Abortion Rights & Challenges Ahead

Episode Notes

Transcript

Kimberly Mutcherson:

There are lots of ways that you can even without necessarily getting a federal ban passed, which seems like it might become a little bit harder to do, given that the majorities are not very big in terms of Congress. There are so many other ways that you can make abortion access incredibly difficult, and that is what we’re going to see undoubtedly, no matter what was said about allowing states to make their own decisions.

Announcer:

Welcome to the award-winning podcast, Lawyer 2 Lawyer with J. Craig Williams, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession. You are listening to Legal Talk Network.

J Craig Williams:

Welcome to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Craig Williams, coming to you from Southern California. I occasionally write a blog named May It Please the Court and have three books out, titled How To Get Sued, The Sled, and y newest book, How Would You Decide? 10 Famous Trials That Changed History. You can find All 3 on Amazon. In addition, our new podcast miniseries In Dispute: 10 Famous Trials That Changed History is currently featured here on the Legal Talk Network and on your favorite podcasting app. Please listen and subscribe.

On June 24th, 2022 in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the United States Supreme Court overturned 50 years of precedent overruling Roe v. Wade. Leading up to the presidential election, abortion was a hot issue and appeared on ballots across the states. Voters in seven states, Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York moved to protect abortion access where similar measures in other three states failed Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota.

Since the election, former President Trump has publicly denied that he would support a national abortion ban and has said that he believes abortion should be left to the states. So what happens now today on Lawyer 2 Lawyer, we will discuss abortion rights and the challenges ahead and to help us better understand today’s topic, we’re joined by returning guest, Kimberly Mutcherson, professor of law, and former codeine at Rutgers Law School in Camden, New Jersey. She currently has a visiting appointment as the Philis W Beck Chair in law at Temple Law School for the fall 2024 semester at Temple. She’s teaching “Bioethics, Babies and Babymaking.” Professor Mutcherson is a reproductive justice scholar whose work focuses on assisted reproduction and abortion among other topics. Welcome to the show, Kim.

Kimberly Mutcherson:

Thank you so much for having me again.

J Craig Williams:

Well, yes, it’s wonderful to have you back on the show. You were back on, I think September 17th, 2021 just prior to the Dobbs decision in 2022. A lot’s happened since then.

Kimberly Mutcherson:

An enormous amount. Yes.

J Craig Williams:

Well, first let’s get a little bit about your background and then how you got interested in abortion rights.

Kimberly Mutcherson:

Sure. Well, I always say that my interest in rights started very early. I went to my first abortion rights march when I was in high school, which was quite a long time ago. I won’t tell you how long, but it was quite a long time ago. And so I’ve been really interested in questions of the kinds of decisions that people get to make about pregnancy, about procreation in general and about parenting. And once I entered the legal academy, those were the issues that I really wanted to focus on. So as you said, I’m a reproductive justice scholar and I think it’s always useful to describe to people what reproductive justice is because folks hear that term and they almost automatically assume reproductive rights, but reproductive justice is actually different. It’s a movement that was started by black women in the mid nineties and it focuses on three central tenants. It focuses on the right to have a child, the right to not have a child, and the right to raise your child in safe and sustainable communities. So when I think about questions related to abortion, I never just think about it in isolation. I always think about it along with all these other sorts of issues that are really pertinent to the decisions that people make about both getting pregnant and staying pregnant.

J Craig Williams:

Do you think that when people discuss abortion rights that they really look at it that way?

Kimberly Mutcherson:

I don’t think they do, and I think that’s really unfortunate. I think we’re seeing a little bit more of that now as people are starting to realize things like, oh, abortion rights also have an impact on miscarriage management. So I think that there’s a lot of education that hasn’t happened for folks and that people don’t unfortunately think as broadly as they should about why people are making decisions about whether they want to be pregnant or not be pregnant, and all the reasons why people might choose to have an abortion, that if you really wanted to have fewer abortions in this country, there are lots of things that you could change that aren’t about banning abortion

J Craig Williams:

Certainly. Right. Well, let’s go back to when you were first on the show in 2021, right before Dobbs, we were talking about Texas SB eight, which had just passed under Governor Abbott and the abortion ban that Texas enacted. What’s happened since then?

