Pre-Dobbs, Many Stories of Suffering Came from Catholic Hospitals. Now, They're Everywhere.

Catholic hospitals and existing religious restrictions on abortion are currently co-existing with post-Roe abortion bans across the U.S. And, in states where abortion is still accessible, Catholic hospitals are still a sizeable barrier to accessing compassionate, evidence-based medical care. Amy Littlefield, Abortion Access Correspondent at the Nation, sits down with us to discuss how trauma previously seen at Catholic hospitals when trying to access sexual and reproductive healthcare is now being seen on a more general scale.   

Catholic hospitals up 1 in 6 acute-care hospital beds and generally follow rules written by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. These rules ban abortion, fail to promote or condone contraceptive practices, ban direct sterilization of men and women, and deny care to transgender patients. Patients often don’t know they requesting care from a Catholic hospital, or that the few hospitals in their area have a religious affiliation or have merged with health systems that have a religious affiliation. For a deeper dive into care offered by Catholic hospitals, find the past podcast episode here.

Before the overturning of Roe, stories out of Catholic or religiously affiliated hospitals included patients having to wait in extreme pain while ethics review boards debated termination, patients having to demonstrate that they were “sick enough” or “deserving enough” for appropriate care, and more. Post-Roe, similar stories are being reported—more generally—at an alarming frequency around the country. Five women in Texas, who were pregnant with wanted pregnancies, were subjected to varying degrees of state-sanctioned torture as they sought necessary abortion care. The Center for Reproductive Rights is currently suing the state on their behalf. Savita Halappanavar died in Ireland after being denied an abortion and developing sepsis as a result. Medical systems waiting for pregnant patients to be “sick enough” or “close enough to death,” endangers and kills people who need and have a right to basic healthcare, including abortion. 

Links from this episode

The Nation on Twitter
The Nation on Facebook
The Southern Hospitals Report: Faith, Culture, and Abortion Bans in the US South
Remarks at Press Conference by Plaintiffs in Zurawski v. State of Texas
A Miscarrying Woman Nearly Died After a Catholic Hospital Sent Her Home Three Times
Two friends were denied care after Florida banned abortion. One almost died.
Catholic Rules Forced This Doctor to Watch Her Patient Sicken—Now, She’s Speaking Out
“She Had a Heartbeat Too”: Waiting for One Dead Woman

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Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast where we explore all things reproductive health, rights and justice. I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and I'll be helping you stay informed around issues like birth control, abortion, sex education and LGBTQ issues and much, much more-- giving you the tools you need to take action and fight back. Okay, let's dive in.

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Jennie: Welcome to this week's episode of rePROs Fight Back. I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So y'all, uh, first I'm recording this on Friday before this comes out. Um, so just things may change from what I am saying in the intro, but I'm not gonna be able to update it. So just FYI. But there is just so much going on, this week has been just utter chaos between the mife ruling coming out of Texas between and then the Fifth Circuit's ruling, which was still really terrible, to now the Biden administration is appealing to the Supreme Court and I mean, you should know at least what happens, but it happened with that by the time you're listening to this. So hopefully, fingers crossed for good news. There's just so much going on and, and we can talk about all of that and I'm sure we'll talk about all of those decisions in a future episode. But, uh, the other thing I really wanted to make sure that we took a moment to consider is that Florida passed a six week abortion ban, um, this week as well. It is not in effect yet, so, you know, it's not in effect yet, but if it were to go into effect, that would be it. That would be the end of abortion access in the South, right? Like if you look at a map, I mean from Texas all the way to Florida, all those southern states would have an abortion ban. And that is just horrifying in terms of thinking about people and how far they have to travel in order to access care. That is just a, just another devastating blow to abortion access. Again, the fight doesn't stop here. I do have a lot of hope, um, that we are going to win. I just, again, my heart breaks for all of the people who are being harmed in the meantime and we have to keep fighting. And there are so many amazing reproductive justice groups doing such good work on the ground, making sure that people are able to get the care they need with abortion funds, making sure to fund people, to help people travel to groups that are working to make sure that people are able to get abortion pills they need so they can self-manage. I mean, people getting access to telemedicine. Like there are just so many ways that people are working to ensure that people who need abortions are able to get them. It's just another huge blow that we did not need. Um, and as always, the fight continues. This is a great time as always 1) because it is fund-a-thon time, but also it's always a great time if you are able to donate to your local abortion fund or donate to an abortion fund in the south right now, that would be really amazing. People really need help get accessing what should be really basic healthcare. Yeah, so I think those are really where my head is at right now is thinking about these two huge things with the court cases around mife and the loss of abortion access in the South. Again, like I said, the Florida ban is not in effect yet. Um, it just would be really devastating if it, if it were to go into effect.

