Hi, I'm Ali Velshi. By this point, I'm sure you've heard a lot about Project 2025, the now infamous policy document published by the Heritage Foundation. Taraj P. Hensen sounded the alarm on the BT Awards.

The Project 2025 plan is not a game. Look it up.

Keenan Thompson derided it at the Democratic International Convention. You ever seen a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time? Democrats are beating the drum on the campaign trail. They spent a lot of time pretending they know nothing about this. But look, I coached high school football long enough to know, and trust me on this, when somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they're going to use it. Under a second Donald Trump presidency, Project 2025 would provide a blueprint for governing, giving Trump a toolkit to implement extreme and draconian policies with startling efficiency.

Trump acolytes have an entire plan called Project 2025 that outlines priorities for the first 180 days of a new Trump administration.

But what's important to remember is that in many parts of the country, Project 2025 is already here. In this historic decision, the Supreme Court has now overturned Roe v Wade.

The court's decision means effectively ending abortion not just in Mississippi, but across a wide section of the South.

Governor Greg Abbott signing a bill Wednesday, banning abortions in most cases where a fetal heartbeat is detected. Arizona will now revert back to a mere total ban that has roots in the Civil War era.

The Human Rights Campaign is declaring a national state of emergency for LGBTQ Americans. The move comes after a wave of anti-LGBTQ bills proposed this year around the country, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed four bills that took aim at the transgender community, drag performances, and discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom.

Families and doctors are now suing the state of Alabama after the governor signed a bill criminalizing transgender health care for miners. Civil rights are being rolled back. Environmental protections are coming undone, and vulnerable groups are feeling the crush of restrictive policies, and Project 2025 would expand the threat even further. Msnbc journalists have spent weeks, even months, digging into Project 2025 on air and online. If you've been closely watching this show and this network, and even on social media, you've probably heard of Project 2025.

We have spent a lot of time on this show, warning you about the dangers of Project 2025. Over the next hour, I will lay out the greatest threat to the American Democratic experiment in modern times, and it's called Project 2025.

And in this series, the threat of Project 2025, presented by the How to Win 2024 podcast, we're looking at how antidemocratic policies have already jeopardized Americans, and we'll lay out how Project 2025 could put even more of us at risk.

This is why we have to connect the dots and see this as a project about dismantling democracy. They would kill the Department of Education. The ramifications of that are extraordinary. I cannot even imagine. With respect to LGBTQ people, it is catastrophic as it is for so many communities. You are monetizing potential disaster. You might be placing people at undue risk who can't pay.

That's a recipe for disaster. Throughout this podcast series, you'll hear from Joy Reid on the risks of Project 2025 to education and on the lives of students and parents. Jenn Saki on how minority rights and LGBTQ rights in particular could continue to be rolled back. Chris Hayes will sound the alarm about climate change and the risk to our warming planet, and I'll be taking on reproductive rights. These are some of the key issues that could shape the election this November. So as early voting kicks off this month, we want you to understand what's at stake. Let's get started. When people talk about Project 2025, what they're actually referring to is a 922-page document called Mandate for Leadership 2025, the conservative Promise. There are 30 chapters in Mandate for Leadership 2025, most focused on their recommendations for specific agencies such as the Department of Education or the Department of the Treasury. On the issue of abortion, there's no specific chapter dedicated to the issue. Instead, it's mentioned throughout the entirety of this massive document. In fact, the word abortion appears 199 times, including criminalizing the mailing of abortion pills such as Miffy Pristone, eliminating targeting the Department of Health and Human Services, and replacing it with the Department of Life, changing the aim of the agency to focus on pro-life objectives, or using the CDC to create a massive surveillance apparatus around reproductive health to potentially criminalize anyone seeking an abortion and those who would aid them, including medical professionals.

To help us better understand this, I'll be speaking with one of the foremost experts in the country on abortion and the law, Dr. Michelle Goodwin. I'll talk with someone who's already lived the reality that Project 2025 wants to impose on all Americans, a woman named Amanda Zarowski, who's become an unwitting spokesperson for what she's had to endure in the state of Texas. That's all coming up. In the fight for reproductive rights, you may have heard the name Amanda Zarowski.