Kimberly Mutcherson:

So we basically got Dobbs in the 2022 Supreme Court term in June, 2022, one of the last cases that they released for that term. You’ll remember of course that we had the leak of the Dobbs opinion a little bit early, and so we all sort of knew what was about to happen and almost immediately once Dobbs came down, there was really just sort of chaos around the country. I always sort of think about the folks who were sitting in abortion clinics when Dobbs was decided and who had someone come out to the waiting room and say, sorry, we can’t perform your abortion today. We’re not quite sure whether it’s legal or not anymore. And so we had a bunch of states where they had what we call trigger bans. They already had laws on the books that were meant to go into effect immediately upon Roe versus Wade being overturned.

So some of those laws went into effect. And then we had a lot of states and state legislatures, some of whom held special sessions so that they could actually restrict abortion more in their jurisdictions than it had already been restricted. And so what that has meant over the last couple of years is hundreds of abortion clinics closing. It has meant enormous amounts of travel for people who are seeking abortion care. It has meant some very bad outcomes for folks who are having miscarriages in states that have very restrictive abortion laws, and it has had an impact on state constitutions in really interesting ways as well.

J Craig Williams:

I’m going to jump aside here for just a second because one of the questions, and it’s been bothering me for a long time, one of the questions that Kamala Harris asked Brett Kavanaugh in his confirmation hearing was for him to name a law on the books that regulated a man’s body, and his response was that there was none. So why hasn’t there been an equal protection claim brought against abortion, right, these abortion decisions?

Kimberly Mutcherson:

Yeah, that’s a terrific question. So very early on, and if you read law review articles, which I don’t expect most people to be reading law review articles, but there’s been a lot written about the way that Roe versus Wade was decided. That case was decided as a privacy case and not as an equal protection case. It was not decided as a case that said, we are treating women and women’s bodies differently than we treat men’s bodies, and so therefore that is unconstitutional. And there have been lots of discussions over the years about why deciding ROE as a privacy case instead of an equal protection case was actually a mistake. But that’s what we got and that’s what we were sort of stuck with, and that’s what we’ve really been really struggled with up until the point when Roe got overturned. So the questions about what issues the Supreme Court decides to take up, what specific questions on those issues they decide to take up, and then the decisions that advocates make about how they want to pursue a particular case can have really long range impacts. And we definitely saw that in the context of Roe v. Wade

J Craig Williams:

Certainly. And now we’ve got an election where we’re facing a new president with an apparently different agenda than we’ve seen so far, at least in the last four years. What can we expect to happen?

Kimberly Mutcherson:

Well, I think one thing that we can expect to happen, despite all the things that we were told during the election about how President Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025, is that we’re going to see a lot of implementation of ideas that are found in Project 2025, and those ideas will have a substantial impact on access to abortion in this country. I should say, just to be really clear, that access to abortion in the United States was extremely restricted even before ROE was overturned. Dobbs versus Jackson Women’s Health was a case about the last abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. So there had already been a lot of work done to make access to abortion really difficult, and now it’s just even become that much more difficult. So we’re going to see things like attempts to make it even harder for low income women to get access to abortion care, and that will happen in a few ways.

We already have the Hyde Amendment, which says that Medicaid basically can’t pay for any abortions except in very restricted circumstances. But we have some states that have decided to use their state dollars to provide abortion care for women who are on Medicaid. I would expect the federal government to try to stop that from happening. I would expect also the federal government to institute the domestic gag rule, which is what happened the last time that Trump was president. And that rule basically said that any organization that was either providing abortions or that was providing referrals for abortions was no longer going to be able to get what’s called Title 10 funding. And Title 10 funding is used for enormous amounts of sexual and reproductive health services in the United States. So last time that this happened, good Mocker Institute estimated that about 2.4 million people lost access not just to abortion care, but to basic healthcare, to their pap smears, to their annual exams, to access to contraception.

