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Lisa Ikemoto The biggest impact of these laws right now is all the uncertainty it's creating and the sort of pulling back from fear of the criminal consequences of a lot of activity that's probably legitimate legal activity. But because you don't know for sure, you're afraid.

Soterios Johnson The consequences of the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v Wade go far beyond the immediate right to terminate a pregnancy. Some of the ramifications are only now being realized months after the court's landmark Dobbs ruling. In addition to affecting privacy rights and equality, the ruling also touches on issues of eugenics, disability rights and medical research. This is The Backdrop, a UC Davis podcast exploring the world of ideas. I'm Soterios Johnson. Lisa Ikemoto is a professor at the UC Davis School of Law, where she teaches bioethics, reproductive rights, law and policy and healthcare law. Her research focuses on how race, gender, disability and wealth affect access to healthcare and medical technology. She joins me now to talk about some of the far-reaching ramifications of the court's decision. Thanks for coming on to The Backdrop, Lisa.

Lisa Ikemoto I'm happy to be here. Thanks.

Soterios Johnson So immediately after the Supreme Court decision, many states moved to ban or limit abortions. Others moved to guarantee access. But you say beyond that, the anti-abortion movement has tapped into and revised aspects of reproductive control to its own purposes. How so?

Lisa Ikemoto Well, I have a number of examples. So it's been going on for a while. It didn't originate in response to Dobbs. So, for example, a few years ago, maybe 10 to 12 years ago, anti-abortion advocates ran billboard campaigns in neighborhoods including Oakland, ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ and Atlanta, Georgia. And those billboards asserted that there was a racist eugenics campaign aimed at Black women. And supported by a Planned Parenthood. So the billboards basically equated abortion with slavery or genocide. They had slogans on them or statements on them that said, for example, "Black children are an endangered species." Or another example, "The most dangerous place for an African-American is in the womb." So that's one example.

Soterios Johnson So they're implying that that the proponents of abortion are trying to use that to suppress the African-American population mostly. But but in reality, that has not been proven to be --there's no evidence supporting that those statements, right?

Lisa Ikemoto Correct. Yes. So those kinds of claims, again, they they argue that abortion advocates or abortion rights advocates are actually targeting communities of color in some sort of eugenics campaign. And then, as you indicated, the reality is much different. So going back to the late 1970s, Congress passed a law called the Hyde Amendment, which prevents the use of or prohibits the use of federal Medicaid dollars to be used for abortion, except when necessary to protect the health or life of a woman. So while the Constitution said until this year that everyone has a right to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, it meant that for poor women or low income women, they couldn't actually exercise that right because of the Hyde Amendment. And disproportionately, it's women of color, including lack women who are enrolled in Medicaid and therefore prohibited through the Hyde Amendment from accessing abortion. So that's one example.

Soterios Johnson Right. Right. Is there another?

Lisa Ikemoto Yeah. I mean, in the past few years, several states have passed abortion restrictions that were effectively bans based on the reason for abortion. So they would, for example, criminalize abortion when abortion was provided to someone whose reason was the sex, race or disability of the fetus. And so that was, again, the sort of put into the eugenics framework, claiming that abortion was a tool of eugenicists. And in fact, eugenics from the early 20th century, when eugenics thinking was very prevalent, used forced sterilization or coerced sterilization as its primary tool, not abortion. Abortion bans are, in fact, much more like coerced sterilization. They take away the decision-making authority of the person who's trying to decide what to do about their pregnancy or whether or not to use a  fertility to have a children. 

Soterios Johnson So, yes, when you bring up the issue of disability rights, you also have said that public discourse about abortion has made it more difficult to raise concerns around disability rights. In what way is that, is that happening?

Lisa Ikemoto I think so. I think considering the perspective of people advocating for people with disabilities, it's it's a really complicated issue. And the abortion debate is taking place in very simple terms. It's, you know, in the mainstream discourse, there's only two positions. And that makes it difficult to raise any sort of complex analysis or conduct any kind of complex analysis. So, for example, for people from the from the perspective of some people with disabilities or disabilities rights advocates, abortion and the way that it's conducted and practiced in the United States can be troubling. It is common, for example, there's so much prenatal genetic testing, and in the process of that, people are encouraged either by just prevailing social norms that are discriminatory or by genetic counseling that they received or encouragement from their doctors or their family to terminate pregnancies when a risk for disability is identified through genetic testing. And on the one hand, that sends all kinds of messages that devalue the lives of people with disabilities. On the other hand, it also indicates that people who are considering having children