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Part One:
We speak with Keith Matheny, reporter for the Detroit Free Press, about toxic chemicals called PFAS which last virtually forever in the environment. (PFAS are found in many common products: teflon pans, waterproofing sprays, fire-fighting foam, food packaging, and cleaning products.) These toxins now permeate the entire globe — across geographic boundaries and across species (PFAS have been found in the brains of polar bears, who have eaten seals who had eaten fish which had lived in water contaminated by PFAS). Can we do anything to roll back the damage they’re causing?
This is another example of powerful corporate interests continuing to push products which they *know* to be dangerous, giving their corporate profits priority over human health and safety. Industry executives knew as early as 1949 about the dangers, but successfully hid this information for decades. They paid their own in-house scientists to perform research which, as expected, found no significant impact on public safety. Then, when public research began to notice the true health risks, and when the EPA investigated the problem, it took another fifteen (15) years before these products were pulled off the market.
Part Two:
We talk to Marie Solis, a staff writer at VICE, about the extreme right’s assault on women, in the context of recent state laws banning virtually all abortions. In several states, legislation bans abortions after six weeks (by which time a woman may not even be aware that she’s pregnant). Now Alabama has enacted a law banning abortions altogether, without an exception for situations where the woman’s life is at risk. Seven (7) other states have “trigger laws” which stipulate that, as soon as the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, abortions will automatically become illegal in those states.
Georgia even has a law — modeled on the 19th century Fugitive Slave Laws — which gives the state authority to chase a fugitive woman across state lines and arrest her if she leaves Georgia to obtain an abortion in a different state. One might think that such a law violates the Constitutional right to travel (among other provisions). But we shouldn’t forget the Dred Scott case 150 years ago, when a conservative Supreme Court permitted slave states to cross state lines and drag fugitive slaves back to their “masters.” Can we rely on our current Supreme Court to strike down Georgia’s law?
Finally, our guest outlines several ways in which women’s ability to protect their reproductive rights could be chilled simply by the right wing’s strategy of enacting these laws and demonizing pregnant women — even if Roe is not actually overturned and the restrictive state law bans are never actually enforced.
