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The cut, the cut, cut, cut, cut, the cut. The cut. Idea for a future radio story today is January 20th, 2016. And Donald Trump was just inaugurated.

That was me four years ago. I wanted to capture my fears and concerns about Trump's presidency. So I hopped in the recording studio at my old job and recorded a little audio time capsule. I've kept this file on my computer for four years and didn't listen to it until recently.

So many people in this country are so excited about Trump.

I just can't believe I could disagree with this many people, all that innocent, innocent, extremely privileged disbelief.

But I guess that's why I wanted to ask you, Avery, of the future, you who have lived through one term of. The Trump presidency, so weird, just a few questions, so I recorded 15 minutes of questions about the state of the country for my future self, which is to say me currently to answer, did he build a wall around Mexico or did he try?

Oh, man.

I mean, yeah, he's still trying, like, actively. According to Customs and Border Protection, there's been 371 miles of new wall completed, but there's still a lot more to go. So we'll see.

Is marijuana legal and depends on the state you live in, but it's fully legal in 11 of them. So, yeah, yes or no.

Is gay marriage illegal?

Well, no, but it could be. There were a bunch of other questions that I won't bore you with because I realized I can't actually answer most of the questions from my past self, like they're all kind of complicated and still in process. And it turns out a lot of the rights I was worrying about four years ago are still very much under threat now, including the issue that I was most frightened about on Donald Trump's Inauguration Day.

The very first question I asked to my future self was this one. Are abortions illegal?

Did he defund Planned Parenthood? Of course, I know abortions are still legal for now, the law of the land upholds Roe v. Wade. Although I'm not sure I really understood how complicated the answer to this question actually was and is, especially now that Trump has appointed three Supreme Court justices.

So I want to start asking you that big question. Are abortions illegal?

Well, yeah, they are legal right now. For some people, they have been inaccessible to millions more preceding Trump's inauguration.

Rebecca Traister is a writer at large for New York magazine and the cut.

So where we are right now is that we're closer to abortions being illegal than we've been in my lifetime.

Nominated by President Reagan and serving 30 years on the court, he was often the crucial swing vote. You know, Anthony Kennedy's retirement, Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation.

I am here today not because I want to be I am terrified, writing completely over the testimony of Christine blowsy forward.

I do not believe that these charges can fairly prevent Judge Cavenagh from serving on the court.

Susan Collins, vote for cabinet, all these things on a sort of court level where sort of big, publicly covered wake up calls and there has been women in the streets, right? There have been women and men in the streets. There have been people in the streets. Four years into Donald Trump being president, the like, the reality of that is hitting a lot of people hard. But one of the ways that we got to this point is that the inaccessibility and the project of making abortion illegal didn't hit anybody hard enough.

Inaccessibility isn't just recent. It's now it happens now around the country for millions of women for whom enough barriers have been put in place, that that real might as well not exist because it actually doesn't serve as a barrier. It doesn't serve as a protection of their right to get the care that they need.

So there are states all over the country and where the the laws are so prohibitive, where there have already been people jailed for abortion, abortions might be technically legal, but they are functionally inaccessible in Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and places like Missouri, where in twenty seventeen there were 12 Planned Parenthood clinics in a state with a population of nearly one and a half million women.

And only one of these clinics offered abortion services were used to sort of hanging on Roe is as assurance as insurance that that abortion is still legal. And so if you if you don't overturn Roe, which would be the siren call that gets everybody up, right, then you can still hide all of your ever increasing restrictions under the the blanket of officially, you know, abortion is still legal, even if it has been legislated into non-existence. But that is not a product of just Donald Trump's administration that's been going on for four decades, ever since Roe was decided.

So Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in nineteen seventy three, which was not that long ago. My aunt had several abortions, including several illegal abortions that my grandmother helped her to get in New York City. My grandmother had illegal abortions. Her friend had an illegal abortion that left her sterile in the nineteen thirties, unable to have another child. My grandmother went on to have two children. My aunt went on to have three children. So a abortion is extremely common.

The majority of abortion seekers are already parents, something that very often gets lost in the conversation. And yeah, the illegality is is very recent.

The legalization of abortion was part of this wave of progressive legislation in the second half of the 20th century.

Certainly Roe. Also, the legalization of birth control, which we forget was not that long ago, civil rights, gay rights wins. And there was this sense that there had been this this sort of social progressive revolution in the United States and it had been successful.

And among progressives, the idea was like, yeah, we won. So let's not talk about it anymore.

After those victories of the 1960s and 70s, the Democratic Party by many means ran from those victories. They didn't want there was a there was a party realignment and the Democrats did not necessarily want to be understood. In fact, they ran from the notion that they were the party of of women, which was denigrated as the mommy party. They ran from the suggestion that they were necessarily the party on the forefront of civil rights. I mean, they wanted the sort of the good parts of the reputation for these things, but they didn't actually want to continue to fight hard on these issues.

