rePROs Fight Back

Moved by the power of theater as a healing tool, Christina D. Eskridge saw the unique potential for public health and the performing arts to intersect. Born from this intersection: Elevate Theatre Company, an organization that builds space for artists and audiences to explore health and wellbeing through the art of storytelling. Elevate couples live performances with panel discussions featuring public health experts, including virtual productions such as HOME IS WHERE THE FUND IS: A Story of Southern Synergy— a collaboration with Access Reproductive Care - Southeast exploring Southern politics, abortion rights, and women’s health. Christina D. Eskridge, Founder and Executive Director of Elevate Theatre Company, sits down to talk with us about how theater can be a public health apparatus.

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The ripple effects of SCOTUS' decision overturning Roe v. Wade extend in vast, concentric circles throughout the American health care system. Not only has it eroded access to abortion and other forms of reproductive health care—we are also seeing it have consequences for medical research, chronic illness management, hospital staffing, and more. This week, Alice Miranda Ollstein, Senior Health Care Reporter for Politico, talks with us about her new book, Side Effects: How Abortion Bans Impact Everyone's Health.

“Alice Miranda Ollstein's explosive reporting offers an urgent, on-the-ground look at a medical system under pressure, at the patients and providers caught up in the dragnet of the new abortion restrictions, and at the impacts on both reproductive care and completely unrelated services.”

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The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPPP) is a federal public health initiative that invests in organizations empowering young people with the education and resources they need to make informed decisions about their bodies and lives. It’s evidence-based approach has proven to be extremely successful: since Congress’s bipartisan authorization of the program in 2009, teen pregnancy rates have reached historic lows. Ruth Richardson, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States, talks to us about the administration’s overhaul of TPPP, the legal fights to challenge it, and the wide-ranging benefits of comprehensive sexuality education.

The resounding efficacy of this public health investment has made it an ongoing target for the Trump administration. In June 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services abruptly terminated 53 of the 67 nationwide TPPP grants. These funding cuts are depriving young people of science-based sexuality education that is proven to keep them safer and healthier, forcing programs to close, stripping educators of their jobs, and eroding years of communities’ trust. A coalition of organizations and local governments is fighting back in court. In August, a federal judge preliminarily blocked the administration from implementing its proposed changes to impose an unscientific and ideological abstinence-only approach onto grantees.

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Reproductive rights aren’t only attacked on the federal level; in fact, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade was an abortion ban out of Mississippi. Individual states set the precedent for their own abortion laws, sex education, shield laws, and more. Jillian Riley, North Carolina Director of Public Affairs for Planned Parenthood Votes! South Atlantic sits down to talk with us about how reproductive health, rights, and justice can show up on the election ballot in a variety of ways.

While individual states are determining state-level access to reproductive health and rights, State Attorneys General defend state laws, choose not to defend state laws, or sue the federal government over laws. Governors, meanwhile, sign off on state legislation that attacks or protects health and rights. In addition, the judges we elect have a say in judicial bypass for young people, enforcing state constitutions, redistricting decisions, and more. School board elections inform curriculum, which informs sex education, LGBTQI+ inclusive-education, and available library books. City council and county commissioners also play a large role in funding for doulas, lactation specialists, and maternal health programs.

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September 30th, 2026, marked the 50th anniversary of the Hyde Amendment—a provision enacted in 1976 in response to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision that legalized nationwide abortion. It restricts federally funded abortions through federal healthcare programs like Medicaid and Medicare. Lupe Rodriguez, Executive Director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice (NLIRJ) sits down to talk with us about Hyde’s tragic, dangerous legacy, and how it is past time for repeal.

Not only does the Hyde Amendment restrict funding under Medicare and Medicaid, but it does also so for certain disabled individuals under 65, and for certain community health centers providing primary care in underserved areas, as well. Seven states fund abortions under Medicaid and instances of life endangerment, rape and incest, and 21 states fund abortions beyond federal requirements and using their own resources. Yet, exceptions are not consistently applied.

The Hyde Amendment has prevented millions of people in the U.S. from accessing abortion. In 1977, unable to receive a needed and financially covered abortion shortly after the amendment’s passing, Rosie Jimenez sought an unsafe abortion and died from complications shortly thereafter. Today, the existing provisions of the Hyde Amendment, coupled with harm caused by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) and ICE harassment, will continue to have a devastating impact on Latine communities and immigrants in the U.S.

