Abortion, Surveillance, and Vigilantism : An American Story
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts
Slate Audio
4.6 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2021
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Urgent times call for urgent conversations as Professor Michele Goodwin and Rebecca Traister join Dahlia Lithwick for an emergency Amicus to discuss
what’s new and what’s very old about SB 8, the law that allowed Texas to functionally overturn Roe v Wade. They also unpack what it really means when five justices on the Supreme Court hold up their hands as if to say “nothing we can do.”
Podcast production by Sara Burningham.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | people who would say, well, this is just simply alarmism. |
| 0:09.7 | This is extremism to compare this to historical moments in the past. |
| 0:13.8 | No, it's not. |
| 0:15.2 | It's that those historical moments in the past were, in fact, extreme. |
| 0:18.7 | It's not our articulation of them that's extreme. |
| 0:23.8 | The move toward making abortion inaccessible to vast swathes of this country |
| 0:31.5 | has been happening ever since Roe was decided. |
| 0:35.4 | And there have been people who are not surprised by this, who have been |
| 0:39.4 | working against that trend. And those are the people who are being targeted by this law. |
| 0:48.8 | Hi and welcome to Amicus. This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court and the rule of law. |
| 0:57.2 | And I am Dahlia Lithwick and I cover the courts for Slate. |
| 1:00.4 | And today we're going to bring you an off week special episode to discuss the order that was just handed down right before midnight on Wednesday night, |
| 1:12.9 | upholding a really novel Texas abortion law. |
| 1:17.0 | This law, we've actually talked about it on the show before, is known as SB8. |
| 1:22.6 | It effectively bans all abortions after the six week of pregnancy. |
| 1:27.2 | Many, many women do not know that they are pregnant at six weeks of pregnancy. |
| 1:32.2 | There is no exception for rape and incest. |
| 1:34.9 | Governor Greg Abbott signed SB 8 into law in May. |
| 1:39.1 | And of course, the trick behind the law is that unlike similar, deliberately unconstitutional abortion bans, heartbeat |
| 1:46.3 | bans, what have you, SB8 doesn't allow any state actors to enforce it. They are in fact |
| 1:52.8 | prohibited from enforcing it. Instead, literally everyone else. Any American anywhere is empowered, |
| 2:00.7 | is in fact conscripted to bring civil lawsuits |
... |
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