At this discouraging backlash moment, it’s heartening to listen to four powerful activists engage in a discussion about their innovative work to counter the effects of abortion bans but also the much larger lack of access to reproductive health care, even before the Dobbs decision. Each shares their unique perspective and their organizations’ work, ranging from exciting and effective campaigns to change misogynistic corporate culture, to radically inclusive community health care, to pioneering legal strategies to protect women and expand their reproductive health care options. 

Featuring:

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Elisa Batista is the Content Director and a Campaign Director with UltraViolet. She conceives and implements campaigns to end violence against women, increase economic security for women and families, and ensure that all women have access to full and affordable healthcare services. Prior to her position at UltraViolet, she was a Campaign Director for MomsRising.org, a million-volunteer grassroots organization advocating for policies related to family economic security and child health and well-being. She helped spearhead the organization’s immigration campaign and launch MamásConPoder.org, a community of civically engaged Spanish-speaking and bilingual mothers. 

Cynthia Gutierrez, an Oakland-based, award winning first-generation Indigenous Nicaraguan/Salvadoran reproductive justice organizer, full spectrum doula, cultural strategist and writer is currently Program Manager for the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Hub of Positive Reproductive and Sexual Health (HIVE) and Team Lily programs, as well as an abortion storyteller with We Testify. Cynthia also serves on the boards for ACCESS Reproductive Justice, SisterSong, and Ineedana; and her work at the intersection of reproductive, disability and environmental justice has been featured in many leading media, including: The New York Times, The Lily, Elle Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Rewire News Group, etc.

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Transcript:

EVELINE: I think that for many of us, abortion rights sits at the center and part of the nexus of human rights. And many international human rights bodies view access to safe abortion, includes it in the constellation of rights, a right to equality, right to safety, right to life, to liberty, to have the freedom from cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. And so abortion access is a right that all people should have, and it’s connected to their agency and their engagement in our society. 

So, we know that we live intersectional lives. We don’t wake up on Monday and experience climate change, right, and then on Tuesday we experience lack of affordable housing, Wednesday, lack of affordable healthcare. No one lives like that. Right? And so we need comprehensive solutions that address how these issues intersect. And for communities of color, for marginalized communities, they’re the ones who are feeling the disproportionate burden. 

So when you have communities that are living in neighborhoods which are in the most toxic environments, or are being displaced due to extreme weather changes from climate change, these are also the same communities that don’t have access to healthcare, that don’t have access to reproductive healthcare. So these conditions synergistically impact these communities so that it increases infant mortality, kind of morbidity.

Post-Dobbs, the landscape continues to change, the conditions get tougher. We now have total abortion bans in 14 states, 7 states have partial bans. People’s lives, health and futures are at grave risk because of these attacks. More people are being criminalized, including health providers and patients, and the Supreme Court, of course, is hearing, as we speak, arguments on whether they should ban Mifepristone.

And we have three amazing panelists who are going to share their perspectives in service provision, in organizing, in policy change, and legal advocacy. And so this is a real critical opportunity to hear from these folks who are working behind the scenes with grassroots communities, and you’re going to have a chance to pull back kind of the layer of what you hear on the news and to really hear from them what is going on on the ground, and what are the challenges communities are facing, and where are there opportunities that we can all support. So I want to welcome these three incredible folks. So we’re going to start off…

Next to me is Cynthia Gutierrez. She is an award-winning first generation Nicaraguan/Salvadoran reproductive justice organizer, doula, and cultural strategist, and badass. She is passionate about the intersection of reproductive justice, disability justice, and dismantling the criminal injustice system. She is currently the program manager for the University of California San Francisco’s Hub of Positive Reproductive and Sexual Health, and Team Lily programs. And she is on the board of directors for ACCESS Reproductive Justice, and the California Coalition for Reproductive Freedom. Cynthia has over a decade of social justice work experience within the Bay Area, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Lily News, Elle magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Rewire News Groups. So, Cynthia.

CYNTHIA: For me, the personal has always been political. I have relatives that have experienced incarceration. I am someone who’s had an abortion. I’m very unapologetic about that, as an abortion storyteller, and really building community with other folks that have had abortions. I’m also someone who had to advocate tirelessly to have a birth and post-partum experience that was filled with dignity and respect during a global pandemic. And so to give you the math, that means I have a 3-year-old, and had to birth during a global pandemic, and try to seek post-partum care during that time. 

