S6 E03: Our Bodies Are on the Ballot

Kanya

Welcome to Pod for the Cause, the official podcast of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund, where we take on the critical civil and human rights issues of our day. I’m your host, Kanya Bennett, coming to you from Washington, D.C. And to start off this and every show, let me shout out the pod squad who will be sharing their time and talent and take on the challenges and opportunities before us as we work to save our democracy. We have an amazing guest on Pod for the Cause today. I’d like to welcome Marcela Howell, president and CEO of In Our Own Voice National Black Women’s Reproductive Agenda. Marcela has over 40 years of experience advocating for women’s rights, reproductive health and justice and women’s empowerment. And the National Black Women’s Reproductive Agenda recently became a member of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. We are so happy to have you on the team, Marcela. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Marcela

Thank you. It’s great to be here. I really am thankful to the Leadership Conference for all the work that you do and really excited about becoming a member.

Kanya

Thank you so much, Marcela. We are so happy to have you on the team. Before we jump into today’s discussion on abortion rights, I want to offer some context and stats to set the stage. The Supreme Court decision Dobbs V Jackson Women’s Health Organization held that the Constitution of the United States does not confer a right to abortion. Abandoning almost 50 years of precedent established in Roe v Wade and opening the gates for states to ban abortion. The Supreme Court’s decision was consistent with anti- abortion movements, legislation and lower court decisions that are rooted in white supremacy and the exploitation of women and black and brown women in particular. For black women in the United States, historically, we have not had power over our bodies, our reproduction, our fertility, and our decision if or when to become parents. Reproductive autonomy has not been a liberty. Black people, black women or black trans women have had an ability to celebrate freely. The Howard University School of Law Civil Rights Clinic filed a profound amicus brief in the Dobbs case and stated that during slavery, black women were denied all bodily autonomy. The law expressly endorsed the notion that they lacked humanity and could be bred for their owners profit. The brief goes on for black women whose procreation had been forced, monetized and monitored since they arrived on American shores. Access to birth control represented a unique form of liberty. It is a liberty that has never been fully realized. However, with black women pushed out of midwifery and the field of reproductive health in the late 1800s, and when pushed out of this space, their bodies were often used to make advances in women’s health through experiments done without their consent or knowledge.

Kanya

Black women, then and now face a range of reproductive, sexual and other health disparities. And today, black women and women of color will suffer disproportionate harm with limited access to reproductive health care and abortions. More black people live in states that restrict abortion. 10 million black women of childbearing age now face restrictions on abortion. A 2021 study by the University of Colorado estimated that black people would see a 33% increase in deaths under a total abortion ban, the highest of any racial group. Since the Dobbs decision, all or most abortions are now banned in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming. Georgia and South Carolina have gestational bans which prohibit abortions after six weeks from the last missed period. But gestational bans typically function as total bans, since most people don’t know they are pregnant until after that deadline. In addition to the trigger bans, over 100 bills restricting access to abortion have been introduced in 2022 alone. I wanted to ask you before we get started a little bit more about In Our Own Voice. It’s a national state partnership focused on lifting up the voices of black women leaders at the national and regional levels in our fight to secure reproductive justice for all women, femmes and girls. Can you talk a little bit more about that partnership for those in our audience who may just be getting to know you?

START OF TRANSCRIPT

Marcela

The partnership is with eight Black Women’s Reproductive Justice organizations, Black Women for Wellness in California, New Voices for Reproductive Justice in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Sister Love in Georgia, Spark Reproductive justice Now in Georgia, Sister Reach in Tennessee, the Afia Center in Texas. And women with a vision in Louisiana. And then Black Women’s Health Imperative, which is a national organization.

Kanya

Thank you, Marcella. We appreciate all of the work that this collective is doing. And we really do have our work cut out for us. Let’s go to the Dobbs decision, this moment that we’re in and let’s talk about where we are, this aftermath. Did this decision come as a surprise to you? Talk to us about that.

