"Who are you talking about?" with Jessica Valenti

If we're talking about Dobbs and democracy, there's no one better to talk to than Jessica Valenti, who writes the newsletter “Abortion, Every Day.”

She's also the author of a book that you should pre-order called “Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win.” 

Her invaluable reporting and commentary make the case that if you’re talking about “Dobbs and democracy,” you don’t need the word “and.”

Every day, Dobbs makes the case that democracy matters. Every day, we see the horrors that happen when people lose the right to be treated as full human beings. Every day, we're inspired by people who stand up and say, “Hey, I don't care what state I live in. I'm not gonna let anyone be denied rights that I was born with.”

Listen and let us know what you think about Dobbs/democracy.

Catch up on all the episodes of “How are you feeling about democracy?” here. If you want to back this podcast, please join the earlyworm society – free or paid, your support matters.

**********

TRANSCRIPT

Jason Sattler: Let's begin this conversation before Dobbs. What was the state of abortion rights in America like before June 24th, 2022?

Jessica Valenti: That's a great question because I do think people have this misunderstanding that everything was great and fine. And it really wasn't. 

And as is often the case, the people who were the most marginalized were the canaries in the coal mine for what we're seeing now. If you were poor, you weren't gonna be able to get an abortion not have access in the same way. If you were young, there were all of these restrictions. Even as much as criminalization, right? Women were being arrested for their pregnancy outcomes before Roe, and so it's not like it was perfect. It was far from it, but at least then We had some recourse, and we had some hope, and I think those are the things that are missing now.

I think what we're also seeing, are women of all ages and backgrounds and economic levels being impacted in much the same way more marginalized people were before Roe.

Jason Sattler: Just talking a little bit about the decision to start your newsletter “Abortion, Every Day.” I wonder what you were thinking and how has it been compared to what you expected it to be? 

Jessica Valenti: Sure. I actually didn't make a conscious decision right away. I was so mad about what was happening. I was so frustrated and there was so much going on.

I already had a Substack. I had a newsletter. And so I was just writing columns and angry stuff every single day. And then I started writing a little bit about, "Oh, have you seen this? Have you seen that?" 

And then after a couple of weeks, I think I realized, oh, I'm writing about this every day. And there is something to write about every day. And so I just formalized it from there. 

But I think for me, it was very much about wanting to provide some order to the chaos. There is so much happening in every state and Republicans and anti-abortion groups are relying so much on that overwhelm, on just inundating us into an action because it's really easy to feel frozen under the weight of it all.

And so for me, providing something that gave a little bit of a road map of where we are, maybe what attacks are coming down the road from them. It made me feel a little bit more in control of the situation. And I think it ended up, helping some other people feel the same way. And so it just went from there.

Hilariously, when I started it, I had this moment very naively where I was like, am I going to be able to keep this up every day? Like a year from now? Is there going to be news every day on abortion? Yeah. So I, now I say I should have called it abortion every hour. That would more accurate. 

Jason Sattler: I was going to say that the strange thing about it is it gives me hope. And, a lot of that is because of the actions that are people are taking, I think, is that you're do as good a job of documenting that as the horrors.

What do you think is the kind of balance of telling these stories. Do you think there's a lot of value in getting the horror stories because there are so many out and they don't often break through or, focusing more on the amazing kind of action we've seen where people are banding together to say, we're not taking this?

Jessica Valenti: I think we need both. My fear always, of course, is that if you write about horror stories all the time, are people going to become numb to them? Is it, you're just going to want to turn the page because you can't take reading another one? So when I write about these really horrible stories, what I try to do is reflect when I'm writing, ""Yeah, this fucking sucks. This is horrible. This is really upsetting." And just letting people commiserate in that way, I think helps people to process it and makes them feel like, okay, we're reading this. We have to know this. It's important for us to, bear witness to what's going on, but let's also be really explicit and open about the fact that this is super horrible. 