I’m also someone who lives in deep East Oakland and experiences some of the worst toxic air in the city of Oakland. And that often means that I am looking at things, like you said, every day from an intersectional lens. I am looking at things as a mother, as a person in my community, as someone who’s organizing locally and throughout the country. And, you know, for me, when we talk about why I got into this work, it’s because this work directly impacts me every day, like it’s so personal to me. I can’t sit here and tell you there’s a campaign with X amount of people, and this is what happened to them, like because that would not be genuine, because the people this most impacts is not only me but it’s folks who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of color, young folks, disabled folks, the people that I see just walking around my neighborhood. And that’s important for me to share. 

And as someone who’s done reproductive justice work now for over 10 years, I feel so incredibly grateful that I am really looking at things from a disability justice lens, from an environmental justice lens. My community is surrounded by liquor stores and trash, and the fact that it takes 20 minutes by driving to get to the closest grocery store is unacceptable; the fact that my community is constantly plagued by air that is impacting me as a disabled person who lives with chronic illnesses and has to figure out how to breathe and live and protect my child. And so all these issues are connected. It’s not just about abortion on a Thursday and clean air on Friday, because I need to be able to have clean air to be able to live and survive and create safe and sustainable communities for my child and your children as well.

In the community that I’m sharing—that I’m telling you, my neighborhood, there’s two elementary schools on that block. So we’re all trying to survive. Right? We’re all trying to thrive. 

One thing I’d like to talk about in the time that I have left is my experience as an abortion doula. That’s something that I have so much pride in. I’m actually a full-spectrum doula, but for this panel, I talk about abortion doula work. And as you can imagine, with Dobbs happening and Roe v Wade being overturned, even in California, people are so unclear on what do I have access to; what is legal; where is my local clinic. And you would think in the time of Google, that we could just do these things. But unfortunately, with pregnancy crisis centers, with misinformation online, with people not knowing the correct things, people are often really scrambling to get some of that basic care.

I’ll be quite honest, with the abortion doula work that I do, I don’t quite hear people talk about climate and environment. I mean, folks are just trying to figure out how many weeks am I; how many weeks along am I in this pregnancy; do I want to do a medication abortion; do I want to go in and get a procedure; do I want to try herbs; how can my abortion doula provide me resources that help me not only releasing this pregnancy but any sort of emotional support I’ll need afterwards.

Quickly, some of the changes I’ve seen since post-Dobbs, just really the spread of panic and misinformation. The fact that in deep East Oakland I can show you that there is—what do you call it—a billboard where there is language around Save the Babies: a heartbeat is felt in 18 days, with some precious baby on there. Right? And so the fact that these billboards exist, the fact that people believe this—what I call propaganda that is inaccurate is horrific. Right? And so that’s what people are feeling. 

As you all know, people are still seeking abortions. And as they’re seeking it, they’re very unclear, even in the state of California, if them seeking an abortion will criminalize them or anyone that supports them. And so I will pass it on, because other folks here can elaborate on that, and I’m sure we’ll keep talking about it. 

EVELINE: Elisa Batista is the content director and campaign director with UltraViolet. She conceives and implements campaigns to end violence against women, increase economic security for women and families, and ensure that all women have access to full and affordable healthcare services. Elisa is a very experienced campaigner, working as a previous campaign director for MomsRising, and she’s also a bilingual journalist, an award-winning digital influencer, and her writing has appeared in San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, FOX News, La Opinión, and Wired News. 

Okay, Elisa, can you please take a few minutes to tell us how you got involved and kind of what you’re seeing post Dobbs in your work?

ELISA: So I am a campaign director with UltraViolet. I’ve been here four years. We are a 12-year-old grassroots organization with a million members across the country and DC, and we’re probably best known for tipping off The New York Times to Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual abuse, and it was captured in the movie She Said. 

While Survivor Justice is clearly a big campaign for us, we cover or advocate on many issues that fall under the umbrella of gender justice, and that includes reproductive justice and, as Cynthia had pointed out, disinformation, mal-information, fighting misogynistic disinformation online put out by the so-called manisphere, as well as that put out by anti-abortion extremists, crises pregnancy centers. Yeah, it’s, in California, a little known fact is that crises pregnancy centers actually outnumber abortion clinics in California. Huge, huge problem. 

