--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I'm Ayesha Rascoe, and this is The Sunday Story.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: As the November election approaches, some Republicans, among them former President Trump, seem to be trying to soften their image on abortion restrictions.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Take this statement from former President Trump in an interview with NBC News in August. He criticized a Florida law prohibiting the procedure after about six weeks of pregnancy.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I think the six week is too short. It has to be more time. And so that's and I've told them that I want more weeks.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Trump played a key role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but he appears to be adjusting his position to appeal to swing voters.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: This has raised concern among some anti-abortion groups, including a group of activists who favor not only state and federal restrictions, but total abortion bans without exception.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I am for the abolition of abortion, not its regulation, not its incremental, long, drawn out end. For the total immediate criminalization of abortion.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: This is T. Russell Hunter speaking in April at a conference in North Carolina for activists who describe themselves as abortion abolitionists.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: He leads a group called Abolitionists Rising, which hosted the conference.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Hunter's been getting his message out through social media, especially YouTube, where he has close to a quarter million followers.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I, you know, watch Donald Trump and see what he's been saying over the years about abortion. He said contradictory things. And so I'm looking at it.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Well, I can't vote for Donald Trump because he's still opposed to abolishing abortion.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: NPR's Sarah McCammon has been following this abortion abolitionist movement over the past several months, and she joins me now.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Hi, Aisha.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So, Sarah, let's start with this. What is abortion abolitionism, and how do these activists differ from others in the anti-abortion movement?
--:-- Sarah McCammon: So, abortion abolitionists want to ban all abortions with no exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Abortion abolitionists oppose anything that causes destruction of an embryo, which they see as equal to a human being.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And that includes the fertility treatment IVF, or in vitro fertilization, which often creates leftover embryos that are frozen or discarded.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And one of the most significant positions these abortion abolitionists hold is they support treating abortion as identical to homicide.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: That means charging anyone involved in abortion or some other types of reproductive health care, like I just mentioned, with murder.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Including patients and doctors, with penalties up to and including the death penalty.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So the women who are pregnant, if you go and get an abortion, they favor the death penalty?
--:-- Sarah McCammon: That's what you're saying?
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Yes, in at least some situations.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And that position is out of step with the messaging from traditional anti-abortion activists who usually say they don't want to punish women who have abortions.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Now, I want to be clear, Aisha, the distinction between these different groups within the anti-abortion movement can sometimes be murky.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: So on the issue of rape and incest exceptions, for example, there is some variability within the larger anti-abortion movement.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Some major anti-abortion groups don't think there should be exceptions for rape and incest.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And a growing number of states have abortion bans in effect without those exceptions.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: But there is also a long history of Republican support for legislation that includes those exceptions.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And that's Trump's position, for example.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And just a note here, at NPR, we don't use terms like pro-choice or pro-life, which are favored by advocacy groups.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Instead, we talk about whether or not people oppose or support abortion rights.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: But the abolitionists are critical of most of what we know as the anti-abortion rights movement, the major groups that lobby elected officials to restrict abortion.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And that's because abolitionists see these groups as too willing to compromise.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So what about strategy here? How do they differ in how they're trying to make these changes?
--:-- Sarah McCammon: So the major anti-abortion groups tend to take a more pragmatic, work-within-the-system approach.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: They've worked closely for decades with Republican lawmakers and Republican Party officials to elect candidates who align with their views at all levels of government and make gradual changes to the law, rather than getting behind ideas that are extremely unpopular with the public, like jailing women who have abortions or banning IVF altogether.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Now, abolitionists, meanwhile, are quite willing to take those positions.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: They criticize these major anti-abortion groups for not doing so.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And while abolitionists are working within the political system to some extent, they're much less concerned about messaging and less interested in incremental progress.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So how did you become interested in covering them?
