The Stakes for Abortion Rights, from the Head of Planned Parenthood
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Ever since the Supreme Court ended Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision, voters have been pushing back hard. Democrats outperformed expectations in the 2022 midterms, and every ballot measure that's been up for a vote, even in the red state of Kansas...

has gone for reproductive choice. More voters than ever before call abortion their most important issue, especially women under 30. If Kamala Harris prevails in the election, it will likely be on the strength of the pro-choice vote. Donald Trump is frantically backpedaling from his success in overturning Roe, but he doesn't seem to be on the same page as his running mate J.D. Vance, who recently called for defunding Planned Parenthood.

The president and CEO of Planned Parenthood is Alexis McGill-Johnson, and the group is spending upwards of $40 million in this election to try to secure abortion rights once again. Just a few days ago, just a while back, Senator J.D. Vance, the vice presidential nominee for the Republicans, said this on the question of defunding Planned Parenthood. Look, I mean, our view is we don't think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions.

That has been a consistent view of the Trump campaign the first time around, and it will remain a consistent view. What do you make of the Republican ticket rolling out this idea really late in the campaign while kind of hedging on what its own history is on this issue?

Well, you know, the opposition has been trying to defund Planned Parenthood for a long time. That is just one of the tactics in their book. You know, I sit and I listen to the guy who is trying to shame childless cat ladies and, you know, curry more favor with the American public by saying, let's just take away health care from, you know, the millions of American who come to Planned Parenthood health centers every single day for STI testing and birth control.

birth control and access to life-saving breast cancer. Like, is that really your strategy? What would that mean in dollar and cents terms? And what would it mean for people that benefit from Planned Parenthood?

So defunding Planned Parenthood would mean taking away access to Medicaid reimbursements. It would mean trying to continue to find ways to make us spend money through litigation. All of that is impacting the 2 million patients that come to Planned Parenthood every single year. It would be devastating, of course. You watched the vice presidential debate? I did. So Vance said this about abortion. We've got to do so much better of a job.

at earning the American people's trust back on this issue where they frankly just don't trust us. That was a very, very weird thing to say, no? It is weird. I know. I know that's like the word of the election, but it is kind of weird. Yeah. Like, I mean... What's it masking? I don't know. Some kind of surprise that they think we still actually care about our fundamental freedoms. You know, I think it's probably one of the

number one questions I get often from journalists is, do you think that, you know, women still care about abortion this cycle? And I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, they just took it away two years ago and still, you know, we're watching the impact. So I think it is masking this just complete surprise that we are still up in arms, that we are no longer equal in the eyes of the Constitution.

You've been president, CEO of Planned Parenthood now for five years. For five years. I stepped in during a transition in 2019 as acting president, and I became permanent president the following year. Now, a lot's changed since then, and it's been reported that Planned Parenthood is spending $40 million on this election cycle? Correct. What's the $40 million for? Right.

The $40 million that is being spent in the Action Fund and our Planned Parenthood votes work is to communicate to the 19 million people who show up and take action every single week on behalf of Planned Parenthood, on behalf of fighting for reproductive freedom. It's to focus on ensuring that not only do we see Harris walls in the White House, but that

that a future President Harris also has a reproductive freedom majority so that she can govern and that we can fight to get, you know, restore all of the protections for reproductive freedom. What is the – for Planned Parenthood, what's on the line this time around?

This is the first presidential election since the Dobbs decision, right? And you have seen since 22, every time reproductive freedom has been on the ballot, we have won. And that is because of the outrage, the horror of what is happening to women across this country. Just, you know, a few weeks ago, we learned the names of Amber Thurman and Candy Miller. You know, now we know that abortion bans don't stop people from seeking access to abortion. Abortion bans have made pregnancy more dangerous. Right.

And so we are involved as deeply as we are because we believe that electing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz is key to restoring reproductive freedom, to getting federal legislation that will allow us to end this nightmare. Your predecessor at Planned Parenthood appeared uneasy with the partisan politics that Planned Parenthood had been comfortable with.

and wanted to shift the focus a bit—I think this is fair—away from abortion and then was pushed out of leadership less than a year later. You're taking a very different approach. So I may disagree slightly with the characterization. I think that—

Planned Parenthood has always been about health care, right? We are the nation's largest sexual reproductive health care provider. And the reality is health care is politicized. You don't ask UnitedHealthcare to end its lobbying arm, right, in Washington, D.C. You don't ask that of any major, you know, Walgreens or CVS because they understand how important it is to engage in policy and politics individually.

in order to protect the care that they provide. And I think that my position, particularly in this moment, is that politics got us into this situation. Abortion is not a partisan issue. There is no way we would have won in Kansas and Kentucky and Montana and Ohio and Michigan, all of those ballot initiatives, if you were not bringing along Republican and independents into the conversation, right, and uniting them, because it is—

across the board. That's what all the polling indicates. So I don't see this as a partisan issue. Now, the Dobbs decision undid Roe versus Wade. And even if the Democrats win, you still have the court that you have. What can a Harris administration do within the realm of the likely Congress that is probably at best split?

