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- Hello and welcome to the Crosscut Ideas Festival.

My name is Megan Burbank, and I'm a reporter with Crosscut covering reproductive health policy in the absence of Roe versus Wade.

And today I am joined by two inspiring panelists.

We've got Kelsea McClain, she's the Deputy Director of the Yellowhammer Fund, which is an abortion advocacy and reproductive justice organization serving Alabama, Mississippi, and the deep South.

Kelsea got her start in Texas ensuring access to stigma-free and inclusive sexual health education.

And her work confronts the same barriers that impacted her own ability to get an abortion.

We are also joined today by Judith Arcana, who writes stories, poems, essays, and books.

She's a Jane, a member of Chicago's pre-Roe underground abortion service, and her writing includes work rooted in that experience.

The fiction collection "Hello.

This is Jane," the poetry collection "What if your mother," and the zine, "Keesha and Joni and JANE."

Judith, Kelsea, welcome and thank you for joining us today.

- Thank you Megan.

- Thank you, So happy to be here.

- I'm so excited to have this time with you both to talk about this really important issue for all of us.

And I just wanna start with a pretty easy question, which is I would just love to hear how both of you got involved in this work.

And I would love to start with Judith, and I would love it if you could give us just a little bit of information as well about what abortion access looked like in this country before Roe versus Wade.

- Okay, this is the shortest possible version, of course.

In the summer of 1970, when my life was in complete turmoil, because I was one of many, many teachers in the United States who had been fired for political reasons, it was a popular activity on the part of school boards.

And my life was, as I say, in turmoil and I thought that I was pregnant.

This would not be a good time to make a person, I didn't know what to do.

I called a friend who was a medical student, this is in Chicago, and he said, "I don't know, but I'll get right back to you."

And he did in several hours and said, "Everybody here," meaning at the medical school, "Says call this number and ask for Jane."

To this day, I am stunned and thrilled by the fact that everybody, as he put it, at the medical school was sending people to the feminist underground abortion service in Chicago, which, as you all know, is now called Jane.

So as it happened, I didn't need an abortion on that occasion, but I was invited by the Jane I talked to on the phone to come to a recruiting meeting a couple months later.

And I went, it was very close to where I lived.

It was actually in a church, just a couple blocks from where I lived.

So I went to that meeting and I was very impressed with them and I joined right up.

So that's the shortest version Megan, do you need any more about that?

- Oh well, I think I know the long version, because I've written it and I've spoken to you for long periods of time.

But yeah, so I think I wanna give give Kelsea a chance to answer the same question.

I mean, I think your bio gestures that a little bit, but can you fill us in on the details of what got you into this work?

And then also I think probably for folks who are not super well-versed in what abortion funds do, I'd love to hear a bit more about your work with the Yellowhammer Fund.

- Yeah, so I grew up in the South.

I grew up with abstinence only sex ed, but I grew up being someone that was sexually active before marriage.

And I knew that that just wasn't for me, and it wasn't for my peers.

So I took a pretty early interest on just making sure my peers knew how to safely get condoms and birth control and things like that, that were very taboo and not really accessible to us in the South, even in the year, you know, 2000 to 2003 when I was in high school, I went on to do peer-based sex ed in college, that was my calling.

I would lead seminars with a volunteer group I was with around those issues.

And there was always something missing for me in that work, and it was the discussion of abortion.

Even though we were incredibly sex positive and against stigma and shame, abortion just was one of those things that we would still talk about in hushed terms and we would share it as an option and resource with people.

But we didn't dig into like what abortion is, and what it means to people.

I quickly became very aware of what abortion is, and what it means to people, after graduating college when I needed my own abortion.

This was when Roe V. Wade was the law of the land.

I lived in Florida, despite having three abortion clinics in my community, which is a privilege, is incredibly rare back then and even now, more so now, I couldn't access my abortion because I couldn't afford to pay for it.

I spent weeks struggling to get the funds together, but the realities of the laws restricting abortion meant that my abortion costs around $600, and I was unemployed.

That was literally my entire unemployment check that I depended on to pay my $700 rent.

You know, the math was not mathing in my life.