So we have many campaigns holding them, as well as other corporations—and as I will discuss later on, just how big this issue is and everybody from big tech to our social media platforms, bad players behind disinformation have contributed to what is frankly a very fascist and undemocratic thing that is going on right now.

So how did I come to this work? I’m actually a trained journalist who worked for years as a reporter at Wired News in San Francisco. And something earth-shattering happened to me at 26. I had a baby. And I did what all new moms did in the early 2000s in Berkeley, California, I started a mommy blog. And my blog, “Mother Talkers”, I found myself writing a lot about the intersection between politics and motherhood, and Ms. magazine had voted it a favorite mom blog. And from there, an organization called MomsRising, which also started here in Berkeley, California, had reached out to me and gave me my first organizing job. 

That is where I I learned all the nuts and bolts of organizing and campaign work, and this concept of intersectionality. And it’s so true what Cynthia just said—to raise a child in here, right here in Berkeley, in our country, in this world is incredibly complicated, and there is no one solution to all of our problems. So I advocated for everything from getting flame retardants out of baby products, to health school lunches, to paid family leave, to investments in early childhood education, and, yes, reproductive freedom, including access to contraceptives. 

Okay, so how has my work shifted post Dobbs? I have to say that anyone who cares about women, children, and, yes, babies, should be very concerned about what’s going on. The anti-abortion minority, if there is anything that I want you to walk away with today is that they are, indeed, a fringe minority, filed these lawsuits but also have been passing legislation that is now criminalizing women like Brittany Watts out in Ohio—she’s the Ohio woman who had miscarried at home and was charged with abusing a corpse. And thankfully, her charge was overturned, but the same was not true for Jessica Burgess, the Nebraska mother, who provided her 17-year-old with abortion pills and is now serving a two-year prison sentence. By the way, the evidence that was used against her came from Facebook Messenger, and we did have a campaign, and Facebook has said that they would now offer end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger, and they have not done that yet, so we continue to pressure them there. 

But what we can expect in the post-Dobbs world is basically women, including moms, continue to die from ectopic pregnancies, and pregnancy complications. Obstetricians are leaving states like Texas and Idaho, creating shortages in care, which also put moms and babies at risk. 

So UltraViolet is unique in that we have a c3, we have a c4 and a political action committee, a PAC, so we can actually make candidate endorsements. And I actually wrote down, because for each of those, we’ve taken like a multiprong and very strategic approach on how we have responded. On the C3 front, we’ve been holding corporations like Walgreens accountable to consumers by pressuring them to dispense the pill Mifepristone. We were first out of the gate when we found out that Walgreens had written a letter to the attorney general out in Kansas saying that, you know, basically they weren’t going to dispense the pill there even though abortion is legal—the voters upheld that right. And since then, we drove tens of thousands of actions—emails, phone calls, signatures, social media messages. We hounded them by their headquarters in Deerfield, Chicago with a highway sign calling them out. We also showed up at the pharmacist industry trade show out in Phoenix, Arizona with a billboard. We showed up, by the way, for Kacsmaryk. We had a billboard targeting him in Amarillo, Texas.

But going back to Walgreens, we know of hundreds of members who wrote to us, telling us that they were boycotting and pulling their prescriptions, and calling. And their stock did take a nose dive. And most recently, they, along with CVS, announced that they were going to start dispensing Mifepristone. 

Through our PAC work, in 2022—again, I want to like just press on you all that abortion on the ballot not only wins some of the time, most of the time, it wins all the time, every time. Okay? So next time you’re at the Thanksgiving dinner with your MAGA Republican Uncle Bob, please talk about this issue, because it’s killing them. We just turned over a seat in Alabama and in the statehouse there, and also like through our PAC, we had a successful texting campaign. We sent over a million text messages to voters. We would get together, UltraViolet members on Zoom, and text these voters in these swing states and all states that had the abortion ballot measures, like Michigan and Kentucky. And we won every single one of them. And then I’m going to stop there. But it’s a lot. Anyway, yes, post-Dobbs world is scary, but I am also hopeful moving forward. 

EVELINE: Thank you. So on my far left, Mariko Miki is the interim soon-to-be co-executive director of If/When/How. And since joining If/When/How in 2010, Mariko has held many roles, including designing, launching and directing the Reproductive Justice Fellowship Program, and establishing the innovative Repro Legal Defense Fund, which she’ll talk more about. 

