The Tragedy of Abortion Bans

TOPICS DISCUSSED

  • Reporting on the Supreme Court’s Dismantling of Roe v. Wade

  • The Life-changing Fallout of Abortion Bans in Pregnancy Care

  • Outside of Politics: Football as Our Shared Experience

Thank you for being a part of our community! We couldn't do it without you. To support the show, please subscribe to our Premium content on our Patreon page or Apple Podcasts Subscriptions, or share the word about our work in your circles. Sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Instagram to keep up with everything happening in the world of Pantsuit Politics. You can find information and links for all our sponsors on our website.

EPISODE RESOURCES

UPCOMING SPEAKING EVENTS

ABORTION BANS AND COURT RULINGS

AMERICA’S TOP BROADCASTS: FOOTBALL

This podcast and every episode of it are wholly owned by Pantsuit Politics LLC and are protected by US and international copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property laws. We hope you'll listen to it, love it, and share it with other people, but not with large language models or machines and not for commercial purposes. Thanks for keeping it nuanced with us.

TRANSCRIPT

Sarah [00:00:09] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.  

Beth [00:00:10] And this is Beth Silvers. Thank you for joining us for Pantsuit Politics.  

[00:00:14] Music Interlude.  

Sarah [00:00:33] We're so glad you're here with us. Today, we're going to talk about the Supreme Court and abortion. We have both read and processed the New York Times investigation into the overturning of Roe v. Wade. So we're going to spend some time on that and how that decision is still playing out in the lives of women across America. Outside of Politics, we're going to talk about football and how we're all watching a whole lot of it.  

Beth [00:00:54] Before we dive in, we want to share a few upcoming chances you have to see us in person. We really love to speak with groups in rooms, live, where we can feel your energy and hear your questions and talk with you. And we're very excited that we have two events coming right up to share.  

Sarah [00:01:10] First, you may remember our episode from last July about diabetes, where one of our guests was Stacey Simms. Part of Stacey's work is to create spaces for moms with diabetic children, and she's hosting one of those very special events in Charlotte the first weekend of February. And I am going to be the keynote speaker at that event, the Diabetes Connections Moms Night Out. I'm so excited, just selfishly, for myself, that I get to go to this and be a part of this event. If you are in the Charlotte area and are interested in attending, you can follow the link in our show notes to get your ticket. You can also use the promo code PANTSUIT to get $30 off.  

Beth [00:01:41] And we'll be speaking together in Lexington, Kentucky. We love speaking in our home state very much, at the Emerge conference for Rising Professionals on March 12th. Those events are open to the public, so tickets are available. You can look at the link in our show notes and on our website to get all of the information. We'd love to see you either place.  

Sarah [00:01:59] Yeah, and we're talking about how 2024 is just an intense year with lots of tension in many different areas of American life. And not to brag, but we feel like we shine in that area. So if your organization is having an upcoming event, you want to acknowledge this but not make it overtly political, we're your girls. We can do that. We love to do that. We love to speak about communication and sort of cultural tension and how it shows up in our relationships, in our organizations. So give us a call. We still have speaking slots available in 2024, and we would love to talk to you or your organization. Up next we're going to talk about the Supreme Court.  

[00:02:36] Music Interlude.  

Beth [00:02:52] As we begin this conversation, we want to let you know that because the legal system is grappling with what medical necessity for abortion requires and means, we will be discussing pregnancy loss, grief, some of the physical pain and emotional pain surrounding pregnancy loss. And we want to make sure that we tell you so that you can take care as you need to.  

Sarah [00:03:17] In mid-December, The New York Times released an investigation into the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It was a long, comprehensive piece written by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak. Beth, it showed up in both of our inboxes and we just thought, well, we can't do this right now. We will wait for the New Year to tackle this novella on what actually happened at the Supreme Court while they were overturning Roe v. Wade.  

Beth [00:03:44] This is happening to me more and more as I get older. The curtains close in my brain. All these stories about airplane problems, the curtains close in my brain. I cannot fully take that in. I cannot get into the details of them. I try. I stare at the words, but my brain draws the curtains. And that happened when I saw this piece. I thought, I know I want to read this, but my body will just not accept it until January. So when January rolled around, I read it.  

Sarah [00:04:10] Well, and I'm really using my print New York Times for these pieces. It's very helpful. I'll see something and I'm like, I'm sitting at my desk, I'm task switching; this is not the moment for me to sit down and curl up with my fury and righteous anger at the Supreme Court. But when they show up in the print edition, just reading it on print is a lot easier. And it gives me some time to prepare myself and then I'm ready to sit down and focus. Because this was a long piece. It was about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death. It was about their decision to hear this case, and then their decision to not announce that they were hearing this case. It was about the writing of the opinion. It was a lot about Sam Alito and sort of the machinations of the moderates on the court. There was just a lot in there, and I don't even really know where to start with how we want to break down what was in there. When you sat down and read it, where did you start and where did you end, just emotionally, with the court?  

