COLD OPEN

HEIDEN: I didn't really understand at first what was going on. But as I stared at that
image of the Bible, it hit me. I knew at that moment I had been tricked.

I sat there. I was stunned.

MIKE: Today on the show, can the government force you to say something—something
that violates your conscience?
MATT: We asked that question in our previous episode, and we’re asking it again. Only
this time, we’re not talking about license plates or state mottos.
MIKE: No, this time we’re talking about what is perhaps one of the most divisive issues
of our time. Here’s how NPR’s Nina Totenberg summed up today’s case.

NINA: This one involves abortion, people who claim they were tricked. This is
about how people live their lives, and the values by which they live their lives,
and the freedom to live their lives, and the freedom of others to prevent what they
see as murder.

MATT: I’m Matthew Schwartz.

MIKE: And I’m Mike Vuolo.
MATT: And this … is Unprecedented.

TITLE BREAK

MIKE: In 2013, Emily Heiden was living in Virginia. She was in grad school, working on
a master of fine arts in creative writing. She was fully funded. This was her dream and
life was on track, until it wasn’t.

HEIDEN: I felt an ache. This was really deep down low in my belly. It felt like a
stretching and I had never felt it before. I dismissed it at first and then it
insistently showed up again and then again til it was happening every day. And I
couldn't ignore it anymore. I thought, "Well, okay. I should take a pregnancy test."
I was sleeping with someone and so I knew that there was at least a chance that
this could be what was happening. I took the test and it was positive and my
heart just started totally racing.
VUOLO: It sounds like you knew, "Okay, step one, get a pregnancy test. Step
two, I have no idea."
HEIDEN: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because I was just very, very torn. I felt like my life
was not conducive to having this baby but I also felt an almost immediate
attachment to it. I talked to it.
VUOLO: What did you say?
HEIDEN: I said, "Hi, baby." I mean they weren't extended conversations. But I
had this distinct sense that I was not alone in my own body for the first time in my
life, which was really weird.

1
MATT: So, she searched the internet for a place to get advice? Maybe make a list of
pros and cons? She didn’t know. She had never been pregnant before. She had no idea
how any of this worked.

HEIDEN: I remember I started googling that day just anything I could think of, like
pregnancy help, unplanned pregnancy, pregnancy counseling. I wanted to talk to
an impartial party, somebody who didn't know me. I wanted a counselor to sit
down with me and say, "This is what would happen if you had this baby right
now: you might have to drop out of your graduate program. You might have to
move back home to Connecticut. Or maybe not, you know. Maybe there’s
another way around this." That's what I wanted.

I found this one place that had a great website and this I remember verbatim.
They said that they offered help “without politics or hype." I thought, "Oh my
gosh, I have found what I'm looking for."

MIKE: The place was Care Net Pregnancy Resource Centers. It’s in Manassas,
Virginia. Emily showed up the next day for her appointment and walked through the
door. There was a sign on the counter. It said to ring the bell for service.

HEIDEN: So I did. And then this really lovely young woman came out. She had
brown hair and this lovely sweater and these cream colored heels and this
beautiful smile. She asked if I would like to have a seat on her comfy, green
couch. She offered me a snack—chewy chocolate cookies, Snackwells. It did not
look like any kind of a medical center, but she did tell me that she had some dry,
boring medical questions for me.

She asked me what had been the first day of my last period and I told her that.
She asked if I needed a pregnancy test. I told her no, that I had just had it
confirmed. She asked me if there were things that I wanted to tell her, so I just
launched into my saga and she just let me talk. And I was so relieved. I felt like
she was hearing me out and like she was not judging me, that she was just
listening, that she was so well trained that she knew she should stock snacks.
This is her job. She works with pregnant people and she can help me.

And then it all changed.

She just sat there when I was done. She looked really deep in thought. She
looked really pensive and then she said, "I’d like to talk with you now, Emily,
about something that is really important to me for just a minute, okay?" And I
said, "Sure." She reached over and she plucked this little pamphlet from a table
at her side. I remember the petals of a pink lily on the cover and it was titled,
"May I ask you a question?" She said, "Would you flip with me to page one,
please?"

