Pro-life post-Dobbs: America’s anti-abortion campaigns

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Taxes and fees extra see mintmobile.com. Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Ore Ogumbi. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. There's a set of human like species, let's call them distant cousins, who lived around the same time as early humans. Now a new discovery about just how clever they were could upend a fundamental theory of evolution. And we pay tribute to the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers in an attempt to stop the Vietnam War. But first, It's been one year since America's Supreme Court overturned a landmark judgment known as Roe v. Wade. According to that 1973 ruling, abortion was a constitutional right. But last year, in the ruling of a case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the power to ban abortion was given back to the states.

Today, the Supreme Court of the United States expressly took away a constitutional right from the American people that it had already recognized. They didn't limit it, they simply took it away.

More than a dozen Republican states, including Arkansas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, outlawed abortion entirely and practically overnight. Those who would like abortion to be illegal, self styled as pro lifers, had waited years for this ruling and they celebrated as such.

We are the posterior generation and we will abolish a poster.

This is amazing.

This is probably the best day of American history of my lifetime.

In the years since, there's been a reduction in the number of abortions reported. But with more legal challenges to come, those pro lifers aren't as united as they once were. Rebecca Jackson, our U.S. southern correspondent, visited a group of these activists in Louisiana.

Dobbs was the day we waited for for close to 40 years. Some waited as many as 50.

When I was down in Louisiana, I met Gene Mills, an evangelical reverend who saw the Dobbs decision as a huge victory. He was a member of what he called the God Squad, people who are fighting against abortion in America today.

There's sort of a God Squad that's made up of right to life.

Gene could not have been more overjoyed by the Supreme Court's ruling on abortion.

It was just that surreal moment that this is really what I'm. This is what I've aimed at and we've just accomplished it. What now? It's a prevailing question because we know we've got more work to do in other states.

His sentiment is common across the movement because the gods God realized that giving authority to regulate abortion back to the states was really just the beginning.

And when you say it was just the beginning, what do you mean? What else should we expect?

The pro lifers all agree that the work is far from done. Abortion is not outlawed everywhere. And where it is, women circumvent bans by driving out of state or even buying abortion pills online. In California and New York, 25,000 fetuses are still surgically aborted each month. And since the ruling, the pro choice movement has really become animated. That's also made their job a bit harder.

And why is that? Is the pro choice movement becoming more animated because of the Dobbs ruling?

I think it definitely is an animating force, but this was starting to ramp up just before Dobbs too. Between 2020 and 2022, the share of Americans who promised that they would only vote for pro choice candidates nearly doubled. And in the past five years, the percentage of Americans who said that they wanted three third trimester abortions to be legal also rose dramatically. So to many on the left, Dobbs is now the animating force that Roe was on the right. When I went down to the state capitol in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a state that currently prohibits all access to abortion, I found that some in the pro choice camp had really powerful testimony to share.

For the first decade of my life, I was raped by my grandfather with the assistance from my grandmother. He once tried to murder me. And the scar tissue is extensive enough that my bladder does not work the way it's supposed to.

Audrey Wascom is a survivor and an anti violence advocate. On May 10, she gave testimony to the Louisiana House Criminal Justice Committee.

Then on my 17th birthday, I was raped. For that first decade of my life, my grandparents made child pornography of me and essentially blackmailed me with it. This is a part of my story that I would rather have kept private. And I most likely would have if the stakes weren't so high for future survivors because our state has taken the choice away from survivors of rape and incest for the chance to recover.

Ms. Wascom was speaking in favor of a bill the committee was voting on that would carve out exceptions for rape and incest from the state's total abortion ban. And she wasn't alone in that. Plenty of other women also shared their own shocking experiences of being raped.

There's no doubt in my mind if I had been forced to carry my rapist baby, I would have killed myself. I don't know if there's.

For many.

Women with me, being forced to stay pregnant and give birth would be a death sentence.

But the deep Red state also had many who consider themselves part of the God Squad. They and others were among the pro lifers attending to speak against the bill.

Abortion does not bring healing to a rape victim. Imposing the death penalty on an innocent child of a sex offender does nothing bad to the rapist, but nothing good for the woman. Creating a second victim does not undo the damage to the first.

One man even suggested that it would put men at risk.

Old girlfriends will clamor for the opportunity to put their old boyfriend or ex lover behind bars in order to dispense with the inconvenience of giving birth. Meanwhile, there is no way to treat truly know who is being falsely imprisoned.

When it came to roll call, the bill swiftly died, with lawmakers voting neatly on party lines.

Representative Bacla?

No.

Representative Bryant?

Yes Yes.

Representative Edmondson?

Yes No.

Representative Font? No. No, no. Representative Garofalo?

