Episode 381: Abortion, Power, Democracy: Who Controls a Woman’s Body?

In this episode of The International Risk Podcast, host Dominic Bowen is joined by Professor Michele Goodwin, a leading bioethicist and constitutional law scholar at Georgetown Law, to unpack the history, law, and power structures shaping reproductive rights in America.

Goodwin challenges the assumption that abortion criminalization has always been the norm, tracing its roots to the U.S. Civil War and the political battle over slavery. She explains why the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade wasn’t simply a return to democratic decision-making, why abortion is medically far safer than pregnancy itself, and why today’s map of abortion bans mirrors the map of the former Confederacy. The conversation also covers the criminalization of pregnancy and motherhood, the disproportionate targeting of Black women by law enforcement, the shifting legal question of fetal personhood, and the Supreme Court’s inconsistent treatment of bodily autonomy depending on race and gender.

Key topics discussed:

• Why abortion criminalization has political, not purely moral or medical, origins
• Why Dobbs wasn’t simply “returning the issue to democracy”
• The medical reality of pregnancy, viability, and abortion safety
• The criminalization and policing of pregnant women, particularly Black women
• When and how personhood and citizenship are legally defined
• The Supreme Court’s inconsistent treatment of bodily autonomy across race and gender

This episode is relevant to anyone interested in law, human rights, public health, race, democracy, or international risk.

The International Risk Podcast brings you conversations with global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers who are shaping how we understand and respond to international risk. From geopolitical volatility and organised crime, to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare, each episode explores the forces transforming our world and what smart leaders must do to navigate them. Whether you’re a board member, policymaker or risk professional, The International Risk Podcast delivers actionable insights, sharp analysis, and real-world stories that matter.

Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe’s business leaders.

Episode Transcript: Episode 381: Abortion, Power, Democracy: Who Controls a Woman’s Body?

Dominic Bowen: Most arguments about family planning and abortion start in the wrong place. They begin with law, they begin with politics, often they begin with morality. Professor Michelle Goodwin begins somewhere more important, and maybe sometimes more uncomfortable: with power. Who gets watched? Who gets believed? Who gets punished? And what happens when some of the most intimate decisions that a person can make become matters for courts, for prosecutors, hospitals, the state, and even the media? I’m Dominic Bowen and I’m host of the International Risk Podcast. And today we’re speaking with Professor Michelle Goodwin of Georgetown Law about reproductive politics, public health, democracy, and the risks that really matter.

Professor Goodwin, welcome to the International Risk Podcast.

Dr. Michele Goodwin: It is a pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much for having me.

Dominic Bowen: And whereabouts do we find you today?

Dr. Michele Goodwin: You find me in Washington, D.C., very near the capital of the United States, the Capitol building. I’m in the Capitol space, District of Columbia, but very close to the White House, to the Capitol building and our federal infrastructure.

Dominic Bowen: Fantastic. I feel like it would be remiss of me not to ask — is the famous reflecting pool blue or green today?

Dr. Michele Goodwin: I have not been by the pool, so I’m not sure. I would be very doubtful that it’s reflecting blue. We do have quite a bit of haze left over from the fireworks — the very intense fireworks that were displayed on the morning of July 5th, not the evening of July 4th.

Dominic Bowen: Interesting. Very interesting. We could have a whole podcast about the 250th celebration, but we might leave that to another podcast.

Dr. Michele Goodwin: We could. We can leave that to another one. Though there would be lots to say.

Dominic Bowen: There would be lots, for sure. Look, this is a really serious and very important topic. When we talk about healthcare, bioethics, reproductive rights and civil liberties, I think the debate and discussion around it often starts too late. We talk about different court rulings, we discuss political positions, and it’s often really at a crisis point once it comes to that. You and I were talking just before we started recording — I’ve been in rooms where there have been hundreds of people crying about funding decisions and political decisions, and I think that’s often too late. But before we talk about the law and the policy, I think we need to talk about human dignity, about bodily autonomy, medical trust, and the limits of where state authority should go. So where do you think the conversation should start?

