 All right, we're ready to begin. It's such a pleasure to be with you all. I'm Michelle Bratcher Goodwin, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School and the Chancellor's Professor at the University of California Irvine, Founding Director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy. It's my pleasure to be with you and to welcome a leading scholar who's been, who's work in legal history and constitutional law can be read in books that are award-winning, but also in publications from Mother Jones to the Atlantic to the New York Times. Today I'm joined with by Mary Ziegler and we're joined for a program on contemporary issues in health, law, and bioethics. Today's program is Reproductive Health Rights and Justice the Supreme Court and Beyond. Professor Ziegler is the Daniel P.S. Paul Visiting Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School where you can find her this year. And she is also the Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at the Florida State University College of Law. She specializes in the legal history of reproduction, the family, sexuality, and the constitution. Her most recent book, Abortion and the Law in America, a legal history, Roe v. Wade the present was entirely prescient. Who could have thought by writing that book, which came out in 2020 that she could have foreseen so much of the battlefront that is taking place across the United States and tensions and states and some of those issues making their way all the way to the United States Supreme Court. So without further ado, let's get this program started. We're gonna take down this slide. Now, one matter of housekeeping. For this program, if you have questions for us, then please put them in the Q and A. We would like for you to submit those questions there. And as I've mentioned, this is the second of three programs that we're doing along this line. So please make sure that you stay tuned for our next one. And because we're recording them, you can also follow the conversation that I had with Professor Monica McLemore, which was just absolutely terrific. As I know, this one will be as well. And if you have any technical issues, as you saw on the slide, you know how to address those. So, Professor Siebler, it is such a pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, thank you. Well, I'm gonna talk, I'm hoping this will mostly be a conversation. So I'm not going to talk at you for very long. The questions I guess I wanted to raise were the questions that are preoccupying me as a historian now or sort of how we got here questions. And I think probably we could divide those into two categories, the sort of what did progressives do wrong? And I think there are plenty of things to talk about there, probably mostly in the reproductive justice vein. And then I think something that often is lost in that conversation is what conservatives did well. Because often when people approach either of us about this, it's often the conversation is what could progressives have done differently, which sort of presupposes that nothing is happening on the other side. On the other side. It's worthy of attention. What's that? Because we will be having a conversation because this is just such a rich opportunity to be together. Why don't we start there with the questions that you're looking to unpack? And I'd actually ask for you to start with the second one, if you don't mind. If you could help us to understand that in this time that is defined by a law that stands in Texas, SB 8, which bans abortions, most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, a time in which most people won't know they're pregnant, and provides no exceptions for cases of rape or incest and also includes a bounty where individuals in the state can sue people who are led to aid and abet an individual with terminating a pregnancy, a very, very broad statue. And even that last point of the statue that I just mentioned, attorney's fees can be recovered. And $10,000 or more could be recovered against the individual if successful. But we also have a case coming up before the United States Supreme Court. And oral arguments were heard in that December 1. It's a case called DOBS. It involves a Mississippi abortion ban that's 15 weeks. Again, provides no exceptions for cases of rape or incest. The Supreme Court will probably be issuing a ruling on that case, probably sometime late May, early June. Two similar, but also distinct laws, which I'm sure you'll tell us about. One involving six weeks, one involving 15 weeks, what accounts for that difference? And more importantly, just to get us started and so that we can appreciate all that you give us in terms of your legal history background, how did we get here and what was it that those who were part of anti-abortion movements did well? Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of things. I mean, so part of the way we got here is just luck, right? So if Donald Trump doesn't squeak a win in 2016, we're not here. If Ruth Bader Ginsburg retires earlier or dies later, we're not here. So as is always, historians will say things are contingent and that's true tier. There are things that they had nothing to do with the anti-abortion movement, right? So I don't think we're here unless you have a kind of parallel conservative legal movement that gives the Supreme Court a sense of validation even if they reverse row. So if you think back, we've been in moments before historically when the court could have reversed row, but they wouldn't have been, I think in part because they would have lost face at places like Harvard, right? And now I think you have a Supreme Court that has its own community with its own norms that will celebrate the reversal of row even if that's viewed negatively in the broader legal community. And we have I think a much more polarized in many ways, much less democratic polity where political backlash will be much more blunted, right? There are gonna be lots of people in red states who will not feel the effects of a post-row backlash even if there is one. But I think that conservatives have been and particularly the anti-abortion movement has been savvy in trying to change the Supreme Court and in using lots of unusual levers to control the Supreme Court. And in recognizing that controlling the Supreme Court doesn't just mean having Republicans nominate judges, it means picking judges who will be indifferent to potential political blowback because that's after all where we were in the 90s when the court had considered reversing row once before. It's interesting, I think that the SPO has that. Yeah, because that's such an excellent point. And then we'll have you come right back to where you were indifferent to blowback. And I think it's probably worth just that note here because if we were to look at this on a spectrum Republicans helped to get us row, right? When you sort of think about Roe v. Wade's 72 opinion, five of those seven justices that voted to strike down the Texas law criminalizing abortion were Republican appointed Justice Blackman who wrote the opinion and Roe v. Wade was put on the court by Richard Nixon. So just this piece that you're telling us in terms of level setting this kind of contemporary aspect of history is dramatically different than when thinking about and positioning Republicans and if you look at blowback, Roe v. Wade is a very different time in terms of Republicans and the support for reproductive rights. Totally, yeah. I mean, if you think about it we've had a conservative Supreme Court majority now for a long time. So it's not as if this is just a story about partisan makeup because we've been in that world since at least the Nixon era, right? So that isn't the story. And it's not even the story that people were nominated by Republicans who didn't like Roe because we've been in that world for a long time. So other things have had to change. And I think conservatives have had a better sense of what it means to have a court that would get rid of Roe. And of course those changes augure things for much more than abortion. Because if it's a court that's not concerned about these traditional legitimacy checks that has implications for voting rights and affirmative action and a variety of other things because of course that fear of blowback could have checked the court in other ways that it doesn't appear to anymore. So one of the benefits of the work of your books and the broader accessible work, your books are quite accessible but you also are public intellectual and people can read your work in the Atlantic New York Times other venues. And you really have a kind of intimate view almost as close to an insider's view as one could sort of get and talking about both reproductive health rights and justice and also the anti-abortion movement. So what have been some of the strategies that were utilized that were right? And maybe we'll just preface this with saying that if one reads your work, then we know that since the 1970s, there are nearly 50 bombings of abortion clinics, mass shootings and the rest. A lot of the kind of violence was something that was part and parceled in some ways of the pushback against abortion. Not unusual that there were people chaining themselves to clinics. Not unusual that people could fear that a clinic might be blown up but you've written about there was a change. What caused that change? What came out of that? Yeah, I mean, what's really interesting about the anti-abortion movement, there were always sort of, I mean, like any social movement, you're talking really plural rather than singular, right? But I think there has for a long time and I think there's been a recent change where the movement's turned its back on this but there was a sense in which the anti-abortion movement was playing the long game, which is something that I think will behoo people who support reproductive rights and justice going forward. They understood that losing row was not the end of the story. And initially the focus was on personhood, which is the movement's underlying goal, which is to say, saying that the constitution treats an unborn child or a fetus as