The American Anti-Abortion Movement’s Terrifying Reach Across the World

Trigger warning: In this episode we talk about sexual assault and descriptions of unsafe abortions. Please engage with challenging content with caution.

45% of the 73 million abortions a year are unsafe. One of the reasons they are unsafe is due to U.S. policies that place restrictions on how family planning-related foreign assistance is used. Jodi Enda, Washington Bureau Chief and Senior Correspondent for The Fuller Project, sits down to talk with us about the multiple tools used by the U.S.-- including the Helms amendment and the Global Gag Rule-- and how far their harmful reach truly extends. 

These unsafe abortions result in approximately 39,000 preventable maternal deaths and millions of complications each year. The U.S. is the biggest healthcare funder in the world, as well as the biggest funder of family planning assistance. Still, The Helms amendment and the Global Gag Rule both impact U.S. funding and U.S. global health assistance as it relates to abortion care, albeit in different ways. These foreign policies disproportionately impact access to abortion care for those who have experienced sexual violence, those who are in conflict and humanitarian settings, and those of low-incomes.

Links from this episode

The Terrifying Global Reach of the American Anti-Abortion Movement
The Fuller Project
Jodi Enda Author Page on Ms. Magazine
Global Health, Empowerment, and Rights (HER) Act
Abortion is Health Care Everywhere Act

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Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. [music intro]

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Hi rePROs! How's everybody doing? I'm your host Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So y'all, I'm feeling, like, a little rejuvenated this week. I had so much fun going down to the Supreme Court last week and being able to take part in some protesting. It has been a very long time since I have gone to the Supreme Court for one of the rallies, and it was just reenergizing. I got to see friends, I got to protest, like, it was wonderful. I think I've talked about before how I get really bad anxiety in, like, crowds, big crowds. So, I've avoided a lot of the, like, really big protests 'cause I just start to like, I'm fine, I'm fine, and then I am not fine and I need to be gone. But the ones at the Supreme Court are generally smaller and if I start to feel a little overwhelmed, I can just run back to our office, which is right there. So, it is like the ideal situation for me. It's easy to get out. I can get to the office and get away from the crowds and just be done. So yeah, it was so much fun. I really enjoyed it. Let's see, what else? Oh, so, you know, I think I've talked about this before, that we are slowly uploading all of our old episodes of rePROs to YouTube because Google podcasts is no more, goodbye Google Podcasts. But anyway, you can find almost all of the old episodes now on YouTube. Very exciting. And, you know, there's, like, knowing things and then there's, like, seeing them, right? Like I know that my trans friends get so much more hate on social and all the things, but it was still surprising to me, you know, uploading the podcast to YouTube within a day of any of our episodes dealing with any issue related to transgender rights, we have gotten a bunch of comments, negative comments and, like, dislikes on our videos and it's just so shocking of, like, all the many things we talk about, which could be by some deemed controversial. I mean, I don't find abortion rights controversial or trans rights frankly but, like, none of the others really get that level of interaction and definitely don't get like, comments and like the dislike votes on them in the same way, but on, yeah, within a day of anything related to trans rights going on YouTube, all of a sudden a number of views, a bunch of dislike votes and tons of like transgender comments and...ew, what is wrong with people? Anyhow, I just, it makes me really frustrated and like, it makes me sad to know that like, this is not even like an in decimal of a fraction of what transgender people on social media have to deal with on a day in and day out basis. Yeah. But it was like I said, it was different to see it happening firsthand on all of these videos as they come out. Anywho, so if you see any of our transgender videos on there, be sure to like them because whew, they have gotten a lot of hate. Yeah, I think I might leave it there and move to this week's episode because I'm really excited about it. I feel like it's been a while since we've talked about global abortion issues and global repro issues broader. And so, I'm very excited about this week's episode, but I do wanna give a couple trigger warnings, particularly for the beginning of the interview. One, we do talk about rape at the very beginning, and we also talk about unsafe abortion a couple times throughout the episode about what is happening in some of the countries in the Global South. So, if you don't want to hear that or you're not in a place to hear it today, please come back at a different time. If you don't wanna hear the talk about rape, if you skip like five minutes into the interview, you'll miss that story at the beginning. Just thought it was really important to start with the story so that way, we could hear the impacts of the US policies on people. So, you know, do what you need to do, what is best for you. But just know that we do talk about a rape at the very beginning and unsafe abortion and unsafe abortion practices in a couple places in the interview. Okay, with that, let's turn to my interview with Jodi Enda with the Fuller Project, talking about this really great piece she wrote looking at how US anti-abortion groups are having a global impact. So, let's go to my interview with Jodi. Hi Jodi! Thank you so much for being here today.

