--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hello? Hello, is this Bree?
Bree: Yes, this is Bree. You're one of our summer interns from Today Explained.
Sean Rameswaram: Yes, I am. But you're sick. Very sick, yes. You haven't been with us for days and days and days. It's felt like a millennia.
Bree: Well, since you're not here, I thought I'd, like, bring the show to you.
Sean Rameswaram: That sounds amazing. I appreciate that. Okay, here goes nothing.
Sean Rameswaram: Uber's moving forward, listening to feedback so they can improve and get better with every trip. They're building new features to take the stress out of your pickup and working on ways to keep you better protected and connected throughout your ride. And you can find out more by going to uber.com slash moving forward.
Sean Rameswaram: [chuckles] Look at me now, Mom. At some point tonight, the United States will know who President Donald Trump plans to put on the Supreme Court. But at this point, we already know one thing about her or him.
Sean Rameswaram: The justices that I'm going to appoint will be pro-life. Where the appointee will stand on abortion. I think this is an opportunity to restore a culture of life in this country that honors God and blesses people.
Sean Rameswaram: We definitely see this as an answer to prayer. Justice Kennedy was a legit swing vote on the issue. He was the vote that was keeping Roe v. Wade the law of the land. That is done.
Sean Rameswaram: So what happens now to one of the most controversial decisions the United States Supreme Court has ever made.
Sean Rameswaram: So a lot of people assume that Roe was what made abortion controversial, and that couldn't be further from the truth.
Sean Rameswaram: Mary Ziegler is the author of After Roe, the Lost History of the Abortion Debate. Before Roe, in 1973, was a state-by-state war going on to determine whether abortion would be legal in specific states.
Sean Rameswaram: Heated debate on abortion is taking place throughout the country. You can hear it in churches, women's clubs, on college campuses and state legislatures.
Sean Rameswaram: Both sides press their propaganda war with rallies and marches, slogans and posters. For example, New York State had pretty much no abortion restrictions before O.
Sean Rameswaram: Other states like Texas pretty much didn't allow any abortions at all. And many states were somewhere in between.
Sean Rameswaram: So there was an ongoing fight on a state-by-state basis between anti-abortion forces and abortion rights forces to figure out what the law was going to look like.
Sean Rameswaram: One lawmaker brought a fetus and a bottle to the New York debate. Right here, in the jar.
Sean Rameswaram: That decision is personal, not only for the people of the state of New York, but for each and every member of this legislature.
Sean Rameswaram: No priest or politician, no doctor or any hospital administrator, no government official or husband who should have the right to force any woman to have a child against her will.
Sean Rameswaram: So when Roe came down, it was part of an already really bitter fight.
Sean Rameswaram: The Supreme Court has been asked to rule specifically whether laws restricting abortion in Texas and Georgia are a violation of the right to privacy and a denial of individual rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
Sean Rameswaram: If the Supreme Court decides that Texas and Georgia laws on abortion are unconstitutional, that would open the way to legalized abortion throughout the country.
Sean Rameswaram: We'll hear arguments in number 18, Roe against Wade. Who was Roe? Who was Wade?
Sean Rameswaram: I want you to meet Jane Roe of the famed case Roe vs. Wade. She is Norma McCorvey.
Sean Rameswaram: Norma McCorvey was a woman who wanted to enter pregnancy and wasn't allowed to because of the law that Texas had on the books at the time.
Sean Rameswaram: Norma McCorvey at the time was 21. I found myself pregnant for the third time. I found out where an illegal abortion clinic was in Dallas. I went to it.
Sean Rameswaram: It had been closed about a week before I had gotten there. Your baby was brought to term and adopted, right?
Sean Rameswaram: Yes, sir, it was. So you never had an abortion?
Sean Rameswaram: No, sir, I never have.
Sean Rameswaram: And they then took you as their symbolic case to go to the court?
Sean Rameswaram: Yes, sir. But I didn't attend any of the court hearings or testify or anything like that.
Sean Rameswaram: Just knew you didn't want a baby?
Sean Rameswaram: Yes.
Sean Rameswaram: And she subsequently and kind of famously became a pretty prominent symbol for the anti-abortion movement.
Sean Rameswaram: I've cheated people out of money. I've sold drugs. I was an abusive alcoholic for, you know, many, many years.
