Special report: Maddow shows how Trump abortion bans are hurting women: 'This is the fact of post-Roe American life' AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Rachel Maddow Show

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Episode: Special report: Maddow shows how Trump abortion bans are hurting women: 'This is the fact of post-Roe American life'

Author: Rachel Maddow, MSNBC
Duration: 00:36:00

Episode Shownotes

Rachel Maddow looks at how the politicization of abortion has imperiled the health of women in the United States, making all aspects of reproductive health more dangerous, and showing real-world tragic outcomes, and how Donald Trump's continued kowtowing to anti-abortion activists threatens to solidify these harmful conditions.

Summary

In this episode, Rachel Maddow examines the devastating consequences of abortion bans on women's health in post-Roe America, following the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Maddow underscores the significance of reproductive rights in the upcoming elections, noting a gender gap in voter expectations that may favor Democrats. She poignantly conveys personal horror stories of women suffering due to delays in medical care caused by restrictive laws, highlighting the real dangers posed to women's health and lives. The discussion illustrates the dire need for comprehensive reproductive healthcare amidst the evolving political climate surrounding abortion.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (Special report: Maddow shows how Trump abortion bans are hurting women: 'This is the fact of post-Roe American life') to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_07
And we all know by now how much we stand to lose, that our democracy rests on a knife's edge until Tuesday.

00:00:07 Speaker_07
But in this last bit of Sunday morning real estate, before the final ballots are cast, I want to focus on one issue that represents both the life and death stakes of this election and the potential upset of a great deal of political common wisdom about American politics.

00:00:22 Speaker_07
And that issue is abortion rights. The constitutionally protected right to abortion was stripped away in an instant with the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022.

00:00:34 Speaker_07
And the upheaval of women's health care, including a gruesome parade of first-person medical horror stories that has followed, has reshaped the politics of the abortion fight in ways that could be game-changing in this election.

00:00:48 Speaker_07
And if there's one person in the country who can help us understand what's happening with abortion rights, who can sort the truth from the political spin, who knows the history and has been reporting on it for decades, it's my friend and colleague, Rachel Maddow.

00:01:02 Speaker_07
After the 2009 assassination of the Kansas abortion doctor, George Tiller, Rachel produced a documentary about it that included crucial context about the violent fringe of the anti-abortion movement.

00:01:14 Speaker_07
After that, Rachel continued to follow the threat of violence against abortion providers.

00:01:18 Speaker_07
In the 2010s, when Republicans swept state House majorities and began passing unprecedented new abortion restrictions, she was one of the very few journalists in the country to pay constant and unrelenting attention to these efforts to chip away at the rights that were, at the time, guaranteed by Roe v. Wade.

00:01:38 Speaker_07
When Roe turned 40 in 2013, the inside of an abortion clinic was rarely ever seen on television, and her show visited five of them in embattled states where abortion had already nearly been eliminated by a combination of hostile state governments, harassment, and threats of violence.

00:01:57 Speaker_07
And in 2019, when Donald Trump's reshaping of the Supreme Court was in progress, she hosted a special hour full of original reporting and historical context that served as a flashing red light of what was to come in 2022.

00:02:12 Speaker_07
You know that we are deeply committed to covering the erosion of reproductive rights in this country.

00:02:17 Speaker_07
We bear witness to the erosion of the rights of women on every single show we do, which is why I'm so grateful that Rachel has agreed to join me this morning, playing the role of the amazing reporter that she is and sharing this special report and her own analysis on this crucial and potentially decisive issue.

00:02:35 Speaker_07
Rachel, this is only the second time we've had this luxury. So thank you so much, because that's how important this is.

00:02:40 Speaker_02
Well, Ali, thank you for giving me this space to do it. I realize this is your final Sunday before the election. This is real estate on your show. I'm really grateful for the chance to talk to your audience about it.

00:02:49 Speaker_02
We put together this special report, I think, to illuminate something that I think has flummoxed a lot of the political class and the pundit class in particular, but is easier to see if you take sort of a different lens on it.

00:03:02 Speaker_02
So, in an election in which basically no reputable political forecaster is saying he or she definitely knows how this thing is going to go overall, there is one expectation for the vote this year that forecasters do seem to be pretty comfortable predicting at this point, and that is that there will be a massive gender gap, possibly the largest in history.