Jodi: Thank you for having me.

Jennie: So, before we dig into this interview, do you wanna take a second and introduce yourself and include your pronouns?

Jodi: Sure. My name is Jodi Enda. I'm the Washington Bureau chief and senior correspondent for the Fuller Project. And my pronouns are she/her.

Jennie: Jodi, I'm really happy to have you here today, one 'cause it's been so long since I've talked global on the podcast, but two, I really enjoyed the piece you wrote recently talking about the global reach of the US anti-abortion movement. And I think it's really important that people think about that because it has had huge global impacts. I mean, even just recently thinking through the Uganda decision around the anti LGBTQ law, they cited the Dobbs decision. So like, this is all the same world.

Jodi: Absolutely. What happens in the US affects the rest of the world, and that's true in so many different areas and it's especially true when it comes to our family planning policies.

Jennie: So, since it has been a while since I've talked global, I thought a really good place to start our conversation is like centering it on the people who are impacted. And I think you did such a brilliant job of illustrating it in your article by centering it on a story. Would you like to tell the story that you started the article with?

Jodi: Sure. I interviewed a woman in Nairobi, Kenya, whose name is Editar Ochieng. Editar is 35 years old, and she now works at an advocacy organization to empower young women. The reason that she got to this place in her life is that in 2006, when she was 16 years old, she was raped. She was raped by three young men whom she knew. One of them was like a brother to her. And she was walking near the river in Nairobi in a somewhat isolated area when they beckoned her into a house. And because she knew them, she didn't think much of it and she went in and she was raped and then she got pregnant as a result of the rape. In Kenya, abortion is, for the most part illegal and Editar being 16 years old, didn't really know what to do, but she knew she didn't wanna have a baby. She didn't tell her parents, she didn't go to a hospital, she didn't go to the police because abortion was mostly illegal anyway, and she didn't think anything would happen as a result of it. Instead, she and a friend found an untrained abortion practitioner who performed a very painful abortion on her by sticking some sort of object into her. And the main thing that Editar remembers about it was the pain, the intense pain of this abortion. It would've cost her $280 US dollars at the time to find a trained abortion provider. It cost $43 to use an untrained provider. She didn't even have that much money. She had to borrow it from her friend who took it out of her college fund. That's really her story. People in Kenya don't earn very much money, and two thirds of the people there live on less than $3.20 a day. And Editar at the time was still in high school, so she didn't have an income. And again, she didn't go to her parents because of the stigma, and she thought that they would suggest it was her fault. This is what happens with a lot of women. In a way though, she was fortunate because she, despite the fact that she had a lot of pain, she made it out alive. And she's telling her story today so that other girls and women don't have to go through what she went through.

Jennie: So, a lot of people may hear this story and go, that's really sad, but like, what does this have to do with US abortion policy?

Jodi: Yeah, that's a really good question and I probably should have explained that, but I will now.

Jennie: No, but I think it's like a really good place to start is to center it with that story. But yeah, like...

Jodi: Yeah. So-

Jennie: Why are we talking about it?