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Viriginia plays a critical role for abortion access in the South. In fact, Virginia is the only southern state that did not enact a post-Dobbs abortion ban, leaving it the only southern state without a full abortion ban or extremely restrictive ban on the books. April Greene, Executive Director at the Blue Ridge Abortion Fund, talks to us about Virginia’s important role in continuing to provide care for the southern region and help ensure reproductive freedom nationwide.

In 2024, more than any other state, Virginia saw the largest increase in out-of-state abortion seekers. Patients are coming from all over, but the largest number of abortion seekers come from Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida. As patients are traveling to access care, they encounter practical barriers, including transportation, lodging, childcare, food, and time away from work. These barriers can impact if and when someone accesses an abortion. The post-Dobbs landscape makes access more complicated for patients and abortion funds who support them. Before Dobbs, Blue Ridge Abortion Fund’s funding budget ranged from $9,000 - $14,000 a week. After Dobbs, the budget increased to $20,000 a week to account for new needs.

Virginia voters have the opportunity in November to vote on a ballot initiative that would enshrine reproductive freedom in the state’s constitution, protecting abortion and other reproductive healthcare into the Virginia constitution.

Links:
Blue Ridge Abortion Fund
Support the Blue Ridge Abortion Fund
Blue Ridge Abortion Fund on Instagram
Blue Ridge Abortion Fund on Facebook
The Right to Reproductive Freedom Amendment

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Independent abortion clinics collectively provide 58% of abortions in the United States. After 26 weeks of gestation, abortion clinics provide 100% of abortion care in the country. Yet, independent clinics have faced unrelenting attacks to their funding, resources, and physical wellbeing, especially over the past decade. Nikki Madsen and Erin Grant, Co-Executive Directors at the Abortion Care Network (ACN), sit down to talk with us about the critical, community-based work of independent clinics and the importance of International Safe Abortion Day around the world.

The Abortion Care Network is the national organization for independent, community-based abortion clinics, whose programming supports sustainability and professional development for clinics and their staff. Providers are navigating providing care to patients plus those that are arriving from out of state, with low pay, little time, and low support for their mental health and wellbeing. Independent providers, showing up every day to under resourced and threatened clinics, believe in provide the human right of sexual and reproductive health care.

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**Trigger Warning: Miscarriage and Pregnancy Loss

“One of the most prevalent myths about human pregnancy is that of all possible outcomes, a baby is the most likely. Pregnancy Interrupted challenges the misleadingly linear narrative that begins with two lines on a pregnancy test and ends with a newborn. Kate Clancy shares her own deeply personal stories of pregnancy loss and moving interviews with others, and reveals how the frequency of loss and miscarriage is far more common than most realize.”

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Planned Parenthood has been under attack in Texas for years. This has resulted in a lack of access to affordable healthcare, lack of access to birth control, and worsening maternal health outcomes. Shellie Hayes-McMahon, Executive Director of Planned Parenthood Advocates of Texas, which is the 501(c)(3) arm of Planned Parenthood Texas Votes, sits down to talk with us about the perfect storm of attacks to reproductive health and rights in Texas, which provides a perfect blueprint for other states who wish to follow suit.

The current push at the national level centers on defunding Planned Parenthood via Medicaid. Patients who lose their Planned Parenthood provider in Texas cannot just find a new provider. In fact, the state is currently seeing a decrease in providers generally, as well as medical students. Cancer screenings, birth control provision, critical counseling, and more, are services that are becoming increasingly more expensive for Planned Parenthood to provide, while crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are receiving millions of state dollars. In Texas, public school-provided sex education is abstinence-only, while misinformation around birth control is currently skyrocketing. The nationwide attacks on mifepristone, one of the safe and effective drugs used in a medication abortion, began in Texas.

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Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are unregulated storefronts that exist as a way of pushing out anti-abortion misinformation and blocking people’s access to care through deception, shame, delay, and intimidation. Tara Romano, Executive Director of Pro-Choice North Carolina, talks to us about North Carolina’s CPC landscape.

The term "crisis pregnancy center" refers to anti-abortion facilities that mislead, confuse, delay, misinform, and purposefully re-direct pregnant people looking for education and services, including abortion care. North Carolina has 16 abortion clinics and approximately 100 CPCs, which are typically clustered around college campuses. CPCs in the state began receiving money from the sale of “Choose Life” license plates and $350,000 from general funds in 2013. By 2023, the number was closer to $20 million. Because these are not medical centers, they do not have medical restrictions or medical privacy restrictions.