a person, which means abortion is unconstitutional. And that doesn't mean just in Alabama, that means in Massachusetts and California and New York. That strategy would have been great if it worked but the movement recognized eventually that it wasn't gonna work, right? No one has successfully amended the constitution for a while. And so instead, the strategy became to control the Supreme Court because if you couldn't amend the constitution, you might be able to get Republican presidents to nominate the right people. You might be able to get Republican senators to confirm the right people. And you may be able to use other strategies like campaign finance, like getting insider positions in GOP, being like a Republican committeeman or a general counsel of the Republican National Committee. You could use all of those levers of power to try to get people you thought would be indifferent to controversy on the court. And that meant that there were sort of guardrails for a while in terms of what the anti-abortion movement would say publicly because they didn't want to sabotage either the political or the legal strategy. After Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the court, that changes, right? So increasingly you see these laws coming out of states saying no rape and incest exception, saying bans from fertilization, calling for a person, things that don't pull well, things that could turn off some Supreme Court justices. And I think increasingly what's happening is that on the right there's a sort of amnesia almost, right? That they've forgotten their own history, the history of showing that the Supreme Court doesn't put an end to conversations about reproductive rights and justice it participates, but it doesn't end those conversations. And there's a lot, I think, of overconfidence and sort of obliviousness to the fact that whatever happens with the Supreme Court in the dogs case, as you mentioned, Michelle, is like, that's gonna just be the beginning of other stuff. It's like, we're gonna just say, okay, well, the Supreme Court decided dogs. And now we can all just wrap this up and move on to other topics in bioethics. Like that's not how it's gonna go. Well, it seems to me that there was a lot banking on this strategy. And maybe I'll talk a bit about, this is a sophisticated strategy. I mean, it's not as if these are just a few people. It's a kind of well-oiled machine and a kind of deeply bankrolled machine because it wasn't necessarily obvious that there would be those within the Republican Party that would buy into this at all. I mean, let's be clear, Prescott Bush, who was the father of George H.W. Bush was the treasurer for Planned Parenthood. So it's not absolutely obvious that this kind of turn from sort of chaining to clinics and the violence, which really helped to define a significant part of the anti-abortion movement in the 1970s, which was not something that mainstream Republicans wanted to touch at all because it wasn't something that was consistent with mainstream Republican values, either at state levels or at federal level, certainly not at the federal level. That was not a conversation that was going to go far. And so, where was there some sense of confidence? Do you think that this could actually pay out? Yeah, I mean, I think that there were a couple of different key moments. So one of the moments was that the anti-abortion, so the early anti-abortion movement had people in it who were not Republicans and there were Republicans who were pro-choice. So it wasn't clear that that was the way to go. But when Ronald Reagan ran in 1980, there was sort of like a community of interest. So Reagan realized that he needed to pick up voters who would have usually voted for the Democratic Party out of economic self-interest. And he thought one way to do that might to be to peel off socially conservative Catholics and white eventual local Protestants. Sort of insurgent conservatives who didn't like the GOP establishment thought that anti-abortion voters could help them get rid of people like Betty Ford and Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller who were either pro-choice or sort of, they would be sort of squishy. And anti-abortion leaders who hadn't really liked the Republican Party anymore than the Democratic Party saw sensed an opportunity. So there was a sort of partnership of convenience that made a lot of this possible. And then I think over time, after 1992, the anti-abortion movement expected the Supreme Court to reverse it once before when there was a Sixth Justice conservative supermajority and it didn't work. And so then the movement concluded that they needed to do more to make themselves useful to the GOP in the way they primarily did that was through money, right? They helped Republicans out raise Democrats. They helped revolutionize the First Amendment doctrine and the way we think of campaign finance. And so it really, at that point, the anti-abortion movement in the GOP are very, very interwoven now. That's true, I think of certain religious communities but it's true of the anti-abortion movement too. So now I think it's almost true that the Republican Party couldn't function without the anti-abortion movement. So I think in various ways, the strategy was to make the anti-abortion movement indispensable and that worked in some ways, at least as far as the Republican Party's concerned. Right, well, I was gonna ask you about that and you beat me to it, right? The possibility of the disentanglement. How exactly does one do that? Because if we look at various research studies, whether it's research studies that pivot to who are the people who utilize abortion services and we know that there are conservatives who are anti-abortion who use abortion services. And if we look at Republicans who still may speak the word of anti-abortion, we know enough that in fact, there's been support in their personal lives with regard to abortion. But it seems to me that the disentangling from the rhetoric would seemingly be very difficult now just because of how interwoven, as you say, the movement has become to the party. Yeah, and I think one of the questions some people have is sort of, are we at a moment where there could be a party realignment, right? Because people will view the GOP in row as sort of the dog catching the car, right? Because getting rid of row has been this tremendous, fundraising tool, it's been this tremendous get out of the vote tool. So the question would be, does the GOP want to get rid of row? And does that mean that anti-abortion voters will essentially say, hey, it's not in my economic self-interest to vote for this party? And the thing that that misses is, well, one that politics for many of these people is a question of identity, not just a question of policy and a question of race and identity, not just a question about abortion, but it also misses that the end game isn't getting rid of row. So as much as the strategy has changed, the objective has not. So there still needs to be a strategy if you're in the anti-abortion movement to get to a nationwide abortion ban because banning abortion in Alabama substantively doesn't change much, right? If you're looking at national abortion numbers, the vast majority of abortions are happening in populous blue states. They're not happening in small red states. Well, and it's become so difficult in small red states places that specifically want abortion clinic left. Right, so if you want to change what's left, you have to have a nationwide ban and to have a nationwide ban, you have to have a political partner and you probably need to have control of the Supreme Court because it's hard to imagine a world where we have Congress banning abortion or California takes it upon itself to ban abortion. That probably has to come to us in some sort of not democratic way or it's not gonna happen at all. Right, so this says a lot about next level strategies and maybe we'll turn to that before getting to, well, what was it that those who were indifferent or supportive of abortion rights didn't do well? So what does the future of this look like? So we've co-written together and you've written about how the nature of the abortion bans that are being seen today are quite different than what would have been plausible, enactable and then upheld by courts, right? So bans that make no exceptions for cases of rape, that would have been something completely unpalatable. It would not have been something that could have had legs even amongst those who identify themselves as being anti-abortion but now this has become part of the legal landscape and we're very likely to see more legislation like this, not just Texas and not just in Mississippi but we're gonna see this elsewhere. How did we get to that point Mary? Well, I think in part, as much as the fate of the anti-abortion movement, the GOP is intertwined, there's been a kind of populist insurgency in the anti-abortion movement. So the anti-abortion movement we've been describing is this like very sophisticated DC top-down hierarchical strategy operation. And at the same time, the anti-abortion movement's message was, we can have a Supreme Court that doesn't care about polling, focus groups, popular democracy, like we can just have a Supreme Court that will do what we want. So eventually you began to see voices in state and local anti-abortion organization saying, well, why doesn't that apply to us? Like why doesn't that apply to politics? Why can't we just do that now with our policies? Like if we have the Supreme Court we need, why do we need to be jumping through all these hoops? So you began to have groups that had been dismissed as fringe groups, dominating strategies. So if you may have heard of the so-called heartbeat bills, the people behind those were not major players in anti-abortion strategy until 2018 or 19. You begin to see state activists who don't even have organizations proposing laws that get a lot of attention. So there's been a sort of disintegration of the anti-abortion hierarchy just as there's really been a disintegration of the GOP establishment. And part of that is that there's