I expect that is definitely going to happen again. And I think that there will be a lot of changes in terms of access to medication abortion. We’ve already seen attempts to take Retone, which is one of the two medications used for medication abortion to try to get that off the market. And that’s really huge because over 60% of abortions in this country are now medication abortions. So if you take that drug off of the market, you’re going to make it much more difficult for people to have access to that kind of care. And then I also imagine that we are going to see a lot more state efforts, right? States feeling really emboldened because they know that they have the federal government behind them. And so we’ll see a lot more state action as well states either suing the federal government to say, for instance, we’re not going to enforce Tala, which is an act that was challenged in a case called Mole that went up to the Supreme Court.

And essentially in that case, the question is whether if there is a set of circumstances where a patient is in an emergency and the care that that person needs is an abortion, whether the federal law that requires that care is going to Trump state laws that say that abortion care cannot be provided. So those kinds of cases we’re going to see continuing to make their way through the court. So essentially what, and then the other thing that I should say as well is that’s the potential for a very old statute called the Comstock Act, which was an anti vice statute that was passed in the 19th century. And part of that act says that you cannot send anything through the mail that is for the purposes of being used for abortion care that would obviously have an impact on medication abortion, but it could also have a broader impact. I mean, speculums are used for abortion care. So lots of questions about what that is going to look like as well.

J Craig Williams:

Sounds like a mores. Well, at this time, we’re going to take quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back and welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m joined by Kimberly Mutcherson. She’s the professor of law and former co-dean at Rutgers Law School now the Phyllis W Beck Chair in Law at Temple Law School for the fall of 2024 semester. Well, Philadelphia’s going to be cold this winter. Sounds like it’s going to be cold for women.

Kimberly Mutcherson:

Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I think is really striking as we are still doing our Monday morning quarterbacking about the presidential election is that I think a lot of folks, because we saw a number of states that had abortion ballot initiatives that passed where Trump also won, right? Which is sort of interesting split. And I think part of what happened there is that people don’t recognize how our federal system works. So if the federal government decides either to start enforcing, for instance, the Comstock Act, or if they pass a federal abortion ban, it’s not going to matter that you voted for abortion rights in your particular state, that federal law is going to trump that. So people who split their votes who said, yes, I believe in abortion rights, but I also think that Trump should be, our president may find that vote for abortion rights on that ballot initiative ends up not meaning anything. In the end.

J Craig Williams:

Are we going to see, as you mentioned in the beginning, some of the project 2025 things like tracking women’s menstruation periods.

Kimberly Mutcherson:

I think that that is going to be very difficult to do. And one of the reasons why I think that’s going to be difficult to do is that at least some of the apps that women use for that purpose are making it very clear that that is not information that they are willing to share and so good on them that they are saying this is private information, it’s information that we’re not willing to share. Now, whether they’re going to be able to fight subpoenas and those sorts of things is another question. But that’s definitely one of the things that’s sort of been out put out into the world. I’m less concerned about that than I am concerned about the kind of surveillance that already happens. So lots of states, and this has been true for a very long time, but the stakes have really gotten higher.

Now, lots of states track the abortions that happen in their jurisdiction. They want to know who has an abortion, they want to know when they have the abortion, they want to know the reason they have the abortion, they want to know the gestational age. So states have already been collecting that kind of information. And one of the things that I think we should be concerned about is what happens in a world where states decide, you know what? We don’t want to just criminalize abortion providers anymore. We want to criminalize the women who get abortions. And the reason why I raise that as a concern is that with medication abortion, if you are a state that really wants to make it very difficult for women to access abortion care, you one have to go after medication abortion, and two have to start thinking about actually punishing people who get abortions and not just people who help provide abortions. So that’s the thing that I’m actually more worried about, not necessarily the period tracking and those sorts of things, but other ways in which states already have data that they could use to really turn on people.

J Craig Williams:

If we start punishing women for abortions, what’s going to be the punishment and will there be an equivalent punishment for the man?