Jodi: Right. Well, we're talking about it because in the world as a whole, 45% of the 73 million abortions a year are unsafe. And they're unsafe for a number of reasons, one of which is US policies that are placed on foreign assistance and that place restrictions on how you can use family planning money. Those unsafe abortions cause about 39,000 maternal deaths each year and millions of complications. Women end up in hospitals or with untrained practitioners trying to seek help from the complications that result from these very dangerous abortions. Why is America involved in this? Well, in the 1960s, the United States started getting involved in family planning overseas because policymakers were concerned about a population explosion around the world. And they were particularly concerned about this happening in countries that were still developing. And those mostly were populated by Black and brown people. And in those days, in the 1960s, a lot of policymakers considered those people to be biologically and socially inferior. This is according to a book called The Global Gag Rule and Women's Reproductive Health by Yana Rodgers, who is the Director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University. In 1968, the US began distributing birth control in developing countries and then the Nixon administration and George H. W. Bush, who was then the US Ambassador to the United Nations, established an organization called the UN Fund for Population Activities, or UNFPA—it has a different name now, but the same acronym—which became the world's largest provider of donated contraceptives. So, if you wanna get back into it with that, we could just add that George H. W. Bush who, as you know, went on to become president, was such a strong supporter of family planning assistance that in Congress he was known as "Rubbers." So, all was going along smoothly with this contraceptive distribution until 1973. Well, we all know what happened in 1973, the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade. You would think that that would be a positive in terms of family planning around the world. But a lot of people in the United States were upset with Roe. Conservatives pushed Congress to do something about it. But as you know the other thing that was going on in 1973, or one of the other things going on in 1973 was the Women's Rights Movement. It was very strong at the time, and Congress could not do anything about Roe. So, what did they do? They looked to do something overseas so that they could tell the anti-abortion forces in the United States that they were doing something. So, at the end of 1973a senator named Jesse Helms from North Carolina, very conservative proposed legislation that would be attached to foreign assistance. And this is called the Helms Amendment. And since the end of 1973, this amendment has prohibited foreign governments and non-governmental organizations, NGOs, from using United States Foreign Assistance as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to practice abortion, even in countries where abortion is legal. So, that was the first thing that happened that restricted how United States Foreign Assistance could be used. But that wasn't enough.

Jennie: And honestly, I'd be a terrible advocate if I didn't point out the way that is written. There is some wiggle room in there, right? Like it is...can't use it as a method of family planning. It seems to leave open some space for some exceptions that we usually allow that could be allowed. But it has always been implemented in country as a total blanket ban. And I think that's really important to point out because there are so many instances, particularly like in areas of conflict or something where we're talking about sexual assault, where, you know, if you're talking about rape, that there could be exceptions in the country in the us but they are not applied similarly within Helms.

Jodi: That's exactly right. Excellent points, Jennie, thank you for adding that. So, you might recall that in 1980, a strong force in the election of Ronald Reagan was the Moral Majority. Moral Majority was a group of conservative activists who really wanted more anti-abortion policies. And Reagan gave them that. In 1984, during a population conference in Mexico City, his administration announced something called the Mexico City Policy. And under that policy, which was layered on top of the Helms Amendment, foreign organizations that accepted US family planning money couldn't provide abortions, counseling, or even advocate for abortion rights, even with non-US money. So, if they got money from other countries, if they raised money on their own from other donors, individual foundations, they still couldn't use that money for anything abortion-related if they also accepted US dollars. Now, this was a policy that was implemented through executive order. So, Reagan imposed the policy and every Republican president since him has imposed the policy but no democratic president has. So, we have this ping pong situation where whenever there's a Republican president, they invoke the Mexico City policy, and then when we have a Democratic president, they revoke it. So, the NGOs in other countries, you know, have this kind of weird back and forth situation where they sometimes can do things and sometimes can't do things with US money.

Jennie: And that only applied to family planning money back then.

Jodi: That applied to family planning money up until recently. And let me just pause to tell you that the very first study that was done on the Mexico City policy by the University of Michigan School of Public Health at the end of Reagan's term in the beginning of 1989, said that that policy caused 380,000 unwanted pregnancies, additional unwanted pregnancies, 311,000 births, 69,000 abortions, and 1,200 maternal deaths. So, you see what the policy does, what the Mexico City policy does is it causes maternal deaths, but it doesn't even work to reduce the number of abortions because the problem is the same medical centers, clinics and practitioners that either provide abortion or talk about, council abortion, they're also the ones that distribute contraception. And if they're not distributing contraception, then more people get pregnant. More people have unwanted pregnancies equals more abortions. And because they can't always get safe abortions, it means more unsafe abortions. So, the policy really backfired, but that didn't change that it was implemented with every Republican president.

Jennie: And it's like a really hard bargain that the choices that organizations are forced to make. Do you take this large pot of money and restrict your other activities that are core to your mission, right? Do you not provide abortions with your non-US money? Do you not counsel with your non-US money? Like, or do you take this huge pot of money and be able to at least provide the family planning services? And you can't blame organizations who decide to take that choice, but it's a really hard balancing act that people have to take when they're trying to provide care to their patients.