Jennie: I think with that we'll turn to this week's interview and I just, I think it's worth giving a bit of a trigger warning for this week. Um, we are talking about, um, people who are trying to, who have wanted pregnancies and, um, are miscarrying, and trying to access abortion care in states where abortion is banned. So if you don't wanna listen to any of that and there are some kind of traumatic stories that are shared, like, you know, please feel free to step away, come back at a time when it's better or if you are not able to listen, you know, that's okay too. Just, just, it's worth noting to have this conversation. I'm very, very excited to have with me Amy Littlefield and I totally forgot to have her introduce herself in the podcast. So let me do like a really quick, uh, introduction. Amy Littlefield, her pronouns are she/her and she is a, the Abortion Access Correspondent at the Nation. Um, and she's a journalist who focuses on reproductive health, reproductive rights, and religion. And I had such a wonderful time talking to Amy that I hope you all enjoy our conversation even though it is, like I said, a pretty heavy conversation. So with that, let's turn to my interview with Amy.

Jennie: Hi Amy. Thank you so much for being here today.

Amy: Hi, Jennie. It's great to be talking with you again.

Jennie: I, uh, there's like, uh, just to be crystal clear, there is so much happening this week, everything, and like, we're not even gonna touch on like a lot of those things, but just there's, there's a lot happening around medication abortion right now a lot and it feels like worth just at least putting a flag in that, that we know it's been one of those years that somehow been packed into a week.

Amy: Yes. Yeah.

Jennie: Anyway, I'm super excited to have you on to talk about Catholic hospitals and abortion, but, but also it's much more than that because Catholic hospitals are kind of all hospitals in states where abortion is banned right now. Spoiler, as we're… we'll get there. Yeah. But maybe let's start at the beginning and like, I think this is something we talked about the last time you're on the podcast, but I think it's something that unless you're like really involved in repro, I think a lot of people don't understand that like if you go to a Catholic hospital, there's different care that you are going to get around abortion.

Amy: Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like some of these restrictions that existed before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade are getting overshadowed because everyone's focused on abortion bans, which is understandable. Abortion bans are terrifying and harmful and causing distress and chaos all the time. But yeah, it was really interesting, Jennie, to go back to our 2019 conversation where we were talking about Catholic hospitals and how we were talking about how Catholic hospitals were a preview of the future that the Trump administration and anti-abortion strategists wanted to see. And now here we are in 2023 and were living that reality, right? Um, and we're living a reality where Catholic hospitals and existing religious restrictions on abortion are coexisting with abortion bans and are also still a major factor in states where abortion is easier to access than number before… like Washington State, which has a very high number of Catholic hospitals. So just to recap and do my like little Catholic hospital elevator speech, Catholic hospitals, um, which make up around about one in six acute care beds in the country, and they follow religious directives that are written by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. They forbid abortion. They do not promote or condone contraceptive practices except counseling married couples on natural family planning. They ban direct sterilization of either men or women. And of course that has been used to deny care to transgender patients in Catholic hospitals who, for example, need a hysterectomy as part of their gender transition. Um, I think we talked on the podcast before about Evan Minton, a trans man who needed a hysterectomy, was turned away from a Catholic hospital because they didn't think his need for a hysterectomy, um, was urgent enough. Um, even though they perform hysterectomies on cis women, um, for other reasons that they do think are urgent enough. So that was the landscape. And of course, you know, Catholic hospitals turn up here in my community in Massachusetts, they exist all over the country. They're not confined to states where abortion is restricted at all whatsoever. And while I was reporting at Rewire…hi kitty, sweet kitty. Which kitty is that?