Kimberly Mutcherson:

Well, I’ll answer the second question first. I’m about 99.9% sure that there will not be an equivalent punishment for the man. And I don’t know necessarily what that punishment will look like. I mean, one of the things that we’ve already seen, and we’ve seen this over a period of decades, even though it doesn’t necessarily get talked about a lot, is women being criminalized for their pregnancies. So a woman, for instance, who takes illicit drugs during her pregnancy and who has a stillbirth and who gets charged under not under an abortion statute, but under a state homicide statute or a manslaughter statute. Those are the kinds of things that we have already seen. And there’s a really wonderful organization out there called Pregnancy Justice that tracks a lot of these kinds of prosecutions. And one of the things that they have found in a recent report is that post Dobbs prosecutions of that nature have actually increased.

So I think that that’s the kind of thing that we can expect to start happening because again, if you really want to stop access to abortion, and to be clear, you will never totally stop access to abortion. People who don’t want to be pregnant will find ways to not be pregnant. But if you want to make it harder and harder, you do the things that are being done now, you make it almost impossible for providers to do their jobs. You tell them, if you provide an abortion, we think you shouldn’t provide, we’re going to take your medical license. So we are going to take away your ability to provide the care that you went to medical school to provide, and we’re potentially going to put you in jail or we’re going to put you in prison. And then you can say the same thing to women as well.

If you have an abortion that we think you shouldn’t have, we’re going to go ahead and put you in prison. And the collateral consequences of that are really substantial. Most women in this country who have abortions already have children at home. So when you decide that that woman who is having an abortion is going to be sent to prison, you’re not just punishing her, you’re punishing the kids who she has at home, you’re punishing her community, you’re potentially punishing her partner. So there’s a lot that really flows from that that I hope people pay attention to as we start to see some of these prosecutions happen.

J Craig Williams:

Since we’re talking about criminalization, there has been a movement in California out here on the left coast to Trump proof California from all of this. But isn’t there going to be a problem if women from other states travel to California to receive abortions?

Kimberly Mutcherson:

We’re already seeing tons of travel for abortion care. And what we’re also seeing in conjunction with that are some of the more aggressive attorneys general in restrictive states who are doing things like trying to seek medical records for people who are getting care outside of their states, which is just to be completely clear, I’ll use a legal term here, totally bonkers, right? That’s just not a thing that happens. You do not try to punish someone for healthcare that they get that is perfectly legal in the state where they get it. And so one of the things that we have seen in California is one of these states is states passing what we are calling shield laws. So laws that say, if you are an abortion provider in our jurisdiction and someone comes across state lines to get an abortion, we certainly aren’t going to punish you for that, but we’re also not going to make it easy for that other state to punish you for that.

We’re not going to give medical records, we’re not going to respond to subpoenas. We’re not going to hold you so that they can come and arrest you. So we have a lot of states now that have those kinds of shield laws, which have been really important. And as you say, there are other states that are thinking about, okay, now that we’ve got this new administration coming in that is going to be deeply, deeply hostile to a lot of different rights, abortion rights being won, but to a lot of other rights as well, we have to figure out how we can insulate ourselves. But that then brings us back to this problem of federalism where there is a federal law that is in conflict with the state law. The general rule is that the federal law trumps the state law. And so the question for a lot of states is going to be, well, what kind of civil disobedience are we willing to engage in order not only to protect the citizens of our jurisdiction, but citizens to who come to our jurisdiction for their healthcare?

J Craig Williams:

Well, if the Trump administration leaves the abortion decisions up to the states, how is that going to play with that issue?

Kimberly Mutcherson:

Well, that you would have to believe that the Trump administration is going to leave the decision up to the states. And I simply don’t believe that. I mean, I don’t think that there are many promises related to reproductive justice or reproductive rights that I would put any stock in when it comes to this new administration. And certainly when you look at the folks who thus far have been suggested for some of the most important cabinet offices and some of the most important departments that are part of the federal government, there’s no reason to think that anybody really will be safe, but certainly not people who are abortion seekers. So I put absolutely no faith in the promise that we will not seek a federal abortion ban, and even if they don’t seek a federal abortion ban, there are lots of other ways that you can interfere with access to abortion.

