The Abortion Pill in the Mail

Breaking down the mifepristone ruling, shield laws, and the political mess Dobbs created — plus the pieces of journalism we can't stop thinking about.

In this episode, Sarah has a moment that took me back to my second grade teacher. Mrs. Bell frequently told us that in America your rights end where someone else’s begin. Every time she said it, it sunk in a little deeper for me. I’ve experimented with a lot of versions of this ethos: live and let live; you do you; keep government out of my wallet and my bedroom. I do think Mrs. Bell had the truest version of my overriding political philosophy: we should give each other a lot of room.

That simple sentiment gets tangled up quickly in post-Dobbs abortion debates. Today, we’re talking about recent fallout from the Supreme Court “returning abortion to the states.” The state of Louisiana wants federal courts to find that mifepristone, an abortion medication, should not be prescribed via telehealth appointments and mailed to patients. Louisiana says that the FDA’s authorization of this practice interferes with its sovereignty. The Supreme Court will have to take some action on this next week (it temporarily halted an appellate court’s order that would require in-person visits for access to the drug). It can be hard to decide where rights begin and end in this conversation, especially since the Supreme Court announced that we do not have a federal right to abortion access.

We talk about the Court, the politics, and the people caught in the crossfire today. Outside of politics, we share our “personal Pulitzers”--the long-reads that lodged in our minds and hearts for years. - Beth

Topics Discussed

• Mifepristone, the Courts, and the Mail

• Trump, the GOP, and the Abortion Trap

• Outside of Politics: Our Personal Pulitzers

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Episode Resources

Abortion

• Mifepristone legal battle returns abortion to political spotlight (The Washington Post)

• Supreme Court temporarily restores mifepristone mail access (CNN)

• The Supreme Court may force Trump to take a position (CNN)

• Medication Abortions Accounted for 63% of All US Abortions in 2023 (Guttmacher)

• #WeCount Report June 2025 (Society of Family Planning)

• Abortion Trends Before and After Dobbs (KFF)

• More than 26,000 self-managed abortions post-Dobbs (Missouri Independent)

Our Personal Pulitizers

• Prize Winners and Finalists | The Pulitzer Prizes

• The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty (Texas Monthly)

• The Sorrow and Shame of the Accidental Killer (Alice Gregory in The New Yorker, September 2017)

• The Itch (Atul Gwande in The New Yorker, 2008)

• It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart (Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic, 2022)

• “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart” with Jennifer Senior (Pantsuit Politics)

• Why Can’t Americans Sleep? (Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic, 2025)

• What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind (Jennifer Senior in The Atlantic, 2021)

• “Fatal Distraction” (Gene Weingarten in Washington Post, 2009)

• The Innocent Man Part 1 and Part 2 (Pamela Colloff in Texas Monthly, 2012)

• The Really Big One (Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker, 2015) t

• The Case for Reparations (Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic, 2014)

• The Tune of Things: Is Consciousness God? (Christian Wilman in Harper’s, 2025)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:28] Sarah: This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

[00:00:31] Beth: This is Beth Silvers.

[00:00:32] Sarah: You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Today, we’re talking about abortion rights. Where is the debate? What is the legal reality? And does Donald Trump care? Outside of politics, the Pulitzers came out this week, and we’re going to talk about our own personal Pulitzers, pieces of journalism or writing that are still sticking with us years later.

[00:00:52] Beth: We’re doing something fun this week. We need your help making a decision about something we’ve been working on for the summer. It’s a very special project, so head over to our Substack and subscribe for free so you don’t miss it, and so you can weigh in. Okay. Let’s talk about abortion. Beth, it feels like we don’t spend a lot of time talking about abortion these days. Isn’t that weird? It is weird. It’s weird, and it feels like it’s happening by design because the people in charge got everything they ever wanted around abortion, and now they kind of hate it and we all hate it, and it’s very stuck.

[00:01:36] Sarah: There was some movement this week. We had a court decision from the Fifth Circuit. Louisiana sued the FDA, arguing that mailed abortion pills undermine its state ban. It’s a new legal theory called sovereign injury. It feels like it came out of some sort of Samuel Alito wet dream. But this is what it means. So we are currently in a reality where over two-thirds of abortions in the United States are medical abortions using mifepristone, the abortion pill, and many, many, many of these are mailed. The FDA relaxed restrictions on mifepristone several times since it’s been approved. In 2016, they deemed it safe to use to terminate pregnancies up to 10 weeks. In 2021, they removed a requirement that it be prescribed in person. In 2023, the FDA changed its risk evaluation and mitigation strategies policy around mifepristone, and so now you don’t even need an in-person visit at all to access the drug. So in practice, that meant that people in pro-life states Could order the drugs online from pro-choice states. And, you know, some of these states tried shield laws to protect in-state medical providers. That’s largely worked. Um, the pro-life states have challenged those shield laws, but first they went after the FDA.

[00:03:02] Beth: These cases are extremely frustrating to read. That’s always been true because when a court is considering anything about abortion, you have, like, several verticals functioning at one time.

You have what is real standard of care medical practice in one vertical, and courts do not have the expertise to weigh in on that- ... so they largely ignore it, but that is where the rubber meets the road for all of us living out here in the world.

