Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Today on the show, Alvin Eng's New York story, and maybe yours. His book is called Our laundry, Our Town My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond. It's his first-generation memoir of growing up in Queens in the turbulent 1970s, and what's changed for him and his community since, and we'll invite calls from listeners who can relate.

Also, today, has Mayor Adams changed anything about homelessness in his first seven months? David Brand from City Limits may be New York's most laser-focused homelessness reporter. He will take stock and explain the mayor's new plea for more aid from Washington, because, have you heard this? He says thousands of homeless asylum seekers from Latin America have recently moved or been sent here from Arizona and Texas.

The sent here part is intriguing in that the mayor suspects the anti-immigrant Republican governors of Arizona and Texas, Abbott and Ducey are sending asylum seekers here to try to turn New York against them. We will get David Brand's take on that.

We'll have a call in at the end of the show on pandemic purchases you regret. Vox has an entertaining article on that. Was it a piece of Peloton equipment when you thought you'd never go outside again? Was it a house in the suburbs, a little harder to get rid of on Craig's list? Was it a cute little stress bunny that's now grown into this big ordinary rabbit in your apartment?

On the other side, the things you acquired that you'd never dreamed you'd ever want, but now you're addicted to using. All that's coming up, and we start here. Feminist writer and podcaster Lux Alptraum says it may be time to move from the era of so-called empowerment feminism to something she calls disempowerment feminism as a response to the Supreme Court reversing Roe versus Wade, Joe Manchin, and the Republicans killing the universal childcare bill in Congress and other current events.

Maybe you saw her New York Times op-ed on that last week. Lux Alptraum is also a writer meeting this moment. In other ways, she recently wrote a guide to abortion resources in a post-Roe America for Wired. She tweets under the handle Lux “Ask Me About Self-Managed Abortion” Alptraum. We'll talk about that. She definitely have thoughts about the implications of the Kansas referendum in which voters in a very Republican state overwhelmingly voted to keep abortion rights protected by the state constitution on Tuesday.

Some of you may know her as the author of the 2018 book Faking It: The Lies Women Tell about Sex--And the Truths They Reveal. Lux, thanks a lot for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

Lux Alptraum: Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Can we start on Kansas? Were you surprised at the outcome?

Lux Alptraum: I wouldn't say I was surprised, per se. Going into it, I didn't know what to expect. I know that abortion rights are pretty popular even with Republicans, so I wasn't shocked when it turned out "Oh, wow, almost 60% of voters voted to keep abortion rights." With a lot of these things, it's not a question of what's popular. It's a question of who is voting, who gets access to the polls, how much voter suppression is doing to keep people out of voting.

With this case, in particular, the way the ballot initiative was phrased was very confusing. There was a lot of intentionally misleading campaigning, like saying like, "Oh, vote yes to give Kansans a choice," which to a lot of people it was going to sound like to maintain abortion rights, when actually they mean a choice to get rid of abortion. Going in there was just all of that where I was like, it feels weighted against it, but then it turned out overwhelmingly for abortion rights.

To me, that just says that people want to have abortion rights. I think the complex thing that makes it a little less optimistic than I would like it to be is that a lot of people are fine with abortion being restricted like we saw over the past decade, plus abortion rights were whittled away through the trap laws and nobody cared. I think, for a lot of people, it's like you say, waiting period, you say mandatory counseling. They hear that as you're making abortion safer, not you're making abortion harder to get, but when you say we want to completely eliminate access to abortion, that's a hard line for a lot of people.

You can do a lot of things to restrict it, but the minute you say no abortion, people, as we saw in Kansas, will turn out and say, "No, we're not okay with this."

Brian Lehrer: Now the issue goes state by state. You tweeted that the news from Kansas gives you hope from Michigan's ballot initiative to enshrine abortion rights in the state's constitution this fall. Why Michigan, in particular?

Lux Alptraum: Well, I'm focused on Michigan in part because state Senator Mallory McMorrow, who many people know from her viral speech that she gave after her opponent slammed her as a "groomer" for supporting trans children, she's a friend of mine. I'm very invested in her and her work. I know that she's currently working to flip the Michigan state legislatures, but it's blue and they're also working really hard to get abortion rights codified in the Michigan state constitution.

It's just a state I'm paying attention to and it's certainly a state that's much more purple than Kansas is. If Kansas is going to come out for abortion rights, I feel pretty confident that Michigan will, this fall, as well.