Beth [00:05:08] Well, I mentioned this a little bit in our last episode. I started hot because they started hot. Like the second paragraph is Neil Gorsuch responding to the 90 plus page draft in less than 10 minutes, saying he's good to sign on no changes. And that infuriated me in such a visceral way. By the end of the piece, I found myself calmer, thinking about how we don't have this reporting for every major decision of the Supreme Court since its creation. And a lot of the procedural machinations sound shocking. But I don't know what I don't know, and I've never worked at the Supreme Court. And so I tried to kind of pull myself back from just hot to a place of greater acceptance. And I have relied a lot in my acceptance on something that I've learned from you. I think it is so clarifying and helpful when you will say in kind of a neutral way, "Well, this is an extreme position relative to the populous and neutral," because I know that I hold some extreme positions relative to the populace. It's not necessarily a positive or negative, it's just true. And so I keep trying to take deep breaths with this court and say, look, the majority of this court has an extreme position on abortion relative to the populace. And they've told us in every way they possibly can, and I believe they're going to continue to tell us in every way they possibly can. And the public is pushing back against that hard. And we didn't get here overnight, and we're not going to get out of it overnight. What about you? How did you take it in?  

Sarah [00:06:46] Oh, I started hot. I'm still hot and will stay hot. I think two things to what you said. I think everything you said is fair. To the point of we don't know what we don't know, what lends me to believe that this was an exceptional moment on the court is that people talked. That so many people talked even anonymously to the New York Times. To me says everybody was looking at this going, whoa!  

Sarah [00:07:12] And what I think I learned big picture over the course of this piece is that we saw them shred the idea precedent, but they were shredding procedure at every moment, every little decision along the way. They knew what they were doing and they decided to do it anyway. They knew they were shredding procedure up until the point that Amy Coney Barrett said, I don't think I want to do this right now, and changed her mind about hearing the case to begin with because she was new enough to get spooked at all this shredding of procedure. But Sam Alito didn't care. He didn't care, neither did Clarence Thomas. And to me, the point about like they've told us, I think why I started hot and stayed hot, one moment that really just infuriated me is like, no, they didn't. They lied. They stood before United States senators and said, no, we respect precedent. We will respect precedent. But that was a lie. And Sam Alito knew it was a lie when he said it. And he worked to that end. The whole time he was on the court, he took his moment when he could take it. And it's infuriating. It's infuriating to read that they knew they were going to hear the case, but they didn't want to announce it just because they didn't want to make people mad, basically. And the moment when the case gets leaked, it felt like such a shocking departure from precedent. But I think this reporting shows they were doing that at every step of the way. Like that was just one more manifestation of the ways in which they had decided (they this super conservative majority, I think, probably led mainly by Alito and Thomas, who'd been on the court longer) to just keep going down that path. I read this piece and thought it was Sam Alito who leaked that decision. I don't know how you felt after reading it, but I was like, I think that's what Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak are telling us and not telling us. Which is the only people the investigation couldn't investigate were the justices themselves. They didn't reach a conclusion because it was a justice that leaked it. Well, this locked in the opinion, so who would leak it? Let me think a minute.  

Beth [00:09:10] I believe that we will eventually know who leaked it. And I believe it will have been a justice. I think that if anyone who is not called justice in that building had done this, we would know by now. I really do believe that.  

Sarah [00:09:25] Absolutely. Well, and there was the accompanying piece a few weeks later about Thomas and his sort of network of clerks and the way he used to take applications from both sides of the aisle and they eventually were like, no, I just want clerks that feel the same way I do. And the way they sort of emotionally groom and manipulate this body of clerks to get them jobs, to keep them on their side to protect themselves, which obviously has gone too far because some of those clerks are talking to the New York Times. I mean, I guess I wouldn't be surprised if it was Ginni Thomas, but it's got to be a justice. Who else would it be? And it's just this sense that they didn't care. I don't think they care about the court. They care about achieving the legal aims they want to achieve, and everybody else can be damned.  

Beth [00:10:19] I think that is true about Justice Alito and Justice Thomas. I think that is true. I want to argue that point, there's something in me that wants to say no. Even the most ideologically extreme people care about this institution. But with those two, I just think there is a growing body of evidence that says they care about their principles and ideals. They care about their version of what this court is supposed to be. And I think that version is probably rationalized and contextualized for them by all the mistakes they think the court made before they got there.  

Sarah [00:10:52] Well, and they think God is on their side. You can justify a lot when you think God is on your side.  

Beth [00:10:56] You can. And I think that if you are reported to only hire clerks who meet some kind of ideological purity test, you're signaling a lot about what your intentions are for your time on the court. I would think that if you are going to the Supreme Court and just having any perspective on what your body of work there is going to mean and how it's going to be reviewed over hundreds of years, you would want to hire the smartest people you possibly can who are the most different from you and each other, so that you're really fighting every one of these out and getting to the clearest, best distillation of legal work that you can do. And it's just so obvious that is not the goal for these justices.  

