Body & State

In this episode of Body & State, Sarah sits down with Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation and a key author of Project 2025, the right-wing plan that has become a blueprint for the Trump administration’s policies. A conservative Catholic and long-time opponent of abortion rights, Severino wants the government to promote policies that favor heterosexual marriage and parenting. He says these “pro-family” policies are key to stemming what he believes is a catastrophic decline in births. He also predicts these falling birth rates in the United States will lead to a fight for resources between the young and old, and a breakdown in the social safety net.
Watch our PBS NewsHour segment about the pronatalism movement and its ties to anti-abortion activism 
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-inside-the-pronatalism-movement-encouraging-americans-to-have-more-children
 
Read: "Project 2025” Mandate for Leadership The Conservative Promise
Chapter 14 Pg. 449  Written by Roger Severino
https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
 
Read: How Project 2025 Seeks to Obliterate Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/how-project-2025-seeks-obliterate-srhr

In this episode of Body & State, Sarah sits down with Leslie Root, a demographer at the University of Colorado Boulder, who closely studies fertility trends in the United States and across the globe. Root has been trying to inject caution into the sometimes apocalyptic claims about the declining birth rate made by Elon Musk, pronatalists and far-right activists.
Watch our PBS NewsHour segment about the pronatalism movement and its ties to anti-abortion activism 
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-inside-the-pronatalism-movement-encouraging-americans-to-have-more-children
Leslie Root: https://ibsweb.colorado.edu/colorado-fertility-project/people/leslie-root/

In this episode of Body & State, Sarah visits Simone and Malcolm Collins at their home in Pennsylvania. The Collinses are part of a movement known as pronatalism that wants to encourage people to have more children to help stem population declines. Several trends are driving down the birth rate: women have increased access to contraceptives like IUDs; far fewer teenagers are having babies; and more women are having children in their late 20s and 30s. In later episodes, you’ll hear from demographers who say lower birth rates are not an apocalyptic threat.
Watch our PBS NewsHour segment about the pronatalism movement and its ties to anti-abortion activism 
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-inside-the-pronatalism-movement-encouraging-americans-to-have-more-children
Simone and Malcolm Collins podcast “Based Camp”
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/based-camp-simone-malcolm-collins/id1686813618 

Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher, a Democrat from Texas, explains why she believes the right to contraception is at risk in the United States and what she views as a growing effort by Republicans to limit access to birth control. Fletcher is a co-author of the “Right to Contraception Act” that would prohibit the federal government, states and localities from restricting access to birth control.
Watch Rep. Lizzie Fletcher in our PBS NewsHour segment “After fall of Roe, anti-abortion activists take aim at birth control.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/after-fall-of-roe-pro-life-activists-take-aim-at-birth-control
Watch “Examining the facts about contraceptives as birth control misinformation spreads online.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/examining-the-facts-about-contraceptives-as-birth-control-as-misinformation-spreads-online

In this episode of Body & State, Sarah sits down with John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life, a Christian anti-abortion advocacy group that has advanced sweeping anti-abortion laws in Texas. Texas is widely viewed as a laboratory for other states, enacting an abortion ban before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and a new law that allows private citizens to sue anyone who “manufactures, distributes, mails, transports, delivers, prescribes, or provides” medication abortion pills to Texans. Seago spoke about efforts to stop Texans from receiving medication abortion through the mail, how he defines certain common forms of birth control as abortion, and what’s next for the anti-abortion movement.

In this episode of Body & State, Sarah sits down with political scientist and Texas A&M professor Valerie Hudson to discuss how the treatment of women in a society shapes the success of a nation. Hudson says a light bulb went on when she was having lunch with one of Afghanistan’s first female members of parliament. Hudson remarked how much progress women had made in Afghanistan. But the female minister responded that her husband could divorce her by simply saying, “I divorce you” three times. She would lose custody of her children and have nowhere to live. Hudson realized that the signs of women’s empowerment – like education and political participation – failed to capture the depths of sexual hierarchy. She has spent the last decade devising a theory to explain how it has persisted.
 