Jodi: It's very difficult. And for a lot of organizations, it depends on whether they can afford to forego the money, because for some of them, a full 90% of their budget comes from the United States. The United States is the biggest funder of healthcare in the world, and the biggest funder of family planning assistance. So, if you get 90% of your budget from the United States, it's pretty hard to pass that by. If you're, you know, if maybe if you get a much smaller percentage, you can skip it for the four years or the eight years of Republican presidency, but then you have to try to find the money elsewhere or cut back on services. And that leads us to the Trump administration. If you want me to go there, Jennie, are you ready for Trump?

Jennie: Never. I am never ready to talk- to go back to those four years, but yes, let's, let's talk about it.

Jodi: Okay. So first, we have to talk for a moment about nomenclature because President Reagan called this policy the Mexico City policy. People who didn't like the policy called it something else. They called it the Global Gag Rule because it really prevented practitioners from talking about abortion, so they were gagged. When Trump came into office, he expanded the rule and renamed it. He called it Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance, which is a real mouthful. The acronym P-L-G-H-A is something that very few people actually use. So-

Jennie: No.

Jodi: So, now people just call it the Global Gag Rule, at least people who are opposed to it. What the Trump administration did in 2016...2017, sorry, is they expanded the Mexico City policy from just pertaining to family planning to pertaining to all healthcare assistance in the United States that the United States provided. So, it went from affecting about $560 million a year to $12 billion. And that was just in 2018, about two thirds of that money went to PEPFAR. PEPFAR is a very famous, well-known program that stands for the President's emergency plan for AIDS relief. And Jennie, do you remember who was president when PEPFAR what took place?

Jennie: I am pretty sure that would be the other Bush.

Jodi: That's right, the younger Bush. And that was a very big part of his legacy, some would say the most successful part of his legacy. Bush really advocated for and created PEPFAR with a bipartisan majority in Congress. And it was very successful. It's been said that it has saved 25 million lives around the world since it was implemented. So now, PEPFAR has been cut and family planning has been cut. And then in 2019, the Trump administration under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expanded the policy even more so that now contractors in different countries who took US aid could no longer use subcontractors that had any abortion-related activities, even if what they were subcontracting for had nothing to do with abortion or even with family planning. And they couldn't do it even if they paid the subcontractors with their own money. So, that further restricted and complicated enforcement of this. A lot of these clinics are not that big, and they might have contracted with another provider for one part of their service, for instance, cancer screening. And if the people who did the cancer screening also did anything that had to do with abortion, even if they were using their own money to pay them, they couldn't use them. So, that really limited how these organizations could operate. At the end of the Trump administration, the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is an organization that was founded during the administration of Abraham Lincoln, did a study on the impact of Trump's expanded rule. And it said, during the four years of the Trump Administration from January 2017 to January 2021, the rule caused 108,000 maternal and child deaths, 360,000 new HIV infections and led to an untold number of other complications because the rule affected so many areas of health. It affected, in addition to family planning, and of course family planning and HIV are connected, it also affected things like malaria, tuberculosis, cancer testing and screening. So, there were a lot of people who weren't getting the services they need. And a lot of clinics that cut back on what they were able to provide and many that closed around the world. And we're talking about the poorest countries in the world here, many of them are in Africa, South America, and some are in Asia.

Jennie: I think one of the things I, that is also really troubling, like, thinking back to the story at the beginning is that people then seek unsafe abortions because the clinics that the US is funding can't have abortion care depending on if GGR is in place or not. And it means that they turn to unsafe abortions, but then if they get an unsafe abortion and need post-abortion care, they can go to those same clinics that they were prevented from getting a safe abortion at to receive care. And this isn't to say they shouldn't be providing post-abortion care, they obviously should be, but fixing the harm that you caused is not helpful, right? Like, they should be able to get that safe abortion care from a trusted provider in the first place.

Jodi: Yeah, it costs a lot of money to provide post-abortion care. And it, for instance, in Kenya, the largest hospital in Nairobi has a whole ward just for post-abortion care. So, even though most abortions in Kenya are illegal, post-abortion care is legal. So, the care in the hospital and in those clinics had to go up during this time. The other side effect is that when a lot of clinics close, people don't get any healthcare because in some of these countries, there are a lot of remote towns and villages. And for instance, I talked to a woman who runs a network of family planning clinics—not only family planning clinics, but medical clinics that provide all sorts of care, but family planning is a big part of that—and she said that they had to close 25 clinics during the Trump administration, and that in a lot of those villages, people would have to walk a whole day to get to another healthcare provider. Well, you might be working, you might have children to watch. It's not so easy to take a day and walk to get a health exam. So, a lot of people didn't get their services. And in fact, she said that they had to cut two-thirds of their services and could no longer serve 200,000 people.