Sarah [00:11:41] No. Even what they articulate in the decision themselves. We are sending this back to the state so we don't have to make decisions about abortion. Except for here we are back again making decisions about abortion. We're going to talk about mifepristone, and we're going to talk about Idaho's strict ban. I'm like, did you even believe this when you wrote it? Because you are either lying to yourself or not smart enough to see what was obvious to everybody else that this was going to just create chaos everywhere. The parts of the decision where they basically ignore every woman on the court, they ignore the woman on their side, the only mother on the court who said, this is a bad idea, it's just infuriating. I read that and then I read the stories of women across this country whose lives are either ending or being turned upside down. And to read those side by side with the clear not only disregard but disdain for the people who will be affected by this is enough to just-- I don't even have words. I don't have words for the fury I feel for these men.  

Beth [00:12:59] With respect to Alito and Thomas in particular, I also believe that they are so extreme on this issue that they will not be satisfied with the states deciding. And so that's part of why I'm trying to sort of condition myself for the long road ahead. As we know well in Kentucky, it is not enough to just defeat extreme anti-abortion measures. You have to build a new framework for this area of law, and you have to do that against the odds of your state legislatures sometimes, and constitutional law. And I think that the federal courts will become an impediment to trying to create that new framework as well. And I just I hate that. But I think that's where we are, and it's important to be clear-eyed about it.  

Sarah [00:13:54] Well, and it's just so maddening because when this decision came down, you and I sat here and I had conversations on Facebook because I was so angry, I didn't know what else to do. I understand that's a bad application of my anger and time. But when you feel powerless, often, social media debate gives you a sense of something. And I just remember so many people saying like, well, it won't. If your life's at risk, you'll be okay. Or the people who are just claiming that women experiencing spontaneous abortions will face criminal charges, that's radical. That's ludicrous. But that is exactly what is happening.  

Beth [00:14:36] I just want to pause here and define spontaneous abortion. That is a pregnancy loss that occurs before 20 weeks of gestation. It's something that happens in 10 to 15% of confirmed pregnancies, and over 80% of those spontaneous abortions occur in the first trimester.  

Sarah [00:14:57] There is a woman in Ohio, Brittany Watts, 34 years old. She experienced spontaneous abortion. She flushed the remains of her fetus down the toilet, and she is now in jail, being charged with felony abuse of a corpse. And I want to scream into the void. You said this was ludicrous. And it definitely feels like to me, I don't know if this feels like to you, like the medical exceptions. This feels like the first play. Like this is what we're going to have to battle about first. Is the medical exemption. We had Kate Cox, we have women joining this case in Tennessee, lots of women who had just excruciating complications. There's a woman I read about, Katie DeLong, who was sent home with pads instead of medical abortion pills, came back with the fetus almost entirely stuck in her vaginal canal and facing serious risk of sepsis. You read these stories? ABC did a big thing on 18 women who couldn't get the care they needed. Their lives were put at risk, their fertility was put at risk. And you just realize that the medical exception is a joke. It's a joke.  

Beth [00:16:07] It's a trap for medical professionals. So this Idaho case that the court has agreed to take, I think puts this in really clear relief. State of Iowa has a ban on abortion. It does not allow for abortion care in the state of emergency, except if the life of the mother is at risk. Well, what does that mean? The Biden administration challenged Idaho's law and said it conflicts with federal law. We have a federal statute saying that emergency room professionals are to do what needs to be done to stabilize patients in cases of emergency. And the Biden administration says that law preempts Idaho's law that says you cannot perform an abortion. And so what is the difference between a medical emergency requiring stabilization under federal law and the life of the mother being at risk, such that an exception to Idaho's ban on abortion would apply? I'm not a medical professional, I have no idea. But I know enough about the law to know that if you got a bunch of medical professionals in the room, there would be disagreement among them about what their duties are in light of those two laws. And I think reasonably so. And I think courts are particularly bad at figuring those kinds of things out, the application of what they've said in the courtroom to what people face in an emergency room where you don't have the luxury of time to call five different lawyers and say, what do you think is going to happen if I do this: to me, to this patient, to this hospital? What's going to happen now? This is the kind of disaster that people have warned about in the wake of the Dobbs decision.  

Sarah [00:17:51] Well, and here's the thing. If you can't get stabilizing care in an emergency room, that's the lowest bar. You know where you don't want to be as a pregnant patient? In the emergency room. There's a long piece in The New Yorker about a woman, Yeni Glick, she was an uninsured woman. She struggled with hypertension and diabetes. She gets pregnant with a wanted pregnancy, but the hospital in her town has no ObGyn unit, has no care for pregnant women. And the first really impactful part of the story is the emergency room talks about since the legislation passed in Texas, how they're delivering more and more babies at this completely ill equipped, unprepared emergency room. They were previously dealing with somebody rolling in at five centimeters or a miscarriage a couple times a month. Now they're dealing with very complicated, very dangerous pregnancies and deliveries. This woman was one of them. And she died. And her baby died. So she made it the first couple times out of this emergency room, ill equipped to deal with her high risk pregnancy. Lowest bar imaginable. She makes it 30 minutes away to the town nearby. Where in any other state that allowed abortion, a medical team would have advised her to end the pregnancy because of her hypertension or other risk factors.  

