a row was on a collision course with the Constitution from the minute it was decided that he thinks it should not have been a constitutional question, but it was because one way to argue how women could get the authority to not have their providers arrested, if they performed an abortion was to think about abortion as protected behavior protected by the constitution. So that’s how it became it was an effort to make things better for women by allowing them to have legal abortions.

Andy Slavitt 

Let’s now look at the bigger picture. Robin. 13 states have so called trigger laws on their books related to abortion. Can you explain what that means? And give us a sense of what it’s likely to look like in different states, you but you talked about Alabama already? Should this really get finalized?

Robin Marty 

Sure. So 13 states do have trigger laws. But what is important to understand is at this point, we assume that there are 26 states that are likely within the next few months of after Roe v. Wade being overturned, will either implement bills that have been blocked so far, or need in legislature to have new bills. So in essence, we are going to have 26 states that will not have legal abortion will have the most minimal of legal abortion. As soon as this fall, when we look at this, what we will realize is that the states that are codified and keeping abortion rights in their state constitutions or making it accessible for people are almost entirely on the west coast or on the northeast coast. And then there is just like a state here in there like Minnesota, that is keeping it intact. Minnesota, Colorado, New Mexico, Illinois. That’s it.

Andy Slavitt  16:38

So if you’re in the southern part of Florida, how far do you have to travel? How many states would you have to travel to find a state where abortion was legal?

Robin Marty

If you are in the absolute tip of Florida, probably your closest clinic would be Washington DC. So that’s about five states up. And that’s five very long states, because you are at the very bottom of Florida. For a person in Alabama, your choice would be either to head over to Washington, DC, or head to Southern Illinois, which again, is another four to five states. We already know what this looks like. Because currently in Alabama, we are already seeing patients from Texas. So we have patients who come in now at least once a week, because the clinic surrounding them, Oklahoma, which now as of today, no longer has abortion after six weeks, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi all have waiting for an appointment between three and four weeks right now. So what we’re looking at are people who could actually be pregnant, try to get an appointment at a clinic anywhere in a surrounding state, and find that by the time their appointment would actually happen. Roe could already be overturned, and that abortion could now be illegal.

Andy Slavitt 

So our craft geographic team just told me that it’s 1000 miles from Miami to Washington, DC. And so it’s 1000, literally 1000 miles away.

Robin Marty  18:09

it is. But one of the things that I really want to make clear to people is that for the most part, people who are having abortions, it doesn’t matter if it’s the next state over or if it’s 1000 miles away. This is a lack of resources that makes it virtually impossible for a patient to be able to get to a clinic that’s even in their own hometown. Like if you’re looking at Alabama, a person needs to be able to take the time off to go to a clinic, then wait 48 hours, then have another appointment to go back into the clinic. And in clinic abortion in a southern state usually costs about $700 in the first trimester. There are no insurances of any kind, private or Medicaid that will cover any of this. So the financial burden is always already huge. We look at even simple things like people who want to have procedural abortions, but can’t do that, because they don’t have a driver that can take time off of work in order to come with them so that they can go back home. We see people every day who are coerced into the types of procedures that aren’t the ones that they wanted, not because of anything other than restrictions that already exist on what is supposed to at this moment right now be a legal accessible procedure.

Andy Slavitt 

So incredibly difficult. Under the best of circumstances, is it safe to say that if you live in one of the other states where abortion will remain legal, or that if you have all kinds of time and money, you’re wealthy, you can be away from your job. That even then it’s difficult but where the burden really feels like it’s going to fall is on poor women on younger women on women of color. Disproportionately?

Robin Marty 

It is and also, it needs to be recognized that this burden is going to be predominantly in the southeast, and especially the Gulf Coast area. That’s not just because of the lack of available clinics or the poverty level. But the fact that these are the same states that have opted out of expanding Medicaid in the first place, every state that you are looking at that is going to have an abortion ban in the south also has not expanded Medicaid under the Obama Care Act. And that means that for people who are essentially making $27,000 a year or less, they are unable to access any form of health insurance. And so because of that they are unable to access any form of contraception to begin with.

