Stay Informed, Stay Autonomous

From recent court cases, to LGBTQI+ health and rights, to sexual and reproductive health, rights and justice, we have the perfect news source for you. Garnet Henderson and Susan Rinkunas, journalists and co-founders of Autonomy News, a worker-owned reproductive rights and justice publication, sit down to talk with us about their new publication platform and how it can not only teach, but empower.  

Recent reporting on Autonomy News includes a case in Texas involving the first federal lawsuit against Aid Access—a large provider of abortion pills in the United States. Other reporting also includes a threatened lawsuit from the Arkansas Attorney General who has sent cease and desist letters to Plan C and Mayday Health, which also provide medication abortion. Additional articles include those examining a circulated, biased survey sent to OBGYNs and the rising number of Planned Parenthood clinic closures.

For more information, check out Well...Adjusting: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/well-adjusting/id1649386566

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:26

Welcome to Repros Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health rights and justice. Hi, Repros. How's everybody doing? I'm your host, Jenny Wetter, and my pronouns are she, her. So, y'all, I guess the biggest thing on my mind right now, since I live in Washington, D.C., is the federal government taking over the D.C. police force and having the National Guard come into D.C., The pretext that D.C. is this wildly unsafe place and it needs all of this extra law enforcement is just crazy to me. I do not feel unsafe in D.C. I've never really felt really unsafe in D.C. This is just wild and it's so surreal in a terrible way to go places and see all this extra law enforcement and the National Guard. And I just, another clear example of why we need DC statehood. I have already been in talks with doing another why DC statehood is a reproductive justice issue episode. So we'll probably make that happen, try to make that happen sooner rather than later. But yeah, man, like it is, it is really, I'm just really thinking of all of my DC people right now and hoping everybody stays safe. Okay, let's move past the heavy and go to the fun. I love stone fruit season. Like there is nothing like getting fresh peaches and nectarines and honestly cherries. It is like my favorite fruit season. So I ordered a big box of peaches from Oregon and they came and y'all, they're like the size of a softball, at least. They're

SPEAKER_01: 2:17

huge

SPEAKER_02: 2:18

and they're so good. And I have been just enjoying them. as is so far because they don't need anything. But I was thinking maybe this weekend I might make a peach cobbler because that also sounds pretty delightful. So we'll see. I don't know yet. I'm... Looking forward to it. But I have just been enjoying eating the plain peaches. But I have more coming. I have a box of peaches and nectarines, so I'm also looking forward to that. Yeah, it's, again, stone fruit season. I love it. Also this weekend, I am looking forward to seeing a friend I haven't seen in a while. We are going to get out of the city for a little bit and go winerying, I think. So when you're hearing this, this will all have already happened because I'm taking a mental health day on Friday and my friend and I are going to go and get out of the city. And I'm very much looking forward to it. I think it will do wonders for my mental health for all of the reasons. And this had already been planned before. The federal government took over the D.C. police force. The National Guard came in. So it feels even more necessary to mental health to get out of the city for a little bit right now. So I'm looking forward to that. So, yeah. Having a weekend that I am looking forward to with fruit and wineries. Maybe we'll go to an apple orchard or something. Yeah. We'll see. It'll just be nice to get away. With that, let's turn to this week's interview because it's a little bit of a longer conversation. Not too long, but just a little bit longer. I'm so excited to have on Garnett Henderson and Susan Rakunis with Autonomy News. I'm so excited to get to talk to them, one, about Autonomy News because it's new and I'm so excited for them personally. launching it. And then we're also going to talk about some of the reporting that they have done. So it's a little bit of a hodgepodge episode where we're talking about kind of a number of issues related to sexual and reproductive health, but it was a wonderful conversation. So let's turn to my interview with Susan and Garnet. Hi, Garnet and Susan. Thank you so much for being here today. Hi, thank you for having us.

SPEAKER_01: 4:35

Hello, Jenny.

SPEAKER_02: 4:36

Okay, before we get started, let's do a quick round of introductions. Garnet, do you want

SPEAKER_01: 4:42

to go first? Sure. My name is Garnet Henderson. I'm an investigative journalist, and I specialize in covering reproductive and sexual health rights and justice. And I am a co-founder of Autonomy News.