[00:19:23] Her body was ill equipped to handle this pregnancy. It increases your blood flow if you have problems with hypertension and diabetes. And you know she'd had all these complications with Covid in that same emergency room. This is a young woman and her and her baby died, and it's because the doctor couldn't look at her and say, this pregnancy is going to risk your life. Now, maybe she would have decided to carry it otherwise. Who knows? But they couldn't even give her the basic medical advice. All these gray areas. All these gray areas in medicine. I was really struck by this quote from one of the systems there says, one of the great challenges and rewarding features of abstract works is that you have two patients. They sometimes have competing interests and one is dependent on the other. Your job is to get both through the pregnancy safely, but that's not always possible. And it's very frustrating to have your hands tied because the patient who you need to save is not the one that's protected by law. And that's exactly what's happened with these exceptions for the life of the mother. No, the law is built to protect the fetus, period. That's the only interest as far as Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas is concerned.  

Beth [00:20:34] And think of what that means in this Idaho case. If I'm understanding the facts correctly-- I have not read all the briefs. If I'm a medical provider and a patient comes into the emergency room, and I believe in my best medical judgment that an abortion is necessary to stabilize the patient, and the court says the Biden administration is wrong. I am not allowed to perform that abortion in Idaho to stabilize the patient, but I can perform an abortion if the patient's life is at risk. Am I just supposed to wait? Am I supposed to allow the patient to get to the point of being at risk? And when do I know that we've tipped over that point? But in the meantime, imagine what it does to those health care workers to watch a patient they know how to help, suffer more, degrade, get in a riskier situation over and over. This is not a rare occurrence. It just all makes me think, like, what are we doing here?  

Sarah [00:21:37] Right. That's what I texted my friend when I read about this case in Ohio. Like, what are we doing here? We're charging this woman. You read spontaneous abortion. Why are we still having a conversation at all? This is what I was assured over and over again would never happen. That's not what we're talking about. No, this is what we are talking about. Because the medical exception of the life of the mother is a lie. Because people who hold extreme positions on abortion believe that women should sacrifice their lives for the life of the baby. I know that to be true. And if you listen carefully, you can hear it over and over and over again. They think that is the admirable and ethical thing to do, is for the mother to sacrifice her life for the baby. Period. That's what they believe. And that's what this law and so many of these laws are structured to perpetuate. That's the prioritization that they make. And they believe everyone else should make it as well. I can't imagine what it's like to be a doctor right now with that, before you do no harm except to wait till someone's in sepsis, to wait till they have a fetus rotting inside their vaginal canal. I'm sorry that I am being explicit, but why should the rest of us get to protect ourselves from this while the women and the medical professionals have to live with it?  

Beth [00:22:56] And I want to be careful, because I read this morning that as the Eurasia Group was putting together its top global risks for 2024, the number one global risk was America versus America. That's a bad place that we're in. I do not want to make it worse. And I really struggle even on the ethical side the more I think about this issue. Because when you say, well, we're only talking about existing life and potential life. And we believe the pure and ethical thing is for existing life to sacrifice itself for a potential life, what sense do you have of our relationships to one another? Every existing life is caring for other people. Maybe other children, maybe aging parents, maybe friends, maybe the person down the hallway who needs you to get their groceries because they can't do it themselves. I mean, the potential life matters because we know that lives matter, that we are all part of this web of relationships with one another. And the law, I've said this a million times, is such a blunt instrument in this arena, and we wouldn't want to be evaluating anyway whose connections are deep enough to merit this being the time that we don't expect the existing life to be sacrificed for the potential life.  

[00:24:22] I'm having a hard time getting it. The deeper we go into this, the more of these stories come out. I'm sad that it's taken me this long in my life, that I've had to hear this many stories to get it. But more and more, I think, what if I got pregnant today? I'm going to be 43 in March. I would have risks associated with that. And I'm in a state and surrounded by states where the care that's available to me is limited. I just struggle with thinking that the vast majority of people would say, well, if it doesn't work out better for you to try, than for your two existing children to have a mom. Better for you to try and for your husband to have a wife. Better for you to try than for your parents to have a daughter. I struggle believing that's what we intend. And so I try to walk back to okay, the summary is there are people who have an extreme position on abortion and they do. And I'm not going to change that. And then the courts are not going to change that. The courts are not going to change that, because some of those people are on the courts and they have a majority on the Supreme Court right now. So what's next? What's the path forward?  

[00:25:33] Music Interlude  

Sarah [00:25:44] I've been a progressive for a long time. I've been a pro-choice activist for a long time. There are a lot of places in progressive life that I think are prone to hyperbole, where I think we don't give enough grace. We ignore the nuance. We refuse to understand or even sympathize with our opponent's viewpoints. This is not one of those places. After over two decades inside this debate, the hyperbole is well placed. This is not about life. This is about women and whether or not you see and view and understand women as full and capable human beings with dignity and the ability to make decisions in their own life. I know it sounded crazy. I get it. Lots of reasons it's easy to think women sound crazy. But it's not crazy to say that this is about women. This is about not believing women have the right to be full and functioning human beings. How can you see this list? How can you read these stories and think anything else? I know it was extreme, and I know it sounded like they're just creating these extreme examples to prove their point. I know, I get it. I get it. But the further we get along this path, I hope that is becoming clear that was not the case. That there are women being arrested for having spontaneous abortions. Please help me reason that out under any other rubric except a hatred for women. Help. I would love to hear it. I'm open. I've been looking for it for over two decades. It's not there, guys. And this is just showing that.  