Brian Lehrer: Also the referendum in Kansas, as you just referenced, was in the negative. It would've removed abortion rights from the state constitution. Is the Michigan one a positive wording, like, "Do you vote for abortion rights?"

Lux Alptraum: Yes, but it's a little bit different because Kansas already had abortion rights enshrined in their constitution. That's why they wanted people to vote to take that away. Whereas Michigan doesn't have any protections for abortion. In fact, they have I think 1931 era law that restricts abortion, that there's been battles over whether or not that could even be enforced. They're trying to add abortion protection to their constitution because they don't have it.

Whereas Kansas surprisingly already has that, and they'd have to work to take it away if they want to do anything to restrict abortion further than it already is. I do want to be clear that Kansas abortion access is not great. There's already mandatory waiting periods. If you're a minor, you need parental consent. There's already a lot of things that are restricting abortion access in Kansas. It's just that they cannot take it away fully.

Brian Lehrer: You've written that there's a difference between abortion rights and abortion access. It's very clear when you put it that way, because one thing is on paper, the other thing is in reality with all kinds of limitations that antitrust people can still put on it. On Michigan, did you see what happened there on Monday? I heard the dramatic NPR report this morning about how multiple court rulings in the same day stopped abortion providers from serving their patients in the middle of the work day, even as patients were in their offices.

Then the right got restored, at least for the moment, later in the day, Monday, by another court ruling.

Here's a clip from that report of a clinic director in the Detroit area, Audrey Lance, on that first shocking moment.

Audrey Lance: We wanted to do our very best to take care of them, but that we had to stop for the time being to figure out what we were legally going to be able to do.

Brian Lehrer: Stop for the moment because the court had said that, "Sorry, clinics providers, patients, that 1931 law now takes effect because of what the Supreme court did and Dr. Lance talks about how that felt."

Audrey Lance: Felt a total gut punch and in real-time trying to figure out what this means for the patients that are literally sitting in my clinic.

Brian Lehrer: That from NPR's morning edition today in Michigan Public Radio. That gut punch, that reversal twice within a day, is that emblematic of the state by state, court by court literally hour-by-hour struggle that the Supreme court has unleashed?

Lux Alptraum: Absolutely. You can take the long view, which I do sometimes, and say abortion is really popular, this is going to be worked out, but that doesn't help someone who needs an abortion today. That doesn't help someone whose abortion appointment just got turned over because of what a judge just said, and now they're scrambling to figure out, "Can I get an abortion in my state? Do I have to travel?"

This is a medical procedure that's a ticking clock because the longer you wait to have an abortion, the more complicated, the more difficult it is, the more you run up against even more laws, the more expensive it often becomes. The sooner you can get an abortion, the easier it is for everyone really. In the laws--

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. Sorry, go ahead.

Lux Alptraum: No, I was going to say as these laws get overturned, it just throws people who need urgent medical care into chaos.

Brian Lehrer: Does Kansas make you think the statewide referendum might be a nationally powerful tool for the abortion rights movement or not so much? When you look at the polls, Republicans are still very much against abortion rights. Democrats very much for independence, pretty much for. There's been some analysis that Kansas conservatism has a strong libertarian streak, keep your government hands off my guns and my body, where conservatism in states like Texas or Alabama or elsewhere in the Deep South say, may not run that way. I'm curious if you're thinking about the power or not of referendum in light of the Kansas result.

Lux Alptraum: Well, The New York Times actually had a piece this morning that suggested that about four out of five states would vote for abortion rights if it were put to a referendum. I don't think it would happen everywhere, but I think a lot of states, even some of the states that we think of as conservative, might be more amenable to abortion rights if it was put to a vote.

I think part of the problem is not every state actually has the ability to do a referendum like that. It definitely is how that would work and what that looks like really is built up in individual state laws. I don't think that that's something that we can put to practice everywhere, but I do think it would turn out more in favor of abortion than people expect because a lot of times we think about red, blue, but it's much more complicated than that. There's a lot of people who--

I think Dobbs really changed the calculus on this because there's a lot of people who are happy to vote for anti-abortion politicians, so long as they think that abortion is safe because it just feels theoretical. It's like, "Okay, you can say whatever you want, but I'm going to be able to get an abortion when I need it." Now that safety net is gone and so the people who are saying, "We want to make sure nobody can have an abortion, even if they have been sexually assaulted, even if they are about to die."