But yes, I think, talking about the sort of activism that's happening on the ground is really important because it does give people hope and it gives people ideas for what they can do themselves, because that's something I'm hearing all the time from readers. They want to know, "What can I do?"

I want to be involved. I want to help in some way that goes beyond voting or that goes beyond donating to an abortion fund. And so what is some innovative way I can help? Like t here's a group of volunteer pilots who started flying women out of anti-choice states to places where they could get care and they like took that, they incurred that cost on themselves.

And so people are looking for stuff like that. Like where can my own individual expertise or knowledge or background help in some way. 

Jason Sattler: Why is it so important to know that they planned for this and it is the planning continuing because it sometimes feel like they've lost the plot sometimes?

Jessica Valenti: Yeah, it's interesting. I think that they are very much relying on this lie that they didn't know it was going to be like this. And you'll hear that reflected in a lot of the language they use where they say, "Oh, this law just needs to be tweaked or we're just going to add some language and to clarify this law. It's just growing pains legislative growing pains. We just need to work this out." But no, people need to know that they had decades and decades. They had 50 years to plan for this. And they knew that people were going to die. They knew that there was going to be an incredible amount of suffering.

You're talking about a movement that has millions and millions of dollars and a lot of power, and they polled for this stuff, right? They strategized, they hired consultants, they talked it through, to the point when these horror stories started coming out, they all had the same message because they knew what was going to happen. And their message was, "Oh, doctors just don't understand the law, they're not reading it correctly." 

And so it is really important that we know that this was all planned for, and that everything moving forward is planned for too. Because we need to lay the blame really directly on their doorstep.

Jason Sattler: And to go into that and something that a thread that you put out a couple weeks ago that I just I want to nail to the door of every house in America is how they, how Trump could ban abortion without a single law. Can you describe that and why it's so important to know this? 

Jessica Valenti: Sure. That thread came about because I was so frustrated. I started noticing this Republican messaging coming up in comments on my TikTok videos. And I saw it in tweets. I saw Republicans saying "The president doesn't make abortion policy. There's not going to be a national ban. We're never going to even if we wanted one, we're never going to have the votes."

But guess what? You don't need a national formal ban to make abortion laws abortion banned nationally. As soon as Trump gets into office, and this is not stuff I'm predicting, this is stuff that they've been very clear about and written down on paper, as soon as he gets into office, they would replace the head of the FDA, which means that they can repeal approval for Mifepristone. Abortion medication is how 63 percent of people and their pregnancies at this point, right? So right off the bat you have that 63 percent gone. Then they would replace the head of the DoJ and they would decide that the Comstock Act, which is this 18th century obscenity law, that applies to abortion and birth control and that it's no longer legal to Not just ship abortion medication, but anything having to do with abortion, like clinic supplies.

And so right off the bat, that is a national ban. It may not be formalized, they may not have a name for it, but if no one can get an abortion, that's a ban. 

Jason Sattler: It wouldn't be like one day, like the lights turned off. It would be like, we're going to start prosecuting certain clinics in certain areas, sending a chilling effect across the country. 

Jessica Valenti: Yeah, they're already doing this in anti-choice states or states with restrictions where, they target individual clinics, and it won't be like, "We're gonna shut you down or arrest you." It'll be, “We are going to give you 200 fines for $10,000, and you're not gonna be able to pay those fines, and so you're gonna have to shut you down.” Or they are going to legally threaten abortion funds, which are the local groups that make it possible for people to leave the state or help them get money. And you're talking about largely, a volunteer effort. And all of a sudden, if they have the state AG coming after them saying, "I'm going to prosecute you for aiding and abetting," or "I'm going to prosecute you using the RICO Act," which is something that they've talked about.

That will have absolutely a silencing effect. And that's the point.

I think they very much don't want to have that big splashy newspaper story where they have an abortion provider arrested. They want it to be that people are so afraid that they are just not giving the care at all.