[00:27:42] And what I believe to be true as far as the path forward, is that the majority of Americans who not only disagree with this, but who find it abhorrent will finally see the extreme nature of this political position clearly laid out before them. Will no longer be able to be like, well, come on, nobody wants to see the murder of a baby so I'm definitely on this side. Will say like, oh no, I am seeing this side, this extreme position laid bare clearly before me. Now, it is a tragedy of epic proportions that so many women will pay huge prices for us all to see this clearly. Babies will die. Women will die. Women will lose their fertility. Women will be traumatized. Lots of babies won't be born because women will make the calculus you just did and say, no, not worth it. Forget it. I think that's true in lots of places that we're talking about that risk assessment. I thought the piece on the families from Covenant in Nashville who thought, no, we're reasonable Republicans. We own guns. We'll go before the Tennessee state legislature and they'll see this is the reasonable thing to do, and instead were just met with radical, abhorrent ideologies. I have to believe that there are places in American life, abortion and otherwise, where people are waking up and saying it was easy to hide under the Republican Party and think this is a reasonable place to be. But instead to see that party was hiding radical ideologies and continues to.  

Beth [00:29:38] And I think it is important to acknowledge many people who hold very, very strong views against abortion would come into this conversation and say, you find the loss of life for these women abhorrent. I find it abhorrent how many babies are not being born. How many babies are being killed. Right. And I would sit with them and say, you know what, I don't disagree. I think this is incredibly hard. I think it has always been hard. I think it will always be hard. I think there are pieces of this that are very, very hard. And I think it's true that always we will exist with things happening that are abhorrent to some of us. And so as a nation, we have to say, well, what are our ideals as a nation? Not my individual ones or your individual ones, but our ideals as a nation. And a question this hard, you have to really go to the fundamentals. And I think our fundamentals are when we have such a hard question, what promotes the liberty of our citizens? And I think we are so far, when we're talking about whether a doctor can look at an emergency room patient and advise them properly on what gives them the best chance to remain stable. We're not promoting our liberty when the court system has taken us this far into people's decision making.  

Sarah [00:31:08] Well, and I've talked about this on the show before as a person who had to wait for medical care. For no one's fault, no one's legislative purposes, just doctor's scheduling, I had to wait for medical care with a fetus that had died inside my own body for a weekend. The prison that is. The prison to be stuck in your own body in that way, knowing that someone can help you and they won't or they can't, I cannot, fully describe what a very specific kind of torture that is. A very, very specific traumatic type of torture to be stuck, trapped at risk in your own body. It's still her body. I don't know how to say that anymore clearly. It's still her body. It didn't stop being her body. How can we not see that? Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It's her body. It's her beating heart and her lungs and her kidneys and her liver and her everything, her being, at risk. Even with unwanted pregnancies. I think that I'm so spun up about it because I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. We're going to hear more of these stories. They're going to get worse. Because we're not just talking about government principles or legislative ideas or constitutional problems. We're talking about people who think they have God on their side, and it's just so scary. And I know that's not a very uplifting, hopeful note. But I think that there's going to be a lot more visceral facing of the horror surrounding these situations before we can have some sort of breakthrough.  

Beth [00:33:34] I think that's right. The point that I just want to emphasize as we think about the path forward is that we don't get to fix this in one fell swoop. Like in Kentucky, we defeated this amendment that tried to keep the courts from finding an exception or any judicial review of Kentucky's ban on abortion. And we resoundingly defeated that amendment. But our court took the case and declined to chip away at our extremist law on the books in Kentucky. And our legislature shows some signs, but few, of opening any doors for exceptions. We have some people working on exceptions for the life of the mother, but again, that's an exception that then we'll have to be litigated and fought over, and it will matter who you elect to be your state representative. It will matter who becomes your attorney general. Every election is going to touch on this in some way for quite a long time. And I hate that this issue is just going to continue to permeate through American civic life this way. But that's where we find ourselves, and it's what we've chosen in many respects. So I think I just gotta own that and stay present to it.  

Sarah [00:34:55] I do want to say that I think this piece that we started with illustrates a lot about the people on the court. It illustrates a lot about the reality of abortion or lack of abortion care in America. But I think it also illustrates one more time that it's just a messed up structure we have in our Supreme Court. I thought one of the most affecting parts was talking about how much hung on whether or not Ruth Bader Ginsburg could live a few more months. That's not what we want. It's not what any other advanced democracy has. Where we're hanging so much on the health of one very elderly person, or their decision to retire or not, where in a country of 330 million people, you can have just two extremists get up there and affect the lives of hundreds of thousands of women. It's not a good system and I would like to reform it. That's where I'm even more firm on that point after reading this piece.  

