Video: Religion and Democratic Ideals: Reproductive Healthcare Access and White Nationalism

“Reproductive Healthcare Access and White Nationalism,” featured founder of Funky Brown Chick, Twanna Hines, and Melissa Deckman, CEO of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). Assistant Dean for Religion and Public Life, Hussein Rashid, served as moderator. Access to reproductive healthcare engages with explicitly religious language. This session positioned that language in the broader framework of white nationalism, which is often undergirded by Christian nationalism. The session tied together structures of patriarchy and race, and offered ways of possible solidarity to create a more just future.

This was the third of four sessions in the Religion and Democratic Ideals series. This series focused on where religion intersects with democratic ideals and institutions.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

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SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Religion and Democratic Ideals, Reproductive Healthcare Access and White Nationalism, October 15, 2024.

HUSSEIN RASHID: I'm Hussein Rashid, the Assistant Dean for Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people.

Welcome, and thank you for being here this evening. Religion and Public Life is dedicated to service of just world at peace. We work within a dynamic method that has religious literacy at its core and brings in critical analysis to understand and challenge systems of inequity.

Our focus on just peace building recognizes that a peace without justice is not sustainable. The goal of RPL programming is to bring analysis from experts, including academics and practitioners and those living in inequitable systems, and offer some ways forward to build a more just world. The program is founded and led by Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean for RPL.

This series, like all our programming, would not be possible without the support of our team, including Reem, Hillary, Anna, Natalie, Tammy, and Rachelle. I also want to mention Becca Leviss, the student who conceived of this series and has been instrumental in putting it together. Thanks to them all.

This series emerged from conversations with students about what politics and democracy mean. It became clear through these conversations that democracies exist in service to ideals. We are a program that looks at questions of structural inequities. So our response has to be about the structures functioning in our current political moment and working towards creating structures of equitability.

We are trying to respond to what we feel our students are asking of us while making sure that we are true to who we are. A liberal democracy should produce societies that are inclusive, equitable, dynamic, and responsive to the needs of citizens. Thinking about outcomes that we want from a democratic system create space for us to construct pathways to achieving those goals.

For Religion and Public Life, the conversation is about democratic ideals. The focus of ideals of equitable, inclusive societies where every member is treated as valuable, that's our lead into just peace building. This event in the series engages us with the role of race in reproductive health care and how those questions of race are informed by antireligious and religious sentiments over who belongs in the US body politic.

Tonight, we have two amazing speakers-- Melissa Deckman and Twanna Hines. Melissa Deckman is the author of Politics of Gen Z. Her first book, School Board Battles-- the Christian Right in Local Politic, won the American Political Science Association's Hu Morken award for best book on religion and politics.

The author of more than two dozen scholarly peer-reviewed articles, Deckman's commentary and research about politics has appeared in the New York Times, MSNBC, The Washington Post, CNN, the Hill, Vice News, The Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight, and Politico, amongst other outlets. Prior to joining PRRI, Deckman served as the Louis L. Goldstein Professor of Public Affairs and Chair of the Political Science Department at Washington College.

Dedicated to promoting leadership opportunities for young women, she was the cofounder of Training Ms. President, a Maryland-based, nonpartisan program that encouraged young women to consider running for political office. She is proud to have conducted research for IGNITE, a leading nonprofit organization that builds political ambition in young women across the country.

Twanna A. Hines, MS, is an award-winning sexual health educator, healthy relationships advocate, and entrepreneur. She specializes in social impact entertainment. A Sundance Creative Change alum, she has written for many magazines and news outlets, including NBC News, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Time Out, Mashable, Fast Company, and The Huffington Post. She's been interviewed by outlets from coast to coast, from the San Francisco Chronicle to The New York Times.

Founder and CEO of the creative enterprise Funky Brown Chick, She's appeared on CNN, NPR, Sirius, CBC, Paris Premiere, and in documentary films. Thank you both for taking time out this evening to join us. And welcome to the series. I think the first question I have for you both-- and, Melissa, since I introduced you first, I'll ask you to start us off in response-- is help us, as audience or me as an audience member, understand what this topic means to you and why it's important for now.

MELISSA DECKMAN: Sure. I'm really happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation. And I'm looking forward to a really good conversation. So I wanted to unpack what the topic means to me by literally looking at what's in the title of the talk.

And really, it's about reproductive health care access, and it's linked to white nationalism. So I want to unpack those concepts a little bit here at the beginning. And I really want to make the plea for why having a public opinion aspect or having a public opinion view about these things is important in a democracy, because I think part of the goal here is to talk about how these issues really play into democratic ideals.

And I think our form of government-- this is the former political science professor me. So indulge me for a second. But our form of government, of course, is a representative form of government, one that essentially and hopefully lies in the basis of government being the people, being that, really, the power of the people to rule.

And of course, it's not perfect. We have undemocratic aspects of our system. But generally speaking, it's important to understand public opinion because we have to have a check on people in power. And it also gives knowledge and information to elected officials about what their constituents are thinking.

So understanding the pulse of American public opinion isn't just fun around election times or scary, depending on your point of view about the elections. But it's really about trying to understand larger trends in society and people's attitudes about these policies that affect all of us on a day-to-day basis.

So with that in mind, here at PRRI, we are, of course, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization that examines the intersection of religion, culture, and American public opinion. When I think of reproductive health access, I think initially about abortion. And, of course, this is something we're debating right now in our country in a post-Roe world with the Dobbs decision.

But since our inception in 2009, which is 15 years ago, PRRI has been asking Americans about their attitudes on the legality of abortion. And so the way that we measure that is we ask Americans, do you think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases or illegal in all or most cases? And looking at our most recent data, this comes from a report that we issued earlier this year in April, which really provides data across all 50 states, including more than 20,000 interviews. So it's a very rich, robust set of data.

We find that 64% of Americans, almost 2/3 of Americans, say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And of course, then we find that only 35% of Americans think it should be illegal in all or most cases. But I want to focus on the last part of that question, because we find that fewer than 1 in 10 Americans say that abortion should be illegal in all cases. And yet we are in a policy landscape where that is actually happening in many states because of the overturn of Roe and the Dobbs decision. So I think that's important to think about as we're having this conversation.

I would also be remiss by not talking about the religious factor here. This is, of course, Harvard Divinity School. And we specialize, at PRRI, at looking at a religious lens in a lot of our analyses. And really, we find that most people of faith support abortion legality. The only major religious groups in which a majority of people do not support abortion legality in all or most cases are white evangelical Protestants. Just 27% think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Latter Day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses, again, 32% to 25%.

But I think, however, a conversation about reproductive health care should not just be limited to abortion. It should also bear in mind things like access to birth control. So we haven't really polled very recently on that at PRRI. Part of the reason is that most Americans think we should allow women to have access to virtually all forms of birth control.

But we did have a poll in 2019 that I pulled from our records. And we found that 3/4 of Americans believe that government health insurance programs, like Medicaid, should provide low-income women with birth control. Even a strong majority of Republicans agree with that. So I think that's really important to bear in mind. Yeah, we have a policy landscape where that might be in question kind of moving forward.

