Alternative facts, otherwise known as lies, aren’t a revolutionary idea. They’re a long term political strategy that the Radical Right set in motion decades ago in order to maintain white patriarchal control in a changing world. Today, their cronies have infiltrated the highest ranks of government, and their propaganda playbook is filled with pseudoscience and disinformation. In this episode, we unpack the Radical Right’s tactical narratives that have come to dominate language, talking points, and debate around abortion on both sides of the aisle. How were the Radical Right so successful at warping both their base and the mainstream talking points around their lies? Join us as we pull back the curtain on the man who started it all -- the Godfather of Anti-Choice Disinformation -- John Willke.
We are joined by Stacey Abrams (founder of Fair Fight and Fair Count), Ilyse Hogue (President of NARAL), Ellie Langford (Director of Research at NARAL), Imani Gandy (Senior Editor Legal and Policy, Rewire.News, podcast host: Boom Lawyered) Loretta Ross (Author, Professor, and Reproductive Justice activist), Laura Bassett (political columnist at GQ), and Karen Mulhauser (former president of NARAL). For more information on our podcast contributors, visit: https://theliethatbinds.com/the-podcast/
This series is based on the book “The Lie that Binds,” by NARAL Pro-Choice America President, Ilyse Hogue, with Ellie Langford. To purchase the book, visit: https://theliethatbinds.com/
Jess McIntosh [00:00:00] This limited series podcast is based on the book, "The Lie that Binds" by NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue and research director Ellie Langford. We recommend starting with Episode 1. A content warning for our listeners for this episode, we found it vital to include the lived experiences of real women. Their stories are a necessary part of this conversation. And it's for that reason that this content contains descriptions of sexual assault and later, abortion. If that's not something you can take on, we get that. Take care of yourself and we hope to see you again next week.
Ilyse Hogue [00:00:35] I think in the early Obama years through the summer of 2012, the second election, I started to have a theory as an organizer that we were leaving energy on the table around issues of reproductive freedom and justice because of sort of cultural stigma that extended to Democrats.
Jess McIntosh [00:00:57] Democrats were on the defensive. They had lost big in the 2010 midterms.
Archive [00:01:02] Well, in a conference call to his supporters say President Obama was blunt, saying there's no way to sugarcoat it. Last night was tough for Democrats, who warned that they most likely face even tougher days ahead, sweeping, stunning Republican victories all across the country.
Archive [00:01:14] A very different map today than when the president won in 2008. A very troubling map if you're Barack Obama looking ahead to 2012.
Jess McIntosh [00:01:22] A surge of Tea Party victories helped the Republicans win the House. And the fight to keep no cost contraception in the Affordable Care Act had cost the Obama administration a lot. Now they were less keen to center policy conversations around reproductive freedom. Going into the 2012 election, democrats knew they needed to hold on to the Senate and it didn't look good.
Ilyse Hogue [00:01:43] There was a Senate race in Missouri and Claire McCaskill, who has been elected to be the senator of Missouri in 2006, was running against Todd Akin.
Jess McIntosh [00:01:56] The polling looked bad for incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill. Her opponent, Todd Akin, was a well-liked businessman who represented Missouri in Congress, where he was awarded a 97 percent rating from the American Conservative Union. He also happened to be an anti-abortion crusader. He called abortion providers terrorists and was arrested eight times in a three year period in the mid 80s for trespassing at clinics. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, momentum was moving in Akin's favor.
Ilyse Hogue [00:02:25] She was not actually beating Todd Akin. He was leading in the polls and people were scared.
Jess McIntosh [00:02:32] Then something happened. Akin appeared on a local news show where he was asked about his stance on abortion.
Archive [00:02:38] What about the case of rape? Should it be legal or not? Well, you know, people always want to try and make that as one of those things. Well, how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question? It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.
Jess McIntosh [00:03:02] Public condemnation was swift, loud and bipartisan.
Archive [00:03:06] Those words were almost universally condemned, even giving Mitt Romney and Barack Obama something to agree on.
Archive [00:03:13] The views expressed were offensive. Rape is rape.
Archive [00:03:16] His comments about about rape were deeply offensive. And I can't defend what he said. I can't defend him.
Jess McIntosh [00:03:26] The interview went viral.
Archive [00:03:28] You know, actually, Jimmy I don't take credit for the congressman's courageous stance. Let's put Akin's face over mine for this. All he's saying is the female body shuts that whole thing down to prevent a pregnancy during a legitimate rape. Therefore, any woman who gets pregnant wasn't really raped.
Ilyse Hogue [00:03:50] Now, aside from this being scientifically just preposterous, it showed an underlying disdain for women in inferring that they would cry rape in order to get an abortion. It was kind of the anti-choice statement heard around the world.
Jess McIntosh [00:04:14] The backlash worked in McCaskill's favor. Todd Akin lost that Missouri race by 15 points, a total reversal from what polls projected. Democrats kept control of the Senate, and at the time, it looked like anti-choicers were starting to pay a price for their extreme views. And maybe in the short term, that was true. But what about the long game? Here's Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
Ilyse Hogue [00:04:36] While they didn't like it, they were willing to sacrifice an election here or a candidate there to actually mainstream what otherwise would seem like preposterous ideas. As an organizer, it was impossible not to take notice of that and start to also understand how radical the ideology of the other side was and how we were letting them off the hook by not organizing to force them to say their truth.
Jess McIntosh [00:05:02] GOP leaders wanted us to believe that Akin was an outlier, a bad apple, and the left largely let them get away with it. But when Todd Akin talked about legitimate rape, he just made the mistake of saying the quiet part allowed.