Amanda Zerowski. She was one of the five women suing the state of Texas over their six-week abortion ban. She was denied an abortion despite dangerous pregnancy complications she was experiencing.

She's the lead plaintiff in Zarowski versus State of Texas, the first lawsuit on behalf of women who were denied abortion since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022. When the Supreme Court struck down Roe, this triggered a Texas law banning most abortions after six weeks. Shortly after that when it went into effect, Amanda began experiencing a serious health complication, 18 weeks into her pregnancy. She learned that her unborn fetus was at risk, as was her own life, and she needed an abortion. Under Texas law, doctors denied her, and she almost died. The next year, she filed her lawsuit. She also wound up testifying before Congress.

I may have been one of the first who was affected by the overturning of Roe in Texas, but I'm certainly not the last. More people have been and will continue to be harmed until we do something about it.

That wouldn't be the last time she shared her story. She's become an impassioned advocate for reproductive rights, especially as it's become a key issue this election. At least 10 states will feature abortion measures on their ballots, and a recent survey shows that one in eight voters list abortion as the most important issue in this presidential election. At the DNC last month, women took to the stage to highlight why abortion matters. And Amanda was one of them.

Every time I share our story, my heart breaks for the baby girl we wanted desperately, for the doctors and nurses who couldn't help me deliver her safely. But I was lucky. I lived. So I'll continue sharing our story, standing with women and families across the country.

I sat down with Amanda to hear why, as she puts it, we should all be terrified of Project 2025. Tell me about where you grew up and your life before you came to Texas.

Well, thank you for asking me that. I don't get to talk about my hometown very often. I'm originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is also where my husband is from. We met when we were four in preschool, and he moved to Austin right after college. I was actually a teacher in Indiana for about five years, and then just decided I think I want to experience something different. Got a job in Austin and moved down here. At that point, hadn't talked to Josh since college, so it had been maybe eight years. And we reconnected and started dating right away and got married five years later, and here we are.

Had you thought about abortion much before you got pregnant in 2022?

I grew up in a really conservative area in the Midwest, conservative family. My family has always been progressive socially, and we've always believed that those decisions should be up to a woman and her doctor. But it wasn't something we really talked about. Even though we implicitly agreed that we were all pro-choice, we didn't really talk about it. When Roe fell, I was furious just because I'm a woman and think that I should have equal rights and rights to make decisions for my own body. But I was also actively undergoing fertility treatment. I didn't I didn't see it from the perspective of possibly needing an abortion for a pregnancy because I was trying to get pregnant. However, with fertility treatment, there is a higher likelihood for multiples, and my body can't physically carry multiples. We said to my doctor, What does this mean? What if I get pregnant with multiples? He said, You'd have to leave the state to have what's called a selective reduction because otherwise it would be considered an illegal abortion. It's swirling around in my head for a number of different reasons.

But probably closer to the back of your than the front. It wasn't something that was governing your thinking about this pregnancy.

Absolutely not. I was not thinking in any capacity, in any reality, would I need or want an abortion?

You said you met with some complications during your pregnancy. Can you tell us a bit about this? Because so many of us have first learned about how complicated pregnancies can be. Tell me what happened to you.

Yeah, that's a good call out because every pregnancy is different, and getting pregnant is complicated, being pregnant is complicated. And there's this feeling with a lot of women, I think that once you make it to 12 weeks, you're safe. You're in your second trimester, you've made it. You're good to go. We can start being excited. Right.

Many people don't tell people they're pregnant until that point.

Yeah, and I was in that space. I thought I had made it. And I could tell something was wrong, but this was my first pregnancy, so I didn't know what it was. I described it to my doctor as just feeling like I was wider than I should be. My body was physically wider. Well, come to find out, that was my body dilating. So my cervix dilated prematurely. It's a condition called grotesquely incompetent cervix. Basically, it just means that I was dilating way too early. At 18 weeks, the baby is not viable, and so there is no way to reverse course, so there was nothing they could do to save the pregnancy.