Watch our PBS NewsHour segment about the pronatalism movement and its ties to anti-abortion activism 
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-inside-the-pronatalism-movement-encouraging-americans-to-have-more-children
 
Learn:
Women’s Stats Project: https://www.womanstats.org/
 
Read Valerie Hudson’s research and books: 
Sex and World Peace
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/sex-and-world-peace/9780231131827/
 
The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-hillary-doctrine-sex-and-american-foreign-policy-patricia-leidl/31320ea405d3cc46?ean=9780231164924&next=t&next=t
 
The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-first-political-order-how-sex-shapes-governance-and-national-security-worldwide-donna-lee-bowen/5350ad9efe073a1b?ean=9780231194662&next=t&next=t

During last year’s presidential campaign, President Trump said he did not support a ban on birth control. But since taking office, his administration has signaled a willingness to curtail information about and access to certain forms of contraception, purging birth control guidelines from government websites, freezing funds for some family planning clinics, and making plans to incinerate $9.7 million dollars worth of birth control pills, IUDs, and hormonal implants that were flagged as "abortifacients." 
 
Anti-abortion activists have said they believe many common forms of birth control are the same as abortion and that argument is at the heart of the strategy to outlaw certain contraceptives under state abortion bans.
Anti-abortion activist and founder of Live Action Lila Rose talks with Body & State host Sarah Varney. We have fact checked some of the assertions in this interview and included links in the episode notes.
 
Watch Lila Rose in our PBS NewsHour segment “After fall of Roe, anti-abortion activists take aim at birth control.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/after-fall-of-roe-pro-life-activists-take-aim-at-birth-control
Watch “Examining the facts about contraceptives as birth control misinformation spreads online.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/examining-the-facts-about-contraceptives-as-birth-control-as-misinformation-spreads-online
Link to The Lila Rose Podcast: Lila Rose - YouTube
Hormonal birth control does not lead to divorce: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4536625/ 
Hormonal birth control does not encourage sexual promiscuity: https://intranet.bixbycenter.ucsf.edu/publications/files/DoesECPromoteSexRiskTaking_2008.pdf + https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24785603/ 
Hormonal contraception can cause mild side effects, and in rare cases, certain contraceptives that contain estrogen can increase the risk of things like high blood pressure, blood clots or stroke. But the medications and devices are safe and effective:
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/mirena/about/pac-20391354 
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/3977-birth-control-the-pill 
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/3977-birth-control-the-pill
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/mirena/about/pac-20391354
 
The pill has long been shown to reduce the risk of certain cancers, treat the symptoms of endometriosis and uterine fibroids, and prevent anemia:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/3977-birth-control-the-pill
 
Percentage of women seeking abortion who reported using contraception: https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2018/about-half-us-abortion-patients-report-using-contraception-month-they-became
 
Listen to Sarah Varney on “Science Friday”in collaboration with KHN about why contraceptive failure rates matter in post-Roe America:
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/contraceptive-failure-rates-pregnancy/

Legal scholar Mary Ziegler explains the anti-abortion movement’s efforts to re-classify common forms of contraception as abortifacients, and whether these plans could succeed in states with abortion bans like Texas. We also dig into how pronatalists like Elon Musk share similar goals with some in the anti-abortion movement, including the authors of Project 2025, and what’s next for pardoned anti-abortion protestors.
Watch Mary Ziegler in our PBS NewsHour segment “After fall of Roe, anti-abortion activists take aim at birth control.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/after-fall-of-roe-pro-life-activists-take-aim-at-birth-control
Watch “Examining the facts about contraceptives as birth control misinformation spreads online.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/examining-the-facts-about-contraceptives-as-birth-control-as-misinformation-spreads-online
Learn more about Mary Ziegler’s books: https://www.maryrziegler.com/books