SPEAKER_00: 4:56

And I'm Susan Rancunas. I'm an independent journalist focusing on reproductive health and politics. I am freelance and also a co-founder of Autonomy News.

SPEAKER_02: 5:06

Well, first, congratulations on founding Autonomy News. I am so excited to have you on to talk about some of your reporting, but maybe let's for a second let you sing your own praises. What is Autonomy News? Tell us about

SPEAKER_01: 5:19

it. Sure. So, Autonomy News is a worker-owned reproductive rights and justice publication. We're the first worker-owned publication on this beat. And Susan and I are the co-founders, as we mentioned. Right now, it is us. It's a team of two, as well as freelance editors who help us make sure that all of our stories are rigorously edited and fact-checked. But we do hope that going into the future, we will be able to expand and bring more people onto our team as worker owners.

SPEAKER_00: 5:52

And Garnet and I have worked together professionally since... At least 2018, maybe 2017 when I was an editor at Vice and Garnet was a freelancer at Vice. And we've just worked well in that regard. And Garnet reached out to me and asked if I wanted to maybe start our own thing earlier this year. And then we launched in early June. And part of the reason we wanted to do this is because there are so many stories to tell. And it feels like there are vanishingly fewer places to tell them and tell them the correct way with all of the proper context necessary. So we started our own website and newsletter and it's hosted on Ghost, which is notably not Substack, if that matters to people. And if people want to sign up, they can choose not to get any emails. They could just go to our website if they prefer to consume the content that way or via social media, or you could get Yeah, I just went and

SPEAKER_02: 6:54

signed up this week because I was like, I could have swore I signed up previously. Our spam filter at work is... Possibly going to be the death of me. So I feel like I signed up and the verification got hung up or something. Anywho, I am now officially getting the emails. So I was very excited when I got mine yesterday. So I know it worked and it came through. Well, thank you for signing up. So I'm very excited to talk to y'all. And one of the things I've noticed is there's been a lot of reporting y'all have done around Mipha Pristone recently, including... As things change rapidly in this new world right now, we're recording this on August 12th, just in case anything changes between when y'all hear this next Tuesday. So you had a big story that came out yesterday talking about a lawsuit in Texas. Do you want to start there and we can talk about some of the other Miffy stories as well?

SPEAKER_01: 7:51

Sure. So yesterday, we published a story about a new lawsuit from Jonathan Mitchell, who I'm sure pretty much everyone listening to this podcast knows who he is. But just in case, he's the former Texas Solicitor General. He was the architect of SB8, the bounty hunter abortion ban. And he's one of the leading legal strategists of the anti-abortion movement right now, a chief advocate for enforcing the Comstock Act as, if not a total abortion ban, at the very least, a total ban on mail-in abortion pills. So he has a real approach of throwing everything at the wall to see what's going to stick. Lots of people thought SB8 would never stand, right? And then the Supreme Court let it go into effect. Lately, his approach has been centered on representing men who want to sue over their partner's or ex-partner's abortions. I'm sure people have heard about these cases, really weaponizing the legal system against people who have abortions or allegedly have had abortions. In some of those cases, it's not even really clear. But this is the first time we're aware of where he's representing a female plaintiff who is saying that she was given abortion-inducing medication, in this case misoprostol, without her knowledge or consent. So she alleges that the man who got her pregnant ordered abortion pills from Aid Access and So Aid Access and Aid Access founder Rebecca Gompertz are both named in the lawsuit as well. And Jonathan Mitchell is arguing that they violated the Comstock Act. And they're also suing for wrongful death and alleging that all of the plaintiffs, so the man, Aid Access, and Rebecca Gompertz committed felony murder. Because under Texas law, both the wrongful death and murder statutes include, this is scare quotes, unborn children. This is a woman who's alleging a really unacceptable act of reproductive coercion, but it's important to understand that the lawsuit is really designed to further Jonathan Mitchell's two pet priorities, which are fetal personhood and broader enforcement of the Comstock Act. She's alleging that the man basically mixed in the misoprostol with hot chocolate that he gave to her and that she did lose her pregnancy. And there are a lot of text messages. There's quite a bit of documentation in the lawsuit. So it's also, like I said earlier, some of these past Mitchell lawsuits are really quite thin, but this one does have a lot of exhibits. They have a lot of supporting evidence of the claims that they're making.