[00:03:27] Sarah: Right.

[00:03:28] Beth: And then you have the bureaucracy layer. Is the FDA complying with the Administrative Procedures Act when it does what it does? The way the Fifth Circuit starts this opinion is by telling us the supreme Court said that states now get to regulate abortion again. They returned abortion to the states, and then the Biden FDA hastily decides to build this workaround by letting people access mifepristone through telehealth and mailing the pills. And the courts like to explore this path. Was that FDA decision rushed, complete? Did it comply with all the rules that you have to comply with as an agency? Then you have a political dimension always and forever. Very present in this case because unlike previous mifepristone challenges, it is now the Trump Justice Department defending the Trump FDA and not really trying to argue that what the FDA did in twenty-twenty-one complied with the Administrative Procedures Act. Their argument is, “We need to review everything. Just give us a minute. Just hold up. Give us time to review everything.”

[00:04:39] Sarah: They want to hold up permanently. We’ll get to that in the political reality later.

[00:04:42] Beth: Then you have this other vertical of just classic legal issues. So you mentioned sovereign injury. I don’t think that’s a new theory. We’ve seen that theory supercharged really under Trump one, the idea that states can go into federal courts as plaintiffs and complain about federal policy on a number of dimensions, and I think this is something that we all want really. We want states to be able to challenge what the federal government is doing on immigration or the environment or healthcare policy, and that’s part of what Louisiana is saying. The federal government, through its policymaking, has intruded on our sphere, and that has caused us injury both in just our sovereignty and financial injury because a couple of women on Medicaid, two in 2025, had to be treated for complications related to taking mifepristone that they got by mail. It cost the state about $92,000, which is another red flag about our health systems. But that is our financial injury. And so you have all these verticals happening at one time, and no court wants to be honest about that because when you separate it out, you realize this is a mess that judges are not well-suited to navigate. The Fifth Circuit, though, has considered that mifepristone order three times now, and for the third time it has said, “We think the FDA was wrong.” So this wasn’t surprising at all, but it’s going to reach the Supreme Court now that both gave us abortion as returned to the states and has told us they don’t like lower courts imposing nationwide bans on anything. So just a lot of factors to hold in just your legal hand.

[00:06:32] Sarah: So to the verticals, I think the medical reality argument is very strained. You hear some women have complications. Maybe some people use it fraudulently. Some men trick their wives or girlfriends into taking it. Definitely that happens, but that’s a fallacy. People kill people with antifreeze, and we don’t enforce all these extra restrictions on antifreeze. So the idea that some people abuse mifepristone medically does not mean that it is not safe for the majority of women to take via telehealth. All of a sudden pro-life activists are concerned with ectopic pregnancies? Give me a break. No. These are medical realities that not only the healthcare system in the United States, but the healthcare systems in Europe and Canada have dealt with. They are largely deemed safe, okay? So I’m I don’t want to hear feigned concern for women’s healthcare. To the bureaucratic vertical, I think they have some real conflicting arguments and motivations because of what you just said, right? The FDA moved too fast. The same FDA, the same Department of Health and Human Services who you want to speed-boat through every vaccine recommendation we’ve sat on for decades? Give me a break. And I’m not sympathetic to that argument not only because I think it’s hypocritical, but because I think this needs reevaluation all the way across the board. The medical breakthroughs, the specific gene therapies that we are looking at biomedically through advances in artificial intelligence are going to skyrocket. And so we don’t need court decisions slowing down FDA processes. We don’t need more bureaucracy. This is a safe drug. You know it’s safe. You’re using the bureaucratic angle, and you better be real careful with that because you might slow some other things down that you don’t want to slow down. So I don’t buy that either.

[00:08:31] Beth: People don’t run for Congress saying things like, “I’d like to rewrite the Administrative Procedures Act.” But that does need to happen.

[00:08:37] Sarah: But they should.

[00:08:38] Beth: They should do that. I mean, that would be one of the most impactful things that a new Congress could do, to grapple with things like artificial intelligence, to grapple with the way that is affecting healthcare. There are so many places where the federal government is built to be slow, and there are benefits to that slowness. There are problems with it, too, and as miserable as the Administrative Procedures Act is, and it is. Administrative law was the worst class by a lot that I took in law school. It’s horrible. It will put you to sleep faster than anything else. And it’s where so much of the things the federal government does that actually affect people’s lives, that body of law, and it needs a refresh.