Map photo citation: Swartzendruber A and Lambert D. Crisis Pregnancy Center Map. https://www.cpcmap.com/. August 17, 2026. Accessed: August 24, 2026.

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PEPFAR, or the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, started in 2003 and is the largest country-to-country bilateral investment in addressing any single disease. PEPFAR is not only funding, but expertise, and has saved millions of lives since the Bush administration. Dr. Jennifer Sherwood, Director of Research in the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) public policy office, talks to us about attacks to PEPFAR, the populations that are impacted, and some recent protections to PEPFAR’s crucial work.

Early in 2025, a pause on new funding going out into the field was announced, in combination with a stop-work order. Soon after, a PEPFAR waiver was announced, yet it included extremely specific restrictions. amfAR completed a survey across 46 different countries asking about grant status, service provision, and more. It found that nearly 80% of organizations surveyed had grant cuts or eliminations. Because of the cuts, amfAR documented 1,700 site closures, including drop-in clinics that are essential to key populations. Local organizations were also disproportionately impacted by closures and grant impacts.

The term “key populations” refers to populations that are at high risk of acquiring HIV and experiencing additional, structural barriers to care. Often, this is sex workers, men who have sex with men, other gay and bisexual men, transgender individuals, and those that use or inject drugs. Programs particular to key populations were absolutely decimated, as strongly documented in amfAR’s survey. These impacts are also being exacerbated by the recent expansion of the Global Gag Rule.

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Maintaining hope during this moment in reproductive health and rights, plenty of book-talk, and even a deep-dive into Jennie’s sex education in Catholic school. Tarah Demant, Interim National Director of Programs, Advocacy, and Government Affairs at Amnesty International USA, asks host Jennie Wetter a series of ask me anything (AMA) questions.

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Trigger warning: This episode references child marriage, maternal death, and suicide.

August 15th marks the fifth anniversary of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. Gender-based discrimination is a tenet of the Taliban’s policies, which is being enforced and institutionalized across the country. We hear from Metra Mehran, a self-described person exiled from Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover in 2021, and who now focuses on advocacy work related to gender apartheid with the End Gender Apartheid Campaign, as well as advocacy with Congress to hold the Taliban accountable through Amnesty International.

In Afghanistan, there is a systematic level of discrimination that impacts every single facet of life for women and girls. Women cannot work, go to school beyond primary school, or have freedom of movement. The enforcement and institutionalization of this gender discrimination funnels into the crime of the grand-scale gender apartheid being perpetrated in Afghanistan. Child marriage has peaked in the past five years, interrupting a girl’s inability to finish their education. Women and girls face higher rates of domestic violence, reproductive violence, and suicide. And while underground schooling does exist, girls seek education at extreme risk to themselves and their families.

Advocates are pushing to use the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) to take Afghanistan to the International Court of Justice and encouraging the continued proceedings against Taliban leaders before the International Criminal Court. Conversations to include gender apartheid in treaty negotiations are also a testament to the strength and power of the women of Afghanistan.

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Reproductive rights, LGBTQI+ rights, and democracy cannot be discussed in isolation; fundamentally, they are all about who has the freedom to make choices for themselves, and each one affects the other. Cristina Uribe, Chief of Programs at the Collaborative for Gender + Reproductive Equity (CGRE) and Director of the Gender Equity Action Fund (GEAF), sits down with us to explain how these topics are deeply interconnected.

Attacks on women and LGBTQ+ communities weaken our democracy by pitting Americans against Americans and creating enemies out of neighbors. Opponents of these communities—and democracy at large—understand these connections and use strategies like ballot measures and wedge issues to divide coalitions and erode rights. Responding to these coordinated attacks requires coalition-building, commitment to civic engagement, and a recognition that attacks to one group’s rights ultimately threaten everyone’s freedoms.

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Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case which overturned Roe v. Wade was decided, there’s been an abortion access crisis, an assault on legal precedent for abortion protections, and an opportunity to create a stronger and even more inclusive plan to reproductive autonomy than Roe ever provided. Amy Myrick, Senior Council at the Center for Reproductive Rights, sits down to talk with us about legal trends in federal and state courts in the past four years.