SPEAKER_00: 10:23

One thing to note here is that another character is involved that readers of this podcast may be familiar with. Mark Lee Thank you. involving the Comstock Act. These ordinances are either written by Jonathan Mitchell or Mitchell has pledged to defend cities if they get sued over this. That's the intro to Dixon. But Mark Dixon wrote yesterday on social media that he learned about this woman's... This is a horrible incident. Let's be completely clear. This is reproductive coercion. This We can disagree on the methods she's using and having an anti-abortion, pro-fetal personhood lawyer represent her in this case. But Dixon said that he first heard about this incident from a crisis pregnancy center in Texas. And then he wanted to connect her with, quote unquote, his lawyer, a.k.a. Jonathan Mitchell. So there's a lot going on here. The complaint does say that the woman got an ultrasound at one point and that her male partner went with her. So we don't know if that ultrasound was done at a crisis pregnancy center or if she went to the CPC at some point during this saga or afterward. But regardless, Mark Dixon is saying that a crisis pregnancy center disclosed this private information about this woman to him, and then that's how we're getting this lawsuit. So that's not great in and of itself. Most CPCs are not bound by HIPAA because they are not actually providing Real medical care. So they can legally do things like this, even if they claim on their website that they will protect your private information. So that's one thing I want to flag. And the second thing is, not only is this the first lawsuit that we know of that has a woman filing for wrongful death based on abortion pills. It is also potentially the first federal lawsuit against Aid Access itself, which is a large provider of abortion pills in the United States. There was actually research that came out yesterday in JAMA from Abigail Aiken and others who track data from Aid Access, and they found that from July 2023 to August 2024, Aid Access prescribed 120,000 sets of abortion pills and nearly 100,000 thousand of those were to states that either ban abortion entirely or ban telemedicine. So this is aid access sending these pills under laws where providers in states with protections, there are about eight states like this that have these strongest protections, and providers who are sitting in those states are prescribing pills across state lines. So aid access has been a longtime target of the anti-abortion movement, and Jonathan Mitchell has found himself a case in which a woman can allege that aid access provided these pills. So this is pretty scary stuff.

SPEAKER_02: 13:29

I think one of the things I missed reading the story, probably because I was a little distracted, but these things happen, was that the CPC disclosed. I was reading about, I remember reading about like that they can because they're not bound by HIPAA, but I guess I must have missed the paragraph where that was the core of this, which is just horrifying.

SPEAKER_01: 13:52

Yeah, it is. And so I'm actually doing what I can to continue investigating that because I am really curious not only about the CPC connection, but about whether or not this woman knowingly engaged an anti-abortion attorney who was going to use this case to further his own priorities, because I can really see either thing being true. I will say that, as I said, the some of her messages do seem to have a fairly clear anti-abortion bent, but she's also telling this man that she doesn't want to have an abortion and telling him not to order pills. So, you know, there are a lot of messages that could be interpreted as her having an anti-abortion stance or just being specific to her situation saying like, I want to continue this pregnancy, you know? So I am continuing to investigate and, um, If possible, I would like to speak with her.

SPEAKER_02: 14:53

Okay. Unfortunately, that's not the only lawsuit around medication abortion that is happening right now. There's another one out of Arkansas.