So yeah, I thankfully, a few weeks into my process of just like figuring out what I could pawn, figuring out who I could hit up for resources and funds, even after getting support from my boyfriend at the time, my now husband, and my mother, I couldn't afford it, and I found an abortion fund.

Abortion funds are these beautiful nonprofits and collectives that believe in mutual aid, which means that we support our communities with our own resources.

We don't just depend on the government who should be supporting us in the ways that we need them to support us.

So an abortion fund stepped in and made a pledge towards my appointment that covered the remaining three or $400 I wasn't able to get together.

And my abortion was now accessible, I had my abortion.

And from then on I was like, it's done, I am advocating for abortion for the rest of my life.

And through many journeys, I ended up living in North Carolina and working remotely for an abortion fund and reproductive justice organization called Yellowhammer Fund that serves Alabama and the surrounding regions of the deep South.

- Thank you, so we've got two very different sort of activating experiences that both got you into this work.

And Kelsea, I think one of the really salient points of your story is that access to abortion has always been complicated, right?

Like we often see these media narratives that suggest that things were fine and then Roe versus Wade was overturned and then it got hard.

And, of course, we all know, that's everyone sitting here today, we all know that's not true.

And I think that kind of leads me into another question that I would love to hear your answers to, which is just, what do you wish people understood about abortion?

And I think we'll start with Judith since we were just chatting to Kelsea.

- What do I wish people would understand about abortion?

Actually, there are many things that I wish people would understand about abortion, but I'll grab a few for my minutes here.

One is that abortion has been done for many thousands, thousands of years all over the globe by many methods.

I'm not saying it was always safe, by no means.

I'm not saying it was always effective, unfortunately not.

But women needed to deal with it and they did the best they could in whatever the situation was, through those thousands of years.

It's actually very recent that abortion has become this thing used, of course, by the right wing for its political purposes.

And also a source of great difficulty and consternation for people with uteruses and for the medical industry in the United States of America.

Which, of course, despite being, as everyone calls us, a developed country, does not in fact have national healthcare.

I'll just stop with that, that's an opener, and go on to Kayley.

- I think the biggest thing I wish people knew is that it's a very common lived experience for people, especially for mothers.

I think that there's this understanding that abortion is inherently an act against a child or a decision made by someone who is fearful of parenthood and ignorant of parenthood.

And the reality is abortion is a very commonplace experience for parents because they are acutely aware of what parenthood means.

They're often making that choice, not because they want to, but because they have to.

Often we call our movement the pro-choice movement, and that's something that a lot of us in the abortion funding movement have been really like, we wish we could change this, we wish we could change this slogan.

Because abortion is not about choice, it's about necessity, it's about need, it's about socioeconomic status, it's about racism, it's about so many things.

It's about, you know, Black women dying more in childbirth here in the US than in other developed countries, especially in the states that are banning abortion.

And for so many, it's an act of survival, an act of survival for their families.

And, you know, that's why we really embrace this like pro-abortion framework that we do at Yellowhammer.

And I think a lot of us in the movement have started embracing because we've really let...

I think that, you know, what Judith hit on is like we really have let the other side kind of dominate this narrative.

And I think the biggest thing I want people to know about abortion is it's like a very moral, just, and for some people like very valued and cherished and sacred experience that they've been through.

Also, everyone has abortions, pro-life people have abortions.

I worked for an abortion care provider and I would be retired by now if I had a dollar every time someone said to me, "I'm pro-life, but," here's my magical reason.

And their magical reason was usually my birth control failed, it wasn't those extreme things that pro-life legislation builds in as exceptions.

It is the most common baseline thing that happens to human beings who are sexually active.

So yeah, everyone has abortions, that's one I want everyone to know.

- Yeah, it's extremely common.

I mean, I think that's something that's often left out of coverage generally.

And also, really important point that many people, I think it's something like more than half who have abortions, already have a child.

So we're talking about people who understand what it means to be a parent.

So Kelsea, kind of building on that, I would love to hear more about your experience with the Yellowhammer Fund kind of before and after the reversal of Roe versus Wade.

A lot of media narratives sort of give the impression that things really shifted overnight with Roe's reversal.

But I can tell you just from my own reporting, when I speak with clinicians and volunteers in my work, they often say that they were already experiencing sort of more of a gradual ramp up before Roe was gutted.