Mariko has served on the advisory board of Training in Early Abortion for Comprehensive Healthcare (TEACH), and on the board of directors for Exhale Pro-Voice. And in law school, Mariko co-led the Harvard Law School—Law Students for Choice chapter and served as an executive editor for the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberty Law Review. 

Mariko, can you share how you got involved and what are some of the things on the legal front that you and If/When/How are dealing with post Dobbs?

MARIKO: Absolutely. So a little bit about If/When/How first. We are a legal services and advocacy organization that helps people who are in crisis reshape the law. And we’re also building the next generation of lawyers who are fighting for reproductive justice. And we believe that every person should have the power to decide if, when and how to have a child, and to be able to parent the children that they have in safety and with dignity.

Well, let me stop there first and go a little bit into why I got into this. I’ve been with If/When/How for 14 years. When I joined the organization, it was called Law Students for Reproductive Justice. And so it really felt like the right career path for me since I had gone to law school to work in abortion advocacy. 

I’m originally from Tokyo, Japan—but I grew up in the Deep South in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, and I think I was radicalized in various ways, probably first serving on a committee for my county. I was the student advisor for the sex-ed community—or committee in Cobb County, Georgia, and you can probably imagine what that was like. And so by the time I was in college, I was pretty sure that I really wanted to focus on reproductive freedom and reproductive rights. 

And so eventually, I went to law school, and then I found Law Students for Reproductive Justice. We became If/When/How in 2016. And then in 2019, we merged with another organization and started really focusing on direct services and impact litigation work, as well as policy advocacy. And at that time, in 2019, our focus really was around spreading awareness about self-managed abortion. 

You may have read about self-managed abortion these days, but back then, it really wasn’t a household term. And we actually had to do a lot of education, even within our movement, with some of our partner organizations. It was met with some skepticism at first, right, the idea of being able to manage your abortion on your own really scared people. It felt scary. It felt potentially unsafe. But I’m here to tell you today that it is very safe and that the risk that you run really is legal.

And so because we were focused on self-managed abortion, we developed our Repro Legal Helpline, and that was setup so that people who were scared about being prosecuted for self-managing or helping someone self-manage could call and understand what their legal rights were. And then we also setup our Repro Legal Defense Fund because we knew that in some cases, people needed funding, they needed resources. And so the fund was setup so that we’d be able to bail people out of jail if they were arrested for self-managing their abortion or helping someone do so, and that we’d also be able to fund a strong legal defense for them.

And much has changed, I think, since the Dobbs decision, but some things have remained the same. You know, as Eveline noted earlier, communities have not had access to abortion for a long time. And also the criminalization of pregnancy loss has been going on well before the overturning of Roe.

We have a research paper that came out this past December where we looked back over a 20-year period, from 2000 to 2020. We found 62 cases of people who were criminalized, prosecuted for ending their own abortion [pregnancy]. And those were all pre Dobbs. 

Then, post-Dobbs, we’re seeing an increase of the criminalization, and what’s interesting is that there’s only one state at this point, Nevada, that explicitly makes it a crime to self-manage your abortion. And yet we are seeing people criminalized for this in many, many other states. 

The way this is happening is through a misapplication of the law. Overzealous prosecutors are basically throwing any charge that they can against someone and seeing what sticks. And so, for instance, the case in Ohio, right, the Brittany Watts case. She was charged with abuse of a corpse. That’s one we see frequently. We’ve also seen charges of homicide, manslaughter, chemical endangerment, sometimes child abuse. We’ve also seen the use of statutes that are actually meant to protect the pregnant person and their fetus from a third party who might be causing them violence. 

So, we really try to fight these where we can, and we really offer strategies either in support of the counsel that people already have, or sometimes we will, you know, take on the representation ourselves, or we will co-counsel with them. And then through the Legal Defense Fund, we will actually provide the financial resources. So I’ve personally actually bailed multiple people out in the past couple years, which is not something I necessarily thought I would be doing when I went to law school. Working with bonds people in various states is an interesting experience that I can share more about. 

But what I will say is that in the post-Dobbs world, there is a heightened risk of criminalization, and that’s because abortion has become more stigmatized. There is an aura of criminality. Right? Like if something goes wrong in your pregnancy, well, you must have done something; you must have committed a crime. And that’s what we’re seeing more of. 