Marcela

Actually, it did not come as a surprise to me. We could see it coming. We knew that once we got these conservative members of the Supreme Court in place, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and then, of course, Amy Coney Barrett, we knew that there were going to be a number of rights that would be overturned by this conservative majority. The Dobbs decision was one that we expected at least black RJ organizations expected it. We had been having conversations several years ago about what to expect if indeed Donald Trump got elected and therefore also had the ability to name members of the Supreme Court and what that would mean for black women and their families. So we had been talking about that already. It’s the legal experts, I think, who really didn’t think that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe because of its historical human rights value to it. And the fact that it was you know, they were literally taking rights away and overturning almost 50 years of president. The advocates in us knew it was coming. The legal resources in us basically didn’t think the court would quite go that far. And of course they did. And so now we are faced with states overturning their laws and putting into place abortion bans or very heavy restrictions. We’ve got Lindsey Graham introducing a national ban, which of course, the members of Congress of the conservative members said they were not going to do that. They were just putting this back into the states. And we also expected that that was going to happen, a national ban. So we’ve got all of those things in play right now.

Kanya

Now that the advocates and the litigators have the decision and obviously now need to proceed on one accord. Right. To figure out how we move forward. You talked about Senator Graham offering a national ban on abortion. Certainly, we know what the states are doing. They are pushing forward their own bans. So let me ask you sort of where do we push to try to restore this right to abortion and how do we do it, especially given that the socioeconomic status of those seeking abortion varies across the board. And so we want to ensure that folks who need access get the access that they need, not based on a particular state they live in and certainly not based on the ways in which they can circumvent a national ban should there become one.

Marcela

The reality is, is that we’ve got an emergency piece in place that we need to make sure that people who need access to abortion services are able to access them. That means in states where there is an outright ban, people need to be able to travel to other states where abortion is still legal. It means we need to make sure abortion funds are fully funded. In order to provide those funds, we need to make sure that the states where abortion is still legal are able to absorb the load that will come to them that is coming to them. We need to make sure that people know what their rights are, even if they are living in states with restrictions that we want to make sure they know what their rights are and that they can basically get to other states to get the kind of services they needed. So those are the immediate pieces. The other urgency is to get people to vote this November. Because we have all of these races and ours is a 500 1c3. So we can’t advocate for a specific candidate in any state, but we can encourage people to really pay attention to who’s running in their states. There are governors races at stake. There are Senate races at stake. There are state legislative races at stake. We have watched for the last 50 years almost the states do things within their own power to restrict access to abortion, even when it was legal.

Marcela

And that’s the thing that people have to understand. Roe v Wade was decided in 1973. Three years later, Congress put restrictions on accessing abortion services for anyone who was getting their health care coverage through Medicaid. They were forbidden from actually using that health care insurance to access abortion care services. So there were already restrictions coming out of the federal government. Then there were states setting up waiting periods or determining that clinics had to be surgical centers instead of just clinics. There were things like mandated counseling and restrictions on doctors in terms of what they had to do in order to be able to practice in states. So there were all these different kind of state structures that were already being put in place. And what overturning Roe did. It allowed those same conservative members of the state legislature to come up with these big barriers. So what we have to do now is look at how our vote can help change that. And it’s no surprise that the same conservative members of the state legislatures who are passing these abortion bans and abortion restrictions were also passing barriers to voting, especially for black women. Black women vote at the highest level in this country, both in presidential elections and in midterm elections, Where we don’t always vote is in local elections and state elections.

Marcela

And that’s where so many of the barriers, the restrictions are happening. So we are trying to encourage black women voters to really vote the full ticket to look at what’s going on in the state legislature, look at what’s going on in terms of the courts and judges, because they are making decisions as well. They are either supporting those bad bans or they are trying to overturn them, but they are in those positions to do that. We need to look at those kinds of races. And it’s interesting because a friend of mine recently said it wasn’t enough to just tell people to vote. And my response was, “why not?”. Of course it’s enough to tell them to vote. Our problem that we have is we don’t tell people what happens after they vote. After they vote, they have an obligation to hold those elected officials that they vote for accountable for their pledges that they make when they’re candidates and their running for office. The promises they make, we have to hold them accountable. I mean, the reality is, if you look at what happened on the Supreme Court, you had people who were nominated for the Supreme Court who promised that Roe v Wade was settled law and they would never vote to overturn it. Well, they lied. Those same people that have voted in the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe, we have to be able to hold not just our elected officials accountable, but are judges accountable.

