In This Episode
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TRANSCRIPT
Jane Coaston: It’s Monday, March 30th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that doesn’t see the issue, American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp. Here he is at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday.
[clip of Matt Schlapp] How many of you would like to see impeachment hearings? [cheers] No. That was the wrong answer. [laughter] We’ll try it again. How many of you would like to see impeachment hearings? [cheers] No! Can someone bring some coffee out for the–.
[clip of unknown speaker] Yeah, no, that’s the–
Jane Coaston: I don’t think coffee is going to help. [music break] On today’s show, Transportation Security Administration agents are finally set to be paid, but federal immigration officers are staying in airports to keep bringing down the vibes. And the Trump administration is reportedly planning a ground invasion of Iran, even though President Donald Trump insists we already won the war. But let’s start with reproductive rights. It’s been nearly four years since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization found that the Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion. The decision overturned Roe v. Wade and sent the issue back to the states. Since then, more than a dozen states have essentially banned abortion, while others have severely limited access. But of course, some anti-choice activists think that’s not going nearly far enough. Back in February, two Tennessee Republican legislators had a terrible idea. What if women who had abortions could be charged with, quote, “homicide of an unborn child?” That would make them eligible for the death penalty under the state’s criminal law statutes. Yes, the death penalty. Though when State Representative Jody Barrett was asked about that provision by Nashville’s News Channel 5, he made it clear that putting women to death for ending their pregnancy wasn’t a real problem because it would be rare.
[clip of Representative Jody Barrett] Now do I have to admit that the death penalty is a possibility? Sure, but since the death penalty was reinstated in Tennessee in 1977, there’s been less than 200 people that have been sentenced to death and only 16 have been actually executed, none of them women.
Jane Coaston: Wow. I don’t feel better at all. The bill mercifully failed on a House committee, but lawmakers in ten other states have tried putting forth similar bills over the last two years. So to talk more about the state of abortion in America right now, and how the GOP is trying to thread an impossible needle in legislating women’s reproductive rights, I spoke to Shefali Luthra. She’s the reproductive health reporter at the 19th. Shefali, welcome back to What a Day.
Shefali Luthra: Thanks for having me.
Jane Coaston: It’s been almost four years since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, and a lot has happened since then. Obviously the decision sent the issue of abortion back to the states and a lot of states made some decisions. Where has it become difficult or even dangerous for women to seek abortion care?
Shefali Luthra: What I think is a really interesting facet of this question is that obviously if you live in states with abortion bans and that’s almost half the states in the country and those range from near total to six weeks to twelve or a little bit later, it’s very dangerous to get an abortion it is illegal right if you live in say Texas or Oklahoma or Florida after six weeks of pregnancy these quite meaningful states in terms of population but what I’ve been thinking about a lot is it’s more than just what state you live in, it can be down to where specifically in the state. And I think this is really striking to conceive of the fact that if you live in a state like Texas, like Florida, like Oklahoma. Like all sorts of these more conservative states, your rights are less, your ability to get reproductive healthcare is limited, but also if you live in a community with law enforcement whose politics you may or may not know, that can make that even more dangerous.
Jane Coaston: Something I’ve been thinking a lot about is that for people who oppose abortion, there’s been a new movement, and you’ve done some writing about this, for the abolishment of abortion writ large. So ending Roe versus Wade wasn’t good enough for them. And in the last year, we have seen some pretty extreme bills that would either completely outlaw or criminalize abortion come up in red states. Like in February, Tennessee Republicans introduced a bill that would make women who have an abortion eligible for the death penalty because it would turn abortion to be a homicide. Now, thankfully, it failed, but what’s going on here? Because you look at the polling on abortion and Americans kind of feel the way that Americans have felt about abortion for a long time, which is like, they’re largely supportive of legalized abortion. They may want some restrictions, but they don’t want to abolish abortion. So why are we doing this?