Sean Rameswaram: But I think the far greater sin that I did was to be the plaintiff in Roe versus Wade.
Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so Roe is an alias for Norma McCorvey, who's this young woman who wanted to end her pregnancy in Dallas.
Sean Rameswaram: Who was Wade?
Sean Rameswaram: Wade was the district attorney of Dallas at the time that Roe v. Wade was litigated, and Norma McCorvey and the other plaintiffs in Roe were arguing that Texas's law was unconstitutional and filed suit against the state of Texas, and Henry Wade was the named defendant.
Sean Rameswaram: Good evening. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court today legalized abortions.
Sean Rameswaram: The majority in cases from Texas and Georgia said that the decision to end a pregnancy during the first three months belongs to the woman and her doctor, not the government.
Sean Rameswaram: Thus, the anti-abortion laws of 46 states were rendered unconstitutional.
Sean Rameswaram: For two reasons. First, that the law was impermissibly vague.
Sean Rameswaram: and second, that it violated a woman's right to continue or terminate a pregnancy.
Sean Rameswaram: Who delivered the decision in Roe v. Wade?
Sean Rameswaram: So the justice who delivered the decision was Harry Blackmun, who was a Republican nominee, interestingly.
Sean Rameswaram: And he spent a lot of time at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota thinking a lot about abortion as a medical procedure and doctors' thoughts about abortion.
Sean Rameswaram: And a lot of that research and thinking was evident in the final opinion in Roe.
Sean Rameswaram: The more recent abortion decisions out of the Supreme Court have been pretty close calls.
Sean Rameswaram: Was Roe the original close call? Was it a tight decision?
Sean Rameswaram: No, it was actually a 7-2 decision.
Sean Rameswaram: Wow.
Sean Rameswaram: And it's also interesting because Harry Blackmun thought at the time that Roe would not only be uncontroversial in the Supreme Court, but actually in the country.
Sean Rameswaram: So I think Blackmun thought that this was going to be a fairly unremarkable opinion.
Sean Rameswaram: So the fact that we're still talking about it this many years later probably would have surprised the seven justices in the majority.
Sean Rameswaram: And does the fact that it was seven to two speak to a different era of the court as far as the way political ideology influenced it?
Sean Rameswaram: Or was it just not that controversial a case for the justices on the court at the time?
Sean Rameswaram: I think it was a lot of justices who were fairly openly conservative about other things like Warren Berger the chief justice at the time who had been a great critic of you know earlier decisions giving rights to criminal defendants, for example, just didn't think that abortion was going to be the kind of culture war issue it became.
Sean Rameswaram: So I think it speaks both to how at least the justices, maybe even the elites, thought abortion was going to be less of a big deal politically and constitutionally than ultimately was the case.
Sean Rameswaram: The Supreme Court today ruled that abortion is completely a private matter to be decided by mother and doctor in the first three months of pregnancy.
Sean Rameswaram: During the second three months of pregnancy, it ruled a state may regulate abortion procedures, but only to ensure the safety of the mother.
Sean Rameswaram: And in the last three months, whatever state laws say prevails.
Sean Rameswaram: So the first takeaway was that the right to privacy was broad enough to encompass a woman's decision to end her pregnancy, right?
Sean Rameswaram: So the 14th Amendment right to privacy included a woman's right to end a pregnancy.
Sean Rameswaram: Why did Justice Blackmun choose to base his decision on the right to privacy?
Sean Rameswaram: I feel like that might be surprising to a lot of people.
Sean Rameswaram: In part, it was because there's a line of cases that the court had decided earlier that were grounded in the right to privacy that seemed analytically related to abortion.
Sean Rameswaram: So in 1965, in a case called Griswold v. Connecticut, the court had held that a law from Connecticut banning married couples from using birth control was unconstitutional.
Sean Rameswaram: And then the court held that a Massachusetts law preventing single people from using contraception was unconstitutional.
Sean Rameswaram: And in that opinion, the court held that if the right to privacy means anything, it means the right for an individual to decide whether to bear or beget a child.
Sean Rameswaram: So by that point, the right to privacy had come to mean, at least for the Supreme Court, something that looked more like a freedom to make decisions about really important areas of your life.
Sean Rameswaram: Okay, so the 14th Amendment right to privacy includes a woman's right to end her pregnancy.
Sean Rameswaram: What other provisions are in the Roe decision?
