The Dominican Republic and Brazil: A Glimpse into our Abortion Future?

Abortion is impossible to access in the Dominican Republic and extremely inaccessible in Brazil. Misinformation, gender-based violence, and influences from the harmful U.S. anti-abortion movement are contributing to rates of higher need in countries where abortion access is remarkably difficult. Garnet Henderson, Senior Reporter at Rewire News Group and host and producer of ACCESS: A Podcast About Abortion, sits down to talk with us about the current status of abortion in the Dominican Republic and Brazil.

Abortion is completely illegal with no exceptions in the Dominican Republic, which has one of the higher maternal mortality rates in the Americas and very high rates of child marriage and gender-based violence. In addition, the Dominican Republic and Haiti have a history of forced sterilization, stemming from a history of conflict between the two countries. In Brazil, abortion is illegal with an exception to save the life of the pregnant person who has been a victim of rape or incest, or in the case of fetal anencephaly. Medical providers also refuse to participate in abortion at very high rates in the country, where crisis pregnancy centers are beginning to pop up and rates of sexual violence are high.

Links from this episode

Garnet Henderson on X
Under Brazil’s Abortion Ban, ‘Lack of Information Kills’
Members of Brazil’s Far-Right Are Importing U.S.-Style Anti-Abortion Tactics
The Dominican Republic Women Who ‘Do Not Exist to the State’
In the Dominican Republic, I Saw Broken U.S. Abortion Policy Firsthand
ACCESS: A Podcast About Abortion

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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, before we get started, let's do just a little bit of housekeeping. One, as always, if you love the podcast, if you can take a moment to like rate and review, that would be amazing. Wherever you listen to your podcast, if they have that ability. It helps people find the podcast and it's always nice to know what you all think. Two, did you know that you can donate to support rePROs? If you go to our website, there's a donate button and we have started doing giveaways with, with our donations. So, for anybody who does a $25 donation, you get these amazing stickers that we had Liberal Jane design for us. There's four of them. One says, "support repro pod-cats," and it's got pictures of my kitties on it. One says, "fund abortion, fight evil" with someone in like a little super superhero costume. One says, "slash the patriarchy," and it's a person with my two cats. And then the last one says, "reproductive rights are human rights." They're all super cute and definitely worth getting. So, for a $25 donation, you get the stickers. And we also have a postcard that Liberal Jane designed will also include that in the package. And then if you wanna give at the $50 level, you'll get the stickers, plus we have these really cute bags that we have designed and a comic book speaking bubble says "Abortion, it's a human right, not a dirty word." They're super cute. I love them. They've been really popular when we've given them out. And now you can get your own. So, like I said, for a $25 support level, you get the wonderful Liberal Jane stickers and the postcard for $50, you get the stickers and the amazing bag. So, if you love our podcast, make sure to support us. Okay, that's, that's enough housekeeping for now. So, this last week has been, it's been a little rough, y'all. I have been sick. So, when I did the interview, I was still not at a hundred percent. So, if I'm not sounding my best, that was that. I don't, I don't know what bug I caught. It was not super fun. I had it for a couple days and had my interview kind of in the middle of it, so that's okay. I'm feeling much better now. It was nice to have my two kitties be my snuggle buddies as I like napped and laid in bed and read and just, like, tried to recover. So, it was nice to have cute little furry caretakers. I think those are kind of, like, the big things. Like I said, I was sick so it kind of took a lot out of me. And I'm, like, slowly starting to, like, bounce back, but nothing else super exciting has happened. I think with that, maybe we'll just turn to this week's interview. I am super excited to have Garnet Henderson on. She is a reporter with the Rewire News Group and also the host of an amazing podcast, ACCESS: A Podcast About Abortion. Definitely check it out. And I'm so excited to have her on to talk about two reporting trips. She took one to the Dominican Republic and one to Brazil. And so it's great to talk about both of them with her. So with that, let's go to my interview with Garnet.

Jennie: Hi Garnet. Thank you so much for being here today! Before we get started, let's do quick introductions. Do you want to introduce yourself and include your pronouns?