Ilyse Hogue [00:05:16] I wrote a piece for The Nation at the time called The Dangers of Laughing at Todd Akin, because what I knew even before I was at NARAL was that treating him as an outlier was antithetical to the way that the anti-choice movement worked. They lost the election, but four years later elected a serial sexual predator to the White House.
[00:05:41] And I think that there are so many lessons for us in that because we stopped at Todd Aiken and we didn't dig deeper. We didn't look at the underlying ideology of the Republican Party at that time and fully leverage it to our advantage, partly because we have internalized stigma and we weren't centralizing these issues as a progressive movement.
Jess McIntosh [00:06:05] Welcome to The Lie that Binds a six-part series exploring the insidious history of how the anti-choice movement was built from scratch. I'm your host, Jess McIntosh.
[00:06:17] In episode one, we explored how the anti-choice movement was formed by tapping into racism and misogyny to gain political power. This week we're looking at how the Radical Right has used junk science and disinformation to manipulate an entire generation of voters. These days, we talk so much about alternative facts and misinformation. But the early adopters of these tactics were the anti-choice movement. Only then we just called them lies. When you don't have popular opinion on your side and you don't have facts, you resort to these tactics to maintain control. You lie and tell people remain silent because they don't know how to argue with lies. And the lies are most powerful when they tap into deeply held suspicions or beliefs. The anti-choice movement knew just how to do this when it came to women and sex and shame. These strategies were written into the anti-choice playbook from day one.
Ilyse Hogue [00:07:09] I think the assumption at the time was like they're just like these independent, crazy people who were never educated. But the opposite is true. They were quite carefully educated around this set of alternative facts, junk science that the movement created. And it's quite coherent with what tons of right-wing people have been taught about these issues over the years.
Jess McIntosh [00:07:33] For abortion to become a mobilizing issue, conservative activists had to make their message palatable to the media and to the public. They needed a set of stories and supporting evidence that would help them claim the moral high ground and prove abortion was actually as bad as they claimed. Enter John C. Willke
Archive [00:07:51] A guy named John Willke, who's the founder of the National Right to Life Committee, wrote an article. My guess is it's the article where Todd Akin got his ideas about female reproductive biology,.
Archive [00:08:01] In it Willke arguing, quote, To get and stay pregnant, a woman's body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that's easily influenced by emotions. There's no greater emotional trauma than can be experienced by a woman than assault, rape, unquote. That's John C. Willke, often referred to as the father of the pro-life movement.
Archive [00:08:21] It's safe to say that the pro-life movement would not be where it is today without Dr. Willke.
Archive [00:08:27] From Dr. and Mrs. Willke's legacy, we were given the blueprint for the pro-life movement that will endure until our battle is truly won.
Archive [00:08:35] There wouldn't be organizations in place without his early work.
Archive [00:08:40] What we did help to fuel it to become ultimately successful. Call us pioneers. That's probably what they'll do.
Jess McIntosh [00:08:51] Dr. John C. Willke is widely referred to as the father of the anti-abortion movement. But a more accurate title would be godfather of disinformation. Despite his training as a physician throughout his career, Willke increasingly embraced the role of propagandist.
Ellie Langford [00:09:06] John while he was an anti chocie activist who really wrote the book on how to talk about abortion.
Jess McIntosh [00:09:14] That's Ellie Langford, director of research at NARAL Pro-Choice America. She isn't speaking metaphorically. Wilkie and his wife Barbara literally wrote the book on anti-choice ideology before Roe v. Wade. John and Barbara Willke were early leaders of the isolated religious movement that fought against abortion access. Their daughters encouraged them to share their beliefs with a wider audience.
Archive [00:09:35] They said, Why don't you and Mom just put down your ideas about abortion? You don't have to write a story. Just put down questions and answer. In fact, just call it handbook on abortion.
Jess McIntosh [00:09:47] It's a little unnerving to hear John Willke speak about this so fondly, because it almost sounds sweet, but that's how they get you. Part of why the Willkes were so successful in spreading lies is that on the surface, they seem like a couple of grandparents who just love babies. But the handbook on abortion is filled with dangerous misinformation. And it had an enormous impact. First published in 1971, it sold millions of copies and has since been translated into many languages and disseminated all over the world.
Ellie Langford [00:10:17] Pretty early on, Willke was trying to figure out a way to translate anti-choice ideology from a niche Catholic issue into something that he could build a broader organizing effort around.
Jess McIntosh [00:10:30] His opportunity came in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe decision. After that, Willke became a go-to source for anti-choice talking points.
Archive [00:10:40] Roe versus Wade. Well, that was nine o'clock in the morning. By the time I went to bed at midnight, I was on 14 radio and TV shows.
Jess McIntosh [00:10:51] He now had a much larger and more public stage to amplify his ideas. Wilkie used to say things like words are important. Words are powerful. He believed the words chosen by activists on either side of the debate could shape the values of those who listened.
Ellie Langford [00:11:07] He was the one who figured out how to message this whole thing, to misdirect the conversation, to just evade the real, frankly, difficult conversations about what it looks like to demand somebody go through a forced pregnancy.
Jess McIntosh [00:11:27] He provided specific guidelines instructing conservatives to never describe physicians as doing abortions, but rather committing abortions in order to place a cloud of stigma over the procedure. Willke also offered a list of words to avoid, chief among them, rape.
Ellie Langford [00:11:44] He recommended that people on his side don't use the word rape, but instead qualify it as assault, rape or forcible rape. And he actually wrote that, and this is a direct quote, "Using the word rape alone includes statutory rape, which is intercourse, consensual or otherwise, with a minor. To use assault rape or forcible rape, separates it from the more vague and specious terms like marital rape or date rape.
Jess McIntosh [00:12:13] Another key part of Willke's strategy, erase the woman from the conversation entirely.