Jennie: This is Cinder who feels like she needed to come say hi to everybody.

Amy: Hi Cinder. I see why you call her Cinder because she is beautifully gray colored. So it's really eerie to go back to some of the reporting that I did in the pre-Dobbs era on Catholic hospitals because the stories that we're hearing coming out now with frightening regularity about people being turned away from hospitals after their water breaks prior to viability, about people being forced to get sick and be almost at death's door before a hospital feels comfortable terminating their pregnancy, those were the types of stories that I was hearing and reporting on in Catholic hospitals and now they're happening everywhere in ban states. And so it's this constant feeling of deja vu, that these stories [that I thought I] left the Catholic hospital, they're now happening everywhere. Now huge qualifier here, which is a lot of hospitals that weren't Catholic also refused to perform abortions prior to the Dobbs decision. So some of these horror stories were happening in Protestant hospitals, in secular facilities, public hospitals in the south. Um, so, you know, people who are pregnant were being forced through this gauntlet of having to wait or having to sicken until the point of almost death in order to have their pregnancy terminated. Um, not just in Catholic hospitals, even before the Dobbs decision made it the case across the board in a lot of states.

Jennie: I think one of the things, and we'll definitely talk about abortion more as we go forward, but that I think a lot of people don't think about is that it's not just abortion that is restricted, right? It it's different forms of contraception and you may not know that's why you're being refused. I'm sure you have heard some iteration of a friend telling you a story of, “oh, I had a friend come to me who was gonna be giving birth and wanted to have her tubes tied at the same time because she was having a C-section and they told her she didn't qualify for that.” And I'm like, “I'm just gonna stop you right there. Was it a Catholic hospital?” And they were like, “yes,” but they didn't, like, the story obviously went on much further cause they had no idea that was the reason they were being denied.

Amy: Absolutely. And it's a huge problem when the Catholic hospital is the only health system in your community. If they're not gonna offer contraception, if they're not gonna offer sterilization, if they're not gonna offer gender affirming care procedures, um, where can you go? And, um, and I think that's another way in which Catholic health systems offer us a preview of the endgame here, which is that we know the religious right is coming for birth control. They've been doing that for a long time. We know that their vision is one of, you know, a complimentary role between heterosexual men and women and a world in which birth control and abortion are do not exist or not allowed, and trans people don't exist. Right? And so, um, I think this is another way that Catholic healthcare, where these hospitals operate directly under these religious rules written by bishops, offer us a glimpse into the future that religious conservatives want. And it's kind of scary that I said that to you four years ago and now here we are, um, with, you know, a dozen plus states that have banned abortion outright.

Jennie: I think the only other thing I would flag with Catholic hospitals is like, you may not know with, with hospital mergers that your hospital is actually now a Catholic hospital. They're not all gonna be St. Mary's or whatever where it's clear like with hospital mergers, like it could have been taken over by a Catholic health system and kept its name absolutely common.

Amy: Right. Spirit Health, Peace Health. These are names of, you know, huge mega systems that don't necessarily sound Catholic. You're not necessarily gonna walk in the door and see a cross on the wall. Um, or you might end up with a scenario like here, you know, my sister delivered at St. Elizabeth, which is a, a hospital in Boston, it's owned by a big for-profit, um, system. And so you can end up with these confusing relationships. Where did they follow the Catholic ethical and religious directives? Did they not, did the contract when the sale happened, require them to maintain some of these restrictions? Did the land use agreement, you know, when that hospital changed hands require them to stay Catholic? Uh, when it comes to reproductive health control, even healthcare health control kinda works.

Jennie: Yeah, yeah.