SPEAKER_00: 15:01

Yes. Well, at this point, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin has threatened a lawsuit against two information sites. Let's be extremely clear that these are not even websites that send pills to people like Aid Access does. So in late July, Griffin sent cease and desist letters to both Plan C and Mayday Health, which listeners of this podcast might be familiar with. Plan C especially is a top clearinghouse of information. They've explain where people can access pills in all 50 states. And they provide links to other information, including, you know, if people have medical questions or people have legal questions, they are really, you know, they're doing First Amendment protected activity, right? They're not providing these pills in any way. But Griffin sent two separate cease and desist letters to these entities claiming that, and this is the crazy part, he claimed that by the sites describing abortion pills as quote-unquote safe, that they were engaging in deceptive trade practices under an Arkansas law. And to back up that specious claim, he cited the Ethics and Public Policy Center paper that was published in May that conservatives have been rallying around to try to completely limit access to abortion pills, either by ending telemedicine prescriptions or just trying to get them yanked from the market entirely. So

SPEAKER_02: 16:27

this is

SPEAKER_00: 16:29

silly, but we should still take it somewhat seriously, because as law professor Mary Ziegler told me for Autonomy News, this does seem to raise First Amendment questions, but it perhaps just the threat of lawsuits, including fines for every violation, could make some websites basically comply in advance and not advertise these services to Arkansas or other states that could try to copy this move from Griffin. So if there is a lawsuit against them, it's basically Griffin said you had 14 days from the date of the letter to stop doing this, what he called deceptive advertising. And then if the sites don't do that, that he could investigate them and potentially file lawsuits. And then they might face civil penalties of up to$10,000 per violation. So that's the chilling effect there. And I do just want to add that these cease and desist letters came on the same day that Griffin and 15 other attorneys general sent a letter to Congress urging them to effectively ban shield laws. They asked them to consider passing legislation that would prevent states from passing shield laws so that they could basically override abortion bans in their states. So that was a little bit buried, but just these two things taken together show you that shield laws and abortion pills by mail are a huge threat to the anti-abortion movement, and they're doing everything they can to come after them.

SPEAKER_02: 17:56

In the episode that came out today or last week for y'all listening, I talked to Erin Mattson about the attacks on the FACE Act. And she was talking about like why they're so mad about medication abortion pills because then people don't need to come to the clinics and deal with the protesters and all of that stuff. And they can't so easily protest if pills are in people's hands and they're getting mailed to people.

SPEAKER_01: 18:23

Yes, actually, I won't say too much about it. But we have Autonomy News has an exciting collaboration coming up where we're going to co-publish a story with another outlet. And it involves abortion pill reversal. And that is something that has come up a lot in our reporting for that story. Unfortunately, even though abortion pill reversal is so obviously a load of crap, not only does it not do anything wrong, it could be dangerous, right? The only clinical trial actually studying this was suspended after three patients hemorrhaged so badly they had to be transferred to the hospital. And just for anyone who doesn't know, abortion pill reversal involves taking progesterone after having taken mifepristone. Mifepristone blocks progesterone, so the idea is basically just like, you put more progesterone in there and it will compete with the mifepristone to attach to that receptor. No proof of that theory. So... What we have seen is that, first of all, when patients do have to go to a clinic now, a majority of them at many clinics are walking out still pregnant, but with their abortion pills in hand. Whereas previously, most people walking out of an abortion clinic were no longer pregnant, right? So any protesters or CPC volunteers who were outside only had the opportunity, scare quotes, to talk to those patients when they were on their way in. Thank you so much. That specific anti-abortion myth, even though I think some progress had been made there just as more people became aware of abortion pills and how they worked, people were maybe less likely to be swayed by the abortion pill reversal myth. But unfortunately, the anti-abortion is really, really doubling down on their disinformation there to try and confuse people.

SPEAKER_02: 20:31

Oh, I thought that had like really... gone away. Like it went quiet for a while and apparently it's now really back.

SPEAKER_01: 20:39

Yeah, especially because so many of the states that passed those laws requiring providers to tell patients about supposed abortion pill reversal are now total ban states. So it's not that that doesn't matter that they pass those laws, but nobody is really having to follow those laws or almost nobody is having to follow those laws anymore, right?

UNKNOWN: 21:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 21:00

Okay. Sorry. A bummer to know that that's back. Gross. Okay. I feel like there was something else that y'all had around medication abortion.