From the moment you started feeling something was abnormal, at what point did you first realize that Texas's abortion restrictions were going to coincide with your pregnancy?

Immediately after my doctor said, You're going to lose the baby. I said, What do we do now? And she had to essentially ask because the law was so new. And I just couldn't believe that we were living in this reality that we didn't know what we could or couldn't do. And it became very clear that there was nothing she could do. And she said, Look, either you're going to deliver naturally, you'll go into labor naturally, or you'll get so sick that then we can treat you.

There was nowhere to turn. There was nothing you could actually do in the state of Texas. You go to an emergency room or go to another doctor and say, Hey, I know this is happening. This is what has to happen. This is the medical treatment for what's happening to me. You didn't have that option.

That's exactly right. My doctor, after consulting with her ethics board at her hospital, even called other hospitals around Austin, around the state of Texas, and said, Can I send her to you? And they all said, No, our hands are tied. No one can do anything except wait.

What were the alternatives that were presented to you at that point when you realized you couldn't get treatment for a medical condition, possibly life-threatening medical condition? What were options that were presented to you?

I could wait at the hospital or I could wait at home. And that was it. You hear some stories similar to mine of women who have to flee their states to go to a state where they can get care. My doctors explicitly told me, Don't be farther than 15 minutes from a hospital because I had lost all of my amniotic fluid, which is what protects a pregnant woman from infection. So they knew that I was at a high risk of infection and yet still could do nothing. Three days later, I was shaking uncontrollably because I was freezing cold, even though it was 110 degrees. My teeth were chattering so violently, I couldn't get a sentence out. And my husband, Josh, is calling our doctor saying, Is she sick enough yet? If I I'm bringing her in, will you treat her yet? Because we had been to the hospital three times in between thinking that I had met the criteria, and we were turned away every time. So finally, my fever was 103. He just said, I'm bringing her in. I don't care. I'm bringing her in.

Was everybody satisfied that you were sick enough?

Well, it took them 45 minutes to decide that I was. But finally, they decided, Oh, she's in septic shock and she's literally dying, so I guess we should give her an IV now. The only thing I remember is sitting in the waiting room for 45 minutes across from a woman who has I was starting to have contractions and was seemingly about to deliver a healthy baby while I knew I was about to lose mine.

Tell me about you now, because you did not leave this without scars.

No, literal physical scars. Obviously, we still really want children, and so as soon as we were able to start trying again, once I had recovered enough physically, my doctor said, Okay, let's get some imaging. Let's see what we're working with here because your body has been through a lot. The scarring was so severe, Allie, that they couldn't even get imaging because it was so dense that the X-ray machine literally could not get pictures. So my doctor had to go in and surgically clear out all of the scarring. He was able to get most of it. One of my fallopian tubes remains permanently closed. He had to surgically rebuild my uterus because it had collapsed in the process. And now the extent of the damage is so severe that we have been advised to go straight to IVF if we would like to have children again and to also use a surrogate because my body has been damaged so poorly, they don't recommend that I try to carry again.

For the context of this discussion, I just want to be clear. A woman who wanted to have a baby, nearly died and lost a baby that she wanted to have, and now is going to have more trouble than she would have otherwise had conceiving and having a baby. It doesn't sound like what the goal is of Project 2025 and those who would like to stop abortions. Let's talk about what happened next. You got involved in some fashion in a lawsuit. Tell me about that.

Yeah. I was actually still in the hospital when Josh and I decided we've got to do something about this because I'm so early on, just from a timeline perspective of when the law went into place in Texas, that people probably don't know what these laws really mean and what they really say. I knew that I was the best case scenario in terms of opportunity and privilege to get health care and get to the hospital before I died, have a spouse that could take me. We were talking about all of the people who don't have access to those things. We said, People are going to die. We decided right away we've got to fight back. We had no idea what that was going to look like. How on earth do you sue a state? You can't sue a state. Well, it turns out you can. We were connected with the Center for Reproductive Rights. After an initial phone call with them, it just clicked, and we were like, Yep, we're doing this. I think for us, it started out as we just wanted to educate people. We want people to know what the laws are doing to people.