Marcela

And right now, there isn’t a way to hold Supreme Court justices accountable for what they say before Congress, where they literally lied under oath. But they are now on the Supreme Court and they think they can do whatever they want. We have to come up with ways of holding them accountable as well. No one should be appointed for life when they have not fulfilled the obligation of telling the truth before a congressional committee so that we need to be able to do that. And for those people that we vote for the very next day, the hard job starts. That’s when you start watching what they say as soon as they get sworn in, how they’re voting, whether or not they voted for a bill that they promised they were going to support or they promised they were not going to support, we need to hold them accountable. And that’s the hard work of being a citizen in this country. It really is hard work. You don’t get to just walk into the ballot box, vote and you don’t have to do anything for the next couple of years. No, during those couple of years, you have to make sure that that person is actually doing what they said they would do.

Kanya

Absolutely, Marcela. I am so happy that you made that connection between this fight around abortion rights and voting. You are absolutely right and right to encourage folks to turn out and vote. Vote the whole ballot and understand and appreciate that those folks who we are sending to office. Right. They are responsible not just for the laws that get passed. They are often responsible for making appointments to these courts that ultimately determine the constitutionality of the laws that they have passed. And you are right to stress the need to then hold electeds accountable from the moment they get into office. We need to continue our engagement is not just enough to install people based on commitments they made on the campaign trail. We have to make sure that we are in their district offices, that we are in those town halls, that we are showing up and reminding them of the policies that they committed to and the policies that we elected them to then carry out once installed in office. So, yes, we are about 30 days out, just over 30 days out from the midterm elections. And it is critical that folks show up and cast that ballot. We talked about the need to do more than vote, as your colleague was sort of pushing you. And I think we’re doing some of that right now by educating folks on this very issue. So if you are outraged by the court decision in Dobbs, the overturning of Roe, you will be educated and equipped, certainly in this podcast. And I know Marcella will have more resources to get folks to turn out and vote if they need more. And so with that, I want to know you touched on some of this, but what work is particularly motivating right now in this moment as we pursue abortion rights? Is there a particular entity, is there a particular advocacy that is very inspiring and keeping folks motivated? And what is really a pretty dark time for us when we think about reproductive rights?

Marcela

The thing that is keeping people motivated right now is the fact that we can make a difference. We’re clear that our vote does make a difference. We do a lot of polling of black women voters, and one of the things that we did is we polled people right after the 2020 election and we talked to them about whether they thought their vote really counted. We saw black women who were saying that they thought that black women voters had the power to change elections, that we had the power to be able to determine who took office in this country, both at a national level and at a state level. And they saw that in the 2020 election as people started moving into the primaries of the presidential election, we saw what happened in South Carolina. Black women turned out in large numbers and voted for Joe Biden. That put him on the trajectory of becoming president because it was our votes that counted in terms of getting him elected over a Donald Trump, getting him and Kamala Harris elected. It was black women’s votes that really wore a big issue in that. We see ourselves as a powerful force and conservative politicians see black women’s votes as a powerful force. So these voting restrictions that are being put in place are targeted at black communities, counties that are predominantly black, so that they are making it harder. One of the things that we tell people in our work, we have a program called I Am a Voter, which does exactly what I was saying. It tells people that they must vote. Being a voter, once you are registered to vote and you vote, it means that you are now a life long voter. You know those little stickers that they give you when you go to the polls and you vote and it says, “I voted”? Well I hate those stickers because those stickers, they imply that your vote is all you have to do.