Ellie Langford [00:12:19] He also recommended that you should never use the words pregnant woman, only call a pregnant person a mother. He also recommended that you never say uterus, that you only talk about the womb. He said that that was a warmer, more maternal term and less medical. He certainly didn't want abortion to be considered a medical conversation.
Jess McIntosh [00:12:40] While people in support of abortion access relied on legal structures and scientific facts to make their case, John and Barbara Willke knew how to press people's buttons.
Ellie Langford [00:12:49] And he and his wife were actually really invested in putting together focus groups to try and test different ways they could get people to think their way on abortion. One of their biggest insights was how important visuals were. They found that they had a lot of trouble getting people to really picture a fetus as what they wanted. Born baby who should be treated legally as a person.
Archive [00:13:17] We're telling people that this is a baby and they don't know a thing about what we're saying. But if we could just hold a picture up. And so that's what we started to do, is start collecting pictures and we'd find out we describe this beautiful baby and then we'd hold up a picture to go, oh, it is a baby. And we'd just been saying it. So we realized we needed props.
Jess McIntosh [00:13:39] The Willke's embody the Radical Right's messaging strategy that values style over substance. Again, to hear Barbara Willke discuss these focus groups, they sound so well-intentioned. But that's all part of the carefully crafted campaign that seeks to focus the attention on props and away from the reality of pregnancy.
Ellie Langford [00:13:58] And of course, that insight is still something that we see on street corners all the time.
Jess McIntosh [00:14:03] In the early days, immediately after Roe, John Willke saw the opportunity to get ahead of the medical conversation and start spreading lies about fetal development.
Archive [00:14:12] When we started, almost no one knew the facts of fetal development. Everybody knew how the baby got started. Everybody knew how the baby came out. But here were nine dark months in here. Medicine, of course, threw light on that and how truly human that baby is very early on. And in the first two decades of the pro-life movement, basically we were educating our nations to fetal development.
Jess McIntosh [00:14:50] The Willke's descriptions of fetal development have been proven misleading or flat out untrue time and time again. But that hasn't stopped the spread of anti-choice misinformation from infecting the public conversation.
Ilyse Hogue [00:15:02] That quite intentionally moved the country, who was feeling deep sympathy for women who had suffered pre Roe to very intentionally erasing women from the picture entirely and constructing this idea of what a fetus looks like to move this sympathy there. It was a real undertaking to be able to do this.
Jess McIntosh [00:15:27] The Willke's success taught the right a vital lesson. It doesn't matter if what you're saying is true. It just has to feel true. Once the anti-choicers perfected their propaganda. it was time to take that lesson into the political sphere.
Ilyse Hogue [00:15:40] It started to move policy that was politically feasible at the time, which was always going to be policy that affected women without class privilege or race privilege. And so that's how you got the Hyde Amendment.
Jess McIntosh [00:15:54] The Hyde Amendment, the landmark legislation that arguably jumpstarted the policy conversation around abortion as we know it. And like so many pieces of this story, this brings us back to one of our main characters from Episode 1, Paul Weyrich, as the Willke's were building their grassroots misinformation campaign. The primary architect of the Radical Right was grooming GOP candidates.
Ellie Langford [00:16:17] Weyrich founded Heritage in 1973. The very next year, he said that he was worried that conservatives were losing all over the ballots in the House and he put together a PAC designed to help conservatives win. He said they didn't have a ton of success, but one of the key people they invested in and helped put over the top was Henry Hyde.
Jess McIntosh [00:16:38] In 1976, with Willke's doctrine in his year and Weyrich support in his pocket, Henry Hyde launched what was essentially a one-man congressional crusade to roll back the freedoms afforded by Roe. He proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would prevent all low-income Medicaid participants from using that insurance to pay for abortion.
Ilyse Hogue [00:16:58] Henry Hyde explicitly said if he could outlaw abortion for every woman in the country, he would, but he knew he couldn't. So he was just going to take what like nobody really argued with him was the low hanging fruit, which was women without structural power in society. You look back at it and it's so deeply cynical and egregious that you can't believe people didn't rise up. But, you know, it was all men in power at that point.
Archive [00:17:23] The constitutional amendment means that if you're poor, your right to an abortion is meaningless.
Archive [00:17:28] The Hyde Amendment is nothing but a discriminatory policy against poor women. And quite frankly, I've just about had it with my colleagues who vote against people of color, vote against the poor and vote against women.
Archive [00:17:42] I think you saw a lot of the racial tensions that are in society reflect in the columns flare up in this debate.
Archive [00:17:47] Henry said, quote, I believe nothing in this world of wonders is more beautiful than the innocence of a child and that little almost born infant struggling to live as a member of the human family. Abortion is a lethal assault against the very idea of human rights and destroys along with the defenseless baby. The moral foundation of our democracy. And close quote.
Archive [00:18:07] Henry Hyde himself is one of the people who wrote down legislation for maternal health program.
Archive [00:18:14] We'll do. The basic intent of Henry Hyde was to simply prohibit the use of federal funds to pay for abortions. But when you actually get into the implementation of the policy, you find that there are a lot of other questions that people raise.
Ilyse Hogue [00:18:30] It was a very long and robust conversation in the course of discussing the Hyde Amendment in 1976 about whether or not you needed a rape exception to it.
Jess McIntosh [00:18:40] For as long as men in power have led the conversation about abortion access, that conversation has included passing the definition of rape. During the initial Hyde debate, conservative House members demanded that forced rape be inserted into the amendment to make sure statutory and marital rape was not covered under any exception.
[00:18:59] It's important to remember marital rape wasn't even considered a crime in all 50 states until 1993. The first version of Hyde passed with no exceptions whatsoever. But the House and Senate were soon forced to confront the question of rape again.