And abortion is a perfect example of that, because the Democrats immediately sort of a lot of them signed on to the Hyde Amendment, the Hyde Amendment, the dark shadow that chases Roe v. Wade to this day.

The Hyde Amendment was first passed in 1976, just three years after Roe, as a part of the immediate abortion backlash.

The Hyde Amendment, which is a legislative rider that prohibits federal insurance money to be put toward abortion care, that has meant that low income women who rely on federal insurance programs cannot get abortions.

So this means that since nineteen seventy six Medicaid, like public funds, have never paid for abortions.

Yeah, not a penny, no. Now, so wait.

So this means when they're saying defund Planned Parenthood, that just means like get rid of the funds for all the other stuff. That's not abortion.

What it actually means is basically taking. Weigh all the federal funds for everything that's not abortion from Planned Parenthood, right, so that millions of women who go to Planned Parenthood and use their federal insurance for pap smears and exams won't be able to do that either. Defunding Planned Parenthood is not about like, oh, we're going to stop federal funds for paying for abortions. Federal funds haven't paid for abortions since nineteen seventy six.

If you are somebody who uses a federal insurance program for health care and are not and do not have the money, it can mean waiting, saving the money, amassing the money and amassing the money. Saving for it doesn't necessarily just mean saving for the procedure. It can mean saving for the necessary travel. Because in many states where the so-called trap laws have been designed to shut down huge numbers of clinics, you can have to travel hundreds of miles to get to a clinic.

It's a 13 year old, right?

This was captured in a documentary by Don Porter called Trapped. This is a clip of the director of whole women's health clinic explaining why a rape victim on the cusp of her five month legal abortion window is being turned away.

She had a 13 year old who was referred to us for Magavern. And in order to see her, I need to put her to sleep. And in order to do that, I need a nurse to narcissists. And because this crazy law, it is impossible to find people to work for us. People know that our work environment is unstable. And so now I'm down to one lone certified nurse to this and I'm basically held hostage by her schedule. And if she can't be there, I can't see patients.

And unfortunately, we have to turn this young girl away because I don't have any money to sleep. And she's 13 years old and she is a victim of rape. And she drove four hours from McCallan to San Antonio and we had to turn her away and there was nothing I could do to save her. And so now if she has a procedure that is huge, she'll have to go all the way to New Mexico and pay five thousand dollars and get there and spend three days.

It'll never happen. We know about.

And then in states where there are mandatory waiting periods where you have to wait overnight, which might mean that you have to travel somewhere and then stay the night after a consultation. And if that's going to be the case, then do you also need if you are one of the majority of abortion seekers who are already a parent, do you need to pay for child care? Do you need to pay for a hotel room or do you need to save up to be able to take off the one or two or more days from your job?

And while you wait to get the time to travel, to get the abortion or to save up to afford it, your pregnancy progresses.

And so then if you are in a place where there are limits on the number of weeks at which you can get the abortion, then if you still require abortion care, you may have to save more money to get to a place where you can safely get care from someone who does a later term abortion. All of these things. There are a million factors that that make the procedure all but inaccessible to two tons of people already.

So many people cannot get the care they badly need. And the Hyde Amendment has been passed again and again every year.

1976 was the first year and it's passed every year as a legislative rider. And at first it had no exceptions for the life or health of the mother or rape or incest exceptions and and Democrats. Including our current presidential nominee, who I want very badly to win the presidency. They were supportive of the Hyde Amendment right. And and yes, absolutely, Democrats ran from abortion, didn't want to talk about it up through.

Barack Obama called the Hyde Amendment a tradition.

What now? Yeah, as Rebecca Traister puts it, abortion is always the first issue to be offered as a bargaining chip in the name of bipartisanship. Democrats do not fight for it. They do not even talk about it.

They did not talk about abortion at the Democratic convention in this year of our lord 20, 20.

And this actually doesn't make any sense strategically. Because legalized, decriminalized, accessible abortions do have bipartisan support, Roe is wildly popular, Roe enjoys majority support that lots of other issues would kill for in this country. For years they did polling on abortion. That was really bad and it would turn up every time the country is hopelessly divided on abortion. Half of Americans are in favor of abortion and half of Americans are against abortion. And this was terrible polling.

And it's really only like in the past decade that they have started doing the polling differently.

And here's what they did. Smarter pollsters began to go and ask two questions.