Andy Slavitt  20:41

Carol, help us understand what’s likely to happen in terms of potential exceptions. Because this narrative that well, people make their own choices, and they have to live with the consequences is a really neat narrative from 1000 miles away. But sadly, we know that it’s not that simple. And that there are lots of reasons why people are in situations where they have to terminate a pregnancy or where it makes sense for them to terminate a pregnancy including women who are carrying the child of a rapist. incest, people who are have a topical pregnancies or pregnancies that are dangerous to them. Or they’ve got to carry a severely disabled child to birth. Obviously feels like it’ll be a state-by-state thing. But can you just give us a sense of will there be exceptions?

Carol Sanger

Can I just add one more group to the group, the Raven says, fetal anomaly. I’d add mothers motherhood is a reason why many, many, many pregnant people have, they have two children, or they have three or they have one. And they know what it’s like. And they know how much money they earn. And so motherhood it’s known taking better care of the children you already have, is a great driver of why a fair proportion of women want to have an abortion, they want to be good mothers. And so I think you have to add that in. But as for the legal exceptions, we’ve always had rape and incest. And the thinking has been that that’s because if you had involuntary sex, you don’t deserve to be punished. You know, you don’t deserve to have the kid which is in a sense, the punishment, that would be unfair. But if you had voluntary sex, too bad for you, you know, all these other reasons, too bad for you. Now, in the last several years, the states have gotten bolder and bolder about the age bands. So putting them down to where it’s clearly below liability, but also taking away at the legal exceptions. Some, I think Arkansas just has only the life to save the life of the mother, as do a number of other states. So in a way, it’s like industrial strength, pro-life. We mean it when we say we’re for fetuses, above all, every fetus, we don’t care how it was conceived, we don’t care what its health status is. So I think states will become more restrictive, with regard to no exceptions, at least in the beginning. And then we’re gonna all have to live with this and see what how it feels in our, in our communities. So that the state can change its laws. But at the beginning, I think there’s going to be a real swagger to the laws that are passed, like we finally beat you down. It took us, you know, five decades, but it’s done.

Robin Marty 

I want to follow up on what Carol said. But I also want to say that I feel that the reversal might happen more quickly than she believes. And I believe that simply because here in Alabama with the amount of media that has been coming out the very person who introduced and argued for the total no exceptions abortion ban in 2019, Terry Collins, she has been asked recently about how she feels about Roe v. Wade. This is a woman who threatened to pull her entire bill because they tried to add an exception for sexual assault victims. And she is now currently telling news media that she thinks that perhaps a good place to end up is having a six-week heartbeat ban and one that allows victims of sexual assault or those who have fetal anomalies, to be able to still get abortions because according to her, she thinks most reasonable people can agree on that. So we’re already seeing down here the backlash of these very, very extreme bands now that they are coming into fruition, and now that legislators are having to actually see what the effects will be. Because I think in a lot of ways, many of these people were doing this for the political clout, they were doing it to get elected, they were doing it to get money from anti-abortion groups. And now that reality is setting in and they actually have to see these bands go into effect that they quite frankly, never really expected to see. And especially not this soon, I think they are getting their comeuppance, and they’re getting scared.

Carol Sanger  25:39

And I just follow that. I think that there’s the via that many people believe they don’t know anyone who ever had an abortion. And so it’s not their problem. It’s not their family. It’s nothing to do with them. But I think that abortion is like this massive, open secret in America. We know there are clinics, places, we know, people begin to look a little chubbier than they did, we know and then and then they’re not that talked about, it’s not talked about That’s right, when somebody when a teenager is covering a pregnancy. And I think that it’s time well, it’s way past time for people to confront their own families. I think every family must be far short of six degrees of separation from an abortion. And it’s people that you people that you love and care for. So I think that knowing who has abortions would be a good thing, although I’m not for outing anybody. But I think that this new circumstance of more teenagers are gonna have to go to their parents and say I’m stuck.