And finally, another way to think of and conceive about of reproductive health care access is to think about in vitro fertilization, which again, is having a lot of attention put on that topic in wake of the decision last year by the Alabama Supreme Court to initially overturn a law saying, because of their personhood amendment, that it should be illegal. And then of course, it's so broadly popular that the state legislature amended the state law to allow for its legality.

But this is a preview for tomorrow. We're releasing our 15th annual American Values Survey. But I can't give you specifics. It's still under embargo. But this is all to say that most Americans, including most religious Americans, broadly support IVF.

So that's the reproductive health care access. So I want to talk a little bit about the white nationalism just for few more minutes, and then I'll turn it over. So here at PRRI, we tend to think about nationalism as white Christian nationalism. So of course, there's other forms, but that's really how we tend to measure that.

So I want to talk a little bit about what Christian nationalism really is. I'll give you a definition. I tend to think of it as an ideology that holds that the US was founded as and should remain governed as an explicitly Christian nation. Christian nationalists are determined to restore what they see as the religious founding vision of America by fusing a conservative vision of Christianity with our political and civic life.

But one definition I really like is from Katherine Stewart, who writes pretty regularly about Christian nationalism. She describes it as "a reactionary, authoritarian ideology that centers its grievances on a narrative of lost national greatness and believes in the indispensability of the right religion in recovering that lost greatness." Because I like that definition, because it really gets to those nationalistic undertones in a lot of ways.

Really quickly, here at PRRI, we have come up with what I think is a very strong measure of Christian nationalism views and how they are spread throughout the country. And so we don't rely on one question. We rely on five questions to create an index.

And so essentially, we ask Americans the extent to which they agree that the US should declare America a Christian nation. Our laws should be based on Christian values. If the US moves away from Christian values, do you think we'll have a country any longer? Is being Christian a really important part of being an American? And finally, do you think that God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of America?

And looking at that scale together, roughly speaking, we found about 1 in 10 Americans strongly agree with all those tenets. Another 2 in 10 are what we describe as sympathetic to those views. And maybe they agree with them, but not quite with the same strength as adherents do, which means, of course, that about 70% of Americans are not what we categorize as being sympathetic to Christian nationalism.

Now, the racial component here, because this is a seminar on white nationalism, is really important. We tend to find that African Americans and Hispanic Protestants or Hispanic Americans are just as likely to be Christian nationalists. However, politically speaking, there are a lot of really important differences, including differences related to reproductive health, I might add.

But generally speaking, we find that Black Christian nationalists are far less Republican. They're far less likely to support Trump. They're far less likely to support anti-Black attitudes, which we do find white Christian nationalists really espouse.

And when it comes to-- and tying these two things together. This is my last comment-- linking reproductive health with Christian nationalism, we find that most Christian nationalists only-- well, actually, only 25% of Christian nationalist adherents say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. So they look very different on attitudes about abortion.

And when it comes to Black Christian nationalists, they're twice as likely to support abortion rights. They look more like Americans in general. 59% of Black Christian nationalists and sympathizers say, abortion should be illegal. That's very different than white Christian nationalists, of whom only about 29% say, abortion should be legal in all or most cases. So I'm going to stop there and let Twanna weigh in.

TWANNA HINES: Yeah, happy to weigh in. I'll save most of my commentary for the discussion part. But I'll just say I'm super excited about this conversation, both personally and professionally. Personally, as a Black American woman who's been working in reproductive justice for 20 years now, one of the things that I think often gets skipped over when we start talking about health care access, democratic ideals, things of this nature, we have to really dial all the way back to the roots of this country, right?

When we start thinking about being a representative government now or whether we start thinking about how this country was founded, we have to really talk about race and ethnicity. I love that this conversation started, even before we spoke, about a land acknowledgment. So as we talk about democratic ideals and inclusion, we think of everything from whose land are we standing on right now to when we talk about who actually has the right to participate and whose votes are suppressed and whose aren't and all of these kinds of things.

And even when we talk about public opinion, what people say they support, sometimes that runs counter against different views like support for white supremacy and white nationalism. So someone might say, I actually support reproductive justice or reproductive health care access. And there are tons of numbers on that, like after the last election, but people voting against those same interests because other interests, such as white supremacy, trumped that literally for certain demographic groups.

And so as a Black American woman who's been working in reproductive justice for a long time, when I think of democratic ideals, I always really caution us to really think about who is included, who is represented, and who is not. So that's that side of it when we think about democracy.

The other thing we have to think about on that personal side of Black American woman, we have to remember a lot of what the United States does when it comes to reproductive health care access. Stretch is far beyond US borders. Roe versus Wade, 1973, says, hey, look, OK, American women have the right to abortion access based on privacy rules guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. We'll get to the 14th Amendment later, right? '73, this is what the United States says.

Months later, in that same year via the Helms Amendment, we say, OK, but poor women don't have that access. If you actually need to use federal funds to help pay for your abortion, we're going to bar it. So the very first year that we had the Roe, we already had women who were earning low incomes excluded immediately that exact same year.

And then right on the back of that, then we had that go into the Hyde Amendment where the United States says, you know what? Beyond US borders. So we're not even talking about Black folks. We're not talking about poor folks. We're not talking about Americans. We're talking about US funding abroad. So the United States says, in our US foreign policy, we're actually going to block abortion access. And that's access.

Fast forward another decade, and then you have the global gag rule, where the United States is saying, we don't care if you're using your own money. We don't even care if you're not talking about actually performing abortion. Simply counseling on it, simply referring people to where they can go to get information, we will snatch all your global health funding, which is significant considering the United States is the largest provider of global health funding.

And so all of this comes to us thinking of, what do we actually mean when we say democracy, democratic ideals, representative government? Because even when we had Roe, before Dobbs, right, we were already restricting so many people in the US and abroad from gaining access.

So I think when we start looking really at like, who's been excluded? Dobbs was going to happen because we already lived in a post-Roe world in many communities and outside of the United States before Roe was ever overturned by Dobbs. So that's on a personal side, being a Black American woman, looking at these issues about the US, Black folks, things like that.

On the professional side of the fence, founder, CEO, Funky Brown Chick, and we do two things-- sexual reproductive health rights, justice, all of these things, writing, teaching, speaking, everything about sexual health and rights. And so for the past two decades, as we've seen everything from in vitro fertilization, curbing sex education in schools, charging women with murder, again, before Dobbs, charging women with murder for their abortions, all different kinds of things were happening before we even talked about really curbing reproductive health care access.

And then the other side of our fence, we do digital analytics and digital analytics, data, all of these things for these intersectional social issues. Because when we talk about health care access and we look at a reproductive health instead of reproductive justice, we start forgetting things like about how climigration falls into this, food security, climate justice, all different kinds of issues and items and topics and lives, really, and stories that are interwoven--

HUSSEIN RASHID: Twanna, I'll interrupt you for one second. You used the term "climigration." And I'm not sure all our audience would recognize that. So if you could just take a second.

TWANNA HINES: Which one, climate justice or climigration?

HUSSEIN RASHID: Climigration.