Sean Rameswaram: The second one was that the Constitution's idea of a person, because the Constitution mentions the word person a lot, didn't include fetuses or unborn children.
Sean Rameswaram: The third was that the state's interest in protecting fetal life wasn't compelling at contraception, which meant that states couldn't ban abortion.
Sean Rameswaram: And then probably the final one was what's called the trimester framework.
Sean Rameswaram: So Roe basically said that what states can do depended on how far along in pregnancy a woman was.
Sean Rameswaram: So the government could do very little in the first trimester and couldn't do anything to protect fetuses or fetal life until after viability, which I think in 1973 was around the 24th to 26th week.
Sean Rameswaram: So those were the big takeaways.
Sean Rameswaram: So Rose Hefty, there's that 14th Amendment right to privacy, but then it also defines who a person is.
Sean Rameswaram: It says states can't get involved at contraception, and it breaks down government involvement based on trimesters.
Sean Rameswaram: It's decided in January of 1973. Is it immediately celebrated, hated? Is it just another day?
Sean Rameswaram: The abortion rights movement immediately after Roe didn't think that there was as much to fight about, although there were real questions about whether abortion was going to be accessible, even if it was legal.
Sean Rameswaram: So now when you think of abortion, most people think of freestanding clinics, either independent clinics or Planned Parenthood.
Sean Rameswaram: January 22nd, 1973 will stand out as one of the great days for freedom and free choice.
Sean Rameswaram: This allows a woman free choice as whether or not to remain pregnant.
Sean Rameswaram: This is extraordinary.
Sean Rameswaram: At the time, that was a pretty new phenomenon.
Sean Rameswaram: So a lot of women who were getting abortions were still getting them at doctor's offices or hospitals.
Sean Rameswaram: So in a lot of states, like in Louisiana and Mississippi, there were still women dying because they were having illegal abortions or they couldn't access abortion, especially poor women of color, partly because the services weren't available even if they were legal.
Sean Rameswaram: So the abortion rights movement knew that the kind of medical side of the equation was still a work in progress.
Sean Rameswaram: But I think there weren't political rallies as much on the abortion rights side because they thought Roe had settled the question.
Sean Rameswaram: And how did abortion opponents react to Roe?
Sean Rameswaram: The anti-abortion movement reacted pretty badly to Roe right away.
Sean Rameswaram: How many millions of children prior to their birth will never live to see the light of day because of the shocking action of the majority of the United States Supreme Court today?
Sean Rameswaram: The first push was for a constitutional amendment that would not just overturn Roe, but that would ban abortion nationwide.
Sean Rameswaram: But over time, as it became clear that the Constitution wasn't going to be amended, leading anti-abortion groups decided that the goal was going to be to overturn Roe, not to amend the Constitution.
Sean Rameswaram: and that as part of that process, there would have to be all of these incremental restrictions that would set the stage for a decision overturning Roe.
Sean Rameswaram: Where does this national fight go? Is it to legislation?
Sean Rameswaram: Well, what happened after that was the Supreme Court for a while rejected efforts to chip away at Roe through the early 1980s.
Sean Rameswaram: But then some of the justices who had been on the Roe majority began age and retire.
Sean Rameswaram: It's not just in fulfillment of my constitutional duty, but with great pride and respect for his many years of public service that I am today announcing my intention to nominate United States Circuit Judge Anthony Kennedy to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
Sean Rameswaram: By 1989, you had a plurality on the court essentially saying Roe doesn't make any sense.
Sean Rameswaram: This whole idea of viability is not constitutional law. It's kind of the court playing doctor.
Sean Rameswaram: And so it seemed at that point to anti-abortion activists that the court was pretty much inviting them to challenge Roe immediately.
Sean Rameswaram: So by 1992, the most recent Supreme Court nominees had taken their place.
Sean Rameswaram: There were people like Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy and David Souter who were widely expected to vote that Roe wasn't good law.
Sean Rameswaram: And so the court wound up taking a case called Planned Parenthood versus Casey.
Sean Rameswaram: The court agreed to uphold three of four restrictions on abortions in Pennsylvania.
Sean Rameswaram: But at the core of the case was whether or not they should overturn Roe v. Wade.
Sean Rameswaram: And the court retained what they called the essential holding of Roe, so the idea that the Constitution does protect a right to abortion.
Sean Rameswaram: But the court also changed Roe in foundational ways.