Dr. Michele Goodwin: I think the conversation should start with human dignity — that which we have, which is inalienable, that can’t be taken away by government, that cannot be governed by religious position. It is as fundamental as our right to liberty, the nature of being able to breathe, to be able to drink water — what is fundamental to being. And we have become so divorced from that in political parlance and political decision-making. We are extreme in that regard with regard to women and people with uteruses, and not so much with men. So it’s a vast difference between how we understand a man’s body and the ability to navigate intimate spaces, political spaces, local spaces. There is a default in understanding the dignity, the autonomy, the freedom, the liberty of a male body. We’ve not reached that point with regard to a girl’s body, to a woman’s body. It is something that becomes politicized in spaces, criminalized, policed, surveilled, shackled, and so much more. We’ll unpack all of those different inferences.

Dominic Bowen: Definitely. And I think some listeners would potentially be rolling their eyes and thinking, “Listen to that rhetoric.” But I think it’s really important that we unpack where those words come from and what they mean.

Dr. Michele Goodwin: It’s important. Let me turn it back to you to ask the question you’re going to ask. But yes, let’s unpack that, because the quick default for people could be, “Oh, I’ve heard this before, there’s no mystery here, there are important reasons why the state steps in.” So let’s unpack what makes that actually problematic. Let’s be nuanced in terms of how we understand the way in which the state and civil society have governed the space of reproduction.

Dominic Bowen: I think that’s important. And I wonder if you can help me, and maybe some of our listeners, with one of the hardest parts of this debate. When people ask my opinion, one of the bits I really struggle with is that if we simplify it into two sides — and I know there’s more than two sides — they both speak about rights. One talks about the rights of the unborn child, the unborn child’s right to life, while the other side frames it around bodily autonomy, equality, privacy, health, and freedom from state coercion, and their own human rights. And that’s a bit I struggle with, because I go, yeah, definitely the baby has — the unborn child has a right to life. And, not “but,” and — of course — so does the woman. So I sit now and look at both sides and see them talking at each other, but never together, never moving it forward. How should policymakers, courts, and citizens of both genders — especially given the imbalance of men in many of these decision-making roles who don’t have to make these same decisions — how should they be thinking about this?

Dr. Michele Goodwin: Let’s start with origins. That’s really important. And you’re right that the vast majority of people who make decisions in these spaces with regard to reproductive healthcare happen to be men. From a historical point of view in the United States, to take one page from that — that too became politicized. In the U.S., nearly 100% of reproductive healthcare had actually been governed by women leading up to the time of the U.S. Civil War. That changes near the time of the Civil War, and the change is dramatic. Those women were midwives, and they governed healthcare. When you think about it, that’s not strange. For millennia, human beings have been on the planet — were there men walking around in white lab coats and stethoscopes telling women to open their legs so they could look inside? No. But we’ve become so divorced from the reality of who we are as human beings. Were there men governing women’s bodies? No. For millennia, there were not. That was knowledge held by women. And there were very specific political and medical efforts to push women out of healthcare.

The American Medical Association has in recent years apologized for its role in that — its effort to push women out, and in particular to push women of color out, because in the United States more than half of the midwives were actually Black women who had been enslaved or formerly enslaved and were doing reproductive healthcare. Again, not a mystery if we sit back and think about it. But nearing the time of the Civil War, it became a time in which those committed to the platforms of slavery became really concerned about what we call today, and what was called then, replacement theory. The idea was that if the abolitionists achieved their goals — and here we’re talking about white abolitionists who were men in Congress, and they deserve to be talked about because they were people recognizing the ills of American slavery, and in particular recognizing the sexual abuse and sexual assault on which it was based.

Let me pause here for anyone who might contest this. Thomas Jefferson — a revered American political figure, president, statesperson — wrote in letters, which you can find on the website of Monticello, his plantation, which still offers tours, that it was better to stock your plantation with girls and women because they turned a profit every year or two. Now, Jefferson isn’t just saying they’re better than men and boys at picking tobacco or harvesting crops. He’s specifically talking about sexual exploitation. They’re turning a profit because they are breeding — bearing new babies who can be bought, sold, traded. This is what he’s talking about.

