In a heartbeat: abortion in America

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Hello and welcome to the intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Voters in Malawi will elect a new president today. Just like every election season in the country, it's a dangerous time for people with albinism. There's a widespread belief that the body parts of albinos bring wealth and luck and perhaps success at the polls. And young people in America just aren't having as much sex as they once did. Are they still in the shadow of the financial crisis? Are those pesky smartphones to blame? A preponderance of porn our correspondent considers a curious conservatism. First up though, Today a federal judge in Mississippi will rule on whether a new abortion law in the state should be upheld. It almost certainly won't. It's one of several strict anti abortion laws being passed across the country that aren't really expected to survive court challenges. So called heartbeat bills, they prohibit abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which can be as early as six weeks. You say bro. And you say life. Bro. Life.

Bro.

At noon local time across the country today, abortion rights protesters aligned with more than 50 organizations will descend on state houses and court steps to decry the laws. What do we want? Abortion, I say why do we want it all this legislation directly challenges Roe versus Wade. That national legal standard says that abortion should be protected until the fetus viable. But Kay Ivey, the Governor of Alabama, who signed the strictest of these recent bills into law, appears ready to challenge it.

You certainly cannot deter your efforts to protect the unborn because of costs, even.

If it means going to state, to.

The United States Supreme Court.

So this year alone, there are 12 bills, at least, going through the state legislatures.

Meehan Ridge is our U.S. news editorial. She's been reporting on the progress of these laws for the Economist.

And four heartbeat bills have passed. It's quite likely that other states will announce similar bills in the coming weeks.

And how did we get to this stage? There's this sort of proliferation of these kinds of bills being proposed.

So ever since Roe vs. Wade was declared by the Supreme Court to be a constitutional right in 1973, pro lifers in America have been finding ways to take it on and challenge it. The way that they've traditionally done this is to chip away at Roe by undermining it, so introducing at a state level, regulations which make it very difficult for women to access abortions and for clinics to provide them. So one way, typically that they would do this, is dictating very precise things like the width of a corridor in a clinic. So that's been a very successful strategy. But in the last couple of years, pro lifers, not all of them and not all organisations, have adopted a much more aggressive stance and they're trying to directly challenge Roe versus Wade. And they've been empowered to do that, first of all, by the election of Donald Trump, who promised as a presidential candidate that he would overturn Roe v. Wade.

And that'll happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro life justices on the court.

But most importantly, by his appointment of two conservative justices to the Supreme Court, and with the appointment of the second of those, Brett Kavanaugh, last year, the Supreme Court now has a solidly conservative majority.

So what's in this Mississippi law?

So the Mississippi law that's going to court today is a heartbeat bill. Abortions would be banned once a heartbeat has been detected, and that typically happens around the sixth week of pregnancy onwards, which is a short time after a woman has missed her menstrual period. So lots of women don't realise that they're pregnant at six weeks. Lots of people are calling them effective abortion bans rather than early abortion bans. And there are no exceptions in the case of this law for rape or incest, only exceptions if the pregnancy endangers the woman's life or health.

And how likely is it that the Mississippi law heading to court today will be upheld?

It's extremely unlikely. It's a completely clear, straightforward violation of Roe v. Wade. So it's a pretty straightforward legal case. The court will strike it down, almost certainly. And the judge that's actually looking at this case in November, he struck down a Mississippi abortion ban that would have come into effect at 15 weeks of pregnancy. So it seems impossible that he would allow through an even more stringent abortion ban. So these bills aren't being put forward to realistically become laws. They're being put forward in the hope that they will, at some point, if there are enough of them, get before the Supreme Court and in front of those conservative justices who they hope will want to overturn Roe v. Wade.

And what's your view on that? What do you think the Supreme Court would do should they be presented with such a case?

I think there are two parts to this. Firstly, the Supreme Court won't be anxious to take up one of these bans. And secondly, if it does, I think it's, on the whole, unlikely to overturn it, because especially a couple of years or a year before presidential election, it would be seen as a very partisan act. And the Chief justice in particular doesn't want to be seen as being partisan. He also is a very keen institutionalist. He doesn't want to overturn long held precedents, especially one of this importance.

And how do you think this will eventually play into the 2020 race?

So Donald Trump's got a bit of a balancing act here because he needs to hold on to the conservative evangelicals who voted for him in 2016. And for many of them, abortion is the single most important voting issue. But he also will be aware of the fact that a majority of Americans want abortion to remain legal, at least in the first trimester, so they want Roe to stand. In other words, he doesn't want early abortion bans to become a big issue. And in fact, over the weekend, he put out some tweets suggesting that these bans were a bit much. He said he had the same view on abortion as Reagan. And we should remember that Reagan appointed a female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day o', Connor, who voted to uphold Roe. The safe. The safest bet for him is to rail against late term abortions, because while most Americans believe that early abortions should be legal, they're much less certain about late term abortions. Only 13% of Americans think that late term abortions should be available under any circumstances. So he feels safe railing and raging against late term abortions, as he did in his State of the Union address.