Amy: You know, did, did are there restrictions that are there even though the hospital has changed hands? Um, it's very confusing. Um, and opaque, often delivered deliberately. So, um, and so that makes it really confusing for patients, uh, especially in this landscape where now we have abortions and court battles, you know, over reproductive healthcare being waged on top of that baseline. And so yeah, you know, know your healthcare provider, ask informed questions, check the Catholic Healthcare Association website, um, you know, be aware. And the other thing is, you know, after we spoke last time about Catholic hospitals, I was involved with, with a, a report, um, that the Columbia Law Rights and Religion Project did. And we set out to look at Protestant hospitals, Seventh Day Adventist hospitals, Baptist hospitals, you know, hospitals that had a, a religious affiliation that wasn't Catholic. And we looked in particular in the south, um, where Catholic hospitals maybe weren't as prominent, and where we thought Protestant health systems might be really important. And we found two things. One is that, um, religious denominations often are still playing a huge role in the governance and leadership of these Protestant health systems. And the other is that even though we set out to study religious health systems and, and what restrictions on reproductive healthcare might be there, we found hugely pervasive restrictions, especially on abortion care in secular and public facilities all throughout the south, all throughout the Midwest, places that we weren't even trying to study. We had doctors coming to us with stories, horror stories about patients, you know, who had cancer, having their abortion care delayed because the facility, you know, didn't think that that was serious enough. And, you know, having their, their cancer treatment, um, potentially interfered with, you know, because of that. Um, stories like the ones that are emerging now about the impact of abortion bans that were happening, um, beyond Catholic hospitals as well because of pervasive abortion stigma because of, um, laws in some cases regarding public hospitals and this sort of interlocking network of restrictions, explicit and not, um, that had such a chilling effect on miscarriage management and abortion care all throughout the country. And so that was the baseline of sort of confusing and dangerous, you know, that was the baseline of abortion restrictions and stigma throughout healthcare and stigma for trans folks in this country before we had the Dobbs decision.

Jennie: Yeah, I think one… that was a great report. I definitely checked it out when it came out. Um, and then two, yeah, this was all pre-Roe. So like what are we looking at now for abortion? I mean, just for access for needed healthcare, right? In states where abortion is banned.

