South Carolina isn’t just another red state — “it’s really one of the most fascist states,” Andra Watkins says. A new bill there doesn’t stop at criminalizing abortion; it folds in hormonal contraception, treating birth control as if it were an abortion. The logic comes straight from fetal personhood dogma: “even if it’s not implanted, it’s a tiny human being.” What reads like tortured science is actually theology, smuggled into law to punish women for daring to manage their own bodies.
For Andra, the point isn’t medical; it’s moral. “What this really is about is them imposing their religious beliefs on everyone,” she argues, and those beliefs frame any sex outside of marriage as impurity. Contraception becomes intolerable because it severs sex from consequence, and consequence is the whole point. “They want to make people who engage in that potentially have to live with an unwanted pregnancy,” Watkins says — not as a side effect, but as a deliberate deterrent.
That’s why the cruelty multiplies. When a Texas official declared, “It’s a woman’s calling to suffer,” Watkins recognized it as evangelical code: Childbirth pain as punishment, miscarriages as moral failures, and even Tylenol cast as indulgence. She warns that in this system, every pregnancy loss can be reclassified as a crime. “Removing some of these things … gives them the ability to say, you caused this miscarriage. It’s really a murder.” The dystopia isn’t abstract; it’s an operating manual already being tested.
Her prescriptions aren’t easy, but they’re urgent. “Stockpile contraception and other reproductive healthcare supplies now,” she tells viewers, because tomorrow it may be illegal. Long-term fixes like IUDs and vasectomies become survival strategies, and local organizing — “get out in your communities and find like-minded people” — is the only real firewall when lawmakers are drunk on power. It’s the hard talk many don’t want to hear, but Watkins insists that’s the point: pretending it’s normal is how democracy was lost in places like Venezuela.
Watch the conversation with Sam and Andra and let us know how you’re feeling in the comments.
The MAGA Fealty Spiral: When Women and Minorities Forget They’re Not Allowed to Think
I was at home, half-watching the news while piecing together my fall syllabi, when a chyron flashed across the screen about Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laura Loomer going nuclear on each other. Two of MAGA’s loudest hype-women clawing at each other like rival contestants on a reality show where the grand prize is Trump’s approval. I looked up from my lap…