[00:09:24] Sarah: Now, to the sovereign injury vertical. Look, it is true that the Supreme Court said states get to decide, and as they do in so many cases, they ignored the lived reality that is all but impossible. It’s like they get in their narrow, cordoned-off ideas of reality, and they say, “Well, this law’s no good, and we don’t really care what happens next.” They did it with the tariffs. They did it with online gambling. They did it with election financing. They don’t care. And I think it is a big reason that the validity and legitimacy of the Supreme Court is tanking with the American public because you’re going to sit up there, you’re going to act like legislators, you’re going to pass decisions that basically act as laws and change the lived reality of Americans, and then when it’s a shit show, go, “Rah, rah, rah.” Because that’s what this is. You said states get to decide. Have you heard of the mail, friends? Have you heard of the internet? We don’t get to make America first by cordoning off the borders any more than Louisiana gets to control its citizen without a shadow of a doubt within its borders. This is a federal system. We live in the age of transportation, open communication, the mail, which has existed since the time you like to talk about that you’re such experts in. It’s just so stupid. Like, what did they think was going to happen? Like, the telehealth rose 63% post-Ops because people went, “Fine, I’ll just get it through the mail.” Again, y’all just put on blinders and you decide that what you write on paper is all that matters. But those decisions go out, and they have real consequences. I don’t think this court has an answer for the fact that telehealth is going to continue to exist when it comes to abortion, whether they like it or not.

[00:11:17] Beth: If you go to the court thinking that Roe versus Wade was wrongly decided and that defines the terms of the debate for you, you are living in a very different reality than the one that we all inhabit. This is a federalism powder keg. You briefly mentioned shield laws. I want to make that extremely concrete. Louisiana has criminally indicted a doctor in New York and a doctor in California for prescribing mifepristone through telehealth to people in Louisiana. The governor of Louisiana has enthusiastically signed extradition orders saying those people need to be hauled from their homes into court in Louisiana to be prosecuted for facilitating crimes under Louisiana’s law, and the only reason that they haven’t been is because their governors have said, “No, our state legislature has chosen to shield people from extradition, to shield doctors from this happening.” That story really needs to be told. Americans need to understand the stakes involved here. Can you imagine the way this country would blow up if a doctor from New York were hauled into a criminal court in Louisiana, tried and convicted and jailed in Louisiana for putting some pills in the mail? I think most people, the vast majority of people, even people sincerely opposed to abortion in their hearts, do not want that reality for the United States of America. But that is the reality Louisiana is pursuing in every way that it can pursue it, through criminal laws, through Supreme Court litigation. Louisiana wants to be able to control what doctors outside of Louisiana can and cannot do for citizens of their state.

[00:13:03] Sarah: I don’t understand on lots of levels why the medical profession is not hair-on-fire about this. People are suing doctors in Texas, trying to revoke their licenses and suing them for medical malpractice because they did not perform abortion procedures on women that were going toxic, women that have all kinds of health procedures because they were scared of the Texas law. Like, they’re making you guys the villains. I don’t know why the AMA, I don’t know why the American College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians is not using all their lobbying power and money to say, “This is unacceptable. You’re making us the villains. You’re putting doctors in an impossible position.” The Supreme Court put all of us in an impossible position. These doctors in California and New York, it might sound theoretical. Well, no big deal, they won’t go to Louisiana. They won’t go to jail. No, they can’t leave the state. Like when you have criminal charges against you, that’s a big deal that affects all kinds of things about their lives. These doctors are taking enormous risks because they believe women have the right to access this medical care. And Louisiana, Texas, these states saying, “No, we get to decide how women access this reproductive treatment.” No matter what, you can’t go into another state. Don’t go into another state, do it, and then try to come back. We’ll arrest you. People are getting arrested. People are going to jail for miscarriages, much less crossing state lines to have abortions.

[00:14:37] Beth: I can imagine the doctors just feel like they’re under assault from so many angles that it’s hard to break through on any one of them. I was just reading an article about how many doctors are being deep-faked as though they are endorsing wellness products.

[00:14:52] Sarah: Oh, my gosh.

[00:14:53] Beth: And this is apparently so commonplace, like the article quoted one doctor saying, like, “Pretty much everybody I know has had a situation like this happen to them.” So it is wild for people who work in healthcare in so many ways. This is a big one, and in similar context, Americans have made it clear that we don’t like this kind of situation. Like, you think about marijuana; Americans have not liked states making it legal and it being illegal federally, so the banking has to be all weird for businesses, and it depends on what side of the river you’re on where I live if it’s legal or illegal. We have said, like, there is a reality to being in a country where we have said in some places you can do this, and when we have said you can do this in some places, it’s hard to say in other places that you can’t. We are going to figure it out one way or another.

[00:15:45] Sarah: Well, to me, it’s just exposes the fact that this was never about states’ rights. This was about red states’ rights. It is clear that particularly those in the pro-life movement who are their hair on fire about these pills, I can tell you that much, they don’t want to let the states decide. They want to end abortion. Some of them want to end birth control. So that’s the goal, and the Supreme Court, when it trots out something like, “Let states decide,” or, “No, what we really mean is, like, that Congress needs to decide,” that no, you want to do what you think is right. You want to enforce the politics that you think are right. D- John Roberts this week saying, “We’re not political.” You are the last person on Earth who still believes that, dude. Someone should tell you the truth. Do you not have any friends? Clearly not. You don’t have anybody telling you the truth. The reality that you have created in your head that this is some institution that’s above politics, no one believes that anymore. You came in and erased precedent because you thought abortion was wrong. And now you are facing the lived reality that didn’t get to wipe out abortion, and so people are still going to be knocking at your door. I don’t know if they thought Dobbs was going to end it. I don’t know if they were, like, that detached from reality. I don’t know. But I don’t know what they’re going to do. They’ve issued the stay. They have like two weeks to prepare briefs?

