In this episode, host Gwyneth Shaw talks with Arneta Rogers, executive director of UC Berkeley Law’s Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice. Founded in 2012, the center was the first law-school-based interdisciplinary think tank on reproductive issues and a key hub for academics, practitioners, advocates, and activists.
Rogers, who stepped into the role in early 2024, has revamped and re-energized the center in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a woman’s right to an abortion. Under her leadership, the center has aimed to focus on several issues that have taken on new urgency post-Dobbs, including connecting the right to abortion with a broader reproductive justice agenda, opposing criminalization of reproduction and bodily autonomy, combating the threat posed by anti-abortion state legislatures to democratic processes and democratic voice, abolishing the family policing system, and supporting healthy, dignified, and affirming birthing and postpartum outcomes for all people.
About:
“Berkeley Law Voices Carry” is a podcast hosted by Gwyneth Shaw about how the school’s faculty, students, and staff are making an impact — in California, across the country, and around the world — through pathbreaking scholarship, hands-on legal training, and advocacy.
Production by Yellow Armadillo Studios.
Episode Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING] GWYNETH SHAW: Hi, listeners, I’m Gwyneth Shaw. And this is Berkeley Law Voices Carry, a podcast about our faculty, students, and staff are making an impact through pathbreaking scholarship, hands-on legal training, and advocacy. In this episode, I’m joined by Arneta Rogers, executive director of UC Berkeley Law Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice.
Founded in 2012, the center was the first law school-based interdisciplinary think tank on reproductive issues and is a key hub for academics, practitioners, advocates, and activists. Rogers, who stepped into the role in early 2024, has revamped and re-energized the center in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson women’s health decision, in which the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a woman’s right to an abortion.
Before joining the law school, Rogers led the gender, sexuality, and reproductive justice program at the ACLU of Northern California and served as the policy director of Positive Women’s Network USA. Rogers earned a JD from UC Law, San Francisco. Thanks for joining me, Arneta.
ARNETA RODGERS: Yeah, thanks for having me.
GWYNETH SHAW: It’s been three years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. How would you characterize the reproductive rights landscape right now?
ARNETA RODGERS: So I would describe the post-Dobbs landscape as one that is characterized by, of course, unprecedented challenges, in access to abortion care, but also one that we know still has very high levels of public support for abortion care. People think that abortion should be legal overwhelmingly in our country. We’ve seen it play out in the electorate.
But our policy leaders and those who are in control right now during this administration do not align with the greater sentiment of the public. So the landscape is fraught. It’s dangerous. It’s becoming more and more criminalized, surveilled. And of course, it’s deeply divided in terms of access by geography with regards to where you live dictates your own reproductive autonomy.
And of course, also, the landscape is exasperating health inequities experienced by marginalized communities. So that existed, of course, prior to the fall of Roe. So people who are young, migrants, BIPOC communities, low income people, LGBTQIA people, people with disabilities, who already face barriers to care are facing even greater barriers to accessing the care that they need to live their lives.
And so since Dobbs, we know that several states, 12 states have enacted near-total abortion bans, and eight more have moved to create– we also call them bans. They’re not bans just because they don’t completely ban abortion, but they’ve also enacted further restrictions on access to care.
And many of the same states have also implemented similar bans on access to gender-affirming care. And so, yeah, we’re seeing that same playbook across the issues on bodily autonomy and self-determination of futures. And that’s what we’re working with right now.
We’ve also seen other states enshrine the right to abortion care in their state constitutions and have had even what some folks might consider surprising victories with ballot initiatives and referendums that we see. This tension where legislatures, like we have an instance in Missouri, where the legislature is trying to override the will of the voters in that state who voted to enshrine access to care.
GWYNETH SHAW: There were a lot of predictions ahead of Dobbs about what a post-Roe world would look like. Are there things that surprised you that have happened since then, or is a lot of this what you and other people expected going in?
ARNETA RODGERS: Yeah. Well, I mean, I feel like the most prescient warning that advocates, and I know I had, around ending this legal right to care was that people would die. We knew people would die. And we’ve seen it play out, and that these bands have become deadly.
We’ve heard the really tragic cases and stories of folks like Candi Miller and Amber Thurman, who are women in Georgia who died preventively because of Georgia’s six week ban and complications around managing miscarriages. And we also knew– it’s not surprising that the communities that I was saying that were already bearing the brunt of health injustices are faring far worse in this climate.
