- [Announcer] "Flatland" is brought to you in part through the generous support of AARP, the Health Forward Foundation and RSM.

- Hi, I'm D. Rashaan Gilmore and welcome to "Flatland."

As you know, every month we dig into one issue that's raising questions, causing tensions, or has gone curiously unexplored in our area, and for this episode, we'll be talking about reproductive rights.

(energetic music) (screen whooshing) (gentle piano music) - [Woman] When your rights are under attack, what do you do?

- [Crowd] Stand up!

Fight back!

- And who woke up pissed off today?

(crowd cheering) - They have taken a right away, a constitutional right, for those of us who stand at intersections, as far as our race.

This should concern you.

- A right that pregnant people had been afforded for almost 50 years, it is no longer in existence.

We're in a period of time where we don't have precedent of how to move forward.

The state regulations, some of them are on hold, some of them have taken effect, so we have states that have passed bans that leave no exception for victims of rape, that leave no exceptions for the life or health of the woman, the pregnant person, lots of legal challenges going forward, and that's just the regulation and the state policy.

We haven't even started getting into what will inevitably be case-by-case lawsuits against abortion providers, against women.

- We have dreaded this.

It has felt like a mourning even before it happened because we knew it would.

- It is a very fraught legal landscape for people seeking abortion care.

The court removed the federal floor that protected access to abortion and returned the issue to the states.

It has put an issue of essential healthcare into the hands of state legislators and we've already seen that it has not gone well.

A Missouri legislator had a bill that would criminalize a termination of an ectopic pregnancy through abortion, not realizing that an ectopic pregnancy is not only not ever going to be viable, but it's also lethal if untreated through medical procedures, that is, abortion.

As soon as there is a Republican majority in Congress, they will likely pass a fetal personhood law and that will outlaw abortion in every state in the nation, and so what we're seeing right now might just be the first volley.

There might be much more to come.

- Missouri has an abortion ban in place.

Kansas, right now, is in a bit of a precarious situation and a lot of it will depend on what happens after the primary election on August 2nd.

If it is passed, what that will do is take away the right to abortion which the Supreme Court has found to exist in the State of Kansas.

(gentle piano music) - The Value Them Both Amendment is a pro-life constitutional amendment that just simply restores the people's ability to have a conversation.

Value Them Both is a direct response to the 2019 state supreme court decision which cleared a path for a nearly unlimited abortion industry.

I believe we should have basic sanitation laws in place to protect women.

I believe that my tax dollars shouldn't be used to fund abortions.

I believe there should be bans on abortion in the third trimester.

- When we look at Kansas relative to other states in the country where abortion is still legal, it's heavily regulated here.

There are dozens and dozens of anti-abortion provisions on the books.

It requires them to tell things to the person seeking an abortion, confusing information.

It has misinformation or inaccurate information in it, requiring ultrasounds, waiting periods, gestational limits.

We also have the specific provisions around minors and minors' access to abortion.

There are bans on telehealth medicine.

Abortion is one of the safest reproductive healthcare procedures that a person can receive.

Abortion providers and clinics are one of the most regulated outpatient healthcare facilities in the country, so that is just simply not true, full stop.

There's just no evidence to support it.

There's just not a whole lot to say beyond that.

It is a false claim.

- There will be, and there has been, an enormous amount of misinformation that is going to try and dissuade the people of Kansas.

It's going to try and confuse the people of Kansas.

Value Them Both does not create any new policy and it doesn't take away any new policy.

Value Them Both does not ban abortion.

The only thing Value Them Both bans is taxpayer funding of abortion.

- [Reporter] How do you get away from that reality?

That the groups that are actually, that are behind it, they're anti-abortion.

- The only thing Value Them Both does is restore the people's ability to come to a consensus on abortion.

It does not ban abortion.

- It's very disingenuous to say, "If this constitutional amendment passes, that doesn't mean there'll be a ban on abortion," because that's exactly what we've seen around the country in states that are similar in political partisanship and political agendas as they are in Kansas.

- [Crowd Member] When this passes and I vote yes on August 2, then that will open up the way for trigger bills to pass.

Is that right?

- [Lori] We do have one ready in the state, HB2746, so we'll move that up.