Well, the goal is to get to a trifecta, right? A reproductive freedom majority in the House and Senate. And if that happens, what can happen? Federal legislation to restore reproductive freedom. It should not be the case, for example, that I go to visit my mother in Georgia with my daughters and all of a sudden I'm less free there than I am when we wake up here in New York City. And so the importance of having federal legislation to protect those freedoms and to restore that

is going to be paramount. That's what we're working towards. And we also know that it is quite possible that federal legislation could be contested and brought up to the court, but we would be forcing the court to take away this right again and again, and we would be forcing people to bring that case when we know where the American public is. Let's say you don't win the trifecta. In fact, the likelihood is you don't, that the Democrats do not

have both houses of Congress and the White House. If they do win the White House, Democrats win the White House and one house of Congress, one chamber of Congress, what's the best that can happen?

Look, I think there still is a lot that we can do and that the vice president can do in supporting and bringing more protections to things like family planning, more protections to things like maternal mortality. Right. You know, the other kind of concurrent crises that are happening along with the public health crisis of losing abortion access. Right.

And so there are a lot of conversations that can be had. And, you know, at the end of the day, it will be very, very close. Whatever the margin is, we know we won't get to a 60 majority in the Senate. But it will allow us, I think, an opportunity to force some very hard votes and very hard conversations with those senators.

The stakes of this are enormous and sometimes overlooked, at least by people not paying attention. Stefania Taladrid, a reporter for The New Yorker, as well as ProPublica more recently, have made it quite plain that the stakes of what's happened are that people die. Yes, yes. Tell me a little bit more about that, our understanding of what has been the cost, the human cost of the end of Roe. Yeah. Yeah.

I remember right after the leak in May of 22, the leak of the Supreme Court decision about jobs. Lancet Medical Journal, it's a premier medical journal, the cover read, women will die. And while we...

know that while we knew that. Remember, we had been living a year into SB8 in Texas and we were seeing... It was the first time I was hearing stories about patients being sent to parking lots in hospitals to wait for sepsis before doctors would provide the care. You knew that...

that the human costs would happen soon after. Whether or not we'd be able to tie the abortion bans to the actual, to the deaths that we would see, or we knew we would have to wait until the maternal morbidity data was collected to actually be able to make the argument. To now have names of people

women like Amber Thurman and Candy Miller to know their stories, right? They're, you know, leaving behind families, leaving behind children. The fear that they had, one was afraid to go to the hospital when she knew something was wrong because she feared criminalization, getting health care. The other went to the hospital and was essentially denied care until it was too late.

And so I do think that the devastating consequences, which I'm sure extend beyond Amber and Candy, of course they do. Those are the only ones we know about. It really puts into perspective how horrific these bans are. I'm speaking with Alexis McGill-Johnson of Planned Parenthood, and we'll continue in a moment. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Dell. This season, get premium tech that inspires joy from Dell Technologies.

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Visit justinwine.com and enter Radio 20 for 20% off your order. I found it very interesting when you spoke at the Democratic National Convention. You said, we cannot call ourselves a free nation when women are not free. And you also chose to highlight the story of a woman who sought an abortion not because of a life or death situation, which is what Kamala Harris did in the debate, but in your words, because she, quote, realized that she was pregnant and didn't want to be.

Why was that the story you chose to highlight? Because being able to elect what you want to do with your body is fundamental to freedom. And if I am free and equal, I should be able to speak about an elective abortion. I ask that not because I object to what you said. What I'm saying is that it's very interesting to watch even politicians that one knows to be pro-choice, that they pick as examples people.

When there is a life and death situation as opposed to someone who doesn't choose to be pregnant? Because the reality is the majority of people who seek access to abortion are making these decisions because they do want to have an abortion because they have made some decision around what their life plan is. And they do not see having a child in whatever particular moment as where they would like to go. The majority of people who seek access to abortion are already parents.