And then there’s been more research to confirm that– there’s been some research. There was a recent study out of– I think, from Johns Hopkins that was saying that amongst the states that have abortion bans, we’re also seeing, of course, really devastating retrenchment of maternal and infant health crisis. And specifically, Black infants are dying at much higher rate than would have been expected in the absence of these bans.
And there have been significant increases in infant mortality, especially in Southern states. And those are already states where there were already broader health disparities and inequities with the populations that live there. So those things were not surprising. We knew that would come, and part of the reason we really tried to advocate not to have this outcome.
I would say something that has been a little bit more surprising is that while access is more limited, of course, these strictures around access, the number of abortions has actually increased post-Dobbs due to novel legal strategies that have helped disseminate medication abortion through telehealth and across state lines, where providers are able to actually support people to manage their own abortions and assist people in doing medication abortion, even in banned states.
And so, I mean, I think that’s something that has been a little bit surprising. And honestly, it’s really pissed the anti’s off. It’s like, oh, they’re mad about that one. But yeah, that’s been a little bit surprising. What hasn’t been surprising, I guess, again, to go back to what hasn’t been surprising is that there’s been the proliferation of criminalization.
Pregnancy Justice, which is a legal organization, they are a leader in pregnancy criminalization, advocacy, and advocating against the criminalization of bodily autonomy. They reported that there were over 200 cases of criminalization in the first year after Dobbs. And we’ve seen our providers now starting to be criminalized, testing these shield laws with Dr. Maggie carpenter out of New York, who was one of the first shield law providers to be criminalized.
And also, they’re going after patients and helpers. We’re seeing that people who help people, manage their own abortions are being criminalized people, parents who are supporting young people in managing their abortions. People are being criminalized for miscarrying the wrong way, discarding their fetal remains the wrong way are being criminalized. And so that wasn’t also surprising either.
I think there was a lot of– right after Dobbs passed, I feel like there was a lot of initial concern and general panic around surveillance and digital privacy and like period trackers and geofencing and all those ways that we’re all just like really weary of the way technology lends our information to the state.
And that might subject us that’s to surveillance and criminalization, especially with trying to access care. And I would say that that has not that been– the evidence has not borne out that has been as significant of an issue As we’ve responded to initially. I think it has come up a little bit.
But generally, when we’re seeing instances of criminalization, the people that are sharing the information are the people on the folk’s communities. Sometimes they’re the loved ones or family members are entangling their health care decisions with law enforcement and causing that initiation of criminalization. And so that’s something that’s been a little bit interesting as well.
And then also, I guess– yeah. I mean, I guess some issues also are coming up that are jarring. I don’t if it’s surprising, but it shocks my conscience is the emergence of the idea of fetal personhood assigning rights and legal rights to embryos and fetuses has moved really from a really fringe legal theory over the past decades to one that is very central to the antiabortion movement.
And we’re seeing the legal rights of fetuses supplant the rights of people with a capacity for pregnancy in really dangerous ways. And one of the most jarring examples is right now, there has been in the news lately is the case of Adriana Smith, also a Georgia woman who is dead and has been kept on a ventilator as a vessel to incubate her fetus because of Georgia’s six week abortion ban.
And so when necessary– so it’s surprising. It seems like the state is stopping at nothing to control our reproductive futures and our autonomy. But it’s jarring. And I hope these are the types of cases that help spur more people to action.
GWYNETH SHAW: Let’s talk some about the center and what it’s done historically and what you’ve been able to do since you’ve arrived. What are some of the ways in which the center is working in this space right now?
ARNETA RODGERS: Yeah. So the center– and we call ourselves Courage– we’re deeply grounded in the reproductive justice movement. And the center has always been since its inception in 2012. And the Reproductive Justice RJ framework movement and framework, it’s one that really extends beyond reproductive rights, which has historically been defined by the legal right to access contraception and abortion.
And it’s a movement that was really conceived in the 90s by a group of Black women that viewed that framework is really too narrow and excluded their lived experience based on their social and political realities, and particularly regarding class and race. And kind of also determined that their reproductive futures had also or their experiences had been erased due to the legacy, the really dark, long history and legacy of reproductive injustice, including forced sterilization and medical exploitation. So that hadn’t been really included in the reproductive rights framework. It’s deeply intersectional, and it insists that we all have the human right to bodily autonomy, to parent, to not parent, to parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities with the resources we all need to thrive.