Currently, legal cases have been aimed towards medication abortion and telehealth (a lifeline after Dobbs). It is important to remember that legal attacks on abortion have broader implications, including for transgender health and rights (particularly for young people). Increasingly, anti-abortion actors have had to pivot to tactics that are often blatantly anti-democratic. In several states, ballot amendments have been taken to court.

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The Supreme Court has heard two cases on transgender women and girl’s ability to participate in school sports after states have issued categorical bans on trans women playing on sports teams that match their gender identity. Madiba Dennie, author of The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People Can Take It Back and Deputy Editor and Senior Contributor at the legal commentary outlet Balls and Strikes, sits down to talk with us about these cases as part of the broad, comprehensive attacks on trans people’s health and wellbeing.

The Supreme Court justified this discriminatory decision against trans women and girls by arguing that the state cases don't turn on transgender status, but on sex alone—a step toward defining transgender people out of existence. It isn’t just sports and it isn’t just bathrooms; birth certificates, driver's licenses, freedom of travel, ability to work, ability to have healthcare, and ability to learn basic information in schools are all interconnected. The U.S. is also exporting this philosophy abroad through the expanded Global Gag Rule.

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This week’s special bonus pod features the abortion story of Hannah, a full-spectrum doula, an abortion doula, a childbirth educator, and a social worker.

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The Title X Family Planning Program was created in 1970 to fund reproductive health and contraceptive services and remains the federal government’s only dedicated source of family planning funding. Since his first term in office, Trump and his administration have repeatedly targeted the Title X Program, most recently by changing the application process for funding. Clare Coleman, President and CEO of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA), joins us to talk about what the latest funding announcement means for Title X and its grant recipients, and the lawsuit that NFPRHA, the ACLU, and FHCCP are pursuing against the Trump administration’s blatant contradiction of the Title X statute.

Title X-funded programs provide contraceptive services, STI and pregnancy testing, and other crucial preventative and reproductive health services. The new funding announcement changes the process of applying for Title X grants, undermining Title X’s statutory mission by giving political appointees the power to decide who even gets considered for funding. This politicization of family planning resources promotes the President’s narrow agenda and poses a threat to the millions who rely on Title X-funded clinics and resources.

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The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) is a federal law that protects the right to emergency healthcare, including abortion. There has been, post-Dobbs, a clash between these federal protections and states with abortion bans. Amani Echols, Senior Policy Analyst for Maternal Health at the National Partnership for Women and Families and Ashley Kurzweil, Senior Policy Analyst for Reproductive Health and Rights at the National Partnership for Women and Families, sit down to talk with us about this unleashing of chaos and confusion around whether and when emergency abortion care is permitted.

In many states, patient health must deteriorate to an extremely risky state before qualifying for the “health exceptions” to abortion bans that are in place. In addition, hospital closures are occurring around the country after Trump’s recent One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), and for those who have emergencies in rural communities, that is extremely dangerous. For women of color who often experience dismissal or de-prioritization in medical settings, the pain, stress, and complications are often exacerbated.

Abortion restrictions will no doubt worsen the maternal health crisis in the United States, which has the highest rate of maternal deaths of any other high-income nation. Black and Indigenous women are more than three times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts and are even more likely to experience morbidity or severe maternal morbidity related to their pregnancy.

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The most recent numbers show that two-thirds of abortions in the U.S. are medication abortions, while 29 percent of all U.S. abortions were telehealth medication abortions. Dr. Angel Foster, researcher at the University of Ottawa in the Faculty of Health Sciences, global abortion researcher, and co-founder of the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project (MAP) sits down to talk with us about the work that MAP performs and the importance of shield laws for reproductive health care and gender-affirming care.

Mifepristone, the first of two medications that people will take during a medication abortion, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000. Decades of evidence shows its safety and effectiveness. Access to the two-drug regimen increased significantly via telehealth during the pandemic, which required a new regulatory framework in 2023. MAP, through state shield law protections, allows licensed Massachusetts clinicians to prescribe medication abortion to those anywhere in the country, regardless of the legal status of abortion in their state. This year, the Fifth-Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that would prevent providers from sending medication abortion through the mail—thankfully, MAP was able to shift to a misoprostol-only regimen (also safe and effective)—but the mass confusion had been immediately impactful. As of now, a stay has been issued to halt this decision by the Fifth Circuit.

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