So they have full sense of what that means in terms of the impact to their family and to their lives and their communities. And so I think it is actually very important to normalize the circumstances of elective abortion because they are, in fact, you know, a great majority of the decisions that people are making. And quite frankly, honestly, it's no one's business. That was the other point, right? It's literally no one's business. As a policy matter, President Biden and Vice President Harris didn't

But as a matter of emotion and emphasis, they did. President Biden, in fact, had a reference to abortion in one major speech, and he excised it. Whereas Vice President Harris has had a long record of

on this issue. What do you make of her rhetoric around the issue of abortion access? Without question, the vice president is the most kind of vocal and profound elected speaking about abortion as a surrogate on the issue, right? She is the one who took this on right after Dobbs. She is the one who traveled around the country, met with, you know, hundreds of state legislatures and providers and patients and

to really understand full circle what the impact was. She is the first sitting vice president or president to come to a Planned Parenthood health center, to come to an abortion clinic, and really understand the conversations that have been happening on the ground. And please do understand that when we talk about a clinic such as this, it is absolutely about health care and reproductive health care. So everyone get ready for the language. Uterus.

That part of the body needs a lot of medical care from time to time. And I think

The marked difference isn't just her ability to wrap her arms around it. It's the fact that she brings so much of her lived experience, her professional lived experience into the conversation. So you'll hear her talk about prosecuting sexual assault cases and her own personal experiences growing up. You'll hear her talking about what it took to pull together the omnibus bill to focus on maternal mortality and the wide range of abortion circumstances and pregnancy-related issues.

circumstances. You heard her grilling Justice Kavanaugh, right?

to say what other procedure for men, right, is as heavily regulated and legislated? Like, can we name one, right? No, because there aren't any. And we've seen her, I think, as a vice president, really sit strongly with movement leaders and with other party leaders and corporate leaders to talk about the broad impact. It's her best issue, is it not? Yes, 100%. But it's her best issue and then her ability to move the dial

legislatively, if and when she's elected, is at best contingent. Is there a possibility that could lead to a great deal of disappointment?

I think that's our job. Our job is to get her a governing majority and ensure that we get the federal legislation that she can sign. And I think we have to continue to explain to Americans that she is the best on this issue. We know she will fight and we know she will sign legislation. And look, we are very sober around the long-term plan, right? That

We didn't get here overnight. We didn't get here, you know, simply because of the Trump administration issued in these abortion bans. This was a long-term strategy of

taking over state houses, taking over federal judiciary, and got expedited literally in four years under the Trump administration. And so we know who to blame, and we also know that to do the work, it will require us to stay vigilant state by state, living room by living room. What would happen with a new Trump administration? Well, you know. For the record, your eyebrows are soaring. Yeah.

Your hands are now shaking. My head's on fire. Just definitely chalk that up to post-traumatic stress. Or pre-traumatic stress. Pre-traumatic stress, exactly. Look, I mean, they've laid it out in Project 2025, right? How confident do you have to be to lay out a 900-page playbook on what you would do on so many issues, but particularly on issues of reproductive freedom we're talking about? Which, for the record, he's disingenuously or not disavowed.

Project 2025. Again, he does two things, right? He says he's disavowing it. Are you saying he's lying? But right before that, he also says, you know, this is really bad for us. So now I'm going to disavow it. So like we're watching him have these machinations in public, which is exactly why I might say, yes, he's being disingenuous at best. What do you think he would do or what do you think he could do with control of Congress?

Well, what Project 2025 would do would be you couldn't effect nationwide nationwide ban, not just through federal legislation. Right. But by enforcing the Comstock law. And I think that explain that the Comstock law, which is a 1800s law against pornography, prohibiting the, you know, kind of distribution through the mail of pornographic products and

He would likely direct the DOJ to enforce that law. How does that relate to abortion?

Abortionists. He's not sending Penthouse Magazine through the mail. Yeah, exactly. To include something like Mifepristone in that broad sweeping. Yes, in the suite of things that would be considered obscene. Yes, exactly. Mifepristone. So, again, effectively a nationwide abortion ban given that more than half of abortions are done through Mifepristone. The pregnancies are, right, like a database of pregnant people.

Sorry, a pregnancy czar?

Like I say that as if that's like some dystopian, you know, nightmare. But the reality is Planned Parenthood in Missouri, there was the state health commissioner was actually tracking patient menstrual cycles. So this kind of level of surveillance and invasion of privacy into private health care and medical decisions is insane.

Is work they have been testing in order to essentially codify that inequality in government agencies. Is that scary enough for you? It is, yes. It is sufficiently scary. Explain my eyebrows. Alexis McGill-Johnson, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Alexis McGill-Johnson is the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, the health care provider, as well as the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the group's lobbying arm.

That's The New Yorker Radio Hour for today. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell.

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