To defend the dignity of every person. I am asking Congress to pass legislation to prohibit the late term abortion of children who can feel pain in the mother's womb.

Well, if the president isn't really pushing for an end to early abortion and the people aren't pushing for an end to Roe v. Wade, why is it at risk at all?

So Roe vs Wade is unlikely to be overturned anytime soon, but I think what will certainly happen over the next couple of years is that Roe will be challenged in incremental steps. So every time there's a regulation at the state level that's challenged by an organization and ends up going to court, if it ends up at the Supreme Court, it's more likely to be upheld now than it would have been a few years ago, meaning that states will have fewer abortion clinics and women will find it more difficult to access abortion at any stage during their pregnancy. And so Roe versus Wade will be slowly and steadily chipped away at me.

And thank you very much for your time.

That's a pleasure. Thank you.

In the country of Malawi, witchcraft is a part of everyday life. Medicine men sell potions and charms. They boast that they have the power to bring fortune, win back lost loves, or punish rivals. Such superstition is not uncommon in much of the world, but in Malawi, it can carry dark undertones. Some say the most potent spells require ritual human sacrifice. And people with the pigmentation condition called albinism, who number no more than 10,000 in Malawi, are said to carry the most powerful magic.

I went to visit a woman called Misa Maulidi who lives in a very remote part of central Malawi, deep in the tobacco plantations.

Adrian Blomfield writes for the Economist.

Misa Maulidi was in an unusual position. She's a black Malawian woman, but she had two children who suffered from albinism. Goodson, 14, and her daughter Faith, who was three. One night in February, she woke to find a gang of men inside her house. She knew immediately what they had come for. She had to make a lightning decision. While bleary eyed was sleep, she scooped up Faith, ran out of the house through a window and told Goodson to run to his grandparents who lived across the yard. He didn't make it. The gang caught him. His family put up a valiant fight. Two of his grandmothers were slashed with machetes. But Goodson was spirited away into a car and driven off. He's not been Seen again.

Stories like these are not unheard of in certain parts of Africa.

Persons with albinism generally in the region of sub Saharan Africa face danger on a day to day basis.

Ike IRO is the United nations independent expert on human rights and albinism.

There is a widespread belief in certain countries in particular that the body parts of persons with albinism can be used in rituals related to witchcraft and that when they are used in these processes, the user can attain wealth, good luck and other benefits.

And where do these superstitious beliefs come from?

This idea that persons with albinism can be used for rituals related to witchcraft has always existed. From the preliminary research that I've done in sub Saharan Africa, what is new is this commercialization that has led to persons with albinism being trafficked and also their body parts being sold on a black market for tens of thousands of US dollars.

Ik told me that in Malawi, where Goodson Makanjiro was kidnapped in February, the situation is particularly dire.

Malawi is one of the most troublesome countries on this matter because they have had attacks non stop since 2014. There has been some lulls and then you think things will improve and then there you go, you hear a new case. What is more difficult to bear in Malawi is the fact that there has been investments into the preservation of animal life and the preservation of animals going extinct. There has been foreign assistance for these, but for human life and the situation unfortunately is quite analogous. We're being hunted down. Myself being a person with albinism who felt insecure the last time I was in Malawi, we're being hunted down and not getting the same type of support.

And a grisly pattern has been emerging in the country in recent years. There's been a spike in attacks and abductions around election time. Today Malawians will vote in general elections that have been overshadowed by the issue.

In terms of who's behind the attacks. It's a complex network. The witch doctors are central to this. There are criminal gangs that carry out the abductions and sometimes the killings, although witch doctors are also accused of carrying out the killings. However, there is also a question about who the clients are. And body parts from albinos cost a lot of money, thousands of dollars. That kind of money can only be found by businessmen, by politicians. And I spoke to activists, but also to politicians on both sides of the political divide in Malawi who also say they believe that politicians are very, very much involved in this whole trade.

So why then should these kinds of attacks increase around the time of elections?

There is A belief that albino bones bring good luck. Elections in Malawi are often closely fought, so the allegation is that politicians use these charms to try and win their seat or to extricate themselves from political difficulties. The association for Persons with Albinism in Malawi started to notice that there had been a surge in attacks on albinos before the last election in 2014. And that's when they started to document the number of killings along with Amnesty International. So they have counted killings between the two elections, but they've noticed a surge in the last few months. It's been a very, very toxic election. And it does seem that the issue of the killing of people with albinism has been manipulated to become an election issue, with all three sides accusing each other of covering up the killings or possibly being involved in them. Now, they vehemently deny this.

Well, one way for politicians to draw suspicion away from themselves is to be involved in measures that protect people with albinism. I mean, what's the government trying to do here?