Jason Sattler: The thing about the CDC that I think a lot of people have woken up to in the last few months because of your reporting and other reporting about Project 2025, the CDC is where they plan to monitor every abortion in America.

What is that about? 

Jessica Valenti: The abortion reporting stuff I've been writing about more and more and it is really troubling. They're doing it for a bunch of different reasons. The first is shame and stigma and making women and people who can get pregnant too afraid to get care in the first place. Because if you know that your state is tracking who's getting an abortion, if you know that they're taking down your personal information, keeping your name or your information somewhere, a lot of people are not going to feel comfortable with that. They're not going to want to do that, especially when you go and it's not just that they're like checking off a box that says, "26 year old got an abortion." But in places like Kansas and in other states, they're trying to require Not just that they're checking off that you had an abortion, but asking patients questions about their abortion. Why did you get the abortion? Do you have enough money? What's your relationship like? Really asking very invasive questions again to make people too ashamed and afraid.

 It's depressing. They're collecting real data to use in a way to make it seem as if, oh so and so said they're having abortion for this reason. And so we're going to try to target that they're weaponizing data in this big way. And the other piece of abortion reporting that they're really focused on is abortion complication reporting and honestly, this lie of what abortion complications are. 

Jessica Valenti: I wrote about this, about the law in Texas, where essentially if you go to the hospital and let's say you have an infection, right? You have an infection because you had some surgery. And then they ask you, "Okay, what's your medical history?" and you mentioned you had an abortion five years earlier. That infection is getting reported to the state as an abortion complication because of the way the law is written. They have this list of 30 different conditions that if you show up with any one of these conditions and you've had an abortion ever in your life, even if it's totally unrelated to why you're there, you're counting that as an abortion complication.

So at the end of the year, the state can come out and say, look at how dangerous abortion is. And because they have doctors doing this, like they're forcing doctors to under threat of losing their license. Because it's doctors making these reports, they can say we didn't make this up. This isn't from an anti-choice group. This is from doctors. How can you argue with that? And so they're really thinking very strategically and carefully about how to use data. In the same way, they're trying to sow a lot of distrust in the community. In real data, like maternal mortality numbers for the last year or two, they've been talking about, "Oh, you can't trust those numbers. Those numbers are incorrect. They don't collect them in the right way." So that when inevitably new numbers come out, and it shows that a whole bunch more women have died, they can say, we told you that those numbers were no good.

Jason Sattler: And the thing you're saying, you're focusing on data and one thing that blew my mind in 2012 -- and I was always pro-choice, but it just made me angrily pro abortion rights -- when I saw there was a report that where there were bans, abortion was actually more common. So I actually believed for a while that this was about actually ending abortion. That disabused me of this notion. 

And I think we've seen this experiment proven in the United States. If I understand the numbers correctly, abortion has gone down not at all since Dobbs, the number of abortions conducted in this country. And in fact, it may some may have been eliminated because of we know the kind of costs that people are having to endure there. 

This doesn't affect the demand for abortion to put in that terms at all. They know that. So what is this really about? Why do they want to ban it if they are not actually eliminating abortion? 

Jessica Valenti: I think it's very much about punishment and control and You know as much as yes, like the abortion rate has gone up But we also still know that people are being denied care that they need and really what better way to If the ultimate goal and this is the ultimate goal is to track women in the domestic sphere to enforce traditional gender roles to enforce the traditional gender binary What better way to do that than to ensure that women are forever pregnant, right?

That you can't get care or soon down the line, you can't get birth control. You can't access it. Or you've been so your health has been so damaged and hurt that you're also not Able to be in the public sphere like it is very much about reinforcing those traditional roles and punishment and shame I think you know when you look at a lot of abortion policies and obviously a lot of anti abortion activists are against abortion, no matter what, but a lot of Republican legislators, oh I believe in rape and incest exceptions, right? To me, just that is so clear cut. You want pregnancy to be a punishment for people who had sex willingly. That's really what you're saying. If abortion is murder, then why does it matter? At least be ideologically consistent. They're not. To me, it is so very clear that it's about, I don't know. We want to punish you. If you're going to have sex, then that's what you get. It's a shame and punishment tactic. 

