Attacks on contraception and abortion access are increasingly cloaked in pseudoscience and moral panic.
Criminalization of pregnancy-related behavior echoes centuries-old efforts to control women’s bodies.
Even in blue states, racial inequities and systemic neglect put women’s lives at risk during childbirth.
In this weeks episode of First Draft,
and author/New York Magazine Senior Correspondent Irin Carmon reveal how reproductive health has become both a moral battlefield and a regulatory weapon. Irin, whose new book Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America just hit shelves, traces the throughline from 19th-century superstition to 21st-century pseudoscience — and how both serve the same purpose: punishing women for existing in their own bodies. The real crisis isn’t just about abortion — it’s about who gets to define humanity itself.
The fight for reproductive freedom has become a fight over truth itself — a clash between lived experience and the machinery of control that insists women’s bodies and what is done with them is up to the government. Disinformation has replaced medicine, ideology has replaced empathy, and “family values” have become the banner for policies that destroy families. The question now isn’t whether these restrictions will spread, but how far Americans will let them go before naming what they are: erasure of personhood under the language of protection.
Tune in to this essential conversation with Irin Carmon and Susan Demas.
The Men Working to Transform the United States into Gilead
“Women are the kind of people that people come out of.” – The Rev. Doug Wilson, August 7, 2025
