What Can I Doooooo? with the ACLU: J. J. Straight on Reproductive Freedom

3 ways to help protect reproductive rights in the U.S.

Welcome to the first edition of our new monthly interview series, What Can I Doooooo? with the ACLU. This month, J.J. Straight is here to tell us what we can doooooo to fight for reproductive freedom. The transcript below has been lightly edited for readability. If you’d like to listen to our conversation, you can! Just press play:

Meet J.J. Straight

W. Kamau Bell: Hey everybody, it's me, W. Kamau Bell, and welcome to the first edition of What Can I Doooooo? with the ACLU. It’s for all of you out there asking me all the time, “What can I doooooo?” It's 2024, everything's happening all at once. This is the sequel to Everything Everywhere All at Once. And today we're going to talk about reproductive justice and reproductive rights. (We should probably actually find out the difference between those two things!) And we're going to start with one of my new friends from the ACLU, J.J. Straight. How are you doing, J.J.?

J.J. Straight: I am doing quite well considering the state of the world, as you said. I’m here and ready to talk about what we can do.

WKB: That's the way we are in the current era of America. When you ask somebody how they're doing, they have to go, “Well, separate from the state of the world, here's how my life is going.” Because it feels like we’re in a dryer that has shoes in it, and we're just all clunking around the dryer. It's a lot right now. 

JJS: Absolutely.

WKB: First of all, J.J., tell these fine people about yourself and how you ended up being the person I called today.

JJS: Well, thank you. I am an organizer for the ACLU. I’m actually the National Campaigns Director for Reproductive Freedom here at the National ACLU. And a lot of folks assume that maybe I am a lawyer. I am not. I do like to say some of my best friends are lawyers here at the ACLU. However, I'm an organizer. My background is deeply in organizing. I came up through movement organizing in the labor movement and working with Planned Parenthood. I found myself in this moment at the ACLU because, honestly, I had a cushy sort of dream job at a foundation, and then Texas passed a bill that went to the Supreme Court called SB 8. This was before Dobbs. When that happened, Kamau, I had to jump back in and do something directly. And I was so lucky to find this job at the ACLU. I think it’s a perfect fit for me to be able to dive right back into that organizing element and to hopefully help continue to drive the change that we need right now.

WKB: At first when you said you found a cushy job, I thought you were saying the ACLU is the cushy job. And I was like, “I don't often hear the ACLU described that way!” But you left the cushy job for this pin-cushion job at the ACLU.

JJS: I did. I left that job that was great and an amazing organization, for sure, but maybe this is a little bit more high-speed – not just funding the movement, but being in the movement again.

Reproductive Rights, Reproductive Justice, and Reproductive Health – Popular!

WKB: When we’re talking about all these issues related to abortion, there are phrases thrown around – reproductive rights, reproductive justice. Can you tell people who maybe come in at the 101 level the difference between those two things?

JJS: Yeah, I'm so glad you asked that because they can be conflated, and that's okay, but they are very different things. So we are a reproductive rights organization at the ACLU. What that means is that we are looking at how we can change policy using politics, to make that change at the policy level.

We have an amazing movement called reproductive justice, which actually this year is turning 30 years old. It’s an amazing group of visionary, mostly Black women who came together and really wanted to put a different framework together than just fighting for abortion access or fighting for birth control access. In reproductive justice, they're really taking a very holistic viewpoint of what it means to be a parent, when to parent, and making sure that you are looking at your community as a whole on how you can parent. We are allies with reproductive justice and we look at the whole.

We also have our reproductive health partners who do the actual reproductive health access, like Planned Parenthood or providers who give birth control or abortion access. So the three of us come together and we meld together to make sure that we are looking at all of these different ways to ensure that everybody has access to the health care they need.

WKB: So lots of different movements coming together to accomplish – I guess I was gonna say one goal, but – a lot of related goals. So here's my question. Why do you need to do all that work when, if you look at all the national polls on abortion, it's a popular issue. It has, like, over 60% support. People think that abortion should be free and legal in states across this country. Why would we need to do all this work if the people have already decided?

JJS: Yeah, that's the question, right? Like we absolutely know, and I say this probably two or three times a day, abortion is not political to people in this country. It's political to a lot of politicians, but we are seeing, particularly post the Dobbs decision, people really standing up and saying, “Wait a minute, this isn't political to me. This is not partisan. I'm not deciding how to get healthcare based on, you know, the letter that I put behind my name when I go to vote, right? I demand to access this health care and abortion when I need it, period.” I've done this work for quite a long time, and I will say that the shift that you just mentioned, it's overwhelming sometimes, like how much the folks that are in charge right now – particularly in some of these states with egregious bans – are out of step with their constituents.