TWANNA HINES: Climigration. So a lot of the immigration laws in the United States are founded on a crime bill from the 1990s. And so the ways in which the United States even thinks of immigration is from a criminal justice lens. So then if we start thinking about reproductive health care access, LGBTQ inclusion, all different kinds of things about why and how people might be coming into the United States and reproductive rights intersecting with that, if we start by looking at it as like a crime lens for immigration, then it also plays in as well.

Thank you for-- and please feel free to do that throughout. Like I said, I've been in this field for a long time. So if I start throwing jargon around and you're like, What is she talking about? Please do exactly what you did. I appreciate that. Thank you. And I'll stop there because, like I said, I want most of the conversation to be between the three of us.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Well, I'm not quite done, Twanna, because I want to push you a little bit further on something, which is when you start talking about who is represented, who's not involved in the conversations, and we're talking about reproductive health care, we have to think about reproductive science and gynecology and the origins of gynecology. And I mean, I'll let you get into the history.

But basically, there's this really-- without sounding too judgmental, but really sort of disgusting exclusion of certain women from a conversation as it's literally their bodies that's beginning to define the conversation.

TWANNA HINES: Absolutely.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Can you speak into that a little bit, please?

TWANNA HINES: Yes, can I tell a story?

HUSSEIN RASHID: The floor is yours.

TWANNA HINES: Pictures to tell that story as well? I love storytelling because it's really how we've always related to the world in a lot of ways. OK, let's tell a story. Once upon a time-- so as we start thinking about exactly what you said, whose bodies are considered? Whose all of these things, stuff like that? Borders are arbitrary, change over time, things like this.

So if we were to look at the world right now, you might wonder, what are those little colors? What's the purple, the red, all of these things? Why is it only in certain regions of the world? All of that type of stuff.

This, my friends, is my DNA. I needed to do health testing years ago. So I had to get a DNA scan. One of the things that happens when you do a DNA scan is that they actually tell you, where in the world is your DNA most likely found? Where are your ancestors from? Where are your people from?

So if you look at this picture, what this literally tells you is I'm Black American. This photo is telling you that European people enslaved African people, brought them to the North American continent, and did things such as sexual assault. So as we start thinking about bodily autonomy, who's included, all of these things, we have to remember that the way this country was founded includes a lack of bodily autonomy, whether we're talking about the trauma, the actual physical trauma that is involved when you talk about sexual assault and/or enslaving people.

So before Roe-- it was 1973-- way before then, as we start talking about who's included, who's not included, all of these kinds of things, we have to stop and remember the bodies that we're talking about and the ways in which we think of bodily autonomy has always been exclusionary. And then when we talk about the actual biology of it all, how do we even know what an abortion is, what is IVF, all of these things?

The man who's widely hailed as the founder of modern gynecology-- it's why we know the fistulas, right-- J. Marion Sims, Dr. J. Marion Sims. You can look online, all of these things. He's literally considered the person who really told us what's going on with women's body.

And if he's not a woman, how did he find that stuff out? How would he know, right? Well, we know that he actually found that out by performing medical experiments on enslaved women without anesthesia and without their consent. And so when we start really digging into reproductive health care, when we start talking about innovations, we start talking about all of these things that before Henrietta Lacks, there's so much richness in there about who's excluded and who's not considered when it comes to our own bodies.

HUSSEIN RASHID: All right, thank you so much for that introduction, Twanna. And Melissa, thank you for helping frame with some data. And I want to come back to some of the data questions, Melissa, is I think I have the sense that there is the arc of justice. And obviously, it needs to bend. It doesn't bend automatically. We need to be involved in bending that arc of justice. And so we expect to see changes generationally.

Now, your new book is on the politics of Gen Z. Is this true? Are we seeing generational shift on questions of these democratic ideals, like on inclusivity, equitability, health care access? And how does it look across genders?

MELISSA DECKMAN: Yeah, that's a great question. I think in terms of inclusivity more broadly, I mean, when I think of Generation Z, I wrote this book initially because I was struck that Gen Z women during the Trump era were actually engaging more in politics than their male counterparts, which was historically very unique. And I wanted to know why that was and what it meant for the political future.

So the book is really a much larger examination of the impact of both gender and sexual orientation and gender identity on the politics of Gen Z. But I think it is notable that Gen Z women, I think, are, in fact, the most liberal and progressive generation of young women. Not just my data showing that in the book, but Gallup recently had a really interesting study, a longitudinal study, looking at how people classify themselves in terms of their ideology.

And young women 18 to 29 are the most liberal cohort. And their liberal ideology and identification has really grown in the last decade. It's not merely in name only they're liberal. But Gallup, in my own book, also showed that they tend to hold the most progressive values on a range of issues, including reproductive care.

And so we find, at PRRI, that young women are the most staunchly supportive of abortion rights. We found as many as 7 in 10 young women say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, at higher rates than young men, although young men are more in favor of abortion rights than not. But really, the salience of that issue for young women is really, really palpable.

And I also find in my book that if you look at why and how some young women are engaging in politics, if you look at-- I did a model in the-- the analysis of regression model. And essentially, the more that young women support abortion rights and the more that they identify as feminist, the higher number of political acts they engage in. And so this is really, I think, really profound in helping us understand the politics and motivations of young women today. And reproductive rights certainly have a role to play in that.

But I think it's important to realize that Gen Z is incredibly different than older generations in the sense that they're more racially and ethnically diverse. Roughly 1 in 2 Zoomers are nonwhite. They're more likely to identify as LGBTQ. 1 in 4 Gen Zers identify as queer. And it's even higher among young women. About 30% of young women identify as LGBTQ.

And so that very diversity-- and they're also diverse and unique in that young people are less religious than older Americans. They kind of look like millennials, though, in terms of religious disaffiliation. But again, another way that Gen Z women are unique from their male counterparts is they're actually more likely to not be religiously affiliated.

And I think that makes sense in some ways because this is a very fiercely feminist generation in a lot of ways. Of course, no generation is monolithic. And there are certainly conservative women, and I talk to them in the book.

But generally speaking, this is a cohort of young women who've grown up with really strong self-esteem, been told that they can do and be anything. And they're running into some very traditionalist conservative religious faiths where, wait a minute, why aren't women being ordained? And why are we covering up the sexual abuse scandals that have faced young women who've come forward bravely?

And so they're turned off by a lot of that and, of course, also the treatment of LGBT individuals. So all of this is to say, this is a generation, I think-- especially with young women who are broadly, I think, supportive of inclusivity in our politics.

HUSSEIN RASHID: So let me try to emphasize something you said and then try to dig a little bit deeper. One is it sounds like this is not just values in theory. But the more values oriented your respondents were, the more likely they were to take action. So this is values in practice as well. It's not this abstraction.

MELISSA DECKMAN: Absolutely.

HUSSEIN RASHID: So that really struck me because I think there is a sense that younger generations believe these things, but they don't actually do anything about it. These are spoiled generations. We've heard this about millennials. We've heard this about Gen Z. I'm a Gen Xer. I heard it about my generation. So I think it's important to show where the data goes.

I think the one thing I'd like to tease out, Melissa, out of what you just said is you keep talking about religiously disaffiliated. And I know PRRI was one of the first to start talking about spiritual but not religious. And we started to understand that it didn't mean people were leaving religion. It meant they were leaving organized religion, which is a different concept. So these are not people who are leaving religion, if I'm understanding it correctly. These are just people who are leaving organized institutions of religion.