But I do think that this is likely going to continue and likely get worse. And I think that we provide a really unique resource through our helpline and our fund. And our website also has very easy-to-understand, accessible information about what the abortion law is in every state. And we also work with and help people, young people, who are trying to figure out how they’re going to get an abortion because they face even more hurdles than adults do.

EVELINE: Thank you. It’s a very comprehensive picture of what’s happening post-Dobbs. So let’s dig in a little bit as folks, you are all three talking about how this is impacting communities, communities of color, low-income communities in various ways. We’re going to dig into the kind of connection between kind of these restrictions, and people’s ability to have autonomy, not only over their bodies but just be able to engage in every day lives and be part of a democracy. 

So, Mariko, you talked about the increased surveillance and criminalization, how do you see, from your point of view as a legal advocate, how this is kind of connected, inherently connected to folks being able to kind of live their lives with agency and liberty, and be able to kind of function beyond protecting reproductive health, but in other ways?

MARIKO: Yeah. And I think that there is an increase in surveillance, but it’s also that the people who I think are most vulnerable are the people who have already been most vulnerable. Right? They’re the people who are already marginalized in our society, and so they are folks who are living in poverty, they’re folks who are incarcerated, people—young people who are living in foster care, often communities of color. And so those are the people who are already likely enmeshed in the criminal legal system, and they’re the ones who are most likely to be criminalized for their reproductive decisions. 

I do see it as far-reaching. Right? Like a lot of our clients that we see come through our helpline, they might have been arrested for a pregnancy loss but it’s frequent that we see that they then have—they then—their immigration status is then jeopardized. Or in many cases, the family policing, so CPS, gets involved and takes away the kids that they already have. And so these people, I think, are already experiencing a lot of state control and state violence, and the reproductive decisions are only one piece of it. 

One thing that we’ve seen in our research and through our helpline is that often it’s healthcare providers who are often the ones who call law enforcement, which is troubling. And so a lot of our work has actually been to research mandated reporting laws in every state, and to present and educate to medical providers about what is their duty to inform police about a suspected crime or in some cases, if someone is suspected of using substances during their pregnancy, is there a duty to report in that case. And we say no, that there is no duty, and in fact, they’re doing a real disservice to their patient by doing so. It might be in violation of HIPPA. 

So I think that what we’re seeing is that reproductive decision-making and the ability to decide whether or not to have a child is just part of a spectrum, and it’s part of—the restrictions on that are part of this kind of larger agenda to have the state control people, particular kinds of people, right, especially, and that it can implicate these others pieces of your lives, being able to raise the children that you already have, being able to stay in this country, being able to get away from an intimate partner violence situation, all of these things are implicated in pretty much all of the cases that we see.

EVELINE: Thank you. That’s a pretty intense image, right, of healthcare providers being the component of state control. 

Cynthia, the Gumacher[?] Institute reports that there’s actually—abortion rates are higher than ever, actually, in the last decade. And so even though with the bans and, you know, with the attacks on—the restrictions, and—but they…point to the “extraordinary efforts of clinics and abortion funds” like Reproductive Justice Access in California, the extraordinary efforts that you all – you’re the board chair – Reproductive Justice Access have gone to be able to provide resources for folks who need abortions. So could you talk about kind of what you’re seeing in regards to reproductive justice access in California. What are some of the ways that you all are providing funds and resources for folks in terms of helping them increase their agency in their lives?

CYNTHIA: Thank you for that question. Before I jump into that, I just really want to speak to what you just said. I love these panels having more of a conversation instead of us just talking at you, but I wear many hats, and what my day job—often people forget that I have a day job because I’m involved in so many things—but I actually work at UCSF in the Department of OBGYN, and manage two clinics. And one of our clinics is called Team Lily, and we support pregnant people who are using substances, who are experiencing homelessness, who have been formerly incarcerated, experiencing mental illness, all these things at once in San Francisco, so right over the bridge. 

