Since day one, we've been covering medical disinformation on this podcast, always wondering where it would move next. Our collective breaths were stolen when learning about the seemingly inevitable overturning of Roe v Wade last week—and the extensive implications that could have for American society.Mother Jones senior editor, Kiera Butler, has been reporting on medical disinformation in parenting groups for years. Her most recent piece points out the next potential freedom to be stripped from women: the use of contraception. She joins Derek this week to talk about this seemingly dystopian present we're moving into, as well as the continued merging of the Christian Right and wellness influencers—which is very much a part of this movement. Show NotesThe Anti-Abortion Movement’s Next Target: Birth ControlThe Terrifying Story of How QAnon Infiltrated Moms’ GroupsThe Death of Roe Is Going to Tear America Apart
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I'm Derek Barris, piloting Solo this week as Matthew and Julian put the finishing touches on our book, which we'll be submitting soon.
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Conspirituality 103.
Row against the machine with Kiera Butler.
I call them the hollow days.
Those days that numb you.
The days that force you to sit back and say, wait, is this really happening?
Is this really where I live?
It happened to me on 9-11, up close and very personal.
January 6th was a hollow day as well, even though I was far from that action.
And it happened again last week when the preliminary Samuel Alito opinion about Roe v. Wade was first published.
I remember reading an article about 20 years ago in Harper's.
It was about the generational battle over Roe v. Wade.
The reporter focused on the number of Christian universities that were specifically training young conservatives to enter politics with the goal of overturning Roe v. Wade.
In a generation later, here we are.
So to say that the Christian right hasn't been planning this for decades would be a major oversight, and one that I believe the left hasn't taken seriously enough.
And then you get to the flood of other possible liberties being stripped from us if this decision comes to pass.
Gay marriage, LGBTQ rights, contraception.
I can't believe, right now, that some American states might ban the pill and forms of hormone control that women use.
But if you haven't learned that the craven religiosity of some Americans creates perverse outcomes, well, you've really been sleeping.
Because that's not how power works, at least the type of unrestrained power that we've been dealing with for generations in this country.
And if the Alito leak hit me this hard, I can't imagine how traumatizing this has been for the real target of this bill, which is women.
So, you really don't need to hear from me on this issue.
Last week an article was published in Mother Jones by senior editor Ciara Butler.
It's called the anti-abortion movement's next target, birth control.
And then there's the lead.
End disinformation from social media influencers is helping their cause.
And if you think she meant conspiritualists, you're spot on.
Ciara's been covering this beat for a minute now.
I first had the chance to chat with her when she interviewed me for the September 2020 article, The Terrifying Story of How QAnon Infiltrated Moms Groups.
She's covered a lot of issues around motherhood, medicine, and policy.
So when I read her most recent article, I wanted to talk to her about what she uncovered in her reporting.
And as you'll hear during our conversation, I'm very glad she said yes.
My eyes were opened to some things I didn't even know and I spend a lot of my time tracking this stuff.
So, looking forward, we're going to continue to cover Roe v. Wade and conspiritualists in the coming months, as all three of us believe this is only going to grow more problematic.
And we're already looking for other experts to chat with as we turn this over and investigate it from different angles.
Now for now, let's hear what Kira has to say about embedding with anti-abortion activists in the Christian right.
We've been wondering how can spirituality will evolve, especially as it come towards the midterms.
And we've been focusing on the anti-vax and the medical disinformation aspect.
But now this just kind of, it's not like it just rushed in.
This is not new.
But the convergence of forces that have led into war.
What we're now experiencing with abortion just makes it in some ways even more disorienting and more alarming than even what I imagined with the vaccinations.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think it just it also kind of plays into conspiracy theorists ability to fold in the latest headlines to basically whatever narrative they already have.
And I mean, I saw this when Russia had just invaded Ukraine.
There was a whole, you know, big uptick in pro-Putin ideology that the Instagrammers that I follow who usually are just all about vaccines were all of a sudden like talking about geopolitical strategy.
It's the attention economy, and it's what these conspiritualists and wellness influencers thrive in.
They only have attention to monetize, and so it doesn't matter if they have any clue what they're talking about, they just need to hit those hashtags and stay in any conversation whatsoever.
Right.
Which is, you know, honestly something that I can relate to as a journalist.