And so the center has always been deeply grounded in that legacy and analysis and since I started. I really want to continue that. So for people that are maybe less familiar with the reproductive justice framework, they might wonder, like some of the issues we’re working on, that doesn’t seem like that’s reproductive rights. So I always like to share where we’re grounded on, grounded in, where our work takes root.
So for over the, I guess almost past year and a half that I’ve been with the center now– which I can’t believe it’s already been that long– we’ve done a really deep dive into some of those criminalization of reproduction and bodily autonomy issues that I was mentioning earlier.
And we’ve also really focused on the tenant of RJ, of ensuring that all people can lead self-determined lives and have the resources they need to parent the children that they have free from punishment and surveillance and control through the child welfare system or what we call the family policing system.
And so more so than ever in the post-Dobbs environment, people with the capacity for pregnancy are being forced to remain pregnant and then punished and targeted for forced family separation, for parenting without adequate resources.
And then the threat of that family separation and violations of bodily autonomy for marginalized birthing people that primarily, low income and Black and Brown and Indigenous birthing people experience as a result of mandatory reporting and non-consensual perinatal drug testing also deters people from getting the critical pregnancy related care that they need.
And so with that, we get adverse pregnancy outcomes and reproductive decision-making also being scrutinized, which makes people vulnerable to criminalization. And so it’s all wrapped up, first, justice and family separation and reproductive justice, all in this kind of same chasm around that third tenet of reproductive justice that the center has really been doing a deep dive into.
And so last fall, we collaborated with some partners in movement, one partner movement for family power and also if and how lawyering for reproductive justice to host like the first of its kind symposium on the intersecting politics and advocacy priorities regarding abortion, pregnancy criminalization, and forced family separation to talk about how the interplay between these issues and what is really coming up for people in this post-Dobbs political landscape and what we can do as scholars and advocates.
So after that convening, our groups are now, along with another national birth justice organization, Elephant Circle, we’ve since been collaborating on a monthly virtual teaching series to explore other intersections of family policing and reproductive justice.
So we’ve been doing a deeper dive into the criminalization of birthing people who use drugs and the war on drugs specifically, and how that targets specific communities thinking about ending family separation and the deportation machine at the border and in our communities as a reproductive justice issue.
Welfare rights as we’re seeing the social safety net being decimated or attempts to decimate it with the agenda of the current administration and how that ties into reproductive justice. And of course, trans liberation and the right to bodily autonomy for queer and trans people as that relates to our reproductive rights as well.
So yeah, we’re hoping to keep building. And what I see as the center’s role is to keep building on those intersections across movements. Our work is really interdisciplinary, and it really relies on the wisdom of our partners and other movements to determine what our course and what our priorities should be. We support policy advocacy campaigns of partners and local and state coalitions on reproductive justice issues.
And we also weigh in on amicus efforts for issues that could impact some of the priorities that I’ve talked about as well. For instance, we worked with Pregnancy Justice, a partner I mentioned earlier, on an amicus brief concerning a case in New York, actually, in which a presumptive father had been charged with neglect, essentially, of a fetus for failing to control his is partner’s substance use during her pregnancy.
And so it brings up a lot of questions around bodily autonomy for the birthing person. But also, it was the center. We decided that was an important case to weigh in on because of the implications for fetal personhood if we decide that a fetus can be the center of neglect. So it’s a subjugating, not only the rights of the birthing person, but also entering this idea around fetal personhood. So those are opportunities that we will continue to take on in the future.
GWYNETH SHAW: Let’s talk some about the role of students in the center’s work. How are they broadening and deepening what you’re able to do as one person, and with the faculty who are advising the center?
ARNETA RODGERS: Yeah. The students are really moving the work, just like you said. Currently, at the center, we’re lean and mean. It’s like me as a one full time staff person, and also I have amazing support of our administrative coordinator. But yes, substantively one person. And so I’ve had the really great pleasure of working with groups of students through the slip and the student-led projects
GWYNETH SHAW: Yes, Student-Initiated Legal Services Project.
ARNETA RODGERS: OK. Yes, one of those, or two of those, really. And on one particular research project that I’m hoping will have great impact for movement is– I’ve been working with students on– they’ve been doing foundational research for a mapping project that is looking at compounding forms of criminalization of bodily autonomy.
