Welcome everyone, I just have a quick intro for you here to let you know that we have excellent episodes coming up on abortion rights and the Texas law, reproductive justice more broadly and our take on the 9-11-20th anniversary.

I think we'll have a slightly different take than most mainstream outlets. Those are all in the works. They're going to be excellent.

They're just taking a little longer than expected because we're quite busy behind the scenes here and you know how when things are going well and you fall a little bit behind, you can do a little bit more work to catch up, but when things aren't going well, doing that little bit of extra work to catch up becomes an insurmountable task.

That's kind of how things are now. So as a mental health reminder, it's not just about taking care of yourself when you are at your wit's end and you are about to collapse. It's also about recognizing your limits and preventing that collapse from actually coming about, being a little forgiving to yourself for when you can't do what you wish you could.

So that's the situation I'm in right now. I would like to do a little bit more work and get a little caught up.

But on the other hand, I worry that darkness that way lies. So today I have a rerun for you and coming right up, I will have those excellent episodes I described. So for now, enjoy.

Welcome to this episode of the award winning best of left podcast in which we shall learn about the future of abortion rights and the broader reproductive justice movement in the face of a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court.

Eclipse today are from AJ plus on the media, the national network of abortion funds, ABC News's Democratic primary debate and capitalism hits home.

Is the GOP obsessed with outlawing abortion? The country is witnessing an unprecedented wave of abortion restrictions.

But this anti-abortion rights platform did pop up suddenly. The GOP has had to be patient, strategic and aggressive in their tactics and occasionally say things like this.

I've noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.

Wow, thanks for that groundbreaking insight, Mr. President. I'm going to break down why the GOP embraced abortion as a core policy and how we ended up with so many abortion restrictions.

First, it may come as a surprise, but the GOP and their supporters weren't always against abortion rights.

Three years after Roe v Wade, a landmark Supreme Court case that made abortion legal in the United States was decided, public opinion polls actually showed that on average, Republican voters supported abortion rights more than Democrats.

Well, historically, neither party was really pro-choice or pro-life and there were politicians in either party who could be found in each camp.

So there were lots of Catholic pro-life Democrats like a presidential candidate Joe Biden at one time opposed abortion.

Republican First Lady Betty Ford called Roe v Wade a great, great decision.

And Republican Vice President Nelson Rockefeller had campaigned for abortion rights in New York.

Even the chair of the Republican National Committee was pro-abortion rights. Despite this, in the mid-70s, something started to happen in the GOP.

Three or four years after Roe v Wade was passed, the GOP was definitely moving toward a more anti-abortion position, so the GOP Republican platform in 1976, for example, had some language about supporting the efforts of people who wanted to ban abortion through a constitutional amendment.

Abortion really started becoming a core issue for the GOP when this guy got into office.

Is an unborn child a human being? I happen to believe it is.

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