So whether it is, again, restricting money that is used for not just for abortion care, but for family planning services and for contraception and for general gynecological care, whether it is no longer enforcing a federal act called the Face Act, which was an act that was passed many years ago to protect abortion providers and clinics from harassment. So if you decide, you know what, we’re no longer going to enforce that act and you can do whatever you want to at clinics, that is going to create a problem as well. So there are lots of ways that you can even without necessarily getting a federal ban passed, which seems like it might be become a little bit harder to do, given that the majorities are not very big in terms of Congress, there are so many other ways that you can make abortion access incredibly difficult, and that is what we’re going to see undoubtedly, no matter what was said about allowing states to make their own decisions.

J Craig Williams:

Well, it’s time for us to take another quick break. We’ll be right back and welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m joined by Kimberly Mutcherson. She’s the professor of law and former codeine at Rutgers Law School. We’ve been discussing abortion rights and some of the upcoming things that are occurring. We have seen our Supreme Court justices in their confirmation hearings that the conservative ones at least say that Roe versus Wade was settled law and that they considered it to be somewhat sacrosanct. Obviously, that hasn’t turned out to be true. There have been a number of other significant cases that have been overruled among them like the Chevron doctrine, but there seems to have been a trickle down effect of the Supreme Court disrespecting precedent now into the circuit courts, and I’ve even started to see it in the district courts where precedent is somewhat regularly disregarded. What kind of judicial rule of law are we looking forward to as it comes to abortion with respect to the judicial branch and their involvement in interpreting these laws?

Kimberly Mutcherson:

Yeah, I mean, we’ve definitely seen a lot of things that I would describe as deeply problematic. So even if you go back and read Dobbs, the kinds of cases that the majority that Justice Alito was comparing dobs to were cases like Brown versus Board of Education that ended segregation in our public schools. Cases that were foundational civil rights cases that were not about taking rights away, but that were about making sure to expand rights and to enforce the freedoms and the promises of our constitution. What we saw in Dobbs and what we’re now seeing in some other cases is ignoring precedent for the purpose of actually taking rights away, of making people’s lives harder and of ensuring that the next generation does not have the same rights that were accorded to their parents and their grandparents. And that’s not something that I feel particularly comfortable with, and I think a lot of people don’t feel comfortable with that.

So we are a system with three branches, and the idea is that those branches act as checks and balances for each other. And if you have a judiciary that refuses to do its job and do its job well, then we’re not getting those checks, and therefore we are not going to be in balance. Now, having said that, what we’ve also seen in some state courts is state courts really stepping up and saying, listen, our constitution protects access to abortion rights, or state courts stepping up and saying, well, this is the law that you pass, but it is too restrictive. You have to do something better with that. On the other side of that, we also have state courts like those, and I’ll use Idaho as an example, that just upheld what Idaho is calling an abortion trafficking law, which basically is a law that says anybody who takes a minor across state lines in order to get an abortion can be penalized, can be punished for that, including a parent who chooses to do that. So we’ve got a little bit of both going on right now, and I think that we’re going to have to sort of wait and see how that all shakes out. But the long-term consequences, and that’s the thing that I think we all should be thinking about, the long-term consequences of having a court, particularly a Supreme Court that feels kind of rogue at this point, are really substantial. Because if our system is not in balance with itself, then our constitution is not in balance.

J Craig Williams:

Let’s talk about that constitution and add in the swirl of mix here, the freedom of religion. There seems to have been a Christian nationalism push for restricting abortion rights in all instances as we’ve been talking about through this, but there’s been a claim that that’s their right and so forth. What role does the First Amendment play here?

Kimberly Mutcherson:

So I’m going to go back a little bit. I think that there are some examples that happened before we had this constitution of justices on the court that can be instructive. So there was a case that was decided by the Supreme Court, which we all refer to as Hobby Lobby Burwell versus Hobby Lobby. And that was a case where Hobby Lobby, which we all know is a big for-Profit Corporation, decided that they did not want to provide contraception as they were required to do under the Affordable Care Act because they believed that certain types of contraception actually acted as abortions, right? Because their position was as soon as an egg gets fertilized, if anything is done that keeps that egg from implanting in the uterus, that is basically an abortion. You’ll not find any reputable physician who will say that that is an abortion. But the folks in Hobby Lobby said, our faith tells us that that is an abortion.