So at the time the march toward the Civil War was happening, the abolitionists in Congress were finding it difficult to grapple with the fact that they were reading advertisements daily — “gang of breeding wenches, eight to ten years old, ten to twelve years old, for sale.” What does that mean? What makes you a “breeding wench”? Why is this eight-year-old being sold as one? They were reading advertisements about those who’d escaped — advertisements such as: “Maria, who is fourteen, has escaped with her two-year-old mulatto daughter, Lisa.” What made Lisa “mulatto”? How did that happen? This fourteen-year-old who escaped — with a two-year-old. Do the math on that. And this was normalized — not hidden in some sneaky, private publication. These were the learned papers of the time, where you’d read policy decisions but also read about the depravities of slavery that had become normalized.

As the march toward the end of slavery was happening, the “radical Republicans” in Congress were saying, “We can’t stand for this,” and their most compelling argument against slavery was about sexual assault and forced reproduction. Just days after making that case, a senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, was nearly beaten to death by a colleague in Congress — nearly killed — because he had just given a speech called “The Crime Against Kansas,” which addressed exactly this point.

So when we get to the end of midwifery, it is because political figures and doctors were saying they needed white women in this crusade, that they needed white women to, quote, “spread their loins north, east, south and west.” Before this time, abortion was not criminalized. Abortion was legal in the United States. The Pilgrims performed abortion. It was nobody’s business. In fact, Benjamin Franklin wrote a pamphlet about how to perform an abortion. Jefferson and other leading figures at the time described these as private issues. That begins to change when the question of the shape of American democracy becomes contested — can slavery prevail? If not, how do you make sure white people have enough numbers to keep the United States in much the fashion it had been before? So this becomes a political issue.

So where do we begin? We have to understand these histories. And then we have to understand the body itself, medically — something we’ve become divorced from in the political discourse. Pregnancy, by its technical and medical meaning, is parasitic. The human body tries to avoid pregnancy. That’s menstruation, which starts early — it’s the effort to push out any form of pregnancy, early. How does a pregnancy happen? I think this is actually important — I apologize to your listeners who already know this, but given that our U.S. Supreme Court has gotten this wrong, it’s worth stating clearly: a pregnancy attaches, it happens, when there is an ovum and a sperm meets that ovum. But sperm meeting an ovum floating around in a uterus is not, technically or medically, a pregnancy. This matters because there are those who say pregnancy — unborn childhood — begins at the point semen enters the uterus. Not at all. The sperm has to meet the ovum, and then it implants in the uterine wall. But even that does not sustain a pregnancy, because more than 20 to 30% of what is a pregnancy will end in miscarriage — often without the person ever knowing it, because it just looks like menstruation. Or stillbirth, because the pregnancy has gone on for a while but the body releases it.

The question, historically and even today, is: why does the body do that? It turns out pregnancies are very dangerous. What makes this difficult is that I have a child. Many of your listeners have children. We love our children absolutely. And so our love for our children can sometimes mask and confuse us about what is biologically and medically true — which is that the body tries to push away, to avoid, pregnancy. Why? Because it’s dangerous. Because there can be any number of medical crises during a pregnancy — gestational diabetes, pre-eclampsia, ectopic pregnancies, and more. Let me just say — I’m speaking to you from the United States Capitol — the United States happens to be the most dangerous place in all of the industrialized world for a woman to be pregnant. We rank somewhere around 58th in the world. We have the highest rate of maternal mortality and maternal morbidity among our peer nations, and the highest rates of infant mortality and infant morbidity. So even though there’s a romanticization of what pregnancy means — “ooh, childbirth” — it turns out it can be very fraught, incredibly dangerous.

And that doesn’t depend on which side of the debate you’re on. One of the things we’ve begun to see in the United States after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — which had decriminalized abortion — is that, in high numbers, women who previously identified as anti-abortion have come forward saying they experienced a medical crisis and nearly lost their lives. They needed medical technology to save their lives during a medical miscarriage that could have killed them. We’ve seen women who have actually died — bleeding out in their cars. People are coming to understand that this is health, body, medicine. It’s not politics.

After the Dobbs decision, I found it important to correct anchors and viewers who said this had been a Republican agenda for the last fifty years. There was a cohort of anti-abortion advocates who had really been on the fringe in the 1970s and were very committed to overturning Roe. But Roe was a seven-to-two decision. Five of those seven justices were Republican-appointed. The author of the Roe decision, Justice Blackmun, was put on the Court by Richard Nixon — not a “fainting-heart liberal.” So it’s a mistake to think of this as simply a Republican agenda. It actually wasn’t.