Garnet: Sure. My name is Garnet Henderson. I use she/her pronouns. I'm the senior reporter at Rewire News Group. Before joining Rewire, I was a freelance journalist reporting on abortion access for a long time. And I'm also the host and producer of ACCESS: A Podcast About Abortion.

Jennie: You know, and a real sign of like how this year, like I one, I'm shocked it's June, but like it's just been a little chaos. Like I thought it has been much more recent since you were on. So, I was a little surprised when I looked back and I was like, oh, it was like January or something.

Garnet: It's so funny. I had the same thought process. I was like, oh, it'll be so nice to talk to Jennie again so soon. [laughs] Not really.

Jennie: I know I tried to be cognizant of, like, not asking people to come on like super often and like, so I keep that in my mind and then all of a sudden, I'm like, no, it actually was not that recent.

Garnet: No, and I'm happy to be on literally anytime, so.

Jennie: But I think you had just gotten back from your Dominican Republic trip but hadn't written the pieces yet. And now you've also had this trip to Brazil. So, I'm so excited to talk to you about all of it. Maybe since Dominican Republic came first, maybe let's start there. What is the status of abortion in the Dominican Republic?

Garnet: So, abortion is completely illegal in the Dominican Republic with absolutely no exceptions. It does not matter if you are dying, you cannot get a legal abortion. Of course, like everywhere else in the world, people with money are able to travel or there are some private clinics that will provide abortions, maybe are a little bit more permissive at least than the public hospitals. And of course there are ways to get misoprostol, to get abortion pills and have an abortion that way. People certainly do. There are accompaniment networks as there are elsewhere in Latin America. But miso is quite expensive in the Dominican Republic. And so, from what we heard, it is a bit more difficult there for people to actually get their hands on it than it is in a lot of Latin America.

Jennie: I also found the conversation around, like, abortion access in the Dominican Republic particularly of note because it has one of the higher maternal mortality rates in the Americas and that just also was super striking.

Garnet: Absolutely. And the abortion ban is one of the biggest drivers of those maternal mortality rates. There are a lot of preventable deaths. In fact, we met with family members of two women, or one of them was a girl I should say, who lost their family members, in one case a daughter and in the other case a sister, because of the Dominican Republic's abortion ban. The girl, a teenager, has come to be known as Esperancita. Her case is pretty famous in the Dominican Republic. She had cancer and when she was diagnosed with cancer, they discovered that she was pregnant. And so, they refused her treatment for her cancer, for leukemia, a cancer that she almost certainly would've survived. And she died of cancer in the hospital and then another woman who died of a septic miscarriage and she already had children. So, she left behind multiple children who she had already had, and she tried- her family and her tried to get help at five different hospitals and clinics, none of which would help her. And so, she died after a miscarriage at 15 weeks. So again, a fetus that could not have under any circumstances survived and no one would help her.

Jennie: I think it's also really important to note, especially we just did an episode recently talking about harmful gender-based practices in the US and we talked about child marriage in the US. Child marriage is a big driver of the maternal mortality rate in the Dominican Republic.

Garnet: Absolutely. The Dominican Republic has very high rates of child marriage. And one of the things that we learned when we were there, actually from girls who spoke with us at an organization called CONAMUCA, which is an organization that's focused on fighting for the human rights of girls and women in the rural parts of the Dominican Republic. They've got a really cool mission that's centered on reproductive justice but also agricultural sustainability. And so, they do this really cool sort of all-encompassing work in the rural communities in the DR and we spoke with a lot of girls who participate in CONAMUCA's clubs. And what they told us is that first of all, we heard this from a lot of people actually child marriage was technically outlawed a few years ago in the Dominican Republic, but there have been no prosecutions under that law. So, it's really not being enforced. And also, there is a pretty widespread practice, particularly in those rural areas of families marrying their girls off to much older men without them legally getting married. So, they're basically just giving girls to an older man without even any kind of, you know, giving her any legal status as his wife. And what we heard from the girls is that there are a lot of girls who enter into that kind of arrangement because it's a way of getting out of a home that is abusive or oppressive. And then unfortunately, those girls are just entering another situation that's very likely to become abusive or oppressive and they're often getting pregnant very early and then leaving school and not finishing their education.

