In life, the only certainty is death. And yet, we have an almost superstitious aversion to talking about death–an aversion that is probably doing us all harm. Our guest this week looks at death differently. Alua Arthur is a death doula. Her new book Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life by Getting Real About the End is available at bookstores everywhere on April 16th.

In their frenzy to completely control women, the Republican party is attacking every aspect of our reproductive health. This includes not only access to abortion care and birth control, but also is having serious and chilling effects on access to in-vitro fertilization. Amanda Zurawski knows this all too well, and she joins us today to discuss.

In this episode, we officially introduce Ben Jackson as the co-host of the podcast, and Alyssa and Ben check in on some of the critical issues of the day.

One in four women in the United States will have an abortion–and that doesn’t even take into account trans men and nonbinary people. The barriers to care and stigma attached to these people is so unfair, and so crushing. Our guest this week is Asha Dahya. Asha is a filmmaker trying to break that stigma and tear down those barriers with her new short film “Someone You Know.”

For half a century, Roe vs. Wade was the law of the land. While states continued to attack the rights of pregnant people to our bodies, we had that basic fact to give us some refuge. That is now gone, thanks to an extremist Supreme Court. To discuss where we are and where we might go, we’ve invited Rickie Solinger and Krystale Littlejohn–co-Editors of the new anthology “Fighting Mad: Resisting the End of Roe v. Wade” onto the show.

Ballot initiatives can be an important way for citizens to directly legislate when their government refuses to listen. But now, politicians in some states are working to weaken citizen initiatives and increase veto power over them. To discuss, we’ve invited Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, Executive Director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center onto the show.

The world is a dangerous place for LGBTQIA people. Not only do they have to fear hate and discrimination in communities–which would be bad enough–but now many of our governments are actively attacking their very existence. The Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative is working to make sure safe spaces exist for LGBTQIA people across the nation, and we’re joined by Stacy Lentz and Angelica Christina to discuss.

The United States is in the midst of an opioid crisis, driven largely by the greed and deceptive marketing practices of large industrial corporations. However, it might shock most of us to know that the US, along with Britain and other Western nations triggered an opioid crisis in China that lasted for more than a century. In his book “Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories,” renowned writer Amitav Ghosh explores the history of the opium trade and its relationship to the present day opioid crisis.

Intro: Somehow in 2024, we still live in a time where white people in power, mostly men, are trying to erase the contributions of Black people, and especially Black women, to our history. Our guest this week, Dr. Jenn Jackson, is asserting those feminist histories and lessons in her new book Black Women Taught Us: A History of Black Feminism.