00:03:22 Speaker_02
More women casting their ballots for Democrats, more men casting their ballots for Republicans. Now, on the Republican side, in terms of the campaign, the presidential campaign of Trump and Vance has really leaned into this.

00:03:34 Speaker_02
They have effectively abandoned any sustained, substantive effort to try to appeal to women voters, while they have tried, sometimes quite awkwardly. to up their campaign's perceived machismo or virility or something.

00:03:52 Speaker_02
Republicans holding up jars of what they said was J.D. Vance's sperm, after he was selected as Trump's running mate. Yes, that really happened. Trump himself talking about the size of another man's penis.

00:04:06 Speaker_02
Trump saying his plans for women will happen, quote, whether they like it or not. There was also a long riff from a top Trump surrogate about America being a, quote, very bad girl who is going to get a very, quote, vigorous spanking from Daddy Trump.

00:04:22 Speaker_02
And it's not going to hurt the daddy at all, but it's definitely going to hurt the girl. And that's a good thing. This was at an official rally for a presidential campaign just days before Election Day. It has all been a little bit weird.

00:04:36 Speaker_02
And so, yes, the expectation is there will be a gender gap, perhaps like none we've ever seen before. But on the Democratic side, of course, you can see it less in the campaign and more in the campaign's stated expectations.

00:04:50 Speaker_02
Both the Harris campaign and other Democratic campaigns this year are willing to state, they will tell you that they expect more than anything to benefit electorally from the issue of reproductive rights.

00:05:01 Speaker_02
The question, though, is how much should they expect to benefit from that issue? And there is an underappreciated reason that that even now remains a mathematical black box. It is an unpollable metric.

00:05:16 Speaker_02
The American public's reaction to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the imposition of new Republican abortion bans in 21 states, is not yet in focus in terms of how strong it will be as an electoral factor.

00:05:30 Speaker_02
And that is because the American public's understanding of what these bans mean is something that is growing and changing every day.

00:05:39 Speaker_02
And that is because women are coming forward themselves and, in particular, because there is increasingly good and prolific investigative and shoe-leather journalism about the real-world impact of the Trump abortion bans in America.

00:05:54 Speaker_02
And it is changing Americans' understanding, day by day, of something that the anti-abortion movement fought for years, for decades, to keep out of the political fight on this issue.

00:06:05 Speaker_02
And it is the fact, the contested fact, but the unmissable fact, that abortion is healthcare. And you've heard that phrase, right? For a long time, that has Sounded like a slogan to many Americans for the pro-choice side.

00:06:19 Speaker_02
It has sounded maybe like a branding effort, maybe something that's a little bit hard to understand. Abortion is healthcare.

00:06:25 Speaker_02
But now we are seeing it in the news, in our faces every day, this raw and now very visceral, undeniable fact that when the government makes abortion a crime, you take away healthcare from American women that is healthcare they need to stay alive.

00:06:44 Speaker_02
banning abortion hurts and kills women, American women, in our generation, in our time. And abortion has always been healthcare. A midwife from the 1850s knew that as well as any obstetrician knows it today.

00:06:57 Speaker_02
But the anti-abortion movement in this country for decades has insisted on messaging, not just that abortion is bad or wrong, but more insidiously, they have insisted that abortion is not needed.

00:07:11 Speaker_02
that it's elective, that it's an indulgence, that it's a sin, that it's not part of healthcare.

00:07:18 Speaker_02
And even while we had five decades of federally protected abortion rights in this country, that messaging campaign from the anti-abortion side, it seeped into mainstream thinking, even among people who largely supported reproductive freedom.

00:07:32 Speaker_02
Even reasonable, moderate-thinking people started believing that abortion is a marginal thing, that it's at best a regrettable necessity. That it can be severed from women's healthcare without bringing down the whole women's healthcare system. Right?

00:07:48 Speaker_02
That it can be severed from all these other things that keep women alive. That you can take abortion away without causing needless suffering and preventable deaths among American women. And it turns out it cannot.

00:08:00 Speaker_02
And ahead of this election, the American public is learning that in real time, broadly and bluntly. Seeing in the news now, every day, what two-plus years of Trump abortion bans is doing to collapse women's healthcare in the United States.