MELISSA DECKMAN: Well, I think it's a little bit of both, to be frank. So we have found that there are some people in American society who are spiritual but not religious. But generally speaking, people that have completely decided to disaffiliate, we asked them in an earlier-- we did a big, deep dive into this in a survey report we released right before Easter.

And we asked Americans, of those who've left, is it just that you haven't found the right place for you to worship? Or are you looking for some sort of organized activity where you could actually find a community of believers? Because part of a religious life is experiencing it communally.

But really, 90% of those folks said, no, I'm done, no thanks. [LAUGHS] And I think that's a really important point to recognize. And the leading reason that people have left religion is they just stopped believing.

Now, many of them also cite that treatment of LGBT individuals. That's really important for young people who've disaffiliated. They believe there's a lot of hypocrisy there, and there's not room for queer folks. And so that's very, to them, hypocritical of what a uniting message of love should be.

And don't get me wrong. There's lots of church communities, lots of faith traditions that are embracing LGBTQ Americans, too. But generally speaking, the young people equate religion with very conservative views on those issues there.

So it is interesting. I mean, I do think that Americans-- I think the human condition is searching for things and meaning and what that looks like in the future. We're just, I think, starting to figure-- still trying to sort what all that is, what that all means.

HUSSEIN RASHID: So if there is alienation from religion, which is helping to define politics, Twanna, one of the things that I've heard you speak about is the way technology is used to surveil people and how both governmental and nongovernmental-- it feels like this weird moment where sometimes the lines between government and a tech company gets really blurry. And there's also a sense of alienation coming from that direction. Could you speak into that a little bit, please?

TWANNA HINES: I'd love to. Yeah, and I love specifically that you called out both of those both state actors. But then you've also got private companies, especially tech companies. As we start to think about surveillance, what that even means, right? What does that look like? What does surveillance look like? It looks like things like a teen in Nebraska speaking to her mother using Facebook Messenger, talking about obtaining pills to terminate an abortion.

And so they're messaging each other privately, not Facebook newsfeed, right? This is in their private messengers, messages back and forth to each other about obtaining pills. That is a private company. Facebook is a private company.

That information can be subpoenaed by state actors saying, hey, we think this is what's going on. We're going to subpoena information from this private company Facebook to find out whether or not you're actually having these kinds of conversations. And so then what happens-- and this actually did happen in the case of Nebraska teen-- they're actually tried and sentenced to time in prison based on information that was traded privately on a private company. State actors did that.

The other kinds of things that we're seeing when it comes to surveillance is that we see for people traveling outside of their state. So say you live in a state where abortion is illegal or there's a ban that's so short that it's functionally illegal because by the time you would even know that you're pregnant, it's illegal to terminate that pregnancy. So say you live in one of those states, and you decide, OK, I'm actually going to travel to a different state to obtain an abortion or something of that nature.

All of different kinds of things that can be surveilled, everything from offline surveillance, such as police taking pictures of license plates, out-of-state license plates to say, hey, we actually know this is happening because here's a car that people drove. License plates gives us all the information that we need because that's all in databases as well. And so we can actually surveil who's going to what places for which things.

And so that is another way in which we see it. And that's nothing to speak of things like period trackers where many people who have periods will use a digital tracker to say, when did my period start? When did it end? So when you go for your OB/GYN visit and they say, What's the first date of your last period? you pull up your tracker, and that's how you know what it was.

Those things can be either subpoenaed by state actors and/or by individuals or groups, doxing folks and actually hacking into phones, things of that nature and getting that information and making it public in a lot of ways. So we see everything from surveillance digitally, offline, like the license plate example, and things of that nature. And that's for people who may or may not be having an abortion.

You can also use surveillance to take 2 plus 2 and get 25. What could that look like? Say, for example, you are not pregnant. So there is no pregnancy to terminate. But you use Uber or Lyft or another ridesharing place to get a trip from where you live to where your friends live. So you go to your friend's place. You hang out. You leave, all of these things.

Next day, you go to the pharmacy. You use Lyft or Uber again, and you transport. You could actually make the argument that someone terminate a pregnancy that didn't even exist because, say, your friend lives near an abortion clinic, a medical center that provides abortion. So that pharmacy provides pills that can terminate a pregnancy.

And so if there's the assumption that you may have terminated a pregnancy, that's another way in which people can also find themselves trapped in this net of surveillance. And this is one of the reasons why we need much more intersecting collaboration between the people working in movement spaces and surveillance, because that crowd will tell you for decades that people who've been going to rallies for Black Lives Matters and a lot of other things have been surveilled to the high heavens in all kinds of ways.

And then you've got, separately, the reproductive justice folks having the same thing. And so we need different intersecting fields speaking with each other-- cyber security folks, data privacy folks, reproductive justice folks. If we get these people in the room and have more conversations, then we have interesting things like, wait a minute, isn't HIPAA supposed to protect me in my health care information?

Hey, cybersecurity people, help me understand better how this is violating HIPAA. So there are more ways in which we can have folks in the room having these kinds of conversations like we're having now, where we're bringing different ideas together to make these kinds of conversations even richer.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you. So I think, for me, listening to both of you on this most recent explanation of your areas of expertise, I do want to come back to this question that you opened with that both of you spoke into, which is reproductive health care and white nationalism, because for me-- Twanna, you're putting this in the context of surveillance.

So it's about the question you raised of bodily autonomy. Who controls a woman's body? What happens to that body? Melissa, I think about the quote you gave-- I think you said it was from Katherine Stewart-- about white nationalism and the need for the right religion to restore a greatness, a perceived sense of lost national greatness. And that, of course, as you said, you're looking particularly at white Christian nationalism in this.

And so trying put those two things together in my head is-- and sorry. Melissa, as you're talking about people turning away from religion because they're seeing all these things that they feel are hypocritical or are not liberatory, which they're told religion should be, it seems a lot of defining what the white nation is in the context of white nationalism, by Christian nationalism is about controlling women's bodies, who gets to reproduce and under what conditions, and how that that is the value of a woman is their ability to be literally the carrier of the nation. Is that a fair assessment? Is that really where we're coming from and where we're going with this?

MELISSA DECKMAN: Oh, I--

TWANNA HINES: [INAUDIBLE]

[LAUGHS]

Go ahead. Go ahead. I'll speak after, yeah.

MELISSA DECKMAN: Yeah, I was actually thinking about that very question because I think in American politics, I would argue that pronatalism is having a moment. And I think it's having--

HUSSEIN RASHID: I'm going to ask you to define pronatalism for our audience, please.

MELISSA DECKMAN: OK. So a pronatalist is someone who thinks that we're having a population decline. And that's problematic. And so a pronatalist such as JD Vance would argue that we need more policies put into place that allow for more production of kids and really to better the nation.

And so just to give you an example-- and I think this is something that a lot of Americans have heard and maybe laughed off. But I want to get back to childless cat ladies because it had to come up at some point in this conversation. So recall, of course-- this went viral-- JD Vance, when he was running for Senate, a couple of years before-- of course, he's now the vice presidential nominee for the GOP-- was interviewed by Tucker Carlson.