SPEAKER_01: 21:11

Yes. Well, and also on the subject of disinformation, we recently reported about a strange survey that a lot of OBGYNs received from the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs, who folks will recognize as among the groups that sued the FDA to try and revoke the approval of Mifepristone. So these groups sent out a survey to OBGYNs, and a number of the OBGYNs received them at personal emails or abortion clinic work emails that they did not think were publicly accessible. And the email described the lead investigator of the study as Hector Chapa, who is a professor at Texas A&M and a former board member at ACOG, who actually wrote an editorial for, I believe, Live Action, right, Susan? Yeah, about his choice to resign from ACOG's board because they support abortion access. And so the survey was supposedly collecting information about OBGYN's attitudes around abortion. It used the phrase elective abortion, and it also used a lot of just obvious anti-abortion language, like the phrase dismemberment was in there. And so it was a very strange, obviously biased survey. No apparent approval by any kind of review board to check that it meets basic ethical standards. no informed, clear informed consent. So they're claiming that this is something that will later be published in a peer reviewed journal, but clearly not following the procedures to make that happen. And we know that the anti-abortion movement has a long history of producing junk science to try and justify its positions. We've seen a lot of that play out in court, specifically in that case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine versus FDA. And so Yeah, it's just a red flag that they're trying to produce yet more biased junk

SPEAKER_00: 23:16

science. Absolutely. And this time, OBGYNs who received the survey reached out to us. So we at least have a heads up if this organization does try to publish this paper somewhere or even self-publish it, like that Ethics and Public Policy Center study was self-published. They didn't even try to go to a journal. But one thing I also want to note is that, again, Hector Chapa, a former board member of ACOP, is one of these people who likes to argue in his various op-eds that he has now published since resigning that most OBGYNs do not provide abortions, thereby OBGYNs oppose abortions, and that's not how that works. It's actually... More OBGYNs should provide abortions. Let's be honest about that. But some of them don't because of where they work. And some of them would like to prescribe medication abortion, but they can't because their office would need to become a certified provider under the REMS. So unless they decided to start volunteering for aid access, right, it's hard for some OBGYNs to actually provide medication abortion. Now, the other thing, too, is that ACOG actually had to send CHAPA a cease and desist letter. So this is our second story that references a cease and desist because in the email that went out to OBGYNs, the text says, sort of implied affiliation with ACOG. It said that this survey was going to be sent out to the ACOG list and that it was going to be used, I'm going to quote now, they claimed the survey was intended to quote, inform ACOG policy, programming, strategy, and outreach. And the survey website, which is still live, did scrub the claim that it was gonna go out to the OBGYN list, but ACOG told us that they had to send a cease and desist so that AHM and CHAPA and APLOG would stop suggesting affiliation with ACOG. Yes, he is a former board member, but he is not doing this under the auspices of the organization, nor would he have any ability to influence their policy since he's no longer a board member.

SPEAKER_02: 25:19

Yeah, there's no way you could read that and not think it was affiliated with ACOG.

SPEAKER_01: 25:24

Totally. And especially if somebody had missed the news that he resigned and would potentially recognize his name as an ACOG board member, it's very misleading. And we did look into, I was curious whether he might have inappropriately used membership terms. information that he had from being a board member of ACOG. Obviously, we can't be sure either way. But when we spoke to OBGYN, several of them said, no, this email address is not one that I've ever used for ACOG. So still kind of unclear how they got some of that contact information, actually.

SPEAKER_02: 25:56

Okay, let's move past the myriad of attacks on medication abortion and talk about another thing we've been seeing, and that is Planned Parenthood's closing. What is going on? Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 26:10

Susan has been tracking the number of Planned Parenthood clinics that have announced their closure so far, and I believe the number is at 35 so far for 2025.