Dominic Bowen: Wow. Thank you. So much in there I want to dive into. I appreciate you explaining some of that history — some of it certainly new to me, and no doubt to our listeners — as well as the statistics I’d heard before: that pregnancy in the U.S. is not only, as we’d like to think, beautiful and romantic, but also very dangerous, which is hard to imagine for what we’d largely consider the world’s most advanced country.

If we look at today, in your book you talk about Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. You use some of the language you used earlier, and I think that’s powerful. In the book you talk about how reproductive control isn’t just about abortion access — it’s also about surveillance, punishment, and links to poverty and race, which you’ve alluded to, but also the criminal justice system, which I think many of us would find surprising — healthcare and the criminal justice system, where’s the link? Talk to us about the criminalization of pregnancy and motherhood, about state control, and about what many of us have never considered.

Dr. Michele Goodwin: It’s a great question. Thank you for referencing my book, Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. That was a book I anticipated would take two years to write and get out before moving to the next project. It took ten years — not because I couldn’t get the words out, though I was publishing articles along the way, but because I was spending time in Alabama, in Texas, in places all across the country. I was speaking with prosecutors, multiple times, who told me how they targeted pregnant women — how they visited hospitals, spoke with nurses and doctors, asking them to call when a patient came in who was pregnant and revealed information that should have stayed between patient and provider, but which the nurse or doctor suspected might violate local law.

I’ll give you an example. A woman comes in for a prenatal visit and says, “I had a really challenging time in the last couple of weeks and I took half of a Valium that wasn’t mine.” That was the kind of disclosure that could trigger a call to local law enforcement and prosecutors, who would then prosecute those women — or women who acknowledged struggling with some form of drug use during pregnancy. Again, something that isn’t resolved at a police station, isn’t resolved by a prosecutor. It doesn’t make the pregnancy healthier. It doesn’t resolve the drug use through incarceration. In fact, I spoke with one prosecutor during the writing of this book who said it’s the worst possible approach — criminally punishing someone for drug use — because incarcerating them just puts them in “a candy store” behind bars. It’s not a good idea.

So what took shape in the United States, during the 1980s and ’90s so-called drug war, was that it began targeting women — particularly Black women — during a period when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land. These were women who were pregnant, and by attending prenatal visits, were clearly trying their best to preserve their pregnancies. They could have had abortions. They could have avoided medical appointments altogether. But these were women trying to keep the healthiest pregnancy possible. What they didn’t realize is that efforts across the country specifically targeted Black women. Studies from the time showed a Black woman was ten times more likely to have law enforcement called on her than her white counterpart for the exact same disclosure of drug or alcohol use during pregnancy.

There are documented cases of women being dragged out of hospitals in bloodied gowns, shackled and chained right after giving birth; women shackled during birth; women giving birth in prison, on concrete floors, in prison toilets. How can we call that dignified? If our commitment is to babies that are born — and I’d contest the very term “unborn child,” which is a fairly recent addition to legal discourse — how can we say we care about the dignity of children, or of a pregnancy, when we know the outcome is a mother shackled and chained to a bed, a child born in a prison toilet or on a concrete prison floor? Is that dignity for the child?

That’s part of what began this process. I think one of the challenges we must face is that even those who care about reproductive freedom and justice ignored these women. The racism at play here isn’t only that anti-abortion advocates targeted Black women — Black women became scapegoats, canaries in the coal mine, an easy cohort to start with: poor, seeking public medical assistance. If they’d had private medical assistance, perhaps their doctors wouldn’t have called law enforcement. But they were largely ignored by reproductive rights organizations too, who didn’t see these women as part of their core constituency — which was largely middle-class white women seeking birth control or abortion access. Those organizations also demonized these women: “You don’t represent our mission — you’re using drugs during pregnancy, something is wrong with you.” Yet what was happening to those women was, in fact, this policing of the womb — and it was also cultivating the idea of fetal personhood, which is now the central rallying cry of the anti-abortion movement.

Dominic Bowen: So when does a child enter the rights framework — or when should it? I really struggle with that. Is it at conception? Six weeks, once there’s a heartbeat? Twenty-two to twenty-four weeks, when the pregnancy is viable? At birth? I’m a Christian, and I love and admire the love Jesus had for sinners, for people making mistakes, people struggling in life — and I really struggle to know where I sit on this. I’ve had this conversation with so many women about what it means to them, and it’s genuinely difficult. From your perspective, how should we think about when to recognize the child?