00:08:18 Speaker_02
And so, here it is. This is what women's healthcare looks like in post-Roe America. It looks like Carmen Brewster, who spent 19 days miscarrying, bleeding, blacking out from the pain, unable to eat, and denied healthcare.

00:08:34 Speaker_02
Because the health care she needed is what's known as a D&C, dilation and curatage, the procedure used in surgical abortions. And abortion is banned in Idaho, which is where Carmen lives. Here she is on a hospital bed, literally crying for help.

00:08:53 Speaker_08
I've been actively miscarrying since the 8th. I have gone to a doctor, and this is my second visit to the ER. If you're wondering why women's rights matter, I'm just gonna f***ing bleed out on this table before somebody comes and actually helps me.

00:09:12 Speaker_08
This is my life. Nobody actually's coming to help. They're always gonna send me home.

00:09:20 Speaker_02
And now, because of complications from that 19-day ordeal, which could have been addressed with a 30-minute procedure on day one, Carmen Brewster now has an incurable heart condition that she will have to regulate for the rest of her life.

00:09:36 Speaker_02
Post-Roe America also looks like Amber Nicole Thurman, who arrived at a Georgia hospital suffering from a rare but easily treatable complication after taking abortion medication. She also needed a DNC.

00:09:48 Speaker_02
But, as reported by ProPublica, because of George's abortion ban, Amber Thurman's doctors didn't feel they could treat her, and so they watched her infection spread, they watched her blood pressure drop, they watched her organs begin to fail for 20 hours before they could bring themselves to operate, and by then it was too late, and Amber Nicole Thurman died, leaving behind a six-year-old son and a grieving family.

00:10:14 Speaker_01
Did she really have to be the sacrifice? I feel like she had to be the sacrifice for the greater good. It hurts so bad because this could have been prevented and somebody has to be held accountable.

00:10:33 Speaker_02
Post-Roe America also looks like Nevaeh Crane, whose story was just reported by ProPublica and the Texas Tribune.

00:10:39 Speaker_02
She died six months pregnant after trying to get care in three separate visits to Texas emergency rooms, turned away twice, in worse shape than she arrived.

00:10:51 Speaker_02
and turned away a third time after arriving too weak to walk, feverish and vomiting, and blood staining her thighs. She was forced to wait two hours for treatment while doctors confirmed that her fetus didn't have a detectable heartbeat.

00:11:05 Speaker_02
And by then, it was too late. Her blood pressure had dropped, her organs began failing, and hours later, Nevaeh Crane was dead. Post Roe America looks like Gisele Barnica, whose story was also reported this week by ProPublica.

00:11:20 Speaker_02
She was 17 weeks pregnant when she learned her pregnancy was not viable. She started to miscarry at a hospital, but doctors told her it would be a crime to speed up the delivery in order to stave off a possible infection.

00:11:37 Speaker_02
Her husband told ProPublica, quote, they had to wait until there was no heartbeat. So Gisele laid there in agony for 40 hours

00:11:45 Speaker_02
while her uterus was exposed to bacteria, and three days later, predictably, predictably, she died of an infection, leaving her husband to raise their four-year-old daughter alone.

00:11:59 Speaker_02
It is hard to imagine doctors letting this happen to their patients, right?

00:12:04 Speaker_02
But you should know that this system was designed deliberately by anti-abortion politicians, and it is being deliberately upheld by them every day in the face of outcomes like these, which are now well-documented and publicly known.

00:12:19 Speaker_02
In Texas, in particular, Texas's abortion ban, it promises prison time for any health intervention that ends a fetal heartbeat.

00:12:30 Speaker_02
One health law expert from Georgetown told ProPublica and the Texas Tribune, quote, pregnant women have become essentially untouchables.

00:12:38 Speaker_02
Quote, in states with abortion bans, patients who have complications in their pregnancies are sometimes bounced between hospitals like hot potatoes, with healthcare providers reluctant to participate in treatment that could attract a prosecutor.

00:12:52 Speaker_02
In some cases, medical teams are wasting precious time debating legalities and creating documentation, preparing for the possibility that they will need to explain their actions to a judge and jury. And that is not paranoia. It's not an unfounded fear.