Kanya

You need to do. Sure.

Marcela

They imply that, okay, I voted. And you know, and I’ve been in line. I remember when Barack Obama was running the first time and there was a line at my polling place for people who were trying to get in to vote for the first black president. There were these young men in front of me and they were all talking. This is their first time voting. They were going to go in and they were going to vote. And the line was so long and they kept talking about how they were going to leave and let’s leave and come back later. And this. One young man who was with his three friends kept saying, I told my mother we were going to vote. So you’re going to stand here and you’re going to vote. And they were talking about it and they were like, we don’t know who to vote for other than Barack Obama. So we had a whole long, lengthy discussion about that, and I ended up talking to them a lot about voting and what this was going to be. The thing about when you’re the first time voter is the whole place applauds for you. Once you cast your vote and you come out and they all applaud and say, Yeah, first time voter, yay, yay! They were in front of me again as we were leaving and we were getting those little stickers.

Marcela

And one of the guys said, Oh God, now we voted. We can go home again. And I go, Well, actually there’s a mayoral election coming up. They all looked at me and go, What? And I said, Well, you’re going to have to vote in that, too. And the one young man goes, Well, my mother didn’t tell me I had to vote again. And I’m going, Yes, you have to vote in this one, too. And I wrote it down on a piece of paper. One of the pieces of paper that they had that had the ballot telling them when that mayoral election was. And I said, and you have to vote on that. And they go, oh, you know, we have to do this all the time. And I go, Yes, you have to do this all the time. That’s part of what being a voter is. And I don’t know if they voted in the mayoral election. I have no clue. But I watched their faces that they went. First, they were disappointed like we got to vote again? And then they were kind of ecstatic, like, well, my vote is going to count again. Okay, I can do that. So we’ll just all come together and vote again. So it’s that kind of enthusiasm that we have to implant in our young voters to let them know that their vote does mean something and that they need to come out each time and voice their opinion because those local elections are the ones that impact their lives the most.

Marcela

They are the ones that will dictate whether their neighborhood gets good city services, whether the housing is good, whether they have a representative on the city council or in the mayor’s office who actually pays attention to them. Those are the kinds of things that we need to instill in people we use to teach students about civics. We don’t do that anymore, so it has to come from somewhere else. It needs to come from our churches and our community centers and our parents. But we need to instill in them how important it is that we as black people vote, that that is something that so many people died for and are still dying for and are being prevented from voting because of what conservatives think they can do. And what this court may do in a decision that is coming up in Mulligan, that we need to make sure that that doesn’t happen anymore, that people understand that we fought for our right to vote and we will continue to fight for our right to vote because we know it impacts our personal lives and the lives of our families.

Kanya

That’s right, Marcela. And I suspect that you made a pretty compelling and convincing case to those young men. I suspect they went and voted in that mayoral race. I know that my colleagues are going to be pleased at all the dots you are connecting here, really making the point that our vote matters on a range of issues and that these issues, it’s all intersectional and we are talking abortion rights, but we also should talk about black women’s health as a whole in this context. And we know that the maternal death rate of black women is nearly four times that of white women and 10 to 17 times worse in some states. And so what effect will these abortion restrictions have on black women’s health as a whole? Well, let’s talk about that for a little bit.

Marcela

Well, we know that when you force people to carry a pregnancy to term, you put their health at jeopardy, you put their economic well- being in jeopardy. The reason that black women fought so hard to be able to make their own decisions about their bodies is it wasn’t just about abortion rights. It was also about the right to have children, because at the time when white women were fighting so hard to have access to abortion, black women were fighting hard not to be sterilized by the state. Not to have people telling them that they would take care of them while they were in labor, only to find out later that they had been sterilized. It is our right to make a decision about when and if we start a family. And so when you talk to black women about that, about being able to make the decision for yourself as a personal decision. You get overwhelming support from black women that they believe that even women who say that they are very religious will say the right to make that decision should be mine. It is not the role of a politician. It is not the role of a Supreme Court justice to make that decision for me. The idea that we now have states essentially forcing women to carry pregnancies to term, which is what this means, also puts their health in jeopardy.