- [Mark] So until we vote that there's not a guaranteed abortion in our Constitution, we've gotta vote for this amendment.

We'll be able to make further laws, further refinement, with my goal of life starting at conception.

(crowd applauding) - They want to take protection of abortion out of the state's constitution, which is the first step to paving the way to banning abortion completely in the State of Kansas.

- A lot of people talk about these later-term abortions are such a problem, but there's only 3% of us that have them.

We went in for our anatomy scan with our daughter, Hope.

We found out that she had osteogenesis imperfecta type II, which is the lethal version of brittle bone disease.

Her condition was not only life threatening to her, but it also threatened my life as well, and so we made the difficult decision to have an abortion at 18 weeks.

We needed to save my life.

I already had a three-year-old at home and a husband that I needed to go home to.

The laws that they wrapped around the clinic at the time actually caused me some trauma and caused myself some post-traumatic stress.

They asked me six different times if I wanted to be there having the abortion.

Deep down in my heart, did I want to be there doing that?

No, I wanted a healthy baby, but that just wasn't in the cards for us.

We had to do another ultrasound.

Days earlier, I had been through a two and a half hour ultrasound examining every single broken bone in her body.

The inhumanity of that law, making me look at that one more time, was cruel.

Abortions like this have to happen in a clinic as opposed to a full hospital because of funding laws.

Because you're not in a full hospital, you can't be completely anesthetized for a procedure like this.

Unfortunately, every time I fell asleep, I would stop breathing, so they had to keep waking me up, so I saw everything.

It's not the caregiver's fault for any of this.

They gave me this blanket that they held her in.

They gave me her footprints as well as a poem.

I can't thank them enough for how kind they were, but the fact is that what happened because of the laws caused me trauma.

- I know abortions won't end.

Just because they're criminalized will not stop them.

They're safer now than they have ever been and so people will somehow get their hands on what they need.

People with privilege will be the most able to get their hands on what they need.

- They can self-manage their abortion.

They could order abortion pills online, through services such as Aid Access, which are safe and effective, using the same medications that are FDA approved.

However, using these services opens people up to legal risks.

- It'll be interesting to see what happens now that abortion opponents are on the defensive and the abortion rights movement is on the offensive, if it will open up new ways of thinking about abortion in ways that aren't tied to this narrowly cabined constitutional rights framing.

I think the reproductive justice framework is going to be becoming much more relevant.

- Reproductive justice is encompassing of all issues, not just abortion but those also that are intersectional.

It's about housing.

It's about racism.

It's about all of those things that impact Black and Indigenous communities.

- It is much more focused on a grassroots movement trying to protect reproduction across a broad range of issues, giving people the right to exercise bodily autonomy, whether they want to have children or not, and it considers these issues within larger systems of race and class and disability, immigration status, gender identity.

- The initial reaction is, how do we repair this?

How do we undo what the Supreme Court has done?

How do we restore reproductive rights for people across the United States?

Burnout is real and this isn't something that's, you don't have to do all the things tomorrow.

This is a long road.

- Out here, this is labor that we are doing based off of our strength and our love and our care for this community of people.

(crowd cheering) - Having a rally isn't the work.

Having a protest isn't the work.

Shouting in the streets isn't the work.

It makes us feel good in the moment and there is space and a need and time for that, but right now, we need to be focused on supporting people, caring for people, and quite frankly, following the direction and leadership of Black and Indigenous-led organizations.

- Our fight.

- [Crowd] Our fight.

- Repro justice.

- [Crowd] Repro justice.

- Is our right.

- [Crowd] Is our right.

- Those folks who will be more impacted by this decision than anyone else.

We need in particularly white allies to know that they not matter enough about this, so I hope that those people who go in the streets come along and work with us.

We have to lean on each other, support each other, and figure out how to get somebody outta town to get an abortion.

(Justice laughing) - We are going to stand up.

We are going to fight back.

We are going to vote, (crowd cheering) and we're gonna make our voices be heard!

(crowd cheering) - Welcome back for the discussion portion of today's program.

With us in studio is Justice Gatson, director of Reale Justice Network, Yvette Lindgren, associate professor of UMKC School of Law, Kelsey Walker, founder of From The Green Desk, and Dr. Iman Alsaden with Planned Parenthood of the Great Plains.