So not only pregnancy criminalization, but also the criminalization, and I’ll call it quasi criminalization for civil penalties as well around gender-affirming care and sex work and HIV. Just to think about the ways that we can really disentangle law enforcement and kind of carceral policies from public health in general and all these other policies that also impact our right to bodily autonomy.
And that a lot of times, the same communities that are experiencing barriers to care or that might be vulnerable to criminalization in one form of bodily autonomy would also be vulnerable to other attacks. And so it’s a way of looking at the data that hasn’t been done before and hopefully creating policy recommendations and advocacy tools for advocates, policymakers, and even folks in law enforcement who want to understand how these issues are connected.
I’ve noticed in my practice that people get really fired up about we’re a reproductive– in California specifically, though, this is a national project– we’re reproductive freedom state and understand that they want to protect the right to abortion, but don’t understand that criminalizing consensual sex work is also an attack or an affront to bodily autonomy. And so drawing those connections.
And the students were really leading that project and helped me think about interesting research questions, not just the labor, but they became great thought partners in how the data should be visualized and working with them on how to share the information, what other resources would be good for advocates. And so I’ve been really grateful to have their support with that.
I’ve also had an opportunity to work with some of the students in the Family defense Project, SLP. And working on the symposium as well to support with that and also with the Berkeley gender law and justice journal students to produce like a special symposium volume, which was a really special project because we worked with many directly-impacted authors to share reflections.
It wasn’t a traditional volume that we’re producing. It’s not just a law journal. Yeah. So I thought that was a really great experience working with the students and have the opportunity to work with folks that are directly impacted by the issues that we’re working on, elevate their voices, and something that they have control over in the journal. So that was really great.
And I’ve also had the opportunity to work with some undergraduate students as well. They support with some of the social media stuff that I am just like, it’s outside of my bailiwick. And I just– [LAUGHS] I’m just like, young people, help me. They’re really great and creative, and they ground me, honestly, in this moment because it’s very dark times. And I think it’s just they instill in me some possibility that–
They have their whole futures. They’re just getting into this. They want how to make this a career path. They’re interested in my career path. And that gives me even more motivation to be solutions-focused and have a longer-term vision for the work that I’m doing with the center. So it’s been a really great opportunity. I come from the advocacy space, but being able to be here and grounded in the university is it’s really great to have access to the students.
GWYNETH SHAW: One of the most remarkable things about the last few years is the advent of attacks on reproductive rights using novel legal tactics. You’ve mentioned a few of them already, but I’m thinking about the Texas bill that encouraged people to turn in their neighbors if they think they obtained an abortion, a couple others like that are part of that surveillance mechanism you were referencing earlier. Are there other things on the horizon that you’re seeing or hearing about that we can expect to see in terms of just coming at some of these areas you’ve mentioned from a new angle?
ARNETA RODGERS: Yeah. I mean, I just don’t even want to give them the credit of calling it novel. I just– [LAUGHS] wanted to say that, yes. OK. They’re grasping. They’re grasping. They really want to control and exert power, and they’ll find a way to do it. And they’re trying to find ways to do it. And so yeah, I mean, I think we can expect– or I don’t know.
We’ve been kind of waiting in movement for the other shoe to drop around this threat of a nationwide ban, either like through backdoor policies, through budget reconciliation, through what people are trying to push through the budget, or the revival of the Comstock Act, which is a anti-obscenity law from the 19th century that would make it illegal to mail medication abortion, which now accounts for most abortions. And so that would have really sweeping consequences for the whole country, even in states like California, where we have access to abortion care.
I think some other more, I’ll say not novel, but nefarious strategies, they’re using are– we’ve seen like in Louisiana, they’ve tried to, or they have successfully now define medication abortion, drugs used for medication abortion as controlled substances that could be more criminal penalties for using them, which only makes managing all pregnancy related care much more dangerous and difficult.
I think that we definitely have to be wary of more regulations coming. I know that HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. has just announced that the FDA is going to review regulations around mifepristone based on junk science, which we know the drug is safe. It’s also come up against before the Supreme Court. We know the drug is safe. They’ve been trying to attack that. Yeah.
But I suspect that we’ll see more nefarious ways for criminalization to be enacted. We’ll see more tests around the shield laws. We’ll see how those are pushed back against. And I think also this rise of fetal personhood is kind of like the next frontier for where the anti-abortion movement really wants to go.