Jennie: I think it's just really important to raise it. I feel like often and when you have the global conversations around child marriage, Latin America and the Caribbean is not something that comes up very often. Like, the focus tends to be in Southeast Asia, it tends to be in Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean doesn't get talked about a lot. Oh my god, it feels like forever ago. But I went to a big child marriage conference in Kuala Lumpur and talked to someone from Mexico who was doing work and talked about kind of, it's a harder way to have the conversation because of what you talked about. A lot of it isn't this legal marriage, it's a lot of domestic partnerships or things like that that work to get around the laws but like aren't seen as marriages. They talk about unions a lot and so it makes the conversation a little more nebulous to navigate.

Garnet: Mm-hmm, absolutely. And it's, I do think it seemed like there's a generational shift that is happening, but it does seem that a lot of the older generations in the Dominican Republic view that as very normal. Like, it's just normal for a girl to get married at 14 or 15 and obviously that kind of cultural shift is really difficult to bring about. It takes a lot of organizing and it requires a lot of people to be willing to have difficult conversations. And it does seem like that work is happening but again, because of other policies like the abortion ban, we also learned that it's really difficult to access contraception for people when they want it. And then also there's an entire history of forced sterilization, particularly of women of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. And so, it's really just a very difficult situation for people to access sexual and reproductive health services. There's little to no sex education in a lot of places. It's really just a handful of NGOs that are doing that kind of work. And so, it's really all of that on top of the child marriage. All of it combines to create frankly a really dangerous situation for a lot of girls and young women.

Jennie: I'm really glad you brought up the Haitian women part because that was another article in your series on the Dominican Republic that like I had a general idea of, but definitely learned so much more about their status in the Dominican Republic and their lack of access to care. Do we wanna talk a little bit more about that part?

Garnet: Sure. So, for anybody who doesn't know, the Dominican Republican and Haiti share an island, I think most people know that. Dominican Republic, former Spanish colony, in fact it's the first place in the quote unquote "new world" that Christopher Columbus landed. And Haiti was a former French colony and after Haiti fought a war for independence and won, the entire international community really turned against Haiti. I think more people are aware of this now, right? That all of Haiti's problems, the fact that it is one of the world's poorest countries and it always seems to be mired in these incredibly difficult situations is actually because Haiti was forced to pay reparations to the French former slave owners that they had forced out of their country. And for a time after Haiti liberated itself from the French, Haiti also invaded what is now the Dominican Republic, or depending on who you ask, that was either a liberation or an occupation. And so much, much later on there was a Dominican dictator Trujillo who really constructed a Dominican national identity in opposition to Haiti. So, he constructed this idea that Dominicans are Spanish, so they're white and also Indio indigenous, which is probably partly true, probably many Dominicans and Haitians have some degree of indigenous heritage. But most of the Taíno population, which was the indigenous population on the island, was wiped out by either violence or disease when those colonizers arrived. But Trujillo really constructed this national identity around the idea of Haitians both being inferior and also being oppressors. So, to this day, the Independence Day that the Dominican Republic celebrates is its independence from Haiti, not from Spain. And so, there's this really complicated situation that I think in the US we would call colorism, but there I would say functions as racism because many Dominicans do not consider themselves black despite the fact that at least about 80% of them have African ancestry. And so, they see Haitians as black and are therefore inferior when in fact, you know, the ties between the two countries are so extensive and they have so much more in common that you might than you might think, but there is this language barrier and a very long history. So, there are a lot of Haitians who live in the Dominican Republic who are recent migrants, but there are also generations of descendants of Haitians who either moved to the Dominican Republic for jobs for education or many of them who were effectively kidnapped and forced to labor on sugarcane plantations under that dictator Trujillo. And those people, so the descendants of Haitians and also more recent Haitian migrants are subjected to really racist treatment in the Dominican Republic. The current president who just got reelected, Luis Abinader, is deporting those people in huge numbers by the tens of thousands. Many of these people are like DREAMers in the US, they have never been to Haiti and, and they're getting deported there now. And basically again, what I learned is that that additional form of marginalization and discrimination creates an even worse situation for girls and women of Haitian descent. It's very difficult for them to access reproductive healthcare. They face a lot of racism in medical settings and in numerous documented cases they've even been deported straight from the hospital. So, even seeking care puts them in danger.