Shefali Luthra: It’s a really good question. And what it speaks to is this growing frustration and also schism within the anti-abortion movement. Broadly, abortion opponents thought abortions would decline with the fall of Roe v. Wade. And that actually hasn’t happened because people are resilient. They are finding ways to continue getting abortions, even when they live in states with bans, whether they are traveling out of state or getting medication mailed to them. And so abortion opponents are thinking about this in different ways. And some of them say we need to target the drug manufacturers or the healthcare providers who are making abortions available to people living in states with bans. And some are saying, if you are truly intellectually consistent in your position that abortion is murder, you need to treat it as such and go after everyone who is involved in the abortion, including the pregnant patient seeking healthcare. This is still very divisive amongst abortion opponents. And that’s why those bills you referenced, they become more and more prominent every year, more states have them. But they haven’t made meaningful progress, even in deeply conservative states like Louisiana, like Texas, the mainstream anti-abortion movement views this as a step too far. And I think the really important question to pay attention to is whether that remains the case or whether this repeated year after year introduction of and almost normalization of these bills ultimately contributes to a bigger culture shift and leads to actual statutory change.
Jane Coaston: Here’s my question, and it might be a big one. Do you think Republicans, like the GOP, do you think they want this kind of aggressive legislation?
Shefali Luthra: That’s a very good question and at the very least the president does not. And he has made very clear that he does not want to engage with abortion policy at least on the federal level right now because it is unpopular. Voters do not largely support where the GOP is on abortion, on abortion law, on abortion restrictions. They like Roe v. Wade. They wish it were still law of the land and in fact a lot of people have become even more supportive of abortion rights having seen the consequences of these bans. So Republicans, many of them know that this is not a good issue for them, but they’re really in a difficult place because at the same time, they have relied on the anti-abortion movement for a very long time for their support and their political resources and capital. And so they’re trying to walk this very fine line. How do we keep this important influential constituency in our corner? Without alienating the vast majority of the country, and they don’t have an answer to that yet.
Jane Coaston: Right and I think that goes to my next question. We do know that Republicans are trying to thread that needle by making it harder for women to get safe abortions. Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill earlier this month that would remove the FDA approval for Mifapristone, which is one of the two drugs used for medicinal abortions in the U.S. What would it mean for abortion care if this bill is successful?
Shefali Luthra: It would be a very big deal. And I first want to be very clear. At this point, a bill like this is not passing. It does not have 60 votes in the Senate. It may not even have 50 for those aforementioned political calculation reasons. However, getting medication abortion is very important for how people end their pregnancies in this country. Most abortions are done with medication and a growing share are done with medication provided in the mail, especially to people living in states with restrictions. This is a key way for people to keep getting abortions without having to travel, in some cases, hundreds of miles, thousands of dollars of trips to get that healthcare. And that’s why people like Senator Hawley have really zeroed in on this as an area of public priority. They view this as undercutting and in some ways, fundamentally defeating the purpose of their abortion bans by helping people keep getting that medical care. I do think that this is going to be a really continued area of focus for abortion opponents and they’ll keep framing it as he has in this more conventional language. They say we are protecting women. They are being targeted by unscrupulous doctors who are sending them these medications in unsafe conditions and we need to make sure that they are having more proper care. And frankly, that’s not true. The science is very clear. This is a safe drug to take at home. It is very effective. You can talk to your doctor on the phone over video chat. As long as you have some kind of medical supervision, even if it is virtual remote, you will be fine for the most part. And if you have complications, which are again, very, very rare, there are clear protocols for dealing with that.
Jane Coaston: Some abortion critics have also spoken out against IVF, saying that any embryos that aren’t viable for implantation and that are then discarded are basically being aborted. And that’s something that’s come up with the White House where they briefly were talking about free IVF but then they got yelled at by this group. You’ve written about a fertility movement that’s being promoted by conservatives. Can you tell me what restorative reproductive medicine is?