One was the first was, how do you personally feel about abortion? And then you'd often get your 50 50 divide. And then the second question was, regardless of how you personally feel, do you believe that abortion should be legal? Do you believe do you support Roe? And once they started doing that, they got to like a massive majority support for Roe, including in purple and red states. This wasn't just some blue state phenomenon. It turns out that a massive majority of Americans want legal abortion protected.

But Democrats are loathe to run on this. And that's how so many people did not know that, that it was in peril, that it is imperiled, that it is that that legal abortion, whether it's via overturning Roe or any number of other paths that people might take that legal abortion in this country is. I mean, to say it's in danger at this point is an understatement.

I just I mean, like I know this is probably my own issues and but I feel like I just have to address it anyway, that it's like hard to cheer for, at least like I find it hard to be like, yeah, abortion.

Like, oh, I find it very easy to cheer for actually. Really I do. Abortion is health care. Abortion is crucial to how bodies work, to the ability of people to have autonomy and be liberated, the inaccessibility of abortion is oppressive and. The inaccessibility of abortion. Is immoral, wrong, and the accessibility of abortion. Is morally correct. The very notion of personhood, what it means to be a full human, is wielded by anti-abortion right wing forces and applied solely to the fetus, right.

That's what those bills are called, personhood bills. And yet the personhood of the person carrying the pregnancy. Is is pushed aside, denigrated, devalued their ability to to have access to this form of health care. To make. Decisions about their lives that will have health and economic and emotional impact on them. The other members of their family, their other children. That's all denied to those people, those human beings, when you deny them access to this safe form of health care, and that doesn't it's not a reflection on like how you feel about babies or parenthood.

Katha Pollitt wrote a book called Pro that really informed my thinking on this.

Katha Pollitt writes that abortions are the reason you can have later marriage and why women can have a sex life and also go to college and graduate school and have professions there. How there can be the small families that most people want and most people can afford. It's why marriage is better. You don't have to marry some guy who got you pregnant. That's all part of a package that people like. The abortion is not the goal, the goal is being able to lead the kind of life you want.

There are many people who have said to me over and over again, the mistake was thinking that Roe was the end was the goal instead of the beginning. This is what Rebecca said over and over again in our interview, that the pro-choice movement focused entirely too much on the choice of whether or not to have an abortion when really abortion is one of the many ways to help people make choices, to truly choose how you want to live your life.

OK, abortion is a crucial component to this, but that has to be the start, right? Or it has to happen coterminous with fighting for all kinds of other pieces of public policy that actually enable security, dignity, the resources that people around this country are going to need in order to make actual choices about how to live their lives and whether and under what circumstances to form families. That comes down to housing policy, the social safety net, education, well-funded schools, health care, affordable health care, affordable, accessible health care of all kinds.

All of those parts of a progressive project that actually would enable people to make choices about when, if and under what circumstances to have kids. And abortion is a crucial part of that.

So is the damage done, like what can we do? How can we unfocussed know the damage is not done? This has been an ongoing this has been centuries of fight and we're still in it. And this is a really old story. And that doesn't mean we should take it any less seriously. It was a mistake to not be taking it seriously for the past. Five decades doing that, and thanks to the court appointments of Donald Trump, it is even harder.

Do you agree with Justice Scalia's view that Roe was wrongly decided?

Senator, I completely understand why you are asking the question, but I can't predict it or say, yes, I'm going in with some agenda because I'm not. That's just it's a contentious issue, which is I know one reason why it would be comforting to you to have an answer, but this fight is not over.

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And often, even when it comes to Roe, it's framed as like white middle class women saying, like you are, my daughter is going to be able to get abortions. The reality is probably, you know, wealthy women have always had access to safe abortions. And in watching the Amy Barrett hearings, they don't want to fight for Roe. And this is bananas. It's bananas.

It's this horrible two pronged thing where the left doesn't want to talk about abortion or fight for it while the right is running this loud campaign against it.

There's very legitimate criticism to be made of a pro-choice movement of Democrats. But it is also true that the strategizing by the right, while savvy in certain ways, like paying attention to state legislatures. Right. Paying obsessive attention to the courts. Right. We're going to win this by attacking the courts, which is which is done right. They did it. Those things are canny and smart, but they also stole and cheated and broke institutions. It wasn't just, oh, they won because they were smarter and more savvy about it.

It was they broke the rules by depriving a Democratic president of the ability to fill a Supreme Court seat for two hundred and seventy days. So, yeah, I think that people have been screaming for years about all of this happening. But that doesn't mean that it was any less real before we knew which bodies were going to be filling the seats.

And of course, it doesn't make it any less real if those bodies in the seats of power are women.

You know, I do think that. People hate women and want to keep them dependent, like liberated women. Are very terrifying to the power structure, and I think abortion is a key part of women's liberation.

