Baby Boom! Lawyered

Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins pushed hard for Texas’ House Bill 7, a “bounty hunter law” that allows total strangers to sue anyone who mails or hands over abortion pills. Then, she went to Texas and went undercover, reportedly calling herself “Wanda,” to order abortion pills. She was trying to prove how easy it is to procure the pills despite Texas’ ban. Now a Texas mother using the pseudonym Maria Puerto is suing Hawkins and three Students for Life staffers under that same law. Talk about hoisted by your own petard.

Imani Gandy breaks down HB 7, whether Maria Puerto can actually win, and why Hawkins’ best defense might be admitting the whole thing was a stunt.

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Episodes like this take time, research, and a commitment to the truth. If Baby Boom! Lawyered helps you understand what’s at stake in our courts, chip in to keep our fearless legal analysis alive. Become a member today.

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Sam Alito keeps saying he has a pretty good idea who leaked the Dobbs draft but he still won’t share it. Funny. Imani has a suspect too: Sam Alito.

From the toothless investigation into who leaked the Dobbs decision and the alleged leak of the Hobby Lobby decision to Alito’s flag collection, which is associated with the Stop the Steal movement and Christian nationalism (and which he blamed on his wife for), Imani Gandy walks through why you should never take his word. 

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Expert Repro Journalism That Inspires.

Episodes like this take time, research, and a commitment to the truth. If Baby Boom! Lawyered helps you understand what’s at stake in our courts, chip in to keep our fearless legal analysis alive. Become a member today.

B*itch, Listen now has its own dedicated feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you already subscribe to Baby Boom! Lawyered, sign up for B*tch, Listen so you won't miss it.

One of our listeners, Contessa, wants to know what the hell fetal personhood is. Short answer: It’s the anti-choice movement’s push to give fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses a legal right to life, which turns pregnancy into a conflict between two people, with the state serving as referee. In this Office Hours episode of Baby Boom! Lawyered, Imani Gandy explains how the law decide who counts as a person, from corporations and Alabama’s “extrauterine children” to a fetus in Florida whose lawyer tried to spring it from jail.

Expert Repro Journalism That Inspires.

Episodes like this take time, research, and a commitment to the truth. If Baby Boom! Lawyered helps you understand what’s at stake in our courts, chip in to keep our fearless legal analysis alive. Become a member today.

B*itch, Listen now has its own dedicated feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you already subscribe to Baby Boom! Lawyered, sign up for B*tch, Listen so you won't miss it.

Louisiana, Alabama, and Arkansas have filed two lawsuits targeting abortion shield laws and the providers who mail abortion pills into states where abortion is banned. Imani examines how the states use fetal personhood to describe their alleged injuries, whether the Supreme Court is likely to hear their case, and what today’s shield-law fight has in common with the personal liberty laws Northern states used to resist the Fugitive Slave Act. Also: why Louisiana put mifepristone, anthrax, and mail bombs in the same sentence.

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Episodes like this take time, research, and a commitment to the truth. If Baby Boom! Lawyered helps you understand what’s at stake in our courts, chip in to keep our fearless legal analysis alive. Become a member today.

B*itch, Listen now has its own dedicated feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you already subscribe to Baby Boom! Lawyered, sign up for B*tch, Listen so you won't miss it.

The Supreme Court did something nice for Black voters. I’m as shocked as you are. On Sept. 25, the Court told the Eighth Circuit to knock it off and stop trying to force Missouri to use a gerrymandered 2025 congressional map that Republicans drew at Trump’s urging. Imani Gandy breaks down how Missouri’s secretary of state gambled and ran the primary on the wrong map, and why the Supreme Court had to tell Republicans in Missouri three times that they can’t use the 2025 map—they have to use the 2022 map. Also, she explains what the Purcell principle is so you can dazzle your friends in the group chat when talking about these messy midterms.

Expert Repro Journalism That Inspires.

Episodes like this take time, research, and a commitment to the truth. If Baby Boom! Lawyered helps you understand what’s at stake in our courts, chip in to keep our fearless legal analysis alive. Become a member today.

B*itch, Listen now has its own dedicated feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you already subscribe to Baby Boom! Lawyered, sign up for B*tch, Listen so you won't miss it.

