David Remnick: The Supreme Court's ruling in the Dobbs case didn't come as any surprise. In fact, given the draft opinion that was leaked in May, overturning Roe v. Wade was nearly a certainty, but the effects have been rapid and chaotic. In some states, abortions stopped overnight. In others, there's confusion about what kinds of maternal care might now be potentially criminal.

The response from Democrats in Washington struck many supporters of abortion rights as painfully inadequate. Jia Tolentino and Stephania Taladrid have both reported extensively on the issue. They spoke this week with New Yorker senior editor Tyler Foggatt on the podcast Politics and More. Stephania had returned from the state of Texas where she was in an abortion clinic in Houston exactly when the Dobb's decision was announced.

Stephania Taladrid: The decision came shortly after 9:00 AM. Several members of the staff were huddled in the front desk area and the reactions were dramatic. People started crying. People were just in complete disbelief of what was happening. Then at some point, a patient comes up to the clinic director and says, "Why are you all crying?" Then she had to put herself together and wipe away her tears and go up to the patients who were waiting in the waiting room and say, "Ladies, the Supreme Court just struck down Roe v. Wade, meaning that we can no longer operate as an abortion clinic and we will not be able to assist you today."

I was struck by a Cuban woman who spoke no English and she couldn't really understand what was happening. At one point, she turned to the clinic director and says, "Que paso? What did just happen?" Then someone explained to her what had happened and then she just left. Many of the other patients, the minute that the decision was announced, they just fled the clinic.

Tyler Foggatt: Because they were worried about getting in trouble just for being there?

Stephania: Potentially. Who knows? There were just so many reasons why that could have been. To me, what was most striking was just seeing the enormous distance separating what was happening in DC and the reality on the ground.

Tyler: Jia, you grew up in Texas. Can you talk a little bit about the cultural attitudes toward abortion that you observed long before this?

Jia Tolentino: Yes, [chuckles] I grew up in Texas, in Houston actually, where the clinic that Stephania just visited is located. I don't think I knew a single person that was not anti-abortion until I went to college really, but I also think that the anti-abortion movement that has entrenched itself in half the country and that has become victorious in half the country is one that is significantly markedly more extreme than the one that was dominant in the '80s and the '90s.

This is an anti-abortion movement that has been as radicalized as the GOP has since 2016. There are at least 11 states that have no exceptions for rape and incest, which is previously an unthinkable level of extremity and cruelty. The people that I grew up around, they talked about abortion as murder. There was this doctrine that life begins at conception, that abortion is killing a baby.

I think that when it really came down to it, abortion was not actually instinctively tantamount to murder. There was an understanding that there was a loss in abortion, but that there was not actually a reason why you would deny a pregnant person chemotherapy because she was pregnant, that you would refuse someone care for a septic uterus because you would have to stop the fetus's heartbeat first.

I think that the true implications of fetal personhood, which is what this current anti-abortion movement is organized itself around, the idea that, effectively, the fetus is the kind of person with rights that are not only equal to but really far superior to any that any of us enjoy, the right to make someone die so that you can live, that is significantly more extreme than any of what I grew up around and that was already quite extreme.

Tyler: Yes, it seems like there's been a real shift. I was thinking about SB 8, which is the Texas law that banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. That allows private citizens to go after abortion providers and people who aid and abet those seeking an abortion like the Uber driver who takes you to the clinic, but that law technically doesn't hold the person who got the abortion liable.

Then in 2014, Tennessee passed what was the first law in the United States to allow women to be prosecuted for drug use during pregnancy, but even that was discontinued after a couple of years. It seems like there has been a hesitation up until this point to actually go after the women who are getting the abortions even if you're indirectly going after them by making it harder for them to get the procedure.

Now, you're seeing in states like Wyoming that they're looking to pass their own versions of the Tennessee law, so basically going after women for this idea of fetal endangerment. I'm wondering if you guys have any thoughts on the exact point at which the pro-life movement pivoted to the criminalization of people who are getting abortions or pregnant people rather than going after the doctors or the people who are surrounding the procedure.

