Body & State

Chelsea Stovall is a 35-year-old mother of two, who works as a cook at a daycare in Fayetteville, Arkansas. When she was pregnant with her third child four years ago, having an abortion never crossed her mind. But after finding out that her daughter would have less than a 1 percent chance of surviving the pregnancy, Chelsea’s opinion on abortion began to shift. We sat down with Chelsea to discuss...

A majority of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. But there is a growing gap between men and women on this issue. Even among Generation Z, 75 percent of women want abortion to be legal, while 59 percent of men do. I sat down with sociologist and author Tricia Bruce to discuss what’s behind this gap. WATCH ON PBS NEWSHOUR:  https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/gen-z-men-and-...

Generation Z has witnessed some of the biggest social changes in American history: gay marriage legalization, the MeToo movement and the fight for transgender equality. And as young Americans are becoming adults in this new reality, there is a growing gender gap on issues like marriage, children, and abortion. I sat down with demographer Ryan Burge to discuss what is helping shape Gen Z’s views to...

For decades the Catholic Church has placed restrictions on certain reproductive health services at Catholic-run hospitals. The Ethical and Religious Directives lay out 77 rules for providing health care in the U.S., all based on the church’s theological and moral beliefs. But critics say these rules can run afoul of needed, emergency reproductive healthcare, especially in places where a Catholic-r...

In 2024, California chiropractor Anna Nusslock was pregnant with twins. But 15 weeks into her pregnancy, she found out the twins would not survive. And Anna was told she could not get an abortion, because she was being cared for at a Catholic hospital. Sarah sat down with Anna at her home in rural Eureka, California to talk about her fight to access abortion care in a state that right is protected...

Across the country, crisis pregnancy centers offer free services to women, things like ultrasounds and pregnancy testing. For some pregnant people, getting care through these centers is the only affordable option, but many are unaware that they do not offer abortions and are often unregulated and unlicensed. In Texas, there are around 200 crisis pregnancy centers, the most of any state. And tens o...

The state of Missouri is home to around 90 crisis pregnancy centers. These primarily faith-based organizations offer resources to pregnant women to steer them away from abortion. The nonprofit Coalition Life runs one of these centers out of their offices in the St. Louis suburbs. I talked to founder and executive director, Brian Westbrook, about how they operate, where they fit into the anti-abort...

A growing part of the anti-abortion movement in the U.S. today is crisis pregnancy centers. These often faith-based nonprofits offer resources to pregnant women to steer them away from abortion. But reproductive rights advocates and the medical community have criticized the centers for using deceptive and unsafe practices. I speak with one woman who accidentally ended up at a CPC during her freshm...

I sit down with Carrie Baker, a professor of the study of women and gender at Smith College. She’s authored a number of books on women’s legal history, gender policy, and reproductive health activism; her most recent book, “Abortion Pills: US History and Politics”, examines the history of the medication throughout American history. We discuss today’s anti-abortion movement, from contraception to a...

The abortion pill was developed and first approved for use in France in the 1980s. But it took until 2000 for the medication to finally get approval in the United States, after years of work by activists and healthcare professionals. One of the women involved in that work is Elisa Wells, co-founder of Plan C, which provides information and education about accessing abortion pills in the U.S. Sarah...

Today in the United States more women opt to use abortion medication than receive a surgical abortion to end a pregnancy. But the future of access to those pills is uncertain. Throughout the country, health care workers, doulas and ordinary people are stepping in to make sure women can still get abortion pills, even where it is banned. We spoke with two of the people involved in these networks. WA...

Medication abortions make up more than 60 percent of all abortions in the United States today. But after the fall of Roe, abortion pills are now banned in at least 14 states. That’s led to the rise of underground networks, operating outside the legal system, to give more people access to abortion medication. We sat down with one of the women involved in these networks. WATCH ON PBS NEWSHOUR: Under...