When you start hearing that, now you have to take those people seriously. It's not just rhetoric. This is actual stuff that they have the ability to do. I think that has energized people and people who might have been more Republican-leaning. Certainly, if you break abortion out as an issue, rather than saying, "Vote for these candidates who have a package of different platforms that you may agree with some and not agree with others." If you say, like, "What do you feel about abortion?" I think you're going to see a lot more people say, "I want abortion to be protected." Maybe you can put restrictions on it, but I want it to be protected.

Brian Lehrer: Of course, we'll see how that plays out in the midterm elections, which may be a misnomer for November because that only refers to Congress and so much of the action is at the state level or it's not "A midterm." It'll be the new session of the legislature or of whatever governor is enacted yet and that, of course, is where the action is because of a Supreme Court ruling on this issue.

By the way, Lux, in looking at the polls this morning, I was reminded that there isn't that much of a gender gap that appears to be there about Roe and abortion rights, generally. The big divides are by political party and education level, but men and women overall, only about a five-point difference, five points more support among women. What do you make of it, for example, in terms of pinning the anti-abortion movement on misogyny?

Lux Alptraum: Misogyny is a really complicated topic. People will often bring up 53% of white women voted for Trump, which is true. That never surprises me because it's like we do know there are women in the Republican Party and they're going to be white, so it's going to be a larger share of white women versus women of other races. When you get to abortion, it's really complicated because there certainly are some women who are like, "I could get pregnant and I might not want to be pregnant, therefore, abortion rights are really important to me."

There's also other women who are looking at it like, "Well, I've been a mother and I could never do that, so how could anybody?" I don't think it is as simple as like, "Well, women love abortion. Women want abortion rights."

I do think that you mentioned misogyny. There are, as we have seen over and over, there are women who will align with misogynist men because they see that as a way of protecting themselves, or they think, "Oh, if I'm really good and I am sexually pure and I do this and I do that, these men will protect me." They say mean things about women, but they mean the other women, "and I'm not like that."

We see over and over again women who use misogyny against other women. It doesn't really surprise me that we see women who don't support abortion, that we see women who are like, "Oh, the only people who need abortion are sluts. The only people who need abortion are people who had a bunch of sex outside of marriage." There's this idea, which it should be noted that the majority of people who seek abortion are already parents, and they're often parents who just cannot afford to have another child.

Our idea of who gets an abortion is already pretty skewed, but there's a lot of people who have these myths about women in their heads, who have this idea that they are not those women and those women deserve to be punished, whereas they're always going to be fine. A lot of times what we see is there's a lot of ostensibly anti-abortion women who suddenly are pro-abortion when it's their uterus.

Abortion clinics talk all the time about seeing the people who protested them showing up in their office the second that they get pregnant. They're like, "Well, I'm not like these other people. It's different for me because XYZ, because I already have these kids and I can't afford another, because this, because I didn't mean it." It doesn't surprise me.

Brian Lehrer: It's complicated.

Lux Alptraum: I wish it did, but it's complicated, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your calls welcome for Lux Alptraum, writer and podcaster on Kansas and other abortion referendum states or her New York Times op-ed, Women, the Game Is Rigged. It’s Time We Stop Playing by the Rules. Are you ready, listeners, for a new kind of feminist movement or new kinds of outside-the-system women's rights strategies or anything else relevant to our guest? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. We'll get to that Times op-ed from Lux right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with writer and podcaster Lux Alptraum. Maybe you know her 2018 book or read it or want to ask her a four-years-later question after having read it that had the book, Faking It: The Lies Women Tell about Sex--And the Truths They Reveal or maybe you read her New York Times opinion piece just the other day on the limits of empowerment feminism. 212-433-WNYC, if you want to talk to Lux Alptraum this morning or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Lux, can you remind people how that term empowerment feminism is generally used and how you used it?

Lux Alptraum: Yes. When I think of empowerment feminism, I think of feminism that is saying, "We can empower ourselves through the system. If we are confident, if we work hard, if we understand the rules, we can take power, we can get elected to office, we can launch or get to the head of companies. We can shift the balances of power by showing that we're good enough fundamentally by believing ourselves."

