How To Fight The Coming Abortion Ban In The United States

How can we protect the rights of women in the United States now that SCOTUS will seemingly overturn Roe v Wade? Michelle Oberman joins with strategies that have proven effective in other countries with strict abortion bans.

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Sam: From your research have you found that the most effective mechanisms that have been deployed to fight bans, both materially and so far, are like providing the access to the extent that it can be with a ban, and also politically in terms of undercutting the existence of the ban politically?
Oberman: Yeah so I think the answer to that question comes by centering on the needs of the most marginalized and vulnerable. and when you start by asking how they'll be affected then you can build out a response. I watched this happen on the ground in El Salvador. where what they did was they centered okay who's being affected by this. and they realized oh wow so there's patients in the hospital setting and doctors who are afraid. And the doctors who are afraid are reporting the patients to the police. or they're under treatment for things like cancer. Right like an ectopic pregnancy. And so they mounted a strategy to first begin to sue doctors who breached confidentiality. And secondly to begin to articulate malpractice. When doctors were you know treating cancer. So that's a small example. Let's look and see what's happening with the folks who are being prosecuted. And then begin to build out cases around wrongful convictions. Because those folks ended up of course there as they will here be the poorest folks in the country. Poorly represented by incompetent lawyers. Convicted by judges who were sloppy. so they put a team of lawyers on those cases and they had an astonishing exoneration rate. In the past 10 years, they've found 30 close to 30 cases of women who've been exonerated as fully innocent and sent home from prison. Right, the majority of cases of women serving sentences in El Salvador have now been exonerated. And then in terms of the most important impact of building on the ground, it's to create safe places to go when you're struggling with an unwanted pregnancy. So it's not just that you need to be able to use your phone and some money to access drugs. You need to find somebody who can tell you this is the right drug. This is the right time to take it. this is what to do when you go to the hospital if you have this what's abnormal what would cause you to have so much bleeding to go to the hospital this is what to tell the doctor. So we need trusted advisors. They don't have to be professionals but trusted advisors to walk us through it. Think about abortion doulas you might call them right? We have that movement here. It just hasn't been scaled up. But that's what we need. We need something to combat the misinformation and I think we'll save the most vulnerable in that way. But if we're just worried about how our wealthy white women are going to survive without a right then we're missing the importance of this moment.