Dr. Michele Goodwin: Let’s be clear that there are different windows we could look through. One is rooted in religious belief — some believe that from the moment of sex onward, anything that develops must be protected. Now, one’s religious views don’t necessarily map onto legal views, and don’t necessarily map onto what is actually medically accurate. We should respect people’s religious viewpoints, but religious viewpoints don’t govern how we all must live, and they don’t necessarily reflect what is medically true. As I described, some believe that a sperm and ovum together already constitute a child. But that isn’t, technically, even a pregnancy yet.

So how do we add more nuance? In Roe v. Wade, there was a trimester framework tied to a certain point of viability — but that clock of viability is interesting, because as medical technology advances, the point of potential viability moves earlier and earlier. Neonatal wards are now among the most profitable departments in American hospitals, and much of that investment has had less to do with abortion and more to do with assisted reproductive technologies, which increase the likelihood of multiple-order pregnancies — twins, triplets, quadruplets, and beyond. These pregnancies are more likely with assisted reproductive technology, but if you’re gestating four or five fetuses, they won’t reach target birth weight. Twenty years ago, that often meant those infants died within days or weeks. Now the odds are much better, the technology more sophisticated — which means viability has effectively moved earlier.

But notice: viability is still assessed while the fetus is in the womb. We only truly confirm viability after birth. You have to be born to be viable. There are stillbirths that occur days before a pregnancy’s due date — meaning that although the gestational age suggested viability, it turned out not to be viable. That too is a matter of nuance.

The final lens is legal. This is interesting: the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment — relevant to the recent Supreme Court case on birthright citizenship — makes you a person and a citizen at birth. Not in the womb. Donald Trump, who has been vocal on both immigration and abortion, would not want to extend personhood to fetuses in the immigration context — imagine all the pregnant women in the United States without legal status whom he’d like to see leave the country; he would not want their pregnancies counted as citizens. So you see the inconsistency: on one hand, “unborn children” in the abortion context; but are the pregnancies of undocumented women in the U.S. counted as citizens, as children, in the immigration context? No.

Another important legal point: the only place in law — and this is very recent — where we’re seriously debating personhood in utero relates to questions of women’s power and abortion. We don’t raise the same questions in trusts and estates law. Could your fetus buy a house? Do some tax maneuver? If a nearby corporation is polluting the air while you’re pregnant, can your fetus file a lawsuit to force a cleanup? No. The only area where the law recognizes childhood in a fetal state is with respect to whether a woman can have an abortion.

Dominic Bowen: Definitely more food for thought there. A lot of the reproductive justice discourse focuses on individual liberty, which I think is right and necessary. Some critics argue it underweights duties and recognition owed to families, to fathers, to communities — sometimes the term used is “social fabric.” I wonder about that, because I feel there is some value there, though I don’t think it should override individual liberty. When we consider families, fathers, and communities, how should we think about these actors in this discussion?

Dr. Michele Goodwin: It’s a great question, and I’d like to connect it to the prior one. It’s important to also recognize that people want to be able to have healthy pregnancies, to give birth, and to raise their children with dignity — that has to be part of these conversations too. When we talk about when life begins, we should also talk about healthy pregnancy. One challenge, as we sort through all this, is: how do we support people who very much want to become parents and raise their children with dignity? Those are economic questions. States and nations that take an anti-abortion — or “pro-life” — stance often do very little to support the human dignity of those who are economically vulnerable but want parenthood. That has to be part of the conversation.

One further layer, thinking about the challenges experienced by immigrant populations, or by communities that have been in a country for many generations — Black and brown people in the United States, for instance — is the ability to see your child through childhood and into adulthood without the terrors of racism and bigotry, which can lead to real harm. It’s not the central point of our conversation, but I want to include it, because it breaks my heart. There are parents whose children are straight-A students, contribute to their communities — and yet those parents live with a kind of fear about whether their children will make it to adulthood safely. That might sound, to some listeners, unusual.