SPEAKER_00: 26:21

Well, the first thing I'll say is that independent clinics do provide more abortions later in pregnancy and they offer more kinds of abortions than Planned Parenthood. But Planned Parenthood does have a large footprint in the United States and anti-abortion advocates have been trying to shutter these clinics for a while. So this is why we're focusing on this a little bit in our coverage, as well as the fact that the budget reconciliation bill that passed and was signed on July 4th, Wahoo purported to defund large abortion providers and that was aimed at Planned Parenthood, although they weren't named in the bill. Basically, we think that they were not naming Planned Parenthood because they didn't want to look like they were actually targeting them when they were entirely targeting them. So that happened in July. But these closures have been announced since the beginning of the year. One of the first stories I wrote for Jezebel this year was Illinois announcing four clinics being closed in January before Trump was even inaugurated. So clinics have been struggling for years. And some of those struggles have certainly gotten worse since the Trump administration is threatening to exclude abortion providers from Medicaid, even for non-abortion services like birth control and STI testing. But in general, I mean, clinics, as many of your listeners will know, have been struggling with The fact that more people are coming to get abortion care later in pregnancy and the costs are higher and they might have less money to pay for that. And that's as well as the fact that funding has been limited a little bit to support patients, including via the National Abortion Federation. Garnet reported extensively on that when she was at REWIRE. But yeah, the National Abortion Federation basically put a per patient per caller cap on funds. They will say that they haven't cut their funds and it's the same amount, but they are limiting the amount that each person can access. So that has created kind of a rolling crisis in abortion access. And then there have been other attacks as well. The Trump administration froze Title 10 funding in either late March or early April, and that's the federal family planning program that has existed since 1970 and covers, it provides grants to clinics and health departments and people who apply, right? It's not just Planned Parenthoods or abortion clinics to provide birth control to people who are living on low incomes and it's low and no cost birth control. Now, when that money was frozen, Clinics did keep offering the service, a lot of them, but that puts them in a budgetary hole as well. Some clinics have had their funding restored, but others have not. So there were those attacks on top of now this defunding bill. And the one thing I'll say is that clinics are closing and citing the defunding bill, even though right now there is a preliminary injunction preventing the bill from really being enforced. So on July 28th, a federal judge in Boston said that the Trump administration had to continue reimbursing Planned Parenthood clinics for Medicaid services. And that injunction was for all 47 Planned Parenthood affiliates. But some clinics have said that the previously announced closures are still going to go through. They can't just walk it back thinking that this injunction is going to fix them. And then I also reported last week that some affiliates in Ohio are actually not fully accepting Medicaid after that injunction. So there's one small affiliate, Planned Parenthood Southwest Ohio, that is down to four clinics. They closed two after the bill passed. And they said that they will not be accepting Medicaid because of the chance that the injunction will get overturned and the administration will try to claw back any Medicaid payments made in that time period. And they said they can't take that risk. A second Ohio affiliate said that they are accepting Medicaid, but not for long acting birth control, including IUDs and Nexplanon arm implants because those are the most expensive services that they provide. I was worried that they were going to say it's because of an argument about fertilization and anti-abortion advocates claiming that IUDs cause abortions. No, they said it's dollars and cents and those are the most expensive services they provide and they cannot risk not being reimbursed for those services. So that's kind of a stark reality right now of how clinics are reacting to this defund bill and they are limiting services in some instances. And then also clinics are continuing to announce closures, even though the bill hasn't taken effect yet. That was a long and rambling thing. So Garnet, tell me what else you want to add to that.

SPEAKER_01: 31:15

I think you really covered it. I was just going to add that, yeah, you know, in previous reporting I had done, I had heard a lot of rumors about that many affiliates were going to be shutting a large number of clinics as far back as last fall, fall of 2024. So yeah, the clinics that are closing have been struggling for a long time. And I think this is much more of a straw that broke the camel's back type of situation, if anything. And yeah, just the fact that, for example, as Susan just said, there's at least one affiliate that is not providing LARCs, long-acting reversible contraception, for Medicaid patients is just heartbreaking because that's not only the most expensive type of contraceptive service for the clinic, that's by far the most expensive type of contraceptive to get if you have to pay for it out of pocket. I mean, there's just no way that most Medicaid patients could pay for an IUD insertion out of pocket. And in so many states, there are such massive... Healthcare deserts, just period, and specifically reproductive and sexual healthcare deserts. For so many people, a Planned Parenthood clinic in their community was the only place that they could afford to go. And I do think that's one of the downsides of the increasing popularity of medication abortion, even though, don't get me wrong, that has been so incredibly important. especially in terms of helping people in banned states access abortion care. The abortion rate has actually gone up overall slightly in the United States since Dobbs. But the downside is that if you're providing tons of medication abortions, you don't really need a clinic. Only a handful of patients really are going to need to come in for an ultrasound before doing a medication abortion. And I wouldn't want to come into a clinic if I didn't have to, right? But that's the downside of the shift is that, you know, if you have fewer patients coming into the clinic for a service like medication abortion, it's harder to then keep the clinic open for services like procedural abortion, which is still very important and necessary, and contraceptive care and counseling, particularly IUD insertion. You can take an IUD out at home, but you cannot put one in at home. That's such a good point.