00:13:10 Speaker_02
Here's a situation in Texas.

00:13:12 Speaker_02
So there are federal guidelines in the United States of America that require hospitals, if a pregnant woman shows up in an ER, federal guidelines require hospitals to stabilize or transfer any pregnant woman who shows up in an ER needing help.

00:13:27 Speaker_02
But the Texas State Attorney General fought in federal court to be able to force Texas doctors to disregard those federal guidelines. And in court, he won that fight. So, it is not a surprise that women are dying here.

00:13:43 Speaker_02
And it is not mysterious why it is happening or who is causing it. I mean, in Texas, that same state attorney general has intervened himself to stop life-saving care for individual Texas women in crisis.

00:13:56 Speaker_02
For example, Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two, she was told her pregnancy was not viable. She was told she needed an abortion to preserve her own health and her future fertility.

00:14:06 Speaker_02
She had to get court approval for an emergency abortion, and she did.

00:14:12 Speaker_02
But even once she did that, that same attorney general, his name is Ken Paxton, intervened personally in her case and threatened to prosecute her doctor anyway, even with a court order allowing the abortion she needed.

00:14:24 Speaker_02
She still had to flee the state in order to get it. This is a fact. Right now, this is not a threat, this is the fact, the lived fact of post-Roe American life.

00:14:37 Speaker_02
The top law enforcement official in your state can deny you healthcare and threaten your doctor.

00:14:44 Speaker_02
Incredibly, and this is something I think most people do not know, the crisis here that we are already in reaches also into postpartum care as well, by which I mean the Trump abortion bans are hurting American women after they give birth as well.

00:15:01 Speaker_02
Take Caitlin Cash. She needed a DNC to resolve a dangerous complication after she gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

00:15:09 Speaker_02
But because she gave birth in Post Road, Texas, her life was also endangered because the postpartum care that she needed used the same tools as an abortion.

00:15:21 Speaker_04
After my daughter was born, I had a retained placenta. The standard of care treatment for that is a DNC to remove the tissue. And the standard of care is to make sure you are having that procedure within 30 minutes of birth.

00:15:32 Speaker_04
I waited an hour and 49 minutes. I nearly bled out because they couldn't get me the equipment that they needed. And that was two years after SB8 had gone into effect.

00:15:45 Speaker_02
Post-Roe America also looks like Kylie Thurman, who had an ectopic pregnancy. An ectopic pregnancy is when a fertilized egg grows somewhere outside the uterus. It is nonviable. An ectopic pregnancy is never a viable pregnancy.

00:16:00 Speaker_02
It is a deadly threat to a woman if untreated. And the only treatment for an ectopic pregnancy is abortion. And yet Kylie Thurman was initially denied care because of Texas' abortion ban.

00:16:13 Speaker_02
By the time doctors agreed to give her an injection to end the pregnancy, one of her fallopian tubes had ruptured.

00:16:22 Speaker_00
I wanted to have kids, and I wanted to keep my fallopian tube. But now it's gone. A piece of my womanhood was taken.

00:16:32 Speaker_02
Post-Roe America also looks like Deborah Dorbert, who was five months pregnant when she learned her baby would not survive.

00:16:39 Speaker_02
But because of Florida's abortion ban, Deborah Dorbert was not even allowed to have labor induced before carrying her pregnancy to full term, which is to say she was forced by the state of Florida, in her grief,

00:16:53 Speaker_02
to carry on that non-viable pregnancy for three more months, knowing she would be forced to give birth when and only when the state decided it was okay. And then she would be forced to watch her son die with no help.

00:17:11 Speaker_06
I remember my OB panting me a baby boy that was blue. and cold, gasping for air for 94 minutes. And I just tell them, we just watch our son suffocate. The trauma I went through, I wish it upon no one.

00:17:38 Speaker_02
Because abortion has not just been banned, it has been criminalized. This is also what post-pro-America looks like. It looks like 22-year-old Omari Marsh. She suffered a miscarriage in the second trimester of her pregnancy.

00:17:52 Speaker_02
The state of South Carolina then charged her with murder slash homicide by child abuse for a miscarriage. She spent three weeks in jail and another 13 months on house arrest before ultimately being cleared by a grand jury for a miscarriage.