And so I would love to know if that aligns with your experience and kind of, how that dynamic shifted with that, with the Dobbs decision.

- Yeah, so pre-Dobbs in June, that happened in June of last year, our work was difficult at Yellowhammer.

It was a lot more heavily focused on abortion funding, and you're about to find out why, a little spoiler alert, but we're a state that only had three clinics and we had gestational limits on how far into pregnancy you were able to seek those services.

And we also had a 48 hour wait period that mandated basically two appointments for every single person seeking abortion care.

They would have to visit the clinic, receive counseling, and I'm using air quotes there because there's nothing even resembling counseling that happens in that counseling.

You are read a script that the state has mandated you be read to satisfy the requirements of the state's law.

You would receive an ultrasound, some blood work to make sure your iron levels were good and that there were no risks proceeding with the care you were about to receive.

And then you would be sent home for 48 hours to wait the magical timeline to end, so you could now legally have an abortion.

While there were some exceptions to that rule, typically clinics didn't know how to navigate those exceptions.

They required more documentation and proof than anyone would be willing to give up or provide, and genuinely would probably take longer to get the exception approved than it would just wait the 48 hours to receive your care.

So everyone was subjected to a 48 hour wait period, regardless of what led to that pregnancy.

Not that we think that there should be different restrictions based on why you're choosing abortion, but the regardless is is that exceptions didn't matter.

And I just lift that up because I think people really lean on exceptions in thinking abortion legislation isn't so bad, but that's not how it works.

We faced restrictions on how minors could access abortion care, they had to jump through hoops.

Clinics were required to do mandatory reporting to the Department of Health and Human Services whenever they provided abortion care to a minor.

It was just inherently assumed that a minor is being abused or neglected if they end up needing abortion care.

We were a state that heavily surveilled abortion clinics.

Our clinics would get inspections pretty regularly.

Anti-abortion activists could at any time request a inspection of a clinic, and the state would comply.

So there was this heavy surveillance happening.

Now as we led up to June, we were very aware that abortion clinics would be shut down in our state.

But what we didn't know, what frustratingly was not communicated to us by the many lawyers we spoke with, the ACLU, but I think a real testament to how confusing the law can be, especially when it's regulating our bodies.

We didn't know that fundamentally everything we did to support abortion seekers would have to stop and shift and change the second that law went into effect.

We knew our work was going to change, we knew that it was going to get more intense, it was going to get more traumatic, it was going to cost more.

Our weekly budget to fund, or I should just say our annual budget to fund abortion seekers was $130,000.

And that was not covering the need, that was barely scraping the bottom of the barrel of the need.

We were going over budget frequently because telling people in circumstances that were reaching out to us, no, was not possible for us.

But we found out 8:00 p.m. the night of the Dobbs decision that we would not be able to fund abortions anymore.

And in addition to that, we would not be able to fund travel out of state for people, which would be the biggest need Alabamians we're seeking in this post-Dobbs landscape.

And even more crucially and something I still struggle to understand, but every legal analysis we've had done has told us this is true, we cannot make direct referrals.

We cannot tell people how to end their pregnancies with medication.

We cannot direct them to the websites that will help them source those medications.

What we can do when someone reaches out to us asking for abortion help is give them a list of articles written by journalists, which is considered First Amendment protected speech that guides them in the right direction of their care needs.

This is inadequate, this is not sufficient.

It is painful for us that we can't do what our clients need us to do, and it absolutely feels like a violation of our rights.

But we are pursuing and exploring how to challenge that carefully because the state government can impact the rest of our work, which is focused on families that are impacted by all of the other litany of laws and restrictions and barriers that the state of Alabama has created to keep people poor.

And to ensure that systemic, that institutional racism does not go away anytime soon in the state.

We have leaned heavily in the post-Dobbs landscape into first supporting people with knowledge around how to self-manage their own abortion needs with medication.

How to safely do that without facing criminalization, and how to reach out to different organizations in our state for support and resources as they navigate these processes.

We've also leaned heavily into training up our community to be the experts on abortion rights access and reproductive health rights and justice.

So we just completed a fellowship with 25 people who we spent six weeks with.

We funded them, we paid them for their time, we supported them, we fed them, we nourished them.