The truth is, Kamau, that we have a small group of folks who have inserted themselves into offices a lot of times in ways that they've set themselves up to be there, not necessarily through what we normally think of as democracy, right? Like they've gerrymandered districts or they've really suppressed people's voting. This is where we see a dramatic tilt between how people feel about this issue in a democracy and what their expectations are and where our elected officials are. And you know what, I will say this, every election since Dobbs has proved that folks are not going to keep putting up with that, right? Like we have seen, abortion is nonpartisan and abortion is popular. When we are winning at the ballot box based on this issue, whether directly on a ballot measure that actually calls the question directly in state constitutions, or certainly when we're differentiating candidates, whatever level they are on the ballot, we're winning by nine points. We're not winning by like one. When they have a collective opportunity in this country to send a clear message, they are sending it.

WKB: Yeah, when states put it on the ballot – even in so-called red states – the people choose the freedom to have an abortion.

JJS: That's absolutely right. And we see our opposition knowing that and trying to even put extra barriers in the way. So last year, in Ohio, once we qualified an abortion ballot for the election in November, the majority party there scrambled and went against their own words and tried to put a ballot in front of ours in August to make the threshold higher for a ballot to pass. We called them out on it, and we won that overwhelmingly because people are absolutely clear on abortion. When they know what the choice is, they are again sending that collective message together that their expectation is that they have access to this fundamental healthcare.

The Supreme Court and Intended Consequences

WKB: Yeah. Can you talk about a little bit of that? I know there's a couple of Supreme Court cases, but can we talk about the idea that abortion is healthcare – which is a phrase that I've learned in the last few years – and how it relates to one of the Supreme Court cases that are currently up?

JJS: Yeah, it actually, I think relates to both of them. I think that, throughout time, abortion has been put in this other category outside of healthcare, like it's a separate thing. It's certainly been legislated that way at the state level, obviously not at the national level through the Supreme Court's interpretation of our rights. But we're seeing what I call the intended consequences. These are not unintended consequences. These are the intentions of the opposition that we face in this country, that small minority of folks who are holding the pen in some cases on our fate of whether we can access care. We are really seeing how fundamental this healthcare is, so let's talk a little bit about those Supreme Court cases that you mentioned.

We have not only one, but we had two abortion cases in front of the same Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade. The first one was a consideration on whether or not we could continue to have access to medication abortion in this country. The opposition brought that case right after the first election post-Dobbs when we won overwhelmingly everywhere across the country.

So I found it no coincidence that the next month they filed a case to bypass democracy and go straight to the Supreme Court. And their ask is that this very important medication is taken off the shelves, a medication that has been approved for almost 25 years, that has been used by over 5 million people, and that is safer than Tylenol. They are asking it to be removed. 

And I want to make a point. I sit here in Colorado, and I believe you're in California today? Yeah. This would affect California and Colorado. They are saying they wanna take away medication abortion in all 50 states because they want the FDA's approval to be reversed. So that's the first case. That was heard last month. And I wanna continue to point out that our opposition, when they know they can't win at the popular will of the people, they're looking at other ways that they can try to insert their will. And this is one of them. 

The second case, which we just heard is, again, a complete picture of the intended consequences of these bans that we've seen. So in the state of Idaho, they have an abortion ban with very few exceptions. Various kinds of emergencies can happen when you’re pregnant, and for some of these medical emergencies, the treatment is an abortion. That's where the idea of “abortion is healthcare” comes in. And I've even had to educate my own family around this. I myself had a miscarriage. I had to have medication treatment, which was an abortion under medical terminology. Abortion is healthcare. 

Because the Idaho ban is so extreme, doctors are unable to give pregnant people emergency care under that ban without a risk of putting themselves in a criminal situation – meaning that they could be incarcerated for up to five years, I believe, in Idaho's case. So doctors become criminals, and instead of being able to stabilize a patient, they are turning patients away in an emergency. We've seen these stories over and over popping up since the Dobbs decision. Patients are turned away in an emergency and told to go out of state, or told to go home and wait till it gets worse and they have sepsis or something extreme enough that the doctor feels that they can justify the intervention. So the state of Idaho — instead of clarifying their ban when these things were happening — doubled down and is going to the Supreme Court. The Department of Justice nationally brought a case to say, hey, we are not gonna continue, we have this federal law called E.M.T.A.L.A., and this federal law says that in order to receive funding from the federal government for hospitals – almost all hospitals get federal funding – you have to give people emergency care treatment. And the state of Idaho said, “Nope!” and went to the Supreme Court to fight that. 