Karen Malhauser [00:19:14] A few years later, after the Hyde Amendment passed, it was an effort to reduce the funding even more and not having it available for women who were victims of rape or incest.
Jess McIntosh [00:19:28] Karen Malhauser who you met in Episode 1, testified in both the House and Senate about her own assault. A quick content warning. The next section includes some details from that testimony.
Karen Malhauser [00:19:40] It was not easy. But I testified before committees. As a survivor of rape by two men at gunpoint, some of the Republicans in the committee room were so they didn't they so did not know how to react. That one of them literally turned his chair from the table and face the wall. Rather than listen to a real human life story and another, I called him out in the in the House hearing because in a committee hearing, he had said the question is not whether or not she was raped, but how much she enjoyed it. And of course, he denied saying that. But he said it was seventy nine and there was not Twitter. There was no Internet. So it was me in a room of men.
Jess McIntosh [00:20:36] As Willke correctly suggested, rape is a powerful word that forces people to empathize with women. Karen's testimony, along with other firsthand accounts, had an impact beyond making the mostly male politicians uncomfortable. In 1978, the Hyde Amendment was updated to include new exceptions for rape and incest victims, along with instances where the woman's health would be severely harmed. However, in 1980, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the original Hyde language, containing only an exception for life endangerment.
[00:21:09] In other words, if a woman could survive carrying a pregnancy to term, she should be forced to.
Archive [00:21:15] Demonstrations protesting the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the Hyde Amendment took place last week across the country. The Supreme Court decision has been interpreted not only as an attack on poor women, but also as an attempt to take away the right of all women to control their own lives.
Jess McIntosh [00:21:32] Since the Hyde Amendment requires yearly approval, the law has become a canary in the coal mine, alerting us to the strength of the radical right's grip on the country at any given time. After that 1980 Supreme Court ruling, the Hyde Amendment remained in place unchanged, with only that life endangerment exception. For over a decade through the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, but high can't be placed at the foot of the GOP alone. Republicans spearheaded the effort, but they ultimately found bipartisan approval by erasing the impact it would have on women and instead focusing the conversation on funding, specifically taxpayer funding. This has been a powerful strategy to silence the pro-choice majority from the time it was first proposed. And throughout the decades of debate around abortion, here's audio from a C-SPAN roundtable discussing the Hyde debate in 1993.
Archive [00:22:21] That's the most contentious aspect of the abortion debate, I think, and that is federal funding of abortions for poor women.
Archive [00:22:30] Federal funding for abortion has always been unpopular among voters, even people who are pro-choice or uneasy with the government financing abortions. And they kind of a lot of people kind of want to take a hands off approach, saying, on the one hand, abortion should remain legal. On the other hand, the government shouldn't subsidize.
Laura Bassett [00:22:48] A major talking point that they've been using is don't make me pay for it if you're gonna get an abortion. I oppose that. Don't make me pay for it.
Jess McIntosh [00:22:56] That's Laura Bassett. She's an award winning journalist and one of the first reporters devoted entirely to covering the state of reproductive rights in America,.
Laura Bassett [00:23:03] At least when I first started covering this Democrats always defended themselves by saying, well, the Hyde Amendment exists and for 30 years it's been illegal for taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions. And that's been sort of a defense thing that they would use. It's been their little security blanket against, 'no, your taxpayer dollars aren't paying for abortion.' And I think they've been unwilling to sort of give that up because then they have to say, 'no, you know what? Abortion is OK. It's part of health care and your tax dollars should pay for it.' The same way they pay for all kinds of family planning grants and all of. And all these government programs that help people that need it, because it shouldn't just be a thing that rich women can access and poor women can't. That's not really a right, if half the country can't access it. And I think they've been unwilling to go there and poor women have been unable to, they don't have the platform to stand up and say this is messed up.
Ilyse Hogue [00:23:54] Hyde is unjust on the face of it, and we should never have allowed it to pass. And it should not stand today. And thankfully, our allies in the reproductive justice movement have led the strategy to repeal it. At the same time, it was an early lesson in the sort of idea that on our side we could make concessions and find common ground. And on the other side they were never interested in common ground. And if anything, you know, we saw that sort of loss and failure of our side to draw a bright moral line in Hyde come back and haunt us. Hyde still stands today. It's egregious.
Jess McIntosh [00:24:36] This conversation started in 1976, but it has continued every single year since. So what are the takeaways from Hyde? Well, as Ilyse said, you can't bargain with people who have already been indoctrinated by the Radical Right. Compromising on Hyde has only led to more and more incremental losses over the years. Both sides of the abortion fight have tried to avoid the annual Hyde debate. Pro-choice progressives have fought to remove Hyde from the spending bill entirely, while conservatives have fought to make it permanent. In 2010, the opposition proposed H.R.3, a standalone bill that would do just that.
Archive [00:25:12] Madam Speaker, I knew one minute to the gentleman from Ohio, Mr. Boehner, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
Archive [00:25:18] We thank my colleague for yielding and expressed my support for H.R.3, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act. This common sense bipartisan legislation codifies the Hyde Amendment and similar policies by permanently applying a ban on taxpayer funding of abortion across all federal programs.
Jess McIntosh [00:25:39] Which brings us back to where we started this episode. Todd Akin. Akin was one of 212 Republicans and 16 Democrats in Congress, including future Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who that year attempted to deprive rape survivors of abortion care by enshrining the phrase forcible rape into H.R.3.
Archive [00:25:59] Ryan, like Romney, distanced himself from Akin's remarks. But in Congress, he joined Akin in opposing abortions even when a woman has been raped.
Archive [00:26:09] You sponsored legislation that has the language forcible rape. What is forcible rape?
Archive [00:26:13] Rape is rape. It's rape is rape, period. End of story.
Archive [00:26:17] So that forcible rape language meant nothing to you at the time.