Representative no.

Representative Gudo? No.

No.

Representative Hodges? Represent?

No.

Representative Wharton?

No. And so did those on the pro life side celebrate this win?

They definitely did. I joined them for a lunch afterwards in the private suite of the lieutenant Governor.

Thank you so much and kudos to each of you for being here today. For the lawmakers, I want to say Justin knocked it out of the forest.

There were lots of cheers for the legislative slam dunk that they just scored, but also plenty of moments of sadness because they really think that babies are continuing to be killed at a rapid rate In America.

We're celebrating, but we do it with a somber attentiveness. Darkness has a tendency to say this is my territory because this generation is lost. It's a drift. Some would say we have been at the tipping point. I would say we're a candidate for judgment in America.

To them, they feel as though they're wrestling in evil as grave as slavery or even the Holocaust. Across the nation, different states are prioritizing different things. Legislators in Louisiana are guarding their wins. And because they hope more babies will now be born in Wyoming, they recently expanded Medicaid for new mothers. Californians are ramping up their cultural campaign by showing more people bloody pictures of tiny aborted bodies. Texans are sorting out the legal logistics of criminalizing traveling for abortion. Some are even flirting with banning morning after pills. And others are attacking in vitro fertilization, arguing that too many babies on ice are discarded when couples implant only some embryos.

And in light of all these quite different approaches, has there been a splintering in the pro life movement?

Before Dobbs, the pro lifers were a pretty united bunch. But since two camps have been jockeying to set the movement's direction, the establishment pro lifers used political connections to score policy wins with judges and legislators. These people are more incrementalist. They believe in promoting politically viable policies, and they think that that's more important than gunning for gold. They point to two Republican states that both rejected abortion ban referendums last year, Kansas and Kentucky, as evidence that rash moves can really backfire. On the other side, you have younger pro lifers. These are boosted by groups like Students for Life, and they tend to be more absolutist.

I find that quite surprising. Aren't younger people typically more likely to be pro choice?

They certainly are. But within the pro life movement, while a greater share of older people think that abortion should be illegal in some or all cases, 18 to 29 year olds are actually most likely to want outright bans. They dream of a federal ban and are kind of keen on going after birth control pills. Young advocates talk about born privilege, which is the discrimination against the unborn, and about the environmental costs of chemical abortions, for which, as of now, there's no scientific evidence. Many of the young people are using the lingo of the left to try and capture other adolescent hearts and minds. These radicals are really resistant to any exceptions to bans. But some are taking it a step further. Last year, a Louisiana legislator brought a bill that would allow the state to bring criminal charges against women who got illegal abortions. Over 70 prominent pro life organizations opposed the bill. It threatened the idea that they had worked so hard to construct that being anti abortion can also be pro woman. For a long time, there wasn't much infighting in the pro life movement. Everyone united around overturning Roe. But now there's a little more tension. The radicals argue that if one truly believes that abortion is murder, it's logically inconsistent to not prosecute the killer. Incrementalists are worried about the political ramifications of that.

Rebecca, this all sounds pretty scary. How do you think it will affect the future of women's rights in America?

Well, Ori, I think for one thing, abortion policy in America is looking really different. In different places and will only continue to. And I think that means that for women in the Deep south, say, living in Louisiana, their lives and access to reproductive care will look increasingly more different from, say, those living in New York City. The Dobbs decision really electrified that divergence.

Rebecca, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me. Oregon.

Thank you to everyone who's filled out one of our listener surveys recently. It's really, really helped us improve what we do. If you could spare us a few more minutes, we have a new follow up survey and we'd be really grateful if you could fill this out too. It's@exterator.com podcastsurvey you know the drill. The link is in the show notes. Our species has changed a lot in the roughly 6 million years since we shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees. You've all seen the illustration showing how people went from being stooped apes through simple cavemen to become sophisticated humans. This story is largely accurate. As we evolved, we lost adaptations for climbing and stood upright, gaining the bigger glutes and peculiar feet that allow us to run on two legs. Our jaws and teeth reduced in size, and our heads became rounder and larger. And as our brains grew, we evolved to be smarter. Well, that's been the main thinking anyway. But some new discoveries about our very distant cousins suggest that this march of progress is not quite so straightforward.

So the story that paleoanthropologists have told about human evolution up until now has been a relative, simple one.

Dylan Barry writes about science for the Economist.

It can be summarized as bigger brains have allowed human beings to develop more complex tools, more complex behaviors, and all of the things that we think set ourselves apart from other animals, including language and culture.

And you said that's been the thinking until now. What's changed?