a sense in which people in the movement think they don't need a strategy because they have the Supreme Court. There's no need for sophistication anymore and they may be right about that. And I think we're really seeing probably just the tip of the iceberg. So there are conversations being had now about punishing people for managing their own abortions, punishing people for traveling out of state to get abortion, allowing people to be sued for traveling out of state to have abortion, punishing people for possessing abortion medication, even if you can't prove they've used it, regulating the mail. I mean, so I think there's, the sort of laws we've seen as much as they may seem really stringent are not, that's just the beginning, I think. Right, so to your point, just the beginning and so much of this era and time, I spotted and talked about, reminded me of that fearful time that folks had of states enabling laws that dismantled slavery in their states, that provided benefits for freed black persons to be able to be in that state and what I mean by benefits. I'm not like welfare benefits, but you won't get tracked down and you won't be put in jail, you can live free in this city, by that state. And in the wake of that, we have fugitive slave acts that then are enacted by the federal government, which provides bounties and that in these laws, there are dramatic ways in which they really restrict even the potential for people who were free to even be able to articulate about being free, famously in the Fugitive Slaves Act, any random person could go and take some black person before a magistrate and the black person wouldn't even be entitled to be able to speak. So you had instances where there were free black people kidnapped, tracked and who had no legal right to articulate, hey, I happen to be free and this person's trying to bring me down to Alabama, I've grown up and lived my entire life in Boston or Philadelphia. And so I'm wondering if you too see some of what is coming about as seeming to have some connection or tie to the kinds of strategies that we saw when there were those trying to hold on to the institution of slavery. Yeah, I mean, so one of the questions, there's just not much law out there on what's called extra-territoriality. So the question is, let's assume, which I think we have to assume that sooner or later states like Alabama start to punish people who can get pregnant and not just doctors. And why I think we have to assume that otherwise the law is a nullity because otherwise people can just order abortion, medication, get it in the mail and take it or leave to get an abortion in the other state. So the only way you're gonna be able to do this is by punishing people who can get pregnant. So then say the person decides to go to Massachusetts, get an abortion and come back, can Alabama punish that person when they come back? And there's very little law on this on extra-territoriality of criminal laws. And much of what there is is free slave litigation. And that's not an accident because it's infrequent that you see states saying we're indifferent to the right to travel, for example, which is not a right that's historically been controversial. It's one of the rights that's the easiest to document at the time of the founding or the conservatives and progressives alike are often invested in federalism principles, right? Where we states often have to respect one another's laws and that what's legal within the boundaries of that state is respected, not withstanding states disagreements about that. That's original, right? I mean, this is what we get after the Articles of Federation, right? When we get a real constitution, right? It's making sure that we no longer have these colonies saying, well, we're kind of a country onto ourselves and it's just our rules, right? The way in which we can have a United States is about respecting laws between states. And the only time you see states kind of breaking ranks with that in the, I mean, it's not that it never happens other than that, but the times most of the law on this sort of extraterritoriality are from that era. And so obviously there are other echoes too in the sense of who's going to be affected by abortion bans who actually has abortions because of other failings of the healthcare system. But I mean, quite literally just in a black letter law way, a lot of the most on point cases are about slavery. Right, and so that it's not a reach. No, no, I mean, yeah, I was just talking to, yeah, I was talking to colleagues the other day and I think we had found like two cases that were not slavery cases that were from the 70s, one of which was like not even a federal case. So it was like a Missouri state case, one commercial speech case and everything else was slavery. So it's not a reach. Right, this is like, I mean, this is the playbook. And for those who say, well, you know, it's a bit offensive to their sensibilities to connect this era to a time of slavery. But, you know, as your work has spoken about and mine has too, so many of the people who are going to be affected by these laws happen to be people who are economically vulnerable and amongst them, women of color because in the states that have really made some significant anti-abortion progress, it's the people who are black and brown who are most affected or in Mississippi, for example, with one abortion clinic left. Empirically we know that the people who most use that clinic happen to be black women. So when you sort of connect this legacy of slavery and the laws that look most similar are in that time the most affected today who may be trying to go out of state and find ways to actually be able to get the reproductive healthcare that they want will also be black women. Yeah, and we know this too from international and comparative examples. So in other places where abortion is a crime like taking Ecuador, for example, unsurprisingly for people who have experience of the United States, it's people who are more likely to either suffer complications and pregnancy which is people of color or it's people who are more likely to have encounters with law enforcement which is people of color who are the people who are overwhelmingly likely to be because the other question is not just who's more likely to have abortions but enforcement of these laws is going to be challenging because how do you know someone has abortion medication? How do you know they're traveling out of state? And often the answer is you don't but law enforcement finds out more often if people of color are using drugs or people of color. What's interesting is that there we could sort of look at hit rates. I mean, the reality is that law enforcement just simply doesn't police white people like they police black and brown people. And so what you find is that there are actually really high hit rates when it comes to law enforcement finding whatever the contraband is on white people. It's high hit rates because it's so under police that it's almost absolutely certain that they're right that there is something wrong happening here. And the hit rate is so dramatically off base when it comes to people of color and black people and it's a sign of just the sort of most egregious type of policing, which is your point. So who are gonna be the people that are gonna be most surveilled whether they've got abortion pills or not there's gonna be black women because there's already that which we see in these very states, right? It's just simply applying it to a new category. Right, exactly. Yeah, I think that's right. And I mean, I think that the states are also trying to create kind of surveillance networks. And you mentioned Texas's SB8 is a forerunner of that. Texas is sort of experimenting with a similar idea when it comes to trans youth. And I think because they recognize that if you want to capture a broader universe of people having abortions who are not the people who are overpoliced then you have to have some kind of surveillance network because otherwise people are gonna have to kind of rat each other out or look at people's social media or look for a financial reward unless there are any people who are, as they say known to law enforcement because law enforcement is looking for a reason to do something. Now, when I was on with Professor Monica Mithlemore we also spoke about the high rates and maternal mortality and we won't necessarily talk about it here but I think it's part of the conversation that we also find in these same states where there has been such a kind of proliferation of anti-abortion legislating very high rates of maternal mortality that are affecting women of color especially black women in those states. I wanna remind those who are joining us right now that if you have questions then please put them in the Q&A and we will get to those. But before we do, you also mentioned when you started that there are two questions. One of the questions relates to what's been done strategically well by those who've been part of the anti-abortion movement. And then there's the question about, well, what is it that progressives lost in this space? And I might just add to it as you transition from one to the other how has this affected doctors? Because historically, even though we've spoken about these issues and most people even law students think about Roe as something that was liberating for women and substantively it was but these were laws that were criminalizing what doctors would do, right? And so doctors have played a central role in the narrative even though in some ways and they're there in the cases but they've kind of taken it out of the social narrative. So as you transition between the two questions if you could address that a little bit, it'd be great. Yeah, I mean, in terms of the role of doctors doctors historically were huge. I mean, I think doctors were the reason that the Supreme Court in large part decided to rule the way they did in Roe. It was not certainly because of sympathy for the women's rights movement. If you read Roe, it seems as if the right is being assigned to physicians, not to women. Since then the story is much more