Archive [00:26:20] Rape is rape and there's no splitting hairs over rape.
Jess McIntosh [00:26:24] While the forcible rape provision was removed in the wake of the Akin comments, nearly the entire Republican caucus was on record, advancing the idea that women would cry rape in order to access abortions, spreading the junk science claim that women's bodies would shut down pregnancy in so-called legitimate circumstances. The GOP tried to separate themselves from Akin, but the 2011 H.R.3 hearings brought back all of Willke and Hide's original talking points.
Archive [00:26:51] Madam Speaker, it is said that a government is what it spends. This bill is really about whether the role of America's government is to fund a practice that takes the lives of over one million unborn American babies every year.
Jess McIntosh [00:27:04] Hyde codified a winning strategy for passing policy. Punish women without privilege. Make it about something palatable like federal funding, and string it all together with misleading and manipulative talking points about unborn babies. Akin's comments pulled focus away from the more troubling belief that he, Paul Ryan and countless others in the radical right held that survivors of rape should be forced to carry that pregnancy to term. You can hear this plainly in this Chuck Todd interview with Akin two years after his viral moment.
Archive [00:27:38] Should abortion be legal for somebody who has been raped?
Archive [00:27:44] Well, that gets to the heart of the question on that interview two years ago. And so here's the question. Should the child conceived in rape have the same right to life as a child conceived in love? I had a number of people on my campaign that were children that had grown up, that had been conceived in rape. They were helping me on the campaign.
Archive [00:28:09] So well, which, by the way, also undermines your argument that somehow the woman's body shuts down.
Jess McIntosh [00:28:15] It undermines his argument because there is no argument. Akin paid a big price for his claims about women's bodies and rape. But at the end of the day, none of the semantics actually changed his stance on abortion. Over the course of the last four decades, conservative politicians learned to walk a tightrope in order to signify their allegiance to extremists without frightening the majority of Americans. Of course, some politicians, like Hyde and Akin would always find themselves slipping off the tightrope. But there were people waiting in the wings, ready to pick them up and teach GOP leaders how to message around their mistakes. People like Kellyanne Conway.
Ellie Langford [00:28:52] I think many people recognize her from her alternative facts comment. Some people will also remember her as Todd Akin's top defender. She was there to pick up the pieces and she was the person who ran seminars and trainings with Republican political figures. After the fact.
Ilyse Hogue [00:29:13] She was really called in as a crisis communications person after Akin. She and her ally and the cause, Marjorie Dannenfelser, did these boot camps teaching these male candidates essentially not to speak their truth. I mean, they they literally sent them to boot camp to be like, don't talk about rape, don't talk about rape, don't talk about rape.
Ellie Langford [00:29:36] What she really did was attempt, sometimes unsuccessfully, to rein in some of these conservative figures. Most frightening impulses and most candid statements, frankly, and teach them a way to present themselves that at least didn't trigger alarm bells.
Jess McIntosh [00:29:58] With the right messaging, the right political infrastructure, and enough politicians who understood how to stay on message they could be devastatingly successful. It took decades for that strategy to fully form the political behemoth we know today as the Radical Right throughout all of it. Weyrich, Falwell and their colleagues were mounting a massive infrastructure effort to push their beliefs into law. They had many legislative victories along the way. But in 2010, their work paid off.
Archive [00:30:26] Republican Party leaders, Republican candidates led by Tea Party organization and Tea Party backed candidates have taken positions that have increasingly moved the party far to the right and outside of the American mainstream positions that would take Americans backward not forward.
Jess McIntosh [00:30:43] H.R.3 is just one example of a larger effort from conservatives to create a legislative stranglehold on abortion. New bills were testing the limits of Congress's legal capacity to regulate reproductive rights at the federal and state level. Imani Gandy, now a senior legal analyst at Rewire.News, was tracking the rise of anti-choice legislation.
Imani Gandy [00:31:04] It was about that time that the Tea Party explosion of anti-choice bills just swamped legislatures across the country. It was partially a blow back to the election of Barack Obama, but it was also partially the culmination of decades of effort by anti-choicers to get to the point where they were ready with institutes and organizations dedicated to writing model bills.
Jess McIntosh [00:31:29] One of the largest and most prominent of these organizations is yet another Paul Weyrich brainchild, ALEC.
Ellie Langford [00:31:36] ALEC, was one of Weyrich's early initiatives. ALEC stands for the American Legislative Exchange Council. They turn out draft bills that they pack a job and send to legislators across the country. At the state and federal level, ALEC is the kind of organization that straightup puts out the language for bills that are tailored to exactly what their strategic goals are. All legislators have to do is copy and paste.
Imani Gandy [00:32:03] So they spend all year working with junk scientists, working with anti-choice advocates, lawmakers to come up with Madlib bills, but they can then send to legislatures. And legislatures don't have to do their own work. They can just fill in the blanks and then introduce those bills in their state.
Ellie Langford [00:32:21] ALEC isn't alone. An anti-choice organization called AUL, Americans United for Life, they're the kind of organization that has been around for a while and that has really led the fight for incremental rollbacks of reproductive freedoms. AUL is the organization responsible for that whole raft of anti-choice bills that we saw last year, but also that we saw earlier in 2010.
Imani Gandy [00:32:45] These bills were being introduced just hand-over-fist by legislators who didn't even really know what they meant, who hadn't really even read them. And so it became clear to me that a lot of the information that was in the bills was wrong. With respect to what the bills meant from a scientific standpoint, and it became clear to me that there was nothing in terms of reality when it came to these bills versus what actually happens with pregnant people and pregnancies and abortion.