Andy Slavitt 

Let’s talk about some of the what am I call workarounds? It maybe you can explain to them how some of those workarounds some of them are other types of abortions like medication, assisted abortion pills, you could take up to 10 weeks. Then there’s another whole category of things that are not abortions, that enhance birth control, education, Plan B things in that variety. Can you talk about what you see happening in that regard?

Robin Marty 

Sure. I’m in the south especially, we are doing a lot of campaigning around making sure people understand that medication abortion that you get online from a vetted source. So either because you’ve gotten it from a pharmacy in the US, probably if you are in a state where this is illegal, you’ve gotten it through somebody else who’s who has done this for you. And I am saying right now, that is officially considered a crime. So you need to be aware of that fact. But the other option is people are getting it from overseas, and especially through an online group called eight access, where we know that the medication that is coming through is the medication that is exactly the same as what we give you in a clinic. Can

Andy Slavitt  28:29

Can you repeat that site again, aid access?

Robin Marty 

Sure. It’s called aid access, and it’s run by the same people who run women on waves women on the web, they’re very good at getting pills to places where abortion is illegal. What we know about post roe America as opposed to pre roe America is the fact that abortion is much safer now and can be done much more safely, privately in your own home in ways that it could not be done before. The biggest risks that comes from a poster of America when it comes to managing your own care is the fact that if you happen to be one of the few people who does require a follow up for any reason, that is where you could find yourself potentially being criminalized. We want to make sure that people understand that medication abortion is completely safe, that it’s something that they should feel free to use that it’s been used in other countries without even a pregnancy test or an ultrasound. The only real risk is making sure that if you do your own abortion, you are being very careful about talking to medical providers afterwards. If you do think that you are having some sort of reaction or some sort of medical complication.

Andy Slavitt 

When say do it at home, that does that want to make sure I’m understanding..

Robin Marty 

You literally will take one instructions will come with it. You take one pill of […] and you will go ahead and do take that pill and then 24 to 48 hours later, you will take the other four pills of misoprostol, which are provided to you. And you can either stick them in your cheek and hold them or you can stick them in your vagina and hold them. And I love seeing vagina on the air. I’m going to do it again, vagina. And so when you do that, it will essentially the […] makes the pregnancy stop developing. The misoprostol will allow the uterus to expel all of its contents. It’s exactly what would happen in a clinic, you’re just doing it at home and not inside a clinic.

Andy Slavitt  30:32

And that can be done at what point?

Robin Marty 

Officially, you can do it in the first 10 weeks. We do know that there are people who are doing it further along than that. If a person were to try to do something like that, they would want to make sure that they were able to get a hold of more misoprostol so that they can continue to keep taking it until they are sure that their uterine contents are expelled. That is something that is far more easy to get a hold of than […] which is very highly regulated for no reason other than politics.

Andy Slavitt 

There’s also I believe, a telemedicine and I’m blanking on the name, although we’ll put it in our show notes that are offered telemedicine services consults as well.

Robin Marty 

Yes, there are services that offer consults, I will say that if you’re talking about places like just the pill, or hey, Jane, or those sorts of organizations […], a lot of these abortion pill only sites can only speak to people who are in states where tell them that abortion is legal. That is not anywhere in the south. So they are not going to talk to you.

Carol Sanger 

Well, I just want to add one thing. So we have this really efficacious method of privacy simplicity, it’s kind of and then we have the state legislature coming in and saying, oh, you can’t, it’s a number of states, I can’t remember the number, say that you have to have the pill given to you by a physician. So it’s a way of spoiling, is Alabama that?

Robin Marty  32:06

Alabama, the doctor has to see you literally take it, literally stick it in your mouth and take it.