Sean Rameswaram: The court got rid of the trimester framework and replaced it with this kind of nebulous thing called the Undue Burden Standard.
Sean Rameswaram: The Undue Burden Standard What that So the Undue Burden Standard says that abortion regulations are constitutional unless they have the purpose or effect of creating a substantial obstacle for women seeking abortion.
Sean Rameswaram: It wasn't clear to anyone what that meant.
Sean Rameswaram: The court applied it in the Pennsylvania case Casey and wound up striking down only one of a bunch of abortion restrictions that were before the justices.
Sean Rameswaram: That was a law requiring women to notify their husbands.
Sean Rameswaram: So it was clear to most observers that Casey would allow states to regulate abortion much more than Roe had.
Sean Rameswaram: The fact is the court did uphold Pennsylvania, a very restrictive law.
Sean Rameswaram: And I think it opened the door and gave a green light to politicians across the country to enact more onerous restrictions.
Sean Rameswaram: And actually, when we're talking about Roe being overturned now, we're really actually talking about Casey because Casey is the binding law now.
Sean Rameswaram: And Roe, too, but what's left of Roe after Casey, not the original decision.
Sean Rameswaram: Really?
Sean Rameswaram: So Roe v. Wade isn't even the question when we talk about Roe v. Wade?
Sean Rameswaram: It's this Casey Planned Parenthood case from 92?
Sean Rameswaram: In a way, yes, right?
Sean Rameswaram: So Casey modified Roe in fundamental ways.
Sean Rameswaram: You kind of can't talk about Roe being overturned without talking about Casey because the version of Roe that we have now is one that's been heavily, heavily modified in 1992.
Sean Rameswaram: It's interesting in its own right, right, because why are we still talking about Roe?
Sean Rameswaram: I mean, I think that speaks to the sort of symbolic power of Roe, because even if it's not the decision it once was, it's always had this kind of magnetic pull on Americans in a way that Casey didn't and a way in which a lot of other Supreme Court decisions haven't.
Sean Rameswaram: This Casey decision from 1992 basically rewrites Roe.
Sean Rameswaram: It opens it up to all kinds of legislative challenges.
Sean Rameswaram: And it's been chipped away, state by state, law by law.
Sean Rameswaram: So what's left of Roe?
Sean Rameswaram: And how will a new balance at the Supreme Court affect it?
Sean Rameswaram: That's next on Today Explained.
Sean Rameswaram: So tell me a bit about your disease, Bree.
Bree: So I have mono, which is actually a very common, like not really too serious condition.
Sean Rameswaram: And with me, I guess my immune system went haywire and decided to close up my air pathways and my tonsils and, you know, everything I need in order to breathe.
Sean Rameswaram: So I was rushed to the emergency room and then transported to the hospital in an ambulance.
Sean Rameswaram: Oh my gosh, not in an Uber not in an Uber, sadly you know, I was right about to call one too.
Sean Rameswaram: It was 2am and my family went home and I was like, an ambulance sounds expensive I'm going to Uber or something.
Sean Rameswaram: And they're like, you're being ridiculous right now.
Sean Rameswaram: I kind of get why you might have thought to use an Uber they've got new features, Bree.
Sean Rameswaram: Like what?
Sean Rameswaram: Oh, you know, like making it easier for you to verify the details of your ride and showing your driver's name, car, and license.
Sean Rameswaram: You can make sure you take the right ride every time.
Sean Rameswaram: That's awesome.
Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, there's more information at uber.com slash moving forward.
Sean Rameswaram: It tellers me to the real world. What's it like out there?
Sean Rameswaram: Are people taking Ubers?
Mary Ziegler: Mary, you said this Casey decision from 1992 lets states regulate abortion much more aggressively than they could under Roe.
Mary Ziegler: Does that happen all at once or over time?
Mary Ziegler: So there was a spike in anti-abortion laws in state legislatures.
Mary Ziegler: So after the key party wave.
Mary Ziegler: So this is 2010?
Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, 2009, 2010.
Mary Ziegler: There was a big surge of Republican elections in state legislatures and a real increase in anti-abortion legislation in the states.
Mary Ziegler: And we've seen about 20 states have passed 20-week abortion bans that would make it illegal to do an abortion after 20 weeks of gestation.
Mary Ziegler: We've seen a number of states pass things like ultrasound laws.
