On June 23, 2022, Samantha Bee hosted the final episode of her talk show Full Frontal while suffering from COVID in order to talk about the impending Supreme Court decision that would strike down Roe v. Wade. “We have to raise hell,” she urged. “In our cities, in Washington, in every restaurant Justice Alito eats at for the rest of his life.” The aftermath of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision has had devastating effects, but the hell-raising that Bee called for has been quieter than one might have expected considering that half the American populace had a 50-year-old constitutional right yanked away. Yet all around the country, activists have been invisibly putting themselves on the line to make abortion accessible to those in need.
These are the people that Bee and longtime ABC News journalist Gloria Riviera decided to spotlight in their new podcast, The Defenders, a deep dive into 2023’s complicated abortion rights landscape from Lemonada Media. Riviera, who also hosts the podcast No One Is Coming to Save Us, visits the area near the Texas-Mexico border to hear how reproductive care intersects with immigration issues and elsewhere in the country hears a woman talk about her harrowing journey to get an abortion across state lines. The hosts also talk to doctors and clinic workers who are under constant threat, church leaders who discuss these issues with their flock, and activists helping patients navigate the obstacle course of contemporary abortion law. Throughout, Bee does what she does best: trawls through political history, connects the dots between disparate justice movements, and makes it all clear and—somehow—wryly funny.
The Defenders started out as a blind date for Riviera and Bee, who didn’t know each other prior to working on this project. It wasn’t until she saw Bee’s live show that Riviera understood the potential. “I left that show thinking that she just talked about the most horrific issues that are happening in our country right now and I was laughing out loud. So I felt like we could work together,” Riviera says.
“We do have to keep talking unapologetically about abortion,” Bee says. She hopes that listeners will take away from the podcast the idea that anyone “can be a defender.” Opponents of bodily autonomy have been “chipping away at this right forever,” she continues. “Now we can chip back.”
The duo talked to Vanity Fair about ways to fight back, connections between the reproductive rights and gender-affirming care movements, and the need to take the abortion fight to television.
Vanity Fair: Many of us remember the day that Roe was overturned as a devastating moment. I know a lot of people felt powerless, like: “Okay, what can we do now, other than contributing to abortion funds?” Was that part of the motivation for doing the series?
Samatha Bee: Oh, for sure. And to be honest, even under Roe huge swaths of the country never had access to abortion care, and they built systems to account for that. So learning about that and highlighting the tireless work of the people defending access to abortion, in a pre-Roe world and a post-Roe world, felt like a very important exercise. There is joy in the fight, there is fun in the fight—as someone says in an interview—and it spans the country. It’s very energizing to listen to these incredible people speak. It makes you understand that everyone can help, because it’s not over. And keeping going can be difficult unless you have something to model yourself after.
In one episode, you talk to an activist in Tennessee who says that instead of getting intimidated by how high the wall is, you have to just chip away at it by doing grassroots work. What kinds of different groups did you speak to who are doing the chipping?
Gloria Riviera: One of the places that I went to was McAllen, Texas, which is close to the border with Mexico. There’s a group there called the Frontera Fund. When the Texas abortion ban passed in September of 2021, at the time it was the most restrictive abortion ban in the country. If you are undocumented in that part of the country, it’s impossible to leave because of the internal checkpoints inside our own country. You can imagine how difficult it is to access health care for an undocumented immigrant. So what happens is that you have a friend who does have a green card and they cross the border into [Mexican town] Nuevo Progreso. They still sell misoprostol, abortion pills, there. But there’s so much fear because although it’s legal to buy it, the gray area is whether it is legal to bring it back. But [activists] are doing the work and they’re not giving up.