Jason Sattler: I think that's been exposed in the last few months in a way that hadn't been quite clear to people before. Correct me if you think this isn't correct, I think the two things that told the story are the combination of the IVF ban and then the 1864 ban being react reactivated. 

I think a lot of people haven't thought deeply about this. They're like, "Why do they what, why? And then also the 1864 ban is, "They're not running from this. They want to go back to 12 amendments in the Constitution?"

Jessica Valenti: It's pretty wild and I think that's part of the reason. For a minute, I'm like "Why is everyone so upset about this ban over all others?" And it's of course, it's 1864. They're not hiding the misogyny. It's so clear. Yes, we want to go back to a time when women didn't have a right to vote, when you had no say over anything, not even your own body.

The Washington Post had an article about how the guy at the head of the legislature at that point had a thing for marrying little girls. He had a 12 year old wife, a 14 year old wife, a 15 year old. That is what they want to go back to, and it's Shameless, honestly it's like they could not be any more explicit about it.

 I've been on the road a lot and I'm talking to a lot of people. I think that is what has really gotten to people is just the unabashed. misogyny, that it's just like such an insult to your humanity. You're already afraid, you're afraid of, for your health, you're afraid for your life, you're afraid for your kids, your daughters. But this just complete affront to your humanity, like who you are as a person, is just too much for a lot of people to take.

Jason Sattler: The reporting about the guy who wrote the 1864 ban started make me think about how people could potentially look back at this moment and be like, "Of course, the guy who banned abortion was Jeffrey Epstein's old best friend. Of course, that's the guy who bought a teen pageant so he could walk in on the contest. Of course, that's the guy. That's that. It makes perfect sense." 

And you predicted almost word for word what he was going to come down on Trump's stand abortion rights. A nd he focused on exceptions. I think you pointed to the actual kind of moral consistency of exception, but could you point out why exceptions, especially the way that he uses them, are just complete bullshit.

Jessica Valenti: Yeah, it's just total nonsense. Trump knows that Americans want abortion protected. And he very much knows that exceptions are so incredibly popular. Like when you pull and you ask, rape, incest, all this sort of stuff, it's overwhelming, even overwhelming among Republicans. And it's this Fake way, not just for Trump, but for all Republicans exceptions to make it seem as if they are moderate to make it seem as if they are softening on abortion, especially when they add exceptions after the fact. Like, "Look, i'm compromising i'm going to give you this exception." 

But the thing is exceptions are deliberately crafted in order to never be used. Their only purpose is a PR tool.

When people say, "Oh, is that really true?"

 I always give the example of rape exceptions. What do most people, I think, know about rape victims? They don't report to the police. I feel like that's common knowledge at this point about rape victims. So what do Republicans do when they go and sit in a room and craft a rape exception? You make the first mandate, you have to report to the police and bring a police report.

So they are very clearly never meant to be used, but to just make it seem as if it is, possible to get an abortion. In Mississippi, for example, on paper, they have an exception for rape victims. But in reality, there is not one single doctor in the state of Mississippi who will perform an abortion on a rape victim because of how punitive and extreme the law is. No one is going to risk it. And so no matter what's written on paper. It's not real. It's not there. If you can't use it, that's not a real thing. 

Jason Sattler: And that, I think, connects back to why the IVF ban freaked people out so much. 

I don't know if people know that this is about embryos being dropped to the floor in the freezer of an IVF clinic. So that's how far it goes And that means if you're in alabama right now You don't know who's going to prosecute and the prosecutors may not even know yet if they're going to prosecute so how is there ever going to be Is there ever going to be a standard again that applies in every 50 states without expanding the court?

Jessica Valenti: I honestly have no idea. I can't pin my hope on anything in the positive direction, and I can't let myself get too caught up in the negative direction. Just not sure.