SPEAKER_00: 33:39

Tying these two threads together, medication abortion access medication abortion has been wrongly respected for so long and it's more accessible now but that is leading to kind of a shift in how the clinic universe is structured you know some of these clinics were going to close even if kamala harris had won the election like that's just how this was going to go and on that vein i do want to add one thing i forgot to mention Somehow, which is the Supreme Court case out of South Carolina that said states can defund Planned Parenthood from their Medicaid plans at the state level as opposed to at the federal level. So that's another thing. That case went the way it went. Even if Kamala Harris had won the presidency, that would be a threat going forward. And we... are very likely going to see more states try to pass laws like this in their upcoming sessions. Although, as Garnet mentioned previously with abortion pill reversal, a lot of the states that would do that have already banned abortion, so it's hard to argue that you need to defund the provider because of abortion if they can't provide abortions anymore, but they might say like, oh, well, they're providing gender-affirming care. I mean, truly. So just, we might see more states saying you can't even, as a Planned Parenthood provider, bill Medicaid for IUDs or birth control, and that will lead to more clinic shuttering, which is devastating.

SPEAKER_02: 35:02

Yeah, I could just see them arguing they're providing abortive patients even if it's not medication abortion or whatever.

SPEAKER_00: 35:09

Yes, deep exhale. The last thing I will add is that, yes, not only are IUDs and implants very expensive to get if you're paying yourself. These Ohio affiliates did tell me that patients can self-pay and clinics do give self-pay discounts, but that's still hundreds of dollars. People could try to get these implants. methods of birth control at a county health department or state health department. But the problem is that they often need to wait long times to get appointments at those health departments. And Planned Parenthood clinics are more likely, based on Guttmacher data, to have same-day appointments and same-day insertions because they have these things on the shelves. Like, this is what they do, you know? So if anyone tells you, oh, well, people can just get it somewhere else. Not quickly, they can't. And that's something that in South Carolina, the head, the medical director for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic was saying that the state is arguing people can get care other places. And she said, I have people telling me they have to wait three months for an IUD appointment at the health department. So like, let's be real here.

SPEAKER_01: 36:12

Even if you have the money to go to a private practice, most providers in private practice are not stocking IUDs and implants on site. They have to order them. You know, they have to be sure that either you're going to pay for it if it's a self-pay situation or that your insurance is. So there's pretty much a delay at any type of site that's not a dedicated sexual and reproductive health clinic.

SPEAKER_02: 36:34

Okay. There was one more piece that I saw that I would love to touch on, even though we're running low on time, but I still wanted to make sure we talked about it real quick. And that is the one about the administration and eugenics. just felt like it would be a miss if we didn't at least touch on it a little bit.

SPEAKER_00: 36:52

Yeah, it's quite dark, but you're referring to one of our stories from when we launched, and I wrote this one, and we wanted to show the breadth of what Autonomy News will be covering. So it's not just abortion, birth control, gender-affirming care, but also reproductive justice more broadly. And We had had a few months of the Trump administration's rhetoric to work off. And one thing that is extremely clear is that they do not want everyone to reproduce. They only want certain people to reproduce. That has been true for a while. But the stark statements from both candidate then President Trump and even Elon Musk when he was still a special government employee involved in Doge plus Health Secretary RFK Jr., every time I have to say that out loud, it is so sad. It hurts. It hurts a little bit. But these are kinds of people who say things like, you know, only sick people should die of measles or, you know, the West is declining because we're not producing enough babies. And it's like, well, what do you mean by the West?