This is going to be so embarrassing to admit, but it's like it feels it's like, you know, I'm like, oh, I'm a I'm a cis white woman, you know, like, I'm fine. It almost feels embarrassing to, like, talk about the ways in which I am oppressed or I am in danger. It feels like real, but I also have a lot of privileges and like I'm fine for now, you know what I mean.

Right.

Which is one of the reasons that I take so many pills and one of the reasons I actually don't want to talk about it, because I don't think me running around being like people hate women is a very useful thing because power structure is built around. And it just I say these words all the time, and I hate myself for saying that because they're so dirty. But like, we are built around a white capitalist patriarchy. And in order for that white capitalist patriarchy to continue, you have to put in place all kinds of policies that that keep people dependent on you.

Right. That keep them in their place. And it doesn't mean, look, white, wealthy, white, CIS women are going to continue to have access to abortions. But that doesn't mean that they're actually going to be hated less by, in fact, when they challenge us, when when when those white CIS women challenge the power structure, if they are Hillary Clinton, if they are Christine, blowsy, Ford, if they are Heather Higher, guess what?

They're hated to. Right, and their abortions are protected because it's it's white men's prerogative to control their own economic and family lives that are protected. It's not like so when white women who have so many advantages and privileges challenge the system that they're expected to support in exchange for those privileges and advantages, they will be cannon cannon fodder to God help the woman who decides not to support and defend that system. And it does.

Yeah, that totally accounts for Amy Barrett as well. Of course.

Yeah. That's why Amy, I mean, that's the and that is, you know, we are not short on white women who are very eager. To do the work of a white patriarchy to some degree, because they're protected within it and to some degree because they themselves just profit from it.

And I guess that's the thing that makes me ask, like, is this over? I like I know it's not over, but it just feels so hopeless.

Like the.

No, it's not over. Here's the thing about the feeling that it's over. If we see to that feeling like here's the reality, it's really hard. It's going to be really hard. It's going to be much harder than if people were had been awake to this 20 years ago. Right. But we know things that can be done. Court expansion making Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico states. Right. That's actually just the right thing to do. But it also crucially rebalances some of the power imbalances that were built into this country to preserve white male power.

Right. Abolishing the Electoral College, a green new deal. All of these things are tied together. We are in a period in which. A huge number of very exciting and very challenging solutions have actually been presented to us. And. We have a path forward. It is insanely hard, but it is not, by nature harder than the paths that have been trod by generations before us. In fact, by many measures, it's probably easier. We have the answers, we are all, myself most certainly included, going to have to work up the courage to actually talk about abortion and read about it and follow it and advocate for it and donate to reproductive justice organizations like the Yellow Hammer Fund.

And as Rebecca Traister points out, to see it as part of a larger fight against oppression.

Part of the challenge is demanding that we have government representation that is going to be willing to make the big choices that have to be made. I voted today, actually. I filled out my mail in ballots. I am voting for the health care access that people need. I am voting for humanity.

Simon Sanders is one of the senior advisers to the Biden Harris campaign. And yes, it's true, Biden used to support the Hyde Amendment.

Yeah, I think I think almost every senator that's ever said in the United States Senate, Democrat or Republican, have voted in support of the Hyde Amendment, had always been tacked on and tucked up in a number of different bills, just to be very clear. But let me tell you where Joe Biden is. He's going to protect a woman's constitutional right to choose. And now I I know you're asking, what does that mean? OK, that means that Joe Biden is going to codify Roe in law.

I mean, isn't Roe v. Wade already the law of the land? What more can be done? Roe v Wade is the law of the land, Avery. But as we have seen, OK, states have passed these extreme laws restricting women's constitutional right to choose. And we have to the thing that we can do about this is appoint and confirm judges who will protect the constitutional rights that we as women have.

There are state courts and appeals courts and state supreme courts. And Joe Biden is going to appoint and confirm judges for these federal positions who will protect our constitutional rights. And that's so important. So there are there are multipronged pieces to this. This is also about, though, when we talk about electing folks, we need to vote all the way down the ballot. Actually, I like to tell people every to vote up the ballot because we need to make sure that Joe Biden has some mayors that he can work with across the country, that he has governors that he can work with, because everything we care about the rights that people have fought for for 50 years or more on the line with this election.

And even if hopefully there are some victories at any level. We cannot become complacent again, like we did after Roe v. Wade was decided, we have to continue to fight harder and no more than we did decades ago and more than I did four years ago. I hope you can still find this in the future. Be strong and fight harder this time.

Our lead producer is Bob Parker, and it's from Allison Barrenger Mixon scored by Brandon McFarland, who also made our theme music special. Thanks to Corrine's headiness and Sangeetha cincher, it's still a buckbee.

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