And he lamented that, quote, "America was being run by a bunch of childless cat ladies who were miserable at their own lives and the choices they've made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too."

But adding on to that in that same interview, he went on to really criticize the Democratic leadership at the time, citing Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, who, at the time, did not have children but now has adopted children, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as never really having had their own children, saying, quote, "How does it make any sense that we've turned our country over to people who really don't have a direct stake in it?"

And really, what's happening is a very clear worldview that is pitting together childbearing with nationalism. So this worldview holds that those who produce children are really committed to the nation. And national power and privilege should really belong to them. And in fact, JD Vance has had floated before he became the VP nominee that, in fact, maybe we should give more voting rights to parents, or we should tax parents at lower rates to encourage people to produce children here.

Now, this isn't something new in, I think, American religion. I've studied the Christian right for many years. And you probably heard of the Quiverfull movement, or Americans might be familiar with the Duggars as an example of this idea. And the Quiverfull movement is really about trying to populate and to really breed as many Christians and really in a way that you can end up taking over society because you just keep having lots and lots of children here. And it leads to, of course, opposition to birth control.

And so before this talk, I went to look at some of the long-standing Christian right organizations out there, including Conservative Women for America, which was founded by the late Beverly Lahaye as a response to now in the 1970s in reaction to the second wave women's movement. And so here's what they say about having kids. "Populating the Earth is a mandate from God, not a threat to humanity."

And this, of course, is also-- the Christian right is often very critical of climate science and saying that we're alarmist about all these sorts of things. That can be your next webinar, but that linkage there.

But anyway, so "God created man in his own image," they go on to say. "In the image of God, he created him. And male and female, he created them," citing the Bible here. "Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the Earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, et cetera."

And so there's a biblical call then for many to have lots of kids, but it's really extended into national politics and nationalism. And one good example of this-- and I'm not a comparativist-- but you have to bring up Viktor Orban here, who has really explicitly endorsed, I think, racial pronatalism.

So this is, again, a quote that I pulled for tonight's talk. Orban has said several years ago, "Part of the picture of the decade of war facing us will be recurring waves of suicidal policy in the Western world. One such suicide attempt that I see is the great European population replacement program, which seeks to replace the missing European Christian children with migrants who are adults arriving from other civilizations."

So Orban has, in fact, instituted a very strict policy against migrants coming in the country, in fact, treating migrants at the border cruelly. He's kind of cut off migration from nearby Serbia, those folks who were Muslim, of course, also being very strict against LGBTQ rights because LGBTQ individuals, from their philosophy, can't really reproduce. And it really pushes a message that women should be taking up all their traditional roles as homemakers, as mothers in order to serve that kind of role for the state. And that's really the broader context that we're hearing.

But in the US, of course, you might think, well, that's in Hungary. That's not going to happen here. But I wanted to cite really quickly the work of Sam Perry. Sam Perry is a very talented sociologist of religion out of the University of Oklahoma. He's written extensively about Christian nationalism but also its link to pronatalist policies.

And so for him, the thing that Christian nationalists fear is replacement. So they would like a society that looks like them. Christian nationalists are very alarmed by the growing diversity of this country, for example, an America that's racially and religiously very diverse and less religious as well and more queer. And so how do you restore cultural primacy to white Christians?

One way you can do it is you can limit immigration, especially people who are brown and Black and don't look like other Americans. And you can label them things like horrible things we're hearing today in the politics is as immigrants who are, according to Trump, really talking about the great replacement theory and soiling the blood and using all of these horrible fascist language.

You can also, however, increase the number of babies that are born. And so Sam's work has found that Christian nationalism is very strong and lead to statements like, "Our declining fertility rate should alarm us as a nation. And married couples in our country should have more babies and not fewer."

And then finally, my last point on this from a policy perspective is to bring up Project 2025, which I'm sure we were going to get to anyway. This, of course, is the Heritage Foundation's blueprint for what policies they'd like to see enacted by a second Trump administration. Trump has disavowed knowing anything about it. But most of that blueprint, over 900 pages, was written largely by former Trump appointees and people in the first Trump administration.

But with respect to reproductive autonomy and with respect to health care, just a couple of things to bear in mind. Project 2025, for example, would really rescind US contraceptive provision. Twanna has already talked really about how that's not always been accessible anyway by lower-income women or people of color. But this would, in fact, gut even further family planning and federal contraceptive coverage that's now guaranteed under the Affordable Care Act.

It would change the fundamental premise that abortion is not health care, and that the CDC would be banned from ever talking about it that way. It would rename Health and Human Services to Department of Life. It would collect data on people who have had abortions, getting back to some of what Twanna was saying here in terms of using that surveillance state.

It would urge the Biden administration-- it would urge the Trump administration to rescind the Biden administration's policy on EMTALA, which is emergency medicine law. And if anyone remembers, the Supreme Court case, last year, dealt with this very issue in Idaho case where doctors were saying, look, the federal government guarantees that in an emergency situation, we have the ability to treat women. The Supreme Court kind of punted on that over a standing ruling. But nonetheless, this is still something that, I think, deals with government regulation.

And finally, last but not least, it was very clear that Project 2020 is arguing that the FDA should reverse its 2000 approval of the medication abortion drug mifepristone, because that's really how most early term abortions are happening in this country. And so it's a very clear policy blueprint and limiting access to health care.

And part of it is because of religious reasons that want to have, in fact, more babies in the country. So I think there is a policy, I think, mandate by some on the right to bring that into fruition if, in fact, Trump were elected into a second term.

HUSSEIN RASHID: I want to get your reflections. I do want to just point out one thing. For those who may not be aware of the great replacement theory, it is, as Melissa said, this idea that, well, whiteness will be replaced. This manifested in the Charlottesville riot where people were chanting, "Jews will not replace us," where Jewishness is a contingent sort of whiteness. And there's a lot of anti-Semitism that animates this movement.

It also animated the shooter at the Tree of Life Synagogue, where HIAS, which is a Jewish refugee resettlement organization, was believed to be bringing in more Muslims to advance the Marxist Sharia agenda to replace white America. So there's a lot that's going on here that's tied to a lot of our recent past. But Twanna, are your thoughts on reproductive autonomy, white nationalism?

TWANNA HINES: Oh yeah. Now we have to tell a story because we don't teach reconstruction in this country. And so people genuinely don't-- I think of Tom Hanks even saying like, Tulsa, what was that? And he's like, it's a shame that we don't learn these things.

And so I'm going to tell a little bit of a story that has to do with reconstruction, because a lot of people were like, if I say, Dred, they're like, who is Dred? What is Dred? What are we even talking about?

So when we talk about white nationalism, when we talk about replacement theory, all of these things, we have to start with a question, whose nation are we talking about? Who actually owns the United States? Who has the right to call themselves an American citizen? Whose nation are we talking about?

So if you're not familiar with the Dred Scott ruling, this goes back to 1857. So you've really got to understand the roots of things in this country to really understand what's going on with reproductive rights and the lack thereof, right?

OK, So Dred is a Black person born on then American soil and was wondering, wait a minute, why am I not considered an American? Why am I not considered a citizen? I'm a free Black person in these United States. Why would I not be a citizen just because I'm Black?