There's a lot of rhetoric that goes with it where it's like, "Yes, carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man," which suggests that it's just women not being confident enough, or power posing and that's going to make you really feel like you can take on the day or lean in is a great example of this, where it's like, "I'm going to tell you how the system works so that you can work for it, make it work for you."

I don't want to say that it never gets results because it certainly gets results and it gets results for some people, but I think that it has limited efficacy. I think right now, especially, we're seeing that it's like, "If the system is rigged against you, it doesn't matter how much confidence you have." If people say we don't want to do shows that are led by women, it doesn't matter if you say, "Well, I have all these statistics showing that these shows get a huge audience and make a lot of money." People are just going to say, "We don't care. We just don't want that."

I think that that can be really frustrating for people who have been working hard, and the truth is on my side, and XYZ. That's the fundamental problem with empowerment and feminism, that it only works in a good faith system.

Brian Lehrer: You acknowledge progress toward getting more women in positions of real power, like CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, a quarter of members of Congress, and a third of all state legislators, even though that's still far from the 51% that would be proportional, plus the MeToo Movement bringing down powerful abusers like Harvey Weinstein, and yet you conclude empowerment feminism hasn't delivered on its promises. What promises are you thinking of?

Lux Alptraum: I think that many of us would think, "Oh, wow, we have a Supreme Court that's almost a gender parity." If that's the case, if our country has reached that, then surely we are a country where abortion rights are going to be protected. Surely we're a country that's going to have guaranteed family leave, guaranteed child care. Surely we are not going to have a wage gap that breaks down along gender and racial lines. Surely, we're going to be in a  place where women are not doing the majority of the housework. Surely, we are going to be in a place where sexual assault survivors feel respected and feel like their cases are taken seriously, they had an easy time being believed and getting access to the support that they need. Surely, all of these feminist issues that women and other feminists have been rallying behind for decades, surely, we would have made some progress or would have completed the progress on them.

The case, it's a lot more complicated than that. Misogyny is still really really rooted in our politics and in our culture. As we noted earlier, there are a lot of women who still align with misogyny and misogynist goals, including one who was on the Supreme Court. It feels very Sisyphean. We almost make it and then we get pushed back down the hill.

I really don't want to undermine the achievements of the people who've worked to make it so that we have so many women in government. The people like EMILY's List and Emerge, and all of these groups that are working to help put women in positions of power. I think we also have to recognize that, in the short term, that is not working for a lot of people, and a lot of people cannot wait for justice and cannot wait for the services they need.

We need to get creative about how we're going to, for instance, get people access to abortions. How we're going to get--

Brian Lehrer: No, no, go ahead. Finish the thought, I'm sorry.

Lux Alptraum: I was going to say how we're going to get rape survivors some semblance of what feels like justice, or at least a path towards healing. Those are my two issues that I focus on a lot, but I think it's applicable for a lot of issues that are aligned with feminism where--

Brian Lehrer: Maybe you say, strategically, it's time to turn to a feminism of disempowerment. Explain how you mean disempowerment.

Lux Alptraum: It's not about accepting, it's not about being disempowered or not fighting back. It's a play on empowerment feminism. I got the term from Emma Sulkowicz, who many people know from her art project, Carry That Weight mattress performance when she was a Columbia student who accused one of her classmates of sexually assaulting her. It was not a case that was taken seriously. She didn't feel like she had gotten justice. She went around carrying a mattress like the mattress she had been assaulted on throughout the rest of her senior year.

I connected with her when I was working on my book, and I was working on the conclusion which talks about, where do we go from here, talks about why do people assume that women are lying about rape? I thought she was going to just do the stump speech "We have to believe women, we have to believe survivors, we have to do this." She really surprised me by saying, "I at this point don't feel like I necessarily need the masses to believe me." Because she had tried to be believed, and she had just been ridiculed and harassed.

If you're a rape survivor, that doesn't change the fact that you were raped. People telling you it didn't happen doesn't mean it didn't happen. She and her artwork had moved on to a process of almost pushing back on this reality that nobody was going to believe her by trying to make herself as unbelievable as possible. In that case, she did her follow-up art project was her recreating her sexual assault on video and then posting it online, because that was the thing no "real rape survivor would ever do."

She was challenging this idea of, what is a real rape survivor? What does that mean? How do they act? She phrased this to me as feminism of disempowerment, where you accept that you are fundamentally disempowered by the system, and then you figure out, well, what power is there in that? Because if the system is not going to respect you, why do you have to respect the system? Why do you have to play by the rules? Why do you have to stay within the path that's been laid out for you? That, for me, was just really, really powerful reframing.