Trump’s Department of Justice says the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, discriminated against white and Asian applicants, and it’s giving the school until October 2 to enter into a voluntary resolution agreement or get sued. Imani Gandy breaks down the DOJ’s claims, including its attack on application essays asking students how race shaped their lives, which Chief Justice John Roberts expressly left legal when the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Then, she explains who pays when fewer Black and Native students become doctors: pregnant people in maternity-care deserts, Black patients whose pain gets dismissed, and anyone already waiting months to see someone.

Expert Repro Journalism That Inspires.

Episodes like this take time, research, and a commitment to the truth. If Baby Boom! Lawyered helps you understand what’s at stake in our courts, chip in to keep our fearless legal analysis alive. Become a member today.

B*itch, Listen now has its own dedicated feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you already subscribe to Baby Boom! Lawyered, sign up for B*tch, Listen so you won't miss it.

Tierra Walker knew her pregnancy could kill her, so she asked about an abortion. Not one of the more than 90 doctors who saw Walker offered her abortion care. 

Now her family is suing the doctors, hospitals, and Texas officials who failed her, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Imani Gandy explains how the state created an abortion regime that terrifies doctors into inaction, then blames those doctors when patients die—and why that regime still doesn’t excuse that Walker’s doctors failed to save her life by providing an abortion.

Expert Repro Journalism That Inspires.

Episodes like this take time, research, and a commitment to the truth. If Baby Boom! Lawyered helps you understand what’s at stake in our courts, chip in to keep our fearless legal analysis alive. Become a member today.

B*itch, Listen now has its own dedicated feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you already subscribe to Baby Boom! Lawyered, sign up for B*tch, Listen so you won't miss it.

The new Supreme Court term doesn't start until October, so why has the Court been issuing important rulings while it's supposed to be on break? 

In this Office Hours episode of Baby Boom! Lawyered, Imani Gandy answers a listener's question about the shadow docket, the emergency track where some of the Court's most consequential decisions get made all year. They’re decided quickly—and often with no explanation at all.

Expert Repro Journalism That Inspires.

Episodes like this take time, research, and a commitment to the truth. If Baby Boom! Lawyered helps you understand what’s at stake in our courts, chip in to keep our fearless legal analysis alive. Become a member today.

B*itch, Listen now has its own dedicated feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you already subscribe to Baby Boom! Lawyered, sign up for B*tch, Listen so you won't miss it.

Disparate impact may sound boring. It isn't.

It's the rule the Supreme Court established in 1971 to catch discrimination that doesn't announce itself. Fifty-four years later, the EEOC, acting on Trump's executive order, walked away from that standard. Then the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel went further, declaring disparate impact liability under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act unconstitutional. 

The new requirement: prove the employer intended to discriminate, which sounds neutral until you notice who can actually produce that proof. A white employee suing over "reverse discrimination" has a paper trail sitting right there — the employer's own DEI policy. Black workers rarely, if ever, get that paper trail; they'd have to read a hiring manager's mind.

 Imani Gandy breaks down how the law built to stop discrimination got rewired to shield it in this Imani Explains It All episode of Baby Boom! Lawyered.

Expert Repro Journalism That Inspires.

Episodes like this take time, research, and a commitment to the truth. If Baby Boom! Lawyered helps you understand what’s at stake in our courts, chip in to keep our fearless legal analysis alive. Become a member today.

B*itch, Listen now has its own dedicated feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you already subscribe to Baby Boom! Lawyered, sign up for B*tch, Listen so you won't miss it.

On Wednesday Louisiana asked the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to stop the abortion drug mifepristone from being mailed to patients by reinstating a rule that says you have to show up in person to get it. But if it wins, Louisiana told the three-judge panel, it doesn't want the rule change to go into effect immediately, because Louisiana doesn't trust the Supreme Court would let that restriction stand.

Meanwhile, the FDA showed up to oppose Louisiana in court but wouldn't answer a single question about its own rule. So the abortion pill manufacturers (who are now party to the mifepristone lawsuit) ended up defending the agency's rule instead.

Imani Gandy breaks down what actually happened at this week's oral argument in Louisiana v. FDA, why one judge called Louisiana's own strategy "self-defeating," and why the FDA's silence in that courtroom should worry you more than anything Louisiana said there.
 

Expert Repro Journalism That Inspires.

Episodes like this take time, research, and a commitment to the truth. If Baby Boom! Lawyered helps you understand what’s at stake in our courts, chip in to keep our fearless legal analysis alive. Become a member today.

B*itch, Listen now has its own dedicated feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. If you already subscribe to Baby Boom! Lawyered, sign up for B*tch, Listen so you won't miss it.