Helena Wadia
Surprise! We’re back. We just missed you too much.
Mathilda Mallinson
Did you miss us? Rude. Anyway, before we start, we just wanted to outline our agenda for 2023 and beyond.
Helena Wadia
As regular listeners know, we just wrapped our third series and are taking a break to begin work on the next series’ investigations. These investigations will be more ambitious than any before. So if you’d like to, and are able to, support us in our off-season period, please subscribe to our Patreon for the price of a coffee per month. We’ll put the links in the show notes.
Mathilda Mallinson
We plan to relaunch weekly in a few short months. But in the meantime, don’t worry, we have a series of urgent stories like today’s which we’ll be releasing every few weeks. So make sure you turn on your Media Storm notifications. That will also give us a chance to weigh in on whatever’s in the news agenda and keep you tuned into the most overlooked and most important voices in the story: the people living it.
Helena Wadia
So if there’s anything you see in the news while we’re away that makes you wonder, what’s Media Storm’s take on this,? Please email us at mediastormpodcast@gmail.com, and we’ll pipe up.
Mathilda Mallinson
Now onto the topic of today. Today, in partnership with Amnesty International UK, we’re bringing you a shocking story about a woman who needs your help. A woman whose experience tells us a lot about the fragile status of bodily autonomy, the prevalence of patriarchal forces and the politicisation of human rights around the world. And most of all, our need to mobilize and defend them.
Helena Wadia
Something we’ve seen lately in a few countries, not least the US, is bodily autonomy becoming a major political battleground.
Donald Trump
I believe in the three exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. I believe in that. Without the exceptions, it is very difficult to win elections!
Helena Wadia
The most stunning example was Poland’s parliamentary election a few weeks ago in October.
Rachel Maddow
Polish people turned out this weekend in unprecedentedly gigantic numbers. And they voted out the hard-right party that had been the governing party there, the so-called Law and Justice Party.
Helena Wadia
Young voters and women fueled a record-breaking turnout and abortion rights were recorded as the second most important reason they were voting, after the economy. The result? A fatal blow to the conservative Law and Justice Party in government.
Mathilda Mallinson
Although President Duda is trying to drag out their final breath as slowly and undemocratically as possible.
Helena Wadia
Yeah, and presuming he fails, which seems inevitable now that the party has neither a majority nor any allies, opposition groups will get the chance to form a new coalition government.
Mathilda Mallinson
But at the centre of the abortion debate in Poland, through no will of her own, was one woman. Her life and freedom thrown into the political ring.
Helena Wadia
This is an ongoing story with high stakes that requires all of you listening to act and share as part of Amnesty International’s Write for Rights campaign, which aims to harness the power of the people, i.e. you and me, to protect those being persecuted for doing vital humanitarian work.
Mathilda Mallinson
In the next part of this episode, I’ll be sitting down with Justyna, who will take us through what she’s currently enduring. And then we’ll hear from Amnesty International about what it means worldwide, and what we all can do to help.
Helena Wadia
Then I’ll see you back in the studio as we return to our discussion from Media Storm series two, with American abortion rights activist Renee Bracey Sherman, to discuss everything around this media storm.
INTRO THEME
Helena Wadia
Welcome to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last.
Mathilda Mallinson
I’m Mathilda Mallinson
Helena Wadia
And I’m Helens Wadia.
Mathilda Mallinson
This week’s special episode, Abortion on trial: Poland and the politicisation of human rights. Poland. The land of vodka, Mary Curie and delicious dumplings. But unfortunately, a country that has seen some turbulence in terms of human rights rights which have been steadily corroded by the Law and Justice Party, and its efforts to exert influence over the courts during its time in power.
Newsreader (clip)
Poland’s Constitutional Court turning back the clock on abortion rights.
Mathilda Mallinson
And the party has used that influence to launch a sustained attack on sexual and reproductive rights, particularly access to abortion. In October 2020, after failing to do so democratically in Parliament, the government turned to the Constitutional Tribunal, a court effectively under its control, to issue a decision that virtually eliminated legal abortion in Poland. They removed one of only three grounds on which abortion could be obtained, the grounds that had made possible 90% of all legal abortions in the country up to that point. This decision marked Poland as one of the only countries in the world rolling back on reproductive health rights. Within a year, 34,000 women were known to have sourced abortions illegally or abroad. At least six women have died after doctors failed to terminate pregnancies that posed a fetal risk to their lives. And one woman has been criminalised for answering a cry for help. A warning: the upcoming interview includes references to domestic violence, suicide and self abortion.