2
MATT: Emily had just answered a series of “dry, boring medical questions,” as she put
it. The counselor had one more question.

HEIDEN: "Has anyone ever taken a Bible and shown you how you can know for
sure that you're going to heaven?"

MIKE: In that moment, Emily realized: this place isn’t what she thought it was. Care Net
is what’s often called a Crisis Pregnancy Center. You can think of them as part Christian
ministry—which some don’t advertise—and part medical clinic. One of their primary
missions is to steer women away from abortion.

HEIDEN: As I stared at that image of the Bible, it hit me. I knew at that moment I
had been tricked. I felt like an idiot. I was so angry at myself in that moment. I
was so furious you know at myself. [crying] I felt like I had fallen for … I felt very
stupid. You know, I was working on my second master’s degree at that point and
I was a pretty educated person and I thought, you know I’m a good reader and I
thought that I should have known better. That I shouldn’t have fallen for this. But I
did. Sometimes I just kind of freeze up when I am feeling so many things and so I
just sat there and I just let her keep going. I numbly turned the pages of the
booklet with her.

It said that the Bible contains both bad news and good news. And that, "The bad
news is something about you and the good news is something about G-d." And it
said, "We are all sinners, we have all come short of G-d's standard of perfection,
and the penalty for sin is death." If the place had been called Christian Options I
definitely would not have gone. If there had been a sign saying: We are affiliated
with this church. Any hint about G-d, religion, I woulda left.

MIKE: Remember, Matt, that Emily said she just froze and let the woman continue?
MATT: Mm-hmm.
MIKE: It continued.

HEIDEN: And then they wheeled in this TV and VCR. She just pushed play and I
started watching this video. They described what they said were the dangers of
an abortion procedure. They said that it would cause irreversible damage, that
your uterus would rupture, that it would render you infertile, that you'd bleed out
on the table, and that ending a pregnancy would cause breast cancer.

And I just said, "This is not true." I looked at her and I just said, "This isn't true."
At that moment I could feel myself getting angry about all this misinformation I
was hearing. Then, I left. Yeah, I just went to my car and cried. I don't have good
language for the level of panic that I felt and vulnerability. Until you've been a
woman going through an unplanned pregnancy I don't think you really know ... I
can't think of a different word than vulnerability.

3
MATT: I would imagine, Mike, that it’s precisely this vulnerability that brings thousands
of women to these crisis pregnancy centers every year. Many of them, like Emily,
unaware of their religious affiliation.
MIKE: And so far we've heard this story from Emily. The crisis pregnancy centers have
their perspective too—that an abortion prevented is a life saved. And we will hear from
them. But, it’s important to point out that many doctors are fierce critics of these centers.
In 2018, the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics published an article titled,
“Why Crisis Pregnancy Centers Are Legal But Unethical.” And not too long ago, I spoke
to an OB-GYN who says flat-out that these centers are trading in false information.

DR. STANWOOD: My name is Dr. Nancy Stanwood. I'm an associate professor

of obstetrics and gynecology at the Yale School of Medicine where I serve as the
section chief of family planning in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
VUOLO: Wow. Is that, is that on your voicemail?
DR. STANWOOD: [laughing] No, it says, “Leave a message.”

MIKE: Dr. Stanwood has patients who came to her after visiting a crisis pregnancy
center. The one Emily went to is in Virginia, but there are thousands of them around the
country. They do things like administer pregnancy tests and ultrasounds.
MATT: Mm-hmm.
MIKE: And many have a medical license, but Dr. Stanwood refers to them as fake
women’s medical centers. She told me about one woman who experienced what she
called delay tactics.

DR. STANWOOD: They kept telling her the ultrasound wasn't conclusive and
she needed to come back a week later and she was confused and uncertain and
then she realized that they were completely deceiving her. Some of the other lies
that these centers will say is that having an abortion makes somebody infertile.
And that's patently not true. One of the common, recurring lies that comes up is
that having an abortion increases the risk of breast cancer.
VUOLO: And just to be clear, there is no scientific literature that links breast
cancer to abortion.
DR. STANWOOD: The studies have been done and have been looked at
actually by the National Cancer Institute. And they came out with a very clear
statement to say the medical evidence is clear that having an abortion does not
increase the risk of breast cancer. As a physician we take an oath, the
Hippocratic oath, and part of that is to put patients’ needs before anything else—
before our own needs, before our own beliefs. It is immoral to mislead people
who are seeking medical care—to give them false information, to give them
harmful information—and to make women who are seeking abortion care targets
of those kind of deceptive tactics I think is completely unethical. And when they
do that it makes me very upset to see women harmed in this way.