I once interviewed, on my own podcast, a prominent professor and civil liberties figure from Kentucky, shortly after the killing of Breonna Taylor — a nurse and emergency medical technician killed by law enforcement who came to the wrong house, got the wrong person; she was shot six times and died in her bed. This professor shared with me the fear in her heart when her sixteen-year-old son wanted to go with his white friends after school for hamburgers and fries — something kids should be able to do freely. He’s a smart kid, private school, plays sports, does everything right. And yet she lives with a heightened fear because of the elevated risk of policing — a fear that echoes what women may experience around pregnancy and childbirth, but extends even to children.

To your question about who else figures within the community of pregnancy: our bodies do belong to ourselves. If a woman has uterine cancer, it’s her body experiencing it. Cervical cancer, breast cancer — it’s her body undergoing and experiencing that, just as it’s a man’s body that experiences prostate cancer. However much partners may love and care for each other, it’s the individual body experiencing the medical harm that needs the care of medical professionals.

That said, communities of love are important, and we can think this through different lenses. There’s a religious lens, where someone might believe a pregnancy isn’t the woman’s alone — I don’t share that view, but I recognize it can exist. Legally, though, the body belongs to the woman; the pregnancy belongs to her body. If something occurs in that pregnancy, she is the person the state responds to.

Are there other ways of thinking this through? Certainly. In a society that removed criminal and civil punishment from this space, we could think in a much more flourishing way about what’s healthy in pregnancy and birth. There are books written about how it takes a village to raise a child — and in the best-case scenario, that’s true. But there are legal boundaries too. Philosophically, let’s have our village, our warm embrace, relationships that sustain pregnancies, relationships that support termination when needed, community embrace when miscarriage happens and there’s a need for love, care, and compassion. So community absolutely has a place in pregnancy and childbirth — but with limits. Ultimately, the legal weight has to rest with the person whose body is experiencing this.

Dominic Bowen: Michelle, I come from a legal background myself, and you lecture and are a professor at Georgetown Law. When the Roe v. Wade decision was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, I had a lot of conversations with people, and one thing stuck with me — I know I’m missing something, so tell me what. When the Court returned abortion policy to elected state legislators, that looked, on its face, like a democratic process. I understand there’s more to it, and I recognize the significant issue of gerrymandering — we did an episode on that a couple of weeks ago. But why should that be understood as democratic erosion? Why should it be seen as a travesty, when that’s precisely why we have democracies and elected representatives, even when we disagree with the outcome? Can you tell us where that argument falls apart?

Dr. Michele Goodwin: We could spend a whole episode on the architecture of the Dobbs decision alone — the Supreme Court overturning a right, something it hadn’t done before, despite nearly fifty years of precedent under Roe, which had abolished criminal punishment for pregnancy termination.

Let’s talk briefly about Dobbs and what it meant politically. The Supreme Court overturned not just Roe, but a whole line of cases that had reaffirmed it. One mistake is treating the case as though it overturned only one or two precedents — Planned Parenthood v. Casey in the early ’90s and Roe in the early ’70s. Not at all. The Court had reaffirmed Roe repeatedly, including just three years before Dobbs, when even the Chief Justice sided with the liberal justices to affirm it. So it was something of a shell game — ignoring how consistently the Court had found this constitutional.

The Dobbs decision also didn’t address how, even at the time of Roe, a case was making its way to the Supreme Court involving a woman in the U.S. military, Captain Susan Struck. She was unmarried and became pregnant, and at the time, the military required that if you were pregnant, you had to have an abortion or leave the service. Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke about this case in her Supreme Court confirmation hearings — yes, if you were serving in the U.S. military and became pregnant, you either had to leave or terminate the pregnancy. Struck appealed nine times, losing each time, wanting to stay pregnant. This was the case the young lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsburg hoped the Supreme Court would take up, because if the government could require a woman to have an abortion, that logically meant abortion should be decriminalized and women should govern their own reproductive lives. Struck ultimately carried the pregnancy to term and gave the child up for adoption, but lost every appeal against the military.

