CHOICE/LESS – Rewire News Group

Part 1 of 2: Roy Moore lost, but barely. And his theocratic vision for the country lives on through Operation Save America (OSA), an organization committed to a United States in which abortion, homosexuality, Islam, and anything else its leadership considers "ungodly" is a criminal offense. In this two-part audio documentary, CHOICE/LESS host Jenn Stanley and Rewire investigative reporter Sofia Resnick team up to reveal the alarming ways OSA’s far-right ideology is worming its way into state and federal government. While often dismissed as a group of fringe extremists, OSA has a path to power–and even after Roy Moore's loss, it's farther along that path than you think.

Last winter, Kentucky state lawmakers fast-tracked a bill to ban abortion at 20 weeks post-fertilization. Heather Hyden, 30, of Lexington, Kentucky, talks about how that bill directly affected her pregnancy and her life.

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Calla Hales is the 27-year-old lead administrator of a regional chain of abortion clinics called A Preferred Women's Health Center, which she took over from her parents. She discusses her experience running a chain of clinics at such a young age, and what it's like growing up when the family business is abortion care.

Patrisse Cullors joins CHOICE/LESS again this week, and this time she’s talking to Alex Alvarez, a Latinx transgender man, about his decision to get pregnant and how he plans to parent.

Jenn and Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors are joined by Black midwives Racha Tahani Lawler and Debbie Allen to discuss racism in health care and midwifery, and what it means to provide maternity care and support to communities who need it the most.

Stephanie Toti tells her story of arguing on behalf of Whole Woman's Health in the landmark Supreme Court case Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. Go inside the mind of a reproductive rights attorney as she prepares for the biggest case of her career on the biggest stage in the country.

CHOICE/LESS returns with a blockbuster episode as Jenn interviews former Texas State Senator Wendy Davis about the great lengths she took to kill the sweeping anti-abortion bill that later because the infamous Texas HB 2.

When people hear about racism in medical testing and research, they often bring up the infamous "Tuskegee Study," a decades-long program in which the government pretended to treat 400 Black men with syphilis. In fact, the government withheld adequate treatment to observe the effects of the disease.

"There was a whole history of racism in medicine and research, but this was the definitive study that was well-documented," said Bill Jenkins, a statistician with the the agency funding the program at the time of the study, who helped to blow the whistle on it.

In the final episode of CHOICE/LESS: The Backstory, Bill Jenkins talks about the study, its legacy, and what we can learn from it.

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.

Long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) like intrauterine devices (IUDs) and implants are becoming increasingly popular as birth control methods. Between 2011 and 2013, the number of women using an IUD increased 83 percent from the previous four years, according to a 2015 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics.

Though today LARCs are recommended by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists as very safe and effective methods of birth control, they have a troubled history that have made many people slow to accept them.

In the second episode of our miniseries CHOICE/LESS: The Backstory, Loretta Ross, one of the founding mothers of the reproductive justice movement, talks about how her experience with the infamous Dalkon Shield IUD inspired her career as a human rights activist.

Note: This updated episode features a correction of a minor audio issue from the previous version.