MATT: In Emily’s experience and in Dr. Stanwood’s experience, some of these

pregnancy clinics are misleading women.

4
MIKE: I think that’s fair to say. And here’s why. And let’s take Care Net as the example.
That organization has many affiliates across North America, including the one in
Manassas, Virginia that Emily went to and they hold a national conference every year
where employees can take classes on things like: how to get their clinic websites to
rank higher in Google search results.
MATT: Companies do that sort of thing all the time.
MIKE: They do, they do. But in this case, the clinics are trying to improve their rankings
by implying that they offer services they don’t. I want you to listen to this tape that I
came across. This is a Care Net employee, a guy named Jacob Hall. He’s at one of
these conferences a few years ago. Again, he’s talking about how to improve your
ranking when people search for you online.

JACOB HALL: I type in “abortion” it says “abortion pill.” Bingo. I know “abortion
pill” is something that people are searching. Abortion clinic, abortion clinic near
me, abortion costs—fantastic keywords IF those phrases are on your website. If
they’re not, easy. Just add ‘em in. Somehow finesse a way to say: We’re here to
talk to you about abortion, including abortion pills and abortion surgery.

MIKE: Again, from one of those conferences, this is a woman named Jana Pinson.
She’s the executive director of a pregnancy center in Texas.

JANA PINSON: One of my favorite ones is “planning parenthood.” And I’ve

gotten so many clicks on that. I changed my website tag to be “The #1 source of
abortion information in the Coastal Bend” because we are. We don’t have an
abortion clinic. And putting “#1” with “abortion information” really got me up. So
my click-through rate is at like 6%. Like it’s really high.

MATT: Leading women to believe that you run an abortion clinic when you don’t?
Planning Parenthood? You’re gonna get people who are looking for Planned
Parenthood, who are looking for abortion clinics. It’s very clear what they’re trying to do.
MIKE: Yeah, and these are precisely the kinds of practices, of tactics, that might lead
someone—like a legislator—to conclude that there oughtta be a law.

MAN: Moving to File Item 17.

MIKE: So, in 2015, a state Assemblymember in California—he’s a Democrat from San

Francisco, his name is David Chiu—he introduced a bill called the Reproductive FACT
Act.

ASSYMBLYMEMBER DAVID CHIU: California has a compelling state interest to

make sure that all pregnant women have timely access to healthcare when it
comes to pregnancy related services. Unfortunately, in recent years we’ve seen
clinics that have delayed that care, often with information that falsely links
abortions to breast cancer, infertility and mental illness.

5
MIKE: This law required that these crisis pregnancy centers, these CPCs, that they post
in their lobby or hand out to their clients a very specific message. It’s not very long, so
I’m gonna read it. Here’s what it says: “California has public programs that provide
immediate free or low-cost access to comprehensive family planning services (including
all FDA-approved methods of contraception), prenatal care, and abortion for eligible
women.” And then there would be a phone number included, depending on which
county you lived in.
MATT: Mmm, as a lawyer I’m a little bit wary.
MIKE: Can you expound?
MATT: Yeah, sure. Okay so, on the one hand, yes the government requires disclosures
all the time.
MIKE: Factual disclosures.
MATT: Yeah, like do you think that candy bar makers would actually put the number of
calories on their wrappers if they didn’t need to?
MIKE: I think they would probably tell you nothing …
MATT: Right.
MIKE: … if they didn’t have to.
MATT: But on the other hand, we have a tradition in this country against forcing people
to speak. That was the whole point of our first episode.
MIKE: It was, yeah.
MATT: And forcing people to effectively point the way towards abortion services? I
dunno.
MIKE: Well, that certainly explains why this bill was so controversial. In fact, the debate
that took place in the California legislature got really emotional.

