Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of Left Podcast

Banding abortion is wildly unpopular and also one of the primary motivators

for the group most strongly supporting the Republican Party and Donald

Trump, the Christian Wright, which has transformed both the party and politicians into extremists made in their own image,

threatening the lives and health of millions

and sacrificing democracy in the process.

Sources providing our top takes today include lectures in history, the weeds, technically optimistic,

consider this and counterspen. Then in the additional deeper dive half of the show, there will be more on criminalizing abortion

abortion extremism in the Republican Party abortion in the legal system and what there is to do now. I think now often when we think of reproductive rights and justice, we think of

the context of criminalization and criminal laws, but that's a relatively recent phenomenon.

So if you go back far enough, and there's a dispute about this that was reflected in the Supreme Court's decision in 2022 in Dobbs versus

Jackson Women's Health Organization. The majority led by Justice Samuel

Alito suggested that in the United States to some degree or another abortion had always been a crime at any point in pregnancy.

He might have said or might have believed something similar about contraception, but the reality was that for much of United States

history either passing or implementing criminal laws regarding reproduction

would have been very difficult, in part because it was all but impossible to

identify when someone was pregnant before quickening or the point at which fetal movement could be detected.

Distinguishing whether a drug was a contraceptive and abortifacian or a drug that simply helped people who are having irregular menstruation

was all but impossible.

And physicians relied on highly unusual and ineffective methods to test whether someone

was pregnant or not. Touching someone's abdomen was considered off limits

and inappropriate at a time when women and other people

...