We want them to understand. Then it became, Okay, how do we get people to change their hearts and minds on this issue that's become so politicized, so stigmatized? How do we get them to change their hearts and their minds?

What did the state decide and what would be different today if you were in exactly the same position that you were when you were pregnant?

Initially, there was a temporary injunction, which was thrilling for about 12 hours until the state unsurprisingly appealed it. We appealed directly to the Texas Supreme Court, and the Texas Supreme Court, after about six months after hearing oral arguments from our lawyers sided it against us, said that most of us were not harmed, said that we didn't have standing. And what that means effectively is that Nothing has changed. So if I, by some miracle of miracle, got pregnant in Texas today, nothing would be different. And next time, I might not be so lucky because nothing has changed for doctors.

I want to talk to you a little bit more about Project 2025. I'll read you two quotes from Project 2025. The first one appears on page 450. It says, Abortion and euthanasia are not health care. The second one appears on page 472. Abortion is not health care, and states should be free to devise and implement programs that prioritize qualified providers that are not entangled with the abortion industry. Your physician was not a provider who was entangled with the abortion industry. Am I right?

Not to my knowledge.

Abortion is not health care. What were you going to do? Where did this issue come up? When you found out you had a nonviable pregnancy, other than health care, what were your other options?

To die, literally. If I hadn't been able to get the health care that I needed, if I wouldn't have been able to leave my home to get somewhere to get health care, I would have died. That's one of the things that I think a lot of people don't think about is the folks that can't leave their states. I couldn't have left Texas. If I had left or tried to leave and gotten stranded on an airplane or in the middle of the desert in West Texas, I didn't have days or hours. I had minutes.

One of the reasons we're having this conversation is because a lot of people aren't going to read this 922-pages document. But if Donald Trump gets elected, this is a 180-day implementation. From inauguration day until six months thereafter, they will put these things into place. I think people need to understand that that is a choice they're making. So when you're surprised six months after January 20th, that all of this has happened, part of this discussion is to explain that's a choice. You can make that choice on November fifth, and you're getting that message out right now.

There's nothing more terrifying to me than a second Trump administration. When you were talking just now and you said 180 days, I had a physical visceral reaction. I got sick to my stomach. It's absolutely terrifying. And you and I right now are just barely scratching the surface of all of the horrific barbaric plans that they have very clearly laid out for us. And yes, I agree with you. That's why I'm going out on the road. I'm telling my story. I'm trying to distill it for people so they know, look, this is the reality if he's reelected. This is real. And if you can get through to people just on a personal level, once they see a real person who's been affected, it's really hard, I think, to hold up that frame of mind of, oh, no, that should be exactly what's happening.

Have you seen that personally? Have you had people tell you that you taking this out of the abstract and making it real has allowed them to see this differently?

Oh, yes, over and over again. Where I live is pretty liberal, but I am on the road in a lot of places that are not so liberal. I've heard so many people, whether it's in their church communities or just in their conservative neighborhoods, say, I have never thought about it like this before, and I am really changing the way that I think about all of this.

Do you think that this has been a real motivator for people who may not have, A, otherwise gone to the polls, or B, were making their decisions based on other things that they thought about but are now realizing this is about fundamental freedom.

Absolutely. I think as you continue to peel back those layers and you help people understand, look, this isn't just about abortion. This This isn't just about women's rights. This is about a government that wants to take away our rights, rights that we have fought for, and they won't stop there. If they're going to take human rights from one group, who's to say that they won't take human rights from other folks? These are basic freedoms guaranteed to us as Americans. It doesn't matter who you are. If you are a human being in the United States of America and Trump is reelected, you should be scared for your basic human rights. You should be scared for your freedom because he's already told how he's going to take them away.