Obviously this is a decision that throws out a lot of precedent, 50 years' worth, in fact.

Can you talk about some of the reactions that you're hearing from the legal community about the impact of this decision?

- "The Dissent" described it as a Jenga game and we have just removed the bottom block and it has made the foundation for all other rights related to privacy and intimacy and people's most profound, private decision making, has put that into jeopardy.

- Were you as stunned as I and many others were to see that the references to hundreds of years' old theories around rights of privacy and the right to one's body, did that catch you as off guard as it seemed to catch everybody else?

- Yeah, the history that the court relied upon is very contested.

Fundamentally it is very troublesome that we have a court that has shifted to an originalist framing that essentially is looking to what the status of law was centuries ago, at a time when women and people of color and most people who weren't white male landowners who were Christian did not have rights.

They did not have, they were not legal persons.

- What should be the response or rallying cry of those who are determined to either restore or protect this right?

And just as Yvette mentioned, the protections that the Roe decision relied upon are now in jeopardy.

Folk like us would've been considered chattel slavery, as she mentioned.

Where do we land with this and where do we go from here?

- Not having bodily autonomy, not being listened to, not being heard has been our life's walk.

Nothing so much changed for my community.

What did change was the position that some of my siblings now find themselves in.

They have now joined us.

- Who are they?

Who are they specifically, these siblings that you refer to?

- I would say white women in particular who have benefited and have been privileged from this system that they are now being cast out of.

You say, "Where do we go?

Where do we go now?"

It's where we should've always been, and that is to trust Black and Indigenous majors, marginalized genders, to trust Black women, to trust Black trans women.

- That's a really powerful perspective, and I just wonder, Kelsey, you helped manage support groups for others who, like you, have sought abortion care in the past, and I'm just curious, when you hear what Justice is saying and the frame, how does that resonate with you or does it at all and the women that you work with and represent?

- With the changes and making sure that we focus on not just women who have abortions and who lose children but making sure that we surround them as people, a lot of the times, what I'm seeing is people in general who have a repressed scream around the challenges that they've had losing a child or having abortion care in that way, and a lot of it is this stigma that we've put around abortion care.

- One element of hope that I think some people are trying to cling to really relates to the exception, Missouri's abortion ban being for cases of medical emergency, but has that sparked debate on what constitutes an emergency and who gets to determine if it's an emergency?

I know in Wisconsin, for example, there have to be three physicians who agree that there's an emergency, so if you're some little small town, where do you find three physicians who would all agree that it's the best interest of the birthing parent?

- This religious belief about when life begins, this Christian belief about when life begins is now influencing my medical practice.

I'm not allowed to practice medicine the way that the medical board and American College of OB-GYNs has approved me to practice medicine, and this is another instance of that, so like not being able to provide abortions, but then also now, all of a sudden, to make a basic medical decision about whether something is an emergency, you need three physicians to agree.

Find me three physicians who agree on anything.

(laughing) It's difficult, and I do think that medical emergency is a not-clear and very blurry term.

There are many things that can rapidly evolve in pregnancy that start off looking and appearing very benign and then get very dangerous very quickly, so we like to treat them early.

- Something that is upsetting to me that came out with Biden wanting to put federal protections on what he calls at risk to the mother, you have to read deeper into what they're saying is being at risk to the mother.

It's talking about these medical emergencies where someone needs to be bleeding out, or in shock, or show signs of sepsis.

That claims at risk to the mother, and they have these standards in Michigan already where someone has to be in the stages of dying to be considered at risk and that's not fair to someone that has a life-threatening condition but is not actively in the stages of dying, and then you're amplifying that for women of color and also with a long history of people not listening to women of color when they're telling their providers what is going on with their bodies.

- The overturning of Roe versus Wade will hurt Black, Brown, Indigenous women and less-resourced women of all colors, ethnicities and backgrounds the most.

Does this, in your opinion, amount to a death sentence?

- We absolutely do.

We see what's happening now, before the overturn of Roe v. Wade, as very, very problematic in our communities.

I want us to definitely pay attention to our language too.