complicated. Doctrionally, the court has made it increasingly clear that not only are doctors not rights holders their ability to bring cases on behalf of their patients is not a given. I think politically physicians had largely sort of stayed out of fights about abortion. Although there's certainly physicians involved like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has usually staked out a pretty pro-choice position. And then the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists has staked out a kind of pro-life position but lots of other larger medical organizations just largely stayed out of it until quite recently. And I think that's been significant because there's a sort of a silence. I think among medical providers about what they think about abortion that's been consequential, I'm struck here. So there's an opinion about a federal statute called the Federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that banned a specific procedure in 2007. And the majority opinion upholding the law has this very graphic description of what partial birth abortion is. And the dissenting opinion by Ruth Bader Ginsburg is while very critical of the majority has no account of what abortion is or what abortion doctors do. And that to me is sort of emblematic of something bigger that's happening which is that conversations about what abortion is and what abortion providers do happen between abortion providers and patients or between abortion providers and other abortion providers. And the anti-abortion movement has a very rich narrative about this. And the sort of political reproductive rights movement has said nothing, right? And I think that's been part of it. You know, and it's also been interesting too because then it's also been a matter of who gets to control the narrative within these spaces, right? So it's been, and that's been significant because there's such a gap in terms of how people then come to socially and culturally understand abortion. So it's almost as if, look, you know, there's a kind of common sense around pregnancy, but even read Supreme Court cases and others where the common sense around pregnancy or what would be the medical standards around pregnancy no longer are the same, right? So abortion gets read as incredibly dangerous when on the other hand, you know, the World Health Organization has long that that an abortion is as safe as a penicillin shot, you know, or you read Whole Women's Health v. Hellersted 2016 where Justice Breyer is relying on data from studies that a person's 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by terminating it. An abortion is an incredibly safe procedure one of the safest procedures that one can have, but that kind of, one wouldn't even have to call it rigorous, but it is rigorous. So it's a kind of like normalize scientific medical view of pregnancy and abortion has now been reframed. Yeah, I think part of that is a bigger, so I mean, obviously, usually when you think about abortion, there's always broader trends at work. And part of that I think is something you've seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is sort of a falling away of respect for medical authority. So it's not an accident in a row. The court reached for medical authority to kind of legitimize what was going to be a controversial ruling. That would be much less effective now because of course many Americans question medical authority. They believe medical authority has been politicized. They think that people like media gatekeepers who report on what medical authorities are doing are not trustworthy. And so I think that's certainly part of it too, that you see non-healthcare providers weighing in more on what healthcare providers should do because there's been a loss of trust in some quarters. Or narrative as if they are medical providers themselves, right? I mean, that's also been the rise of crisis pregnancy centers as well. People maybe even without high school. Yeah, and parallel medical communities too. Like the American, I hate all the acronyms. So like the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, like, we should just like have, you know, like acronyms on the screen. We should. Maybe after this we'll make sure that there's a circulation of a document that hits all of the acronyms that are being described in this program. But there has been in that way, some might say the kind of hijacking of what the medical narrative then is. And we saw this in the California case, the NIFLA case where the state of California was challenged after it had enacted a law that required two simple things of crisis pregnancy centers. One is that crisis pregnancy centers identify whether they were medically licensed or not if they were operating in the state of California. And then the second thing was to post a sign that says, well, the state of California has passed laws that protect reproductive rights and that one can have access through the state of California if indigent to STI screenings, to contraception and a variety of other things. And this was challenged by NIFLA, NIFLA being an organization that has supported financially the building out of crisis pregnancy centers across the country. And one of the biggest concerns about NIFLA is that it turns out many of the clinics are not medically licensed at all. And that even though people may wear stethoscopes inside and wear lab coats that some of those people don't even have high school diplomas are not necessarily college graduates. And so the concern was people who are coming in and wanting to get care, reproductive healthcare and talk about abortion or attain an abortion might not realize that the places that they're visiting actually have no medical expertise with the exception of being able to provide a sonogram. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I'm always struck by with crisis pregnancy centers too is just a sign. It's another sign of how central race is to this conversation because there's some really interesting book by a historian at George Washington named Sarah Matheson about people of color's use of crisis pregnancy centers. And one of the really interesting and surprising findings she makes is that people of color know full well often what crisis pregnancy centers are. And they're going there because they don't have resources essentially because people are failing them. So crisis pregnancy centers to their credit will give people divers and will give people access to information about things like child support. And often it's because our social safety net is so frayed, which is including in places that are planning on eliminating abortion that crisis pregnancy centers actually are found to be useful not withstanding what often the strings that are attached to people who might not want those strings. But I think that's one of those things. Yeah, well, I'm glad that you raised that because again, if we're thinking about states and it's not just southern states because they're Midwest states and Northern states that have been involved in anti-abortion lawmaking, but you raise an important point which is that there hasn't been the expansion of Medicaid in many of the states that are engaged in anti-abortion lawmaking. They've become even more restrictive with regard to welfare and what one can actually use benefits for. A lot of people don't know that can't use them for things like diapers, right? Can't even use those for sanitary supplies if you happen to be a woman. So then when you think about crisis pregnancy centers and where people end up having to go to get certain items that are important to be able to maintain health in their families, it would be there even if politically there might be disagreements. All right, Mary, I promise that we would transition to the other question that you have and to just give a bit of a preview, I then want us to talk about then what is that hard space? That space where there are people who are anti-abortion and who are trying to figure out where there is some and if there is some way, some middle road between an anti-abortion movement and a movement that supports reproductive rights. But before we get there, what's your take in terms of the progressive movement and what it failed to do or what it's doing right? Yeah, I mean, I think in the past, the sort of mistakes fell in some three broad categories. There's the sort of, I think, vacuum that let there be more stigmatization of abortion providers. And then there was sort of, I think, an indifference to people of color historically, right? So I think the strategy starting in the 70s and going through the 90s was a political strategy and the intuition was that the way to win was to create the broadest base for the pro-choice movement, which meant taking for granted people who would be the most affected and people who would be with you and focusing on people who might not be with you and kind of catering to the lowest common denominator in terms of support, which is why there's lots of language about freedom from the government and choice and these sorts of things. Of course, we've seen sometimes that it's not, what wins is not always raw numbers. It's sometimes passion and people turning out and actually showing up. And that's especially true in a context like this where you're ignoring the people who are the most affected. So I mean, one of the most striking things in the historical record is the complete indifference to the Hyde Amendment, which is a fan on Medicaid reimbursement for abortion that emerges in the larger pro-choice organizations. And there's of course a parallel reproductive justice movement that pushed back against that with varying degrees. And then just a moment for those who might be wondering about the Hyde Amendment. Can you just quickly explain what the Hyde Amendment actually is? And so everyone knows what Medicaid is. So the Hyde Amendment, which was introduced as an appropriations writer in 1976, prohibited Medicaid patients for getting reimbursed for abortions. And in various forms, the Hyde Amendment has been enforced ever since. And there are, most states have some sort of equivalent of