Project 2029: How We Protect Reproductive Rights Against MAGA

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:00)
Hi, we're on vacation, but we have an amazing special episode for you. In the last year, we set out to ask some questions to the smartest people in their fields about what Democrats should do when they regain power. We hope you'll enjoy this special episode of Project 2029, A Reimagining.
Hello, and welcome to part three of our new docu-series, Project 2029, A Reimagining. I'm Molly Jong-Fast, a columnist, podcaster, and person you occasionally see on cable news. In this series, we're trying to start a conversation about where the Democratic Party goes when it regains power. The hope is that there will be an agenda that puts people first and creates incentives for many of the voters Democrats have lost to come back to the party. In this episode, we're going to discuss reproductive rights and how, when Democrats regain power, we can work to make sure those rights are codified. We've assembled some of the smartest people we know to explain to us how we can begin to protect, codify and help change our legislation. So we never have to fight for these rights again. But first, it's easy to forget just all the ways these rights are being attacked. So let's walk through where we are at this very moment in America today. First, we'll hear from Mary Ziegler about the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

**Mary Ziegler** (1:25)
Probably the most significant thing that's happened in recent years is that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which opened the door to a bunch of other legal changes that are really unprecedented, right? So we've seen criminal abortion laws that are much more stringent than anything that was on the books in the 19th century. We've seen those laws interpreted in ways that preclude physicians from intervening in miscarriages and stillbirths, not just in situations where people are seeking abortions, and we've seen that those laws can have unintended consequences for people at the end of life too, people whose advanced directives don't address pregnancy or who don't have an advanced directives at all. So I think one of the things we've seen is that what seems to be changes just about abortion, which are significant enough in their own right, are spilling over into lots of areas involving people's lives, whether that's birth control or IVF on the one hand, or certainly people with wanted pregnancies having pregnancy complications on the other.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (2:26)
Now we'll hear from Nancy Northup about Texas's impact on abortion laws.

**Nancy Northup** (2:32)
So you both have the flat out criminal laws that make abortion a crime, aiding and abetting abortion a crime. Texas has been the innovator on this, for lack of a better word, that allows these bounty hunting lawsuits where ordinary individuals can sue someone because they have provided an abortion, aided and abetted providing an abortion. They just passed a law about going after the manufacturers and the shippers of medication abortion, which has been a lifeline in post row America. So it's everything from the state prosecuting to giving individuals the power to become sort of their own vigilante attorneys general to go after people who, again, might be a friend helping someone go out of state. I mean, we have represented individuals in the state of Texas where an abusive boyfriend has sued the friends and family of a woman, in one case, who left the state of Texas to have an abortion in another state. That's perfectly legal to do, but he brought this lawsuit against them. We represented another woman. She found out when she was driving around that a million dollar lawsuit had been filed against her for allegedly helping a friend secure medication abortion in the state of Texas.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (3:49)
And all of this madness started with SB8. Mary Ziegler will explain what SB8 was designed to do.

**Mary Ziegler** (3:57)
So SB8 was passed in 2021, and at the time it was mostly designed to circumvent Roe. So the idea was that instead of the government enforcing criminal abortion laws, that enforcement would be outsourced to private citizens who could sue anyone who formed an abortion for at least $10,000, regardless of whether that person had any connection to the abortion. So this was designed to scare abortion providers to stop offering services. It was designed to kind of incentivize a group of bounty hunters to go after them. And it legally meant that some of the constitutional roadblocks that could be in place if the government was enforcing these laws would go away. And of course, SB8 stopped mattering as much when Roe came down, because Texas could enforce lots of other criminal bans. But it still mattered in lots of other ways, because we've seen that sometimes politicians hesitate to enforce the most stringent bans, because they know that doing so will be politically unpopular.