Beth [00:36:01] I agree with you in that there are dimensions of the court that I think could be vastly improved. And I think we have two people on the court who do not care about it. I think the other seven do. They'll reach very different conclusions than I would many times. But I am only past the point of any optimism with Justices Alito and Justice Thomas. I have some real upset with the others, but those are the two I find irredeemable.  

Sarah [00:36:34] I was coming around on Gorsuch but I changed my mind and I'm back at the start with that one. Just so you know.  

Beth [00:36:39] He's a tough one. I struggle with the level of critique of the court because I believe the court system is essential, and we are in a year where the court is going to be pivotal in our civic life in ways that are even more dramatic, if that's possible, than in the past couple of years. And continuing to aspire to what the court is supposed to be feels extremely important to me. And as bad as the structure that we currently have nine people for a country this large and issues this consequential, countries that don't have it are in a world of hurt. And so I try to hold both of those things at once that I am grateful for this institution, even as I am mad at it. And I understand that what these nine individuals are asked to do is too much for nine individuals to be asked. And I also think that we have two who are unworthy of sitting in this spot for lots of reasons that are now being constantly discussed, and the body of reporting around them continues to grow.  

Sarah [00:37:44] We are definitely not done discussing this court around abortion or any other issues in 2024. We know you aren't either. We'd love to hear from you. We'll continue to talk about this and look forward to hearing from you in email or on social media. Up next, we're going to talk about football. Watching football. We can talk about watching football.  

[00:38:05] Music Interlude.  

[00:38:24] Beth, I sent you this great infographic that Axios made which illustrated one main point, which is that the NFL made up 93 of the top 100 broadcast programs last year. So from 82 last year and 72 in 2020. There were a couple breakthroughs. My beloved Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The state of the Union, the Oscars. But I mean, it's just football, football, football, football, football. And there are two things about this that I want to talk about. One is the case of the article, which is there are so few shared viewing experiences among Americans, and now almost all of them are football. There's a great quote where one of the industry experts was like, when so much of the industry thinking is designed by risk aversion, the second best thing you can do is make money. The first best thing you can do is not lose money. They know they're not going to lose money on football, as opposed to spending a lot of money on a pilot or a television show or whatever. So we want to talk about that. But I think the second question is, what do we think it means that this is the shared viewing experience? That it's this particular game. It's not like we don't have other sports in America, but this very aggressive, very violent game is the only thing we're all coming together to watch all the time? I'm just going to be honest with you, I don't think it sounds great. I don't love it. I went on a little journey with football along with the rest of America last year, which culminated in me going to an NFL game in Nashville. And I ended where I started, which is I don't love football. I think it's violent. I think it's hard on the people playing it, and I don't love it. I don't love that this is what we're all watching together all the time.  

Beth [00:40:11] Well, a couple of years ago, I would have been in total agreement with you, and there are still parts of it that I am really troubled by. And also, I have come to a greater place of acceptance that I would be troubled by things in the world, and they will still exist and have redeemable qualities. So I went to four NFL games this year. Chad and I share a season ticket license with another couple, so we split the season. I only go, as Chad likes to say, when it is above 50 degrees and sunny. I will not go if I'm going to get wet or be cold. I don't like football enough to be miserable watching it, but I do enjoy going to the games. The spectacle I think is really interesting. I love spending that time with him and I've watched just a lot more football on TV this year than I have in past years. I think there are a bunch of reasons for that. I think the biggest one is that I don't have to make any decisions. Football has an element of scarcity that is greater even than other sports. We get a share of Reds tickets. There are 80 baseball games in a Red season. That's too many games. But the football season is relatively compact. It is compact in terms of days of the week that you can watch football. It feels like it's all building to the playoffs and then the Super Bowl. There are fewer teams playing and I think all of that scarcity just keeps it really confined. And so if it is Sunday especially, it's just easy to be like, well, let's just watch football. It's on. It will be exciting. It's an interesting game. The NFL has been really strategic in making it more interesting by bringing in not just Taylor Swift, but a number of side stories. Get to know these people better.  

Sarah [00:41:53] They didn't bring in Taylor Swift. But I get what you're saying. Don't perpetuate that conspiracy theory.  

Beth [00:41:58] Featuring that relationship. I mean, listen, I'm not I'm not a conspiracy theorist. And I also know the NFL is interested in making more money by having more people watch football. And so finding that sweet spot of panning to somebody that famous is smart. And I think they're doing it. And I think they're refining what that sweet spot is. Not too much, not too little. But I think they have done a lot more kind of human interest work in their communities, like individual teams have done that. I just think a lot of marketing and decision fatigue with a gazillion channels and too many options, and the scarcity built into the football season and the NFL as a whole has contributed to this.  