And as you were talking about that topic, I was thinking about how working in this hospital, our patients have to interact with labor and delivery, and social workers, and all these things, and one of the things that our team is often trying to educate our colleagues about is the family regulation system, also known as CPS—Dorothy Roberts, an incredible scholar, talks about this—And what we are discovering is that not only is the local county hospital but many hospitals in the area are reporting patients who are perceived to be “harming their children” to CPS. And often we’re having to untangle a lot of our part of this, a lot of the harm that healthcare does, social workers and nurses and all of that, and how we like funnel that. And so I just want to say that this isn’t just like a report that an organization wrote, like this is happening in real life where we’re having case meetings, we’re having huddles where we’re literally discussing—I was on a huddle this week, we’re like, do we call CPS on this birthing person who has a substance use disorder. It’s happening right here in the Bay Area.

And so there’s a lot of power that our healthcare professionals have, and it sometimes will make birthing people, especially those who are most marginalized, very vulnerable. So just wanted to say that real quick.

But in terms of ACCESS Reproductive Justice, for those of you that don’t know, this is the only abortion fund in California. And this is a huge state, so as you can imagine, a lot of the work is focused here in the Bay Area, but what we know is that there are a lot of people who are not able to access care to their abortions, particularly in the Central Valley, particularly in very, very Northern California, we’re talking way past Sacramento. And although California is perceived as a “safe haven” state, barriers still exist for people seeking abortions, whether being able to access—or be able to go to a local clinic to even confirm a pregnancy. I like to give the example of if someone is trying to get an abortion—and I put myself in those shoes, because I self-managed my own abortion; so I didn’t have to necessarily go to get a procedure—but what a person, for those of you who don’t know—have to consider, you first have to confirm that you’re pregnant, you’re not just having symptoms and you wish, and you kind of know. You literally have to confirm a pregnancy. And some folks don’t know if a pregnancy test is enough; they want to go into a clinic and have that true confirmation for themselves.

And so things that people have to keep in mind is, 1) Can I take time off work? Will my employer let me take time off work? Do I even have PTO? Do I even have vacation time? A lot of working class poor folks do not. Right? If I take a day off work, will I get fired? So that is like a big—like as we think about labor rights and workers’ rights, one issue.

Then it’s like, okay, I take the time off work. I have other children, do I have childcare? If I don’t, do I have extra money to hire someone to watch my children as I go to 1) just confirm the pregnancy; we’re not even talking about any additional healthcare appointments. From there: Do I have a car? Am I able to even drive to this appointment? Ubers and Lyft, since the pandemic, have increased their surge prices. So it’s like does someone have to take an Uber or Lyft?

Then someone has to think: Is there a bus nearby? Do I have to take several buses, BART, to get to my destination? So, you know, these are just some of the things that folks are having to think of when even confirming a pregnancy, getting procedures done, all the things that are needed. 

And for ACCESS Reproductive Justice, we provide three main forms of support. We’re talking about procedural, practical and emotional support. Procedural funding, so we actually give people money for them to get the abortion they need. We trust that if you’re telling us you need $500 to get this procedure done, we trust that you’re not lying about it; this is your healthcare needs and we’ll give you the money to do that. You know, we also have support in terms of practical support. And so we are thinking about transportation. We have incredible volunteers that will literally take someone to their appointment. 

Pre-pandemic, our volunteers would also provide housing. So obviously, we vet our volunteers for that person to be able to stay in their home. But for other folks, we’re paying for a hotel, we’re paying for lodging. Like if you’re going to be in San Francisco for a procedure that takes three days, a week, we are covering the cost of where you’re staying. We’re providing food stipends, transportation. And then emotional support. You know, if you want someone to be there for you, we can provide that. We have abortion doulas. 

And so, you know, in terms of even within our last fiscal year, the majority of our callers—because we also have a healthline. So as you can imagine, with everything that’s happened the last couple of years, our numbers have increased in the number of people wanting to know what services do you provide; can you help me get this abortion. And we’ve discovered that the majority of our callers for whom we have data, identified as Black, Indigenous or people of color, have identified as female or women who are in their 20s, spoke English, called us in the first trimester of pregnancy, reported having no income, and were from California. 

However, now, we have seen an increase of over 150% since the overturning of Roe v Wade. And so more callers are traveling from outside of the state of California. So now we have to take into consideration we’re not just getting you an Uber, a bus ride, a friend to be with you, we’re flying people in. Our data is showing that we’re flying people in from Arizona, from Texas, from almost every state, and we’re actually even getting callers from outside of the country. And so, you can imagine, we can’t necessarily fly people internationally, but we can provide all the services through our healthline to give them as much information, try to help them navigate services that are closer to them.