Justyna Wydrzyñska
I’m 49. I am a mother of three. I’m also a chemist, and I’ve been working many many years as an engineer. This is me!
Mathilda Mallinson
I’m sitting down with Justyna Wydrzynska, a human rights defender and doula who accompanies people through abortions in Poland. It’s a risky game. She is currently appealing a criminal conviction for helping a pregnant woman access abortion pills. Her reasons for doing this were deeply personal. Justyna escaped her abusive marriage and set up a grassroots feminist network to offer funding and information to women in Poland to access medically safe abortions.
Justyna Wydrzyñska
In 2006, I found myself in an unwanted pregnancy. My situation in my marriage was quite tough. I’ve been going through home violence, and I didn’t want my kids to watch the violence and hear the violence. So I decided that if I keep the fourth pregnancy, I was stuck in this marriage, I was stuck in this home. It was very quick decision to get abortion. Like, I didn’t have any doubts about this. But the problem for me was how to do it because I didn’t have like a lot of money to travel abroad. And I couldn’t leave my house because I have to tell my husband why I’m leaving the house. So I started to look on the internet because I have heard that there is an organisation which sends some pills I can use. But nobody knows about this organisation: is it real? And the cost was quite high. So I was afraid to take this risk, but it was almost 12 weeks. So then I ordered them for myself. I have like in my head a lot of fears that I will have heavy bleeding, I will lose a consciousness, I will be in the toilet laying down on the floor and my kids could not open the doors, and I didn’t learn them how to call for the ambulance. So really, I was very, very afraid. But when I went through all those, I felt okay. Physically it was very easy, there was nothing to worry about. So I started to share this experience with other women who were so afraid like I was, and I met a lot of women like I was at the time, really, a lot. We’ve been talking about our feelings without any tabboo. People sometimes feel joy, they sometimes feel sad or sometimes regret. It’s okay for us to feel all those. Every feeling is actually okay.
Mathilda Mallinson
It’s part of a wider European collective called Abortion Without Borders. At all times, she kept a small stock of the pills she’d used for her own abortion in case of emergency. And as it happened, one such emergency came along.
Tedros Ghebreyesus, Director-General, WHO
‘Pandemic’ is not a word to use lightly or carelessly. COVID-19 can be characterised as a pandemic.
Mathilda Mallinson
A global pandemic that saw borders closed and international post intercepted. At Abortion Without Borders, alarms went off. What would women do who needed abortions now? And a message arrived from a woman we’ll call Ania that would set in motion a chain of events that would change Justyna’s life.
Justyna Wydrzyñska
They received a message from a woman who was close to 12 weeks. She told them that she had a visit in a clinic but she had to cancel it. And the reason why she canceled this visit was that her husband, he knows about her decision about doing the abortion. He said to her, if she leaves the country, he would report her to the police. So she was afraid about her safety. And she wrote to this organisation that she’s very desperate, she really wants to stop the pregnancy because of this partner who is controlling her, who’s checking her email, everything on her phone. She’s so desperate that if we don’t help her, she would kill herself.
Mathilda Mallinson
To Justyna the similarities between her story and Ania’s were too much to ignore. She took some of her leftover pills, packaged them up, and posted them with urgent delivery. But they never reached their intended recipient.
Her husband somehow got this information about her being supported by somebody. And he followed her to this post office, and noticed that she’s having some kind of package. He called the police and the police took by a force the pills from her. And on this envelope, it was my phone number, I have to put it to use this very fast delivery. This is why the police got to me.
Mathilda Mallinson
Months passed and nothing happened. Justyna thought the authorities must have just lost interest. But behind the scenes, a warrant was being secured, a political campaign being designed. And then on the first of June 2021, things began to accelerate at terrifying speed.