And in that case, the Supreme Court said, yeah, if that’s what you believe, if that’s your faith system, then yeah, we shouldn’t require you to provide contraception in the same way that other, for-profit organizations are required to provide contraception. So going back to project 2025, there are definitely bits and pieces in Project 2025 that talk about strengthening those kinds of carve outs for people’s religious beliefs. And the impact of that is really substantial. So we already have multiple statutes that are conscience statutes. So for instance, if you are a person who your religious faith tells you that abortion is a sin and you don’t want to participate in even being a nurse who’s in a operating room where an abortion is happening, you cannot be forced to provide that care. We already have those kinds of carve outs. So then the question becomes, how extensive are we willing to allow those kinds of conscious space claims to go?

And right now, it seems like this Supreme Court is willing to allow those claims to extend very, very far, even to the point where it could lead to a patient’s death. And that’s a pretty extreme set of circumstances to be in, but it’s definitely the set of circumstances that we are dealing with right now, and I don’t anticipate that we’re going to see any progress in that realm. I think that what we’re actually going to see is retrenchment and by retrenchment in this case, I mean, we’re going to see people’s civil rights being subsumed in other people’s faith.

J Craig Williams:

So how is that religious carve out with respect to abortion different than what I’m going to say relates more to my generation, the conscientious objectors who didn’t go to Vietnam? That’s the same thing, right?

Kimberly Mutcherson:

Yeah. I mean, I don’t know that. I think that it’s exactly the same thing, and that’s because first of all, conscience can be isn’t just about faith, and certainly some of the folks who were objecting to Vietnam were not just doing so on the basis of religion, they were doing so on other bases as well. But it’s also very clear within our constitutional order that every single right that exists within the context of our constitution is a right that can be cabined, that there are always circumstances in which particular rights can be cabined. And the question is, why is it that this particular, right, the right to exercise your religion can be exercised in this way that creates incredible burdens on other people. And that’s not just in the abortion realm, right? It’s also in the realm of L-G-B-T-Q rights, right? So if you are a religious based adoption agency or foster care agency, you can refuse to allow people who identify as L-G-B-T-Q to be foster parents or to adopt children.

So there are lots of ways in which we have to really think about this conflict between what somebody identifies as their religious belief and their religious faith, and the fact that we are a secular country with a secular government in which people cannot and should not be forced to live somebody else’s faith tradition. And if you are saying, I don’t believe in abortion, and so therefore I’m not going to provide abortions, it’s your right to do that. But when you’re saying, I don’t believe in abortion, and so you can’t have an abortion, that’s a really different set of circumstances, and that’s one where we need to really say there are limits to how you get to exercise your faith.

J Craig Williams:

Well, let’s say that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster believes that abortion is an entitled, right? How does that play out?

Kimberly Mutcherson:

Well, so we’ve actually seen some interesting cases, and I’m not sure how they have been resolved. I think some of them are still moving through state courts where you have folks who are coming from other faith traditions, Judaism in particular, but also we’ve seen people who are satanists, who have their own church, who are saying it’s actually a part of our faith that people should have access to abortion. And I know abortion providers who are very Christian, who are very much people of faith, Dr. George Tiller, who’s a very famous abortion provider, he was killed in church because he was in church every Sunday. So the idea that faith simply means that you are going to be opposed to providing this kind of care simply isn’t true. And in fact, in some faith traditions, having an abortion is the expectation of that faith, right? For instance, if your life is at risk that you absolutely should be able to have an abortion, and that is what those folks believe as part of their faith tradition. So if that is true, and we are not a country that has a religion that is our national or state religion, then why is it that somebody who believes firmly that their faith says we have to have access to abortion care? That person’s right to assert that claim is not as valued as the right of somebody who says nobody should have access to abortions.