And that would have sweeping consequences not only for the right access to access abortion, but also for IVF, for contraception or contraception. And really put whoever has the capacity for pregnancy at stake for their rights to be supplanted.
GWYNETH SHAW: Where do you think the politics of this is going? I this is not necessarily what you spend all your time thinking about, but this is an issue that’s so caught up in politics and is so influential in so many ways.
Do you think that as some of these things that you and other advocates warned about ahead of the Dobbs decision, now that they’ve happened, that is going to reshape the politics of this some? Or do you think that this is going to have to be fought on each state, each election, each instance of these things?
ARNETA RODGERS: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I mean, like I was saying, the polling shows that the majority voters believe abortion should be legal. They don’t agree with government interference. I mean, I think that’s why we see the weird paradox of some folks who voted in support of enshrining abortion access in their state constitutions and then voted for the Trump administration.
Something that I’ve learned is that also people maybe– I’ve been in this movement for decades, but people maybe I think before Dobbs, there was a lot of stigma around who was getting abortions, who needed abortions. It was something for reckless people.
And I think because of the tragedies that we’ve seen, the preventable tragedies that should not have been waged in the name these awful policies, there’s starting to be more of a narrative shift around the collateral consequences of when we have these really oppressive policies.
It doesn’t just matter for people that recklessly– this is recording, but I have air quotes– recklessly are seeking abortion care, if you’re pregnant and you have a complication with your pregnancy in a bad state, your life could be imperiled. And I think people are starting to wake up to that reality who may have not known maybe about the other consequences. Or I’m hopeful that they do.
And I think more people coming forward and telling their own abortion stories or their miscarriage stories can help also stem the tide of the electorate and holding our officials accountable because I know abortion is seen as an important issue.
Some people view it’s not at the rising at the top of as like the cost of living and the cost of getting by. People see it as a secondary issue. It’s like what the general polls tell us. But it’s still an important issue, it’s a salient issue, and something to hold our legislators accountable towards.
So yeah, I think the narrative shift that has to happen is people understanding the collateral consequences of how this can ripple through your life and how someone just like you, you, if you have the capacity or a loved one has the capacity for pregnancy, how they could be imperiled. But I wish it didn’t have to. But I think when things come, come home to roost, that’s oftentimes when we’re spurred towards action.
GWYNETH SHAW: And where do you think things are going for the center? You mentioned a whole bunch of different things that the center is involved in. Where do you see that work going? I know the family separation issue has been a really big one. Are there things that you see on the horizon for the center that you can talk about?
ARNETA RODGERS: Yeah. We’re really grounded. I strive for the center to be really accountable and responsive to the expertise of the communities that we advocate with and for are impacted by reproductive injustice. And I know that that’s a really scary time. We’re here at the university. And we’re not a front line organization, but I want to be responsive to the real concerns that people have.
And so the scholarship that we put forth, the research that we’re doing, I want to make sure that it’s helpful. And I think the criminalization piece is a big one. That’s something that is front of mind. But also, I want to also be a place to help groups distill and lay the foundation, take a step back to think about our longer-term strategy.
Because the antis– and I say the anti-everything– anti let a person live, they’ve had that time. How can the center be a hub for that type of long-term thinking to develop the novel legal strategies and scholarship that gets us to our aspirational and affirming vision of what lived reproductive justice should actually be for us.
We don’t want to just always be on the defense and holding the line. Unfortunately, we’re what, about a few months into this sentence? We’ve got a lot of line holding to do to keep our communities safe. But I do want the center to continue to be that hub for the longer-term vision and strategy and thinking.
And I think it’s really important to have the moral clarity and also the vision to elevate the– our work is intersectional. And the harmful policies of this administration that maybe don’t seem like reproductive justice issues are explicitly such. The war on immigrant communities right now is explicitly– it is absolutely a reproductive injustice.
The erasure of trans existence is absolutely a reproductive injustice. And I want to continue to think creatively about how to have the students understand those things, have our broader community understand those things and rise to the moment. Yeah. And also, people really interested, people were really fired up. I feel like we’re talking about– this is the third year, we’re in this.
People were really fired up initially, but our attention wanes. Abortion funds that provide practical support for people who are traveling to get care or just need support in their own communities, their funding is drying up. Grassroots reproductive justice organizations need support. The center needs support to sustain. So it’s just like– I feel like there’s a sense that people think like reproductive rights and justice, abortion, access, they feel really buzzy right now. But the galvanization that we had immediately post-Dobbs is not there. We need it. We need it. I know we’re being pulled in many different directions for the types of harms that we’re encountering. But the movement needs help.