the state of the Hyde Amendment vis-a-vis state Medicaid reimbursement. And the organized sort of mainstream pro-choice movement often sort of saw the Hyde Amendment as a low priority because donors didn't care about it, political allies didn't care about it, the average sort of white male independent voter you were trying to get on board didn't care about it. And of course that was had some devastating effects because people of color who would naturally have been some of the people the most concerned about or interested in some of these issues weren't part of the movement. It was a white movement. I think that's fair to say about the anti-abortion movement too, which was bad for the anti-abortion movement, right? But anything you're doing where you're fighting about something that affects people of color and your movement doesn't have many people of color. Well, this is what's interesting, right? This sort of people of color, you know, sort of being a population so affected by both movements and neither movement centering the concerns of people of color, such that even after Roe v. Wade dramatically, it becomes a very different possibility for a poor woman who's of color than it is for a white woman of some means to be able to utilize this new right, right? That's come about through Roe v. Wade. Yeah, and it's fascinating to hear. I mean, if you listen to, like, for example, churches of color, right? Listening to what people have to say, including people who identify as pro-life who are people of color, often the conversation is very different because people may believe, for example, you know that a fetus is a rights-holding pre-born child but that people shouldn't be punished for abortion because society is failing people of color and not giving them, you know, supportive alternatives, right? Not making it possible for them to raise the children they want or the children they don't or any children at all, full stop. And I think that those conversations are often conversations that it would have behooved everybody to listen to but that we're not particularly listened to. You know, and so when you think about the progressive movement and I think that you were still on this sort of point of what were this kind of fissures, if you will, in the movement. So, you know, one of them being a movement that really wasn't paying attention, right? To people of color very much and how they would be affected by this because it wasn't an issue that was very attractive to their donors much at all. Also a failure to really sort of be engaged in terms of what this means in the medical space, right? The kind of assumption that everybody is kind of on board with understanding what this all means that we don't really have to debate terms and things like that, which now we see that one does because they're, you know, what is that terminology of my facts or if I can't remember? Sometimes I blank on this kind of terminology of where people are, you know, kind of self-selecting of what facts are. But there's another point that you were going to make in terms of the movement failing. Yeah, I mean, I think the other point just speaks to what the right was doing well, which was that I think progressive sort of failed to understand the game when it came to the courts. So on the one hand, there was a real default setting and you still see it actually among people who are supporters of reproductive rights to litigate as soon as something gets passed. And yet at the same time, there was sort of an assumption that the courts are not going to be the path. There wasn't as much of an investment in federal judicial nominations period or a recognition, I think that the rules of the game would kind of change in terms of who was being nominated to the court and why, which created a fairly significant disparity in terms of the sophistication of strategy when you're thinking about the courts that I think you see. I mean, I think that gap is somewhat closing now but it had been pretty wide, so it's still visible. Well, it's pretty stunning when you think about it. In the wake of Justice Ginsburg, we now have Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Couldn't be a sort of more difference, right? On a spectrum in terms of ideology and perspective. In the Rose Garden, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, not Justice yet, but had been the nominee, said that she saw herself in the likeness of Justice Scalia, who in the last half century was considered one of the more, the most, although one would have to debate that with whether he was the most or Justice Thomas, the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court. So vastly different, but the story that you've been telling as we've been in conversation has been that there was very strategic thinking about who would come onto the court and what these ideologies would mean. And also I think that what you're saying is that, yeah, there was a Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the court, but that wasn't because of any kind of strategy. It's just because she was smart. And if anything, just the strategy of her husband who thought she ought to be on the Supreme Court. Totally, yeah. And I think that there was a sense in which if you go far enough back, both Republicans and Democrats were trying to find nominees whom everybody would like, right? So if you think of sort of the Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg model, people who are sort of viewed as brilliant by everyone, O'Connor is unanimously confirmed, has like almost no questions about abortion, gets the sort of thumbs up because she's the first woman nominated to the court. And that was sort of the dream of both parties was sort of the smoothest confirmation possible. And then at some point, I think particularly on the left or on the right, but to a lesser degree on the left, there was a realization that you could get people riled up about the Supreme Court. You can get people at a rally for Donald Trump saying, fill that seat for Amy Coney Barrett, where they care more about that than about Donald Trump in other ways. And that changes the business model. So the business model is finding people who excite voters. It's not finding people who everybody will like, but nobody will really be that into. It's kind of that they're bored by. But it's interesting because if you tie into and look at, so those of you who are tuning in either via audio or video, you can listen to and you can see the confirmation hearing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And what's interesting about that, and that connects to this conversation then, Mary, we're the very easy conversation that she had around abortion, right? Because she was widely supported. She only got a couple of votes against her. Where in this day and age, you can imagine that nearly half of the Senate might vote no, just given the partisan nature in which voting takes place. And given that Justice Ginsburg was, today would be called outspoken, but at the time I think it was just she's smart. And this has just been her path to the court that she was at the ACLU. She worked on behalf of women's rights. And so, sexy quality abortion rights, it didn't seem as glaring as it seems now. And I say that because if you go back and you read the transcript or you look at the C-SPAN video, every Republicans in Congress who are not flailing about as she's talking about abortion. Yeah, totally. I mean, and I think there was, I mean, just the country wasn't as polarized then as it is now. And there wasn't the same antipathy. I mean, one of the things that was sort of defining trade of contemporary US politics is what's called negative and effective partisanship, which is essentially what do you think of people in the other party? And since the 1980s, there's been a huge spike in thinking that people in the party that isn't your party are just bad people. Like you don't let you feel hostile toward them. And that means that there's an almost sort of reflexive disdain for people. I mean, you don't even really need to know who they are or what they're saying if they have the other letter next to their name, like you're done, right? And you see that play out in Republican confirmation or I mean all Supreme Court confirmations really. Yeah, I mean, it's such a dramatic departure from life as it had been. So I'm going to take a moment and turn to the Q&A and lift up a couple of questions and remind our audience that you're welcome to put a question in the Q&A. I will have to preface this with saying the last time that we did it, we just had people saying, I just love that I'm here. Just love that you're having a conversation. All right. All right, all right. Let's see. Why don't we take this one? Can you talk a little bit more about the role of the religious right in crafting the anti-abortion movement both under Reagan and today and what progressives could do to mute or overcome that impact? That's a really good question. Thank you so much for lifting that question up because Mary, I hope that you also might share too that on the left there was that work that then stopped around the time of Roe. I mean, there were clergy that supported and helped to bring cases to make sure that people in their congregation could have access to abortion services. It seems so far removed from today but that was the lay of the land. Yeah, and I think another thing to be clear about is that the anti-abortion movement definitely, the religious right didn't create the anti-abortion movement. The religious right almost came along later. So one important historical fact is if you think of evangelical Protestants who were probably some of the central members of the contemporary anti-abortion or pro-life movement, they weren't opposed to abortion. At least they were opposed to abortion on demand. They weren't opposed to abortion under certain circumstances until the 80s. So the religious right was a sort of later development really than the anti-abortion movement and the relationship between the two has grown increasingly close in the interim. I think in terms of, we know, people who are