Jia: It's true that, currently, the anti-abortion movement is sticking to the idea that there will be a need for wayward mothers, but this, I have a strong feeling, is a veil that will fall soon enough because progressive states are passing laws that will shield women and doctors from out-of-state prosecutions to block medical records, et cetera. Once you can't target people out of state, once you can't target doctors effectively for providing abortions, the only people to target to stop abortions will really be the people who are getting them.

There are a lot of people who have felt quite surprised by this where, in fact, the people in the reproductive rights community in Texas, for example, have known that this moment was coming with absolute certainty, I would say, since about 2011 when the Texas state bans began passing that were then replicated in so many other states around the country. In terms of the criminalization of pregnancy, the National Advocates for Pregnant Women have done uniquely valuable work on this.

There's been a myriad of charges. There's child endangerment. There's possession and distribution of narcotics to a minor. There's manslaughter charges in some cases of stillbirth even when no causal link could be drawn between the actions of the pregnant person and the stillbirth itself, right? This has been a tactic that has been tested on low-income women, on brown and Black women since the '80s really.

I would say that's when it really started. There were hospitals in South Carolina that were drug testing women at labor secretly and then charging them. It has been pretty successful because even those of us who have defended reproductive rights have tended to think of these cases as outliers. I think we are in an era now when we will see, they were not the outliers. They experienced what is coming for a lot more people.

Tyler: How hard is it to distinguish between an abortion and a miscarriage? Is this the kind of thing where a doctor can step in and say this is very obviously an unintentional miscarriage rather than an intentional abortion?

Jia: Abortion and miscarriage are both incredibly common. Both occur about a million times per year. In many cases, they're clinically indistinguishable. If a woman's uterus expels its contents, there is no instant test to distinguish whether it was a deliberate miscarriage or a natural one. On the one hand, this is helpful for people who will be seeking abortions and getting them, there is no obligation for them to walk into an urgent care facility and say, "I took misoprostol and I think I might be bleeding too much and I would like to have an exam."

They don't need to do that and, in fact, they should not. However, what that also means is that women who are experiencing miscarriage naturally who walk into an urgent care center and say, "I miscarried. I'm at 12 weeks and I think I might be bleeding too much," under certain hospitals, under certain district attorneys' jurisdictions, that miscarriage can and will be investigated as a possible crime, as the possible crime of abortion. The indistinguishability of these two incredibly common events, on the one hand, it is a shield for women seeking abortions and, on the one hand, is a cudgel towards women who miscarry.

Tyler: How do you expect this to affect the care that pregnant women receive?

Jia: What all of these restrictions do is they present a legal framework for charging and detaining women for doing anything that could possibly cause a miscarriage, that could be seen to cause early labor, to cause a stillbirth. It will have an incredibly chilling effect on prenatal care in prohibition states.

Right now, most of the charges for child endangerment while pregnant have come from drug use, but there are plenty of other things that pregnant women are told they are not allowed to do because it will endanger the baby like taking hot baths and exercising too much and eating deli turkey and all of these things, traveling, working a certain kind of job. The inevitable effect is to set people in an adversarial relationship with their own pregnancy, which has happened in states like Tennessee with things like the Fetal Assault Law, which was discontinued precisely because it caused an increase in maternal and infant death.

You will see many, many, many stories of people who experience pregnancy complications. The doctor will need to do hours of judicial review to make sure that they can't get sued for providing any procedure that might endanger the fetus and women will die because of it. Flat out, women will die in the course of ordinary pregnancy because of physician fears of doing anything that might make them liable for felony charges of performing an abortion. It will make pregnancy significantly more dangerous for many, many people.

Tyler: You mentioned that this is a win for the Republicans, but I'm wondering to what extent this is more a failure of the Democratic Party that had a chance to enshrine abortion rights and law and didn't take the opportunity. Do you guys have thoughts on how the Democrats failed to respond to the threat to abortion rights in the Biden administration and even before that?

Jia: [chuckles] Oh, I have so many thoughts about this. [chuckles] I have thoughts about this that I think would require a lot of bleeping. I'm not enamored of Democratic Party leadership and can't think of a single time in my lifetime when I have felt that way. When the decision came down and we saw what the Democratic Party leadership had to offer, that was a moment for me where I began to genuinely suspect for the first time in my life that, actually, the Democrats are not interested at all in protecting the right to abortion.