It gave me a name for behaviors I had already been witnessing. Because you see, not just in feminism, but through so many social movements, people get to a point where they say, "We have asked nicely, we have done all of the things we're supposed to do, and we haven't been rewarded with equal rights, we've actually been punished. We have just angered the system or they have found reasons to deny us even further."

Those people often are like, "Okay. We got to get creative. This path that's been laid out for us isn't working." I think sexual assault is one area that really comes to mind for me because survivors get told, "You go to the hospital, you report to the police, you get a jury, and if you were 'really raped', then you will get justice." We see time and again, that really the system is set up to stymie survivors.

I should note, I work as a volunteer of rape crisis and domestic violence counselor. I have actually been in the emergency department with a survivor when they were getting a rape kit exam done. I know exactly what that process is like, and it sucks. That's part of why we have advocates there to make it easier.

You see, it's like you go through this and the kit's not, "proving that you were raped", it's just collecting physical evidence that can maybe confirm what you're already saying, but it can't provide proof of consent, it can just provide proof that there was sex and potentially injury. Then oftentimes people go to the cops. Even if they've done everything "right", the cops don't believe them, or for whatever reason, they can't get a trial, or they get a trial and the judge or the jury decides that they're not going to find in their favor.

It really feels like this system is set up not to make things easier for survivors, but to thwart them at every turn. For me, as someone who cares deeply about rape and abuse survivors, I just think it's madness and it's unfair, and survivors deserve something better. That something better maybe looks a little more creative, maybe doesn't look like going through the criminal justice system, maybe isn't about worrying about the rape kit backlog, maybe it's about asking survivors what they need and starting from there.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, my guest is writer and podcaster, Lux Alptraum. We're talking about the implications of the referendum on abortion rights in Kansas this week. We're talking about her op-ed in The New York Times the other day, that contrast so-called empowerment feminism to something she calls disempowerment feminism, which she was just laying out.

She tweets under the handle, Lux “Ask Me About Self-Managed Abortion” Alptraum, which we will get to. Let's talk to Aly in Ridgewood, who I think is into your stuff. Aly, you're on WNYC with Lux. Hi.

Aly: Hi. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: I can hear you.

Aly: Okay, great. Hi. I called like a couple of months ago when you were also talking about abortion and asked the question, and I forgot to say I'm a longtime listener, a second-time caller, so I'm saying it today.

Brian Lehrer: There you go. Thank you.

Aly: Thank you for taking my call. Thank you for what you do. Lux, thank you for what you do. When I was asking my question, I wasn't tuned in to everything you were saying to the screener, so I maybe missed if you said something about this, but when you were talking about empowerment feminism, which is something I hadn't actually heard of before, I just was curious what you think about how that relates to capitalism, because some of the language you used reminded me of stuff I've read about like girl boss, or like being a girl boss. It's like, but you're still a boss, and you're still participating in systems that oppress other people.

It made me think about earlier waves of feminism that excluded different types of women who weren't white women, or who weren't these women from it. I'm just curious your thoughts about how empowerment feminism relates to capitalism.

Lux Alptraum: I think empowerment feminism is fundamentally working within the system. Capitalism is one of the biggest and most entrenched systems we have in America, so it's absolutely part of it. Certainly, this girl boss, the lean-in, that's about navigating capitalism, as much as it's anything else. I think that capitalism is not set up to be a fair system.

I said once, there was something I think AOC had tweeted about the wing as a feminist company. I thought it was funny, because it was like, there's no such thing as a feminist company.

There are companies that are founded by feminists, certainly, but if your motivation is to be profitable at all costs, and if profit is your priority, then you're going to end up sacrificing your feminist principles or other social justice principles, which we see again and again and again.

We saw that with the wing. The wing got lambasted for not living up to its ideals and all that. Again, it's because if profit is your motivation, you end up compromising on a lot of things that would make what you're doing more equitable because they're not good for the bottom line.

Brian Lehrer: Yet, what's the alternative? I think most of the small businesses that are started in the US these days are started by women or  some very large percentage. Is the only route to a real gender fair system to just tear down capitalism and try to build a social estate, or what's really the alternative?