supportive of reproductive rights and justice, the history is helpful insofar as it's important to make clear that there are religious voices on both sides of the equation. And interestingly too, I think that authentic religious voices really are missing in sometimes period, right? It's increasingly become a partisan conversation. So if you track people who are likely to be the most politically engaged, it isn't necessarily on either side people who are the most likely to attend church and that sort of thing. So I think, but there's, I think room for more progressive voices of faith in questions of abortion and probably more room for kind of nuanced conversations about faith period, right? Because often when we appear to be having a conversation about faith, what we're really talking about is politics and the people involved are not particularly devout. And so I think getting into kind of some of the questions that may be harder in different faith communities about abortion would be a good starting point too, getting people to kind of come from a deeper place at times than they do in politics. And that seems to be something that's actually lacking within the space, greater nuance within these matters. I wanna lift up another question. And this one is many anti-abortion activists and the politicians with whom they partner oppose contraception as well as abortion. We saw the case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby that had features of that. And in the global health context, lack of abortion access is usually correlated with poor contraceptive access. So can you comment on any anticipated future restrictions on contraception that would follow from the overturning or dismantling of Roe v. Wade? Yeah, that's quite likely. So I mean, historically in the US that wasn't always true, there were some pro-life or anti-abortion groups that supported contraceptive access. That kind of went by the wayside in large part after the anti-abortion movement aligned with the GOP. So since then, the most likely strategy we're going to see is just an expansion of what we mean by abortion, which you already alluded to, Michelle, because the term abortion has always been contested. And many people who are opposed to abortion believe that IUDs and emergency contraceptives, in some instances, but not as often, the birth control pill are abortion-inducing drugs, right? And so it's much less likely that you're going to see states actually say affirmatively, hey, we're going to ban contraception. It's much more likely that you're going to see them say, we're banning abortion, and then sweep in under that umbrella things that we don't, everybody doesn't view as abortion. Well, and that just simply isn't, right? I mean, so this is also part of the years what's been missing, clear definitions that can be universally accepted. And the real challenge is that it's a challenge in accepting things that should be universal. And when you think about it, we began this conversation with talking about era from long ago, slavery. But if we were to sort of really unpack just where a mind can be around this, I mean, we spent hundreds of years in this country saying that black people were not people, right? I mean, even in cases of white men fathering, a lot of them did black kids, right? So you father a black kid, but that child's not human. Or even the debate around the 13th Amendment in 1865, there were still, this is after the civil war, after the union is won, that there were senators that refused to call black people people, refused. You look at the record, they're only referred to as property. And so when we then talk about, then, well, what is an IUD? Now, an IUD does not cause an abortion. It does not, it can't. But when you think about how people get fixed to certain kinds of ideologies, that here is an ideology that must be true, just like it must be true that black people are not human beings, that black people are like chattel cow sheep over in the field, including the children and offspring of slave owners, then those fixed ideas can last for a long, long time. We've got another question that's in the queue. And that is, the definition, is there anything within the context of bioethics? So we can expand this a little bit. Perhaps that gives any recognition of pre-born children, according to the question, as requiring protection. If so, how, what are the limits on abortion or what limits on abortion do you include? Are there any? Yeah, I mean, I guess. Take that question in any way that you can. I mean, my sense of that is that I wish we were in a place politically where we could have a good conversation about that because I think one of the questions that's disturbing to me or concerning to me is in many other countries, not all, but some other countries that ban abortion, there's a sense in which that should come along with support for people who are being told they have to carry pregnancies to term. And at the time that you're saying, okay, we the state think that you have a moral obligation to protect a pre-born child, we're going to then show you that by supporting you and supporting this child when it is born. And that's just not our world at all. And that's the part that makes the conversation so disturbing to me is that it's possible, we know from other countries and we know from our own history to have a conversation where you can take that kind of idea seriously. Now it seems to be that we're in a kind of political space where we don't talk about that. Or if we do, we see those kinds of, and this is just my own view, but that we see needs of people who are parenting is something that isn't the business of anyone but them, or if it's the business of private charity. And it just makes it harder for me to think about the kind of ethics of what pre-born life requires. I also will put out there that I'm not a bioethicist, I'm a historian. So probably if you want really great bioethics stuff, you come to the wrong person, you should probably ask Michelle who actually is a bioethicist. But my sense is that obligations to feed a life have to be culturally and economically contingent on what is available to the people who will be raising that life. And that's not a conversation we have in part because some of those nuances are missing. Well, it's interesting, and I think you're absolutely right that those are nuances that are missing just as there are nuances that are missing beyond the economics. So for the last couple of decades, there's been the integration of a conversation about the economics of pregnancy and also of abortion and childcare, right? This sort of greater retention to the fact that in states where there has been less generosity towards the idea of reproductive rights, that in those very spaces, there are also very significant poverty and indigency in those states and where states aren't really helping the most indigent in those states to be able to rear the kids that they have. So that's part of a conversation that's been taking place. And certainly more needs to just really scratch the surface and haven't done much substantively with that. But also it seems to me that what hasn't happened as well as a conversation about mental health. So we're sort of still in that space that, well, you take just as Amy Coney Barrett's version of this, well, adoption is always an option or you take some other aspect of this and it's economics is always the option. But then there's the question about people who just simply really don't want to be pregnant, really don't wanna have children. And that seems to me a space that we really haven't unpacked in our country, right? We're sort of still in that space that you must want to have a baby. And if you're pregnant, you had a responsibility not to become pregnant if you didn't wanna have a child. And it's almost like a sense of punishment. And it seems to me that what's left out of that is interestingly some of the literature that's coming from the law and econ space, right? Well, so people are studying behavioral economics, right? And so they're studying happiness, right? And it turns out in the happiness studies that for men, generally happiness increases by the number of children they have, right? Like, so you have one kid and you're happy and you get even happier with the second and the third. But from the research that is nascent but still robust even in its nasancy is that there's a plateau for women. Women actually don't get happier by the number of children that they have. And it seems to me that we don't talk about that, right? Like, so we're willing to accept that there's postpartum depression. It's real, right? We know it's been scientifically known, medically known for a very long time. But it also seems to me that it's not a part of these cases when there are courts that are debating abortion rights, right? You know, these kind of speculate, well, they'll be regret if you terminate a pregnancy. And sometimes basing this on really shoddy kinds of cases, but they don't talk about things that we actually do know that there's something called postpartum depression and not everybody wants to be pregnant. So what's your response to that, Mary? Yeah, I think there's definitely a silence around complicated responses to pregnancy. So I mean, it's hard for courts and legislators to talk about people who don't wanna be parents and don't wanna be pregnant. And then it's even harder to talk about people whose emotions about it are more complicated than that, who may have children they're glad exist and are delighted about, but have some sense of regret too, who don't have kind of monolithic, easy to describe emotions. And that of course all is relevant too to the conditions by which people become parents. But because there's a sort of the conversation generally is that people wanna have children or there's one that it's an on-off switch, right? It's either thumbs up or thumbs down. And two that if, and that it's not contingent, right? That people who don't wanna have a child don't wanna have a child because they don't like children not because their conditions are one way or another. And that