And so this was a case that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and Dred lost. And the court was like, no, you are not an American. This nation is not yours. If you're confused about this in any way, go back and read the founding documents. It was never supposed to include you ever, ever, ever, ever.

So all of this Black people being American, there is no such thing, according to this ruling, as Black people being Americans. This is, to this day, considered one of the worst Supreme Court rulings in the history of this country. And it was never overturned.

It was nullified by the 14th Amendment that came in 1868. So the 14th Amendment says, OK, if we're Americans, if we're going to do this thing called America, then we're all Americans. So then Dred is nullified, because if we're all Americans, that includes Black folks, too, right? We're all Americans.

And it's interesting when we talk about the 14th Amendment, because that's the basis upon which Roe was founded. Because if we're all Americans, that includes these women with these women's bodies for having abortions. And the only reason we would even know that a woman was having-- or someone who could be pregnant was having an abortion is because we would be violating her privacy rights. We would be violating their privacy rights between their doctor.

And if we're doing that, we're not treating these pregnant people like the full Americans that they are. We're behaving like we're in this Dred Scott kind of America instead of this 14th Amendment America that says, we're all Americans.

And so when we think of Roe in that context of like all of us being Americans, all of us having rights, one of the things that I always caution people to think about when we talk about the Supreme Court, what they decided is important? Yes. What's equally, if not more important, is, what did the dissenting justices say?

So let's roll back to 1973. The dissenting, so the people who said, no, no, no, these women are full Americans. What are you all talking about? The dissenting justice. So back then, they're saying, we're dissenting.

The dissension here is based on this idea that abortion in and of itself is, quote, "not so deeply rooted." It's not rooted, that this whole idea of women having rights isn't actually deeply rooted into the fabric of this country. I won't read it. This is why it's up here, right? That's the quote. You see it for yourself. That's what the dissenting justice said.

So when we have Roe, they're like, I don't know about this. This isn't actually part of what America is actually supposed to be. This is some trendy thing where we're allowing women to have full access. Not so sure about that. And so we talked about-- as soon as Roe was turned, they started stripping rights from tons of people. And I already talked about that. We can get to that other--

So then we get to Dobbs. So if we think of that root of Roe, until Dobbs 2022, was never overturned. Until then, Dred still never overturned. It was just that the 14th Amendment nullified those rulings. And so Dobbs overturns Roe. Dred is still in place, not overturned.

So Dobbs physically overturns Roe and says, no. So, again, let's talk about the dissenting justices, because what was decided is important. But what's equally, if not more important, is what the dissenters said.

So in this case, we're not talking about Roe dissenters who said, this isn't deeply rooted. The Supreme Court-- so the coworkers of these justices who voted to go with Dobbs and overturn Roe said, here's what you need to be worried about, and verbatim if you want to read the quote.

They are overturning this based on this idea that a pregnant person's right to choose is not deeply rooted into this idea of America as a nation. That's not part of it. It's not deeply rooted. That's some extra stuff. That's some things we'll just let states decide. It's not deeply rooted in who we are as a nation, so white nationalism. You have to dial back to who's, nation is this in the first place?

And so the other thing they said, well, if we're going to talk about that, heck, well, if we're going to say, it's not deeply rooted, then you have to know that a lot of rights that people have in this country are not, quote quote, "deeply rooted."

So either this is hypocrisy, this whole kind of "This is not deeply rooted. We're going to overturn Roe, or to paraphrase, they are lying. They're lying to you when they say that they're not going to come after other rights because-- and we actually went and read the entire dissent, hundreds and hundreds of pages, and looked at each of the court cases that they namechecked. And I did this as an image because I'm going to slow this down because religion plays a part of this.

So when these dissenting Supreme Court justices for the Dobbs decision said, whoa, whoa, whoa, they're only overturning this because they're saying Roe isn't deeply rooted, but there are a lot of rights that aren't deeply rooted, such as-- and they namechecked all of these. So let's talk about the rights that-- and again, these have not been overturned except Roe.

And so the court was saying, if they're going to overturn Roe as they just did, they have every ability. And you should be aware they're going to go after all of these other ones. So let's talk about-- far left there.

Meyer said, "If you want to educate your kids in this nation, you can do that in any language." So kids can learn Spanish. They can learn Mandarin. They can learn Arabic. It's good actually for-- there's all kinds of research. It's good for your brain to learn more languages. We have to go to court to allow people to learn different languages.

Next, Pierce, Pierce versus Society of Sisters-- this was a case that had to go to the court because the court was saying, hmm, in this nation, we're going to decide there's only one way to school kids. So yeah, you can do it in different languages. OK, we'll give you that. But ah, ah, we're going to decide what kinds of school, so no Catholic schools, no Jewish day schools, no any of these kinds of schools.

So this went to the court, and people said, well, if I want to give my child a religious-based, faith-based education, I should be allowed to-- leave funding out of it. But if my kid wants to learn something about religion in a schooling setting, that should be allowed. They had to go to court for that, and they won that.

Skinner-- "People should not be forcibly made sterile, sterilized without their consent." Griswold-- "Married people should have access to birth control," '65. A lot of people don't know when-- a lot of the sex ed in the school in this country was being taught. You had to be married to take those classes.

And so Griswold was saying, OK, married people should-- due to the privacy, 14th Amendment, all of these are 14th Amendment. Married people should be able to get birth control. We have to go to court for that in one, Griswold.

Loving-- "People of different ethnicities should be allowed to marry." Eisenstadt-- you know that Griswold stuff that said, "Married people should get birth control?" How about unmarried people? If we're all Americans in this nation, single people should have access to birth control. We have to go to court for it. And that's why single people can get birth control.

Moore-- "Families aren't just mom, dad, and kids. If Grandma wants to live with us, that's OK. We had to go to court to get that right." That's a Supreme Court ruling. Moore versus East Cleveland, right?

Carey-- "We should be able to distribute birth control." If people have access, we should be able to distribute it because they were actually dragging them into court for giving people and selling condoms. So Carey gave us the right to actually distribute birth control.

Turner-- "People who are incarcerated have rights, including the right to marry if they want to." Lawrence-- "Consenting adults can behave in sexual activities, even if that's sodomy." Consenting adults can choose which consensual sexual activities they engage in. And the government can't tell them, no. We have to go to court for that, and that's not that long ago.

And then Obergefell-- marriage equality. So all of these-- so the Supreme Court told us, look, they just overturned Roe. All of these other 14th Amendment cases are part of the very same fabric.

So when we say, oh, it looks like this country is going back, I would argue we're not talking about going back to pre-Roe. This is the argument we've been having for a very long time. Are we in 1857 Dred Scott kind of country, where the whole idea of nation only includes a few people, and we can actively include some?

Or are we a 14th Amendment 1864 kind of country where if we're American, we're all American, and we all have equal rights? And that is the argument that we still see happening, so much so that the far right actually challenged Kamala Harris's ability to run for president based on Dred. And so when we talk about the deep roots of this stuff, it's very, very relevant even today.

HUSSEIN RASHID: So Twanna, I want to try to-- there's a lot of history there. And I to thank you for that. I want to try to recap to make sure I've understood, which is that the majority in Dobbs is talking about deeply rooted traditions, that this is not a deeply rooted tradition.