Shefali Luthra: It’s really interesting because when you talk to fertility specialists, they call restorative reproductive medicine repackaging a lot of what they already do. But conservatives will say, we are trying to find the causes of infertility and treat those rather than just forcing IVF upon people. And as anyone who’s gone through this process knows, it’s actually very difficult to get IVF in this country and people go through many, many steps before they actually have that fertility regimen made available to them. But so a restorative reproductive medicine clinic, they will test you for endometriosis, they will monitor your hormone levels, they will see what your progesterone looks like, all these other things that are part of typical preconception counseling, but they say if we focus on this and do as much testing as possible, we can find the cause of your infertility and treat it rather than providing you with this invasive, expensive and they view as unethical medical regime. I think what’s really important about this as well is that A, it’s very expensive and very time consuming, which can be difficult if you are right later in your biological fertile years and maybe don’t have as much time or as much money to spend on these very prolonged tests. And also it doesn’t factor in people who maybe have male factor infertility. And it really does not account at all for queer couples because–
Jane Coaston: Yeah, I was about to say, like, I don’t think they’re thinking about me here.
Shefali Luthra: They certainly are not. Um. They would say that you need a penis and a uterus and you need sperm and eggs to come together and anything else is maybe not, in fact I’ve even had some of them say, not worthy of public subsidy, which I think is very revealing.
Jane Coaston: Indeed, it is revealing. And I think that this is another issue, and I’m curious when you report on this, where Republicans are trying to thread the needle between critics of IVF, some of whom even want to ban the procedure, and the fact that there are lots of Republicans, lots of conservatives, lots of people who would term themselves to be anti-abortion conservatives who have used IVF and have seen that it is indeed an effective infertility treatment for many families who are struggling to get pregnant. Like what do those conversations look like?
Shefali Luthra: There was a phrase that got used very, very often in the immediate weeks and months after the fall of Roe v. Wade, the dog that caught the car.
Jane Coaston: Right.
Shefali Luthra: And that’s kind of where we are. You’ve had the Republican Party embrace abortion restrictions in their fullness because it was a politically viable path for them and there were no consequences. But now, in this post-Dobbs landscape, you have to follow that very often to its intellectual end, if you view an embryo as life. Then the argument against IVF makes a lot of sense, right? Because you do discard embryos. And so they are still in a very difficult spot of trying to figure out how do we reconcile what we know people want with this argument and this organization and institution we’ve embraced for so long. And yet again, they’re kind of stuck in the middle. They don’t have a good answer. And in fact, a lot of them are very frustrated that the president has come out saying that he supports IVF, even if he hasn’t in fact done very much to bring down the costs.
Jane Coaston: Shefali, thank you so much for joining me.
Shefali Luthra: Thank you for having me.
Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Shefali Luthra, reproductive health reporter at the 19th. We’ll link to her work in the show notes. Every time we report on abortion access, I get furious, and I know you do too, especially since reproductive rights don’t get nearly enough coverage. If you support our show giving this issue the space it deserves, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. [music break]
[AD BREAK]
Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today.
[sung] Headlines.
[clip of Tom Homan] If less TSA agents come back, that means we’ll keep more ICE agents there. The president has been clear. He wants to secure those airports, especially, as I said earlier, in an increased threat posture. We need to secure those airports. ICE is there to help our brothers and sisters in TSA. We’ll be there as long as they need us until they get back to normal operations and feel like those airports are secure.