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Well, I ran across these groups because I wrote a book about evangelicalism and the role of evangelicals in particularly right-wing politics, including my own background in the evangelical world.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And I'm just curious about how these ideas sort of move in and out of different groups and how religious ideas inform political and ideological positions.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So I'd run across the idea of abortion abolitionism in the course of some of that work and also just covering the abortion issue.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: But the thing that interests me about abortion abolitionists, Aisha, is that they are articulating some of the fundamental beliefs that I think they actually share with the more recognizable groups.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: The idea that life begins at conception, at the moment of fertilization.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: That's something you will hear from across the spectrum of people who work to oppose abortion rights.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Many abortion rights opponents will also use slogans like abortion is murder as something you'll see on signs at protests and rallies, for example.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Where these two movements seem to differ is less on their fundamental philosophy about life and pregnancy.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And it's more so in the application of these underlying ideas about the morality of abortion and other types of reproductive health care and how far they would like to take laws restricting access to these procedures.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Certainly quite a bit further than what most Republican elected officials would advocate for.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And one of the things I was really curious about was their explicit opposition to IVF.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: That issue of their opposition to IVF, that got a lot of attention after the Alabama Supreme Court issued a ruling giving embryos the same rights as children under the law IVF clinics temporarily shut down before state lawmakers passed this legislative fix.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: But that was a big issue. Right. A really big issue for Republicans.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: As I think you remember, many Republicans supported abortion bans and then scrambled to express their support for IVF.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And that's because IVF is very popular with the public.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: You know, abortion access, particularly in cases of rape, incest, medical complications and early in pregnancy, is also quite popular.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: But IVF is even more popular, including with the majority of Republican voters.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Now, former President Trump, who, as we mentioned, appears to be trying to adjust his position on abortion over concerns about backlash from voters to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, has said that he would support government-mandated funding for IVF or a requirement that insurance companies should cover it.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: But as you said, these abortion abolitionists, they want to ban IVF, right?
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Yeah, at a time when many Republicans are trying to soften their image on these issues, these activists want both abortion and IVF banned across the country, and they want patients and doctors to be charged with homicide, with murder.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And so I went to Texas. This is a state where abortion is almost completely illegal.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And it's also one of the places where abortion abolitionists have been the most active.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: When we come back, Sarah talks to abortion abolitionists outside of an IVF clinic in Texas.
--:-- [Sound effects: Protesters shouting, sprinklers going off]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Outside a medical clinic in Bedford, Texas, the sprinklers have been going off periodically as a handful of activists shout at the patients going inside.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: What we do with that knowledge of God is we hold down the truth of God in unrighteousness.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: These protests might sound like what you'd hear outside many abortion clinics around the country, but this is the Center for Assisted Reproduction, a fertility clinic where many people trying to have a baby go for IVF and other fertility procedures.
--:-- [Sound effects: Protesters shouting]
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Among the abolitionist activists are a young married couple, Will and Abby Dietrich.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: They see both abortion and some of the fertility treatments that happen inside this clinic as morally wrong.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: Because, as I mentioned earlier, embryos are often destroyed in the IVF process.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: And on this day in early July, they're confronting an aspiring father who's been waiting outside the fertility clinic during his wife's appointment.
--:-- Will Dietrich: I want to ask you something.
--:-- Will Dietrich: You said you were Hindu, right?
--:-- Will Dietrich: Yeah.
--:-- Will Dietrich: So in the Hindu religion, isn't it true that everything has a soul, like ants, grasshoppers, pretty much everything?
--:-- Abby Dietrich: The embryo is a baby.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: In the womb, my baby right here is a baby, right now.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: They readily say that it begins at conception. It would be wrong for me to kill this baby.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: Just like it's wrong for you to murder your babies that are in the freezer and for you to not implant the babies that you have in the freezer.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: Throughout the argument, which lasts about 15 minutes before it eventually peters out, Abby keeps repeating this sentence.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: I just want you to be consistent with your worldview.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: Do you see how inconsistent that is with your worldview?