Ellie Langford [00:33:15] In the 70s, moving forward, there was this whole cottage industry of anti-choice think tanks and pseudoscientific "researchers." The landscape of faux research organizations in the anti-choice movement has just exploded. Everything from We Care. The American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which has actually been disavowed by ACOG, even though its name is specifically designed APLOG to sound like ACOG, to Susan B. Anthony List's research arm, the Charlotte Lozier Institute.
Imani Gandy [00:33:54] Certainly organizations like the Charlotte Lozier Institute have been very, very effective at creating a veneer of respectability around their science. They are,"peer reviewed" scientific studies, which in actuality aren't really peer reviewed in the way that scientific studies are supposed to be if you're going to publish in a reputable journal. Essentially, what they do is they create these scientific studies and then they peer review each other. So it's just a bunch of junk scientists reviewing each other's junk science.
Ellie Langford [00:34:27] We see a number of groups brought in time and time again to write amicus briefs to provide documentation for anti-choice bills that are moving at the state or federal level, to testify on hearings about anti-choice bills. And it's the same couple of people and the same couple of organizations over and over again.
Imani Gandy [00:34:53] You know, science is always about testing hypotheses and seeing whether hypotheses are true. Right. And because science tends to be uncertain, it tends to be about people trying to find solutions. If there is no 100 percent absolute answer to a particular question, then that leaves some room for doubt. And that's where the junk scientists intervene. They sort of live in that space of doubt and create enough doubt so that a court is not going to be bothered with trying to figure out who's right and who's wrong. And with these people who are claiming that fetuses can feel pain or that there's a fetal heartbeat at six weeks, this is not science. This is not actual medicine. This is just nonsense. So if a legislature says we are passing this bill, this 20-week abortion ban, because fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks. And sure, there might be some disagreement in the medical community about whether that's true. But when it comes to that sort of disagreement, a court is just going to throw up its hands and say, we're not in the business of deciding who's right and who's wrong on the science. So the tie goes to the legislature. And if the legislature has incorporated junk science into their bills, then that means junk science becomes law.
Jess McIntosh [00:36:07] This goes beyond messaging tactics. The anti-choice movement operates with a fundamental understanding of the loopholes in our democratic system. And these model bills are the policy manifestation of the lies John and Barbara Willke developed decades earlier in their focus groups.
Ilyse Hogue [00:36:23] When you don't have popular opinion on your side, you are much more likely to understand that you have to manipulate people's emotions in a way that forces them to be silent about your agenda or go along with it. I don't think our site is about that because we have science on our side or popular opinion on our side, and we don't actually recognize the power of manipulating emotions. And we don't want to be manipulative, like, let's be honest, you know, like it's just not in our playbook to be manipulative. And so, you know, part of why we're actually doing this entire project is because we don't spend enough time understanding what they're doing to match our strategy to theirs. And I'll give you a very small example of that. The six-week abortion ban, they call the heartbeat ban.
Jess McIntosh [00:37:13] There have been several versions of these so-called fetal heartbeat bills. An early example was introduced in Ohio in 2011 and more recently, one of the most restrictive versions was proposed in Georgia. This bill, HB 481, was the one proposed by Brian Kemp, Stacey Abrams opponent in the 2018 Georgia governor race. Here's Stacey.
Stacey Abrams [00:37:35] HB 481. What it states is that you cannot have access to an abortion after six weeks, with very limited exceptions, and that those who seek those services are subject to criminal penalties and the doctors who provide the medical treatment that may be necessary to protect a woman's body, that they could also face criminal penalty. And what we have already learned is that for a number of students in medical school who are matching for residencies, they are questioning whether they want to come to the state. Georgia also has the highest maternal mortality rate in the nation. And we know that for black women in particular, maternal mortality rates are three-to-four times higher than those of white women. And so we live in a state of crisis where we have a doctor shortage and nursing shortage, high maternal mortality rates. We have no Medicaid expansion, which means that women who are working in the state of Georgia who may find themselves pregnant, are precluded often from even getting access to the very medical services they need on the outset. Georgia is a perfect storm of wrong, and it sits at the feet of the abortion bill. The challenge is that they like to call it a fetal heartbeat bill, but that's not science. There is no fetal heartbeat at six weeks.
[00:38:53] Even in the act of repeating those words, you are creating a false narrative that then carries through every other conversation.
Jess McIntosh [00:39:02] The very phrase fetal heartbeat is misleading because a fetus doesn't have a heart at six weeks gestation.
Ilyse Hogue [00:39:09] What does that do? Heartbeat Bill. It focuses you on the potential life on the pregnancy. And even our side says that's an abortion ban. That's accurate right. And access to abortion is actually a very popular principle. So why wouldn't we say that? Well, the reality is that that language doesn't meet their strategy. Right. What we need to recognize is that they're playing on emotions and we're saying something quite factual that requires intellectual engagement and it's about a medical procedure. And so if you're going to hold, you know, a very gut level sympathy for a potential life next to a medical procedure, you're not going to have as much traction as when you think about the language that reintroduces the pregnant person.
Stacey Abrams [00:40:02] Part of our responsibility on the side of choice is to actually create our own language and to use it to restate and reframe the narrative.
Ilyse Hogue [00:40:13] They have been really effective at getting people to use their terminology. We have to be as diligent and thoughtful in making sure that we are actually using language that is embedded in our values for sure, but that centers the pregnant person and the experience of the pregnant person and also is grounded in science and not ceding that language word to that.
Stacey Abrams [00:40:40] Part of the ways this works is this notion of taking truth and throwing it out the window and replacing it with these false narratives that become part of how we hear and think, and that's how we debate the issue. And so I refer to it as a forced pregnancy bill
Ilyse Hogue [00:40:55] These are forced pregnancy laws. There is a person attached to this pregnancy. You are forcing them to do something against their will. And guess what? If you are a casual observer, you are now thinking about that person attached to the pregnancy in a way that you're not. If you're just talking about the medical procedure,.