And now they're out in the community making sure that this information gets out, no matter if you are a member of Yellowhammer Fund, you're aware of us, or you just know this girl down the street who has, you know, the emergency contraception and the info.

So it truly has gone, you know, the title of this panel is "Underground" and like we are embracing that pretty heavily at Yellowhammer Fund.

I don't think we call it that, but we call it community organizing.

But ultimately, like we are depending on the networks of people that exist in our communities to share this information.

Not on the media, not on the organization, and certainly not on our government.

- The underground is a really good place to be Kayley, you're gonna like it.

- Yeah.

- I mean, and I think that's so true.

I think we see often that when these laws go into effect, even in other countries, community activist networks are really what ends up filling the gaps and making sure that people can still access care.

And this is just a reminder to everyone who is watching that we are gonna be asking some of your questions.

So be sure to enter them in the chat section on your screen, and Kelsea and Judith can take them on.

But on that note, I think this really like feeds into something that Judith you often talk about, which is the way that the medicalization of abortion made it harder to operate.

I mean, one of the things that I remember being so struck by when we first started having conversations around this was the sense that when you were with Jane, there was this idea like, well, if this abortionist we found can do it, like we can do it too.

Which I think is so, it feels so different to me, you know, coming from a different generation where abortion was so medicalized.

So I would just love to hear more about how the legalization of abortion in some ways made participating in this work more complicated when it became medicalized and subject to new restrictions and regulations.

- Well, of course, when it became legal or some kind of legal, everything had to change because groups like this, what Janes called the service because our real name was the Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, so the service was just what we said.

The sudden change, that I think you're referring to Megan, made what we did look and feel so different.

We had, as you alluded to, been working with a very, very talented, skillful, and in some ways quite generous abortionist who at first... Now he was in it for the money, he was no feminist.

And there are feminist men, we know this now, it's strange but true, but he was not one of them.

And he liked us, he enjoyed working with us, but he was making big cash.

And when circumstances began to change and it became a good idea for him to finally respond to the pressure we had been putting on him, well look, you are not a doctor, you learned how to do this.

Turned out that he had learned from a longtime skilled underground abortionist, teach us just even the simple things.

And that was at the same time, now I'm talking about the late 60s and early 70s, literally the last century, not this one.

And we were surrounded by this upsurge, tremendous knowledge suddenly pouring out of feminist scholars, searchers, about women's bodies, about women's health.

This is when our "Bodies Ourselves" was being written, and first came out in newsprint as like a 16 page pamphlet.

Everything was new, so we learned how to do self-helps, we all had our own plastic speculums.

All of that was happening, happening, happening all over the United States.

So when we leaned on Mike, that was the name he used, our guy, we just called him our guy, we were coming out of that circumstance, set of circumstances, that background, that sociocultural and political background situation.

And bless his heart and mind, for whatever set of reasons, he did, he came off it with one or two Janes that he knew pretty well, he began teaching us.

And in the teaching and the learning, we saw what I think your question and some of what Kayley just discussed lead to.

And that is that actually, except for extreme circumstances, which could happen with any kind of medical procedure, health procedure, it's really simple.

It's even simple for what we called long-terms.

That is to say, people who were very far along in the pregnancy and some people think too far along in the pregnancy for an abortion.

Now when I say simple, I mean the technique of obtaining the abortion is simple.

Certainly, it's not simple for the person who is having the abortion, it's incredibly complicated, very difficult, emotionally stressful.

It was then when it was underground and illegal, and as Kayley was alluding to, it ain't so easy now.

Even when you can get the funds and get the support, people still have both the depth of ignorance and the, whatever's the opposite, of the pinnacle, the depth here and the pinnacle here of attitudes, beliefs, and emotions that undermine the actual work of the process of aborting.

So, maybe that's enough and I shouldn't take a longer turn, so I'll go back to you.

- All right, I welcome the rambles.

But I think that kind of leads into a question that I have for Kelsea, which is, you know, I think as we see this increasingly complicated legal network emerge, one of the things that I've noticed just sort of in my coverage is that people are getting much more interested in the work of abortion funds.

We're seeing these sort of high profile donations to abortion funds, like here in Washington, the Northwest Abortion Access Fund has received municipal support for the first time.