Amy: Yeah. I mean, it's so scary, Jennie. Like, I just wanna acknowledge like it's really scary and sad and these stories, you know, so stories that I reported on, like I reported on a woman who was sent away three times from a Catholic hospital in Washington state and almost died. She got really sick. Um, her uterus got infected. She described the pain as like the movie The Exorcist, where she was like arching off the bed in pain when her doctor, you know, did a pelvic exam. She winds up delivering her fetus in a toilet before she can get to the hospital, um, cause she's had to wait for the Catholic Hospital Ethics Board to approve her abortion to save her life. You know, she had to get sick enough. You've heard that story before, right? You have to be sick enough, you have to be dead enough. A similar story I reported on, you know, a doctor named Jessica Ralph in Wisconsin who had to watch her patient get sick and watch her get a fever and, and then didn't have mifepristone available in that Catholic hospital to help facilitate her miscarriage management. And these were the pre-Dobbs stories, right? And now what's so disturbing after Dobbs, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed states to ban abortion outright, is that these stories are everywhere. They're happening all the time. And maybe you saw the report in the Washington Post about the two friends in Florida who had, um, rupture membranes, their water broke before their fetuses were viable, right? And they're sent home and told to wait and told “there's nothing we can do for you under the state's laws.” One of those women ended up delivering a fetus into the toilet in a hair salon bathroom and then losing a lot of blood, getting so sick that she almost died. Her husband was praying that she wasn't gonna die. I mean, these horrible stories… Um, the lawsuit out of Texas that the Center for Reproductive Rights filed is another sort of collection of these horror stories. Um, this is a group of five women who were pregnant in Texas with wanted pregnancies and, um, went through varying degrees of state sanctioned torture in an effort to, to terminate pregnancies when that needed to happen. Um, the lead plaintiff on the case is a woman named Amanda Zurawski, and I just wanna talk about her story a little bit. So Amanda, um, lives in Austin. She had a wanted pregnancy she'd named the baby Willow. She was so excited to be pregnant after a year and a half of fertility treatments. And then at 17 weeks, 6 days, she gets diagnosed with an incompetent cervix, a common pregnancy complication. And she asks if there's anything that can be done, the doctors say “no, you know, sadly there's not.” She's sent home and her water breaks and she, she goes to the emergency room, she's diagnosed with premature rupture of membranes and her amniotic fluid’s gone. The pregnancy's not going to survive. But she's told that under the Texas abortion ban, there's nothing else they can do for her. So she has to go home and wait either for her wanted baby to die or for herself to go get so sick that she's considered sick enough, deserving enough of medical care in the state of Texas. And she described really powerfully the hell that this put her in, of having to wait for her pregnancy to end; the pregnancy that she wanted, or for herself to get super sick. And so what happened is she got extremely sick, she spiked a temperature of 101 degrees, she stopped responding when her husband was trying to ask her questions. This is all detailed in the Center for Reproductive Rights lawsuit. And by, by the time she's admitted to the hospital, her temperature is 102, it peaks at 103.2 degrees. And at that point, the hospital thought, “okay, she's sick enough, she's almost dead enough for us to deliver her without violating the Texas abortion ban.” And but her, her saga was not over because her, she was so sick. And, and the thing is, in these cases, you can get so sick so fast, um, that she winds up in the intensive care unit, her family flies into Austin from across the country because they are afraid that she's going to die and they're ready to say goodbye to her. She's in her mid-thirties, so, and she's still dealing with it. She survives, she's discharged, but she's still got scar tissue and, and just think of the trauma. And this, so this is one story, and it, it's like, Jennie, I'm telling you this because as a journalist, I know the power that these stories have. I'm like, “here, let me show you the evidence. Let me tell you how dead this woman was. Let me tell you what this state of Texas did to her.” And then on some level, I'm like, we should not have to tell these stories again and again, right? Like, these women should not have to stand up at a press conference and relive the most horrific moment of their lives again and again and again. And that's, that's what's happening all the time. Um, it feels like, to me it feels like it's happening all the time these days that these stories are coming out. And the last thing I just wanna say about Amanda’s story, and I noticed this recently when I was looking at the Center for Reproductive Rights website, it happened in a Catholic hospital. And so it happened in a facility where they've got Texas's many layers of abortion bans, including the, the pre-Roe ban, the six week bounty hunter ban, and the trigger ban, you know, all swirling around in Texas and, and being in effect or not in effect at various points in time. And then they've also got the Catholic ethical and religious directives that tell them, “you can't terminate a pregnancy unless the woman's almost dead.” Anyway. So what happens in these situations is often medical providers and hospital lawyers are way more conservative than the letter of the law might allow. And so even if there's an exception, which there generally is, that says “yes, you can intervene and do an abortion at the last moment when the woman's about to die, when the pregnant person is about to die.” It doesn't always happen the way that, you know, lawmakers imagine it's gonna happen.

Jennie: There are just like so many thoughts pinging around in my head right now, the like, why must we continually like dig up and share our trauma to be seen as full people? Like for abortions, for intimate partner violence, for sexual assault, like for all of this. Like why do we keep having to have really strong people come out and continually bear their pain to be seen as like full people? So that was like one bucket of things that was like going through my head. And then the other was thinking all of this, all of this, like, “Is she, is the pregnant person almost dead enough to get abortion” is happening at the same time as a huge maternal health crisis in this country. The US has like the worst maternal mortality rate of a developed countries, and this is all happening together. And that worst, uh, among developing country before Dobbs. So like, what are we going to see now? And that's scary in so many ways that it was already terrible and it's probably gonna get worse. Right?