Marcela

I remember not too long ago, one of the U.S. senators from Louisiana was talking about maternal health in his state, and he said 33% of our population are black. And if you take them out of the equation, we have pretty good maternal health figures. So which means he was essentially saying black women don’t matter in my state, at least not to me. Their health, their maternal mortality is insignificant to me because I don’t really represent them. I just have to go to them to get some of their votes. But I don’t think they’re important. He was talking about a third of the population of Louisiana, and he thought it was no big thing because he was worried about maternal health numbers and he only wanted to count the white women in the state because they had better maternal health numbers and therefore made the state not look like it was as backward as it was in terms of providing the kind of prenatal care and post-natal care that black women need in order to be able to have healthy pregnancies and then live beyond that. And that’s the thing about black maternal mortality. They don’t really know for sure exactly why the numbers are so high, but I suspect it is the medical profession and how they are treated and the stress that goes with being a black woman in this country and the kind of stress like we’ve asked questions in our polling about what are all the issues that you consider when you’re thinking about having a family or expanding your family.

Marcela

And things like overpolicing and racism are way off the charts in terms of what people think about, as well as thinking about having access to clean water or to affordable, quality food. All the kinds of things that you think about when you are thinking of having a family, not just health care insurance or money in the bank, but all the other kinds of things that so many white people in our country take for granted. Access to affordable, quality food because there aren’t food chains in a lot of black communities. Access to clean water. 33% of the people that we polled said that they’ve had brown water coming out of their faucets. It’s not just Flint, Michigan. And we’ve seen in Flint, Michigan, the judge recently just dismissed all the cases against these state officials who basically didn’t care whether or not people of Flint got clean water. All of those kind of issues are state and local issues. And our votes must count on those kinds of things.

Kanya

Yes. Thank you so much for capturing that context, that history. It’s disturbing and troubling, but not surprising when you consider the ways in which black people, black women in particular, have been marginalized in our society, the ways in which we’ve never really had control over our bodies. That has often largely been dictated by the state. And as you describe the circumstances that we find ourselves navigating Community. You touched on police violence, you touched on the lack of access to clean water, a lack of access to proper food and nutrition. That is how we get here. That is how we get to a place where you have electeds being dismissive of our health generally, our maternal health, black women’s maternal health specifically. I want to talk now about another constituency that is impacted by this, denied access to abortion. So we know that pregnancy does not just happen to cisgender women. It’s a possibility for all people who can get pregnant. And abortion bans are also going to impact the LGBTQ community. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Marcela

Pregnant people, people who basically can get pregnant and carry a pregnancy to term or terminate the pregnancy are faced with a different kind of discrimination because very few doctors actually treat trans people. They don’t know what to do with them. If you look at the kind of attack on abortion, the abortion bans, the attack on voting rights, the third attack that happens is the attack on trans people. You see these same conservative members passing laws. Now, they will disguise them as parental rights and they basically are attacking the rights of parents to make life affirming decisions about their children who believe that they are trans and who will be trans and are getting services to basically balance out the hormones that they need in order to really have their gender identity affirmed. And what we have is conservative legislators who are saying, You don’t get to do that. We’re going to stop you from doing that. We’re going to have you investigated. Parents investigated if you were allowing your children to get these hormone treatments or if you’ve already had those hormone treatments and you are a trans person, we’re going to prevent you from getting the kind of services you need. Those are the things that if you look at them, it’s this little group of issues that these conservatives believe sparked their base into deciding that they like these laws, these anti laws, anti abortion services, anti voting laws, anti-trans laws, and that they believe that they are culture war issues.