GWYNETH SHAW: So there have been some other recent developments as well. Can you run through some of those?
ARNETS ROGERS: Sure, yes. There have been some court decisions at the end of the SCOTUS term, and, of course, the passage of the administration’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” that has major consequences, harmful consequences, for economy and reproductive justice that we want to be sure to cover, one being the United States versus Skirmetti decision that came down near the end of the SCOTUS term in which the Supreme Court upheld Tennessee’s ban on gender affirming medical care for transgender minors, and so this is a really devastating blow for the right to bodily autonomy, and particularly for trans and gender expansive youth, to allow the state to be able to enforce this discriminatory restriction and denying essential and evidence-based treatment and care that we know is life saving and critical, particularly for trans youth, who already face heightened risk of depression, suicide and mental health consequences for not having access to this critical care.
So you know, it’s not only discriminatory in its provision, not allowing care for transgender youth that would otherwise be allowed for other youth who do not identify as being transgender, but also strips families of their ability to make decisions about their care, urgent health care decisions in consultation with their providers, and so, you know, the decision is limited to Tennessee, but of course, there’s been a proliferation of these bans across the country, and we can expect other states to follow suit or allow their discriminatory bans to go into effect if they’ve had other similar challenges. So that is a big blow, and I wanted to be sure to lift that up as consequential.
There was also another decision, particularly related to abortion care in Medina versus Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, which will allow anti-abortion legislators in the state of South Carolina to block Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funding. And this is a huge blow. Also, we know that because of a federal budget rider known as the Hyde Amendment, federal law already provides that Medicaid cannot pay for abortion in most circumstances, but Medicaid still can cover other services that Planned Parenthood providers provide. So that’s other you know, sexual and reproductive healthcare screenings, cancer screenings and other sexual reproductive health care services, and Medicaid itself is, you know, is the largest public funder of family planning services in the country. It actually supplies and pays for 41% of U.S. births. They’re also a large provider of gender affirming care. And so while this decision, like the Tennessee decision limited to South Carolina, the court is necessarily almost inviting other anti abortion states to, you know, defund Medicaid, or to allow their states to ban or to block Medicaid funding from not only Planned Parenthood, but other providers that provide sexual reproductive health care, other providers that they simply disagree with politically.
So these are two major consequential decisions regarding the right to bodily autonomy and reproductive justice. And then, of course, we’ve seen the passage of the so called “Big Beautiful Bill,” or what others might call it is, you know, a major and a historically pernicious extraction of resources from healthcare and their social safety net program to, you know, provide tax breaks to ultra wealthy in our country, but also to really fuel this, this administration’s inhumane deportation machine, which, of course, is in and of itself, reproductive justice, in the way that families and communities are being separated and targeted. And so I wanted to lift that up.
There’s also, of course, the in that, in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” I didn’t want to call it that, I can’t even, in the in the budget reconciliation bill that was passed by the current administration, it also, know, provide for major cuts in Medicaid funding, and so folks are calling it a back door Obamacare/ACA care ban and also has provisions to also ban or bar more Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood clinics, and so one of those is being challenged in court right now, but we see the administration and time and time again, and these anti abortion advocates have said, you know, we are leaving it to the states, but where I’ve been seeing the flex of federal power to, you know, dictate who can access care, and most importantly, low income people and folks that rely on Medicaid funding the most will have their choice and providers and
largely dictated by the federal government, and not have access to care that they need because of the barriers to health care in general through Medicaid.
GWYNETH SHAW: I’m really glad you brought that up, because it is something, as you said, particularly the family separation issue, something the center is really, really working on. And also this impact from the federal funding is going to be very far reaching, in addition to some of the laws that are already in place, even if you can’t access it, if you don’t have the insurance to access it, then you can’t access it. So it’s a double whammy in some ways.
ARNETA ROGERS: Absolutely.
GWYNETH SHAW: Well, thank you so much for joining me for this great conversation.
ARNETA ROGERS: Thanks for having me.
GWYNETH SHAW: And thank you listeners for tuning in. If you want to learn more about Arneta and the center’s work, please check out the show notes. We’ll also tell you how to support the center if you’re so moved. And if you enjoy this episode, please share it and subscribe to Voices Carry wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time, I’m Gwyneth Shaw.