Jane Coaston: White House Borders Czar Tom Homan, speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, threatened us all with a bad time, keeping immigration and customs enforcement officers in the airports until airports are normal again. What exactly does normal mean in an airport, Tom Homan? On Friday, President Trump signed an executive action to pay transportation security administration agents amid the ongoing Department of Homeland Security shutdown. Administration officials say that the money is coming from Trump’s 2025 tax bill. This executive action, which the administration could have done at any point during the shutdown, came after the House and Senate passed two separate DHS funding bills on Friday. But GOP leaders were unable to agree on a bill to reopen the agency before leaving for recess. ICE workers were sent to airports by the federal government last week. The Trump administration says that’s because hundreds of TSA workers have quit, and Many others have stopped going into work during the shutdown. And while Homan says ICE agents are needed to keep our airports secure, firsthand accounts of agents standing around doing nothing tell a different story. Officials from Pakistan announced Sunday that they will hold diplomatic talks between the U.S. and Iran. But Iran’s parliament speaker called the talks a distraction from a potential U.S. ground invasion. U.S. officials who spoke with the Washington Post said the Trump administration is preparing for an invasion that could last several weeks. In a comment to the Post, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that the preparations do not mean that Trump has decided whether or not to invade Iran. There are currently more than 50,000 U.S. troops in the Middle East, which the New York Times reports is 10,000 more than usual. In a possible sign of where the president is leaning, Trump posted on Truth Social Saturday telling his followers to watch Fox News host Mark Levin’s show that night. Levin then mocked people opposing a ground invasion.
[clip of Mark Levin] He said, no troops on the ground. I don’t remember that in any campaign speech either. But why would we need troops on the ground? Well, there’s a lot of reasons, and we wouldn’t need 300,000 of them.
Jane Coaston: Great point, Mark. Trump definitely said, I’m not going to start a war, but he never said no troops on the ground. You got us there.
[clip of Cristina Koch] It is our strong hope that this mission is the start of an era where everyone, every person on earth can look at the moon and think of it as also a destination.
Jane Coaston: NASA astronaut Christina Koch spoke to reporters on Sunday as she and her fellow crewmates prepared to blast off on humanity’s first trip to the moon in more than half a century. According to NASA, the Artemis 2 crew will venture on an approximately 10-day journey around the moon, testing out a new spacecraft and, quote, “paving the way for future lunar surface missions.” The astronauts are set to launch on Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, but Artemis 2 commander Reid Wiseman’s tempered expectations during the press conference.
[clip of Reid Wiseman] Just to remind everyone, this is a test flight. This is the first time we’re going to try this. This is the first time we’re loading humans on board. And I will tell you, the four of us, we are ready to go. The team is ready to go and the vehicle is ready to go. But not for one second do we have an expectation that we are going. We will go when this vehicle tells us it’s ready and when the team is really to go, so we might go out to the pad and we might have to try again a few more times and we are 100% ready for that.
Jane Coaston: If the vehicle tells you not to go, I say just don’t go, at all. Clearly the vehicle would like to stay here. Large crowds turned out to protest in cities around the world on Saturday, the latest in a series of no-kings protests organized in response to the second Trump administration. Organizers estimated that around eight million people participated in the protests. Obviously, there’s no shortage of issues to oppose when it comes to the Trump administration, but this weekend, many protesters showed their resistance to the war on Iran. Anger over Trump’s brutal immigration enforcement policies was also on full display. In Minneapolis, a huge crowd showed up at the state Capitol to send a message after the Trump administration deployed thousands of ICE officers to Minnesota earlier this year. Rock legend Bruce Springsteen headlined the Minneapolis protest.
[clip of Bruce Springsteen] The power and the solidarity of the people of Minneapolis and Minnesota was an inspiration to the entire country. Your strength and your commitment told us that this is still America.
Jane Coaston: Did you go to a No Kings rally this weekend? Tell us about your protest experience in the comments. And that’s the news. [music break]
[AD BREAK]
Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Do not ask me where 413,793 KitKat bars are and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading and not just about how I don’t know anything about the 413,793 delicious and tasty KitKats bars stolen from a truck heading from Italy to Poland and you can’t prove otherwise, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston. And I am perfectly innocent of any KitKat related crime, as far as you know. Also, congratulations to the Michigan men’s basketball team for making it to the final four. Go blue. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our producer is Caitlin Plummer. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, and Ethan Oberman. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]