Obviously what we're seeing this sort of like piecemeal approach right now is so horrible and so dangerous. And it's really scary to watch. But I think that this is what it's going to look like for a bunch more years, unfortunately. And I think even if we manage to get some protections, we're going to continue to see what we've always seen, which is the most vulnerable people still really being punished and hurt.

Like with the IVF law, for example, right? 

I think in Alabama, it's safe to say that the AG is probably not going to go arrest an upper middle class white woman who's getting fertility treatments and decides to discard two embryos. But they are going to use that "embryos as people" law to arrest a young black woman who they accuse of smoking marijuana, and then she has a miscarriage. 

I think that's how we'll end up seeing that law get enforced. Just in the same way they always have been. 

And so I think in addition to keeping like this anger and outrage up when there are some protections for the people who have always, who were in the protected in the past.

You mentioned the comm stock, but. It seems like in the last few days, there's been a debate. Only a few members of Congress have called for Comstock to be repealed. And what I've read, and I may be getting this completely wrong, but the movement seems to feel we don't want this to debate because if we lose it, then it gives them an excuse to do what we're afraid they're going to do if I'm understanding the strategy to do that.

But given the kind of like, How important is to make this election about this issue? Why wouldn't you want that debate and Republicans need permission, 

 Listen, I think that the idea that you don't want to give them the idea about Comstock is silly. They have been talking about Comstock... Like Jonathan Mitchell -- the architect of Texas's ban on one of the major anti abortion players has been talking about Comstock. You had two Supreme Court justices name check it in the mifepristone case. So I think before some of these organizations were concerned that they had this litigation or they're making this legal argument that Comstock is a dead law. Comstock is a zombie law. And if all of a sudden members of Congress bring forward a bill to repeal it, that sort of says, "I guess it's not a zombie law. I guess it's not a dead law after all." So it takes away some of that credibility from their argument. But I think that argument is done. It was done and gone as soon as a Supreme Court justice started talking about it. 

So at this point, I think it just needs to be all-in on Comstock, just raising the alarm about it for the exact reason we were talking about before, which is people need to know that you don't need a national ban in order to ban abortion.

Jason Sattler: Republicans have started to figure out that not only can they not be honest about the plan to ban abortion without a ban of abortion, but they're pretending to protect abortion rights. 

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jessica Valenti: Yeah, it's unbelivable. I literally, right before we started talking, just made a TikTok about this trying to explain it because I think it's so important for people to know. 

Essentially ballot measures, abortion rights ballot measures are doing so well since row every time abortion has been on the ballot abortion rights has won at first. Republican strategy was to attack it as too radical, too extreme. Then they realize abortion rights is really popular. So let's talk about how it is going to allow children to get gender affirming surgery. Let's throw some anti-trans talking points in there. That hasn't worked either.

They're going to continue doing both of those things. But now they're like if pro-choice ballot measures are so popular, let's have one of our own. And so in places like Nebraska and in Arizona -- in Nebraska, they actually have proposed it, in Arizona they're just talking about it -- they're saying, "Let's propose an amendment that we're going to call 'Arizona Abortion Protection Act,' and it is going to ostensibly protect abortion up until 15 weeks." We won't mention the fact that at the same time we're pushing this, we are going to try to enshrine restrictions in the Constitution , all of their normal bullshit restrictions that make it impossible to get an abortion anyway up until 15 weeks. And we're going to trick voters into voting for this and essentially enshrining a 15-week ban into the state constitution. And that's what's happening. 

Like they've already done that in Nebraska where there's a regular pro-choice ballot measure effort and then anti-choice groups -- and big powerful ones, like Susan B. Anthony and Pro-life America, they're backing this -- they did a constitutional amendment they're calling I think "Protect Our Women and Children" something like that. They're saying we're going to protect abortion rights up until 12 weeks. Nebraska has a 12-week ban already. So what they're saying is, we're going to take that to court. That 12 week ban and enshrine it in the Constitution. So it's a very clever thing to do, and it's not a coincidence either that they chose a title for the amendment that is very similar sounding to the name of the abortion rights group in Nebraska, which is Protect Our Rights. And they're doing this very sneaky, underhanded thing where they're trying to trick voters Into believing that they are casting a vote for a pro-choice ballot measure when in fact, it's very much the opposite. 