Sean Rameswaram: So we've seen a lot of gains in terms of number of states with clinic regulations.
Mary Ziegler: So in a variety of metrics, we've seen a number of laws have been passed.
Sean Rameswaram: Guttmacher tracks state-level pro-life laws.
Mary Ziegler: And it seems that every year we set a record.
Sean Rameswaram: We had like 92 passed in 2011.
Sean Rameswaram: We had 70 passed in 2013.
Mary Ziegler: That's amazing.
Sean Rameswaram: So states have become very active passing these laws.
Mary Ziegler: And we've done quite a lot to protect the unborn.
Sean Rameswaram: How many of these chips away at Roe v. Wade got up to the Supreme Court and Anthony Kennedy?
Mary Ziegler: So the court from 1992 until 2016 didn't have just a huge appetite to hear abortion cases.
Sean Rameswaram: So while abortion opponents were introducing tons of abortion regulations, the court wasn't necessarily that involved.
Sean Rameswaram: This was happening mostly in politics without the court intervening for a while.
Mary Ziegler: And how might that change if politicians are now aware that Anthony Kennedy isn't around?
Sean Rameswaram: I don't know what the new presumed five-person majority that would be skeptical of Roe is going to want to do.
Sean Rameswaram: And I think if you're the anti-abortion movement, you still have to be careful not to ask for too much too soon because there's still kind of like reputational and institutional constraints where the justices want to appear like neutral justices, not politicians.
Sean Rameswaram: They want to appear to respect precedent.
Sean Rameswaram: So, you know, exactly what happens next, I think, is more unpredictable than some commentators make it sound.
Sean Rameswaram: Well, let's try anyway.
Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, no, I'm happy to try.
Sean Rameswaram: So what might happen if President Trump nominates someone who wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, who wants to overturn the case decision from the 90s?
Sean Rameswaram: I saw Jeff Toobin say this thing on the TV.
Sean Rameswaram: You are going to see 20 states pass laws banning abortion outright, just banning abortion, because they know that there are now going to be five votes on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Sean Rameswaram: Now, some of those states would almost certainly ban abortion, because I think at least four of them have what are called trigger laws that would pretty much automatically ban abortion as soon as Roe and Casey are overturned.
Sean Rameswaram: Okay.
Sean Rameswaram: And there are other states I've seen that I would anticipate there being a pretty intense discussion.
Sean Rameswaram: So I think what you would likely see was a big ugly state fight about whether abortion was going to be legal with some outcomes being kind of obvious.
Sean Rameswaram: Like I think it safe to assume that states like Mississippi would go from having you know one abortion clinic to zero.
Sean Rameswaram: States like California and New York where abortion is broadly available and that make up a pretty high percentage of nationwide abortions those would continue to offer abortions and everywhere else would become a battleground.
Sean Rameswaram: So a state like California or New York, they would continue to offer abortions in violation of some Supreme Court decision?
Sean Rameswaram: No, unless the court really surprises me, all overturning Roe does is allow the states to ban abortion.
Sean Rameswaram: It doesn't require them to do it.
Sean Rameswaram: So states that want to allow abortion can do that.
Sean Rameswaram: States that want to criminalize abortion can do that.
Sean Rameswaram: On the other hand, I think it's safe to say we already have a patchwork because of Casey, and we would continue to have a patchwork.
Sean Rameswaram: It would just be a patchwork with respect to legality instead of a patchwork with respect to access.
Sean Rameswaram: So you would expect there to be kind of red states and blue states when it came to abortion legality, much like there are red states and blue states when it comes to abortion access today.
Sean Rameswaram: What would criminalizing abortions look like?
Sean Rameswaram: I feel like that might be hard for people to imagine.
Sean Rameswaram: You have to talk in a serious way about abortion providers and women who have abortions potentially going to jail, which is not something we're talking about in a really meaningful way now.
Sean Rameswaram: There have already been women imprisoned for having abortions when those abortions are illegal.
Sean Rameswaram: So there are states that require you to only have a medication abortion with a doctor's supervision or only before a certain point in pregnancy.
Sean Rameswaram: And there have been women who have terminated their own pregnancies, again, you know, in ways that violated the law.
Sean Rameswaram: On Monday, Purvi Padil, an Indian-American woman, became the first in U.S. history sentenced to prison for feticide for ending her own pregnancy.