Amy: Right. It's so, it's so hard. And just the amount of bravery and dignity that these women have to stand up and share these stories, you know, and at this press conference, they got up one after another and shared these, you know, “my fetus didn't have a brain and my state denied me, you know, the, the care that I needed.” I mean, it's so harrowing. And again, like as a journalist, I feel like I wanna tell you these stories. I wanna tell you like, this was, this is how high the fever was. This is how almost dead she was. And I sometimes wonder about that pattern, right? Because what are we saying, like that there's only one deserving abortion patient and she's almost dead? You know, this sort of like archetype of the almost dead person who deserves an abortion. That's the paradigm in a lot of these healthcare facilities right now, either because of religious rules or because of the law or both. But like, I wanna try not to follow it, you know, I wanna try to avoid it. And, and I think there's also the powerful storytelling that's happening from groups like We Testify, of people who've had abortions and are happy about it, of people who had abortions for the simple and equally justifiable reason that they didn't wanna be pregnant in that moment. And so I think we have to remember the history of this archetype too, which is that this comes from the 19th century. It comes from a moment when doctors were professionalizing, were trying to assert their control over the medical system and drive lay healers out of the picture and ban abortion as part of that process. And the exceptions for abortion bans were for the almost dead. And who got to make that determination? The doctors did. And so that's the legacy of this sort of idea that, you know, abortion is not okay unless you're sick or almost dead. You know, the language in some of these exceptions in in the abortion bans are just, I mean, “impairment of a major bodily function,” you know, um, just the precision with which lawmakers and hospital officials are routinely considering how profound the suffering of the pregnant person must be before an abortion is justified.

Jennie: It's really heavy. Well, and then when does almost dead become somebody dies? And like, are we gonna hear their story with all of the things happening and like, will it change anything? Right? Like there was a death in Ireland that that led to a huge revolution and change, but like, I don't know if the same thing would happen here. Right?

Amy: Right. I mean, that's being generous. I doubt the same thing would happen here, right? Right away. I mean, and that's where, you know, I wrote this piece for the Nation about what it's like writing repeatedly about almost dead women and waiting for someone to die, which I think is how I often feel covering this beat in this moment. I was listening to Amanda tell her story and driving, and I was this feeling, this sick heavy feeling of like, I've heard this story before. I've reported this story before, even before Dobbs. And these brave people who have gone through these experiences keep coming forward and telling these stories and telling these stories. And like the journalism profession relies on the presumption that you tell the story enough times it's gonna make a difference. But we're living in such un undemocratic reality in some of these states, you know, and with the Supreme Court being in charge of making decisions when it comes to abortion that, you know, it's hard to see a path forward, um, sometimes. And so, right, like the story you're referring to in Ireland, Savita Halappanavar, who had a very similar experience, the one we've just been talking about, um, you know, she goes to the hospital, um, she is told that under Ireland's eighth amendment, um, the fetus she's carrying is protected because it has a heartbeat. Her water's broken at 17 weeks, she developed sepsis. And whereas Amanda, you know, ended up in the ICU and almost died, but was able to, you know, be brought back, um, and survived, Savita did not. And thousands of people rallied in the streets. They, you know, held up her portrait, they said never again. And six years later they repealed the eighth amendment in a referendum. So it's clear that under the right conditions, one death can be enough to change a country. And I sometimes feel like I'm waiting for our dead woman, I'm waiting for our death, our dead trans or non-binary person. And I, you know, I started to imagine her or him or them and what they're doing right now, statistically, given what we know about people who have abortions, um, they're probably a parent, you know, someone who will be missed by a child. So, and, and you know, the Black Lives Matter movement and the movement for trans lives show us that deaths can be political rallying cries and can build movements. And yet if the person who dies is not, you know, a person who society is interested in putting on a pedestal, you know, if they're Black or brown or poor, then that death might not be enough to shake the foundations of our, you know, racist misogynist system.

Jennie: Yeah. And it just makes me think that like, you know, they need to be like the perfect victim, right? Like, I don't, like I know long term, I have lots of, for where we're gonna get, I just, it's the getting there and like what is going to be the spark? I, dunno, I'm, yeah, maybe I'm just feeling this has been a rough week, so it's been a rough week.