Well, a series of papers were published online demonstrating evidence of both intentional burials and abstract geometric art in a series of caves in South Africa. Now that's not all that unusual. You know, there's cave art and intentional barriers all over the world, usually associated with our own species and in some very, very rare cases, very closely related species like Neanderthals. But this was different. This wasn't a closely related species. The intentional burials and the abstract geometric art appear to be associated with a species called Homanna ledi, which is quite a distantly related species to us, but one with a much smaller brain and much more archaic features.

So tell us a bit more about these distant relatives of ours.

So Homo naledi was a fascinating species so it was first discovered in 2013 when a paleoanthropologist named Lee Berger and a series of colleagues discovered some fossil bones in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa. Now, Homo naledi looks unlike anything we'd found before. It's a hodgepodge of physical traits, some quite modern and some quite archaic. They were quite short, they were around 145cm to 150cm tall. They had quite human like modern hands and feet. But its hips and shoulders looked a lot more like those of the Australopithecines, which were the more ape like genus that preceded our own genus, Homo. We've been able to scan the insides of some of the skulls we found of this species, and what we see is that it has a brain structure quite similar to our own. But the size of its brain is much, much, much smaller and much more similar to much older relatives of ours. This combination of traits was a confusing one. When it was first discovered, people assumed that Homo naledi probably lived around two to three ago. But when the rocks in the chamber were actually dated and analysed, the revealed Homo naledi actually appears to be only 235,000 to 335,000 years old, which would place it right at the dawn of our own species as a contemporary rather than an ancestor.

I'm still stuck on when you said that they had smaller brains than us, so does that mean we're obviously cleverer than them?

Brains that size have traditionally been assumed not to be capable of sophisticated behaviour. So the assumption was that Homo naledi was nothing special on the cognitive scale. The discoveries at Rising Star cave system, however, contradict that. They suggest just the opposite. Despite Homo naledi's seemingly very small brain, it seems these creatures were getting up to some really, really complex behaviors. So Rising Star cave system is this super intricate cave system. It's very difficult to get into and very difficult to get out of. But what we found is evidence that these creatures were burying their dead there. And not just at the entrance to the cave, but deep, deep, deep in the difficult to reach chambers deep within the system. And once they got to the much deeper caverns within these cave systems, using artificial light, it appears that they were digging shallow troughs to bury their dead as well. Instead of just leaving bodies there, it appears that they were doing a lot more intentional work. They were going in potentially with tools, digging shallow graves and placing bodies in them and likely burying them. And the ways in which the skeletons have kind of collapsed in on themselves are Very suggestive of decomposition of the bodies and covered by soil in ways that we know are associated with burials. That is a very sophisticated behavior. It makes Homo naledi only the third species that we know intentionally buried its dead. That's us, our close relatives, Neanderthals, and our distant relatives, Homo naledi. The burials were a big deal, but an even bigger deal was the evidence of artwork.

And so what sort of artwork are we talking about here?

Well, let's not overstate it. We're not talking about complex cave paintings or animal figures or anything like that. What Lee Berger and some of the paleoanthropologists who've been working on Homo ledi discovered recently are sections of the caves with what appear to be geometric engravings on some of the walls. Essentially, there are a couple of relatively flat panels of wall within the cave with deep grooves carved into them that intersect to form squares and triangles and cross hatched shapes. So it's quite abstract, we're talking about geometric figures, but nonetheless, that's a really significant thing.

What makes it so significant?

The reason art is considered a big marker of cognitive development is because it suggests that Homo naleidi were capable of symbolic thought. That means that they were able to think of symbols. That is considered a really important precursor to the development of things like language and much more sophisticated, much more complex grappling with abstract concepts and things like logic and mathematics. So the fact that Homo naledi appears to have been capable of at least some symbolic thought is a really big deal and suggested it crossed a really key cognitive threshold that, again, we've now only seen in three species definitively ourselves, the Neanderthals, very, very close relatives of ours. And now Homo ledi, a much more distant relative.

If they existed at the same time that we did, how do they know it wasn't us who made this fancy cave art?

Well, fancy might be an exaggeration, but that's a really good question. And actually, this adds to what is a developing crisis in the field. Usually there's only been one big brained hominin in any one place at any one time. And that means if you find tools or evidence of fire use or evidence of complex behaviors, usually as a paleoanthropologist, you just say we can associate that with the biggest brain hominin that was around at Homo naledi, discoveries make that much harder. So now we know that Homo naledi was probably running around southern Africa at about the same time that our ancestors were. And we know that Homo naledi was capable of quite sophisticated cognitive behavior as well, including tool use, use of fire, and potentially art. Now, disentangling the material record, disentangling who is using what tools, who is leaving what art behind, who is using fireware and when becomes much, much, much more difficult. There's the potential for paleoanthropologists to have to re evaluate a fair bit of the material archaeolog record if we find out that other species were doing similar things as well.

Well, Dylan, thank you for coming on and teaching us about our distant, distant cousins.

Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having.

Daniel Ellsberg began to feel particularly uneasy about Vietnam when he actually went to the country.

Ann ro is the Economist's obituaries editor.

@ first he was enchanted by it, and particularly by Vietnamese children who were fascinated by him, who grinned at him, followed him round like a cloud of birds. But on one of the outings that he went on, when he was on attachment to the embassy as an observer, was to a village that had recently been pacified. That is, they'd been driving out the Viet Cong. So they had set fire to the huts in the village, and these Vietnamese children were not smiling, but they were instead searching through the rubble for their toys. This affected him deeply. He had not gone there as a soldier, of course, he'd gone there as a civilian. But in fact he was employed in the Department of Defense. He was one of the people who had been finding pretext for America to get more involved in Vietnam by finding news reports about Viet Cong atrocities and also by writing untruthful statements for the defense secretary, Robert McNamara, to give to the press. So he felt suddenly, deeply implicated in this war, even though he was not fighting there. When he was a child, he had become extremely worried, in fact horrified by the reports he heard in the Second World War about the bombing of civilians in cities in Europe. He had begun to feel the real horror of war when he heard about the bombing of Rotterdam and Warsaw, and also at school after Pearl harbor, when America was getting into some war readiness, he was shown a magnesium bomb and told that it couldn't be doused with water, only with sand. And the sand was kept in buckets in each classroom. And the idea of a bomb exploding and burning his flesh through to the bone was horrific to him. He was only a civilian. This was being done to women and children, and that decided him really, for the rest of his life that he would not ever tolerate the bombing of civilians. He had been an academic at Harvard. He had written a dissertation there on decision making how people weighed the risks and uncertainties of making a decision when they really didn't know what the risks were or what chances they could take. And this was especially interesting in a situation of making war policy where you were also uncertain about what the enemy was going to do. So while he was reading these stacks of memos from generals to the president, president to generals, and various staffers, he became aware that the whole Vietnam policy was based on lies. It was based on illusions about what the enemy was doing and what the usefulness would be of going into Vietnam at all. It was based on keeping everything completely secret and not informing either the public or congress of what the administration was doing. So he was in a web of lies, but didn't quite know how he should expose this to the world. Every night, he would take a certain number of the papers in his briefcase, get them past the security guards, and take them to a friend whose girlfriend had a xerox machine in her office. And there they would do the photocopying. He then passed the copies to a journalist at the New York times, and the New York times began to get them ready for serialization. In June 1971, the times began to serialize all the secrets that he had been passing on to them. And immediately president Richard Nixon took out an injunction to stop publication. There were different decisions, and in the end, the presidential injunction ended up at the supreme court, where the court decided that the right of the public to know about what was being done in their name weighed more than the fact that the executive thought that national security was threatened by revealing these secrets. So president Nixon lost that case, and the publication went ahead and did a great deal to bolster the anti war movement in the state. But meanwhile, Daniel ellsberg had been charged under the espionage act for releasing the secrets at all. So in 1973, his trial took place. But by then, president Nixon had decided that he was going to bring down Ellsberg by setting up a group called the plumbers, who were going to secretly burgle the office of Ellsberg's former psychiatrist to find out whether Ellsberg was actually unhinged, and therefore they could discredit him. But the plumbers, who'd been set up to do that burglary, also then went on and made a. A bungled attempt to try to burgle the Watergate offices. And this unleashed a huge scandal, which eventually brought down the president and put him in such bad repute that the case against Ellsberg crumbled. And, in fact, all the charges against him were dismissed at his trial. So he had got off scot free for making the huge decision to release all these papers. But that was not the main point to him. He was not as delighted as he might have been because he realized he hadn't stopped the war. It actually continued for quite a few years afterwards until a peace treaty was agreed. This was not what he had wanted. He accepted that he had shortened it a bit, but he decided that he would actually change his life and would become a campaigner against all wars. He had once supposed that America was a good force in the world. He thought he was one of the good guys. But by the end of his life he felt that there were no good guys and bad guys anymore. There was only truth and falsehood. There was only right and wrong. And he was absolutely sure now which side he'd come down.

On. Ann Ro on Daniel Ellsberg, who has died aged 92. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Jo Devlin and our sound engineer is Will Rowe, with assistance this week from Saul Rivers. Our senior producers are Sam Westren and Rory Galloway. Our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Alize Jean Baptiste, Kevin Kaners, Barclay Bram and Sarah Larnyuk, with extra production help this week from Emily Elias and Maggie Khadifa. We'll all see you back here on.

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