Sean Rameswaram: In 2013, Bardale arrived at a hospital bleeding.
Sean Rameswaram: She told doctors she had a miscarriage and disposed of her stillborn fetus in a trash receptacle.
Sean Rameswaram: Prosecutors would later accuse Patel of taking drugs to try to end her pregnancy based on text messages to a friend where she discussed buying the drugs online.
Sean Rameswaram: Her conviction was ultimately reversed on appeal, but it just shows you that, you know, you can easily imagine that some states would choose to punish women.
Sean Rameswaram: There have been, you know, successful criminal prosecutions at the trial court level of women who have ended their pregnancies.
Sean Rameswaram: So that's already happening.
Sean Rameswaram: And obviously, if abortion were broadly illegal in some states, you'd expect much more of it.
Sean Rameswaram: Does this mean that if Roe v. Wade is officially overturned and you're a woman in America somewhere, you might want to move to another state where abortion will remain legal?
Sean Rameswaram: Well, if you have money, you should probably not worry about it, right?
Sean Rameswaram: Because you could just travel out of state to have an abortion, which is to some degree what happened before Roe.
Sean Rameswaram: And it would be what you would expect to happen after Roe, too.
Sean Rameswaram: Unsurprisingly, the women who are, you know, having, you know, DIY abortions at home now and the women who would be doing that after Roe are women for whom that's not really a realistic option.
Sean Rameswaram: How is the way Americans feel about this changed over time?
Sean Rameswaram: I mean, we hear most about pro-life and pro-choice, but a lot of people must just fall in the middle and be sort of unsure, right?
Mary Ziegler: Yeah, well, actually, public opinion on the substantive questions.
Mary Ziegler: Like if you ask Americans about a specific abortion restriction or whether abortion should be illegal, sometimes, always, or never, the public opinion's been really remarkably stable.
Mary Ziegler: So there's a group of Americans who are pretty much always opposed to abortion, and that roughly is, you know, 20%.
Mary Ziegler: There's a slightly larger group of people who think abortion should be altogether unregulated, usually, you know, 30%-ish.
Mary Ziegler: And then there's a pretty substantial plurality that's in the middle that thinks abortion should be regulated, but not on demand.
Mary Ziegler: So legal, but restricted.
Mary Ziegler: And then if you kind of probe further, Americans are more comfortable with abortion being widely available earlier in pregnancy rather than later in pregnancy.
Sean Rameswaram: And so often the headline is X percentage of Americans think or identify as pro-choice or pro-life.
Mary Ziegler: But when you dig a little deeper, often what people are talking about in terms of what they actually believe the law should do has remained pretty constant since 1973.
Sean Rameswaram: How is it that public opinion hasn't really wavered significantly, but the politics have?
Mary Ziegler: It's a 7-2 decision in 1973, and now it splits the court.
Mary Ziegler: It's not a big item legislatively, and there's this burst of laws and regulations after the Tea Party wave.
Sean Rameswaram: It seems like the politics don't reflect the people.
Mary Ziegler: It just sort of speaks to how if you have a really passionate minority, that can sway politics, even if that doesn't really track what, you know, most Americans think.
Sean Rameswaram: I think you're never going to get to a point at which people agree on this because it deals with, you know, people's core beliefs about things like women's role in society, biology, the role of government.
Mary Ziegler: But I think that it would certainly be possible if our political alignment was different for people to agree on more things that would make women less likely to want to seek abortions.
Sean Rameswaram: They're definitely women who would probably like to be able to carry a child to term who can't because having a child means that they're going to be unable to keep a job or go to college or because they were sexually assaulted or because they're in a violent relationship.
Mary Ziegler: And so I think if the political alignment in the country were different and there was more support for laws kind of making life better for pregnant women and for women in general, there may be fewer women who wanted to have abortions.
Sean Rameswaram: I mean, the number's already gone down a lot, but the number could definitely go down a lot further if it were easier to be a woman in America.
Mary Ziegler: Mary Ziegler teaches law at Florida State University.
Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram, This is Today Explained.
Sean Rameswaram: So uber's moving forward listening to feedback so they can improve and get better with every trip
Sean Rameswaram: They're building new features to take the stress out of your pickup and working on ways to keep you better protected and connected throughout your ride.
Sean Rameswaram: You can find out more by going to uber.com slash moving forward.