It was presented on the day as nothing but a reason to get people to donate and that I found so abominable that repro activists have been preparing for this moment for a decade. We knew for a fact that it was going to happen in 2018 once Kavanaugh was confirmed and then an extra layer of, absolutely, this is going to happen with Amy Coney Barrett. The Democrats have sat by even before this while abortion was basically made inaccessible to poor and minority women in many states in the South and Southeast over the last decade.

Every candidate campaigns on making Roe the law of the land. Then as soon as they get elected, they back away and focus on things that they consider more important. I'm sure, Stephania, you've seen it in your reporting. The people that we've been in contact with, who have been legging the systems of protection in place, just these tiny threads of connection and support person-to-person with so little funding, with so little anything other than the will to help people-

Stephania: -and so much risk.

Jia: -and so much risk to themselves, the way that they have been doing this for years. I wasn't expecting the Democrats to override the filibuster and codify Roe if they weren't going to do it for the Voting Rights Act. As you can tell, I've been incensed about it.

Stephania: It was interesting, as Jia pointed out, the main message that we got from the president that day was Roe was on the ballot, right? I think the reaction for a lot of people was, "How can you be telling me that the answer is to vote when we already voted you into office? You're there." It was interesting to see that after the decision was announced, I went up to a small rally that several of the staff members at the clinic attended.

People were rightly upset and they were shouting, "Bans off our bodies," and "We won't go back," and "Fuck Greg Abbott," the governor of Texas. Then at one point, Beto O'Rourke showed up. There were some among the crowd who wanted to hear from him. The majority did not. Then the chant became, "Democrats, we call your bluff." What was good to see was that instead of running away from that criticism or just going on CNN and finding another kind of podium, Beto stayed.

He listened to people's abortion stories. He wasn't hoping to co-op that moment and to take the mic away from the women and the pregnant people who were hoping to express their anger and their frustration and their fear frankly for their lives and those of their generations to come. He stayed and he listened as a way to show to them, "I'm here and I stand with you."

Within the party itself, we've heard proposals to build abortion clinics on federal land, to fund people seeking abortions out of state, to expand the Supreme court's membership, right? In a way, I think it's been quite underwhelming to see that the White House's response has been, "Well, we'll protect the right to seek medical care." We stand with the attorney general who has said that no state can interfere with a woman's ability to travel to another state.

We have yet to see whether that's true or not, but then that doesn't solve the issue of, what happens to those who cannot afford to travel anywhere else? You'll have to spend all of your savings or the money that you don't even have to get an abortion out of state. It's just completely insane. We did a story on a family from Dallas who had to travel from Dallas to New Mexico to a city called Santa Teresa so that their eighth-grader could get an abortion.

The family had $1,500 left in savings. They had just put in a down payment for a house that they had worked pretty much their entire lives to be able to afford. They were suddenly faced with a cost of $1,300 to get an abortion. I followed this family. I met them at the clinic in New Mexico and I followed them back to Texas. Just the sense of anxiety, the dread, and the genuine fear of thinking, "Where do we go from here? We have $200 left in our savings account. This just completely depleted our savings."

Jia: What we're talking about here is the ability to make a life. I'm not talking about fetal life. There is perhaps no more fundamental issue to any sort of human autonomy, to the narrative control of your aspirations, to the fulfillment of your hopes, to your ability to feed your family, to your education, to everyone else's lives and your family and your community. It's at the nexus of every single issue because every person, we are all the product of reproductive decisions or the lack of them.

The population's ability to make free choices and to live in ways that are decent and abundant and loving and free. There's nothing that breaks that desire and that ability like pregnancy before you're ready or when you're not able. Stephania, I'm sure you've had a lot of friends texting you. It's like, "What can I do? What can I do?" because there's too much to do. It feels really overwhelming. I keep telling people, "Remember, all of these things are connected. All these forms of justice are connected. If you find one thread to pull and just keep pulling it, that's what we have to do."

Tyler: Thank you both so much.

Stephania: Thank you.

Jia: Thanks. [chuckles]

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David: Jia Tolentino and Stephania Taladrid, they spoke with Tyler Foggatt, who's a senior editor at The New Yorker. There's more from their conversation on our podcast Politics and More and you can read all of our coverage on the overturning of Roe v. Wade at newyorker.com.

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