There’s an irony in the Dobbs decision itself, which came out of Mississippi. The Supreme Court overturned a lower court order that had blocked a Mississippi abortion ban from taking effect. That order was written by Judge Carlton Reeves, a Black judge from the American South. It’s a powerful order because, at the time, states proposing abortion bans claimed they were protecting women’s health and safety — claiming abortion was dangerous. But abortion is far safer than carrying a pregnancy to term. The Supreme Court itself noted, in the 2016 case Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, that a woman is fourteen times more likely to die carrying a pregnancy to term than from having an abortion. Abortion is about as safe as a penicillin shot.

So Judge Reeves essentially said, “Mississippi, you’re not being straight with us.” He used the word “gaslighting” — a term I had to look up at the time, I wasn’t so familiar with it then. How can Mississippi claim this is about women’s health and safety when it has one of the highest maternal mortality and morbidity rates in the country and the world? How can it claim any commitment to women’s civil rights when it denied women the right to serve on juries, the right to vote, the right to hold credit cards or checking accounts in their own names? How can it claim to be protecting Black women in particular, given the history of what was called the “Mississippi appendectomy” — which was no appendectomy at all, but the coercive sterilization of Black women?

The Supreme Court didn’t engage with any of what Judge Reeves laid out. It simply sent the issue back to the states. It’s worth noting that the majority of states with bans ready to take effect were former Confederate states. If you look at a map of current abortion bans overlaid with high rates of maternal mortality and morbidity, it closely tracks the pre-Civil War map of Confederate states.

And this is where it connects to what you asked about democratic process. Those same Confederate states became the Jim Crow states of the 1920s through the 1950s, banning Black people from voting through devices like poll taxes. For an international audience, it’s worth spelling out what Jim Crow meant: denial of educational opportunity despite paying taxes; exclusion from public parks and pools; laws specifically barring Black people from billiard halls, from playing chess or checkers in public, from sitting inside restaurants unless behind a six-foot wall, from entering department stores. That’s Mississippi. That’s the Dobbs state — the state now saying, “Let’s get rid of abortion to protect Black women from themselves,” in a state where, to register to vote, Black residents were once asked to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, or the number of bubbles on a bar of soap, or to recite the state constitution — often to a white clerk who was themselves barely literate.

So in that context, the Supreme Court says: let’s make this a democratic process, send it back to Mississippi voters. But this is a Court that, only a few years earlier, had weakened the Voting Rights Act, resulting in polling place closures near Black neighborhoods and continued surveillance of the polling places that remained. And the Mississippi legislature that passed its abortion ban was over 86% male, overwhelmingly white, without women chairing major committees.

One more piece: the day before the Dobbs decision was announced, the Court issued a different ruling — New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruin, a gun rights case, with the majority opinion written by Justice Thomas. It struck down a centuries-old New York gun law. Unusually for a Supreme Court opinion, Thomas included what amounted to a prologue, explaining what was at stake: Black male bodily autonomy. He spent several paragraphs on the importance of Black men’s access to firearms, rooted in examples from slavery and Jim Crow. And yet the very next day, in a case from Mississippi — a state defined by the horrors of lynching during Jim Crow and sexual abuse during slavery — there was not one mention of Black women’s bodily autonomy, not from Justice Thomas or the majority of the Court.

Dominic Bowen: That’s very difficult to follow up, Michelle. I’ll ask one last question, in the final thirty seconds. Thank you so much for this insight into the Supreme Court’s decisions and the history behind them — genuinely fascinating. We ask all our guests: when you look around the world, what are the risks that concern you most?

Dr. Michele Goodwin: The failure to care for the peace and human dignity of others. The failure to embrace our neighbors as our own. The failure to understand their children as deserving lives of flourishing. Our inability to see and show compassion to people who are vulnerable. That’s what I think we need to address — and it’s our failure to address it that will undermine the future of people all around the world.

Dominic Bowen: Fantastic. Well, Professor Michelle Goodwin of Georgetown Law, thank you very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast today. For our listeners — you don’t have to like or agree with everything we’ve discussed, but part of gaining knowledge is hearing everyone’s different opinions and being able to weigh them up. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and helping us understand this, Michelle.

Dr. Michele Goodwin: Thank you.

Dominic Bowen: That was Professor Michelle Goodwin of Georgetown Law — an acclaimed bioethicist, constitutional law scholar, and author. What a fantastic conversation. Thanks very much for listening to the International Risk Podcast. I’m your host, Dominic Bowen. I look forward to speaking with you again in the next couple of days.