MAN: I got a conscience, and this violates my conscience!

MAN: To force these centers to post and to distribute how to obtain free
abortions cuts to the core of their founding purpose and their reason for being.
MAN: Democrats, for once just say no to your Planned Parenthood racist
masters.
WOMAN: To the gentlemen who appear to be so concerned, when you have a
uterus come talk to me.
WOMAN: They were linking abortion to breast cancer, infertility and suicide, and
claiming that birth control was not at all effective.
MAN: They’re told that an abortion will lead to all sorts of horrific things.
WOMAN: As quite possibly the only person in this chamber who actually walked
into a clinic—young, unmarried, a student and pregnant—I don’t understand why
we’re so afraid of allowing women a complete access to information.
MAN: With that the clerk will open the roll. All members vote who desire to vote.
All members vote who desire to vote. Ayes, 46; noes, 25. The measure passes.

MATT: So it passed?
MIKE: Yeah it did.
MATT: Which means these Christian clinics are gonna have to put up messages about
where women can get abortions?

6
MIKE: That’s, that’s what they would legally have been bound to do, but let’s hear from
Josh McClure. He’s the executive director of one of these centers. It’s called Pregnancy
Care Clinic in San Diego.

McCLURE: As a licensed clinic, what the law was going to require us to do is to

use our walls as billboards to advertise for abortion.
VUOLO: Did you comply with the law when it was first passed?
McCLURE: No, we did not. It's fundamentally wrong to require an organization or
any American to say a message that they don't agree with. The First Amendment
protects the people from government using its power in that way.

MIKE: So he sued. He got together with what’s called the National Institute of Family
and Life Advocates, or NIFLA for short, which is an umbrella organization that
represents about 15 hundred of these pro-life pregnancy centers—and they sued the
state of California for violating their First Amendment rights.
MATT: Josh McClure, along with every one of these Christian pregnancy centers in
California, is being compelled to say something that he doesn’t want to say.
MIKE: That he doesn’t wanna say because it violates his conscience as a Christian. On
the other hand, women like Emily Heiden are drawn to these pregnancy centers under
something like false pretenses.
MATT: Emily was more blunt. She said that she was tricked into walking into this
pregnancy center.
MIKE: She did, she did say that. So the question becomes: How does the Supreme
Court decide between the rights of the pregnancy centers to NOT deliver a government
message and the rights of vulnerable women to have complete information?
MATT: We will answer that question and hear more from the pregnancy centers, after
the break.

7
 SCHWARTZ: What's the website for your organization?
SHEETZ: The website for our organization is empowered2, number two,
choose.org. I can spell that for you if you'd like me to. Empowered2 …
SCHWARTZ: No, no, I’m, I'm on it. I’m on it. I just wanted to, I just wanted to
make sure I was on the right one.

MIKE: We called Becky Sheetz. She runs the pregnancy center that Emily Heiden
visited. We wanted to find out how Emily could go to their website, and actually make
the trip to the clinic itself, all without knowing that this was a ministry.
MATT: And just to be clear, Becky Sheetz was not at the center when Emily Heiden
went there in 2013. But she is now and she was kind enough to answer some of our
questions.

SCHWARTZ: I'm looking at the front page here and there's just nothing about
religion at all, there's nothing about G-d or G-d's word or anything like that and
it’s just—I'm wondering, why not?
SHEETZ: We are, we are funded by churches, we're a Christian ministry, that’s
well known, we certainly do not hide from that, we're very open about that and
that's who we are, that's what we do. We're a non-profit Christian ministry.
SCHWARTZ: Yeah, but if somebody doesn't know about Care Net PRCs I don't
think they would know that. I mean, I consider myself a pretty smart guy and I’m
looking on, through the website here. And if I was worried about what to do about
a pregnancy and I found this website I would think like maybe this is a place
that's gonna give me all my options, I certainly wouldn't think this was religiously
affiliated. Is this deception because the person, Emily, who came to your clinic
thought that she was deceived and it seems to me like it is kinda deception and I
just wonder what you would say to that.
SHEETZ: No, I would disagree with that. I would say that we are a medical clinic
with licensed medical professionals and as you said, it is a place where she
comes to learn about all of her options. We have no financial stake. Everything
we provide, the pregnancy test, the ultrasounds, the information on pregnancy,
the classes, it's all free, it's all open to her so that she can make the best decision
about her pregnancy and for her health and for her life.
SCHWARTZ: So I just want to give you a chance to respond directly. She said to
us, I felt deceived by Care Net. How would you respond to her.
SHEETZ: If we get that feedback on a client form, we would want to talk with her
directly and we would want to help understand why she was deceived and how
she was deceived. We don't want anyone to have anything other than a fantastic,
excellent experience here. We strive for excellence.