Up next, how Project 2025 is trying to take these freedoms away and what this means for democracy. Back in a moment. As we heard from Amanda Zerowski before the break, the real threat of Project 2025 on reproductive rights is that it lays the groundwork for cutting back all freedoms. I want to bring Dr. Michelle Goodwin into this conversation. She teaches health, policy, and law at Georgetown University, and she wrote the book Policing the Wom, Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. The book is about the surveillance and persecution of women and their pregnancies throughout history, especially poor women and women of color. Dr. Goodwin and I spoke on my TV show earlier this summer where we discussed Project 2025 and what she called the Dismanteling of the Autonomy of Women.

The first thing to understand is that Project 2025 is about dismantling democracy. This is all about personhood. This is all about dismantling the autonomy of women and their constitutional liberties.

We reconnected to discuss the many ways these policies have been years in the making long before the overturn of Roe v Wade.

Let me surface a case that I think helps us to understand beyond Roe v Wade. For so many, Roe v Wade is really the guiding star of reproductive freedom. But it's not actually that case that should be our sole guide. Actually, a case that was 30 years before Roe v Wade, 31, to be precise, Skinner v, Oklahoma, really tells us about both liberty and the threat. It's a case in which the state of Oklahoma wants to sterilize men who've committed petty crimes like stealing chickens to take care of their families. And in a nine to zero opinion, a unanimous decision, the United States Supreme Court uses the terms human rights, civil rights, Civil Liberties to describe reproductive freedom that states may not take away an individual's reproductive autonomy and freedom.

That was about men, interestingly enough.

You're right. That was a case about men. The author of that decision was Justice Douglas. It's Justice Douglas, who, again, in Griswell v. Connecticut, case that strikes down criminalizing contraceptive access for couples. He writes that opinion. So it is to say that there is a legacy that is before Roe v Wade of looking at reproductive freedom and autonomy, and now on to Project 2025, our whatever it is being called now.

I come from Canada, where Pierre Trudeau famously said, The government has no place in the bedrooms of the Nation. And it established an underpinning for the idea that you can like abortion or not abortion. It's not relevant to the discussion as to whether or not abortion or reproductive rights should be criminalized. That's what we're getting away from here. We're asking the wrong questions. We're asking people whether they like abortion or they don't like abortion. It's not a relevant question. The question is whether or not the state has any role in the decision that you make, either on your own, with your family, or with your doctor.

That's exactly right. It's something that has become so distorted. It's been part of a playbook, a campaign. With that campaign, it's worth noting that in recent years, we have Supreme Court justices Kagan and Sodermier, before the Dobbs decision, articulating that the court was weaponizing religion, weaponizing the First Amendment, this idea of leaning in to certain kinds of narratives that are really irrelevant to the project of democracy, to the project of constitutional rights and Civil Liberties. That is something to keep at the forefront. I think we'll begin to see more of that. We have been in In state houses that have adopted this anti-abortion platform, which is broad. It reaches to matters of your ability to be able to travel, the ability for you to actually get health care, the ability to actually live and survive a pregnancy. What you see connected with that is this weaponization of religion, which has no place in thinking about our constitutional freedoms. That was something that was very clear to the founders of this country and the drafters of the Constitution. They wanted to protect people from any tyranny of the state because of what their religion happens to be.

But it was not drafted to weaponize religion such that it would be used to truncate other Civil Liberties and rights.

And ultimately it did. The Constitution had its flaws, but it does not have the language of religious supremacy and Christian supremacy that Project 2025 does. I'll go back to another Canadian reference, Handmaid's Tale, written in 1985, five, after the world had all wondered about whether the book 1984 would come to pass. And literally, Margaret Atwood was talking about America. She calls it Gilead, but it's America. And it talks about the weaponization of religion. And it talks about punishing women or disallowing them from having reproductive freedom, in fact, controlling their reproductive output, and at the same time executing doctors who performed abortions back when it was legal, making it retroactive. It's wild to imagine that this book, this dystopian book, is being played out in places like Oklahoma and Texas and Alabama and Idaho. It's happening. And Project 2025 is suggesting that it should or can happen across this country.