Brown University professor Liz Tobin-Tyler walks us through what researchers have found about the link between abortion bans and domestic violence, and how access to firearms in the U.S. can turn volatile homes into deadly ones. She says a victim is five times more likely to be killed when a gun is in the home. And the states with more abortion restrictions, tend to be the ones with lax gun laws....

Anthony Hingle has spent years working with men who have abused those closest to them to help stop the cycle of abuse. At Beyond Harm, a domestic violence intervention organization in New Orleans, Hingle often starts by asking the men to acknowledge the harm they’ve caused, sometimes to their pregnant partners or with a new baby in the home. Sarah sat down with him at Beyond Harm’s office in the M...

Mariah Wineski has spent more than two decades helping survivors of domestic violence. Wineski spoke with Sarah about the misconceptions about domestic violence and the patterns of coercive and controlling behaviors that can go far beyond physical violence.   WATCH ON PBS NEWSHOUR: Abortion restrictions may be fueling a rise in domestic violence, experts warn https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/abor...

A woman's risk of being killed in the United States increases by 20 percent on average when pregnant or after giving birth. For those under 25, that risk more than doubles. In fact, pregnant and postpartum women are more likely to be killed, than die from childbirth-related issues like severe bleeding, infection and high blood pressure. And many killings are the result of domestic violence. In thi...

In this episode of Body & State, Sarah interviews conservative commentator Bethany Mandel, who writes about the declining birth rate and considers herself a pronatalist. Mandel and her husband, both Orthodox Jews, live in suburban Maryland with their six children. Through her writing and her podcast “The Mom Wars”, she aims to be a more moderate voice among pronatalists, and encourages people...

In this episode of Body & State, Sarah sits down with Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation and a key author of Project 2025, the right-wing plan that has become a blueprint for the Trump administration’s policies. A conservative Catholic and long-time opponent of abortion rights, Severino wants the government to promote policies that favor heterosexual m...

In this episode of Body & State, Sarah sits down with Leslie Root, a demographer at the University of Colorado Boulder, who closely studies fertility trends in the United States and across the globe. Root has been trying to inject caution into the sometimes apocalyptic claims about the declining birth rate made by Elon Musk, pronatalists and far-right activists. Watch our PBS NewsHour segment...

In this episode of Body & State, Sarah visits Simone and Malcolm Collins at their home in Pennsylvania. The Collinses are part of a movement known as pronatalism that wants to encourage people to have more children to help stem population declines. Several trends are driving down the birth rate: women have increased access to contraceptives like IUDs; far fewer teenagers are having babies; and...

Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher, a Democrat from Texas, explains why she believes the right to contraception is at risk in the United States and what she views as a growing effort by Republicans to limit access to birth control. Fletcher is a co-author of the “Right to Contraception Act” that would prohibit the federal government, states and localities from restricting access to birth control. Watch...

In this episode of Body & State, Sarah sits down with John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life, a Christian anti-abortion advocacy group that has advanced sweeping anti-abortion laws in Texas. Texas is widely viewed as a laboratory for other states, enacting an abortion ban before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and a new law that allows private citizens to sue anyone who “manufac...

In this episode of Body & State, Sarah sits down with political scientist and Texas A&M professor Valerie Hudson to discuss how the treatment of women in a society shapes the success of a nation. Hudson says a light bulb went on when she was having lunch with one of Afghanistan’s first female members of parliament. Hudson remarked how much progress women had made in Afghanistan. But the fe...

During last year’s presidential campaign, President Trump said he did not support a ban on birth control. But since taking office, his administration has signaled a willingness to curtail information about and access to certain forms of contraception, purging birth control guidelines from government websites, freezing funds for some family planning clinics, and making plans to incinerate $9.7 mill...

Legal scholar Mary Ziegler explains the anti-abortion movement’s efforts to re-classify common forms of contraception as abortifacients, and whether these plans could succeed in states with abortion bans like Texas. We also dig into how pronatalists like Elon Musk share similar goals with some in the anti-abortion movement, including the authors of Project 2025, and what’s next for pardoned anti-a...