MIKE: That was Becky Sheetz, who runs the center that Emily Heiden visited. Since we
spoke to her the name of her clinic has changed to First Care Women’s Health.
MATT: We posed the same question to Josh McClure. Remember, he’s head of a
pregnancy center in San Diego, and he, along with NIFLA, sued California. And Mike,
you asked him: Why, on his website—which, by the way, is unplannedparenthood.org—
why is there no mention of a religious affiliation?

8
 VUOLO: I know that word of mouth is a big part of how people find your clinic,
but certainly some people find it through the internet. And on your website,
there's no mention of Christianity, or the Bible, or even G-d. And I wonder if that's
by design. Are you not putting that on your website because you don't want to put
off a certain segment of the population?
McCLURE: The truth of the matter there is that, um, who is funding us is not
important for the moment of our clients coming in to see us. Okay? They're there
because they need help, and we're offering it at no charge. And, adding that
information doesn't help us or take away from what we're trying to do.
SCHWARTZ: I'm sorry to press this point, but it seems like what you're saying is
putting information on the website to bring people in, that would be helpful to
bring them in, is what you want. So, the implication would be leaving certain
information out—if that helps bring them in—that is a goal that, that you're trying
to achieve.
McCLURE: I didn't say that at all.
SCHWARTZ: OK, well I'm just trying to,
McCLURE: I said …
SCHWARTZ: I’m just trying to understand.
McCLURE: I said that …
SCHWARTZ: Sorry, go ahead.
McCLURE: I said that when I advertise on our web page, I’m providing
information that will bring clients in.
SCHWARTZ: But I just, I don’t understand.
McCLURE: There's no requirement that you have to say everything about your
organization. That's a silly idea. You don't go to buy tennis shoes because of
ideology. You don't go to a hamburger store because of everything that that
hamburger store might support or be supported by. You advertise for what is
going to bring clients in the door.

MATT: Since we spoke with Josh McClure, his website has added a paragraph in the
Frequently Asked Questions that acknowledges the clinic’s “Christian non-profit” status.
MIKE: You know, these pregnancy centers are in the business of salvation. And
perhaps their calculation is that if saving souls requires a little bait-and-switch, well, it’s
in the service of a greater good.
MATT: But California didn’t see it that way. California saw vulnerable women being
misled. And the question now is: How does the Supreme Court see it?

WOMAN: It is the first abortion case the US Supreme Court has heard under the
Trump Administration …
WOMAN: The state of California says the Reproductive FACT Act protects
women from bait-and-switch pro-life clinics …
MAN: The justices will weigh whether a state can require pro-life clinics to
provide information about abortion …
WOMAN: The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates wants the law
declared unconstitutional, as a violation of the clinic’s free speech.

9
 CJ ROBERTS: We’ll hear argument this morning in Case Number 16-1140,
the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates versus Becerra.