Carol Sanger

Literally, you have to take it in front of. So something that works so well, that react or made more difficult, made more difficult. A lot of the abortion regulation is just to harass women, and make it harder to do what they’re trying to do. And so I’m sure states will pass laws that say you can’t receive the abortion pill through the mail. But the mail is still a federal business. And the FDA has said that because of the pandemic, it is fine to get […] through the mail. So that’s still okay?

Robin Marty 

That is still okay in states that already that allow that to happen. The states like Alabama, Wisconsin, I know is one I believe Michigan as well. These are states where there’s already been legislation that has passed that says it is illegal to send medication in the mail in any way, shape or form. And that’s why you see so many pharmacies that won’t give out there.

Andy Slavitt 

Let’s talk about where the where the legal battle goes from here. What can the Biden administration do, is there anything that you see happening, that can happen in the US Congress? And then of course, the state legislatures?

Carol Sanger 

Well, the US Congress needs 60 votes to pass the codification of row as a federal matter. And they don’t have them. They have tops 42 o’clock last night, news hour. So that looks unlikely.

Andy Slavitt

So 42, you’re saying that there are 40 Democrats, and then maybe you’re counting on Collins and Murkowski.

Carol Sanger

But yes, but it’s still it’s even with that wish, it’s still not enough. So federal legislation doesn’t look good now. And it leads one straight to start thinking about the midterms. And that might be another consequence of the backlash that that Robin was talking about. So that’s Congress, then we have state legislatures, and from my money, I think that people gave a talk to a group of law students for choice. And they said, Well, what can we do? And I said, you can work on voter suppression. Because right now, you can’t do that much legislatively for abortion, but you can get people voting so that we can turn that around at because the voter suppression that’s usually thought about in connection with race has implications for pro-choice legislation as well.

Andy Slavitt  34:50

That’d be high on your list.

Carol Sanger 

Yeah, I would put a very high on my list here. And as for courts, we’re really we’ve had a lot of Trump appointees. I mean, not only on the Supreme Court, but at lower levels.

Andy Slavitt 

Yeah, feels good to hear that, doesn’t it? So let’s, let’s actually close where we’re headed in the direction where you started Carol, which I always want to close our Friday shows by telling people, what can they do […] people with a lot of energy, a ton of intelligence. And, you know, look, this is a setback. It’s a major setback. It’s more than a setback. Some ways, it’s a one of the most existential policy changes that you can imagine, still, people throughout the course of our country, our world have fought for things. And even in the face of setbacks of one. So I want to, I want to talk about the places where people should have hope, and where people can take action. And I think you can answer that both from the standpoint of from their own circumstances, if they had begun these circumstances, what you would advise them, maybe Robin, you can start there. And then also, if they want to engage in turning this around, what we’d recommend, and you can, you can, of course, add to that Robin and Carol close with you.

Robin Marty  36:10

One of the things that I’m telling people right now is the reason that I rewrote the book and re-released it, handbook  for a post Roe America is because when COVID hit, we realized exactly what a post Roe America would look like a number of states cut off all abortion access, and we saw people having to use the mail primarily in order to get abortions, people who are essentially stuck in their states. So this gave me an opportunity to redo it with a bunch of liberal checklists of things that you need to do in order to be prepared for Roe v Wade to be overturned. And one of the things that I am saying right now that we are actually facing it is that every person who has any sort of privilege needs to go through a checklist in their head of what they’re willing to do to risk arrest. And I say that because as we go into this, it’s not going to be bloody coat hangers, it’s not going to be people who have died because they took illegal abortions, illegal, what is considered illegal abortions is completely safe, right now, what is going to change things are the number of people who end up in jail over something like helping somebody obtain an abortion, or somebody getting their own abortion, we know that this is going to target the people who are the most marginalized, especially poor people, people of color, trans people, people who are already targeted by police. So if you are a person who has the ability, you should go ahead and do whatever you feel is right for you in order to make sure that people have access to abortion, even if that might not necessarily be legal, because you have the ability to take the risk, and do that in order to move this needle again.