Yes, I've done enough SEO writing in my time to understand that technique.
There's one level of it when you're trying to bring some intelligent analysis to the conversation compared to just trying to monetize the situation, and that's where the problems happen.
I want to get more detailed, but the first question I have to ask you is, given all that you covered, at least in the two years since we first spoke, almost two years, how is your mental health?
A great question and thank you for asking.
Like I was saying before, I usually manage to maintain a little bit of professional distance.
I think when you're covering this kind of thing, you sort of have to, otherwise you would just burn out really quickly.
But I think it's really taken a toll in my Inability to tune things out at the end of the day.
I am a mom.
I have two little kids and it's very important to me to be present with them.
And when I'm looking at Instagram and Twitter to see what the latest conspiracy nonsense is, it's hard to do that.
So for me, I think that that's the biggest toll on my mental health.
I don't talk much about my history.
I'll just say that I am grateful that abortion is legal in America for my personal life from a long time ago.
And I know how that would have affected me differently if that were not the case.
But it also has nothing to do with my body specifically and all of the health concerns and the reality of what it takes.
Given these past few days, we mentioned it's so disorienting, both for you and maybe your circle of friends, what are you going through in your head looking down the pipeline of about what's going to happen?
This is probably the thing that I've covered that is most intimately connected to my life and my friends' lives.
At Mother Jones, we do a lot of writing about vulnerable communities, and I am a person with a lot of privilege.
I often do not fall into the bucket of being part of a vulnerable community.
But the overturning of Roe v. Wade really is something that will affect me and all of my friends.
It feels extremely personal to me.
And you know, we always say the personal is political, but this is about the most salient example of this that I can think of.
Sorry, I feel like I need to add a caveat to that, which is that my friends and I also are privileged in this way, right?
Like, if abortion access is further curtailed, people like us will be able to still access it, basically.
It will be much, much worse for people who live in places where there's even less access.
It will be harder for people who don't have the economic means to get an abortion.
I just said a few moments ago, I'm in the middle of a move.
I'm moving to Portland.
It turns out that Oregon is the first state to really jump out and start a fund of $15 million to say, we will help women come into our state and get the healthcare access they need if this all happens.
That is wonderful.
I feel very good about that.
But the fact that any state even has to think that way.
And the idea that, oh, well, they can just go there, then it's fine, is also false.
It still points to a level of privilege that I don't think most people recognize.
If you're in Texas, you can't just get to Oregon easily, even if they're footing the bill.
Right.
And it also depends on the specific situation, right?
So, you know, a lot of these bills that we're seeing at the state level are proposing banning abortion, even in the case of ectopic pregnancy, which is a life-threatening emergency.
And if your state does not have an abortion clinic and you have an ectopic pregnancy and you're having to cross state lines to get an abortion, you're not going to survive.
So let's start with your recent article and the reason I shot you a DM because it's not only Roe v. Wade bearing overturned, but you mentioned that birth control is the next target.
There's so much speculation about why people want to end abortion and I don't, I think, and I think you as a journalist would agree, that you can't always look at binaries.
They often don't reveal the truth.
They just make tweets.
But you've gone to these events now.
We'll talk about the Heartbeat International one in a moment.
What do you see as the driving, motivating reasons, or if you have a reason, why people are so fervent about ending abortion and whatever that can lead to?
I think that's a really interesting question and I think there are so many different answers.
At the conference that I attended, I met and was in a conference room with many workers at crisis pregnancy centers and these were All of them were women, there were no men in attendance, and they all really seemed to believe that they were doing God's work, that life begins at conception and that they were saving babies.
So, you know, for them, I think that's probably the answer.
I think that there are also other people, you know, I've seen some tweets flying around lately that have a little bit more of a complicated reason for this.
And I think one clue to that is a line that people have been talking about a lot in the Alito draft opinion about the domestic supply of infants.
So this line of reasoning says that in order to supply couples that want to adopt with enough babies, we can't be allowing abortions.
So that's one thing.
There was another, I saw a joke.
Joke?
Question mark?
Tweet from somebody else.
It was Eric Erickson and he said, I'm going to paraphrase, I don't remember.
He's like the, you know, conservative commentator.
I don't remember word for word what he said, but it was something like, I think abortion is great for saving babies, but seeing the reaction from women, I think we also might should go after the 19th Amendment too.