MIKE: The case is called NIFLA v. Becerra. Becerra, by the way, is Xavier Becerra.
He’s the Attorney General of California. And this much we know going in: Freedom of
speech is at stake. In order to pass a law that infringes on a fundamental right like
freedom of speech the government needs to have a really good reason.
MATT: And as we heard from the debate in the state legislature, California had several
reasons for the law. But they all boil down to what California called “informed choice.”
MIKE: Informed choice. That’s not really a phrase that’s top-of-mind for me.
MATT: Think of it this way: The California FACT Act—the message that the pregnancy
centers have to post on their walls …
MIKE: … saying here’s where you can get services from the state of California,
including abortion.
MATT: Right. The government requires this sort of thing all the time. For instance, most
of us don’t stop and read them, but somewhere, wherever you work, there’s probably a
notice that says, “The company can’t discriminate on the basis of race or gender.”
MIKE: Sure, I’ve seen those.
MATT: Or if you get prescription drugs you also get a notice that says, “Here’s all the
potential side effects and complications.” These are all examples of things that the
government CAN force businesses to say, to empower people with information about
what they’re consuming, or the services they’re seeking.
MIKE: And it’s a form of compelled speech.
MATT: Compelled speech that’s allowed! So the attorney for the state of California,
Joshua Klein, argues that the FACT Act is no different! It’s just like all these other
notices. It’s constitutional, he says, because it gives women the information they need
to make the best decisions for their health.

CJ ROBERTS: Mr. Klein?

KLEIN: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court. The interests served
by the licensed disclosure is promoting informed choice by a patient. It
empowers the woman by explaining that her financial circumstance does
not make her unable to access alternative and supplemental care, including
full prenatal and delivery care that Petitioners do not themselves supply.
And it gives her that knowledge in time to be useful, because pregnancy
and medical care is extraordinarily time-critical.

MATT: So Klein is arguing that this required notice isn’t a problem. There’s a tradition in
this country of forcing businesses to disclose information, so that customers, and clients
and patients, have the facts that they need to make a good decision. Cigarette
warnings, nutritional labels—these are all compelled speech.
MIKE: Yeah, but this California notice is different from all the other examples you’ve
been throwing out because this disclosure involves abortion. When you add abortion
into the mix, for better or worse, it transforms what would otherwise be perhaps a
routine disclosure into something incendiary.

10
MATT: It’s true. Some people have moral and visceral objections to laws that force
them to say anything about abortion. Let’s hear another another clip from the oral
argument—this one from the other side. This is Jeffrey Wall, arguing in support of the
pregnancy centers.

WALL: Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: The First
Amendment allows states to require truthful, factual disclosures about
one's own goods or services. What the First Amendment does not allow
and what California has done is to require pregnancy centers to make
disclosures about services they do not provide and that would violate their
most deeply held beliefs without any showing by the state that it truly
needs to compel speech rather than speak its own message.

MATT: The pregnancy centers are saying this isn’t your run-of-the-mill disclosure. This
isn’t about an allergic reaction to a flu shot. It’s not about the number of calories in your
cookies. This is about making us complicit in what we consider murder.
MIKE: So on the one side, we’ve got California arguing that these disclosures are
necessary to make sure women know all of their options—and that’s what’s most
important.
MATT: And on the other side, we’ve got the pregnancy clinics arguing that these
disclosures violate their First Amendment rights and that’s most important. The question
is, which side can convince a majority of the Supreme Court to see it their way?

MARY LOUISE KELLY: Abortion rights opponents are celebrating a victory in

the U.S. Supreme Court today. In a 5-4 decision, the Court sided with crisis
pregnancy centers which counsel women against abortion.
SARAH McCAMMON: Abortion rights opponents are celebrating the decision as
a victory for free speech. The decision is a victory for social conservatives who
have hoped that Trump's election will lead to a more conservative and anti-
abortion judiciary.

MATT: We spoke about this case with Nina Totenberg.

MIKE: Who we’ve been calling the 10th Justice.
MATT: And she’s apparently okay with that. And she says, yeah, the fact that this case
involves abortion is significant.

NINA: Right. There's nothing standard about abortion. The issue has divided the
country, has divided the body politic, and it definitely divides the Supreme Court.

MIKE: But to characterize this as an abortion case is to miss the bigger picture. What
this case is also about, and what underlies many of the 5-4 decisions in recent years, is
the fact that conservatives on the Court are frequently anti-regulation. And they are
invoking the First Amendment—or, as Justice Elena Kagan put it, “weaponizing” the
First Amendment—as a way to strike down regulations.
MATT: Right, she wrote in a dissent last year that the conservatives were choosing
winners and losers by wielding the First Amendment as a sword, and slicing away

11
regulations they disagree with—like California’s Reproductive FACT Act. Another
example is Citizens United, in which the conservative majority struck down campaign
finance regulations.