Jennie: That was just, it was very upsetting to learn about, 'cause you know we talked about the high maternal mortality rate in the Dominican Republic, but as you point out in your piece, like it's three times higher in Haiti going from bad to much worse in terms of access of care. Yeah, it just, it makes me think of stories we've talked about on the podcast before of, like, undocumented people being scared to go and access care in the US and, like, worrying about getting arrested or not being able to travel as freely to access abortion in states that are maybe near the border.

Garnet: Absolutely, yeah. And I mean I just gave, like, the most quick and dirty summary of the history that I possibly could have. Yeah. So, I'm sorry for anyone if it didn't totally make sense, but I mean one thing that really stuck out to me is we visited a clinic in a rural area of the Dominican Republic, about an hour outside the capital of Santo Domingo, an hour or two. And the doctor there said a lot of kind of progressive things, for example, about how horrified he is by child marriage. And he talked a lot about the efforts that he and his staff at the clinic have made to change culture around that issue. But then when we got to that subject of Dominicans of Haitian descent, he said, you know, we have women who come in here and they say they're Dominican, but they don't speak the language. So, we know they're not. And I found that statement especially disturbing because there was an incident that's often known as the Parsley massacre in that history of conflict between the Dominican Republic and Haiti where Dominican soldiers rounded up and murdered a lot of Haitian migrants who were there to work in those sugarcane plantations. Again, many of them had been brought there against their will in the first place and they rounded people up and killed them. And reportedly, the test they used to determine whether someone was Haitian or Dominican was their pronunciation of the word perejil, which means parsley in Spanish. And the pronunciation of it is really difficult for a native French or Creole speaker. It's hard to say that word in Spanish. So reportedly, that was the test that the soldiers used to determine who was Dominican and who was not. And so, just what the doctor said echoed that so strongly to me it was very disturbing, and he delivered that in a very casual way. And he actually also referenced the fact that Dominicans had previously been oppressed by Haitians and he said that was the reason for the hostility and that it had nothing to do with racism.

Jennie: I have to say there were really disturbing things said by doctors in both your Dominican series and in the Brazil series that we will definitely, let's turn to that now because I think I wanna make sure we spend time on that as well. So, the Dominican Republic has, you know, the total abortion ban, but things are, like, a tiny bit better in Brazil. I mean tiny, what is the status of abortion in Brazil?

Garnet: Right. So, in Brazil, abortion is illegal, but there is an exception to save the life of the pregnant person for rape or incest. And because of a supreme Court decision, there's also an exception for fetal anencephaly. So, that's a very specific exception for a rare disorder where the fetus's brain and skull don't develop properly when there are fetal diagnoses that are otherwise incompatible with life. People can petition the court for permission to have an abortion and they do usually succeed, but that process obviously can be very arduous. So yeah, we visited a hospital on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and one of the reasons we went there and spoke to that doctor is because he's someone who actually has a reputation for being one of the more understanding doctors because medical professionals refuse to participate in abortion care at really high rates in Brazil. And so, even though abortion is legal in certain circumstances, and if it's a, you know, if the pregnant person's life is at risk or if they say they were a victim of rape, you don't need a court's permission. You're supposed to as a doctor, just be able to provide them with care immediately. And in fact, technically the law would require that since in Brazil everyone has a right to healthcare under current law. So, this doctor was someone whose attitude was clearly much more open when it came to life endangerment and fatal fetal diagnoses, right? Like, he clearly was, it was very cut-and-dry to him. Like, of course if someone's life is in danger or if their fetus is not gonna survive, we intervene. Right? Like, whereas at a lot of hospitals even that can be difficult. But when it came to talking about the rape exception, he, you know, told us again very casually that they check the person's story to make sure that the length of their pregnancy matches up with when they say they were assaulted and he even told us, and if it doesn't match up, they deny the abortion. And he even told us that if they believe a woman is lying, they'll call around to other hospitals or talk to the medical board and kind of give everybody a heads up in case she tries to go somewhere else. And so, that was another thing that I found to be really chilling that was just delivered super casually.

