Abortion in America: Carole Joffe on the "Obstacle Course" to Get Necessary Medical Care

Current Affairs

Politics, Culture, Government, Comedy, News

4.6 • 673 Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2021

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Carol Joffe is one of the foremost experts on reproductive rights in the United States. A professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, she has been studying and writing about the battle over abortion rights for decades and received lifetime achievement awards from the Abortion Care Network and the Society of Family Planning. She is the co-author of the book Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion In America, and joined Nathan to discuss the various ways that the anti-abortion movement has already succeeded in creating obstacles to having abortions, as well as: - What a post-Roe America will actually look like: why it may not be quite as bleak as the pre-Roe era thanks to abortion pills, but will be worse if criminal punishments are widely deployed - The sneaky tactics that anti-abortion campaigners often use, including placing fake clinics next to real ones - Why the volunteer actions of ordinary people are essential to ensuring the protection of the right to choose Edited by Tim Gray

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine.
0:18.0	Today we are discussing the state of abortion access in the United States.
0:24.6	And I am here with one of the foremost experts on reproductive rights in America,
0:30.2	Professor Carol Jophe. Professor Joppy. Hello. Nice to be with you.
0:34.6	Nice to be with you, Nathan.
0:36.4	Carol Jophe is a professor in the advancing new standards in reproductive health program
0:40.5	in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Services at UC San Francisco.
0:46.8	She is the author of a number of books, including the Regulation of Sexuality, Experiences
0:51.6	of Family Planning Workers, Doctors of conscience, the struggle to
0:55.2	provide abortion before and after Roe versus Wade, dispatches from the abortion wars, the cost
1:01.2	of fanaticism to doctors, patients, and the rest of us, and most recently obstacle course,
1:05.7	the everyday struggle to get an abortion in America co-authored with David S. Cohen. I have mentioned that she is one of the
1:13.6	foremost reproductive rights experts in the United States. That's not just my opinion. Michelle
1:18.2	Goldberg, the New York Times, says nobody knows more about reproductive rights than Carol Joffey.
1:24.2	She is a recipient of a lifetime achievement awards from the Society for Family Planning and the Abortion Care Network. And she is also a graduate of my alma mater, Brandeis University, which, uh, uh, so a proud fellow Brandeisian.
1:39.2	Oh, wonderful. So I, the reason I wanted to talk to you is because I think in a lot of the abortion
1:48.5	discourse, a lot of it focuses on law and policy changes. We talk about time limits. We talk about
1:57.1	different restrictions that are allowed and permitted. But your work, over the course of your
2:02.1	career, what you have focused on in a number of your books and pieces of writing, is how these
2:09.1	legal and policy changes actually affect people on the ground. You zero in on the real world
2:16.8	of women and doctors and abortion counselors and people in families
2:22.6	to talk about what it actually means to have various restrictions or not have them.
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