It's interesting that you should mention that and important that you have, because in the introduction of my book Policing the Wom, I mentioned that this is not about The Handmaid's Tale or Gilead, and that That was fiction, but fiction has been made reality that these are the present concerns in the United States. That book was published in 2020. It was 2022 that we have the Dodds decision, which is to say that this playbook has been something that's been exercised, which is important for people to understand. If they think that it's just about, let's defeat 2025, let's make sure that the former president, let's make sure he's not elected, what they need to understand is that it's already in the water. It's already been infected in the soil. We already see its roots growing deeper and its flowers budding. To your point, quite specifically, you have lawmakers in both South Carolina and as well in Louisiana who have called for the death penalty for those who perform abortions and those who obtain abortions. If anything, what lawmakers certainly know in the space between 2022 and today is just the chaos that has now been exposed, brought to light, that's been created in the wake of DODS in their states.

Now we have little girls going to elementary and middle school as mothers now. We have teenagers who've now become parents saddled with children that they didn't want to have, but they didn't have access to being able to manage their own reproductive destinies. We've seen a mother and daughter be criminally punished because a mother communicated to her daughter via Facebook about obtaining an abortion and how. We have seen in Ohio, a Black woman, Brittany Watts, who had gone to see medical providers several times complaining about her condition They knew she was having a miscarriage. They knew it needed to be managed. She had that miscarriage at her home in her toilet. And only later, upon reporting this, police came to her house, busted open her toilet, searching for fetal remains to criminally punish her. It is not just chaos, it's inhumane.

Brought up a lot of things that I want to touch on. First of all, America, wealthiest country in the world, has a higher infant mortality rate and a higher maternal mortality rate than pretty much anybody in the entire developed world. Now, some of that's got to do not with abortion policy, but with the way we distribute health care in this country. But Project 2025 would worsen that. There are statistical relationships between causing women to not get the reproductive care that they need or the maternity care that they need and the death of those women or the lack of viability of the pregnancies.

Let me just say that across the United States, there are widowers. There are husbands whose wives have died. I've met with a number of them, a room full of men crying because their wives and their girlfriends have died or because their daughters have died in labor immediately after labor or a couple of weeks after labor. As you know, part of this is because of how we organize our healthcare system in the United States. But there is a link to the way in which we regulate, manage, police reproductive options and freedom for people in the United States. Texas became known as the deadliest place in all of the industrialized world before the Dobbs decision.

All of All the industrialized world. Let's just be clear about that.

That's right. All the industrialized world, right, Texas had become the deadliest place, all. The reason why one could say is because Texas had already instituted before Dobbs these targeted regulations of abortion providers, otherwise known as TRAP laws. These laws imposed conditions on health clinics that it long had great records of providing health care for women who wanted birth control, who needed abortions, who wanted STD testing, who needed breast cancer screenings. That's what these clinics did. Many of them received federal dollars through Title X. Although those federal dollars couldn't be used for abortion, they could be used for these other services. Texas began targeting those clinics, targeting them that they needed to restructure. Their cabinets needed to be higher. Their hallways needed to be wider.

Just to draw the picture, they decided that a clinic that provided reproductive care needed to have hallways that were wide enough for a girney or a stretcher to go, two of them, like a grocery store, needed to be able to go both ways. Not a necessity if you're not an emergency room.

That's exactly right. Even before we got to the Whole Woman, Healthy Hella decision case in 2016, which challenged two Texas Trap laws. By that time, there had already been so many health care centers that had shuttered. Those were the same clinics that provided prenatal care. That provided postnatal care. It wasn't just abortion.

It provided care for women who may not have known they were pregnant.

That's right.

You talked about a woman who was talking to her mother on Facebook about getting an abortion. One of the things Project 2025 does talk about is surveillance. Now, this is fascinating because in the same document, it discusses not tracking effluent and pollutants that are put into rivers, not tracking things that the fossil fuel industry does. We already know that we have difficulty in government tracking police shootings.

We can't track the rape kits and actually get them processed.

But a lot of women use tracking apps to determine their periods, when they can get pregnant. It's an important thing for people who are trying to get pregnant to do. I'm a man, but if I had to do one of those things, I'd feel very, very concerned right now that the government is going to decide. They're going to track that, and then they're in my business in a way that cannot be conceivable to an American citizen who thinks they live in a free country.