[00:17:24] Beth: It’s stayed until May 11th, so we’ll see something next week on this. I don’t know if you get to five justices who think that mifepristone should not be available through the mail. They’ve had this case in front of them, a version of this in front of them several times. I don’t know if you get to five.

[00:17:46] Sarah: And what are they going to do, just ignore shield laws too?

[00:17:50] Beth: That’s clearly going to make it to the Supreme Court at some point. There are so many dimensions to Dobbs that are going to be in front of this court again. They are going to have to keep working on it. I want to say about the politicization of the court, when you read cases that don’t make headlines, the compartmentalization, the fictions, the carefulness, the way the court tries to live in a vacuum, you can still see the value of that in a lot of context. In the kinds of cases that courts are good at, you see that value, regular contractual disputes, IP issues, a number of criminal cases. It takes a lot of fiction and a lot of compartmentalization to prioritize the rights of defendants within the justice system, notwithstanding sometimes really heinous facts. There’s still value in what the court exists to do. I think the trouble in the abortion context specifically is that this has been sold to us by politicians and within the legal system as a fight about states versus the federal government, or a fight about morality, and it’s definitely both, and I think it’s also a third thing. When the court said, “This is a policy dispute, not a matter of rights,” it opened the floodgates in the whole arena. If it’s just policy, then why can’t Louisiana do what it’s doing? Most of the cases where I see the court breaking down six-three, a clean split of conservatives and liberals, the conservative justices are saying, “We think that there are very few rights guaranteed to Americans. Those rights that do exist are sacrosanct. We interpret them so broadly that you can’t intrude on them in any way, and everything else can be intruded on in every way.” That’s the conservative legal perspective on this court. Very few rights that are completely sacrosanct, everything else open season. And I just don’t think that’s where most Americans live now. I think most Americans believe that, yes, we have rights, we have lots of rights, in fact, and we should be able to intrude on those rights to some extent in ways that make sense to us. And there are very few things that we think should just be open season in terms of policy, because we don’t see our legislatures doing a great job setting policy, and we want courts to come in as a check. We almost are asking the courts, begging them, to be a little bit more political, to have places where they take the blinders off and they deal in the lived reality, whether that’s what standard medical care looks like or what common sense looks like, what the average American would want. And I think it’s that conceptualization of rights versus policy areas that are up for grabs that is at the root of a lot of the debates we’re having about the Supreme Court right now, but we’re not announcing it that way, especially when we think about abortion.

[00:21:04] Sarah: I’m not opposed to that approach to legal interpretation. I don’t think nine people with lifetime appointments can do it. I’m not saying we should abandon this is the way judges should act. I’m just saying these nine people, or just any nine people appointed the way they’re appointed with lifetime appointments, it’s not working anymore. Needs to be more people. They don’t need to have lifetime appointments. There need to be checks on them because maybe it was a fiction we existed within always that interpreting laws had nothing to do with policy, that interpreting the application of laws that are an expression of policy could be done separate from judgment, prioritization, or strategization around policy. Maybe we’re just making that all up to begin with, and so especially when it comes to constitutional matters, I don’t know, maybe Marbury versus Madison was wrong the whole time. Who knows? Maybe this is not what they should be interpreting because I just think that the idea, it doesn’t read as this clean distinction between rights and policy to Americans. It reads the rights you care about. If you were just to go read the Supreme Court’s decisions on freedom of religion, you sure wouldn’t walk away thinking that they have an aggressive restriction on the understanding of rights, constitutional rights, right? They have a real robust understanding of that one.

[00:22:35] Beth: Well, that’s what I mean. They think there are very few, but the few that exist, don’t touch. Don’t tread on me around those few.

[00:22:41] Sarah: Yeah, but it’s like the few that exist that any person, layperson reading the Constitution around your rights around the criminal justice system, they don’t think those are robust. They will chip away at those left, right, and center. So I don’t. I definitely know how they feel about the right to privacy, but I just think that their ability to continue to blow up the reality of Americans’ lived existence and then just be like, “I don’t know. Tough out there, huh?” It’s not sustainable. And I don’t think it’s sustainable politically either, so let’s talk about that up next. Don’t you know that Donald Trump is so sad about this?

[00:23:30] Beth: Oh, yeah. Just make it go away.

[00:23:32] Sarah: Make it go away. So he basically bullied the pro-life movement in 2024 and was like, “You got what you want. Don’t even think about coming to me or participating in this campaign or making this a priority in this campaign.” He Silenced them. I think they’re done being silenced. I think they thought they were going to get RFK and he was going to go in there and review mifepristone authorization and undo it, which he has not done, and has been dragging his feet about. And so they’d solve their telehealth problem and ban abortion for everyone nationwide because Trump has been pretty clear he’s not going to do a nationwide ban through Congress because it’s very unpopular politically, and I don’t think he gives a shit about abortion, pro-life or otherwise. So they’re mad. There’s some crazy quotes out there from leaders of anti-abortion groups like the Susan B. Anthony group where it’s like, “He’s the problem. Trump is our problem right now.”