UNKNOWN: 37:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 37:59

Be specific. Who are you talking about? And Trump saying that immigrants are, quote, poisoning the blood of our country and calling mostly Central and South American immigrants criminals, that kind of thing. So I looked at kind of the past in the United States, like how we have a dark history of forcibly sterilizing immigrants. mostly non-white people, but also white people who were low income and viewed to be not of quote, you know, like strong stock. The eugenics movement in the 1920s and 30s, unfortunately inspired the literal Nazis, like inspired their, you know, eugenic program. So we're not saying that this administration is going to be executing people, but they do want to control reproduction and they also are limiting healthcare to people they don't want to reproduce. So we are seeing reports, as has always been the case, like horrific access to healthcare in ICE detention. And there are also stories of people being sterilized in prisons in the United States. You know, I spoke to reproductive justice advocates, including like the Lupe Rodriguez from the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice was explaining about how people in Latino communities are like scared to get health care. I mean, an unfortunate reality because the Trump administration said that ICE could now go into hospitals where, you know, that was a policy. They weren't supposed to do that before. and they're scared to go to work, to earn income, to care for their families and buy enough food. All this stuff that the Trump administration is doing is showing an antipathy to these immigrants and it harms their health. And it also is just like part of a larger project to get people to either leave the country or never come to begin with. You know, they're trying to end birthright citizenship. That is at the end of that story about eugenics. Like this is all connected. They don't want people born to non-citizens to become American citizens. Like they are trying to control the populace of the United States in a really scary way. And so we wanted to highlight that.

SPEAKER_02: 40:26

So I always like to wrap up with an action item so that while we're talking about all of these terrible things that are happening, at least we can give our audience something to do. What do y'all have today? What are some things our audience can do to get involved?

SPEAKER_01: 40:41

I think that... A top action item is always donate to your local abortion fund and always prioritize donating to a local organization over a national one. And the other thing that I would really like to lift up is that what's happening in Palestine is also a reproductive justice crisis, in addition to being an absolutely appalling humanitarian crisis in general. And It's not acceptable to me to watch people starve. So I would also encourage people to give to some of the fundraisers to try and help people in Palestine, in Gaza, get food.

SPEAKER_02: 41:19

And remember, people don't stop being pregnant or getting pregnant because there is a humanitarian crisis. That's right.

SPEAKER_01: 41:26

And a lot of the people who are dying are infants. And sick children, which was recently a talking point from Israel that a child depicted in the New York Times had a pre-existing condition. I would argue it's even worse to starve children with pre-existing conditions. Right. Reading those

SPEAKER_00: 41:45

horrible stories, I mean, children starving to death, there are people talking about how their mothers cannot nurse them because their mothers are not getting enough food to produce breast milk. So this is... This has always been a reproductive justice crisis, but yes. And I'll uplift like the Samir Project I know is a really good organization that's helping get people food and water in Gaza. So thank you, Garnet. And I also want to double tap, if you will, on what you said about local abortion funds and local organizations over national ones. would encourage people if they want to help sustain care in their communities with brick and mortar clinics offering even birth control, and that doesn't even have to be abortion, including if abortions ban in your state, but you can donate directly to local Planned Parenthood affiliates and they are the ones actually running the clinics. So, you know, the organizations that I mentioned before in Ohio, but all across the country, there are almost 50 affiliates nationwide. And they're the ones running the clinics. So if people want to try to keep doors open in their community, they can look to donate there in addition to abortion funds, helping people get care.

SPEAKER_02: 42:56

Well, Garnett, Susan, thank you so much for being here today. It was so wonderful to talk to you. And I am so excited to see what is coming from Autonomy News.

SPEAKER_01: 43:05

Thank you, Jenny. Thank you so much for having us.

SPEAKER_02: 43:08

Okay, y'all, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Susan and Garnett. And definitely, if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to Autonomy News. They have really great reporting that it's important to keep up to date on. So I hope you sign up as I did. Otherwise, I will see everybody next week. Bye.