Jennie: Yeah. That that really like took my breath away when I read that was just, like, shocking the lengths that someone would go to to, like, prevent somebody who had been raped from accessing abortion care.

Garnet: Yeah, absolutely. And honestly, again, that's one of the more permissive doctors because he at least sometimes does give people abortions when they say they've been raped. Right. And what we learned and hurt from a lot of survivors is that a lot of times they just hear no, it doesn't matter what the story is, it doesn't matter if it checks out, they just hear no.

Jennie: Yeah. It was also striking as something we see often used as a tool in the US and with, like, with abortion is misinformation and disinformation, like, really flourishing in that people were told incorrect things about what the legal status was. I can only imagine, like, misinformation really thriving in Brazil as well.

Garnet: Absolutely. And I found that even in medical contexts, I spoke to researchers who called around to every hospital in Brazil that is known to provide legal abortion services and they were cursed at, hung up on, told we don't do that here. So, a lot of times people are being turned away by the staff that they first encounter, right? The person who answers the phone at the hospital, maybe even a security guard at the door, the receptionist, lots of people are being told that abortion is not legal in Brazil or it's not available for one reason or another, even when they do fit into those few narrow exceptions. And I didn't have a lot of room to get into this, but there's also a tremendous amount of misinformation about misoprostol in Brazil, which is interesting because that's where its use as an abortion pill was discovered, was by poor women in rural Brazil who realized in the nineties that they could use it to relatively safely end their pregnancies. Although most of them at that point were basically like triggering a miscarriage and then going to the hospital to finish the abortion there. And just the same way advocates tell people, now you can just go and say that you had a miscarriage. Right? And so, what's interesting there is that the government, once they realized that was happening, really cracked down on misoprostol and now it's very difficult to access and there's a lot of misinformation out there about what it does, how to use it, its safety, et cetera.

Jennie: Again, very problematic, because it's safe and people should be able to use it. It has uses beyond abortion, right? Because that's how it was originally discovered. Like, again, just so frustrating of ways to keep people from accessing safe abortion.

Garnet: Yeah. And you know, of course there is a black or gray market for misoprostol, but what we learned about that is that a lot of it is fake in Brazil. And again, it's also very expensive relative to some other places in Latin America. And also, some of the instructions that people get from these illegal pill sellers are really bizarre. Like, we heard all kinds of things. Like, normally for abortion you're supposed to let, not normally, you have to let misoprostol dissolve either under your tongue or in your cheek or in your vagina, right? That's how it's administered for abortions. So, sometimes people were being told to swallow the pills or sometimes they were being told like let one dissolve, but then swallow another one, stay in bed for a full day, don't get up, don't go anywhere. People being told to eat and drink bizarre things and a lot of the times, people not being sold enough miso to cause an actual abortion. So, it seems like for a lot of people they might spend a lot of money on miso and if it is real, it's not working because they don't have enough. And then of course they're in a situation where maybe they have to go to the hospital, and they have to hope that they're not gonna get turned in for having tried to self-manage an abortion.

Jennie: Again, rereading both of them this morning I was like, which one was Dominican Republic, and which one was Brazil? So, I think the other thing that you talked about and is really important to talk about is seeing crisis pregnancy centers popping up in Brazil. Something that the US has been exporting, you know, we've talked about on the podcast many times the global reach of the US anti-abortion movement and this is clearly another sign of their global reach.