So there's a lot of sort of new energy around this work.

And I'm just kind of wondering, like what would be helpful for people who are interested in supporting your work?

And what would not be helpful in terms of just doubling up on existing work that activists have been doing on the ground for a long time already?

- Yeah, so first I think the most important thing that would be helpful is trust.

Trust us and trust our processes.

I think people, a lot of times they hear about these things happening and they're so excited to get involved and they'll reach out to us and be like, "Okay, I want you to plug me in right now and in this way and in this fashion."

And they have this like very clear idea of how they're going to help the cause.

But we at Yellowhammer know what we really need help with right now is X, Y, and Z, not A, B and C, which you just presented.

So we'll be like, "Hey, we appreciate the energy."

"We actually don't have a way to plug you into A, B, and C," or, "A, B, and C will get us all arrested."

I love that people have that energy to get arrested.

You know, as a reproductive justice org, we are a Black-led organization, we have a majority Black board.

Being black and being sent to prison in Alabama can and often is a death sentence.

It can irreparably harm your life or kill you.

We can't fight abortion bans and fight for our communities while we are incarcerated.

So it's very important to us as an org that we stay out of jail, and that we don't bring people in who are going to get us thrown in jail.

So we just want folks to listen, to understand that we've been doing this for years.

And your urgency is real, it's seen, it's felt, but this is an urgency that we have been operating under for decades.

You know, a thing I like to tell people is like I've seen a lot of people especially, I live in North Carolina and I do organizing around this issue locally as well, and we have a lot of people that reach out to our volunteer group and they get frustrated that it's like a six month process to like get through, get vetted, and get trained.

And it's because we got overwhelmed by all of the interest after Dobbs.

But we have people reach out to us and they're like, "You know, this is an urgent moment, why are you not responding with urgency?"

And we just have to explain like, what?

We've been urgent for the last, for sure, we've been doing this work in the triangle for the last 12 years.

That urgency has been there the entire time.

But when you operate under urgency 24/7, you get really good at navigating under it.

You're not running around like the sky is falling because you've gotten used to that sensation and you're not freaked out by it anymore.

You're just like, yeah, the sky's falling and I'm gonna do what I gotta do to keep my people safe and keep, you know, a roof over their head, so the sky doesn't fall on their head.

So just like really trust that if you think work isn't being done, it may not be visible.

There may be reasons it's not visible.

You know, the abortion underground is underground because we have to be, the work that we do is jeopardized, it is criminalized.

Just here in North Carolina, we have passed a monster abortion ban that is now waiting for our governor to veto.

It may actually get overwritten and become law.

And in that abortion ban, they restrict our ability to talk about self-managing abortion with medications.

I was wearing a shirt to the general assembly that said Mife and miso and miso and miso and miso, which is how you use the medications to end your pregnancy.

That shirt could potentially be illegal in a month or two here in my state.

So like please understand, like we are doing the work, we're doing it and we want you along, but we gotta build up trust, we gotta get to know you.

We gotta figure out, are you going to jeopardize the work or are you gonna support the work?

And yeah, just look at like... A thing I'd like to share is, especially with social media and how social media works in algorithms, people often think because they don't see the work that it's not being done.

I just challenge people and say, "If you don't see the work, is it because you have a blind spot or because the work isn't being done?"

Nine times out of 10, it's because you have a blind spot.

It's because you haven't been looking to see the work being done.

And unfortunately with the way social media works, those of us that do abortion work, it's not visible, it doesn't get in the algorithm, it gets hidden.

So it's even more important now for people to like actually do some intentional work to see if people are doing the thing that they wanna do already, plug into that.

And if not, then maybe reach out to some orgs or some activists in your community and be like, "This is what I would like to do, is this not being done?"

"Is this a hole I can fill?

And if not, how can I plug in?"

- Yeah, that seems like a really great framing because, of course, abortion funds have been around for a very long time, none of this is new.

And it wasn't like it wasn't necessary before Dobbs, it very much was.

So yeah, I find that that's something that often surprises people.

And yeah, carceralism, rarely a good thing to add to the mix.

So my next question is for both of you and, you know, I think when we talk about any kind of abortion underground, it's really important that we ground it in an understanding that this work has been going on for a very long time.