There are birthing people who don't necessarily identify as a woman but certainly do bear children.

That's very weighty for a system that already is racist and discriminates against us.

- Many people have expressed this deep concern over laws like those in Texas and Oklahoma that allow third parties to file various lawsuits.

What is the route to protecting themselves legally?

- Overturning Roe is now opening an experience that Black birthing people have already been experiencing since the start of our nation.

The same is now true of the civil bounty laws because it has been communities living in poverty and that are disproportionately communities of color that have been surveilled, criminalized and pathologized.

Now we're seeing this same system of surveillance and punishment being used more broadly against a broader group of people, and Missouri introduced a bill to try to prevent people from leaving the state to seek abortion care by using the civil bounty mechanism, and it's very concerning for people who are in relationships that have violence in them because of reproductive coercion by violent intimate partners, and throwing open people's bodily autonomy to any third party is problematic.

- Where can women living or birthing people living in Missouri and Kansas turn for this vital healthcare service if they determine, medically or otherwise, that an abortion is needed?

- We are seeing patients from Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas on the Kansas side in our Overland Park clinic, and we have another clinic that just opened in KCK and we have a clinic in Wichita, so we've been seeing a lot of patients from all over our region.

- Every month on our website, we answer your questions about life in Kansas City and the issues you care about through our curiousKC initiative.

Let's hear from our director, Cody Boston, about our question of the month.

- This month's curiousKC question comes from Kat.

She asks, "How will this likely impact other decisions under the 14th amendment?"

- All of the cases that rely on substantive due process, and of course, that is same-sex marriage and same-sex intimacy and contraception, access to contraception.

All of those are now very much hanging in the balance.

- I did notice that the good justice mysteriously left out the loving case, but I'll leave that for another topic and another time.

What is your message to people in need?

And the other part of that is, what is your message to politicians?

I feel like a lot of the onus has been put back, and Justice spoke to this, has been put back on the individual constituent.

Vote, vote, vote, vote, vote.

Organize, organize, organize, but as you all have rightly said, that's been happening for some time.

- My message to people seeking care is that there are people willing and waiting for you.

We weren't surprised by this and so we have been getting prepared for this time, and so people who are looking for care, for transportation, for childcare, they can certainly reach out to our organization, Reale Justice Network.

We have community health workers.

We have doulas.

Kansas is wide open and available.

You can always go to Missouri Abortion Fund as well, and for the politicians, what I have to say is, right now requires sincere engagement.

It is not the time to use this as a political football to boost yourself.

You have to make some real commitments to the communities that are dealing one on one with our community.

- We are not going anywhere.

Planned Parenthood has been in this region for decades and we will continue to be here for decades.

My message to politicians is stop putting people's lives at risk by spreading medical misinformation and disinformation.

- Let's take this opportunity to think more broadly about how to protect reproductive rights and justice, overturning the Hyde Amendment, expanding the number of people who can provide reproductive healthcare and abortion care, thinking more broadly about reproduction as the right to have, not to have, and to raise children in dignity rather than focus on this one specific right, but to expand it to a much more robust way of protecting through law the reproductive dignity of all people.

- It is scary to me as a person who has children that are going to grow up in a post-Roe era, and it's scary to me to think that if I didn't have access to the care and the protections that I had, that my son would grow up without his mom, also in general, for politicians, to be honest about whose life you are hanging in the balance to promote your vote.

Abortion care providers, they were the most caring and loving and compassionate people that I could have had in my time of need.

The real monsters and the real scary people are the ones that are in the Supreme Court right now and making policies that are hurting their constituents.

- And that's where we wrap up today's conversation for this episode of "Flatland."

That's been Justice Gatson, director of Reale Justice Network, Yvette Lindgren, associate professor of UMKC School of Law, Kelsey Walker, founder of From The Green Desk, and Dr. Iman Alsaden with Planned Parenthood of the Great Plains.

Be sure to check out flatlandshow.org for more coverage and resources on reproductive rights and healthcare.

This has been "Flatland."

I'm D. Rashaan Gilmore, and as always, thank you for the pleasure of your time.

- [Announcer] "Flatland" is brought to you in part through the generous support of AARP, the Health Forward Foundation and RSM.