Dr. Beverly Gray at a 2023 news conference on abortion restrictions. (Photo: Lynn Bonner)
Doctors Beverly Gray and Jonas Swartz, Duke OB-GYNs, were outspoken opponents of North Carolina’s 2023 law limiting abortion. They tried to convince legislators that such a law would harm patients and force doctors to try to interpret vague statutory language.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, states across the country, including North Carolina, enacted more limits or near-bans on abortion. Gray and Swartz are now hosting a podcast, “Outlawed,” to talk about the importance of abortion in health care and how patients are navigating the legal restrictions.
Gray said she hopes listeners come away with information on abortion that helps them engage in sometimes difficult conversations.
“There’s a lot of misinformation out there about abortion,” Gray said in an interview. “Our goal is to help educate people so that when these conversations come up at the holiday table, they can say, ‘Actually, I heard these two doctors talking about it and this is how they framed it, or this is what they see in their practice,’” she said.
They’ve planned a season of 10 episodes.
The latest episode features an emotional interview with Dr. Caitlin Bernard of Indiana, who provided a medication abortion for a 10-year-old from Ohio who had been raped, but whose pregnancy was three days beyond Ohio’s six-week abortion limit.
The case made national news after Bernard told a newspaper about it. She was threatened, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita investigated her, and the state’s medical board reprimanded and fined her for violating patient privacy laws.
The Indiana Supreme Court publicly reprimanded Rokita last year for misconduct for his public comments about Bernard.
On the podcast she recounted a meeting with a Republican legislator in Indiana as lawmakers there were about to consider an abortion ban. The legislator joked, apparently, about jailing her for 10 years.
“It just makes it so clear what the stakes are, in a way that means we cannot lay down,” Bernard said on the podcast. “We have to keep fighting this, because it is so wrong, it is so dangerous. They will stop at nothing. … In some world, I would love to have a normal job that I can just go to, and then I can go home. But that’s not what this is.”
In another podcast episode, a doctor from Texas talks about hurdles to ending pregnancies even after the fetus has died, putting patients at risk of life-threatening infections. In the same episode, a Texas resident talks about needing to travel to North Carolina for an abortion after she and her husband are told that the baby she was carrying had a serious heart defect.
One episode will feature The Turnaway Study, a long-term look at what happens after women have abortions and after they are denied abortions.
“The idea is that the content will be evergreen and that it live out there, and if people want to tap into certain topics, they can,” Gray said.