Janine Jackson interviewed URGE’s Preston Mitchum about reproductive justice and Roe for the May 21, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

 

Janine Jackson: The New York Times says that by taking up the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court is “plung[ing] back into the contentious debate over abortion.” But the right established in Roe v. Wade of the individual—and not the state—to decide whether to terminate their pregnancy prior to the point at which a fetus could live outside the womb is not really contentious. Majorities of the US public support it and, for some 50 years, courts have as well.

As Rewire’s Jessica Mason Pieklo noted, there is not a single federal appeals court decision upholding a law, like the Mississippi one under contention, that outlaws abortion at 15 weeks—a date with no medical meaning, that even proponents can’t explain. Pre-viability bans are always unconstitutional. On Dobbs itself, lower courts declared the ban plainly unconstitutional, and a federal district court judge called out state lawmakers’ motives, noting, “The state chose to pass a law it knew was unconstitutional to endorse a decades-long campaign.”

But as some will recall, Donald Trump announced on the campaign trail that if elected, he would create a Supreme Court that would overturn Roe, and here we are, with the court considering a case which, as Pieklo explains, doesn’t require them to endorse Mississippi’s 15-weeks ban, but only to ponder whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional. Does that mean the end of Roe? What would that mean?

Preston Mitchum is director of policy at the group URGE, Unite For Reproductive & Gender Equity, as well as adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. He joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Preston Mitchum.

Preston Mitchum: Thank you so very much. I’m happy to be here.

Janine Jackson: When we spoke with URGE executive director Kimberly Inez McGuire in February, she explained how abortion being legal and abortion being accessible are very much not the same thing.

Acknowledging that the right that Roe v. Wade codified, of a pregnant person to decide whether to continue that pregnancy pre-viability, recognizing that that’s not been a realizable right for many women for some time, and for some really ever, that’s not to say that Roe didn’t matter, and it certainly wasn’t to say that losing Roe would not matter. What weight are you giving, or how are you responding, to this latest turn in the legal landscape?

PM: Kimberly is absolutely right: Roe is not enough, has never been enough, and we still need it.

JJ: Mmm-mm.

PM: And what I think is really important to recognize here is that legal abortion, of course, is on the line. But keeping abortion legal is only the first step. And so what Kimberly was really speaking about is a thing that many of us are starting to speak about, and that many others have been speaking about for quite a while: that legality alone is not and has never been enough, because the legal right to abortion access really means nothing if the same people who have the right can’t access their right. You know, there’s a difference between having a choice and having the ability to effectuate that choice.

And so what we think about is our vision, and the vision being bigger: committed to creating communities and centering communities where our loved ones are able to receive the abortion care that they need. And unfortunately, even with Roe, many have been forced to give birth because, of course, Roe established the right, a very important right, to abortion pre-viability; the one thing it did not establish was that people need access to abortion pre-viability.

JJ: The Dobbs case that’s coming forward, that the court has said they’ll listen to, it’s not unique; listeners will know that. The Guttmacher Institute says that 2021 may be “the most damaging antiabortion state legislative session” in a decade, and perhaps ever; there have been more than 500 abortion restrictions, including more than 100 outright bans across some 46 states.

So I guess my question is, what’s the difference between state and federal here? We hear Biden saying, whatever the court does, even if the court overturns Roe, we’re going to still push for Roe rights. But so much of this seems to be happening at the state level. So what is the federal role here? What could be meaningfully done if the court makes this decision?

PM: First thing I’ll say to that is,  the Biden/Harris administration needs to actually say the word “abortion” to speak about abortion care and access.

JJ: Mmm-mm.

PM: To date, we have minimally heard the Biden/Harris administration actually talk about abortion as “abortion,” right? It’s centered on Roe. People don’t go into the clinical setting to get a “Roe”; they go into the clinical setting to get an abortion. And so that’s really important to name explicitly some of the issues related to why the Biden/Harris administration aren’t talking about abortion care by name; it’s one of the first things that’s just incredibly important.