We see it in abortion accompaniment practices in Latin America, right now we're seeing Mexican networks that are currently smuggling abortion pills into the US.

And we've got organizations like AidAccess, Women on Waves, that are finding these really creative and sometimes like very legal gray area ways of getting medications for abortion into abortion hostile areas.

And I just think, you know, for both of you, I would love to know like what are some of the models that you look to in your work, or sort of the ancestors of your work as you see them?

And we'll start with Judith and then go to Kelsea.

- Well, the most obvious ancestors for Janes would be those women, some men, but primarily women, female people themselves, people with uteruses, who had done this stuff.

Luckily in our time, literally in these moments that we're talking right now, there are available books about, literally stories about those women who did abortions, especially in the 19th and first half or so of the 20th century.

There are novels, there are poems, there are stories, and there are non-fiction books that say this happened, this happened, this happened, here's how it went down.

This is what she did, this is what she knew, this is how she learned, and this was the effect on her life, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So well, all right, I'll stop now.

Give, you know, give it back to me, well, to Kayley now.

- I mean, I won't speak to the rest of my org because I'm sure this answer would differ depending on who you spoke to at our org.

But I think certainly inspiration for our work is the Janes.

I think that's big.

And right now in our movement, there's that documentary and a lot of us at abortion events have been showing that documentary in our communities to help folks understand, like this is not new work and it's shifted a lot.

We have medication abortion now and anyone like truly anyone, you don't have to be worried about being squiked out by blood or having to see a cervix.

Like literally anyone can be an abortion provider when you have those five pills in your hand.

Or 12 pills if they take away our Methotrex, but that's a whole other conversation that I won't get sidetracked on.

But, you know, that's a big one.

For me personally, my mother.

You know, I am a child that was like incredibly planned.

I know my conception story, I don't recommend that for everyone.

But my parents were very open with me about literally every moment of my creation and my existence on this planet.

And being a child that was very much planned and wanted was really sweet, it was really nice.

And I know that childhood, you know, like every journey looks different and there's no shame or nothing bad or negative about being a child who was born in, you know, a situation where maybe you weren't 100% enthusiastically wanted and expected.

But I know for a fact that a parent who is able to like have an unplanned pregnancy, but still be like, nah, this is what I wanna do, is probably going to be encountering parenthood in a very different way than a parent who is forced to continue a pregnancy that they never wanted and they know they don't have capacity for.

And I take that with me a lot.

I really love that the majority of the women in my family were strong and powerful and doing things that women were not expected to be doing at their time in history.

My great-great-grandmother was a madame of a prison, which is not a great history, but also, like women weren't doing that kind of stuff.

You know, like she was controlling the whole cell block and was in charge of it.

So I just take that strength of the women in my family with me.

And I also, for me it's like not so much the ancestors, but the real life, like the living, breathing people that I've interacted with over the last 10 years while doing this work.

I've had some really deep and touching experiences with abortion seekers.

There are some that I carry with me in literally every moment.

And I think of every single time I'm at the legislature fighting a bad bill or funding an abortion on a phone call, or doing the other things I do that I won't mention on this call, but they're with me all the time.

Their lived experiences, the barriers they faced in this world that supposedly has liberated access.

Like, I keep that with me all the time and I never forget.

- Yeah.

- I still remember and even longer ago from, as I said, the late 60s, early 70s, several, a good number of women and girls, of course, some of my strongest memories are of 14 and 15 year olds... Yeah, it's an extraordinary element to have inside yourself as you go forward to do the related work.

You know, having to do it is not good fortune, but having those experiences, knowing those people is good fortune, yes.

- That's a beautiful way to put it.

- Yeah, and it's so lovely to hear sort of the resonances between both of your experiences, even though they're so different at the same time.

So we are going to switch gears now and we're gonna look at some of our audience questions.

So one of the questions that we have, let's see, okay, so this is from Nancy.

And Nancy would like to ask, there's such a contradiction between people who are anti-choice and the support for services to support mothers with limited resources, has that changed?

- No.

- Yeah, I'm just thinking, the answer is no, no.

- Yeah, in North... - It hasn't in this country.