And I just want to pause here. This is, to me, such an illustration of the world that our opposition wants to live in, where they are saying that folks in the most extreme circumstances – where you are going to an emergency room because your health or life are at risk – cannot get the care they need. All this over an ideological difference? I mean, it's crazy.

WKB: Yeah. I want to highlight that these are the intended consequences, not the unintended consequences. They want to make it seem like, “Oops, we didn't know this was gonna happen!” But they actually did know that was gonna happen. I think about Alabama – as people know, I have a lot of family in Alabama, I spend time in Alabama – and that thing happened in Alabama where people couldn't even do in vitro fertilization because they declared fertilized eggs as humans suddenly. These were people who weren't even trying to have abortions. A lot of people showed up like, “What do you mean I can't? I'm not even trying to have an abortion.” But because the legislation was written that way, it affected people outside of those who wanted to have an abortion.

JJS: That's right, and that's another perfect example of what I call the intended consequences. These personhood bills do say that, at the point of conception, the fertilized egg has the same rights as you and I, which means that, again, those folks who were giving the IVF care would be put in the exact same positions as those doctors in Idaho. There would be potential criminal consequences that prompt them to be like, “Wait a minute, we now cannot give this care in Alabama.” And Kamau, we saw a lot of scrambling after that happened, right? Because as unpopular as all of this is, they were, again, trying to shy away from what these folks are actually signing on to when they put those personhood clauses into law. Their Supreme Court then interpreted that it would affect IVF. I like to say, they're telling us who they are, right? And we need to believe, to quote a famous author, we need to believe . . .

WKB: Yeah, Maya Angelou. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” My mom used to say that quote so much, I thought she came up with it.

JJS: That's right. There you go. I try to use it a lot, too, because in this moment, when they're signing on to those personhood bills, they're not naive to what that means at all. It's just that they have to face a consequence that comes from a constituency that they're particularly concerned about. That's what happened in the case of IVF. There was an outcry from folks that they were more concerned about. Donors, etc.

We have even seen them go as far as to extrapolate that they don't believe that we should have access to birth control in this country. And when I say that to people, sometimes they're like, “Oh, I can't believe that.” Well, we need to believe them because they're telling us who they are.

WKB: There was a time at which no matter what the country thought about access to abortion, it was considered settled law. There used to be a thing called settled law. And so the opposition came for it. They had a whole plan to come for it. They got it. So, of course, they're going to keep coming for as much as they can because it's about control. 

The other thing that you said that I didn't really appreciate and took offense to is that this is going to affect California. I always thought because I lived in this electric blue bubble that all this stuff was happening over there. (I'm gesturing to the east side of the country.) But I think this is important for people who are listening to this who may think they live in bright blue bubbles. You're saying that these laws are designed to eventually come for all of us.

JJS: Absolutely. I mean, the folks who made up a fake organization and filed the case to overturn medication abortion went to a handpicked judge in Texas. They knew that their case was likely to get attention from him and probably a decision in their favor, frankly because he used to work for the very organization that brought the case. His radical interpretation of the law is not based on the precedence, as you said, of the settled law that we have now seen overturned at the Supreme Court. And those folks knew that the path that that case would take would likely put it at the Supreme Court, again, the same Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade. They're going for their full agenda, which is, How do we make sure that no one in this country has legal access to abortion? A lot of them believe that birth control is abortion. The other thing is that they believe – and have said and written down – that a pregnant person's citizenship is less than a fertilized egg’s. A fertilized egg’s rights supersede the person's health or wellbeing or life. 

You know, many of us may not have had experience with abortion over the span of our life. And many, many people in this country and across the world get abortions and they should for any reason. However, I think almost 100% of us have had some sort of emergency situation where we go to the hospital. The last thought in my mind when I go to the hospital is Representative DeGette. She's lovely, and I'm lucky I have her, but I never think of her. When my nephew recently had a trampoline accident – trampolines are terrible y'all. They're fun, but wow.

WKB: Mm-hmm. We'll do that one later. Once we solve 2024, it’s 2025: The Curse of Trampolines.

JJS: Yes, that's the next thing. When he had that accident, and all of our adrenaline went crazy, and my brother was driving him and sending me terrible pictures of his little face, my brother wasn't thinking, “How do I consult my congressperson to make sure my child is getting this immediate healthcare that they need?” 