Lux Alptraum: I try not to be hard-lined like a capitalist socialist, whatever. I'm for creating systems that work and that give people the need-- meet people's needs. I certainly think some blended capitalist socialist system appears to have worked out fairly well in places that have tried it. I think a nominally capitalist system that also has a robust social safety net is certainly a lot better than what we have right now.

Brian Lehrer: That's really what people like Bernie and AOC are talking about.

Lux Alptraum: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: That's the thing. All right, Aly, please be a third-time caller. Thank you very, very much for raising that. Carla in Montvale, New Jersey, you're on WNYC with Lux Alptraum. Hi, Carla.

Carla: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my call. I've been extremely curious throughout this whole Supreme Court decision, the process and the media coverage. I hear no mention of the male responsibility in pregnancy. Women don't have control over their bodies now when a pregnancy occurs, yet the male that impregnated her is scot-free. He has no financial responsibility, no responsibility whatsoever in raising the child.

A lot of women, young women, children really, who are becoming pregnant and need an abortion are not able to care for a child, especially if it's a result of an incestuous assault, that the child may be special needs, they live in poverty in rural areas.

Where's the education for the mother, the child care? How does this female, particularly the young females, how would they taking care of these babies? The people that say that it's the right to life, it's not the right to life. These people it's the right to birth, and then once the birth occurs, they're done, they want no responsibility caring for these children that are going to be born.

I think that the males need to submit DNA samples. I think there needs to be free DNA tests for women. I think they need to streamline paternity decisions and garnish wages. These babies need to be cared for. No one's talking about the male responsibility here.

Brian Lehrer: Carla, thank you. This is coming up on the show a lot these days, Lux. I think about it two ways on first blush and obviously, we'll get your take. One is, yes, obviously, if there are going to be forced births in this country, then the men, if they're not already hanging around as responsible fathers, need to be made to do that by the state. On the other hand, even engaging in that conversation, in some way legitimizes the idea of forced births.

I wonder what you're thinking about Carla. If you see, in any of the states, because I know you follow this very closely state by state, whether you see any such laws requiring responsible fatherhood after birth to be enshrined in law and enforced.

Lux Alptraum: I think this is really tricky, and I get why it sounds good to say like, "Oh, we need to force people who impregnated people to be parents." Imagine that you're sexually assaulted and now somebody says your rapist has to be in your child's life. Even if you want to carry that child's term, I think most people who are rape survivors are not necessarily going to want to be legally connected to their rapist for the next 18 years. I think that the child support system is a lot more complicated than a lot of us want to believe.

Certainly, the thing is for a lot of people who want abortions, they just want an abortion, regardless of whether or not there's support on the other end, they do not want to go through pregnancy. They do not want to go through labor. They do not want to raise a child. For some people, certainly, if there was financial support, they might be more interested in caring to term, but a lot of people don't want to have the baby.

I don't want to say it legitimizes the forced birth thing, but I think it is ignoring the fundamental issue of people who want abortions don't want kids, but we do--

Brian Lehrer: What about when you get to that point? Because there are a number of states who, for some period of time now are going to have forced births and, at that point, somebody's got to pay to raise those kids.

Lux Alptraum: Right. I think the really telling thing that we see is that the states that are the harshest against abortion are also the states that won't expand Medicaid, that don't want to do family leave, that don't want to do any child support child income. I don't think that we need to necessarily make it about the men or the people who get people pregnant. I think that that gets a lot more complicated, but I think certainly we can make it about the state.

If the state has a vested interest in people remaining pregnant, then the state should be giving paid time off. The state should be giving guaranteed monthly payments and child- not even just tax credits, but lump sums of money that say, if you have a kid, here's $2,000 every month.

If you are a state that genuinely believes that people carrying pregnancies to term is good, you should be financially incentivizing those people. You should be giving those people guaranteed childcare. You should be setting up daycares across the state. We're not seeing that because this is not about wanting children. Because people who are against abortion, first and foremost, just want to punish pregnant people, want to control the bodies of women and other marginalized people.

They're not doing it because they care about babes, and they fundamentally don't care about babies. If they cared about babies, they would probably want gun control so that kids aren't going to school terrified of mass shootings, but it's much darker that and that's also--

Brian Lehrer: Protecting children from conception all the way through birth.

Lux Alptraum: Right. George Carlin has a great line about that. They care about you while you're a fetus, and then when you're 18, they want you to join the military. Other than that, they don't care.