- Yeah, in North Carolina, you are gonna hear probably a lot more about this bill in the coming weeks in national news probably 'cause it's really bad.

But one of the things they did, real sneaky thing they did, was they built in all of these things that the Democrats in our state have been asking for, for years.

Expanded maternal leave, expanded birth control.

Like they snuck it all in at the very back of this bill that's going to shut down our clinics.

But it's like they did it in this like incremental way and they truly didn't consider, like what we've been asking for years is to meet the need in our state as it exists with abortion access accessible.

And now they wanna completely outlaw it for the majority of people who would need it in our state.

And they're literally proposing the same increases , like increases we were asking for 10 years ago that haven't even accounted for like what has happened in the last five years in our country, and what the pandemic did to middle income and low income families.

So yeah, they don't care.

They may do some symbolic things every so often to be like, ah, I gotcha, we supported parental leave that one time.

But especially the people outside of clinics, they have no problem shaming a woman who's a parent, right?

Like they have no problem, you know, yelling at you that you should take care of your own needs.

And that, you know, you shouldn't be depending on the state for your welfare, but also, don't have that abortion.

So yeah, these people don't care.

- No, they do not care.

It's stunning, isn't it?

It's just stunning to understand the extent to which they do not care, and the extent to which there is a good chunk of hypocrisy so that we, I mean obviously Kayley has already alluded to this, so it's still the same as when I was doing stuff.

People show up who are supposedly against the legality of abortion, who ask for an abortion.

And the answer is almost always some, you know when you say, "Well, how come you're doing this?"

"How could you wanna do this?"

And the answer is always some version of, "Well, this is different."

Yeah, here's what's different, it's you this time, that's what's different.

It's infuriating, as you can tell from my tone.

Okay.

- All right, well I think that's a solid response to that question.

So we have another one, this is from someone named Solan who wants to know, there appears to be an assumption that faith-based institutions of all denominations are opposed to abortions.

What has been your experience from members of this community?

- Well, it's certainly very, opposition to abortion is certainly very popular in faith-based institutions.

But I do not think, and again, I'll mention as Kayley has, the film about the abortion service that is available through HBO.

The.. actually I'm not going to go that direction.

Sorry, go ahead.

Take it next.

- I think I might hit on what you were about to say.

It has shifted, there are still faith-based communities that care about and are protecting abortion access.

But I think the narrative of what faith is has changed in this country.

You know, I think evangelicalism has perverted what faith is for people.

The megachurch has changed how people view churches, how people feel view their faith community, and has really screwed up how separate church and state used to be.

You know, we used to just have to argue about prayer in school.

We now have massive churches with millions of dollars in untaxed revenue fighting for things that harm our communities.

- Yeah.

- So it's hard, especially as an atheist, I get real down on religion.

And I have to remind myself that we do have religious allies, but conveniently our religious allies are like, "No, yeah, it sucks, we're right there with you."

"It's all bad, we're fighting for the same thing, just from a different background."

I have said that Jewish faith communities show up for abortion access in the most beautiful and radical and wonderful ways.

They do not show up in front of clinics protesting.

And also Unitarian Universalist communities and Quaker communities have shown up for us so consistently and ethically.

So I do try to remind myself that there are church and faith-based communities that are fighting for abortion rights.

And that it's an unfortunate reality for all of us that evangelicalism has like taken over the narrative about what faith is in America.

- Also about that narrative, I think we need to remind ourselves possibly frequently that it's what goes into, or what is before the public eyes.

And that is this constant presentation that faith-based groups of any sort, just generically are against abortion healthcare.

So it's, who's in charge of telling the story?

Who's got the screens?

Who's got the radio sound, you know, that they put out in the world's ears or this country's ears?

That is extremely important, perhaps in some ways more important than what the faith groups themselves are putting out.

'Cause that's how they get beyond their own group is through the media.

- Right, it's the framing and the narrative rather than the actual religion.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, it also makes me think, Judith, of all of the churches where Jane operated.

I agree with this.

All right, well we are running out of time, but I just wanna thank you both so much.

This has been really wonderful.

I love hearing about sort of the resonances between your experiences, and the differences.

So thank you so much for your time.

- Thank you Megan.

- Yeah, thank you for having us and for having this discussion.

- Yes.

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