We're not a reproductive justice organization, but in that frame, the other intended consequences that we've seen are about maternal health. We continue to be a country that has a terrible record on maternal health, particularly for Black and Brown women in this country who experience an outsized amount of complications during pregnancy and birth. And we're also seeing doctors just flee from the profession because they cannot do their job. I didn't go to eight to 12 years of higher education myself, but if I had, and I had that kind of calling, I know that I would be considering something similar, I'm sure. When you know that you cannot give somebody the care that they need to live, that must be such an impossible situation to be put in.

WKB: Yeah, you're talking about the thing that we've heard about where people show up at hospitals for a miscarriage and the doctors were like, “I don't know if I can give you service because I might get sued or I might get in trouble. Even though you need me, and I know what you need, and I want to help you, I can't take the chance that I end up in jail or sued over performing health care.”

JJS: That's exactly right. We heard from doctors in front of the Supreme Court during those oral arguments for that case who were saying exactly that. Some of them have built their entire practices for years in some of these states and now are faced with potentially being sued. But also, the attorney generals in these states have made it clear that they will press for them to be under criminal indictment and possible loss of license. So the stakes are so high that they are not able to give the healthcare that they have been trained to give and know that they want to give.

We've seen reporting coming out recently in states like Louisiana that in order to intervene, they're not giving abortion care, which is the treatment that you should have in some of these situations. But in order to save the person's life, they're going as far as to do C-sections in a case where the person's experiencing an emergency during their pregnancy, which is a huge intervention that should not be happening.

So again, we bring it back to abortion is healthcare. If you're seeking an elective abortion, you should have the choice of how you have that abortion, whether you use medication or an elective procedure. And then obviously in these cases, which can be at the extreme edge of what we expected. Absolutely everybody should just be able to go and get the care that they need when they're experiencing that emergency.

What Can I Doooooo?

WKB: Wow, well thank you for all this. 

Now we're at the What Can I Doooooo? section. What can the people who are reading this right now do? Because it sounds so big and so overwhelming, and you're talking about the federal courts and vetting politicians and all these things. Especially people who live in blue states who are like, “There's no reason for me to call Barbara Lee and hector Barbara Lee. Barbara Lee's gonna do the right thing.” But what can people do who want to help and don't know how to help?

JJS: Yeah, you can always call Barbara Lee or some of these other folks and thank them, because Barbara Lee is certainly helping lead the charge to make sure that we get back to where we should be. So that's where I'm going to start.

(1) We have a petition at the ACLU to restore our rights for reproductive freedom now. Since Roe was overturned, we have seen these abortion bans going to effect across the country. One just took effect in Florida last week, which is a huge access point. And what we need to do is get together and really call on Congress to take action to restore this right. So we are asking folks to join that campaign which will urge our representatives to pass federal legislation. We need to get back to the point where regardless of where we live in this country, regardless of where we're going to college, regardless of that job opportunity we may have, we wanna make sure that we have access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion, birth control, and IVF. So that's one thing we can do right away. And when you sign that petition, we will then make sure we're keeping you in the loop as we have opportunities to continue to engage and advocate for this. We need to continue to make clear, not only in elections, but in other instances, that the law matches where we are, which is a majority of support in this country. 

(2) We'll also share some information with y’all on what to expect on the Supreme Court case and, as we say, five things to know. You and I sit in blue states. I think it's most important sometimes in these blue states where we maybe don't interact with this on a day-to-day basis the way they do in banned states to pick up your phone, go to your favorites, or go to that last thread you were on with your college friends or your family, and share this information. When you are the source for the information, it can really come across, and we need to spread the word about the intended consequences that could come to all of us. So we ask you all to share that.

(3) And we always like to remind people that – particularly with the Florida ban going into effect again last week – when you find yourself with a little extra cash (and that's the place that you can put your activism) there are amazing abortion funds all across this country. And we have some, I believe, on our website. But you can look for an abortion fund locally, or there's a national network of abortion funds. These funds right now are the critical access lifelines for folks who are in banned states who need to get abortions and have to travel, or need help with childcare, or need help with the cost of the abortion. When you find yourself with a little extra money, please continue to donate to our amazing abortion funds.

