| No Images? Click here   Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring. His replacement — Donald Trump's second nomination to the high court in as many years — could be the decisive vote to overturn the foundational abortion rights ruling Roe v. Wade. But as HuffPost's Molly Redden noted this week, women in many parts of the U.S. are already living in a post-Roe world. We asked her about her story.How did this story come about?So, immediately when Justice Kennedy announced he was going to retire, one of the big, obvious questions became, What's going to happen to Roe v. Wade? You can look at Kennedy's record on abortion restrictions and imagine what kinds of rulings the Supreme Court might reach if somebody more conservative takes his place. But the discussions taking place about what would happen to actual people who wanted to have an abortion felt a little more abstract. "If Roe is overturned, then women will have to—" I wanted to weigh in with real-life examples of what we already know can happen when states restrict abortion. Because the truth is, big parts of the country already resemble a pre-Roe landscape, with the nearest abortion provider hundreds of miles away and laws putting the procedure financially out of reach. I've met women who have traveled to Mexico to get a cheaper procedure, who have taken mystery pills they got from a friend, who've driven hundreds of miles, who've sold furniture or taken out payday loans, who have gotten on planes and flown halfway across the country. I've spoken to providers who have treated women who did dangerous things to try to terminate their pregnancies at home. It's important for people to be thinking about these specific stories reporters have documented, and so I decided to gather a bunch of them in one place. What have you found in your reporting on this subject that was most surprising? When I first started reporting on abortion restrictions, I figured there was a pretty straightforward relationship between all the new anti-abortion laws going on the books and the ability to get an abortion. But over time — and there's now some really good data to show this — I saw that the relationship isn't so straightforward. Waiting periods are a good example. Those are the laws that require people to wait 24, 48, or 72 hours between their first contact or first appointment with an abortion provider and the actual abortion, so they can reconsider. Waiting periods definitely delay people from getting an abortion, but the vast majority of people who make it to appointment #1 make it to appointment #2. Oh, and we still don't have great data on self-induced abortion. We don't really know how often people try it, how often it works, who does it, and why. The forces that actually stop people who want an abortion from getting one are much more complicated and much less obvious. Money is almost always part of the problem. There are lots of laws that can make abortion more expensive. And some of the most important restrictions aren't new at all. We think about the anti-abortion movement scoring tons of victories in the past eight years — and it has — but states have been allowed to block abortion patients from using Medicaid for so long that it's almost part of the wallpaper at this point. It's almost invisible to us. What's the hardest part of reporting on this subject? No matter where you fall on the issue of abortion, I don't think many people would deny that hearing some of these stories about the desperation women are feeling can be incredibly difficult. Two years ago, I was able to read a trove of hundreds of emails that women in the U.S. had sent to an international nonprofit asking for abortion-inducing drugs. So many of these women were facing similar obstacles. Their partners were abusive and they were afraid their pregnancy would make it worse, or give their partners an excuse to stay in their lives. Or they had just gotten a new job after years of searching. Or they were teetering on the brink of financial ruin. Or they were teenagers who thought their parents would kick them out of the house for having a baby or an abortion. (The pills would make the abortion look like a miscarriage.) You would think that reading a version of the same story over and over again would allow you to have distance, but the impact personally was the opposite. Sometimes when you see the whole Matrix at once, it hurts more. Then there's the fact that the people who are most profoundly impacted by abortion restrictions are often the most difficult to represent in our stories. Just like it's easier for people with means — a working phone, reliable internet access, money, a predictable work schedule, childcare, a supportive family — to access abortion, it's easier for those people to participate in news stories. Not just because someone with a complicated life might be hesitant to speak to me — sometimes, it's just a practical thing. They have five things on their plate that are more important than returning my call. What do you want readers to take away? The Supreme Court doesn't have to overturn Roe for the country to look like it did before Roe was the law of the land. In a lot of ways, it already does. Love, |
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