people may have more nuanced reactions. There's just no conversation about that, which makes it really hard to understand what people would need to be in a setting where they would feel supported in their child-bearing decisions. It's interesting too is how a certain analysis of what the sort of space of when people are happy when they're not happy, what they want. How does it come through the court? And at times where the court really isn't relying on any kind of empirical data. So I'm thinking about the case Bradwell v Illinois, a case that dates back to the late 1800s where there's a woman who has contested an Illinois statute that denies her the ability to become a lawyer. And she wants to be able to practice with her husband. And she's already gone to law school, but there's a law that forbids women from becoming members of the bar. The case goes all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. And then the decision, the court says that it's the laws of nature that govern that women are supposed to be there for the care of the home and for taking care of their husbands and for children and that it's the laws of destiny and nature that make it so. And there's like laws of nature and destiny. Did you get some special call from nature? From where did you get that from, right? You know, in a space where otherwise you rely on precedent, you look at cases, you look at research, it seems to me that in designating matters that are associated with women and their role in society, you know, it's been things that, you know, members of the court have just kind of plucked out of the air and have claimed that it comes from some higher power but without any kind of authority. Yeah, I mean, it's almost sort of more comfortable when the court is speaking in a more openly moral register because then at least people, other people like community members like us can engage on the same level and say essentially we can all have a conversation about morality or whatever. But there is this sort of, I think, and I mean, I'm optimistic is the wrong word but I'm thinking that if the court is going to move toward a more kind of transparent assault on row that that will lead to a more transparent conversation about like what are we really talking about here? Like what are the normative priors that are driving this? What are the interpretive methods that are driving this versus what I think is sort of morals masquerading as fact, which is not something that's easy for people to engage with because of course, if someone is allowed to cherry pick or make things up it's very hard to counter that. And I think that that's right that a lot of abortion doctrine has been driven by statements of fact. And I don't think that's satisfying to anyone, by the way. I don't think that there are many people with any of you on abortion who think that that's how we should be doing business. And I turn to another question. And before we wrap up, if you have any final questions then please put them in the queue. And we have a question that thanks you so much for this presentation and joining us. I concur with that. And the question is what core argument could be applied to both pro-life and pro-choice folks that could be a platform to bring together both sides and find a way to enhance instead of further worsen women's healthcare? For example, do you think that directing the discussion to a point of highlighting the risks of exacerbating already present injustices regarding social determinants of health and also OBGYN desert would actually be helpful in finding a middle ground. So essentially is the middle ground the fact that, look there are certain spaces wherein there's a level of suffering just because of economics such as in rural areas and maybe even beyond that. So what are your thoughts on that, Mary? Yeah, I mean, I think to the extent there's been common ground historically it's been when people have been talking about not about abortion but about what would help people not seek out abortions, right? And so some of the most productive collaborations historically were around pregnancy discrimination legislation. So in the seventies, there were people who were opposed to abortion who thought, we don't want people having abortions because they're getting fired because they're pregnant. And people who are supportive of reproductive rights said, well, yeah, of course people who get fired because they're pregnant and no one had to agree on what abortion was because that was a non-starter. And I think that OBGYN deserts as it could be a point of potential common ground. I think you would hope maternal mortality would be a point of common ground. You would think, right? Yeah, and so I think just sort of giving up ex-ante on the idea that you're gonna find common ground on abortion and saying, okay, essentially like let's just assume temporarily for the sake of argument that we all care here about women under some circumstances. Even if you don't believe that because people entering the conversation are not gonna believe that. But just say, let's just entertain this possibility to see if we can get somewhere. I'm hypothetical. Exactly. And I mean, and one of the things I think that's also important to remember is that there are the, so if you're pro-life or anti-abortion and you're listening to this or you're pro-choice in your support of reproductive justice and you're listening to this, it's important to remember that there's a difference between organized movements and individuals you know, like individual doctors. And there are people who may have very strong faith commitments one way or another or very strong political beliefs one way or another who may have pretty nuanced views when you dig down. And so I think if you try to approach one of those sort of abortion adjacent issues that isn't abortion and you do it in a true spirit of encounter where you're saying, I'm not gonna go into this assuming anything about what you're gonna say on this. I'm actually interested like let's have a conversation. People will sometimes surprise you because not everyone you know, as is the case with any stereotype not everyone will conform to every aspect of the stereotype especially when you move beyond organized movements that have been defining the conversation. So all of that said, it's really hard. I mean, because I think our politics are so polarized that finding even like having a normal conversation is not easy. So I'm going where our time is running short but I've got a couple more questions that I'm going to put forward before I let you go. And as usual, it's always such a delight for me personally and professionally to be in conversation with you. There's so much that people can learn from the important research that you've done. And as has been put in the chat and also in the Q&A where folks are saying they've got to buy your work and buy your books and I will say, yes, you do have to go out and buy Mary's works. And then also really sort of pay attention to the works that she's putting out also relaying to the public. Because I think that that's really important that the public is educated across these spaces. To just take a pause here, it's unfortunate that it's taken this long to center conversations about the things that matter to women's lives and people of certain reproductive capacities, people with the capacities become pregnant. I mean, when you think about it, right? I mean, it's 2022 and 2021 where there began the normalization of conversations about these matters, which are central to half the population's life, right? And not just within the context of abortion and pregnancy, even luxury taxes on tampons and things like that. It's kind of like a four-letter word in taboo, right? To talk about menstruation and half the population if not more, right, menstruating people, right? So I'm glad that we're having this conversation. And the reason why I think it's so important, the work that you were publishing in magazines and journals and newspapers all across the country is that it does help to give, it helps to normalize the conversation. So thank you for that. So we've got a question that has a long lead up and I hope the person who wrote it will forgive me for just asking the core of the question, which relates to what happens to be the role of abortion providers going forward? While it seems important to counter and complicate the graphic descriptions that we saw in Gonzalez v. Carhart, how effective would it be to further centralize abortion providers in the conversation? Yeah, I mean, I think that one helpful thing is that there's no real account about what abortion services are like for the people having the abortion, right? So the narrative in Gonzalez is about what happens to a fetus or unborn child. There is no person there other than that in the narrative. And that's, I think, part of the problem culturally. And if we're thinking internationally and comparatively, there's really powerful work about the repeal of the Eighth Amendment in Ireland, which of course was a personhood provision that was in Ireland's constitution. And a lot of the best work on that suggests it was not international human rights, it was not domestic constitutional law, it was storytelling about abortion and storytelling, not just by people who had abortions, but by people who performed abortions about what their patients experienced, what it actually was, right? Because people were afraid, they were confused. And so I think that kind of narrative is destigmatizing too. I don't think, obviously, I think that the person asking the question might be rightly concerned that there's too much of a focus on abortion and too little of a focus on lots of other forms of healthcare and other issues affecting people who can get pregnant. And that's totally right. But I think insofar as we're thinking about having a conversation about abortion, it has to be a conversation where we think of different perspectives are out there and not just the perspective of people who are concerned about, you know, or who think abortion is wrong. Well, this actually ties to, and we'll just take two more