It’s getting harder, right, because we’re getting more callers, we’re getting more people wanting to come to California, and we don’t want to turn people away. Right? And so trying to find that continuous funding for our practical support to be able to provide those services is our top priority.

EVELINE: Thank you, Cynthia for breaking it down in terms of all the things that are necessary. And also just, you know, thinking that person in Central Valley, it’s just a good reminder to us that many people live in counties—even if you’re a blue state—where there are no abortion providers. And then my takeaway is to donate, right, to ACCESS Reproductive Justice because these are the folks that are getting the resources out to the folks who really need to get their abortion. Thank you.

Alright. Elisa, so you mentioned in your opening remarks about kind of the hope that you’re seeing in the electoral process, in ballot initiatives, that—across the country. Can you share a little bit more about kind of the landscape, what you’re seeing in terms of the positive, and also challenges and the lessons you’re taking?

ELISA: There’s a lot of opportunities here. And first of all, yes, yes. Please donate to your abortion funds. I know that was one popular fundraiser we had with our grassroots base, to help people travel from places like Texas to California. 

So where are the opportunities? I mean, we’re constantly identifying them, you know, from the PAC strategy, absolutely, direct democracy, those abortion ballot measures helping elect. We did phone banking too, or texting, on behalf of Governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, and Catherine Masto Cortez [Cortez Masto] out in Nevada, our pro-abortion champions. So there’s the electoral. 

But there’s so much that we can do when we follow the money. One is the corporate accountability. We have multiple campaigns running there. One is, of course, the pharmacies, to dispense Mifepristone. The other is insurance companies to cover the whole—including Medicaid—the whole suite of reproductive freedoms, you know, from the abor—from the birth control pill to the abortion pill, you know, or an abortion, and now IVF. 

One thing that we have been working on, there’s actually a bill in California to mandate insurance companies to cover IVF. I mean, if we really want to be the beacon of reproductive freedom, let’s go for it, California. Let’s cover the whole suite. 

The other area is—that we have long funded—that we have worked and we’re about to launch is defunding the abortion movement and their leadership. For example, we did have a campaign pressuring state legislators in blue states to stop funding CPCs. The most recent was of Pennsylvania finally stopped offering state funding to these sham crises pregnancy centers. These are lower—low-lift opportunities that we can absolutely take on and win. 

So the latest campaign that we’re about to launch is called—we’re calling it internally MAGA RAGA. And what it is, is that the Republication Association of Attorney Generals, you know, they may seem like this innocuous group, but they have done so much damage in anti-trans legislation and also going after abortion seekers. And it turns out that many of them have received funding from—follow the money—companies like T-Mobile and—Yeah, I know, I was so bummed; I use T-Mobile. And I was like, why are you giving to MAGA RAGA? But they do. And so we’re about to launch a website MAGA RAGA, that people will be able to check out and look at all their favorite companies so that consumers can make an informed choice as to whether or not we are going to continue to spend our money there, if they’re funding MAGA RAGA. There’s just so much that we can do there. Definitely check that out. I mean, we saw the power of this kind of campaign work with the Walgreens campaign. We had no idea it was going to blow up the way that it did. 

And we have the power. That’s the thing. It doesn’t matter that, you know, Donald Trump is—Well, it does matter that Donald Trump is the president, but…we can starve them of resources here. We have that power.

EVELINE: Thank you. Yes. UltraViolet has done so much in so many different ways, and I love the MAGA-RAGA—Thank you. 

Cynthia, what do you see as opportunities in terms of how people can get involved to support the tax on reproductive justice and freedom? Where are you seeing opportunities?

CYNTHIA: I’m a proud abortion storyteller with We Testify, and this is an organization that does a lot of culture shift change, a lot of media work. We actually like work—the executive director Renee has worked in like film and media to even change the storylines that we see in TV shows and films, because that’s the kind of information we’re consuming, right, and we want to make sure that when there are storylines about abortion, they’re accurate, they’re sensitive, they’re real. And she says this beautiful thing, and it’s in the back of my sweater. It’s everyone loves someone who’s had an abortion. And I really hope that like when y’all hear that, it really sits with you, because what I’ve learned doing reproductive justice work is that there’s so many more people that have had abortions than we know, and the more that I’ve been unapologetic about mine, and talked about it, and like shared information about it, so many people feel comfortable to come up to me and say I’ve had one too, and you’re the first person I’ve told. And so that, to me, is that kind of like culture shift where we’re not ashamed. We don’t have guilt, we don’t have shame, we’re just ourselves. Right? 

