One week after news leaked that the Supreme Court is planning to overturn Roe, leaving the question of forced parenthood to states, Katie Couric was standing at the last abortion clinic in the state of Missouri.
A nurse handed Couric the pamphlet that Missouri abortion providers are legally required to give to all patients before their abortions. The opening text reads: “The life of each human being begins at conception. Abortion will terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being.”
Just across the border in Illinois, 15 minutes away from that Missouri clinic, Couric interviewed a woman who traveled from southern Missouri with her 16-month-old, crossing state lines just to get an abortion pill. If and when the Supreme Court overturns Roe, instant abortion bans will go into affect in Missouri—and in over half of all U.S. states. Illinois is expecting tens of thousands of people seeking abortions from out of state. The minority of states where abortion remains legal are struggling to prepare for the demand. And for many women, travel just won’t be feasible.
“I think this should be a wake-up call,” Couric tells Glamour. “Whether you’re talking about abortion or you’re talking about gun rights, a minority of the population is dictating how the majority of us [will] live. Now they’re moving to stop things like the morning-after pill or IUDs.” She compared the situation to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women are enslaved and forced to bear children.
Couric has interviewed world leaders, used her platform to radically destigmatize cancer screenings, and given Facebook a public cross-examination concerning misinformation. Now in a new podcast, a six-part series entitled Abortion: The Body Politic, she aims to help Americans—the majority of whom believe that abortion should be legal in most or all cases—understand the state of abortion in this country. “There’s so much information coming at people that they haven’t realized this creeping trend of reducing reproductive rights and how it’s been going on, state by state by state by state,” she says.
The Katie Couric Media and iHeartRadio original will drop weekly episodes starting on June 9 that break down how exactly the anti-abortion movement got this far, how the reproductive rights movement is fighting back, and what’s going to happen next.
Couric’s podcast Next Question recently covered abortion. On June 9, she’ll drop the first episode of a six-part series about the state of abortion rights.
If you are desperate to join the fight for bodily autonomy but struggle to understand an onslaught of headlines from 50 states, constitutional law, and decades of precedent, well, join the club. Legislators intentionally make laws about our own bodies hard to decipher. Katie Couric is here with a translation, a lot of compassion, and marching orders.
“People don’t necessarily understand what life was like before Roe because they’ve only known Roe,” she says. “They’ve only lived in a world where for the most part, until recently, abortion was legal. I’m hoping that this podcast will arm people with the information and the foundation to get more involved and to be more vocal just as the minority has been and is changing laws in front of our eyes.”
Couric and the producers of her podcast aren’t exactly bandwagoners on the abortion issue—they’ve been building the Abortion: The Body Politic podcast since January, when it became clear that the Supreme Court would decide on a case that could challenge Roe. And Couric’s focus on reproductive rights stretches back as early as her anchor gig for the Today show in the ’90s, when she devoted airtime to questioning Republicans’ abortion stances.
She once brought a TV crew to a Planned Parenthood to show Americans that they are simply public health centers—albeit with bulletproof windows to protect patients and providers from terrorists. She pushed vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin to admit that her policies would force survivors of rape to carry their pregnancies to term. Later, she also pushed then president Obama to admit that he didn’t plan to attempt to get abortion coverage into the Affordable Care Act.
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Couric’s abortion podcast doesn’t sentimentalize the Roe v. Wade age as a golden time for abortion access. “A lot of women don’t have the ‘choice,’” she says. “For economic reasons or reasons of systemic racism, they have just never been able to access safe and legal abortion the way that women of means have been able to.”
Producer Lauren Hansen tells Glamour that every person Couric’s team spoke to who pursued abortion care shared that they felt that to some degree: “They had to be quiet, they couldn’t tell their families, they couldn’t tell their friends.” In the course of making the podcast, Hansen decided to share her own abortion story with her family.
“I was like, ‘By the way, I’ve been meaning to tell you for 20-something years that I had an abortion when I was 24,’” Hansen says. Her mom responded, “Oh! I had an abortion too!”
Abortion: The Body Politic aims to break through generations of stigma and silence with compassionate and comprehensive coverage of our national emergency. For Couric, too, this is a personal issue. She remembers as a little girl seeing her mom coming back home from volunteer shifts at their local Planned Parenthood. Her mom would tell her stories about the girls as young as high school age who were seeking abortion.
“There was just never any question that women should have the option to get an abortion for an unplanned pregnancy,” Couric tells Glamour. Abortion was health care then and it is health care now, she says. Read all about it—or just listen.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