NINA: And that was right after they had actually been upheld when Justice
O'Connor was on the court. She leaves. She's replaced by Justice Alito and,
boom, they go the other way and they say, "Regulating campaign finance is
regulating money, and money is speech."
MIKE: So the case that we’re talking about today, NIFLA v. Becerra, hinged on a
Trump Supreme Court appointee and the case that you just mentioned hinged on
Alito, who was a George W. Bush appointee. You know, for all their chest-
pounding over legislating from the bench, it seems that Republicans know that
the bench is where the power is. And if you wanna reorganize society in your
image, that’s where you put your resources.
NINA: That’s true, but you're gonna hear me say this over and over in the course
of this season, the base of the Republican party votes based significantly on the
president's power to name Supreme Court justices.
MIKE: Mm-hmm.
NINA: It is their A-number-one issue, and they throw their weight behind it even
when they have to swallow hard over the nominee like Donald Trump who finally
put out a list of people to allay their fears and promised that he would pick from
the list. Democrats do not do that. The Supreme Court is not an A-number-one
issue for them, and now we see there are some left-wing groups that are trying to
get the candidates to put out their list, which I think is a supremely stupid idea. I
mean, that's not the idea of picking a Supreme Court nominee. The president is
supposed to think about it, have conversations with the finalists and be really
thoughtful about who they pick. And, sometimes, not be thoughtful about who
they pick. But a list is not the way to do it.
MATT: The conservatives have made Supreme Court nominees their A-number-
one issue, and perhaps at some point the Democrats might as well. Is that a
good thing for our democracy?
NINA: No. It stinks. It really does stink. But, you know, I'm a mushy middle
person, so I liked it when you couldn't predict what the Court was gonna do. I
miss a Court that is more centrist, that’s what I miss. I liked it when justices were
genuinely undecided or at least looking to resolve an issue in the least
destructive way. I liked that uncertainty, and it has significantly disappeared from
the Court today—not entirely, but significantly.

MIKE: Here on Unprecedented, we like to think of the people who are behind these
Supreme Court cases as the “accidental guardians” of our freedoms. But who exactly is
the accidental guardian in this case? Is it the California legislature and Dr. Stanwood,
who are battling for a woman’s right to choose free from deception?
MATT: Or is it NIFLA and Josh McClure, who are battling for their First Amendment
rights?
MIKE: Is it Emily Heiden, who believes she was tricked?
MATT: Or is it Becky Sheetz, who believes she’s saving lives?

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MIKE: In much the same way that the justices bring their own biases to the bench, who
you see as the accidental guardian in this case depends on you.

HEIDEN: It was almost like going to that clinic was the final nail in the coffin for
me because they had not talked me out of ending it. And what would have
worked better, I don't know if it woulda worked but what would have worked
better, is if someone had said like, Let's talk about what will really happen. Let's
look at column A and what might happen if you go down this path versus option
B if you go down this path. But there was no logic there. There was no reason
there.
SHEETZ: The women who come here, they're in a tough spot, they're in a crisis.
And they come here to get the love, the support and the medical resources they
need to make an informed decision. We don't want any woman to make a
decision to terminate her pregnancy because she feels like she's hopeless, she
has no other choice besides abortion. We want to be a place she can come to, to
know that there are other options available to her.
HEIDEN: I mean, these places are just continuing. It makes me lose my mind.
Every day other women are in situations like the one that I was in. They wake up
and they don't know what to do and I just think: Oh my G-d, like think of all the
women who are falling for this right now and no one is doing anything about it.

MIKE: Unprecedented is produced at WAMU, and edited by Poncie Rutsch. Ben Privot
is our audio engineer.
MATT: Andi McDaniel is WAMU’s Head of Content.
MIKE: WAMU’s general manager is J.J. Yore.
MATT: If you like the show, tell a friend and rate us on iTunes. It really makes a
difference.
MIKE: And if you want more podcasts like Unprecedented, become a member of
WAMU. They produce and distribute Unprecedented and other great shows.
MATT: Head to WAMU DOT org SLASH donate, and tell them you're giving because
you love Unprecedented.

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