Voices of the Fight: 45 Years Since Roe V. Wade (The Takeaway)

Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this segment This week marks 45 years since the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in the Roe V. Wade case. Though it’s the law of the land in the United States, family planning clinics face onslaughts of protesters on a daily basis, and for many women, access to healthcare also includes persistent harassment. The Supreme Court has ruled that these protesters need to be protected, but Wendi Kent has been on a mission to shine a light on these heated clinic demonstrations. She’s an artist, activist, a photojournalist, and has spent time as an abortion clinic escort. Her ongoing project, “Faces of the Fight,” shows the intensity of these protests, but her story has roots that stretch back years. Back in 1993, Kent found out she was pregnant when she was a 13-year-old eighth grader living in Texas. Just months into her first year as a teenager, she decided to go to a local clinic to get information about her options. “When I went, I had finally come to the realization that an abortion was definitely the best option for me — the smartest option,” she says. But Kent was too afraid to ask about abortion. Even as a young girl, she said she felt there was something bad or shameful about abortion, and she was worried about speaking up. “When I went in, I kind of expected for this option to be given to me, or for someone to tell me that it was an option, because I didn’t want to have to ask,” she says. “That actually didn’t happen. They asked me what I wanted to do, and I kind of suddenly said, ‘I think I want to have this baby,’ because I didn’t know what else I was supposed to say. They said, ‘OK. We’ll get you some prenatal vitamins.’ I was pretty dumbfounded honestly.” Kent was hoping the nurse would lay out all of her options, including abortion, so that she could choose it without stigma. When that didn’t happen, she went home with the vitamins and information about government assistance plans. Months later, at just 14 years old, and after attempting and failing to induce a miscarriage, she wound up giving birth to a healthy baby girl. She tried to make things work with her boyfriend, who was also 13 at the time of the pregnancy, for about a year, but she eventually wound up moving in with her mother and stepfather. “I was then in a pretty unstable environment,” she says. “I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t feel like it was a safe place for my daughter. So I looked back to her father’s side of the family and I asked them to come take her until I could find a more stable environment — a safer place to live. I left my mother’s home and I was on the streets after that. I was unable to find a place to go.” But in the months leading up to the birth of her daughter, Kent visited her local clinic several times for prenatal care. “I remember feeling like I was in a tornado,” she says. “I do very vividly remember someone spitting at my feet, and I was really confused — I didn’t have any idea this was a thing, who these people were, or why they were there. I couldn’t really understand why they were shouting.” A protester confronts a man who accompanied his partner to Metropolitan Medical Associates clinic in New Jersey. (Wendi Kent) Nowadays, Kent is trying to put a face to the protesters outside of abortion clinics. She’s visited demonstrations across the East Coast and Midwest, and takes photos of protesters on location. “The truth is that these are often very aggressive and intimidating people and the tactics that they use are scary,” she says. “They’re invasive, and they’re meant to shame women and really do nothing else.” Kent says she tries hard to stay away from creating any kind of spin around the photos. When she’s out in the field, she doesn’t try to attack or provoke the demonstrators to get the shot, but she merely attempts to speak with them. Additionally, she doesn’t go on special occasions — like the anniversary of Roe — but rather on a typical day that...

Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this segment This week marks 45 years since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade. For 33 of those 45 years, Clarke Forsythe has worked with Americans United for Life in the courts and state legislatures to restrict abortion, always with an eye on the ultimate win: Overturning Roe V. Wade. "There's no historical right to abortion in Anglo-American history, there's no precedent that supported a right to terminate pregnancy, there was precedence that established a right to contraception but not to terminate pregnancy," says Forsythe. He explains how anti-abortion activists are working to roll back abortion rights around the country. This segment is hosted by Todd Zwillich

Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear the full segment Monday marks 45 years since the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling in the case of Roe v. Wade. The 7-2 decision guarantees that women have a constitutional right to choose to have an abortion. But it wasn’t always that way. Today, Barbara — she didn't want her full name used due to the sensitive nature of her story — is nearly 80 years old. She had an abortion in the mid-1950s in Oklahoma, one of 30 states where the procedure was illegal prior to 1973. Back then, there were physicians who would perform abortions, but it had to be done secretly and it came with great risks both for the doctors who faced persecution and for the women who risked injury, abuse and even death. “I asked my girlfriend if she could help me, and she gave me the number of a guy who did abortions,” she says. “I didn’t know anything about him. Back then, you just took your chance.” She went to a strange house in northern Tulsa. The screen door was falling off. She went inside, climbed up on the kitchen table and hoped the man examining her was a doctor. He asked for $200 to do the procedure — money that Barbara, then 18 and working as a typist, simply didn't have. She left, relieved she hadn’t been sexually assaulted. “I left there crying,” she says. “I was just thankful I hadn’t been raped because a lot of these guys raped women whenever they did this.” Still desperate, Barbara sought out a different path. She asked her friend to get her some pills. Barbara took them and experienced extreme pain and some initial bleeding, but was unable to terminate her pregnancy. She then decided to seek a doctor's help. “He said, ‘You need to get over to the hospital,’” Barbara says. “They pushed me down the hallway to the operating room. On my chest, they had put a sign that said, ‘Incomplete Abortion.’ This was a Catholic hospital, by the way. They operated on me and saved my life because the doctor said if I had not gone then — if I had waited 24 hours — I would have been dead.” Two decades later, the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade to allow abortion, in part, aimed to help millions of women gain access to the procedure safely — with certified doctors who would operate in clinics and hospitals and not on kitchen tables. Today, Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land, but it’s been significantly rolled back in recent years. “We’ve had 401 abortion restrictions enacted since January 2011,” says Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager at The Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that advocates for reproductive health rights and policy in the United States. “That’s about one-third of the number of abortion restrictions since Roe was decided in January 1973.” (Credit: Guttmacher Institute ) According to Nash, these state rollbacks have made it much more difficult for women, particularly in the midwest and south, to access an abortion. “The kinds of restrictions that we’re talking about are restrictions on abortion later in pregnancy; extending waiting periods from say 24 hours to 72 hours; making it harder to use abortion coverage in your health plans; and in fact some states have eliminated that option — all kinds of restrictions that make it harder for women to access services,” she says. “In some states, these new restrictions have resulted in clinics closing, so then you’re talking about much more limited access for services.” The abortion rate has been declining since 1980, but there’s a particular decline between 2008 and 2014 — the latest year that there is data available. Between 2008 and 2011, the unintended pregnancy rate also declined. “That is, in part, a reason why you’d see fewer abortions,” says Nash. “But also we were seeing abortion patients and women in general using contraception, particularly what we call long-acting methods, like IUDs, and those methods are very effective [at preventing pregnancy]. That’s one factor in why you’re seeing a...

Click on the 'Listen' button above to hear this segment Monday will mark 45 years since the Supreme Court issued the landmark ruling in the case Roe v. Wade, guaranteeing a woman's constitutional right to an abortion. In the years since, the issue has stood as one of the central wedge issues defining American politics. With a Republican-controlled government intent on restricting or eliminating abortion access across the country, we look toward places with robust anti-abortion laws, to see if a hard-line approach has any actual effects on abortion rates. Michelle Oberman is a professor of law at Santa Clara University, and she's the author of "Her Body, Our Laws: On the Frontlines of the Abortion War, From El Salvador to Oklahoma." She joins The Takeaway to talk about these different approaches, and what their examples could mean for the United States. This segment is hosted by Todd Zwillich