Garnet: Absolutely. I mean I think probably a lot of your listeners will know that the anti-abortion movement has been working to export the crisis pregnancy center model for a long time. But I would say that to my knowledge they have mostly been focusing on countries where abortion is broadly legal and accessible, like the UK. There's a big effort to expand crisis pregnancy centers there. And then also countries like Columbia and Mexico that have recently decriminalized wholly or partly abortion, right? Places where abortion is either accessible or becoming more accessible. Because historically what crisis pregnancy centers have been trying to do is capture people who could otherwise go get an abortion, right? And try to delay them or convince them not to. And so, in these countries where abortion is banned, what's a crisis pregnancy center really gonna do? Well, at least in Brazil, I found that there are a few organizations who are trying it, and they really thrive in that environment where there's already a lot of misinformation. And what it means that the vast majority of people that they're misleading are survivors of sexual violence. Because the vast majority of legal abortions in Brazil at least are because of rape. The rates of sexual violence in the country are very high. Unfortunately, there's pretty much no part of the world where you can say that the rates of sexual violence are not high, but they are high in Brazil, particularly in really poor areas like favelas. And it's a lot of members of militias and drug cartels that are perpetrating sexual violence on a really large scale with, you know, essentially no consequences, no accountability for that. So, most people who are looking for abortions are survivors of rape who would qualify for that exception, but many of them don't know it and they're just looking for help or they do know it and they're trying to figure out how to get illegal abortion but it's really hard. And so, I visited one crisis pregnancy center in São Paulo. I was able to speak with its founder and she has ties to a CPC in Michigan, interestingly not a Heartbeat International, which is the big international network of CPCs. She's tied to just this one CPC in Michigan that kind of started its own international outreach project, and she came into contact with them because she used to work in international adoption. But there are several other organizations in Brazil that are trying to expand that model. And in particular, they're spreading a lot of misinformation on social media and via WhatsApp because so many people are using WhatsApp. There are these WhatsApp groups that are attracting people who are looking for abortions and they're essentially like a WhatsApp CPC.

Jennie: Have to say, as I was reading that story, my breath caught reading about her links to the International adoption movement and I thought this story was about to take a much darker turn and was real worried.

Garnet: I know. Yeah. I will say international adoptions in Brazil are really limited. So, usually a child can only be placed for an international adoption if they're not gonna be adopted in Brazil. So usually it's older children, children and disabled children, which is a whole other problem can of worms, right? And it is certainly still exploitative even if it's not a particularly widespread practice. But yeah, it was, you know, it was really interesting to speak with the founder of the CPC. She has deep ties to the far right in Brazil to Damares Alves who was the minister of women under former president, far-right President Bolsonaro and who is now a senator and probably the leading anti-abortion voice in the entire country. Rosa Santiago, who's the founder of the Crisis Pregnancy Center I visited, has herself run for office despite the fact that she told me that politics have no place at her organization, and she has no interest in that, she has certainly tried to step her own foot into those waters. And she also collaborated on a documentary with a network that has gotten in trouble for spreading fake news in Brazil and specifically got in trouble for trying to influence the election that Bolsonaro ultimately lost. But much like Donald Trump, Bolsonaro is still around in Brazil and hoping to make a resurgence. And he and his party remain really powerful.

Jennie: I have to say. Again, like crisis pregnancy centers, I mean the way that they're thriving off the misinformation, lack of information for people who are just looking for help is so frustrating to me. And it just breaks my heart when people are just trying to access care that they are deserved and that they should be able to get, and these people are lying to them. It just makes me so angry.

Garnet: Yeah. And the founder of this crisis pregnancy center that I visited, which is called CERVI, it's an acronym that stands for translated into English Center for Life Restructuring. So, much like a lot of us CPCs, it's a very vague name that doesn't really tell you what it does, but she told me specifically, we don't do brainwashing here. She really emphasized that and claimed not to lie to people, but there was a Brazilian journalist who went in there undercover posing as a potential client and they told her that abortion is completely illegal in Brazil. So, I know that what they're saying to their clients doesn't match up with what she was telling me about their approach. And she also deployed, she actually told me several stories about their babies, in other words like children who were born because their mothers ultimately chose not to have abortions after visiting CERVI. And in particular she's very proud of this story of a girl who came in pregnant as a result of rape at 18, initially wanted to have an abortion and she ended up carrying the pregnancy to term and having a baby. And now that boy is a concert violinist. And so that was another story that stuck with me from my conversation with her. And then I found out that she had actually deployed that story previously at a hearing for a bill that would remove those exceptions to the abortion ban, so completely ban abortion. And she actually had the boy come and play violin at the hearing and then she stood up and basically said he wouldn't be alive if his mother had had an abortion. So, that also really reminded me of the way that anti-abortion groups in the US like to trot out the people that they call, you know, survivors of abortion. Yeah.