TWANNA HINES: Exactly.

HUSSEIN RASHID: And the dissent is saying, well, hey, there are a whole bunch of other things that we've done in the last 100 years almost all based on the 14th Amendment, so same underlying principle that are also not then therefore deeply rooted. So either all those things are available for us to get rid of, including interracial marriage, birth control for married and unmarried couples, privacy in your bedroom.

Either all those things are on the chopping block, or there's hypocrisy on the court. And you're grounding that in our history. And you're going back to the Dred Scott decision of 1857. I think I want to sit somewhere between 1857 and 1923 where your timeline began or just before 1923, which is the fluidity of race in this country as well.

1922 is the Ozawa decision, which says, "Japanese Americans cannot become citizens because they're not white." And 1923 is the Thind decision, which says, "South Asians can't have be citizen of this country because they're not white." And so therefore, those are deeply held traditions, either. I mean, it's only the Chinese Exclusion Act, which, as the name suggests, keeps out people from East Asia is only done away with in the 1940s. 1965 is when we start liberalizing immigration.

But then the other side of it is our founding documents begin "All men are created equal," explicitly cutting out half the population. And then when we start digging into which men, it comes down to class and race and presumed sexuality, sexual orientation.

And so it seems then that the deeply held tradition is a tradition of exclusion, whereas a democracy or the democratic ideal is one of inclusion. So there inherently has to be a tension here. Are we looking at democratic ideals of what this country could be based on its founding? Or are we saying there is a history here that we have to honor, which is actually the exclusion of nonwhite men from participation as citizens of this country?

And it seems to me that's what your history is highlighting for us and what the dissent in Dobbs is pointing us towards as well, that we cannot be working towards democratic ideals and looking at the deep past of our country without owning up to what's happened. Is that a fair assessment of what I'm understanding from you?

TWANNA HINES: Yeah, absolutely. And I would just add, when we say those-- that timeline on the chopping block, that's literally Project 2025. You literally see a lot of these things explicitly called out as being on the chopping block.

HUSSEIN RASHID: So I want to come back that this has been very helpful for me to clarify some of this history. Then, Melissa, it raises a question for me-- and actually, this is actually more for both of you. Now, before I get there, let's have a specific question for you that I'll come to a question for both of you.

Melissa, in your previous response, you quoted from the Bible, specifically the book of Genesis. "Be fruitful and multiply. Seek dominion." Now, A, there's a question of translation there. Is this really what's happening?

And I'm fascinated by the fact that we had to go to school to say, you could teach in another language other than English. Because having spent part of the summer in Amsterdam, I'm like, if you're not speaking four languages, what are you doing?

But to the point, the question of translation of this verse-- and also, we know, because it is in Genesis, this is an important text for Jewish communities who don't have the same reading of the text. The text is originally in Hebrew.

How do white Christian nationalists-- what comes first, the dominionism that then gets read back into the text? Or is it that, oh, we have this reading of the text, this sort of more modernized King James that got us to where we are. And we're not going to give it up. And it gave birth to our dominionism. And so we're investing in that. And maybe it's a chicken and egg question. But it feels like there's something there about translation and making meaning out of this text.

MELISSA DECKMAN: Gosh, I'm probably not the right person to ask. I'm no biblical scholar. I had a lot of Sunday school. But I just think it's really the whole question of which texts to really use and justify. I know many conservative faiths in the Christian tradition really are sticking to the King James version, heated debates about, should we look at, I think, [INAUDIBLE] or the NIV version, I mean--

HUSSEIN RASHID: NRSV, the New Revised Standard Version, or the New International Version. Or take your pick.

MELISSA DECKMAN: I think that matters less than really using biblical scripture to justify the ends that you want to pursue, because I think you can, of course, look to all kinds of passages in the Bible, for example, to justify why abortion should be illegal to those saying, there are religious cases to be made for why it should be legal.

If you look at-- I think, there's a case in the courts now of a Jewish organization that's trying to say, look, limiting access to reproductive health care is actually a violation of my right. And they point to scripture in the Old Testament that can be interpreted in such a way that looks at the value of women as different than the values of a fetus. So I tend to think of these things as larger justifications for explaining the policy outcomes that you want.

For example, this isn't really related to, I think, reproductive rights conversation. But when Trump was first elected president, the what I would call kind of post hoc theological rationalization for Trump by the Christian right, who, of course, demanded that Bill Clinton resign over an affair with an intern. And we can have that conversation later.

But clearly, there was a sense that they're suddenly having to acquiesce to the fact that Trump is a very, I think, morally problematic person. But nonetheless you hear all these references to things like King Cyrus, who is a pagan, who essentially freed Babylon to let Jews back into Jerusalem. Or you talk about King David, who was a flawed man. But God had given a King David a mandate to usher in Jewish rule.

So I tend to think of those things as more we look at the passages that really justify our, you know-- I think. But again, I'm no biblical scholar. So--

HUSSEIN RASHID: No, fair enough, fair enough. But you're understanding more as an instrumentalist argument. This sort of supports the worldview we've already got. I think, for me-- and I will come to the question that I have for both of you in a moment. I think, for me, there is a-- coming from our office in Religion and Public Life where a lot of what we talk about is that no religion is a monolith.

So even when we look at Christianity, often we hear religion in mainstream media. And we automatically associate it with white Christian nationalists, whether we're aware of it or not, because that's the language that has become so normalized that because of religious illiteracy, the loudest voices, the most extreme voices become the ones that are held up as the normative voices as opposed to the people who are quietly helping others, building community, trying to transform their communities for the better, doing the direct service work that doesn't get enough love and attention through government support.

And so when we start unpacking it, I think that there are a variety of Christian perspectives on abortion. And Melissa, you've talked about this in your polling already.

But we also know that from our lived reality that we can look at the Catholic Church's stance on abortion, for example and what pro-life means is related to also being antideath penalty and anti-war and trying to support people who are struggling in their lives through material resource distribution as opposed to perhaps a different reading which is more tied to a nationalist agenda, which is pro-life insofar as it builds the white nation, but not necessarily as a consistent ideology.

So we can look at that, but also the various types of religious diversity. If we are thinking the Supreme Court is standing on the side of religious freedom, how do they argue for religious freedom and say there is, in fact, only one opinion on reproductive care? Because it feels like there are then conflicts with numerous other religious traditions, where abortion has very different meanings.

And I think we've seen this with Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu communities stepping forward and saying, this is an infringement on our civil liberties and our freedom of expression. So I am fascinated by this dynamic and this going back and forth.

And I'm also taken by the fact by how it permeates our zeitgeist. So as you're talking about natalism earlier, natalism and the tech bros seem to go hand in hand right now. There's a certain ethos in this founders' air about natalism that I'm fascinated by, that our nation is terrible, and we must build the nation. And we are the right people.

It's this very weird, dominating dynamic, like performative alpha maleism coming into play. And I know it's not within the scope of our discussion. But this vision of masculinity, I think, is-- we're seeing played out on a very meta level. But the question I have for both of you-- sorry, now that I've tried to process this real time with you all-- is--

MELISSA DECKMAN: We're watching the arc of where we're going here. You've kind of [INAUDIBLE]. It's a really good place, actually.