--:-- Abby Dietrich: Abby's own worldview is what has driven her to be here today, a view in which an embryo has the same moral significance as a born child.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: She tells the man that if he and his wife end up with extra embryos through IVF, she's willing to carry them.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: Instead of letting them throw them away, I'm saying I'm here and we'll adopt them.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: Yeah, that's a goal of ours in our life.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: That is.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: That's the goal.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: By the Lord's providence.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: On the day I met them this summer, Will was 30 and Abby was 22.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: Is this your first baby that you're working on?
--:-- Abby Dietrich: Number three.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: So far, they've been having children the old-fashioned way.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I pull Abby and Will aside to ask them more about how they became involved with the abortion abolitionist movement.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: Abby says she grew up as a pastor's daughter, and she met Will while they were both street witnessing, trying to convert strangers to Christianity in the nearby city of Denton, Texas, when she was a senior in high school.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: And then I met Will, and I was like, OK, well, we're just going to get married and have kids now, and I'm happy with that.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: Like, that's what I wanted out of life.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: That was my goal.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: They're united by their belief in creating a society that aligns with their vision of God's will.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: The Christians need to be helping implement laws in the government to help them implement God's law on society, if that makes sense.
--:-- Abby Dietrich: We have lots of Christian abolitionists who are also running for office because they also believe that God law should be on society and the church needs to step up.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Farther down the sidewalk, another activist, Christine Harhoff, is holding a megaphone, hoping to catch the ear of some of the other patients seeking fertility treatments.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: We're standing here outside of the CARE Fertility Clinic, exposing the deeds of darkness.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: This is a house of death.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: Christine, who also lives in Texas, drove several hours to attend this protest.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: And so we're calling upon the parents and encouraging them, if they have children inside of the freezers here, to go inside and get their babies out.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: The Bible says to rescue those headed for death, such as those in the freezers.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: So sometimes traffic slows down and there's nobody to speak to.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: We're not out here to be annoying to the neighbors, but I am out here to stir up a fuss.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: What do you hope that this accomplishes standing here and, you know, kind of yelling at people?
--:-- Christine Harhoff: I'm not yelling at people.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: I use an amp just to elevate my voice above traffic.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: My point out here is not to yell at people so much as to oppose something that I think is a great wickedness.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I spent a couple of days with Christine, talking with her at the protest, and as she went door-to-door handing out flyers in the Dallas area.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I also sat down with her for an interview.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: Christine says the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade fell far short of her hopes.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: Even with nearly all abortions now banned in Texas, she says people are still getting abortion pills through the mail or picking them up in other states where Democratic officials have worked to protect access to them.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: The Democrats are simply coaching the woman in Texas into aborting at home via the pills.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: And that, she says, is why she's advocating for tougher laws, laws equating abortion with homicide and targeting patients who have them with prosecution.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Eventually, our conversation turns to emergency medical situations like ectopic pregnancies, where the pregnancy develops within the fallopian tube instead of the uterus, a condition that can damage a woman's future fertility or in some cases be fatal.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: Christine says she wouldn't support terminating those pregnancies either, although she thinks doctors should try to save the pregnant woman.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: I don't think that it's ethical to go in and outright murder the child.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: So the Bible talks about favoritism and favoritism being sin.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: We don't favor the mother's life over the babies.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: You know, a lot of people hear that and they say that is treating a born, fully developed woman, a woman who has relationships, who has feelings, who may have children, who depend on her, who has people who love her, who has wants, needs, and desires, a fully developed woman versus a fetus or an embryo, which is not at that stage of development.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: It's treating her like a vessel, you know, like an object.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: By all means, we have compassion.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: We're not meaning to be out here, you know, saying we don't have compassion for the parents going through this or that we don't have compassion for a woman in an ectopic situation we've all had friends and family members who have gone through something like that and it's it's uh it's hard it's rough and so we would pray for them we would you know try to help care for them and comfort them but still encourage them even if that mother were to die there's nothing unethical and everything very noble and heroic about a mother who would lay down her life for her child.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: Too often in modern society, we ask our children to lay down their lives for us.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: That's what we usually see at abortion clinics and even here at the IVF center.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Christine is in her late 40s and has eight children.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: She says she used to describe herself as pro-life, but now she feels that position doesn't go far enough.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: It's a conclusion she says she reached, partly by spending time outside abortion clinics, trying to persuade women not to go inside.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: She said she used to think, as many anti-abortion activists argue, that women have abortions because they don't fully understand what they're doing.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: And what we found was completely the opposite, that these women did know, almost across the board, that it was a baby, and yet they were still choosing to do it anyway, despite our signs that said, we'll adopt your baby.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: They were still making that conscious decision to go forward, knowingly and willfully, into that abortion.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: So that was a real surprise to us with that pro-life mindset kind of way back then when we were getting started.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: But as we continued to reach out to the mothers, a lot of our mentality that we had had shifted over to what we now have termed the abolition mindset.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: Of thinking of it more as a sin issue, a sin issue that needs both the gospel and needs godly legislation to restrain the mother's sin.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: That's why, Christine says, she believes abortion must be treated as murder, with consequences up to and including the death penalty, though she says it would only be appropriate in some cases where women are fully conscious of their actions.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: She says everyone, including men involved in helping women get abortions, should be held accountable.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: If they were man enough to create that child, they should be man enough to take care of that little one.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: Christine says men who fail to take responsibility for their actions are often part of the problem.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: I often tell them from the sidewalk, it shouldn't take a little homeschool mom from Texas pleading for your baby.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: Man up. Do what men do. Protect your kid. Protect your child. Provide for your child.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: Her advice for some of the men who say they worry about the cost of having a child?
--:-- Christine Harhoff: Sell your gaming equipment.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: You can't pay for the birth? Go get rid of the games, dude.
--:-- Christine Harhoff: Man up. It's time to grow up. Be the dad that you were created to be.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Inside the fertility clinic in Bedford, Dr. Kathy Duty says even though IVF is still legal here in Texas and across the country, these protests are having an impact on her patients.
--:-- Dr. Kathy Duty: She remembers one woman who'd become pregnant through IVF only to miscarry and in the exam room, she was sobbing.
--:-- Dr. Kathy Duty: She said, Dr. Kathy, don't they understand? I want to be a mom. I want nothing more in my life than to be a mother.
--:-- Dr. Kathy Duty: Why are they doing this to me?
--:-- Dr. Kathy Duty: She said they were yelling at her as she was walking in the door.
--:-- Dr. Kathy Duty: I mean, I felt really sad.
--:-- Dr. Kathy Duty: I had miscarriages myself. And all I could do was hug her.
--:-- Dr. Kathy Duty: I said, you know, it's okay. We're going to get beyond this.
--:-- Dr. Kathy Duty: Doody says she respects people's right to protest.
--:-- Dr. Kathy Duty: But this? I don't know. I wouldn't do that to someone else.
--:-- Dr. Kathy Duty: And I would wager not one of them would like to be walking into a doctor's office for a private appointment.
--:-- Dr. Kathy Duty: And for whatever reason a group on the street doesn't think what your appointment is for is correct.
--:-- Dr. Kathy Duty: I don't think they would enjoy getting yelled at.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: All of these women, Abby and Christine and the patients in Dr. Duty's clinic, place a high value on motherhood.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: But for Abby and Christine, an embryo is just as valuable as a woman.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: IVF remains legal all over the country.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Abortion is mostly illegal in Texas, but the penalties don't explicitly target patients themselves.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: So how much of an impact are these abolitionists actually having?
--:-- Sarah McCammon: They've been making some headway in Southern and Midwestern state legislatures with getting sympathetic state lawmakers elected.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: They've been particularly involved in the Texas Republican Party.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And they're forcing a conversation about how to apply some of these basic ideas, like the idea that life begins at conception, to public policy.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: OK, so when it comes to public policy, have they had any achievements?
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Not a lot so far, but legislation supported by abolitionists has been introduced in more than a dozen states.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: It usually hasn't gone very far, but one exception is Louisiana, where a couple of years ago, a bill that would have equated abortion with homicide and defined personhood as starting at the moment of fertilization made it out of a state house committee.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: What was the response to this bill? Was there a backlash?
--:-- Sarah McCammon: There was a lot of pushback, including from major anti-abortion groups like Louisiana Right to Life, who said women who have abortions shouldn't be treated as criminals.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: The bill did not make it into law, but the abolitionist movement saw getting it out of committee as a victory.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And they continue to try to elect like-minded state lawmakers in legislatures around the country.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: For example, in Iowa, Republican State Representative Zach Deacon identifies as an abolitionist.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: He spoke at the abortion abolitionist conference I attended in Charlotte earlier this year.
--:-- Zach Deacon: God's word is consistent. You can't go and be elected official and vote for things God hates and expect him to honor your government.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: As we mentioned, this movement also has been quite active in Texas.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: The state Republican Party platform there includes some abolitionist language, such as a clause urging lawmakers to pass legislation, quote, immediately securing the right to life and equal protection of the laws to all pre-born children from the moment of fertilization, unquote.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: I want to ask you about the language that this movement uses.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Obviously, the term abolition, it brings up memories of the anti-slavery movement, you know, slavery abolitionists.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Is that their strategy to reference the anti-slavery movement?
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Yes, they are quite intentional and explicit about that.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: You know, at that conference in Charlotte, there were long lectures about the history of the anti-slavery movement and with leaders trying to make an explicit comparison between that movement and their own.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: They're trying to cast themselves as inheritors of that tradition and portraying themselves as being not on the fringes, but on the front lines of morality.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I talked about this with Peggy Cooper Davis, a law professor at the NYU School of Law.
--:-- Peggy Cooper Davis: Her work has focused on the history of civil rights, including reproductive rights and the anti-slavery movement.
--:-- Peggy Cooper Davis: And she says associating the anti-abortion movement with the anti-slavery movement is just not appropriate.
--:-- Peggy Cooper Davis: The lack of autonomy with respect to reproductive rights in slavery was one of its most horrible features.
--:-- Peggy Cooper Davis: Having autonomy with respect to reproductive process is a basic human right.
--:-- Peggy Cooper Davis: Freedom with respect to family and reproduction are core issues in anti-slavery.
--:-- Peggy Cooper Davis: And the idea that one could police the reproductive process in the name of anti-slavery is obscene.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Is this movement racially diverse?
--:-- Sarah McCammon: In my observation, no, not particularly.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: The activists I've met, the leadership of the movement and the couple hundred people at the conference I attended are almost entirely white Christians.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: But by using this rhetoric, abortion abolitionists are trying to say something about what they see as the gravity of this issue.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: They see it as something where there can be no compromise, even where the rest of the anti-abortion rights movement and certainly Republican leaders like Trump are signaling a willingness to accept some compromise, at least for right now, in an election year.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Sarah, what are you seeing in this movement going forward?
--:-- Sarah McCammon: I think it's worth watching this movement, even though they haven't had a lot of legislative success so far, because in the last decade or so, we've seen what seemed like marginal ideas become mainstream.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: There was a time, for example, when people wouldn't have imagined Roe v. Wade being overturned anytime soon.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And then it was at what to many felt like a very rapid pace.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: So now the door has been opened to all kinds of restrictions, not only on abortion, but potentially other types of reproductive health care.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: And there are real questions about where those laws will go from here, especially in states with large Republican majorities where lawmakers may not call themselves abortion abolitionists, but may be sympathetic to their larger goals.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Thank you so much, Sarah, for your reporting.
--:-- Sarah McCammon: Thank you.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Justine Yan.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: It was edited by Jenny Schmidt and Megan Pratz.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Gilly Moon mastered the episode.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Thanks to Tony Cavan and Micah Ratner, the Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and our senior supervising producer, Liana Simstrom.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Irene Noguchi is our executive producer.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: I'm Ayesha Rascoe.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week.
--:-- Ayesha Rascoe: Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.