Jennie: You know, that is one of the things that like in our space was talked about a lot, but I think wasn't getting as much attention in like the broader news coverage about Global Gag Rule is with the expanded coverage under or expanded version of it under the Trump administration. The Obama administration had spent the previous eight years working on integrating health systems so that you didn't have to go to this clinic to get HIV treatment and this clinic to get this and this clinic to get that. It was trying to get it so that you could go to the clinic and get healthcare, and then you have this new administration coming in and targets all of the health money. And all that integration that was happening then ended up being so harmful because all that money was tied together.

Jodi: Yeah. It just made it really difficult. And now we have Trump running for president again. So it's likely that if he wins, he would put his policy back in place or even make it more restrictive.

Jennie: A worse policy.

Jodi: Well, yeah.

Jennie: If you believe Project 2025, it's gonna be worse.

Jodi: Well, Jennie, you beat me to it because the Heritage Foundation has drafted a very comprehensive document called Project 2025, and they wanna expand the Mexico City policy or the Global Gag Rule, or whatever you wanna call it, to all foreign assistance, which would be much, much bigger than even what President Trump did when he was in office. So, there's just no telling what impact that would have on healthcare around the world and in, in some of the places where people already struggled to get healthcare. And we, you know, who knows then how many more unsafe abortions there would be and how many more maternal deaths there would be.

Jennie: I have to say before we move on, like one of the things that brought a smile to my cold advocate heart is seeing you talk about the Geneva Consensus. It's not something we've spent a lot of time talking about on the podcast, but in my life outside of the podcast, it's like this thing that will never die, and it keeps coming back up. And yeah. So, seeing it talked about in your article was great.

Jodi: Yeah. I mean, one of the last things that Trump did before he looked left office was advocate for and sign the Geneva Consensus Declaration which essentially said that abortion was immoral and shouldn't be practiced anywhere in the world. The Biden administration revoked that. But who knows, that's another thing that could come back. I mean it's been signed by a bunch of repressive countries around the globe.

Jennie: And I will channel the wonderful Rachel Moynihan at UNFPA as she always likes to point out, whenever the Geneva consensus comes up, it's made to sound like a big UN project that has like global agreement. It was neither done in Geneva, nor is it a consensus document. So, shout out Rachel.

Jodi: We always like clarifications as journalists, right?

Jennie: Okay. So, we kind of talked about the impacts that we're seeing kind of throughout, but maybe we could just go back, like, we started with a story of like one person trying to access an abortion.

Jodi: Mm-hmm.

Jennie: So, how do all these policies, like, come together to impact a person on the ground's access?

Jodi: Well, they make it a lot harder. And frankly, the, the poorer you are, the poorer your country is, and the less available legal abortion is, the harder it is for you as a pregnant person to access abortion, to find somebody who can do it, who can provide an abortion at a rate that you can pay for to get access to abortion pills, which, you know, are not readily available in some places. I mean, it's just very hard. And, you know, there are stories—again, I interviewed a lot of people in Kenya—when people don't have access to abortion, they often try very desperate things. Sometimes they try drinking toxic liquids or sticking foreign objects into their vaginas to try to induce abortion. Sometimes they have a baby and then they drown it in the river. And this is not uncommon. Babies are found regularly in the Nairobi River, newborns, and as well as in the drainage system. And, you know, these are babies that, you know, I know that the people who oppose abortion often talk about fetuses suffering. These are babies that were born and maybe they wouldn't have had to suffer if there had been a better option for their parents. So, that's just really a sad situation. And these, we know that these policies lead to these problems. There have been many, many studies that have been done over the five decades since the Helms Amendment was first enacted. And the common theme of these studies is that whenever- the two policies increase abortions and increase unsafe abortions and maternal deaths. The most famous one of those studies, and I don't wanna talk about studies too much, but there was one done by Stanford. So, it's not done by an advocacy group. This is done by researchers and peer reviewed; it was in the Lancet in 2019. It said that abortions increase 40% in countries that are highly exposed to the Mexico City policy, that a lot of those were because people did not have birth control. Birth control was down 14% and pregnancy was up 12%. So, this is happening all over, and you know, most, again, mostly in poorer countries in Africa and, and South America.