Jennie: Yeah, that's what I was thinking of. Or, like, and it's always somebody exceptional usually.

Garnet: Exactly, yes.

Jennie: Somebody who's exceptional?

Garnet: Yes. It's like what if your baby could cure cancer? Yeah.

Jennie: Yes, yes. Ugh, feel gross, like, just hearing it. Okay, so as we were talking through both of these countries, like, I was just thinking through ways that US policy has influenced it. Like, I was thinking through Brazil and like Brazil being part of the Geneva Consensus and things like that. So, there are lots of ties to the US anti-abortion movement kind of all over the place. So, there are definitely ways that people can get involved in fighting back. So, what can the audience do? Like, it seems, like, you know, telling stories about countries that are as far from us, they may not feel like they have a ways to make an impact, but there definitely are.

Garnet: Yeah, I mean first of all, I think it's really important for people to understand that these countries aren't as different from ours as we might like to think, right? Like so much of the broader discourse around abortion bans right now is about trying to enshrine exceptions into them. And certainly, as I saw in the Dominican Republic, abortion bans with no exceptions do mean people will die. But abortion bans with exceptions also mean that people die because they're delayed in getting the care that they need and deserve. And also, as I saw in Brazil, even when there are exceptions in place for circumstances like rape, they just don't work. And most of the people who should qualify for those exceptions are not getting care. And so, I think it's really important to look at those countries not as, like, backward or inferior, first of all because that's racist and xenophobic, but also because really those countries are just a preview of what we're looking at if we can't somehow really change the conversation in the United States. And so, yes, of course in terms of what people can do to help, I'll say, I'll start with the Dominican Republic. So, there are tons of Dominicans in the United States, particularly if you live in the New York, New Jersey region as I do, this is the place where the largest diasporic population of Dominicans exist. It's over a million Dominicans and many of those people are dual citizens who vote in elections both here and in the Dominican Republic. In fact, I live in upper Manhattan, I live in the most Dominican, like, densely populated or dense population of Dominicans in the United States. And there are actually physical polling places that get set up in my neighborhood for Dominican elections. So, I think people first of all can just be talking about the policy in the Dominican Republic and spreading the word because I know activists are working really hard to spread awareness of the abortion ban and its harms within that American Dominican American population. And you know, there are lots of really amazing feminist efforts to both help people access abortion and also drive policy change in the Dominican Republic. So, an organization that I spoke with is called MUDHA, that's M-U-D-H-A, that's a Haitian feminist organization. They're doing tons of reproductive justice work. CONAMUCA, that organization that I mentioned that is working with rural girls and women is also an amazing fighter for reproductive justice. And then there's the US-based Women's Equality center that is doing tons of policy work both in the DR and in Brazil in all of Latin America actually. And then when it comes to Brazil, I would say, because there's so much information organizations that I would encourage people to support to help American abortion seekers like OARS, the online abortion resource squad are also great to support because they are getting tons of inquiries from Brazilians, I know. And there I also spoke with the founder of an organization called Projeto Vivas. Her name's Rebeca Mendes and she had her own very highly publicized struggle to try and get an abortion in Brazil. Ended up having to travel and so now she helps other people do the same, either travel out of Brazil or get a legal abortion within Brazil. And Fòs Feminista is the organization that provides the bulk of their funding. So, you can also get plugged in with Projeto Vivas, Fòs Feminista, and learn more about what's going on in Brazil and support those efforts there to help people.

Jennie: Garnet, thank you, such great suggestions and as always, it's such a joy to talk to you.

Garnet: Thanks so much for having me. I always love talking to you.

Jennie: Okay y'all, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Garnet. I always have so much fun talking to her, and it was great to have her on. With that, I will see you all 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!