The second thing I’ll name is that there is something Congress can do. And what Congress can really start to do is passing legislation to protect the right to abortion care, such as the Women’s Health Protection Act, or WHPA. URGE has actively worked on the Women’s Health Protection Act that will be introduced in the coming weeks in the 117th Congress with our friends at the Center for Reproductive Rights. What’s really exciting about WHPA is that if passed, it will protect the right to abortion access throughout the United States, and really guards the curtailing of those rights, like the one we see happening in Mississippi. So there is something that the federal government can do, that Congress can do, pretty immediately in the coming weeks, and that’s co-sponsor and pass the Women’s Health Protection Act.

JJ: In terms of media coverage, I’m always incensed when I see media present abortion as a cultural issue, as if it’s kind of a soft issue, as opposed to a “serious” issue like economics. If there’s anything more central to economic life than the ability to decide whether and when to have a child, I can’t imagine what it is. And yet, again and again, in media we see even Reuters talking about this, “Supreme Court Jumps Into US Culture Wars,” you know….

I feel that the way media talk about abortion, it kind of lines up with the White House, where you don’t say the word “abortion,” because that’s icky, so you don’t present it as a central, economic, core, integral right for human beings to have; it’s instead something that, you know, religious people care about or something.

PM: Exactly. And what it does is, it continues to drive a wedge that shouldn’t be a wedge. You know, when we’re talking about abortion, we’re talking about life-saving treatment that people actually need; it’s medical care, it’s healthcare. And all statistics show that abortion care is in many ways safer than giving birth.

JJ: Right.

PM: And so you know, those are statistics and facts that many people, unfortunately, who are driving this “culture war” narrative don’t want people to believe or understand, but it’s true. And, unfortunately, what it does is undermine the necessary conversation we must have around reproductive health, rights and justice, especially reproductive justice, right?

So of course, reproductive justice is more than abortion; it’s comprehensive. We’re talking about the human right to maintain bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. Abortion access is a critical part of maintaining reproductive justice for Black folks, for Indigenous folks, for Asian-American and Pacific Islander communities. And we must center it on the work where people can create a future for themselves, where every person can make their own decisions with dignity, with autonomy and with self-determination.

And you’re absolutely right: When media coverage and narrative is about culture war, it creates this idea that only some people should have abortion access, that the people who do want abortion access are the people who are against what is actually the moralistic framing of this country, and it creates this divide of good and bad. Abortion is not about good or bad; abortion is about access and creating the families and the communities that we want, that we can see, and that can survive in the system that we have today.

JJ: Just finally, I guess I would say I think so many elite reporters can cover abortion as an abstraction because, if you’re a reporter at the New York Times, nobody you know is going to have any trouble obtaining an abortion, no matter what the Supreme Court decides.

PM: Exactly.

JJ: I just think that you don’t have experience of what it means to have to ask your parents, or have to get on a bus and travel two states over…. I guess I would ask you, finally, whose voices could media be listening to that could reshape the understanding that they’re putting forward about abortion rights and access?

PM: That is such an important question. And I think that is the question that we should all be asking ourselves. This is not about uplifting particular politicians’ voices more than anyone else’s. This is about centering the people who abortion has been out of reach for since Roe, and will certainly be out of reach if Roe is suddenly pushed back and overturned by the Supreme Court.

We should really be listening to abortion patients and those who have had abortions, those who may want abortions in the future. And that includes Black people, that includes women, of course, and other folks capable of becoming pregnant, like trans and nonbinary people and queer people. That includes young people especially. That includes places where abortion access has been chipped away time and again, like the South and Midwest. It includes poor people and people who are struggling to make ends meet. And it really includes the communities that the media so often forget about, and never talk to, and certainly don’t center in their conversation.

Abortion care and abortion access is a racial justice and it’s an economic justice issue. And until we have those honest conversations, we’ll be in the courts, hoping that they save our lives time and again.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Preston Mitchum, director of policy at the group URGE, Unite For Reproductive & Gender Equity; find their work online at URGE.org. Preston Mitchum, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

PM: Thank you so much for having me.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.