Brian Lehrer: That's a good one, 1972 reference. We're getting a call from Kansas. Let's take it. Angela in Prairie Village, Kansas, after the big news there, you're on WNYC. Thank you so much for calling. Hello from New York.

Angela: Hello, Brian. I am a four-year resident of Prairie Village in Kansas and Johnson County after moving from Montclair, New Jersey after being on the East Coast for 19 years. I am a long-time listener and I listen to you in Kansas and--

Brian Lehrer: So glad you're still listening out there. Thank you.

Angela: Yes. You're welcome. I just wanted to just make a comment just saying that I'm proud to have voted to say no and keep abortion legal in the state of Kansas. I appreciate all your conversation that you're having on the topic.

Brian Lehrer: Any observation you want to share about why it came out the way it did there, what we were discussing before about whether Kansas has a particular libertarian streak in its conservatism keep your government hands off my guns and my body, that different kinds of conservatism, maybe Texas style, Alabama style may not have. If you have that much perspective on it, do you have a take on why this went the way it did in Kansas?

Angela: Not really. After just being here for four years, the gun issue would be a concern for me because there are a lot of rural areas that do have guns out here. I would be interested to see if that went on to vote how that would go. I would hope that it would be gun safety issues that could be put into our state laws.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask it this way. Do you know any Republicans out there who voted no on this referendum anyway, voted for the abortion rights position?

Angela: I don't because where we live in Prairie Village is a blue area. I think a lot of the Catholic churches, there were a lot of signs for vote yes. I think that the majority of Johnson county is a blue area. I don't know when anyone personally that is a Republican that voted no.

Brian Lehrer: There's a little less-- [crosstalk]

Angela: Makes me proud to just--

Brian Lehrer: For provincial people from New York City or from Montclair, yes, you can move to Kansas and still live in a blue neighborhood. Angela, thank you so much. I'm really thrilled that you're still listening out there. Please call us again. We're almost at a time with writer and podcaster, Lux Alptraum. I did want to reference that your Twitter handle is Lux “Ask Me About Self-Managed Abortion” Alptraum.

Would you tell us something we should know about self-managed abortion?

Lux Alptraum: Absolutely. A lot of people, when they hear self-managed abortion, they think like people drinking bleach, people using coat hangers, unsafely. They assume that this means something dangerous and unsafe, but that is not true anymore. We now have two different pill regimens that are known to be incredibly safe and incredibly effective, especially when you're doing it in the first trimester. That is a mifepristone-misoprostol combo, or just misoprostol alone.

The regimen for mifepristone-misoprostol is one mifepristone pill, then about 24 hours later, you dissolve four misoprostol pills underneath your tongue, it takes about 30 minutes, and then that induces abortion, it's basically inducing a miscarriage. If you only have access to misoprostol, you need 12 pills and you do four every three hours.

Again, it's four pills dissolved under the tongue, wait three hours, do it again, wait three hours, do it again, and it's 30 minutes to dissolve. These pills, the best way to find out where to get these pills is to go to plancpills.org. They link to a variety of telemedicine providers. They link to a variety of online pharmacies that have been vetted and verified, and will get you the pills that you need to terminate an abortion.

If you are in a state where abortion is still legal and safe, this is a good option because clinics are getting flooded with people from out of state. If you are in a state where abortion is restricted, this is still a good option because there's a lot of places that will send you pills regardless of what your state says about abortion. We'll make sure that you are able to get the abortion that you need from the safety and comfort of your own home without having to travel, without having to be berated by people giving you false information about abortion without being forced to wait for multiple days due to a mandated waiting period after you have mandated counseling.

I think self-managed abortion is a critical way for all people who are pregnant and don't want to be to take their bodily autonomy back into their hands and say, "It doesn't matter what you say about the laws, as long as I can get these pills--" which you can, even if it's technically illegal, "As long as I can get these pills, I can reclaim my body and I can decide when I am pregnant and when I am not pregnant."

Brian Lehrer: I'm glad you told me to ask, and there we leave it with Lux Alptraum who besides that Twitter feed is the author of the 2018 book Faking It: The Lies Women Tell about Sex--And the Truths They Reveal and The New York Times guest essay that first met on Friday, Women, the Game Is Rigged. It’s Time We Stop Playing by the Rules. Lux, thank you so so much.

Lux Alptraum: Thank you for having me.

 

 

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