Justyna Wydrzyñska
I was alone, it was 3pm. I had to take my dog for a walk. And suddenly there is somebody knocking on the doors. Three people standing: one women, two men. They said, “please give us all abortion pills you have at home”. And I told them, I have to call to my lawyer. The police immediately took this phone away from me, and they didn’t let me to call my lawyer. And they also took all the computers I have at home, computers of my kids, even if I try to explain to them, okay, this is the online school – if you take those computers, my kids will not be able to join the lessons. And they were like: “we don’t care”. It was the moment I realised that the situation will get very serious. In November 2021, so the same year, I went to the prosecutor and I got two charges. One was because of helping an abortion by sending pills, and another one that I distributed pills without the proper license. Of course, it was not true because I didn’t took any money for this. So we’ve been very surprised about this, like very surprised.
Mathilda Mallinson
There were actually a few things that raised the suspicions of Justyna and her lawyer.
Justyna Wydrzyñska
When we noticed what kind of judge was assigned to the case, we knew that there is influence from the government, from this anti-abortion government, anti-abortion Ministry of Justice: this case really will be political. I was afraid, especially when we were very close to the election year, that maybe they will have to have an example of a person who is abortion activist receiving a jail sentence because of her work. I knew that there will be no fair trial, there will be no justice in this court.
Mathilda Mallinson
Guilty: of facilitating an abortion. Cleared: of illegal drug peddling. And in what Justyna credits to a wave of international pressure from UN Special Rapporteurs, medical groups, and representatives of several embassies. The sentence did not include prison. Eight months community service. So was she relieved?
Justyna Wydrzyñska
Hearing the verdict, I was like very angry, really, like very angry. They actually wanted to show: okay, she’s punished but the punishment, it’s not so big – so you know, this is not a big deal. The same day I got the conviction, the judge received a promotion to the Court of Appeal. This is not a real court. This is not a real justice. This is not a real judge. This is a political game.
Mathilda Mallinson
Justyna, as you’ve pointed out this was all happening in the run up to a parliamentary election. Well, that election has now happened and the Law and Justice Party lost its majority opening the space for opposition groups in the civic coalition to form a new government. Did you, during the election campaign, feel that you were used by politicians – not just those in government but those trying to bring the government down?
Justyna Wydrzyñska
I must be very honest, I felt used by the politicians from the Civic Coalition. In the elections, they’ve been talking about my case, giving my example. They promised about legalisation of abortion, but comparing it right now, it’s unbelievable, really unbelievable. Still we don’t know if that new government will protect abortion activists. We know also that among the opposition, there are two parties who actually are against abortion. And right now there is no abortion written in their coalition agreement. Politicians make only promises.
Mathilda Mallinson
If you’d known then what you know now, that you would be prosecuted and convicted for trying to help Ania to get an abortion, would you do it again?
Justyna Wydrzyñska
Yes. No doubt. Because I’ve been in court I have heard Ania’s story, because she gave her testimony. When the police took the pills from her, she bought a Foley catheter. This is a silicone tube. On one end, there is a balloon and if you put it into your cervix, you pump it with water. She used it by herself in her toilet. So she ends with sepsis. And of course she miscarries but really she escaped from death. If I knew in the moment that the police took the pills, and she has this idea about using the Foley catheter to stop this pregnancy, I would risk again and again, sent her pills and even brought those pills to her personally and stay with her till the moment she used them. Because I don’t want anyone to go through this situation of loneliness. No regrets.
Mathilda Mallinson
Oh my gosh, that must have been awful to hear.
Justyna Wydrzyñska
Yes, it was very awful story to hear. When she was giving the testimony, I was crying those three hours because it was so hard to listen to what this person was going through.
Mathilda Mallinson
Do you think that her testimony swayed the trial at all in your favour?
Justyna Wydrzyñska
No, absolutely. I don’t think so.
Mathilda Mallinson
Do you ever feel afraid of speaking out, of the backlash that you could face from those opposing the right to abortion?
Justyna Wydrzyñska
I was at the beginning afraid that my kids would be harassed. But my kids were very brave, especially my daughter who was doing a lot of TikToks about my case, and also telling and pointing that if you need help, she’s there. Of course there are people who are against, but this is not the first time I meet this kind of people. They will still need abortions maybe in some point of their life. Knowing my case, knowing me, knowing Abortion Without Borders, knowing Abortion Dream Team, in a moment of the unwanted pregnancy, they will know whom they should contact to get this information and support. So, okay.
Mathilda Mallinson
Justyna’s case is one woman’s story. But it raises alarms about threats to bodily autonomy, compromises to judicial independence and the politicisation of human rights in Poland and beyond.
Chiara Capraro
Abortion is absolutely a question of human rights: the right to have to life, to privacy, to dignity, to be free from torture and cruel and degrading treatment. It has to do with economic rights, with the right to family life, and with the right to equality before the law, and the right not to be discriminated against. And the other thing is that human rights are universal, indivisible and interlinked, and therefore taking away the possibility of access to abortion has detrimental consequences for our rights and freedoms.
Mathilda Mallinson
Which is why her case has attracted the attention of Amnesty International, a global NGO whose stated goal is a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Chiara Capraro
Yes, hi, everyone. My name is Chiara Capraro. I’m the Program Director for Gender Justice at Amnesty UK, which means I lead all of our work on women’s rights and LGBT rights.
Mathilda Mallinson
Hi, Chiara. So we’ve just heard that Poland drastically rolled back on access to legal abortion in the country. How does this compare to trends in other countries around the world?
Chiara Capraro
Yeah it’s quite interesting, because of course, Poland was a very high profile case, but actually the trend is towards the liberalisation. So Poland is part of only just four countries that restricted access to abortion since 1994. USA, El Salvador and Nicaragua as well as Poland. But we know that restricting abortion doesn’t make it go away, it makes it unsafe. And it might be surprising, but there’s basically no difference in abortion rates between countries where abortion is highly restricted and where it is broadly available. The big difference is the percentage of abortions that are unsafe.
Mathilda Mallinson
But is there a risk if we paint these four countries as aberrations that we take it for granted, in other countries that access to abortion is a given right?
Chiara Capraro
Yeah, absolutely. For example, in the UK, I don’t think that many people know that actually, abortion is still a crime, except for Northern Ireland, which now has decriminalised abortion and has a different legislation. But basically, abortion and the procuring of drugs or instruments to cause abortion is still an offence under our low and abortion can carry a life sentence.
Mathilda Mallinson
Surprised by this? So was I. But you can learn all about the state of UK reproductive rights after this episode by scrolling down our feed to the episode, ‘Post-Roe v. Wade: How safe are UK abortion rights?’.
Chiara Capraro
So for example, last June, a mother of three was found guilty because she took abortion pills beyond the legal limit. The judge said that she had excellent references for her character, and she already had three children who loved her and depended on her. Regardless, he sentenced her to prison. This case should really make people focus their minds on the fact that we cannot take abortion and we cannot take the broader control of our reproductive life for granted.
Mathilda Mallinson
Let’s look a bit more closely at the USA now since the rest of the world does tend to look at the USA. And in this case, they’re going against the grain.
Newsreader (clip)
The Supreme Court has now overturned Roe v. Wade
Mathilda Mallinson
In June last year, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which was a landmark piece of legislation that had made access to abortion a federal right across the country.
Newsreader (clip)
Iin 11 States abortion is already effectively illegal. Well this map shows the 17 states that currently have some kind of abortion ban.
Mathilda Mallinson
This paved the way for individual states to introduce severe restrictions and sometimes outright bans on abortion. What does this all tell us about the global threat to reproductive rights? How do we understand the forces at play?
I think is important to know that 62% of adults in the US think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And this has not changed post the reversal of Roe v Wade. So this decision was made by the Supreme Court and wasn’t made for any democratic process. The thing is that the legal environment and how judges and legislators interpret the law is also sensitive to political context of a country. And we know that there are extremely well funded actors that are pursuing this agenda of clamping down on people’s reproductive autonomy using especially the courts. So for example, an organisation like the Alliance for Defending Freedom.
Alliance for Defending Freedom promo vid
“All I just wanted to do was just share the Gospel, you know, share the good news with other people. And they came in and stopped me.”
Chiara Capraro
Which is behind a lot of the restrictions to abortion in the US. But it’s also active in Europe and Africa as well, where they are promoting and funding the anti-LGBT movement. And I think it’s something really important to understand who these opposition are and where they come from, how they are funded, what their tactics are. So these kinds of organisations are coming for women and gender diverse people. And that means that unless we organise intersectionally, we’re vulnerable.
Mathilda Mallinson
Bodily autonomy – our right to make choices about our own bodies – faces different threats around the world. Scroll through Media Storm’s feed, and you’ll find a few. Abortion access, yes, but also the right to die, and the right to healthcare for trans people. In these episodes, we dive into those questions in much more detail. But this episode is about Justyna and undoing the injustice against her, which takes us on to Amnesty’s Write for Rights campaign. You’ll find a link in the show notes.
Chiara Capraro
Yes. So Justyna’s conviction, of course, was unjust and we want it to be overturned. So what people can do is to write to the Prosecutor General asking to overturn Justyna’s conviction and also to refrain from bringing further charges against her. So that’s the lobbying part. And then there is the solidarity part. We know that sharing solidarity and support is really really important for people like Justyna and other human rights defenders. So you can send a message of solidarity and hope to Justyna. Be creative, you can use art you can use short videos. And we encourage you to share it on social media using the hashtag: #IAmJustyna and #w4r23, which is the Write for Rights campaigns Amnesty.
Mathilda Mallinson
At Media Storm, we bring you stories from people at the heart of the debates playing out in our current affairs. But we also look at how the mainstream media report on those debates and ask what those affected think the media could do better. In our earlier abortion episode that followed the Roe v Wade ruling, we were joined by us activist Renee Bracey Sherman. She offered scathing insight into the misinformation infecting mainstream coverage of abortion and the ways in which the media manipulate debate. We’ll play that next. That takes us back to the studio. Thanks for sticking around. Welcome back to the studio and to Media Storm, a news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last.
Helena Wadia
This week we’re looking at abortion, the situation in the UK and across the pond and how reproductive rights are reported on. And with us is a very special guest.
Mathilda Mallinson
She is the founder and executive director of We Testify an organization dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions. The writer and reproductive justice activist has been hailed as the ‘Beyonce of abortion storytelling’. Plus, she’s the co-author of Countering Abortion-splaining, out soon, so keep an eye open. It’s Renee Bracey Sherman. Rene, thank you so much for being here.
Renee Bracey Sherman
Thank you so much for having me. It’s both early and also I’ve been at the rallies. So my voice is a little rough. So sorry to everyone. But I have to say I love doing UK interviews because I love the way British people say “abortion”.
Mathilda Mallinson
Does it make it more palatable to talk about?
Renee Bracey Sherman
No, it just it just feels so light and refreshing! I just I don’t know. I love it.
Helena Wadia
Yeah, I wouldn’t use the words “light and refreshing” for what this podcast is gonna talk about.
Mathilda Mallinson
yeah, laugh while you can!
Helena Wadia
Well let’s talk about how abortion is framed in the mainstream media. A big question is, is abortion reported on as more controversial than it actually is? In the UK, nine out of 10 people are pro-abortion. By age 45, nearly 1/3 of all women in the United States will have had an abortion. Do articles fail to mention how common abortion is and how broad the support is for it? I mean, Renee, you coined the phrase, “everyone loves someone who had an abortion”.
Renee Bracey Sherman
Yeah, I mean, this is what my work centres around. Abortion is extremely common. And it’s actually extremely popular, pick any president – abortion is more popular than it! Over 80% of the American public believes abortion should be legal.
Mathilda Mallinson
Can you just explain that statistic, over 80% of the US population think abortion should be legal? Where’s that data coming from? Because that is not the impression that we would get from the 50/50 debate we’re seeing in the media?
Renee Bracey Sherman
Well that’s what’s wild about it! Right. So on Fox News, they asked their viewers, did they want Roe to be overturned? And over half said no. This is the Trump TV station!
Mathilda Mallinson
And still we need a pro-life and pro-choice voice discussing this debate on every show.
Renee Bracey Sherman
As if it’s a 50/50! You’ll notice the polling they ask the question: should abortion be legal in… and then they’ll say ‘no cases’, ‘only a few cases’, ‘some cases’, ‘most cases’. A good like usually 50, 60% say ‘most cases’ and then the other 20, 30% is made up from like those people that are saying ‘some cases’. So that’s where it’s like the, you get the majority right. But what I think it’s frustrating, the majority of this country doesn’t understand who has abortions and why. They think that every abortion is either somebody being slutty, or a 14-year-old being raped, there’s like nothing in the middle. And they also have a lot of judgment around those of us who are just like slutty which, shout out to us! It’s fine. Like it’s okay. I run an organisation with people who’ve had abortions. We share our stories and the whole goal was to change the way we are portrayed in the news, because when I started doing this work a decade ago, I would watch the news, I’d read articles, and it was always people talking about abortion, and no one was saying that they had one. What would it look like if we change the conversation to include the stories of people have abortions? And here’s how my story is actually going to challenge the preconceived notions that you have about abortion, the stereotypes and stigma that the anti-abortion movement has pushed. The fact that the majority of characters on television and film that have abortions are white, they’re young, they’re teenagers. The majority of people who have abortions in real life are in their 20s, they already have children, they’re people of colour, and they’re poor. You’re getting this this misinformation, even through well-meaning depictions. And so that’s what my work focuses on, is changing that conversation.
Mathilda Mallinson
We love that. And that’s why we have you here because of what you do it We Testify. And what we do at Media Storm is try to centre lived experience voices in the conversation. And with abortion, the conversation is so skewed, it seems, away from the actual experience of abortion, the experience of choice, away from lived experience and towards politics. You know, is this a conversation that should have fewer political voices and more medical voices and more lived experience voices?
Renee Bracey Sherman
To me, it feels really simple. You would never put someone who is a doctor on a heart surgery up in a debate with someone who’s literally never opened a medical textbook. And yet, that is what happens constantly.
Helena Wadia
The majority of the of the episodes we’ve done on these minority groups, they all have some form of that ‘both sides’ narrative. I have to tell this story, I was working at a national newspaper here in the UK, and I wrote a piece and created a video about these amazing activists who helped get women and people who need abortions safely into the clinics, and they shield them from anti-abortion protesters outside the clinics – this is in America – calling them murderers and centres etc. These activists, they were really young, they were teenagers, and they use TikTok in a really innovative way to do this. When I submitted this story, I got told I had to get the ‘other side’. And they said: “no, you must interview these anti-abortionists who are calling women murderers and whores. And you must interview them and get their side and interview them for the same amount of time that you interviewed these activists,” and I refused and the piece was pulled. But if I was at that time, a younger, less experienced journalist, maybe I would have been forced to include that side. And then the problem is, then medical voices people with lived experience, they often get pushed aside for this ‘both sides’ debate.
Renee Bracey Sherman
I recently had a debate with media outlets in the United States, they’re a huge morning television show. They wanted to put someone who’s had an abortion up against someone who had an abortion and regretted their abortion, which I want to be clear, I believe that people have abortions, whether they will get them or not, are able to share their stories. That’s their experience. But I explained to them in the way they were planning to do it: it’s just not accurate. It makes it look like it’s 50/50. And we actually have data, and it’s 97 to three, even in that 3% of people who regret their abortions, it’s not necessarily that they still want it to be illegal. So really, it’s like 99 to one and so you’re positioning it as 50/50. And that’s actually just bad journalism.
Helena Wadia
Absolutely.
Renee Bracey Sherman
It’s not just in media. It goes as far as the halls of Congress. Because, in the middle of May after the leak, there was a hearing on the House Judiciary Committee in our Congress. And so what are the storytellers that I work with testified about having an abortion, and then we had an abortion provider. The third witness that sat at the table in the room was the president of a very prominent anti-abortion organisation. She testified that she believes that there’s an abortion clinic in Washington DC and when they get rid of the products of conception, like the medical waste, the way you would any blood tissue, whatever, anything else, like any hospital – sometimes they go to incinerators because it’s a biohazard. She believes that incinerator company, that they – that a lot of hospitals in the country – that that is being used to power the lampposts in Washington DC. I wish I was making this up.
Clip from Congress
Bodies thrown in medical waste bins and, in places like Washington DC, burned to power the lights of the city’s homes and streets. Let that image sink in with you for a moment. The next time you turn on the light, think of the incinerators.
Renee Bracey Sherman
And so this is the type of person who gets quoted equally, in equal amount of time, as I do – someone who’s had an abortion, who actually understands the medical aspect of it.
Mathilda Mallinson
Yeah this is this is the fallacy in the mainstream media of what it means to get ‘both sides’ of the story. Both sides means both political sides. The textbook exercise of impartiality in the media, and scarily apparently, in Congress, is the left side and the right side. But not everything is a political issue. And that’s what Helena and Renee you’ve both just pointed to, with those pretty disturbing examples, is that actually maybe getting all sides of the story as a journalist on abortion means the side of someone who’s undergone abortion, the side of someone who is a medical expert, the side of a social worker, but not necessarily the left side and the right side.
Helena Wadia
I think this hyper-politicisation of abortion does often mean that the language that reporters use, it means that this kind of anti-choice rhetoric does find its way into articles. And a lot of anti-choice language is very emotive, for example, ‘unborn children’, or they call foetuses ‘babies’. Honestly, I think even the term ‘pro-life’ is sneakily emotive, like, abortion is almost always framed as a debate between ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’. But the term ‘pro-life’, when you’re talking about abortion, is quite frankly, bullshit. Because if you were really ‘pro-life’, right, you’d introduce gun safety laws, so children literally stop dying in schools, or you would have universal health care, or you would take action on climate change, which probably is going to wipe out a lot of children in the future, or you make childcare affordable, or when there’s a shortage of baby formula, you would fix that, or you would implement consistent free school meals, which was a big topic here in the UK, you’d address the suicide crisis in the trans community and make their lives better. So I would really, really urge mainstream news media outlets to not use the term ‘pro-life’ without quotation marks around it. Or instead to call it, call it what it is! Like, call it ‘anti-abortion’, call it ‘anti-choice’.
Renee Bracey Sherman
The point of them using ‘pro-life’ is because, what is the opposite of pro-life? It’s anti-life. As if we somehow hate life. And they will say that, they’ll be like: they hate life. They’re trying to stop life. So yeah, stop calling them pro-life. But also ask them the follow-up questions. What does it mean to make something illegal? What are the punishments that you support for people who have abortions? They don’t do anything to make sure people have safe pregnancies. And they also do nothing about the fact that there are so many pregnant people in jail in the United States right now who are shackled during labour. There’s no plan to increase access to food for poor families. That hearing I mentioned, where the woman went on and on about foetuses lighting the lamp posts, that hearing the members of Congress badgered the abortion provider witness and the abortion storyteller witness and the legal witnesses for hours. Right after that hearing, they went to go vote on a bill that would increase the supply of baby formula. Every single one of them voted no.
Helena Wadia
Renee Bracey Sherman, thank you so much for joining us on Media Storm. Before you go, where can people follow you? And do you have anything to plug or shout out?
Renee Bracey Sherman
Folks can follow my organisation We Testify online, WeTestify.org, WeTestify on Facebook and Instagram and then @abortionstories on Twitter. You know, donate to a local abortion fund, talk about your abortion. Talk about what’s happening. Really just just show up with love and support for people having abortions. That’s all I ask.
Mathilda Mallinson
Thank you for listening. If you can’t wait until the next episode to hear our voices, then head over to our feed. We dive into those questions in much more detail.
Helena Wadia
Follow Media Storm wherever you get your podcasts so that you can get access to new episodes as soon as they drop. If you like what you hear, share this episode with someone and leave us a five star rating and a review. It really helps more people discover the podcast and our aim is to have as many people as possible hear these voices.
Mathilda Mallinson
You can also follow us on social media @mathildamall, @helenawadia, and follow the show via @mediastormpod.
Helena Wadia
Get in touch and let us know what you’d like us to cover or who you’d like us to speak to.
Mathilda Mallinson
Media Storm is an award winning podcast produced by Helena Wadia and Mathilda Mallinson. It came from the House of The Guilty Feminist and is part of the Acast Creator Network. The Music is by Samfire.