Jason Sattler: Just to be a little self serving here... I hate to "as a father of a daughter" but as a father of a daughter... I'm hoping it's better in the 10 to 15 years it'll take that my daughter will actually be old enough for me to address this, but probably not. 

Do you have any advice about what to say to a kid about growing up into a society where she doesn't have a constitutional right to control her own body?

Jessica Valenti: Yeah, my daughter's 13. It's really upsetting. It's, um, it's a hard conversation.

And I think, I've watched my daughter come to terms with it on her own. For some of us, for me, my daughter knows that she'll always be able to access care. She has a certain amount of privilege, and so the concern for her is more existential, right? It's living in a country that doesn't see you as fully human is a pretty shitty way to feel and be in the world. And so I think we need to have very honest conversations with our kids about what this really means, why it's so important to be politically active around it. But also why it's so important to do whatever you need to do to protect yourself, to not go to college in a state where you can't get care, to make sure that you are tapped into community support networks.

I tell my daughter, I'm like, no matter what the law says, There are people who are always going to be helping each other, like there's communities of folks who are making sure that we can get the care that we need. We're always going to take care of each other. We're always going to be there for each other. And that, I think, gives a little bit of comfort and solace. 

Then I also tell my daughter, she knows that I have, I think, two or three different sets of abortion medication ready to go that are in the medicine cabinet. And that'll be good for five years. And so I feel and I tell her, tell your friends .You gotta be ready for anything.

But yeah, it's complicated. 

Jason Sattler: What is it do you think we should be expecting from candidates?

There's still this old school mentality that talking about abortion is always going to hurt Democrats. I think a certain generation will never get over that.

 Is there a way we can help them? What would you tell them? 

Jessica Valenti: What I would tell them and what I try to say in the newsletter all the time is that, it's not just that abortion rights are a little popular. They're really popular. And when you talk about it in the right way, it's just insanely popular.

For too long, we've had this sort of framework, we've accepted this Republican framework of "When is it okay to restrict abortion? When is it okay to legislate pregnancy?" 

But when you ask people, "Do you want the government involved in pregnancy? Yes or no?" They overwhelmingly say no. The last study that came out was 81 percent of people when you say, "Do you want abortion regulated by the government?" They say "No." 

I think if we can get Democrats to start talking like that, it would be extremely helpful and to not be so afraid of talking about abortion later in pregnancy, because that's all Republicans are going to be talking about.

They think that is their silver bullet. And it can be if we let it happen. 

To me, there has never been more proof that abortion is necessary for me throughout pregnancy than what we've seen since Roe was overturned. Look at all of these horror stories that are coming out. Look at the horror stories that Joe Biden is using in his campaign ads.

These are all people who were later on in their pregnancies. And so when Republicans say, "Oh, you want abortion up until birth?" Or "Oh, at what week do you think?" It's "Whatever week someone needs it." And to ask them, "Who are you talking about? When you make this claim, who are you talking about?" Are you talking about Amanda Zyrowski, who went septic in Texas, right? Are you talking about Kate Cox? Let's actually talk about real life and what is happening. And I think that we really have the opportunity to put Republicans on their heels. I don't know that Democrats will take that opportunity, but I think they should.

Jason Sattler: Absolutely. Jessica Valenti, I'm going to let you get back to the work of being a national treasure and documenting this history in real time. The easy thing is to look away, but you manage to keep a focus on this without ever losing your sense of morality and your sense of humor. And that's just awesome. 

Thank you so much, Jessica. 

Jessica Valenti: Thank you.