Marcela

What they are ignoring in all of this is that they are ignoring people, real human beings. These are attacks on human rights of people in this society, in this country, who have as many rights as they have. Instead, they are attacking those rights because they see this as galvanizing their conservative base. And when you think about it, they attack these rights from a religious perspective and you go, I’m sorry, I don’t know many Christians who are that hateful that they think that they should be attacking other human beings in this way. And that’s really what this is about. It’s targeting women, targeting trans people, targeting black people for voting. All of this is about saying there’s us over here in one corner and then there’s you people. And as a you people, I object to that. I object to people who couch this hatred in religious terms because there’s nothing Christian about what they’re doing. And we should call them out on that. I don’t understand Christian fundamentalists who think that this is okay. This somehow is reflected in their religion. It’s not and it shouldn’t be, and it most definitely shouldn’t be reflected in their morality.

Kanya

Thank you, Marcela, for making those important points. I want to make sure that after this great conversation that we’ve just had and I know folks are going to be inspired and motivated to show up not only to the polls. Right. But to join us in this fight to re-secure our reproductive rights. I want to make sure that folks know how to stay connected with you, Stay connected within our voice. Please let folks know how they can join in this effort, join in this movement. And if there are other calls to action that they should heed in addition to showing up in November at the polls.

Marcela

Well, they can reach us on our website. They can go on our website and sign up for our alerts, our newsletter. Our website is www.blackrj.org. They can follow us on social media at Black Women’s RJ and they can also go on a site that we have that’s called BlackWomen.Vote, where there is a map of the United States. They can click on their state and find out all the information about the voting laws in their state. That’s the other thing that we do is we want to make sure people know what those voting restrictions are. We want to make sure that people have looked to make sure that they are registered still, even if they have voted in the past. There are a number of states that try to purge black voters from their voting roles. So you need to make sure that you are a registered voter still as you go into this election cycle. Do not make the assumption that you are because you may show up on Election Day and your name is not there. So you can click on your state. It’ll take you to a page where you can actually put in your name and your address and it will tell you if you are still registered to vote in your state. And I really, really encourage people, especially in the southern states, to do that, because that’s where the voter purging happens a lot to make sure that you’re registered, that, you know, if you want to vote by mail, that you can if you want to vote early, that you have the early voting days. One of the things that a lot of states have done is they’ve cut out some of their early voting days.

Marcela

They’ve cut out some of the Sunday votes. You know, there’s a whole thing called souls to the Polls that churches do. And so they’ve cut out some of those Sunday voting days. You need to make sure that if you go to vote with your church after you are in service, that you get on a bus and go out to vote, that those are still valid days. Make sure you do that. In short, you should make a plan to vote. Everyone should have a plan to vote, either early voting, by mail voting, or on Election Day. You should know there are some states that have laws that say people can’t hand you out water or something to eat while you’re standing in long, long lines waiting. So you should be prepared to bring your own water if you want, bring your own snacks if you want . All of those kind of things, make a plan with your friends, with your family. Go to the polls together to keep each other company as you have somebody to talk to and stuff. But make sure that you make a plan. And you know what that plan is and you tell your family if you’re going to go early vote, I’m going to vote on this day. I try to vote early all the time, you know, on the first early voting day and you go out and you vote. Some of those places are different than your actual polling place on Election Day. So you make sure of that as well.

Kanya

Absolutely, Marcela. That’s exactly right. So you heard it make a plan to vote. Abortion rights is on the ballot. So, Marcela, thank you so much for joining us today. I’m proud for the cause. The official podcast of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund.

Marcela

This was a great conversation. It was nice talkingto you. I really enjoyed it.

Kanya

For more information on the Leadership Conference, please visit civilrights.org and to connect with us, hit us up on Instagram and Twitter @CivilRightsOrg. You can also text us text civil rights. That’s two words. Civil rights to 52199 to keep up with our latest updates. Be sure to subscribe to our show on your favorite podcast app and leave a five star review. Many thanks to our executive producer Evan Hartung, and our production team, Graham Bishai, Bennu Amen, Tatiana Montalvo, Dena Craig and Shin Inouye. And that’s it for me, your host, Kanya Bennett. Until next time, let’s keep fighting for an America as good as its ideals.