[00:24:27] Beth: I’m really curious where this issue goes as we get into 2028, as we’ve talked a little bit about who the future of the Republican Party is. This is a fissure within the Republican Party now, and it’s a fissure that gets to the heart of that sense that we want authentic, tell it like it is, strong, tough leaders. Because you have the people like Josh Hawley, like Mike Pence, who are right in with the pro-life movement and know that that’s a great fundraising opportunity for them and a constituency that could propel them to some level of name recognition and get them somewhere through the presidential nominating competition. And then you have a lot of people who would rather not talk about this again ever, for any reason.

[00:25:18] Sarah: Like Donald Trump.

[00:25:19] Beth: Probably in their heart of hearts think that abortion should be legal and safe and rare, like the total Hillary Clinton formulation of the issue is probably where most of them land. But they don’t want to say that out loud, and so I think the way that they’re going to navigate it is by saying, “ This is just not a priority right now. This isn’t the top of the agenda. The Supreme Court spoke. It’s decided. The end.” And I don’t think that’s going to cut it with the public, especially when you see people like Jeff Landry, the governor of Louisiana, willing to stake out a maximalist position on it. The issue’s going to be forced, and so how are they going to deal with this when the terms of the debate have moved so much because they got what they wanted?

[00:26:05] Sarah: Yeah, it’s such a lopsided issue between the parties. You have an incredibly engaged base that’s, like, I don’t know, 60% of the Republican Party with evangelicals who care deeply about this issue, and Catholics. Then on the other side, you have the Democrats who are representing, like, 60% of the voting public, not 60% of their engaged base. Sure, of course, the Democratic Party has a highly engaged pro-choice base, although honestly, the way Planned Parenthood is limping along out there, I’m not even really sure that’s true anymore. I certainly don’t see a lot of really engaged activism beyond the state levels when it comes to abortion rights. That being said, the Democratic Party’s position is represented by most Americans who think medical abortion access should be available. Two-thirds of Americans oppose a nationwide ban on abortion. So you got a real imbalance where a huge part of their base moves the party, but is not representative of Americans. And Trump knows that. He knows it’s a loser. He knows it’s a loser of an issue. It’s why he tries to stay away from it. But I think the reality of the Dobbs decision and this upcoming decision is that you can’t just avoid it. It’s going to become a salient issue again, especially if the Supreme Court disrupts the status quo. If they don’t, if you’re right and you can’t get the votes, well, then the pressure from inside the party on Kennedy, on the FDA, on Congress to do a nationwide ban on another way to stop these telehealth abortions is going to be enormous. It’s going to be enormous.

[00:27:56] Beth: And that feels so silly. When you think about the fact that mifepristone is the standard of care now, 90 plus percent of abortions involve mifepristone and misoprostol. Louisiana, in its briefing to the Fifth Circuit, said that 1,000 women a month in Louisiana receive prescription abortion medication through the mail.

[00:28:24] Sarah: That’s the reason we have more abortions post-Dobbs than we had before Dobbs.

[00:28:28] Beth: Yeah, I would like to note again that Louisiana also argued that it was financially injured by two women in 2025 having medical complications who were on Medicaid. When you put those statistics beside each other, I think that tells the story about why this is the standard of care. So to have an FDA tied up in knots about whether this medication is safe and effective when doctors and patients across these United States are using it so prolifically feels like an incongruity that can’t withstand much stress testing in the political sphere.

[00:29:02] Sarah: No, and even in the legal sphere. Like geography is not going to contain this. Donald Trump just wants to say, “We’ll just leave it up to the states,” just like the Supreme Court wants to create a reality that does not exist. We can’t just leave it up to the states. Stop pretending otherwise. And I don’t know if anyone, including the average American who holds a sort of centrist view on this, faces the reality that this is not something we can legislate our way out of, that we can have a Supreme Court of our dreams fix it for us. The reality is always going to be that some people find abortion acceptable, and some people find abortion murder. And I don’t really know-- we bust on Roe v. Wade all the time. And in some parts I want to say like, man, it created a reality that we coexist, but is that true? Because you have this incredibly energized pro-life movement. You have the murder of abortion doctors. You have all these issues like I don’t know. I don’t know what the status quo looks like. I don’t know what a sustainable status quo looks like.

[00:30:21] Beth: And I think what a sustainable status quo look like- looks like depends tremendously on enforcement decisions. I think the reason that we don’t see a hugely engaged pro-choice movement right now is because this workaround works. People are still getting abortions. They’re getting more of them. They’re getting them through the mail. It’s more discreet. They’re not having to walk through protesters at a clinic. A lot about this current status quo works for people. It’s not great. It’s not perfect, but it works. It’s okay, I think, with a lot of people to have laws on the books that are stupid or that don’t reflect their views, as long as those laws aren’t vigorously enforced. What Louisiana is really pushing, and again, I think the criminal context is the most significant side of this, is to enforce those laws punitively, harshly, frequently. And that is the unpopular place. That is the place where you do reactivate people around the issue. So that’s something to keep in mind, I think, as you try to assess political strategy around this. It’s not just what does the governor say or what does the presidential candidate say, it is what are attorneys general doing? It is what are county prosecutors prioritizing? You can look at what’s on the books in red states, but figuring out whether that’s symbolic or real and oppressive depends so much on what is happening in court.