That's It's incredibly dangerous. Many people use healthcare apps, and there are apps that help individuals track their periods. Well, one of the challenges that has emerged, and you saw this emerging during the Trump administration was this greater attention and mindfulness about girls in their periods, about women who visited clinics, and this desire to get that information. What this document calls for, and what was even preceding this document itself, is further surveillance and policing. The surveillance and policing also has its dangerous effect. The danger, of course, happens to be our privacy, our Civil Liberties, etc. But there's also connected to this In the rise of white supremacy, Christian white nationalism, all of that, we have to look at another form of policing and surveillance that's been quite dangerous that doesn't get air time. That is, there is violence in that movement. It's just not talked about. Since Roe v Wade, there have been nearly 50 bombings of clinics that provide reproductive health care for women. There have been arsons, there have been doctors that have been murdered, there have been nurses that have suffered severe physical trauma because of shootings, and that threat continues to persist. When we're talking about surveillance, part of it is what the government does.

But then we have to be concerned about those who are adjacent to government where government officials have said, Well, I'm ready for those people to stand by. Stand by with what information? We have to really be concerned about that.

Let's talk about the overlap between what Project 2025 has to say about abortion and as you said, Civil Liberties at large. The Comstock Act, a law that should have been eliminated a long time ago that prevented the mailing of and distribution of pornography. That concept is used to continually ban books today. It's also being used and suggested by Project 2025 as a way to ban abortions. This could involve not mailing abortion pills, which are the most common way in which women get abortions these days. It could go into not mailing contraceptives. If you're in a state where it becomes, and we go back to Alabama, where a lot of women don't have health care, they go to these clinics, that's where they get their contraceptives, but the clinics shut down, so now they can't get their contraceptives at low or no cost. So you away for them, but that can't be done. So the abortion pill can't be had. That's right. You won't be able to get the pill, and you won't be able to get anything to do with family planning. So it's more than that.

And that becomes a federal ban. So note in the Dobbs decision where Justice Alito says, You don't like this, go to your state legislature and just vote. This is what women can do. You have Justice Kavanaugh saying there are guardrails around this decision. There are things that you don't have to worry about. You don't have to worry about gay marriage. You don't have to worry about access to contraception, though Justice Thomas has a It's a little different view. But what you see with the revival of the Comstock Act, this 1873 law, is that, yes, it then can become federalized so that anywhere, including in states that have now instantiated in their constitution, reproductive freedom, you might have difficulty being able to get contraception in the male. That is what this is about, and this is laid out in Project 2025. This is why we have to connect the dots and see this as as a project about dismantling democracy and that reproductive freedom, abortion rights are the blood stain on the tip of the arrow. That that is what this is about. When we see fundamental Civil Liberties such as our ability to be able to associate, our ability to be able to speak, our ability to even be able to protest these things, all being attacked and all being undermined.

So you were referencing the Texas SB 8 law, which allows individuals, citizens, to go after individuals that they believe have aided and abetted others who have terminated a pregnancy. It's straight out of a page of the fugitive slave laws, which, of course, we've seen the revitalization of. When SB 8 became law, I said this. We need to pay attention to history. At the time, there were people who were saying, Well, no, no, no, this is just modern. I said, No, this reeks. It has the stench of this pre-civil rights era. Of course, this is what we've now seen with the revival of so much that was old. Here it is.

Let's talk about women who want to have their children. The net effect is the same. One of the things you've told me many times that this is why exceptions don't work, because take the example of Amanda Zerowski wanted to have her child, but the same restrictions applied to her as would apply to someone who these legislators say should not be having a so-called elective abortion. There's a reason why none of this works, because someone who's a legislator, not a doctor, is now making a determination as to whether a woman who's got complications in her pregnancy might live or die. A point you make, which most men don't understand, is that in America, pregnancy is unusually high risk. Women can die from things that happen, and there are doctors who are under threat of treating somebody because they believe they could lose their license or go to jail or be fined for treating a woman who's not sick enough to be treated because she may not be dying just yet.