Stacey Abrams [00:41:14] I think we have to stop fighting the fight set up for us by the anti-choice movement if we want to be effective in our ability to win. When you adopt the language of your enemy, then you are giving your enemy entry into your thinking and into your strategy. When we use euphemisms to cloak what we're discussing, we give people reason to feel ashamed. I very clearly talk about abortion rights. I don't veil it as health care. It is a part of the health care decision, but it's a very specific health care decision. And when we talk about cancer treatment, we don't talk about it as health care. We talk about the issue and the process. And we need to claim that when it comes to abortion, because the minute you hide the conversation, you are admitting that there is something wrong with the process. And that is not true.
Jess McIntosh [00:42:08] It's a positive sign that HB 481 did not become law in Georgia. But we can't take our eyes off this fight, much like we shouldn't get too comfortable laughing at Todd Akin. We can't get too confident about any individual victory. It distracts from the larger strategy. There is a reason why virtually identical bills are popping up again and again, despite repeatedly getting voted down. GOP leaders aren't crazy or simply stubborn. They're testing. The courts will go more into this in episode four. But for now, know this. Trump has stacked courts throughout the country with anti-choice judges by reintroducing the same legislation. They're hoping the new judiciaries will eventually side with them as the Radical Right hijacks the public conversation and sees incremental success. The nature of their rhetoric has become more and more extreme.
Ilyse Hogue [00:42:58] Whether we're talking about Donald Trump or the sort of right wing anti-choice movement that propelled him to victory. You know, one of the things we know now completely is they're not very attached to facts, but they have kind of a reptilian sense of how you push people's emotional buttons to move them to a place you want them to.
Jess McIntosh [00:43:20] We saw this very clearly during the 2016 primary when GOP candidates competed to see who had the most aggressive anti-choice stance. Shockingly graphic language claiming to describe later abortions was amplified from Ted Cruz pro-life rallies to the GOP primary stage and then to the much more public arena of the presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Archive [00:43:41] Mr. Trump, your reaction and particularly on this issue of late term partial birth?
Archive [00:43:45] Well, I think it's terrible. If you go with what Hillary is saying in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby. Now, you can say that that's OK. And Hillary can say that that's okay, but it's not okay with me.
Ilyse Hogue [00:44:06] Trump's description of later abortion on the debate stage in the third debate is seared into my memory and the memory of of many people around the country. You know, there's like the medicine piece of it. But there's also not hordes of women who are seeking to terminate pregnancy up till the moment of birth, that just simply is not happening. But it was visceral and it was designed to put people in a place of disgust and revulsion, because that is a very powerful emotion that usually can not be rectified with facts. Right. Like if you're in a place of pure disgust and revulsion and you just want it to go away, no matter how many facts we give you, isn't probably going to bring you back.
[00:44:54] And the other thing that's notable about what Trump did on that debate stage that was straight out of the anti-choice playbook is never once did he mention or acknowledge the experience of the woman. That's because that would've kicked in compassion for a lot of these people. They're facing situations we would never want to face, who would never want to sit in your doctor's office and get the diagnosis. So so, you know, the good thing that happened out of that debate was many of these people who had experienced this were courageous enough to share their stories. And that's really hard. And it actually pains me that they have to relive some of the worst moments of their lives in order to meet this cruel, dehumanizing narrative that the right is trying to put out. But they did.
Jess McIntosh [00:45:47] It's not lost on us how often the burden falls on women to explain the real implications of the right's most radical positions. It's painful. It's unfair, but it may be one of our most powerful defenses. Here's a story from a woman, Dana, who knew that she couldn't stay silent while the radical right demonized women like her. She shared her story of receiving a heartbreaking diagnosis in the last month of her pregnancy.
Archive [00:46:13] The baby you are carrying has multiple brain defects where brain mass and tissue should have grown and been plentiful. Only large pockets of empty space and gaping holes exist. If you carry your baby to term, you will need to have a resuscitation order in place prior to giving birth, as your child will be incapable of living without significant medical assistance. She most likely will seize to death upon delivery, and no amount of surgery, medicine or physical therapy will be able to reverse, improve or fix this diagnosis. These were the words my husband and I were devastatingly told at 31 weeks into my pregnancy. A little over three years ago. And after carefully weighing our options, we made the heartbreaking decision to terminate the pregnancy. We did not want to bring a child into this world that would only be here in a vegetative state, if at all. Never, ever did I imagine I would need to have an abortion and certainly not one so late in my pregnancy.
[00:47:32] But the harsh reality is that a diagnosis like mine couldn't have occurred and was impossible to confirm until much, much later than 20 weeks. Because brain development happens well into the third trimester. The week I had to endure between learning our diagnosis and when I could begin the termination process was agonizing. Every movement of my baby movement that had brought me so much joy now just brought unbearable heartache. There really aren't words strong enough to describe the anguish I went through during those days. Every minute felt like an eternity until I could finally end her pain. To force women and their families to endure this trauma for weeks or even months and give birth because of abortion restrictions. It's reprehensible. And now it is my generation and the ones that follow that need to raise our voices, become involved and actively join this fight.
Ilyse Hogue [00:48:35] We do need to actually rely on how we think about persuading to base level emotions of people in order to win the debate because they're listening fear. And we need to elicit compassion.
Jess McIntosh [00:48:51] How do we begin to dismantle the infrastructure that the anti-choice movement uses to amplify its message across every platform? We share our stories. We remind people of our humanity.
Loretta Ross [00:49:02] Well, I think sharing my story is what I've learned about this is what feminists do.
Jess McIntosh [00:49:07] That's reproductive justice activist Loretta Ross, who you met in Episode 1.