00:18:13 Speaker_02
When abortion is a crime, every miscarriage is a potential criminal investigation. This is what post-Roe America looks like.

00:18:21 Speaker_02
And if Americans had never truly understood before that abortion is healthcare, if you thought that was a slogan you didn't quite get from the pro-choice side, we are now learning it in the hardest and most emotional possible way.

00:18:34 Speaker_02
Since the onset of the first Trump-era abortion bans, One in 25 obstetric units in the United States has shuttered. That's according to the March of Dimes. Thirty-five percent of all U.S.

00:18:46 Speaker_02
counties are now considered maternity care deserts—35 percent—without a single birthing center or obstetric unit. And this collapse of women's healthcare in our country, in our time, it can be seen in the infant mortality rate, as well.

00:19:01 Speaker_02
It's on the rise nationwide. It is concentrated in the very states that have Trump abortion bans. Take a look at this, look at this. On the top here, this is a map of abortion restrictions in the states. The red states are the ones with abortion bans.

00:19:16 Speaker_02
But now look on the bottom. This is a CDC map of states with the highest infant mortality rate in the darker red. The relationship between these two maps is not a coincidence, right? This is a policy decision, and it's costing lives.

00:19:34 Speaker_02
Women need abortions for a whole host of medical and personal reasons. There is no credible medical or scientific organization that suggests otherwise.

00:19:43 Speaker_02
We have been so steeped in the idea that abortion is a controversial topic for so long, that it's only a necessary evil, that it's something separate and apart from healthcare, that we've forgotten that it's healthcare.

00:19:59 Speaker_02
In this country, abortion began to be criminalized in the last half of the 19th century, as a male-dominated medical profession started to overtake the realm of women's health care that had previously been the dominion of women, of midwives, who regularly helped women terminate pregnancies.

00:20:14 Speaker_02
The Catholic Church didn't start to condemn abortion until the 1860s.

00:20:18 Speaker_02
It wasn't until the 1970s that it became a partisan issue in this country, as the Republican Party, under Nixon's leadership, took up anti-abortion positions, really for the first time, as a political strategy to try to create a wedge issue to deliver Catholic votes and socially conservative voters to the GOP.

00:20:37 Speaker_02
We also know that Richard Nixon's personal take on abortion was much more ambivalent than the message he projected to try to win over religious conservatives.

00:20:46 Speaker_02
Thanks to his very ill-advised Oval Office tapes, we know Nixon's take was quite ignorant and quite racist on the issue of abortion and quite different than what he was saying in public. I will show you how we know that.

00:21:00 Speaker_02
The day after Roe v. Wade was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, this is how Nixon discussed abortion privately with his staff. Like Richard Nixon before him.

00:21:23 Speaker_02
No one believes now that Republican candidate Donald Trump has a particular interest in abortion beyond politics. He promised to appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court. He made good on that promise.

00:21:34 Speaker_02
He thereby brought this health catastrophe down upon this country. But did he care about what it would do to American women? Did he care about who it would kill?

00:21:47 Speaker_02
On that front, Trump told on himself, not in a secret recording like Nixon, but in a town hall interview with Chris Matthews in 2016.

00:21:57 Speaker_10
Should the woman be punished for having an abortion? This is not something you can dodge. If you say abortion is a crime or abortion is murder, you have to deal with it under the law. Should abortion be punished?

00:22:09 Speaker_10
Well, people in certain parts of the Republican Party and conservative Republicans would say yes, they should be punished.

00:22:15 Speaker_00
How about you?

00:22:16 Speaker_10
Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no, as a principle? The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment. For the woman? Yeah, there has to be some form.

00:22:26 Speaker_02
Punishment for the woman. That's what Donald Trump promised at the outset of his political career. That is what he has delivered as he is now asking for another term in the White House. As we head toward Election Day on Tuesday.

00:22:42 Speaker_02
Republican candidate Donald Trump does seem to understand that this has been a deeply unpopular thing that he has done. You will hear him talking now about turning abortion over to the states as if it had nothing to do with him.

00:22:54 Speaker_02
You'll hear him talk about all the exceptions to the abortion bans.

00:22:59 Speaker_02
But the American people know now, in particular from the wave of journalism we have had about the practical impact of these bans in the last two years, we know that the bans are in effect because of him.