Another thing I’d love to talk about is provide financial resources for the people leading this work. And so—Not just nonprofits but there’s people who are—whether they’re abortion doulas or birth doulas, like there are folks in this day in, day out, and in the Bay Area, we’re just trying to survive, you know, with the high cost of living and trying to afford groceries. Like how do we continue to compensate people for their work and lived experience?

You know, of course, please donate to your California abortion fund, ACCESS Reproductive Justice, and that’s your local one; let’s be very clear about that. I also—I’m on the board of Sister Song, which is a national reproductive justice organization, and folks that are just really leading that work, and I always encourage folks to donate there, to get involved. Our conference, Let’s Talk about Sex happening in August in DC, would love to see y’all out there. We’re talking strategy, we’re talking presentations, just like really dive into this work in this movement.

I’m also on the board of I Need an A, which is an incredible website. It’s INeedAnA.org, and if you go on it right now, you are able to see where you can get an abortion anywhere in this country. It gives you how far it is, your clinic, your information. It has stories. It can mail you resources that you need. And so I really just want to uplift these organizations and these causes, because these are folks that are super committed that use a reproductive justice lens. 

And I tell people, go to places, go to spaces where people are pro-abortion. I’m not just talking about reproductive freedom. I want people to say, “I’m pro abortion; I’m pro do-what-you-want; I’m pro getting the birth control; I want the IVF,” whatever it is, like, go there, right, and just be unapologetic about it.

EVELINE: Thank you, Cynthia. Mariko, can you tell us where you see opportunities?

MARIKO: Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s a lot more that blue states can do to be more welcoming of abortion access and abortion seekers. I think that there’s proactive measures that they can take. For instance, I think California has done a great job so far, but we could do more to limit surveillance, for instance. 

There was a bill that we partnered with the ACLU of Northern California on last year that didn’t make it out of the general assembly, but it was a bill that tried to limit law enforcement from being able to get geofence reverse word search warrants from tech companies like Google, and although that bill didn’t pass, it actually did lead to Google changing their policies around how they would provide certain kinds of data to police. Right? And so we think this is a win, and I think that advocates can certainly do similar things like this to really try to get at the problem of criminalization from all sides, and surveillance is one of them.

Another thing I think we can do is blue states like Michigan, for instance, they still have forced parental involvement laws. So if you’re not familiar with those, that’s where if you are under 18, you have to either get your parents’ permission in some states or you have to at least notify them in order to get an abortion. And if you don’t have a parent that you can notify, or if you feel like you can’t for safety or other reasons, then your option is to go before a judge and to have a judicial bypass. So…you know, I’m 45 years old, going before a judge is very scary; I can only imagine how someone who is 15 might feel, and it’s just not something that we think a state like Michigan should still have on its books. So we are actually working with advocates on the ground there to try to repeal that law.

And then there are other states that are passing or working on passing what we called Shield laws. These are laws that would protect abortion providers from being prosecuted by other states for trying to provide medication/abortion to folks in other states or perhaps in their own state, and then someone goes back to a ban state. 

So I think that there’s a lot that can be done sort of creatively and proactively in states that we have more influence in. And then, you know, something that we’ve tried to do is—kind of in terms of what Cynthia was saying about changing the narrative around abortion, and particularly self-managed abortion. We’re trying to get the word out there that this is very safe; it’s medically safe, but it can be legally risky, and so you need to know your rights. And we are also trying to—in that, we’re trying to work with the media and make sure that they are reporting stories ethically and that they’re not reharming or retraumatizing people who find themselves criminalized. Right? It’s already life-changing often when you are arrested; your name gets in the paper, and especially if you come from more conservative communities, that can destroy your life. And as much as we believe that these stories need to be told and that people need to understand what’s happening, I think that there is an ethical way that the media can tell these stories, and that there are things that they shouldn’t do.

And so, we do trainings for journalists, and we try to make sure that no one is endangered when journalists are reporting about where people are sourcing pills, for instance. Right? So I think that there’s a lot of work that can be done on those fronts.