Loretta Ross [00:49:12] My first job in the movement was at the D.C. Rape Crisis Center. And it was through women sharing our story. It's about having survived sexual assault that ended up building, a movement to end violence against women. This is the first practice that I was taught. The silences are the conspiracy that helped keep us oppressed. The people who left their dirty fingerprints all over our lives, they want us to keep those secrets. And so the best way to defeat them is to not keep their secrets for them.
Jess McIntosh [00:49:47] Loretta traces her life of advocacy back to her early trauma. She is a survivor of rape and incest, who at 14 years old, was forced to carry a pregnancy to term.
Loretta Ross [00:49:57] Abortion was not legal in 1968. So I only had a few options, and the only one that seemed available to me was to have the baby and give him up for adoption. But after I had my son in 1969, I found that I couldn't go through with the adoption and signed up co-parenting with my rapist for the next four decades until he died. And so that's where my story begins. Not have a control over if and when I'd have sex for not having control over whether or not to continue a pregnancy. And it took my sister forging my mother's signature for me to obtain permission to have an abortion. A year and a half later goes, of course I became pregnant again. But I'm really disappointed that I had easier access to an abortion in 1970 than young women have today, because the anti-abortion movement had not aroused this anger at young women and started punishing them for their sexual activities the way that they're doing now,.
Ilyse Hogue [00:51:08] I think the anti-choice movement really recognizes our own internalized cultural stigma and shame. And by the way, certainly it is about abortion, but it's really about sex. And so we're aware that they could build an agenda that really was about control. And they've been historically correct about that. Right. Historically, Democratic leadership has said, let's not talk about these issues. You know, they get called identity politics. And people just want to talk about jobs and the economy.
[00:51:40] And it's like, well, that's really great, except like one of the most singular things that affects our ability to have economic security and hold jobs is our ability to control when and how and with whom we have kids. So it's really the anti-choice movement laid a trap and we've stepped right into it. The anti-choice movement is grounded in the idea that women have a very specific role to play and when they don't play that they are bad women.
Jess McIntosh [00:52:10] Anti-choice leaders have spent decades mainstreaming their radical ideas. And we need an equivalent effort fighting to normalize abortion access. In the summer of 2016, Ilyse did something brave from the stage of the Democratic National Convention.
Ilyse Hogue (archive) [00:52:25] I am a fourth generation Texan. Texas women are tough to succeed in life. All we need are the tools, the trust and the chance to chart our own path. I was fortunate enough to have these things when I found out I was pregnant. Years ago. I wanted a family, but it was the wrong time. I made the decision that was best for me to have an abortion and get compassionate care at a clinic in my own community.
Ilyse Hogue [00:53:04] It was terrifying. It was absolutely, utterly terrifying. I realized I was carrying my own internal stigma about it. I needed to model rejecting that. Otherwise, why would I be so scared to do it?
Ilyse Hogue (archive) [00:53:18] My story is not unique. About one-in-three American women have abortions by the age of 45 and the majority are mothers just trying to take care of the families they already have. You see, it's not as simple as bad girls get abortions and good girls have families. We are the same women at different times in our lives, each making decisions that are best for us.
Ilyse Hogue [00:53:50] I wanted to walk that line between making sure that everybody knows they know someone who's had an abortion while also not making it necessary to justify my decision by providing a tremendous amount of details. That being said, when I went on to meet my husband and try to get pregnant, it didn't come as easily as it does to some other people. And I was having an enormous amount of feelings about that. And it was an epiphany to me that I recognized the feelings I was having as ones of shame. And I had this moment through the emotion, I had this intellectual moment where I was like, whoa, it is so deep, right? The shame I'm feeling about not being able to get pregnant is the shame I'm told to feel. When I terminated a pregnancy that wasn't at the right time for me. Which all goes to the core belief that women are put on this earth to do one thing and one thing only. And if we choose not to. We are suspect. And if we can't, we're failures. And I run a reproductive freedom organization, right? And this stuff is so deep that it was still personally affecting me. So when I tell the story, I'm really careful to tell the whole story.
Jess McIntosh [00:55:12] Using our platforms to share individual stories is a powerful step in the right direction, but we need to center these women in every state house, in every judiciary across the country to ensure that these stories lead to meaningful progress. It's not enough to have popular opinion without also holding power and leveraging our own infrastructure. The Radical Right has rigged the system in order to turn their rhetoric into law. Now we need to ensure that our stories and our lived experiences are shaping policy. And we can't be afraid of this fight.
Ilyse Hogue [00:55:45] We definitely need to have learned to lean into abortion rights as part of our core values. They are depending on our silence to win in 2020. And we are culpable if we cede that ground. But we should do it strategically because those are the voters who are being mobilized. We should also do it principally because we need to not just win in 2020, but we need to win with women at the center of the equation. And we need to do that because the interpretation of how we one governs the priorities of the next administration.
Jess McIntosh [00:56:28] We've spent the last two episodes reviewing the playbook and setting up the chessboard. Next week we'll see how the game is played and won. How some of the key players, Weyrich, Willke, Schlafly and Falwell, helped convert a macho Hollywood type with a relatively weak stance on abortion into a winning anti-choice president the first time around.
Archive [00:56:50] Reagan is our projected winner.
Archive [00:56:52] Ronald Wilson Reagan of California, a sports announcer, a film actor, governor of California is our projected winner.
Jess McIntosh [00:57:03] The Lie that Binds the production of NARAL Pro-Choice America and produced by Jackie Danziger. Our associate producer is James Tyson. Our music is by Hannis Brown, mixing in engineering by Kegan Zema. This series is adapted from the book The Lie That Binds by Elise Hoague with Ellie Langford, published by Strong Arm Press, currently available at TheLieThat Binds.Com.