00:23:09 Speaker_02
We know they are in effect in the places where Republicans have political control. And we know that the supposed exceptions don't work at all to keep American women alive in the face of these bans. The American people now know.

00:23:22 Speaker_02
that the Republican Party is actively and openly planning for a fully national abortion ban and to reverse the 20-year-old FDA approval of abortion medication. We know all of that.

00:23:35 Speaker_02
And the reason nobody knows what the electoral impact will be of the Trump abortion bans is because it is really only now that we have this new understanding, that we have two years of journalism, two years of testimony, two years to start to see the accumulating faces and stories and, frankly, the obituaries for what it means to take this kind of health care away.

00:23:58 Speaker_02
Americans are not voting in this election on a slogan, on an abstraction about our rights and our freedoms. We are voting, too, for the first time ever, for these women and for every other American woman who these bans are going to kill and maim.

00:24:13 Speaker_02
And honestly, the big electoral black box in this election is that nobody yet knows how the power of that will manifest at the polls. Not yet.

00:24:27 Speaker_07
As comprehensive as that was, that's eight faces and we know of so many more. All right, we all got to take a breath and refill our water, our coffee. Rachel is back with me now to dive into this issue of abortion. Thank you again for being here.

00:24:42 Speaker_02
Thanks for letting me on.

00:24:43 Speaker_07
One of the points that you made several times here is the idea that the concept that abortion is health care, if we say it that way, some people feel that's politicized. Yeah. But it's not.

00:24:53 Speaker_07
And I think we've tried all the ways to explain to people it's not. We have to get this out of the realm of being an us versus them conversation. It's an all of us conversation.

00:25:01 Speaker_02
Yeah. And I think that, you know, we all follow, like, political tactics and political strategy, and we see the way these things evolve over time. And a lot of it is language.

00:25:11 Speaker_02
And I think that phrase, abortion is healthcare, has struck a lot of people as a slogan. Oh, you don't want it to seem controversial, so you're going to call it healthcare, but we all know it's something separate. And people who

00:25:22 Speaker_02
came up with that idea and sort of sloganed that idea to try to make people understand it that way, were coming from a position where they actually knew what they were talking about.

00:25:30 Speaker_02
It was abortion providers and people who had worked on this issue with the women who it was most affecting for years and who could foresee what was going to happen. if abortion rights were taken away.

00:25:40 Speaker_02
And now I just think that the American public is getting that like a bucket of cold water in the face.

00:25:46 Speaker_02
If you take away abortion as a right, if you take away the federally protected right to it, anywhere Republicans are in control, they are going to ban it. That includes nationally if they are in control of the federal government.

00:25:57 Speaker_02
And when you take away abortion as a right, when you criminalize it, women die. And it is not a, it is not, it's not an esoteric thing. It's not an inchoate idea. It's not an aspirational thing. It's the lived reality.

00:26:12 Speaker_02
And in some cases now the reality of the dead women that we've got in this country because of these bans.

00:26:17 Speaker_07
Is there a distinction between saying, hey, abortion is something that should be decided by the states, it's sort of abstract, versus the criminalization of abortion?

00:26:25 Speaker_07
Because what we're seeing now is the criminalization of abortion, the criminalization of a miscarriage, possibly the criminalization of pregnancy. I mean, that's the criminalization of contraceptives.

00:26:34 Speaker_07
There are some people who are actually looking to go down that road. The criminalization of IVF. When a voter is presented with that idea, are we actually going to do what the Handmaid's Tale did? Are we going to actually criminalize women?

00:26:47 Speaker_07
Do you think that changes the way they think about it?

00:26:49 Speaker_02
I mean, yes. I also think that people are now realizing that in these states where you're saying, oh, we're not going to prosecute the woman, we're only going to prosecute the doctor. Oh, only going to prosecute the doctor.

00:27:01 Speaker_02
Well, what that results in is dead women under doctor's care.

00:27:03 Speaker_07
Doctors go somewhere where they're not going to prosecute. Either doctors leave. Or they don't do it.

00:27:07 Speaker_02
They—or they refuse or they feel like they cannot. And in Texas, they've been told they cannot provide lifesaving care for fear of going to prison.