[LAUGHS]

TWANNA HINES: I love it.

[LAUGHS]

HUSSEIN RASHID: The question I have for both of you and why Silicon Valley was on my mind is, Twanna, you already started us talking about the negative aspects of technology, particularly surveillance technology or specifically surveillance technology. But it also feels, again, having come up when email for the public was a new thing. And this is how you found people, and this is how you found community.

The internet was a golden place where trolls were something you found in Dungeons and Dragons and not on the internet. How are people using the internet now on questions of reproductive health care, reproductive access, building community, and however you all want to take it? But I'm curious what that means for us right now.

TWANNA HINES: Yeah, oh, I love the internet. And I also think it's like-- I often say this. Tech is basically an accelerant. So whatever's going on in the world, technology can just accelerate that, like any accelerant just-- an accelerant doesn't start a fire as much as it makes one larger.

And so if we think of technology in that way-- yeah, we've got more trolls. We've got all these negative things-- I'm super excited about all the beautiful things that technology is delivering to us. There are small abortion funds in Texas and Alabama and all of these other places. They're getting money from Minnesota, from California, from all over the world to help provide rural women access to abortion care and the funds that they need to get that access.

And those donations aren't coming from handwritten checks that are mailed through postal. It's because of online technologies allow funds to flow to the causes that need them. So fundraising is one of the positive bright lights that we're seeing in the ways that technology is helping it.

I spoke earlier about the need for different people and different fields to collaborate. Legal can do amazing things with tracking court cases that are moving through the system that use, for example, religious freedom exemptions to get around some of these awful things, because Hussein, you're 1,000% right. When people think of religion, they think Christian. When we think of Christian, they think Christian right, not Christian left.

And so that if you ask people, What's the Christian left? they've heard of Christian right. But they're not even familiar really with Christian left in that same way, liberation theology, all of these kinds of things.

And so a lot of legal court case tracking, lawyers are able to look at people like Reform Judaism, Unitarian Universalist, Church of Satan. There are all kinds of religions that have filed religious freedom lawsuits saying, these right-wing Christian edicts that you're putting out there about abortion are infringing upon my religion to actually practice it in the way that I see fit. So they wouldn't be able to track the movement of these kinds of legal innovations if it weren't for the internet.

The other kinds of things that we're seeing, telemedicine. So the most abortions and terminations of pregnancy period in the United States, about 63% are medical abortions. So the ability to provide access to get pills online, self-managed abortion access, self-managed care, all of these kinds of things are made possible with telemed, with getting pills via postal, all of these kinds of things the internet makes possible.

So just as, yes, very, very valid, there's this awful world out there that can swirl in the internet, there are also all of these kind of beautiful, creative, innovative, inspiring and hope building, ways in which people are using technology to fight back against those same very negative influences that we see.

MELISSA DECKMAN: I'll just add to what Twanna said. I think she had some really great comments there. But with respect to young people, I do think I agree with Twanna that social media is really an accelerant. And one of the reasons that I think we've seen young women become more engaged in politics than young men is, really, they find community on social media. And it really allows them to find like-minded people more quickly, not only to get information about politics, but also to take that information and actually translate it into more boots on the ground kind of activism.

So I see on social media feeds of these young people, this is how you get a permit to have a rally. This is how you go register to vote. This is how you contact your member of Congress or your local state, city council member. But it really actually translates into actual tangible political activity as well. So I think it is an accelerant for young people in particular.

HUSSEIN RASHID: I'm really glad. Thank you both for that. And, Melissa, I'm glad you remind us that this is not a virtual space for-- there may have been a transitional moment where virtual stayed virtual. But there's now maturity around this, where virtual turns into practical action, not just by remote one, which is what you were speaking at, like the transmission of funds, but really also organizing and bringing people together.

So thank you both for that, because I think there is a lot that is not good in our technological moment. And there's still also a lot of good in it. What is something practical our audience can do leaving this conversation?

TWANNA HINES: I'm going to make this very easy for you. I'm going to tell the very last story of the day, and so my very last story of the day. We might have others after this. And I hope you all enjoy beautiful story times even after this has continued.

OK, so without going into all of the details, my firm produced a report called Three Acts of Justice. And hopefully, we can be able to drop the link to that directly in this chat.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Just dropped.

TWANNA HINES: I'm sorry?

HUSSEIN RASHID: We just dropped the link in anticipation.

TWANNA HINES: Oh, you read my mind. I love this. OK, so here's what we've got here. And so what we did is when Roe was overturned in June of 2022-- it was leaked before that, but when it was actually overturned-- one of the things that we looked at-- so between the leaking of it, the actual-- all of that was 2022, various months in 2022.

We started immediately. And we said, you know what we're going to do? All of this stuff that we've been saying is going to happen. Like we said, Roe was going to be overturned. All of these things, these things that people who have been working in this field for decades and generations have been saying, watch. We're just going to watch this happen.

We're going to fight against it. We're going to fight like hell. And we're also going to document it. My firm took two years, from 2022 when Dobbs decision was announced until 2024. We looked at instances where women were tried for murder. We looked at instances where Facebook data was used to throw people in prison. We looked at instances where people were finding interesting legal innovations to fight back against some of these things.

And we released a new report called Three Acts of Justice. And we talk about some of the things I talk about today because we cannot understand the present, let alone where we need to go, if we don't understand where we come from. So we talk a little bit about the history of that.

And then the way that we wrote this paper, in addition to writing it like a play-- act one, act two, act three, because storytelling always matters, right? In addition to doing it in a more creative, innovative way of writing a report, for every single thing that we explained, here's what the problem is. We immediately followed up with "and here's the fix. Here's the recommendation."

And so throughout the report, we said, here's the problem. Here's what's happening with surveillance. Here's how we fix it. Here's what's happening here. Here's what we've already seen people do this and they're successful. Replicate this.

So we do it throughout the entire report. And the very last section we call the finale, it's just pages and pages and pages of recommendations, really easy things that people can do right now to protect and further promote reproductive health care access for all.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you. Melissa?

MELISSA DECKMAN: I don't have a lovely book project like that. So I think congratulations, Twanna, one on that. I would just say, as a scholar and as the head of a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, we really are trying to influence public conversations about these important topics. And we do so from a very data-driven and empirical basis.

So I would encourage folks to read our reports online to promote those reports. For scholars in the group, our data are all publicly accessible. We are very committed to data transparency. But please you can download the data set yourself and use them in your analyses and promote sort of better understanding about American attitudes on all these important topics that we're dealing with today.

So go to our website, prri.org. Sign up for our newsletters. But look at our data. And please just spread the word, because I think in an age that is really just mired in a lot of disinformation, just having access to what Americans truly believe is important.

HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you both so much, Twanna and Melissa. Really, I've learned so much from this conversation. I hope our audience has as well. To our audience, thank you for being with us this evening.

This is the third in a series of four. Please join us next week as we continue and finish this series. On Tuesday, October 2, we will be talking about rematriation, land, and healing with Cynthia Wilson and Doreen Bird. Please make sure you register. And information will be posted in the chat. Again, thank you all this evening and have a good night.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor-- Religion and Public Life.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.