Jennie: Okay, so how can we fix this? Like, what can we do to fix this?

Jodi: To be honest, Jennie, it would require Congress to do something permanent. Congress would have to both repeal the Helms Amendment, which has been in place since the end of 1973. And it also would have to pass legislation to prevent future presidents from enacting the Mexico City policy or any other new version of that legislation. Congress did try- Democrats in Congress did try in 2020 to repeal the Helms Amendment, but Republicans in the Senate put it back in the Foreign Assistance Bill. There is legislation again to do that. There's also legislation to prevent future presidents from enacting the Mexico City policy. But, you know, I think we all know this, Congress is not gonna do it. It's a divided Congress and, you know, the House is Republican so it's unlikely to come up for- even to come up for vote and it wouldn't pass. So, the only way to change this would be to have more members of Congress who support abortion rights and who support removing restrictions from foreign assistance. It's not like we haven't had that in the past. I mean, we've had now 50 years of the Helms Amendment, and nothing has changed. So, it would also require some members of Congress paying attention to this issue. There are a few now, mostly women, who are paying attention and who have introduced this legislation, but it-

Jennie: And shout out Senator Booker in the Senate, who is the lead of the Abortion Is Healthcare Everywhere Act to repeal in the Senate.

Jodi: Mm-hmm.

Jennie: One man.

Jodi: It would, yes, good point. And there's one Republican who has signed on to one of the bills, and that's Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Other than that-

Jennie: That's the Global HER Act.

Jodi: Exactly. Thank you. But yeah, it's gonna require a lot more- it's gonna require a real concerted effort and that will require voters.

Jennie: Yes. So, since you're a reporter, I'm not gonna ask the usual question, which is what can our audience do? Because I know that might get into sticky ground for you, but Jodi told you about the wonderful bills that are out there, the Abortion Is Healthcare Everywhere Act and the Global HER Act. It's important to let your members of Congress know that you support them and would like to see these policies gone. Since Jodi can't say it, I will!

Jodi: [Laughs] No, no, it's fine. I was just gonna say there, there are still, you know, plenty of people who oppose abortion rights on the other side of the issue, both in Congress and in the general public who are powerful. And I do wanna add one important thing, which is that I reached out to a lot of abortion opponents before I wrote this story, and none of them would talk to me. I did receive a couple of emails from abortion groups, not from any elected officials, but from the leaders of a couple of anti-abortion groups. And they said that they did not believe the statistics that came out of all these studies. They did not think that these policies have increased the number of abortions or maternal deaths. However, I invited them to send me studies that showed otherwise and they did not. I also contacted some members of Congress who are the leaders on the anti-abortion front. And none of them called me back or emailed me. And I gave them many chances to comment because as a journalist, I do try to reach out to everybody on this. And as I noted earlier, a lot of the people I talked to were not advocates on either side, but researchers for universities and they all came up with the same conclusions.

Jennie: Yeah. And I think it's really important to note that, like, the opponents have been looking for more and more places to try and insert these harmful anti-abortion policies. You know, you talked about the history of PEPFAR being really bipartisan, but it's really gotten hung up in the last year over abortion politics and you just keep seeing it, trying to be inserted in so many places where it hasn't been before. I remember several years ago there was a bill to end child marriage that had been moving very smoothly and easily along, and somebody put out a call saying it was related to abortion. It very much was not. But it's being used to target not just family planning and reproductive health, but just anything related to gender as well.

Jodi: Yeah. And we've seen that post-Dobbs now with IVF and other issues that now are flowing through the states and through state legislatures in this case. And so, you know, who knows what's gonna come up next year, but this is a problem for women around the world.

Jennie: Well Jodi, thank you so much. I had a great time getting to talk to you about global stuff today.

Jodi: Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm just thrilled that you were interested.

Jennie: Okay, y'all, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Jodi. Like I said, I really enjoyed being able to talk to her about global issues. It has been a while. Don't worry, we'll have some more global stuff coming up soon, but it has been really fun being able to do some global stuff on the podcast. And with that, I will wrap it up and we will see you next week. [music outro] If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jennie@reprosfightback.com or you can find us on social media. We're at @RePROsFightBack on Facebook and Twitter or @reprosfb on Instagram. If you love our podcast and wanna make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you wanna make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at reprofightback.com. Thanks all!