00:27:15 Speaker_02
I mean, you can't blame doctors here in these situations for not knowing what they're legally allowed to do, because these laws are vague. They are designed to be threatening both to women and to doctors, and the result is that women die.

00:27:29 Speaker_02
And I just feel like whatever you believe about your own personal decisions that you either have made or might hypothetically ever have to make about whether to terminate a pregnancy, where you had an elective choice about it, I think people are now realizing that a lot of this is just not about elective choice.

00:27:47 Speaker_02
It's just about whether or not you're going to take off the table, take out of the doctor's armamentarium, something that is a basic part of healthcare that literally we have done as a people for thousands of years, and say, for political reasons, we're not going to do it.

00:28:03 Speaker_02
All of the little nuances, all of the little, you know, the exceptions. Oh, we're not punishing the woman, we're punishing the doctor. All these little fine lines don't matter. When you ban abortion, women die.

00:28:13 Speaker_02
And we're living through that now, and we're seeing these women's obituaries, and we're hearing from their families. We're hearing from their widowed husbands who are taking care of their surviving kids. And it's just

00:28:23 Speaker_02
I just feel like it has swept away a lot of the political nonsense and small talk we've had on this issue for a long time. And that's why I feel like the electoral impact of these bans is a real black box, Sally.

00:28:36 Speaker_02
I don't think that it's pollable, because I don't think people know how viscerally and gutterally this is affecting people's understanding of what's at stake.

00:28:44 Speaker_07
What's changed since you started reporting this story?

00:28:46 Speaker_07
You reported it well while Roe was there, and while it wasn't clear that Roe was going away, challenges to abortion were alive and well in the states, which came up with all sorts of weird rules about abortion clinics and how wide the hallways needed to be and the doors and things like that.

00:29:00 Speaker_07
You saw that movement underway. What's changed since you started reporting on this?

00:29:05 Speaker_02
Well, I mean, sadly, what happened while we still had Roe was that the courts were a refuge, an increasingly unreliable refuge, but a refuge for women's rights.

00:29:17 Speaker_02
And so you'd see Republicans, again, everywhere Republicans have control, push it as far as they could in terms of restricting these rights, in terms of making the practical necessities of how to access abortion care and related services, making those things impossible to get.

00:29:31 Speaker_02
And you saw so many states go down to one and in some cases no clinic. clinics. And the courts were a refuge that was increasingly unreliable, and now, of course, the courts—again, wherever Republican appointees are in control—are hostile.

00:29:45 Speaker_02
And so, the ways that we protect women the best we can now are in some ways outside the legal system. It's supporting abortion funds.

00:29:54 Speaker_02
It's trying to make sure that people can access abortion medications, even in places where that's threatened to be illegal. It's taking stuff

00:30:01 Speaker_02
essentially outside the legitimate, licit system of how we protect one another, and women are trying to take care of each other off the grid. And that's just a very, very dangerous and very liminal way to do it.

00:30:15 Speaker_02
And to know that your country—again, everywhere Republicans are in control, your country is trying to hurt you.

00:30:21 Speaker_02
Your country is willing to see you dead in order to keep one of these bans in place, puts women in a very adversarial relationship with democracy and with this country. And I think that is a radicalizing thing.

00:30:33 Speaker_02
And I think women want to go back to feeling like our government actually wants to keep us alive.

00:30:38 Speaker_07
So you've got a situation where your government might actually be the one who's killing you.

00:30:41 Speaker_07
You also have a situation where all of the political violence that we're talking about, that you hear Donald Trump talking about these days, the dry run was with the anti-abortion movement. Yes.

00:30:50 Speaker_07
There was political violence that was given cover by authority for a long time in this country.

00:30:55 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think that is underappreciated, Ali.

00:30:57 Speaker_02
I mean, when we did the documentary about the assassination of Dr. Tiller, one of the things that was so unsettling there was that not just you had the murderer, but you had a movement, a pro-murder movement, out of which that assassin came, that celebrated and lionized the attempted assassination of Tiller and then the successful assassination of Tiller.

00:31:18 Speaker_02
In the radical anti-abortion movement, which has now taken over the Republican Party and has now succeeded in putting Trump abortion bans in effect in 21 states, you had a movement that said it was moral to kill people who were involved in the provision of health care to American women.