J Craig Williams:

Well, we’ve gone a little bit longer than we anticipated, and that’s because this issue could be talked about for another several hours to explore all these issues, and we’ve just reached the end of our program. So I’d like to get you to wrap up and get your final thoughts. But as a part of that, let our listeners know what they can do as individuals to deal with this.

Kimberly Mutcherson:

So one thing that we didn’t talk about, and I want to just make sure that I put this on the table, is that the way that we regulate abortion doesn’t just have an impact on access to abortion. It has an impact on access to maternity care. So if you are a person who cares about pregnant people and you are a person who wants folks to survive their pregnancies and to also be able to have babies in the future and to have healthy babies, then the fact that abortion restrictions are actually driving OB GYNs out of states, so creating more and more maternity care deserts. I mean, imagine that you’re a pregnant woman and you have to drive 300, 400 miles for your prenatal care visits. That’s a real burden. So I really hope that people will begin to think about abortion not as this kind of isolated issue, but as an issue that really fits in with our larger understanding of what it means to be a human being who gets to make decisions about how you want to live your life, about whether and how you want to have children, and about how you give birth to those children and about the kind of healthcare that you get access to.

So that’s one thing I think that I want people to really be thinking in those different ways, and along those lines as an individual, even as an individual who believes very firmly that people shouldn’t have access to abortion care. Well, I hope then that you are fighting for a lot of other things. I hope that you’re fighting for extending Medicaid so that people get access to postnatal care for longer than just a few months or a few weeks. I hope that you’re arguing for a wider social safety net so that when people give birth to babies, they can take care of those children and take care of them and allow them to be healthy. I hope you’re arguing for people to have access to housing. I hope that you’re arguing for access to drug treatment for everybody who wants to have it, right? So again, abortion is part of a much larger web, and I hope that people start to think about it in those terms.

The other thing that I would say is that if you are a person who wants to help out in your particular jurisdiction or your particular part of the world, think about looking for a practical support network. Those networks will often do things like provide rides for people who need to get to their abortions, sometimes provide housing for people. And again, as I said, lots of people are traveling now. So those things have become even more important than they were in the past. And then the last thing that I would say, frankly, is to really vote your conscience, right? I mean, if there are things that you believe in, and there are ways in which you think, for instance, that women are being dragged backwards instead of move forward, then don’t sit out on election day. There are millions of people in this country who are eligible to vote who did not vote in our last presidential election. So whether you vote or not, you are going to be ruled by the people who win. So make sure that your voice is being heard. Please, if you want to reach me, my email address is [email protected]. And also, frankly, I’m really easy to find because I’m the only reson in New Jersey, so please feel free to reach out.

J Craig Williams:

Well, Kimberly, it’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you very much.

Kimberly Mutcherson:

Thank you.

J Craig Williams:

Well, here are a few of my thoughts about today’s topic. The expanse and the breadth of the effect of these decisions in the abortion arena are just mind blowing. There are so many consequences that we really should have Professor Terson back on for a second interview about some of these other issues that remain undiscussed and certainly an issue for women that face pregnancies and abortions and still births and so forth. This is an amazing change in the law, and it has had a ripple effect. I think, in upsetting the value of precedent in virtually every other situation. We have seen the Supreme Court overrule major doctrines like the Chevron doctrine, and it’s beginning to have its effect in the ninth Circuit in the other circuit courts, and even in the district courts where we see a regular disregard for precedent. It’s kind of frightening to, as a lawyer, to try and figure out how to advise your client regarding what decisions are going to be from courts.

It’s beyond just the abortion issue. So that’s it for Craig’s Rant on today’s topic. Let me know what you think. Also, our next episode of In Dispute on the Legal Top Network will be released on Tuesday, December 17th, 2024. In this episode, we will venture down under to spotlight thee Lindy Chamberlain, the “Dingo ate my baby” trial. Well, if you like what you heard today, please rate us on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app. You can also visit us at legaltalknetwork.com, where you can sign up for our newsletter. I’m Craig Williams. Thanks for listening. Please join us next time for another great legal topic. When you want legal, think Lawyer 2 Lawyer.

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