Episode Details

Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, where every week I read you the receipts on a movement that wants your uterus, your paycheck, and your ability to leave. Today we’ve got an attorney general confirmed at four in the morning who got caught on a call he thought nobody was recording, the clinic protection law he plans to bury, an eighteen year old in Durham charged with using abortion pills as a deadly weapon, a cop who used a surveillance camera network to find out whether his girlfriend went to a clinic, a jobs report where women lost more jobs than the entire economy did, and a speed round with bishops and a cannabis gummy. Let’s get into it.

Todd Blanche was confirmed attorney general at four o’clock yesterday morning, fifty to forty nine, which is the hour you schedule something you’d rather nobody watch. Ten days earlier he was on a call with faith leaders. He told them the Justice Department is working with the FDA and HHS to choke off abortion pills going into banned states, “so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state.” Then, “victory will be soon, and it will be permanent.” Two permanents in one breath. We heard you. You sound like a man leaving a voicemail for a woman who already blocked him.

The internet decided this meant a national abortion ban. It doesn’t, and Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day spent a column being furious about that, because calling it one hands them a free pass. They deny the ban, everybody exhales, and the real plan sails through. Two thirds of abortions in this country are pills. You don’t need a ban if you can cut the mail.

And that wasn’t even the worst thing he said. Blanche also told that call the Justice Department is putting policies in place so that even after Trump leaves office, “prosecutors will no longer be able to use the FACE Act.” That’s the law that stops people from blockading and terrorizing clinics. He isn’t just disarming this administration, he’s disarming the next one. And the only reason we know is that they recorded themselves saying it and put it on YouTube, where Valenti found it and saved a copy.

Durham police arrested an eighteen year old named Syeisha Johnson on August fourth and charged her with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill. The deadly weapon is mifepristone. A doctor told Johnson and her boyfriend in June that she was already twenty weeks pregnant. North Carolina bans abortion after twelve. She had turned eighteen that same month, and in North Carolina a minor can’t get an abortion without a parent signing off. So she ordered pills online, took them alone, and went into labor in a bathroom.

Then she called 911 herself. Firefighters found the baby with a pulse, performed CPR, and got him to Duke, where he survived. Her public defender, Barbara Lagemann, told the court that calling 911 is “exactly what we would expect her to do, which is getting care for her child,” and that North Carolina statute 14-23.7 exempts a pregnant woman from prosecution for assaulting her own unborn child. On the deadly weapon count she was blunt. “Statute does require that the alleged victim be living at the time of the assault. In order to be living, one must be born.”

So a scared teenager with no legal option in her own state took a prescription drug, and Durham police decided that drug was a deadly weapon. The judge set bond at a thousand dollars and noted neither teenager had a criminal record or posed a danger to anyone. District Attorney Satana Deberry, who is openly pro choice, hasn’t decided whether to pursue it. Durham police looked at a pill bottle and charged it like a gun.

Durham isn’t an outlier. Pregnancy Justice counted seven hundred and thirty fetal personhood bills this session, and bills to charge abortion patients with homicide jumped from three to fourteen in two years. Kansas wants destruction of a fertilized embryo to be a felony, which puts every IVF freezer in the