00:31:37 Speaker_02
And that justification of violence toward our fellow Americans, for supposedly moral reasons,

00:31:44 Speaker_02
has echoes in what you have seen in terms of the violence and the threat and intimidation that has been trained against election workers, that has been trained against secretaries of state, that has been trained against, you know, Democratic political opponents of Republican officials.

00:31:59 Speaker_02
And the idea that violence is going to be the way that you stop the certification of the election or that violence is going to be the way that you, you know, stop the vote counting in Philadelphia or in Detroit or one of these things,

00:32:12 Speaker_02
There was a dry run for that in this country over decades that I think gestated in the anti-abortion movement that celebrated the murder of American doctors.

00:32:19 Speaker_07
One of the things you talked about was the fact that we now have some very good journalism on this, but we did have it with you. Back in 2013, on the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, you showed five embattled abortion clinics.

00:32:32 Speaker_07
You went around the country with now my executive producer. Rebecca Dryden.

00:32:36 Speaker_00
Rebecca Dryden.

00:32:36 Speaker_07
She's fantastic. And I want to play a little about one of the interviews, what you heard from an abortion provider talking about this harassment that they faced.

00:32:47 Speaker_05
When you're the only provider in a state, you become a target for both your local people who disagree with the services you offer and you get put on the national radar and you get put on the national map.

00:32:58 Speaker_05
It doesn't happen in any other business where people are allowed to act like stalkers and use your first name and you know, try and intimidate you on your way into work.

00:33:10 Speaker_05
There's no place else where you would work, where somebody would be allowed to act that way. Do you ever worry about your safety?

00:33:21 Speaker_03
I always look around before I step out of a door. But again, I'm on Social Security and Medicare and have had a good life and somebody's got to do this and I won't be intimidated.

00:33:40 Speaker_07
Somebody's got to do this and I won't be intimidated. I'm fascinated since the fall of Roe when I've started speaking to some of these people. What motivates them? It's amazing.

00:33:50 Speaker_07
These people literally do it at risk of life and limb to help others and in some ways to uphold the democracy that we all believe we share, that all of us should have the same rights, which we do not have in this country anymore.

00:34:01 Speaker_02
I mean, the amazing thing about going into the clinics—and again, this is before Trump overturned Roe—in these embattled clinics in Republican-controlled states, once you get through the gauntlet and the radical anti-abortion protesters and all of the security challenges and the legal harassment and all the other things, once you got inside those clinics, what you found was providers who were not at all radicals.

00:34:26 Speaker_02
Providers who had incredible job satisfaction because once they're in there providing healthcare to their patients one-to-one, they know they are saving people's lives, they know they are giving people care that they desperately need, and they know that if they don't do it, they're not sure anybody else would.

00:34:40 Speaker_02
And that sense of being needed and providing something important made for these very surprising interviews, I think, where they're talking about the incredible threat that they're under. But also no question that they will continue doing the work.

00:34:55 Speaker_02
And that I think was inspiring to me in terms of, you know, all of us as Americans in a time of repression, you know, the thing that keeps you going is not necessarily just, you know, having guts and being willing to gut it out, but being needed.

00:35:09 Speaker_02
making sure that you're doing the things that you can do that maybe other people can't do, being needed, and that gives you not just a righteous place in history, but it gives you a righteous life and a lot of satisfaction, and I think the love and respect of the people who you're helping.

00:35:25 Speaker_07
And this week, people are needed, and people can do something to help their fellow Americans. You are a great friend and a great colleague. Thank you so much.

00:35:32 Speaker_02
Thank you.

00:35:32 Speaker_07
You're busy enough to not have to come in here on a Sunday morning.

00:35:34 Speaker_02
I'm really grateful. I mean, I know this is, again, this is crucial real estate on The Velshi Show, and I'm really grateful to be here.

00:35:40 Speaker_07
We love having you here. And a special shout-out, of course, to our mutual friend and colleague, Rebecca Dryden, who helped put this all together. One day I will get her on TV.

00:35:49 Speaker_07
Thank you to Rachel Maddow, the Emmy award winning host of The Rachel Maddow Show. Thanks for all the important work that you do and for joining us this morning. We'll be right back. That was outstanding. Thank you so much.