Your Call

On this edition of Your Call, we'll check in with clinic workers and reproductive justice advocates to find out how they are dealing with the fallout of the recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Abortion is now banned in at least six states, according to The 19th: Texas, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, and Alabama. There are no exceptions for rape or incest. If providers break the law in many of those states, they could go to prison. Additional bans are expected in the coming weeks. The courts will decide the outcome in nine states, including Montana, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Clinic workers are fielding hundreds of calls from patients desperate for appointments, with no choice but to direct them to states where abortion remains legal. Abortion is protected in five states and is being expanded in seven states, including Hawaii, Oregon, and California, according to the New York Times.

On this edition of Your Call's One Planet Series, we discuss It's Bean Too Hot, a documentary that tells the story of coffee farmers whose livelihoods are at stake as they rush to adapt to the climate crisis.

On this edition of Your Call’s Media Roundtable, we discuss coverage of the Supreme Court ruling ending the right to an abortion. Bans are now in place in seven states and seventeen additional states are likely to ban abortion in the coming weeks, according to ABC News.

President Biden just called on Democrats to suspend the filibuster to codify Roe. How are media covering reproductive justice, the Christian right, and violence against abortion providers?

On this edition of Your Call, we discuss the 6-3 Supreme Court ruling that curtails the EPA’s power to force power plants to reduce carbon pollution. Those plants make up a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, according to the EPA.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote, “The Court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening. Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change."

This case is the product of a coordinated, multiyear strategy by Republican attorneys general, conservative legal activists and their funders to use the judicial system to rewrite environmental law, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming, writes New York Times reporter Coral Davenport.

On this edition of Your Call, we’ll discuss the Supreme Court gun ruling and its implications for gun safety laws in a number of states, including California. Last week, in a 6-3 vote, the court's conservative majority struck down a century old New York law that limited licenses to carry a gun in public.

On this edition of Your Call’s One Planet Series, we speak with Kyla Bennett, a lawyer who represents five EPA scientists turned whistleblowers. They allege that managers and career staff in the EPA's Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention tampered with the assessments of dozens of chemicals to make them appear safer.

On this edition of Your Call's Media Roundtable, we're discussing today's Supreme Court ruling eliminating the nearly 50-year-old constitutional right to an abortion.

Missouri’s attorney general Eric Schmitt signed the country’s first full abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest. Another 25 states are expected to follow suit, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

In their joint dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan wrote, "Today’s decision strips women of agency over what even the majority agrees is a contested and contestable moral issue. It forces her to carry out the State’s will… it takes away her liberty. With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent."

Justice Thomas, in a separate opinion, says the Supreme Court should now "reconsider" its decisions that found a right to contraception, same sex relationships, and same-sex marriage — and "correct the error" it made in those cases.

On this edition of Your Call, we’ll discuss Supreme Court decisions. The court has struck down a New York law that limits the right to carry concealed handguns. The court has effectively rendered gun restrictions presumptively unconstitutional. This is a revolution in 2nd Amendment law, according to Slate reporter Mark Joseph Stern.

The court also ruled that suspects cannot sue for a violation of their civil rights when police fail to provide them with Miranda warnings. Justice Kagan, dissenting, says the majority's diminishment of Miranda will ensure that people who are "wrongly convicted and spend years in prison" will have no remedy for "all the harm" they suffered.

On Tuesday, the court ruled that taxpayer money can now be used to pay for religious education, further weakening the separation of church and state. The National Education Association says the radical ruling further erodes public education.

The high court also issued decisions affecting health insurance payments, disability payments for veterans, and people in prison challenging convictions and sentences in federal court.

On this edition of Your Call, we're discussing the fourth day of the January 6 hearings, which focused on state election officials and the death threats and mob violence they endured as a result of Donald Trump's lies.

We heard powerful testimony from Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss who still live in fear after being the targets of a racist smear campaign by Trump and Rudy Giuliani.

Reuters has documented more than 850 threats and harassing messages to election administrators, including about 100 that legal experts say could be prosecuted under federal law. Almost no one has been held accountable. Nearly one in three local election officials know at least one election worker who has left the job, partly due to safety concerns, increased threats, or intimidation, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

On this edition of Your Call’s One Planet Series, forest ecologist professor Suzanne Simard discusses her book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.

She writes about how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, remember the past, and have agency about the future.