questions and thank you all for all the love that you're sharing in the Q&A. Folks are really celebrating this conversation and what you've brought to it, Mary. So there's a question about messaging and this ties to what you were just saying. As we've seen in other parts of the world, the repeal of laws that would have otherwise punished criminalized abortion, those laws are falling away. And so the question is, what can we learn from the messaging that's taking place in countries like in Latin America that have recently legalized abortion using messaging like contraception to prevent abortions and abortions to prevent maternal mortality, et cetera. So the linguistics that are being used and the linguistics that are being dismantled, how do they fit in the conversation? Yeah, I mean, I think that on the one hand, I think the question is absolutely right that there are frames that have worked in other parts of the world that we haven't used here. I think the other lesson we see from other parts of the world is that sometimes less is more in terms of strategy. And the very idea of like, what is the talking point or the frame has been part of the problem because that's been one of the reasons we've stayed away from what's happening to people of color, what's the more nuanced picture because it doesn't boil down into something you can have in a soundbite. And I think in a lot of other countries, the strategies were much more organic and grassroots and they weren't focus grouped and they didn't have as much money behind them and they probably worked better for that reason because they resonated with real people who have had to decide about whether they wanna continue a pregnancy or not or wanted to try to get pregnant or not. And that kind of complexity resonated more with people who are deciding their own views on the matter. All right, and we have another question and let me apologize for that phone ring. You thought a little bit of jazz was coming into the conversation. And I thought, all right, no one's going to call in the middle of this. It's like, okay, let me turn it off and I thought nobody's going to call. So my apologies there. All right, final question. And so, and I'm grateful that I could bring you all a little bit of jazz. The question relates to maternal mortality. And we've got a couple of people who've raised this in our Q&A and the question. And one raising it as a matter of why isn't that there isn't greater conversation about how race fits into that with regards to maternal mortality and the anti-abortion movement and that that's something important to lift up. And then tied to the second question, it was speaking a little bit more about maternal mortality and the impact of anti-abortion groups refusing to allow exceptions of any kind and ignoring the lifesaving non-family planning uses of abortion procedures. In other words, uterine evacuation in cases of incomplete miscarriage or if the fetus has no heart, et cetera. Which again, gets us back as really, really great questions that you all have put in there. Gets us back to this kind of this invasion of the medical space. People who as you mentioned before, virtually anybody now who has a kind of ideological agenda can lift up something that the state says aha to because of the kind of alignment of movement that then create the kinds of laws that we've seen that really handcuff people in the medical establishment to be able to do that, which is necessary to save people's lives. So what's your response to that, Mary? Yeah, I mean, race has been, I think very strangely absent from conversations about abortion. So I remember, I think here of the example, some of you may remember the Kermit-Gosnell story. So Kermit-Gosnell was a doctor who was not a good doctor, but it likely working in a low income community of color where he was doing things that were atrocious and also providing subpar care to his patients. And I think many people in the community saw that as a story about race, about access to inadequate care and about people needing more from their communities. And when people would talk about it later really pro-choice and pro-life people, there was nothing about race. It was just either, this guy is the exception to the rule and abortion care is generally good or all abortion providers are hacks like Kermit-Gosnell. And so I think there's been, the reproductive justice movement is starting to open up space to talk about how race is a central part of this story. But I think the organized pro-life movements haven't done much of that, right? They've sort of taken race and erased it in ways that I think do us all a disservice. Well, in fact, to build on a second part of one of the first parts of the question is the question about whether it's naive to actually think that there could be common ground around maternal mortality when you think about it because when we sort of think about how these movements have aligned, it turns out there's significant white supremacy that happens to be in the anti-abortion movement. It doesn't mean that people who are anti-abortion are all white supremacists, but it turns out that when you look at the nationalist movements in the United States and white supremacist movements in the United States, there's a whole lot of articulating about anti-abortion. So at the same time, sort of the calls for the annihilation of Jewish people, death to black people and no abortion, all in the same kind of rhetoric rhetorical mind field. Right? And that people who care very much about everybody in one equality in society, but have come to align with people who are part of that movement because they share the same space or the same ideology about abortion. So how does one begin to disentangle that with thinking of coming together around maternal mortality when that exists at that one end and then on the other end of it, those who actually care about abortion center and part their concerns about race, although they don't all do that, but increasingly there is greater. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's important to disaggregate. So I mean, first of all, like I'm not optimistic about common ground. So I mean, if you read things I've written publicly, I sound pretty down in the dumps about that. And so I think every book I've written has gotten like more and more pessimistic. So if I'm making it sound like this is like totally gonna happen, that's not what I think. But I think to the extent there's any room even for exploratory conversations, it's not with movements because Michelle is right about the characterization of the movement. It's about individuals because not all individuals ascribe to everything the movement is doing. And so this is more sort of in like local, in your community, in your hospital, those are conversations worth having because you don't know if there may be some opportunity to do something productive with someone. Whether that translates into, you picking up the phone and calling like a national organization, like that's probably a waste of time. Like I would not encourage you to do that. So maternal mortality I think is more sort of like a hypothetical, like I would hope that that would be. And I mean, in my experience in raising that, it has not been for what it's worth, right? I mean, I've heard a lot of, it's people's fault essentially that maternal mortality tracks, bad behavior by people who are not taking care of their bodies and that that's why they're dying. So I haven't heard a lot of encouraging things about that. But at the same time, I've met individuals who disagree quite strongly on abortion who do care, right? And particularly, I would say healthcare providers who care about their patients, right? Who are open to those kinds of conversations. So I think to the extent there's anything hopeful, it's a much more kind of granular meeting an individual and using that to hopefully build something versus at our national political conversation on race in particular is getting worse and worse. So that's not a problem for you, but it actually does open up a conversation that perhaps just within the anti-abortion movement that could be a disassociation from white supremacy, right? So maybe it's not sort of coming together between those who support the full scale of reproductive health rights and justice and those who are anti-abortion, but maybe it is just within the anti-abortion movement that there can be the disentangling between this sort of anti-abortion and love everybody versus anti-abortion and wanting to see the end of communities, certain communities in this country, who knows? Final question for you, Mary, and thank you so much. What's next? What's your next book about? Give us a bit of a preview and when is it that people can get their hands on it? Sure, I have two coming out in a year, which is weird for me, but it's just because of the moment we're in. I have one coming out in June that's called Dollars for Life. That's about how the anti-abortion movement transformed how we understand the First Amendment, how election spending happens, and then sort of transformed the Republican Party. So that's coming out with Yale in June. And then I have a book about, the question in the second book, which is called What Roe Means, is sort of why are we still obsessed with Roe when it's not the law anymore, when critics have widely derided it. It hasn't been since the early 90s. Yeah, and so there's still this collective fascination with Roe, which I think will last even if the court has fully overruled Roe. And so you can look out for both of those. The first in June and the second one is gonna be in January of 2023, both with Yale University Press. Well, Professor Mary Ziegler, it has been my privilege to be with you this evening. I thank you so much for joining me at Harvard Medical School for this important conversation that's part of the series that we're doing in ethics. And we're all gonna be looking forward to reading your next books when they come out over the summer and then over the winter. Thank you all for joining us. Be sure to tune in to our next conversation. And good night. So everybody.