Andy Slavitt

Carol, give us some hope. Give us a path here.

Carol Sanger

I thought that was very helpful. But you want hope? So I think you should donate money for people to get transportation, there are several places where you can donate to help for women to move, get to a legal state, I would, of course vote, I would if I were advising a family, I would suggest stockpiling some medication because it’s going to hit very fast. And you might as well have it in your medicine cabinet. I would pay attention to your family members. And I would detect whether somebody might be pregnant in the family. And we kind to I mean, women feel so isolated when they have abortions. And they are there right they don’t have very few people to talk about it with so I think I don’t know what the mechanism is for that but more generosity in terms of why a person would have an abortion. A lot of abortion providers say that, that there’s no solidarity among women who have abortions, I don’t know whether you find that to be so because you think everyone else is there for a bad reason in the waiting room. But your reason was good. Your reason was understandable. But that’s too skimpy. A way of trying to confront this as a social issue. So be nice, give money, give your time, put your drive people places, and you’re quite right to think through the legal consequences, because other states may follow Texas and make aiding and abetting a crime.

Andy Slavitt 

Yeah, I mean, this whole move to mob justice is a whole nother topic.

Carol Sanger 

Yeah. I mean, operationalizing just sort of a vigilante state where everyone’s looking at their neighbor to see who might have been pregnant to who went where, how long were they gone? We don’t have that, but it’s not impossible to imagine it.

Andy Slavitt

Well. The one thing we know is that there is often a set of reactions and an anticipated that they get very difficult to anticipate. And I think Robin as you said Earlier when they caught the bus, if you will, that they’ve been the pro-life community has been chasing for so long. We ended up in a situation where we’re gonna see a whole bunch of things we can anticipate, Robin Marty, Carol Sanger. So appreciate you being on our Friday conversation. And in the Bible.

Carol Sanger  40:20

Wonderful. Yes.

Robin Marty 

Thank you so much for having me.

Andy Slavitt

All right. Thank you very much for listening to our first Friday conversation. I was probably a bit nervous about how that would all go. It’s both an important topic area wanted to make sure we did right. It’s also just a First Friday conversation with the new format. Let me tell you, though, what’s coming up next, then please give us feedback on that show. Next week is a really interesting week. Monday, we have Trump’s COVID coordinator, Deborah Birx. And then Wednesday, we have Biden’s COVID coordinator. Ashish Jha. We’ve had him on the show before. I was just with him in the West Wing. He has got his agenda, how we’re going to talk about the current COVID Wave sweeping the country, his plans, what we’re going to do. The Birx interview I can tell you is you don’t want to miss that. It’s a is a zesty interview. She on Wednesday, and then Friday, we’ll be back with our second news conversation format just like today’s show focus on big news event of the week. But let me know what you think. Let me know how you think we did. What did you like, What didn’t you like? What didn’t hear more of which we do differently? We’ll mold it based on your feedback. Just send us an email at inthebubble@gmail.com. If you’ve begun your weekend already, then that’s amazing. If not, you really should begin your weekend soon. And I hope you enjoy it. We will talk with you on Monday.

CREDITS

Thanks for listening to IN THE BUBBLE. We’re a production of Lemonada Media. Kathryn Barnes, Jackie Harris and Kyle Shiely produced our show, and they’re great. Our mix is by Noah Smith and James Barber, and they’re great, too. Steve Nelson is the vice president of the weekly content, and he’s okay, too. And of course, the ultimate bosses, Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Wittels Wachs, they executive produced the show, we love them dearly. Our theme was composed by Dan Molad and Oliver Hill, with additional music by Ivan Kuraev. You can find out more about our show on social media at @LemonadaMedia where you’ll also get the transcript of the show. And you can find me at @ASlavitt on Twitter. If you like what you heard today, why don’t you tell your friends to listen as well, and get them to write a review. Thanks so much, talk to you next time.