They're so They're all the histrionics, you know, something like that.
So I think that you have a real spectrum, and on the one side is people who for religious reasons believe that they want to save babies and that abortion is murder.
And then you have people for whom it really is, you know, more about controlling women.
Now you attended the Heartbeat International Conference, as I said, that's what you kick off the article with.
And you mentioned a roundtable that was called Post Row.
And I just want to hear what happened in that room.
I don't know.
I wasn't there.
In order to go, you had to be the head of an anti-abortion organization, like the head of a crisis pregnancy center or something.
And you had to provide 25 copies of your 990 or something.
So I was not in that room.
Wow.
I would have written about it if I were.
You do quote one of the presenters at the conference, though, as saying that they are exposing the, quote, risks and dangers of our birth control culture, end quote.
What are those risks and dangers in their eyes?
Well, this is where you start to see the convergence of this kind of world of natural living and wellness influencers and, you know, there are naturopaths in this group, there are, you know, so-called functional medicine doctors, integrative medicine doctors, and then there are just plain old influencers who are selling essential oils or whatever.
Who really in the past five years or so have been pushing this idea that the pill, the hormonal contraception and in pill form and IUD form is really unnatural and that it messes up women's hormones and they claim that there are a host of side effects and risks.
Now, I guess I want to be clear at this point that it is true that a lot of women, a lot of people who use birth control, hormonal birth control, do experience side effects and for some people it really is so severe that it just it's not worth it for them.
But these claims that this group of wellness influencers are making go sort of beyond the science.
They say birth control pills will make you less attractive and that they'll make you choose a man who is less manly as a partner.
And, you know, they say that, you know, they'll cause you to have suicidal thoughts and there's a whole kind of gamut of claims that they make.
They also are really obsessed with progesterone and they think because certain kinds of hormonal birth control stop you from ovulating and that when you don't ovulate, you don't get that the progesterone boost that you do when you ovulate.
They think that that is really against nature and unwholesome and that your health will suffer as a result of being deprived of this natural progesterone.
So, that's the influencers and recently, I would say, also within the last few years, folks who are opposed to abortion on moral grounds have picked up a lot of these arguments that these natural living kinds of people have put forth about birth control and have found, honestly, that it's a really effective tactic.
That it's hard for anti-abortion groups to convince secular people that abortion is wrong.
But, you know, if you can kind of go in that door with birth control and start talking about, you know, how it's bad for your health, how it's not just, you know, morally reprehensible to divorce the act of sex from the creation of children, that can be effective.
My wife and I are watching this series on HBO Max.
I forget the name of it, but it's about the unregulated chemicals in beauty products.
And the last episode we watched was about nail polish.
My wife actually, since I've met her, has been on that because your nails are more absorbent than your skin.
The levels of toxicity on some of these chemicals are hurting people who are using them, but especially hurting the predominantly Vietnamese population who work in nail salons and have to breathe this in all the day.
This is one of the issues where I run into, and I just want to hear your thoughts on this.
Here we have real-world data of...
products that are harming populations that we could actually focus our energy on.
And then you bring up that yes, there are problems with birth control.
I've heard that too from women I've dated in the past, that they've had hormonal issues.
But the level of what they take it to is completely unverified in any way.
Why do you think we focus on issues like abortion that are more philosophical in some ways, that they take all these spiritual ideas into their conversations and then just completely ignore?
Another one I've been on is Botox.
Where does that play into all of this?
Yeah, that's a really interesting question, and I think part of it might go back to the whole idea of healthcare providers and scientists somehow being in cahoots with the government and pulling the wool over our eyes.
You know, the way that I've seen influencers talk about birth control, hormonal contraception, it's almost like you as a woman, or as a person who uses birth control, are being fed a lie.
Like your doctor has been pushing this on you and you have not been given a choice and you have not been told about the risks.
So, Rikki Lake, the actress, she produced a few years ago, maybe like a decade ago, a documentary called "The Business of Being Born" that was all about the supposed profiteering of childbirth providers.
It was, you know, the idea that birth has been medicalized and that, you know, there are too many c-sections and too many epidurals given and, you know, it was very promoting of natural childbirth.
And, you know, like everything in this world, it's like, yes and, or like, I don't know, like I don't think that a lot of what that film said was supported by science.
But her newest project, sorry that was kind of a tangent, but her newest project is a similar documentary, but this one is about hormonal contraception.
And really her line is very similar to what we see about vaccines and the anti-vaccine movement.
It's doctors are not telling you the truth, the government is not telling you the truth, One thing that we started, one of the founding principles of the podcast was the lack of participation in politics in the wellness communities, and how problematic that has been for a long time.
And so this entire topic we're talking about was part of the roundtable of Bill Maher this week.
And Paul Begallia said that he believes this decision will open the door to overturning gay marriage.
And again, we're talking about your article with his birth control.
But the other guest, his name is Shel Tafoya, shook her head.
And she said it was ridiculous that this alito's decision, and if this happens, was a limited abortion alone.
And she describes herself as a pro-choice conservative.
but I often feel like liberals take this mindset as well.
Every time there's a policy change, liberals and progressives, they never believe the next step won't happen.
They always see it as one thing.
Not always, but I've noticed this over and over, where they can't foresee the perverse incentives behind bills like this.
Is that true in your experience, that Liberals are not as good at the long game and understanding how policy affects these decisions and where it leads to Yeah, I mean and I think that maybe some of that is because I consider the the progressive vision to be essentially optimistic and sometimes that optimism can sort of round the corner into Pollyannaism That's a word, you know?
You don't really even need to guess when it comes to abortion because we've seen this play out, you know?
We have seen how states that have limited abortion access and have put more and more draconian restrictions around abortion Continue to push the envelope.
This past year with the heartbeat bill in Texas and that was proposed in a few other states, that seemed unimaginable to a lot of people.
The idea that you couldn't have an abortion past the time when most people don't even know yet that they're pregnant.
And yet, it happened.
Almost as soon as the news of the draft decision about Roe broke, we're already seeing states that are talking about getting rid of access to Plan B and also getting rid of IUDs.
So this is not really theoretical.
This is something that is actually observable.
Do you ever see condoms in these discussions?
That is very interesting.
I mean, I know Catholics don't believe in any kind of birth control, but you know, these other groups at the Heartbeat International Conference, there were a bunch of Catholic participants, but there's also like a, you know, an evangelical Protestant strain.
There as well.
And I had expected that they would, their line would be barrier methods like condoms and diaphragms are fine, but it wasn't.
Or maybe it was, but then they also were very disparaging.
Like I found one slide in a presentation that was like, well yeah, there's condoms, but they don't work very well.
It's just like, what?
All of this sounds like, you know, there's been talk about Alito's decision or opinion saying that birth control was not in the constitution and therefore we shouldn't look at this as precedent, which is so ridiculous.
It feels like so much of what we covered in the two years feels like this entire industry just wants to go back to the early to mid 19th century.
Yeah, that's right, and I see this over and over with wellness influencers as well.
There's this kind of argument that they make and they apply it to all sorts of different things that, you know, we shouldn't use this medical intervention or eat this food or whatever or birth our babies in this particular way because our forebears did not, so therefore it's not natural.
Well, you know, our forebears also died a lot.
A lot more.
A lot more.
And they didn't tap out their thoughts on a phone that they were sending to a satellite to hit people across the world.
Correct.
Well, speaking of wellness influencers, you touched upon this.
But I want to drill down a little bit more in your sense, and maybe it's the crossover with the right-wing conservatives on this.
What is their definition of natural?
That is a great question, and I think it probably depends.
I have seen wellness influencers who are against Botox because it's unnatural.
So that's heartening, I guess?
I don't know.
I read a quote on Twitter, just a random one, where it was pointing out that if God is always agreeing with you, maybe it's not God.
You know, every time you say something, God demands this.
It just happens to line up with your beliefs.
Maybe that's a problem.
So I think this could fall on that.
I think so.
I see a lot of wellness influencers who are selling stuff, right?
And so, you know, if you can say this essential oil, which God knows how, like how that essential oil was extracted from whatever plant that they got it from, if it even came from a plant.
It is actually financially beneficial for them to sort of wave away those questions.
Maybe my answer will just be, it is an extremely subjective term.
Natural.
Yes.
Good.
Well put.
And that was actually my next question, which is, did you, have you come across any of these influencers in this world who weren't selling some sort of detox and supplement to go along with whatever they're talking about?
I would say the vast majority are.
I would say the one exception is the people who are kind of in the parenting and childbirth arena.
Those folks seem really ideologically driven.
They tend to be less in the ultra-conservative political camp.
There's less crossover between political issues and what they're doing.
Speaking of Yolan Clark, or Bauhaus' wife, speaking of natural birth, who I believe has nine children, this is an argument I've heard from her, but I've more recently heard it when Kelly Brogan was on Aubrey Marcus' podcast where she talks about birth control being anti-feminist.
Is that something you've come across as well?
Yes, that is definitely an argument that I heard at the Heartbeat International Conference and that I've also seen from influencers.
And the idea is, again, they're tying it back to this very subjective and arbitrary, I would say, definition of naturalness.
It's also tied back to, you know, the distrust of scientists and of doctors because they're saying that male doctors have imposed this agenda of hormonal contraception on women and that the feminist thing to do would be to cast off the chains of these patriarchal doctors and not tamper with the menstrual cycle.
That's the challenge of all of this, because up until pretty much the 1970s, most gynecologists were men.
That's what's so frustrating about this, is there are levels of truth within every conspiracy theory, but also everything that's being said about healthcare.
But it always seems to just get pushed to an extreme that doesn't reflect the reality of the situation.
Yeah, that's absolutely true.
And I think, you know, what these people who are pushing this narrative about patriarchal doctors, what they're ignoring is the fact that women can choose what kinds of Contraception to have or not to have.
Also, there's robust science showing that these forms of contraception are safe and effective.
That kind of never really comes into the conversation.
Listen, you know, contraception, hormonal contraception is one of the most well-studied kinds of medical intervention.
And there's just reams of data on how safe and effective it is.
I mean, you know, my argument, and maybe this doesn't even need to be stated, is that the feminist perspective is really that hormonal contraception gives women the power to decide how and when or if to form families, to have children.
You also quote a presenter at the conference as saying, "...the goal of birth control is preventing sexual intercourse from resulting in its natural, intended biological result—children." Do these people really not understand that people sometimes have sex for pleasure as well and that's just part of their life?
What these people claim is that they think that that is an un-Christian way to think about sex.
But that really, that quote really stood out to me because, you know, like before you were asking about like, well, you know, what do these people think about condoms?
And actually, you know, if that is the underlying goal of all of this, to keep sex just as an act of procreation, then that puts all birth control off the table.
We've talked a little bit about the wellness influencers and their downlines and something we talk about on the podcast often, but from the conservative evangelical space, what are the monetization lines that are happening there, if any?
That is an interesting question.
I think that for evangelical Christians, it has less to do with selling stuff than it does to do with a moral crusade.
And that is not to say that there are not deep pocketed donors and extremely wealthy people and groups that are funding this movement, because there are, but it's less about the grift
That said, I will say that I wrote about the American Pregnancy Association, which is, you know, when you hear the name American Pregnancy Association, you might think that this is like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, just like a, you know, a neutral medical source of information.
And indeed, when you visit the website of the American Pregnancy Association, it kind of comes off like, Hey, I'm pregnant and I wonder if I can eat tuna fish.
Like, this is a site that will tell me the answer.
And it does have all of that information, but then it turns out, and this is what my piece was about, that it is the project of an anti-abortion group.
And that, you know, once you get into the section of the site that's like, am I pregnant?
Then you sort of get led down this path to anti-abortion disinformation.
And this site, in addition to promoting anti-abortion disinformation,
Also brings you to pages where there are sponsored products and the products are things like supplements that they say that you should take when you're pregnant or my favorite was there's like a special kind of ice cream that's like meant to for like this is it's so stupid when pregnant women have like cravings for ice cream at night like they're supposed to eat the special nutritious ice cream it's called night food and this is a website that is
Pretending to be a neutral source of medical information that is actually the product of an anti-abortion organization that is also shilling products.
So that crossover does exist.
I don't know if you have the pleasure of being on Parler's email list.
Oh, no.
No, I don't have that particular pleasure.
Should I?
I have not downloaded the app and will not, considering you don't even know where their servers are.
I do track, as you probably do, a lot of these disinformation sites.
Half of their emails are about why you're fat and need to lose weight.
Then here's the green tea stuff.
Whatever it is, it feels like Dr. Oz 10 years ago was Parler's email list.
Yeah, absolutely.
I thought of one other grift that happens with these groups, which is a lot of these groups will say, we don't believe in hormonal contraception, but we have this other highly effective method of birth control, and it's called fertility awareness.
And this is basically tracking your cycle.
This is what most of us know as the rhythm method.
And there are now countless apps that claim that they can help you track your cycle and prevent you from getting pregnant or get you pregnant quicker depending on your goal.
These methods, study after study, have shown that they are far less effective than hormonal contraception.
But these apps and systems are relentlessly promoted by anti-abortion groups.
There has been so many different angles coming out just in the last few days alone, but one that really struck me, and I haven't looked as deeply as I need to, but you may have, which is the idea of some of those apps selling the data to activist organizations.
Do you think that that's a possibility?
Have you come across that at all?
I absolutely think it's a possibility.
It's not something that I personally have looked into.
But, you know, we have seen how, you know, fitness tracking apps have done this.
We've seen that happen.
This is another case of it's not just theoretical next step.
It's like there is an observable trend here.
And, you know, I think anybody who is not concerned about their privacy when they're using one of these cycle tracking apps, probably a little naive.
You've covered, again, so many angles of this during the pandemic.
You've anti-vax myths and children's vaccines and wellness influencers promoting Putin, as you said, before Ukraine, but now especially with Ukraine.
Nurses groups struggling with anti-vax disinformation.
What are some other troublesome topics that have stayed with you during this pandemic time?
Those are like the greatest hits, I think.
I have been looking at sort of different corners of that that I think are less explored, or ways in which these anti-vaccine activists have been sort of trying to push the envelope in the same way that anti-abortion activists will now try to push their agenda.
You know, for example, right now what I'm seeing is that anti-vaccine activists have moved on from the COVID vaccine back to what they were doing before the pandemic, which was advocating against all vaccines.
In a way, it's going back to what they were doing before.
And in another way, it's completely different because this movement during the pandemic has radicalized a lot of people.
So these influencers grew their audience by leaps and bounds over the past two, two and a half years.
And they are now, they now have a much wider audience to convince that, you know, children also shouldn't be vaccinated against measles.
It's interesting, just today I was looking at some of the influencers that I follow on Instagram, and I wrote about this briefly, but I'm seeing it even more now than when I wrote the article, that one line of attack in that area has to do with pediatrician well baby visits.
When you have a baby, you're like always going to the pediatrician, like, you know, just because babies grow fast and pediatricians need to make sure that they're hitting their milestones.
And anti-vaccine activists that I've seen recently are saying that these visits are completely medically unnecessary and that they're just an excuse for the pediatricians to jab your kids while you're not looking.
You know, when you think about the implications of that for vaccines, that's scary.
But, you know, the idea that there is going to possibly be this whole cohort of parents who are not going to take their kids in for the well baby checks.
You wonder what else?
They're going to miss out on.
These are times when pediatricians actually will screen moms for postnatal depression.
They're times when pediatricians might get an early indication of a developmental delay of some kind of medical problem that needs intervention.
This is really kind of an anti-doctor movement that we're seeing.
Phenomenon we've noticed is there was an influencer in Austin named Preston Smiles.
He got COVID and then felt the need to talk about his nebulizing hydrogen peroxide on Instagram.
And he blamed the worst symptoms of COVID not from not getting vaccinated or the virus itself, but from eating sugar when he first got infected with it.
You had someone else who got COVID really badly, was about to get her breast implants taken out, and then said that the symptoms were really something to do with that, and that that surgery would clear everything up.
So, you see these leaps and bounds of imagination that happen when people get the virus and then can't justify it because they've been talking against it for so long.
From your experiences with mothering groups, are there similar ways that if they don't go to a doctor or they don't get a vaccine and their child gets sick, that they try to justify it instead of actually looking at the fact that they just didn't get their child vaccinated?
Yes.
One narrative that I really am meaning to write about, but I've been busy, shall we say, over the last week or two with the Roe stuff.
Have you heard about this, the hepatitis outbreak in kids?
Yes.
So there's a lot of, there's a lot of interesting things about this, you know, that nobody knows so far what is causing the hepatitis outbreak.
But among the groups that I follow, the anti-vaccine kind of natural living influencers, well, there are two popular narratives.
One is sort of what you would expect, which is these kids are getting sick because the COVID vaccine made them get hepatitis somehow.
There's absolutely no medical evidence for this.
But the other idea is this kind of disproven theory of immunity debt.
The idea that if you don't get sick for a few years, especially when you're a kid, that you're going to get sick a lot after that.
So these folks who are very anti-lockdown, anti-mask, say that the kids who are getting hepatitis now are getting hepatitis because their immune systems were deprived of the challenges for two years that are typically posed by catching colds in daycare or whatever.
Of course, the idea that the concept of immunity debt is real is completely not logical when you consider the fact that not every kid goes to daycare.
And daycare is a relatively recent invention.
A lot of kids stay home with parents or grandparents and don't really get sick for the first few years until they go to school.
And so if this were really the case, then you would have seen a whole lot of hepatitis in kindergarten all the time, which we don't.
Which is sort of a long way of saying that, yes, you know, the mental gymnastics that people will go through to kind of justify their worldview can be pretty impressive.
I always have a list of questions that I plan on asking written out on my screen here.
And then as we talk to anyone, other questions come up.
And that was one of the questions that just, Oh, let me ask that.
And I had no idea where it was going to go.
And as often happens, it's just even stupider than I imagined.
Now I have something else to do, immunity debt, to think about.
They will not stop.
There was an article, an opinion piece in the New York Times, I think it was Michelle Goldberg.
She was just basically saying that if Roe gets overturned, it's going to create a civil war, continue to just split this country apart.
And it was a pretty basic, straightforward article, nothing too speculative, but saying that this can really damage us to a level we haven't even experienced yet.
Do you have any thoughts on that and what happens if this actually goes through in the next month?
You know, this is a direction that I guess I, you know, cynically...
see us going in any way.
The past two plus pandemic years have just shown an increasingly polarized country and it's kind of with each new news cycle as the conspiracy theorists incorporate the headlines of the day into their worldview and as the conspiracy theorists kind of capture more and more people from the
mainstream into their, you know, very extreme version of reality.
You really do, you know, just see this divide widen and you see fewer conversations between people who disagree with each other.
Will Roe deepen this divide if it's overturned?
Absolutely, yes.
I do believe that that will happen.
Do I think that it's the only thing that's making that happen?
No.
I think that there are a multitude of political, cultural, social issues that are just driving people in this country away from each other and toward two teams.
And you hinted at the possibility with immunity debt, which I think would be a great article.
I want to read it as frightening as it sounds.
But is there anything else you're working on right now that you want to flag with abortion and birth control or any other topics in this sphere that you're really focused on?
Yeah, so there are two things that I'm sort of, well there are many things I'm chipping away at.
I have a piece coming out hopefully soon.
I worked with a freelancer who lives in Kenya.
This piece is about the spread of American anti-vaccine ideology to the developing world and she has some examples from on the ground in Kenya there.
And so that was, you know, a terrifying piece to work on that should be coming out, I don't know, in the next few weeks probably.
This week, like right after we get off the phone, I'm probably going to do some reporting about the disinformation surrounding medication abortion.
Most people these days are getting abortions using abortion pills rather than like a surgical abortion.
And the anti-abortion movement is pushing a lot of disinformation around that.
I just want to give you one little example, which is, I think it was in Rochester, New York, last winter, there was a Planned Parenthood being proposed to be built somewhere and there was a local anti-abortion group there that teamed up with a kind of an anti-abortion legal team.
And they made the argument that the building of this Planned Parenthood would not be in compliance with clean water legislation because they would have women coming in and taking the abortion pill and then there would be so many dead fetuses clogging up the waterways.
So that's, and that's kind of like the most out there.
Kind of disinformation around medication abortion that I've seen but there's also very run-of-the-mill Like, you know, it's not safe.
You're gonna bleed to death on your toilet Like just all of that kind of stuff out there too, which is also not true And then lastly I've been working on for a while just sort of pulling string on this idea of kind of contrarian physicians trying to discredit any scientists who get funding from NIH because you know NIH is now You know, synonymous with Fauci, and Fauci is the villain.
Those are kind of the three things that I'm thinking about, and you know, there are many more story ideas that I have that I don't have time to do.
One thing that's for certain, I think, for both of us is we have a pretty steady stream of job security at the moment.