[00:31:58] Sarah: Well, here’s the thing. To me, the issue, if you scratch at it long enough, going back to the Supreme Court and rights, I think most Americans’ fundamental understanding of living in a huge multicultural democracy built on individual rights is I have my rights until they interfere with yours. The problem with the pro-life movement is that’s all they want to do. They don’t want to have the right to believe that abortion is immoral. They want to stop other people from believing that and certainly from acting on that. They want their religious freedom and their right to believe that to continue into, and you don’t have the right to have it, right? That’s the imbalance. They think it’s one thing to believe that a right is wrong, but you want to stop other people from believing it and exercising their right. And so they tried, “Well, you don’t have the right to an abortion.” Okay, but do I have the right to even believe that abortion is okay? Because I feel like they don’t think that either. Your belief is in conflict with many, many Americans, and you want that belief to exceed the boundary of belief. You want it to become action, laws, policy, reality. And as long as that is a political opportunity to the Republican Party, I don’t see it changing. In the same way they have accelerated the use of mifepristone dramatically, and in fact, expanding the abortions provided in the United States. Someone should look at the leader of Susan B. Anthony and say, “If you continue to push this, then you will also accelerate the political reality in which you are not a worthwhile political constituency to exploit because all you bring is political liability,” which I think is what’s happening with Trump. And that’s why she says if how Trump feels becomes the reality, we’re cooked. And she’s right. So I don’t know if the next iteration of MAGA or the next version of the Republican Party post-Dobbs sees the pursuit of a wildly unpopular abortion ban as a political win. I think that in the primary, telling these people what they want to say is still a political exploitation worth taking, but if you’re running nationwide, I don’t know.

[00:35:01] Beth: It depends a lot on who the core constituency of the Republican Party post-Trump is. This issue remains salient despite its unpopularity because it did form a base that could propel people to office in their districts and their states. Will that still be true in 2028 and beyond? I don’t know. I always talk about how politics is a game of addition, but the gerrymandering fight that we’re having right now says otherwise. It seems like a lot of people in office believe that politics is a game of subtraction or finding the greatest common factor or something. The place, this core constituency of people who have enough money and enough time and enough enthusiasm to get you where you need to go. And I think that’s just going to be really interesting to observe heading into 2028. You can see the lesson has taken hold in the party because this is why they wanted to elevate transgender rights. They get to be on the other side of that. They’ve said, “Look, the left doesn’t just want you to live and let live. The left wants everybody to embrace gender as a spectrum, and all of us to use the pronouns, and everybody to play any sport they want to for any reason. The left are the ones who are intruding on your rights with what they believe theirs are.” So they know that’s the more desirable position to be in on an argument. What they do with that, especially if the Supreme Court were to uphold this from the Fifth Circuit, which would be a complete disaster for Republicans and a gift to Democrats electorally and terrible for humans just trying to live their lives. I don’t want that to happen, but I’m so interested to know how they would respond if it did.

[00:37:02] Sarah: This gerrymandering fight, MAGA in general, I think there are so many places where some people within the movement understand that the terrain is changing and some people refuse to see that. I think this is another place where our assumptions about even the most explosive culture war issues are no longer true. And in the same way I see Democrats’ refusal to release their death grip on identity politics-- some Democrats-- despite the fact that America has changed and America’s perception of identity politics and discrimination and all these issues has changed, I think this is the mirror image on the Republican Party. I think you see it in both parties when it comes to Israel. You can just see the people who sense and respond accordingly that things are changing, including in this example, Donald Trump, and the people who refuse. And that’s because so much of the pro-life movement is not playing politics. They’re not just trying to amass power. They have an objective. It is to end abortion in the United States, period. They don’t want any more abortions ever. And so when that bumps up against, “I’m just looking to amass power,” you have a situation like this, which is a mess. It’s a total freaking mess. And like you said, normal people get swept up in the fallout. All right, Beth, Outside of Politics, the Pulitzers were announced this week. Public Service Prize, one of the most prestigious awards, went to the Washington Post for Hannah Natanson’s reporting on the Trump administration’s overhaul of the federal workforce. Does that name sound familiar to everyone? That’s because they raided her house. And she still won a Pulitzer for the same body of work. Julie Brown got a special award for her work on the Epstein files.

[00:39:09] Beth: I’m so happy that she was recognized, yes.

[00:39:12] Sarah: Yeah. So it got us thinking that deep reporting is important. It can cost a lot of people, including the reporters themselves, a lot in their personal lives. And so we wanted to bestow our own personal Pulitzers pieces of reporting that we have not been able to stop thinking about years later. So what are yours?

[00:39:36] Beth: The first thing that came to mind for me was a piece that you sent me back in 2017 from The New Yorker. It’s Alice Gregory. It’s called The Sorrow and Shame of the Accidental Killer. I won’t reiterate my whole personal backstory here, but this resonated deeply with me. It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone in a journalistic capacity speak to what it’s like to have been in a car accident that causes someone’s death. And it was beautiful and important. Just giving me the phrase accidental killer was really meaningful. It’s like the first time I had a label to put on this life experience that has been so formative for me. I thought that she did a beautiful and sensitive job describing the way people who’ve been through this tell that story, and it’s just stuck with me all these years.

[00:40:28] Sarah: Mine is one that actually won a Pulitzer, so I don’t even know if these counts. But the Venn diagram is a crossover, and this is a piece from 2009 called Fatal Distraction by Jeanne Whitegarden, and it was about people who leave their children in hot cars. It’s an incredible piece of writing. Now, 2009 is when I had Griffin, so not surprising that this piece had a lot of impact on me. But I still think about it all the time, even though we put a lot of protections in place, and it’s not that it never happens. But there was a moment when it was happening, like, a lot. And the stories are horrific, just horrific. I’ll never forget about a part in the piece where this man left his daughter and she kept setting off the alarm, and he’d look out the window and turn the alarm off. There was one woman who I think about all the time where it was the confluence of events. It wasn’t one thing. It was 16 things that had to line up in order for her child to die this way. And I just thought when you become a parent and you’re so afraid, you want to keep them safe. And I think it was something about this piece that said, if the unthinkable happens, and it can and does happen, it doesn’t mean you didn’t love your child. And it doesn’t mean that you are a bad person or you wanted to harm them. Because people were getting charged, and this piece was really unpacking, like, why are we charging people for this?

[00:42:03] Beth: When they’ve been sentenced to the worst thing that could happen to anyone.

[00:42:06] Sarah: The worst. And I just think it’s linked in my mind to the moment on Oprah I talk about all the time, where Dr. Robin looks at this woman who fell asleep at the wheel, and her children died in the car wreck. And she said, “You got caught. We all do it. We all make these choices. We’re moving through life. It involves risk, it involves chance.” This piece was probably a foundational text in my coining of the phrase chaos lottery. Like you pull a ticket sometimes in the worst imaginable ways. You can’t protect yourself from the chaos lottery, right? There’s no ways that we think we can control and prevent. We try so hard and some of those efforts are worthwhile. But ultimately, what this piece taught me is not I would never do that, which I think is what people’s reaction was. I would never forget my child. And instead to think, “I could do this, so how should I act accordingly?” Instead of telling yourself, “I love my child, I would never hurt them,” understand that you are human and you are fallible, and you could hurt this person you love most in the world. And I just think it was like one of the most valuable things to come into my life, especially as I was beginning parenthood. It’s an incredible piece.

[00:43:24] Beth: I also would give a personal Pulitzer to Atul Gawande from 2008, his piece in The New Yorker called The Itch.

[00:43:31] Sarah: Oh, I remember that one. This piece gives me anxiety. That’s how I think about it all the time. It makes me so anxious.

[00:43:39] Beth: You opened talking about the cost to the writer. And I think this piece had a cost to the writer because here is a doctor, an expert, saying, “Let me tell you everything we don’t know.”

[00:43:53] Sarah: Yes.

[00:43:54] Beth: We don’t know why we itch. Here’s the incredibly compelling and, like you said, haunting story of a woman whose scalp itches so much that she has torn through it with her fingers. And the part of that piece that I never stop thinking about is when he talked about phantom limbs. About people who lose an arm or a leg and still experience pain there, and how they do mirror therapy to just convince the brain that it’s gone. I probably still think about this piece once a week, and it came out in 2008. It just puts so much together for me about medicine and about science and research, and how what we can say with confidence always has to be viewed against the background of the human brain and all that is unexplored in it. And it’s been a remarkable contribution to my life.

[00:44:54] Sarah: Yeah, the reason it gives me anxiety is because basically what he’s saying here, I think about this with Jennifer Senior’s piece about insomnia, is like your brain just gets a story. It just latches onto a story at a moment in your life, and it gets stuck. And it’s very, very powerful.

[00:45:14] Beth: Yes.

[00:45:14] Sarah: And I’m like, “Oh no, if I never think about itching, then I will not end up like this lady with my brain deciding I’m itching when I’m not itching.” It’s so scary.

[00:45:23] Beth: And it’s very complicated to teach your brain a new story, and it is possible to teach your brain a new story, and just all of that, so good.

[00:45:32] Sarah: Well, it’s so funny because I feel very empowered around pieces and that I’ve heard. Like the pain lady that came on Ezra that time and talked about the person who thought they’d shot a nail through their foot, and they took off the shoe. They took him to the emergency room. The person was in all this pain, they thought they’d shot a nail through their foot, and they took off the shoe, and it went between his toes. Pain is the same way, but to me that feels more empowering that like your brain is very powerful when it comes to pain, but that also means your brain is very powerful when it comes to pain. I don’t know why the pain part of that doesn’t freak me out as much as the itching part, but here we are.

[00:46:05] Beth: Here we are.

[00:46:05] Sarah: My other one I think about a lot because I have a lot of people who I love that live in California, is The Really Big One by Katherine Schultz. It was about earthquakes and tsunami and the very particular risk that exists for those on the entire Pacific Northwest. And it was just a reminder that we all live with this risk all the time. And I live on a fault line as well, but not next to an ocean. I remember hearing a story like somebody moved. Like they read it, and then the friend checked over them like a month later, and they’re like, “I’m moving. I’m leaving. I don’t want to live here anymore. It’s not worth it. I don’t want to live here anymore.” But I think it’s an example of what the theme we’re finding here, which is when someone takes something we all know and puts it together in a way we can see it clearly. To me, that’s what’s the power of these pieces is, that they put together something we are following or we know exists or we understand as a risk, and they put it all together in a way that’s either freaky empowering but always illuminating,

[00:47:16] Beth: and to the hot cars piece, the accidental killer piece, sometimes a person just finds words for exactly where you are in your life. And when they are able to do that and bring all that context and perspective and texture that moves you beyond exactly where you are in your own life, that’s gold. Not exactly what the Pulitzer committee is looking for, I don’t think, but I am so grateful for some of these pieces, for sure.

[00:47:49] Sarah: Well, I know Jennifer Senior, it’s The Friends Who Break Your Heart. I think all the time about the one she won the Pulitzer for about grief in the family post 9/11. I think about where the therapist told them we’re all going to climb this mountain, and we’re going to reach it at different times, and we just have to remember that we’re on different parts of the mountain. I thought that was, like, just such a gift. She’s incredible. The insomnia one, the friendship one. That’s why we had her on the show because she’s just the most incredible writer. The last one that I was thinking about was Pamela Colloff, The Innocent Man, which is about Michael Morton’s wrongful conviction. It was in Texas Monthly in 2012. And despite the fact that Sister Helen Prejean came to college, our college, when I was an undergrad, and convinced me fully that the death penalty is neither moral nor ethical, and I think part of that, I guess, maybe subconsciously or even consciously, was the understanding that the system is fallible, and it existed as a what if that we have executed innocent people. And then this piece said, no, this person. I think it was the first time I read like, oh no, we are proving now that this person didn’t do it, and they were executed. We executed an innocent person. And it just locked it in for me. Like, beyond just what is an appropriate punishment for a heinous crime, it was we can’t, with 100% certainty, assure that we are not executing innocent people. In fact, we have executed innocent people. Is that a cost we’re comfortable with? And for me the answer is absolutely not. Absolutely not. And this piece is so good. This is also, I feel like, the first piece that I started understanding that all these things that had been presented to us on Law & Order as science are not.

[00:49:49] Beth: Just people.

[00:49:50] Sarah: Just arson or the tracks of the flames, whatever bullshit they would make up, blood splatter shaken baby. This is a list we’ve had on our shows for a long time that, like, all these things we understood as criminal science are not. There’s some real problems with them, and this piece was one of the first times I realized that as well.

[00:50:12] Beth: That really sits alongside a more recent piece that I’ve been thinking a lot about. I did not put it in my list, but I will track it down for our show notes. It’s also from Texas, and it’s about a woman talking about her experience on a jury where she finally gave up and voted with the majority on the jury to convict someone who she believed was innocent.

[00:50:29] Sarah: Oh my God.

[00:50:30] Beth: And she had an opportunity to meet that person and apologize to him, and she spoke very honestly with the writer of this piece about the extremely human process of putting people in a room and telling them that they have to stay there until they agree. And it’s beautifully written, and heavy, and haunting in a lot of ways, but also has an arc of redemption that I think is important and worth continuing to build on in future journalistic efforts too.

[00:51:01] Sarah: The last one I will list is one I read recently. I found somebody’s list like this, like long reads they couldn’t stop thinking about. I don’t even remember whose list it was, but on the list was The Tune of Things: Is Consciousness God? by Christian Wilman. I don’t know how to explain this piece to you. I don’t know how to talk about this piece. I just know I read it and was like, “Yep, this is what I think. I couldn’t put all this together.” But especially post consciousness conversations we’ve been having around, like, the telepathy tapes, and religion, and animal consciousness, just all of this, the way this writer put it all together, this was for Harper’s Magazine, it’s incredible. It’s incredible. Again, you’re like, “I want to talk to everyone about this, but I don’t know what to say.” Maybe everybody could just read it and we could just look at each other and nod. I don’t know what else to say beyond that, but again I think that’s the power of these pieces. And I love books, but man, do I love a long read that does this. And that’s the thing. Some books are like, “This could’ve been a long read. This is a more powerful form of the argument you’re making.” Because when it is done well, I mean, think about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations. When it is done well, when it is connecting dots for people in a fresh way, it can change the world.

[00:52:24] Beth: I do think the constraint of having to put something in a magazine or a newspaper versus the open field of a book forces a lot of clarity and precision in writing that’s really valuable.

[00:52:40] Sarah: I was going to say I’m so excited to hear all of yours, but I’m excited and also like, “Oh, no. Now I’m going to have 15 things I need to read.” This is going to explode my Instapaper. I can feel it coming. That’s okay, though. I’m up for it. So please share your personal Pulitzers in your own life. We want to hear them. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Pantsuit Politics. Again, remember to subscribe to our free Substack so that you can be a part in helping us make a very important decision next week. We will be back in your ears on Tuesday, and until then, keep it nuanced, y’all.

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