Recent measures include giving albinos panic buttons that are connected to the nearest police station. They can press them if they are under attack. A task force has been set up to examine ways in which albinos can be protected. We had a man who was convicted of killing an albino, was sentenced to to death. In what was supposed to be an exemplary message to other killers. Activists say this is not enough, though. One of the things that has to be done is to identify those who are ordering the killings.

Well, what about attacking the driving force here, which is the superstition, the belief that these body parts are valuable in some way?

The beliefs don't seem to be an issue of education. The leader of the opposition, Lazarus Chakwera, told me that he knows People with PhDs who still visit witch doctors. It's often those who are at the top of society, the most privileged, who are doing this. So you do need a public relations campaign, from what I understand, to try and demystify this. Kenya has an albino senator, it has albino beauty pageants to try and create this sense that there is no difference between albinos and the rest of the population. There's been very little evidence that that is happening in Malawi.

International and regional governments should first of all bring into their spaces and consciences this idea of harmful practices related to witchcraft. The same way that we have realized FGM as a harm, we have to bring witchcraft related crime to the same level of consciousness. As of today, when I mention this issue, I get mixed reactions. Some People laugh, Some people don't take it seriously. We need to take it seriously.

Ike, thank you very much for your time.

No problem. Thank you.

I went to visit some students at Northwestern University who study on a course called On Marriage, Sort of a mixture of social science and therapy in its considerations of sexual relationships and the relationship between the two.

James Astell writes Lexington, our column about American politics.

So I was drawn to this topic because of the latest of several polls suggesting that young Americans are having quite a lot less sex than previous generations of young Americans. This is part of a broader decline in the sexual activity of adult Americans, which is in itself reflective of a broader decline across the industrialized world.

Well, I mean, as a possibly flawed starting hypothesis, I mean, we kind of tend to think of the youngest millennials, Generation Z, as more liberal, as more easygoing, as more relaxed about things that everyone else was always tense about. Is that not the case?

No, I think that's absolutely the case. I think that this younger generation are much more relaxed about sex, are more liberal, much more accepting of difference, and the normalization of gay relationships and gay sex for 20 somethings in America is a clear change from older generations. Nonetheless, being liberal in your views of sex doesn't necessarily mean that you have a lot more of it. Perhaps the biggest reason why younger people in America especially, but also elsewhere, are having less sex is because they're tending to marry later. And being in a regular relationship, especially cohabiting with someone, tends to mean you get a lot more sex than you would if you were single, even if you're playing the field quite energetically.

Yeah, but that's almost a sort of from above demographic point. I mean, what did the students tell you? Did they suggest why they think the decline might be happening?

They were haunted, I think it's fair to say, by the Great Recession. They all felt the sort of shadow of that recession and the stress that it had put upon their parents, many of them, they felt that very gravely. And I think that it had reinforced what is a more general attitude amongst their peers to put off marriage, to put off even committed relationships or anything of that nature that could hamper them in their careers. Some of the girls said, well, you know, if we're not going to get married for a good time yet, we're not even thinking about such a thing. So why would we even look to be in a stable relationship? It's just a distraction. We're going to be leaving college in a year or two and looking for the best job that we can find. Why put Ourselves in the position of being in any way kind of hampered or weighed down by a relationship.

I mean, the one sort of distinct change from earlier generations to the current millennials and onwards is the presence of technology. The availability of the Internet, the iPhone, the entire tech revolution. They didn't know a life before that. Do you think that plays a role?

I think it clearly does play a role. The kids themselves felt that it had probably changed the behavior of young men especially. They felt that young men were less able to communicate face to face because they spent their time, you know, playing video games and on the phone. And there was a. There was certainly an anxiety about sexual political boundaries, when it was appropriate to hit on a girl or for a girl to hit on a boy. So I think there are sort of three things going on here. A feeling that stable, committed relationships are not for them at the same time for a commitment to casual sex. But casual sex is a sort of high risk thing, as we've seen, especially for this MeToo generation, because the risk of social faux pas is quite high. And we have a generation, it seems, of young men especially young people, but young men especially perhaps, who just don't have the social skills of previous generations to navigate what is a more difficult social dating ecosystem. There is a worry that the amount of porn that these kids have consumed since, I guess, a much earlier age than previous generations because many of them would have had access to it so easily through their teenage years, may have warped the attitudes of young men and women. It's blurring of the lines between porn, sex and real sex. Speaking to these clever, articulate, thoughtful, 20 something American students, I guess I took away from it that their more liberal attitude to sex was in itself a positive thing because it didn't seem to be destructive or lacking in respect for the other party. In fact, to the contrary, if anything, these kids appeared sort of slightly constipated by their concern not to create faux pas, to be respectful. And at the same time, there was a sort of overarching and thoroughly familiar enthusiasm for the benefits of companionship and the fun of romance. In the end, people are people and we have a pretty long history of matching up in our best interests. And I felt all of the enthusiasm for that process that there has ever been in the classroom where I spoke to those kids.

James, thank you very much for your time.

No problem. Thank you.

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