Sarah [00:42:38] That makes a lot of sense to me. I totally get that. And I do think there's a hunger just to watch things together. Everybody's viewership is up, like Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Their viewership was way up this year, so I think people want to watch things together. I just wish we had more options. Look, even the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelsey relationship, which I'm highly invested in, it doesn't make me watch him more on football. It makes me want him to quit. I'm like, let's let's wrap this up, Travis. You done yet, buddy? I'm ready for you to be done. I don't want to watch you get injured. That's what I hated about going to watch the game. People got hurt badly. Very, very badly. I don't want to watch that. I don't want to participate in that. Not to mention the piece they came out with about how now it's just more and more poor states and poor communities fielding the football players that play on these teams because richer families with more resources know it's too dangerous of a game to put their child through. That's messed up, America. That's really messed up. So it does make sense to me that the decision fatigue and yeah it’s easy and it's on. And there's like this aspect of excitement and all that makes sense. I just wish we had other options. I don't even care if they’re sports. I just don't want them to be football.  

Beth [00:43:49] I think there is another reason that you're going to hate that contributes to this. And it is the gambling.  

Sarah [00:43:54] Yes, I hate it.  

Beth [00:43:55] Fantasy football and sports betting and now that sports betting online is legal in more and more states. When we watch games now, Chad doesn't just have a bet on who wins. He's got $5 on these six players, all scoring more than this number of yards. We were laughing last night because we saw a commercial for the Summer Olympics, and I was like, "Lord, Chad, you're going to be like, 'We got to watch the javelin now or the vault. I've got $50 on whether both of her feet hit the ground when she dismounts'" .Like no op. He thinks it's really fun, and he texts other people who are all betting it. And I just think, like, you talk about shared experience, the things that can happen around football, the tailgating, the food, the culture of watching football, the culture of betting on football. It's all there.  

Sarah [00:44:46] Yeah, I hate the betting. If you have a child in college, particularly a son, I encourage you to check in because that is a growing problem, because they target college boys with 'free money' that can then lead to very, very problematic behaviors. I hate the betting. I think it's addictive and therefore inherently risky for lots of segments of the population. Yeah. It makes me sad because I think it's not that this is coming at the expense of actual arts and entertainment. We did see a huge surge in people watching movies, in people going to the movies, in people watching shows. Even in the massive universe of streaming, where you have to decide what you're going to watch. Like the Golden Globes were on last night and you could see that it was fun. The things that won, I had seen. What an exciting, exhilarating experience. I saw the winning movie at a dang theater. Wow, I love it. I love that for us in 2023. But I don't know the answer to the broadcast situation. That they still broadcast. It's a dying art form except when we want it. We want to all watch something together. I wish we could find a show or something that we are all watching together. I mean, we all watched Succession together and it was a delight.  

Beth [00:46:06] But we didn't all watch Succession together. Not even close to football numbers.  

Sarah [00:46:10] I mean here at Pantsuit Politics.  

Beth [00:46:11] Right. But I was thinking, the Golden Globes, you watch those shows and I watch some of them. But the thing about football is that it is on network television. And I think people are having real burn out. I am with the streaming services.  

Sarah [00:46:26] Oh, yeah. For sure.  

Beth [00:46:26] And I think people are realizing like, oh, we're just paying for cable. They're advertising to me and I'm paying for it. And what is the point of any of this? I also feel like watching a sports event is totally different than the decision to watch TV. If I'm going to sit down and get invested in a story, that is a different decision than turning on a football game or a basketball game even. I love Kentucky basketball. I would watch it in the rain or cold, but they don't ask that of me. But I would. I love those games and I feel really invested in them, but it is a completely different part of my brain than watching an episode of Succession. Totally different.  

Sarah [00:47:07] Yeah, for sure.  

Beth [00:47:08] And I find myself more desiring of that part of my brain that just doesn't have to think that hard, that can watch, that can have fun. Yay, I'm kind of in it with them. I'm cheering. Maybe. Maybe I'm reading my book and checking in on the game now and then, and Chad's just really in it. But I just think it's something different. It's hard to compare watching sports on TV to other types of television viewing for me.  

Sarah [00:47:32] Well, I mean, also it doesn't all have to be succession. We all loved TGIF. There was no heavy intellectual lift in watching Full House. Okay, but we got to watch it as a family. We got to watch it with kids.  

Beth [00:47:43] And there's not a lot of that now, really.  

Sarah [00:47:45] No. And that's the thing. It's like with the entertainment industry in this post strike, they're all trying to figure out what's going on. Like Robert Downey Jr. had a great speech last night when he won for Best Supporting Actor, where he was like, hey, isn't it wild that we just got some really good talent together and told a story that doesn't look on paper like it'd be a blockbuster and it was. That was fun, wasn't it? I just think there's just an absence of imagination, because if all you're trying to do is avoid risk and make money, well, of course there's an absence of imagination. I think that's true. There was a great piece by Alyssa Wilkinson about Disney. Is Disney still our shared language? Well, Disney decided to just go big and make as much money and stop trying to create something special. They started trying to create the same thing over and over again so that they could minimize risk and make a lot of money. And I just wish that there were segments of the entertainment industry, there were some real visionaries or leadership. I think there are pockets of that. A24 comes to mind where people are saying, okay, well, let's just make something important and entertaining or funny that meets a need and let's just see what happens next. Because to me, just the proliferation of football says that people still want to gather and watch something together. Yes, I agree that watching sports is super different and there's a lot going on there, but I think there could be a place for that in other art forms or even other games. And I just think that it's also a bummer to me as a person who doesn't love football, that we were getting somewhere and having a real conversation about the cost, and it just feels like it's been silenced. We just all decided that this is where we're going to double down on this deeply, deeply problematic game.  