WKB: Yeah, I personally like the Yellowhammer Fund. It's in Alabama in the south, so that's what I roll with, but you can search by state. It's easy to find out. If you're in a blue state, find a red state. You can donate to your blue state, but yes, I think it's also good to help places like Florida and other places where the bans have gone into effect, because that's where they really need the help on the line. And that's where they have to travel people out of state often. If you're in the South, you might have to travel across a couple states to get to a place where you can have a legal abortion.

JJS: Yeah, that's right. Florida, again, went offline and had an extreme band going into effect on May 1st. So you're absolutely right. A lot of folks across the South have to travel many hundreds of miles to access care now because there's just very few access points for them. So those abortion funds are a critical lifeline for folks, for sure.

USA: Thumbs Up, Down, or Middle?

WKB: All right, my last question, J.J. America right now: thumbs up, thumbs down, or in the middle? I'm asking everybody. Where is it? It can be anywhere along the spectrum. It could be three quarters.

JJS: Oh. I'm gonna put it here today. [In the middle.] I'm putting it, you know, here, [in the middle] but it's moving [up and down a bit]. To be honest it depends on whether I've just read the paper or listened to a podcast. But I'll say this, I'm an organizer, and at my heart, I know, and you know, when you have one-on-one conversations with folks and you really get down to the level of people's personal beliefs and now hopefully how they're turning that into activism, my gosh, I'm so inspired! I tell the story all the time. In Kansas when we had a ballot initiative there — it was right after Dobbs — folks did not expect us to win. But people came together in their own constituencies and fought. My favorite example of that is these folks who said, “We're horse people, and we're going to start an organization called ‘Vote Neigh,’ like neigh, like the horse says.” They did that on their own. They had their own special constituency of people that they knew that they could talk to because they have this thing in common. And Vote Neigh persists to this day, continuing to work in Kansas to keep Kansas a place that has access to this critical health care. So it's things like that that remind me of another great quote from Dr. Martin Luther King – the arc of history bends this way [gestures up with thumb]. And we got to help. My job is when it's here [thumbs down], to turn it here [thumbs up], right? That's what I want to do.

WKB: Yeah, the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. So you're saying that that thumb, it's being pulled down, but we're pulling it back up. We're pulling it up while the forces of politicians and federal judges appointed by politicians try to pull it down.

JJS: That's right. Absolutely. We can and we've proven it over and over again. It's a hard time to live in this country for folks. Sometimes I wonder, you know. I wonder about the future, and then I go work in Kansas, or knock on doors in Ohio, or get on podcasts like this, and I get inspired and I'm like, “Okay!” And honestly, I'm also so lucky that I get to do this as my job. So my job is to keep turning that thumb up.

WKB: Well, thank you for this. Thank you for talking to me. I hope everybody enjoyed the first edition of What Can I Doooooo? with the ACLU. The other thing I want to make sure people hear is instead of just reading these things and feeling how you feel, send them to the people you're already in conversation with. Figure out your own way to “Vote Neigh.” Figure out your own way to, as we say, get in where you fit in. Be creative. Do it with your knitting group, or your crochet group, or your on game night. Whatever you do, get in where you fit in. Thank you, J.J. Thank you.

JJS: I love that. Thank you.

You’re With Me

Here are some updates from Oakland.

May Office Hours: Zoom Edition

Save the date! May office hours are happening on Friday May 31st from 12pm - 1pm PT. Last month’s Zoom AMA was quite fun, so we’re going to do that again! All paid subscribers will get an email with the Zoom link a few minutes before we start, and then we’ll all log on and hang out. If you’ve been thinking about becoming a paid subscriber, this might be the time.

DonorsChoose Projects

What’s kindergarten without crayons?! Mrs. Rede is raising money to get the kindergarteners in her Title I school new crayons that are sturdier and more developmentally appropriate than your standard Crayolas.

Ms. Cynthia teaches middle school in the Bay and she’s working on an amazing resource that she calls the EMS Community Closet. Many of her students’ families can’t afford all of the personal items the students need, but with a fully-stocked Community Closet, EMS students have a safe, private space to get school supplies, clothes, shoes, food, and occasional household items. All donations are currently being matched, so it will only take $198 to complete this fundraiser. Let’s do it!

If these projects get funded and/or you’re feeling extra generous, check out my Giving Page at DonorsChoose for more fundraisers!

Black Twitter: A People’s History

I was invited to be interviewed in Prentice Penny’s new documentary on Black Twitter that is called Black Twitter: A People’s History. It is on HULU now and getting great reviews.

The funniest thing to come out of it so far is that Elon Musk’s hellsite is trying to get people to call the documentary Black X.