Amy: But yeah, I think about Rosie Jimenez, right? The first known person to die from the Hyde amendment, from the ban on federal funding of abortion. She had her, you know, Medicaid coverage of abortion was no longer an option for her. She went to an unsafe provider, um, in 1977 and she died in Macallan, Texas. And, you know, I recently read a book, um, by a journalist named Ellen Frankfurt about Rosie and the amount of work it took to prove that she had died tangibly because of the Hyde amendment. Um, and you know, like we're talking about her, right? That journalist chronicled her last moment, she turned a dark, greenish brown color, blood came out of her eyes. I mean, here it's like, here's the evidence, here's how bad it was. Here's, here's what your policy did. And yet there was a hesitation to rally around Rosie Jimenez, right? She was Latina, she lived in a border town, you know, she, um, she was not what you said, the perfect victim. Um, she was a mom, she was complicated. So that was a case where, you know, we know her story, reproductive justice activist continued to tell her story, but the Hyde amendment is still here. It's been renewed every year.

Jennie: So, okay, that's the dark part. I don't, like, I'm not someone who wants us to wallow in despair at all, because I think that's an excuse for inaction. So what, what can we do to change this?

Amy: Yeah.

Jennie: Like, I, I agree. Like I try to, like, I can't sit and think about the specific people or things too much because that does, that way leads to despair for me. And I need to keep fighting and keep moving. So one of the things that keeps me going is like, what can we do? What, what needs to happen to change this?

Amy: Yes, I love that. And I'll say like, I'll tell you my step one, like my practice of finding hope, because I think it's mandatory, is looking at the beautiful and brave ways that reproductive justice activists are finding to show up for each other all the time. You know, the abortion pill circulation networks in this country, formal and informal, the way that friends are helping each other through moments of crisis. The fact that right now, when the future of medication abortion is in question, we are seeing people seeking out advanced provision so that they can have those pills on hand for themselves or someone else so that they can be ready. The fact that abortion funds are organizing airlifts and moving mountains and, you know, um, that organizations like Just the Pill are, you know, have mobile vans out there, ready to receive traveling abortion patients. Um, that stuff gives me hope because I see people taking care of each other and helping each other survive through these really difficult odds. And I also think like the popularity of abortion rights, the recent results we've seen with the Wisconsin State Supreme Court election ballot referendum, where the abortion rights side has prevailed, show us that there's a deepening divide between policies like the ones that are preventing people from getting abortions on the ground, whether they're almost dead or they just need an abortion, right? And, and public opinion. And I, I don't know that I necessarily believe in the courts, but I do believe in social movements. And I know that the movement for abortion rights is stronger and more robust and more diverse and angrier than I've ever seen it. And that gives me hope. So, you know, if we look back to the case in Ireland, it wasn't just Savita’s death that changed Ireland, right? It was a social movement involving lawyers, you know, people who knew the law, doctors, people who knew medicine, like all levels, grassroots activists, like people were ready. And, um, and I see the groundwork being laid for that now. I really do.

Jennie: Yeah. It is amazing the ways that groups are working together. People are working together to bring this change about, to make sure that people are always gonna be able to access abortion. So even if the mife ban stays in place, making sure that people know, okay, so that isn't gonna work. Okay, here there is this miso-only method, it is WHO-approved, here are the pathways to go to get that, and we'll make sure it's available. Like abortion should be in our hands and the groups that are really fighting to make sure that that stays true. And it's great to see. And yeah, it's definitely the things that give me hope.

Amy: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Jennie: Okay, Amy, as always, it was lovely to talk to you. Thank you for being here.

Amy: Thank you so much for having me. It's always great to talk with you.

Jennie: Okay, y'all, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Amy. Um, like I said, it was really heavy and, um, it's just, again, there is a lot. I do have hope, but thinking of, of all of these pregnant people who are having to almost die to access the care that they need is just really traumatizing. And, um, yeah, it, it's not good.

Jennie: Thanks for listening everyone. And we'll see you on our next episode of RePROS Fight Back. For more information, including show notes from this episode and previous episodes, please visit our website at reprosfightback.com. You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter at RePROS Fight Back, or on Instagram at reprosfb. If you like our show, please help others find it by sharing it with your friends and subscribing, rating and reviewing us on iTunes. Thanks for listening.