It's even dramatic hearing the stories. I feel that, and I'm sure you do, too, as you describe that, that we are a country now that says, Okay, well, in some of these states, we'll enact exceptions. But we know those exceptions don't work. We know that Amanda Zerowski and other women in Texas who have wanted to be able to stay in Texas and get the health care that they need nearby without risking being on the road or in a plane have not been able to get it. We know that there have been such tremendous hurdles that have been put in place with exceptions for, let's say, rape and incest, how much you have to document to oftentimes men at police stations. Then what does this mean for a girl who's been raped? He's 10 or 11 years old who now has to navigate the state.

Can't drive, doesn't have money, has no control over what happens to her body.

Most Americans wouldn't know where their local police precinct happens to be. Look, the cruelty of this we saw right after the Dobbs decision, where a 10-year-old girl had to flee one state to get to the other in order to be able to terminate the pregnancy from Ohio to Indiana. There were lawmakers that scoffed at that. They said, Oh, that's not true. That doesn't happen. Ten-year-olds don't become pregnant. Oh, well, they do. We have an exception in the state. Only to find that No, you don't have an exception, or at least they didn't at that time in Ohio. But what you see is this failure to care, a lack of empathy and compassion for the lives of women and girls. We see more language about unborn child. Now, conflicting what we understand as a child and now making it seem that it's this child that's in the uterus. It just simply hasn't gone through this process to come out. This has been part of a very sophisticated project of messaging, and it makes all of this very complicated because we love children. We want to protect children. But the conflict that has emerged in terms of how this framing has been, women's lives really don't matter.

Women's lives are incidental to all of this, that women are not the constitutional citizens. The women are not the persons. The person happens to be the embryo.

I want to ask you, when you look at not just what's been going on in the legal landscape, but specifically this project 2025, what does America to you look like under Project 2025?

It looks like Gilead. That's not hyperbole. It looks like a place where there are people who suffer, whose toilets are busted open in the search for fetal remains. It looks like a place where women are threatened with arrest and threatened with death penalty for terminating a pregnancy. It looks like women having to flee the state in the cover of night in order to get the health care that they need. It looks like death. It looks like girls going into elementary school as mothers, these things that we've talked about, but only ramped up. But it also looks like a place where hope has been lost, where people feel defeated where they feel as if there is no place to appeal to because the United States has been considered as the beacon of equality, civil rights, and Civil Liberties. It feels, I think for many people, like where else to go and how do you leave? It's a place of immense trauma, and it makes me think about a new Jane Crow, as I've talked about before, because it resonates with me, this migration, the largest in the world that Black people had leaving the American South after a period of slavery, after this period of Jim Crow, that wasn't just about Rosa Parks refusing to give up a seating the bus, but instead, a society where you can't vote, your vote is suppressed, it's not counted, where you can't play checkers in the park, chess, where your kids can't swim in the pool in the park, all of those things where it is just so egregious that you just have to flee and leave.

The question is, where will people go?

Thank you for tuning in to this first episode of our special series, The Threat of Project 2025, presented by the How to Win 2024 podcast. We will continue to discuss the many ways these policies put Americans at risk with our next episode, looking at the threat to education and the lives of students led by our own Joy Reid. Episode 2 is out now, so be sure to keep listening. And next week, Jenn Saki and Chris Hayes will walk you through the risks to LGBTQ rights and climate change. This series, The Threat of Project 2025, is produced by Max Jacobs. Our Associate Producer is Jamaris Perez. Katherine Anderson is our Sound Engineer. Bryson Barnes is the Head of Audio Production. Ayesha Turner is the Executive Producer of MSNBC Audio. And Rebecca Cutler is the Senior Vice President of Content Strategy at MSNBC. And I'm Ali Velshi. Special thanks also to members of my team, Oscar Bauman, Jared Blake, Lily Corvo, Rebecca Drieden, and Dina Moss. Search for How to Win 2024 wherever you get your podcasts and follow the series. And remember, you can listen to all these podcasts and more ad-free, plus exclusive bonus content when you subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts.