CHOICE/LESS

Kelly describes going public with her abortion story--and the shock she felt after it was poached and misrepresented by anti-choice websites without her consent.

Jack RR Evans tells the stories of their abortion and of coming out. Jack, who is a nonbinary transgender person, experienced dysphoria during their pregnancy. Jack understood why years later, when they realized they were transgender.

Catholic hospitals and health-care networks are thriving while other non-profit and community hospitals are struggling. As many hospitals try to stay afloat amidst continued turmoil in the health care industry, some merge with Catholic health-care networks, which follow the ethical and religious directives of the Church. As a result, about 20 percent of the hospital beds in the United States are owned by the Catholic Church, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Patients at Catholic hospitals might not be aware of how the Church's ethical guidelines might affect the quality of care they receive. When the hospital that employed Dr. Debra Stulberg as a resident merged with a Catholic health-care system, she worried it would affect the abortion training she sought and expected to receive. Then she learned that the Catholic directives affected much more than that, potentially putting patients lives in danger.

Conscience and refusal clauses >allow people and institutions such as hospitals, pharmacists, employers, and insurers to refuse to provide, pay for, or refer for medical treatment. These laws went into effect in 1973, after Roe vs. Wade legalized abortion in the United States, and there has been a resurgence of similar legislation in the last decade.

After Dr. Stulberg learned more about these laws, she was surprised by the lack of data regarding the difference in care and patient outcomes at a Catholic hospital compared with a nonsectarian hospital. The Catholic hospital takeover became the defining moment of her residency, and one that continues to inform her research and practice.

Listen to her whole story here, and please take a moment to rate and review us.

CHOICE/LESS will be back with new episodes in the winter. In the meantime, our podcast feed in iTunes and elsewhere will soon transform from CHOICE/LESS to Rewire Radio. While we prepare new episodes of this show, Rewire will bring you new podcasts and audio stories right here. So stay subscribed and look for a lot more reproductive justice coverage and analysis coming this fall from Rewire Radio.

Sterilization abuse so far has played a role in every episode of CHOICE/LESS: The Backstory, but in our third installment, this abuse is front and center.

Charon Asetoyer is a Comanche activist and women’s rights advocate. In this episode, she discusses the Indian Health Service’s extensive and deliberate campaign to sterilize thousands of Native American women in the 1960s and 1970s without their informed consent.

Retired engineer and Lyft driver Rachel Brown came out as transgender at age 68. She's been using her time as a driver to educate her passengers in Massachusetts about an alarming referendum on the ballot this fall that could repeal transgender legal protections in the state. This is her story.