Beth [00:49:25] I don't know, though, because when Damar Hamlin got hurt, for example, that changed some things. That changed some procedures. That really got a conversation going. It captured the nation's attention. I think they are continuing to try to make the game safer. I also think a game where very strong, large men purposefully run into each other, they're not going to eliminate risk from that. As long as it is tackle, people are going to get hurt and they're going to get hurt pretty badly. And I would watch it I think if it were just flag football, I'd probably enjoy it a lot more. But America is not there with me yet and that's okay. What I do really admire about football, this is what I've come to love about football this year, is the throwing of the flags. I love throwing the flag. I love that they throw the flag and then they take a minute to figure out what went wrong there and what is the penalty we're going to share with everybody? And then we're going to get back to it. I just think that's a good model. I use those terms in my house a lot now. I call my children out for unnecessary roughness. They immediately understand what I'm saying and cut it out and we move on. So I've taken a lot of good stuff from football. I agree with you wholeheartedly about Disney. I thought Wish was terrible.  

Sarah [00:50:38] I saw the preview for that movie and I said, ain't no way I'm spending a dime of my money or a minute of my time watching what is clearly a piece of crap.  

Beth [00:50:46] I took just Ellen to see it. Even she really couldn't find her way into I liked this. We had just seen Wonka, which we both loved. And she was like, I don't think this was as good as Wonka. Like, she didn't want to be like, I hated this. Why'd you bring me? But we just didn't like it. And it was so plug and play. It just felt like, okay, these are the components that we take off the shelf to try to make a hit. Chad and I we're watching football last night, and every commercial for television was like an emergency first responders show. It was fire, EMT, police and a law and order commercial. I was like, law and order, still?  

Sarah [00:51:29] What are we doing?  

Beth [00:51:30] But he said these are the shows that are being greenlit right now because like this person said, you don't want to lose money and this is what we can sell.  

Sarah [00:51:38] Y'all might have to lose money to make money, friends. I don't know what else to tell you.  

Beth [00:51:42] Well, hedge against this football money. You're making a lot of money on football. Can we take some risks with that money for other projects? That's my ask.  

Sarah [00:51:52] Agreed. I would love to see that. I would love to see some investment, because again, I understand that my position on football is radical, and a lot of America is not going to get there with me.  

Beth [00:52:00] You are a football extremist.  

Sarah [00:52:02] I am a football extremist. Absolutely. And so that's fine. That's fine. I'm not trying to make it illegal, but man, I don't want it to be 93 of the top 100 broadcasts. Can we just scale it back? Can we just get back to like, I don't know, 70, 60 would be fantastic. I would just like to see some more emojis in this little infographic besides just a sad little turkey and an Oscar statue.  

Beth [00:52:28] I'm not going to be as mad about this one as you are. Of the things, I get it. I get why it's like this. And I'm glad we're watching something together. I'll take it here in 2024.  

Sarah [00:52:39] Well, together is all we have. That's why we enjoy our time with all of you here at Pantsuit Politics. Thanks for joining us today. Don't forget to check out the details in our show notes about the Diabetes Connections Moms Night Out in Charlotte and the Emerge Conference in Lexington. And if you have an event you'd like us to speak at, please reach out to us at Hello@pantsuitpolitics.com, and we can talk details back in your ears on Friday. Until then, keep it nuanced y'all.  

[00:53:01] Music Interlude 

Sarah: Pantsuit Politics is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. 

Beth: Alise Napp is our managing director. Maggie Penton is our director of Community Engagement. 

Sarah: Xander Singh is the composer of our theme music with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima. 

Beth: Our show is listener-supported. Special thanks to our executive producers. 

Executive Producers: Martha Bronitsky. Ali Edwards. Janice Elliott. Sarah Greenup. Julie Haller. Tiffany Hasler. Emily Holladay. Katie Johnson. Katina Zuganelis Kasling. Barry Kaufman. Molly Kohrs. Katherine Vollmer. Laurie LaDow. Lily McClure. Linda Daniel. Emily Neesley. The Pentons. Tracey Puthoff. Sarah Ralph. Jeremy Sequoia. Katie Stigers. Karin True. Onica Ulveling. Nick and Alysa Villeli. Amy Whited. Emily Helen Olson. Lee Chaix McDonough. Morgan McHugh. Jen Ross. Sabrina Drago. Becca Dorval. Christina Quartararo. Shannon Frawley. The Lebo Family. The Adair Family. 

Sarah: Jeff Davis. Melinda Johnston. Michelle Wood. Nichole Berklas. Paula Bremer and Tim Miller. 

Maggie PentonComment