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Amy Littlefield on the Abortion Fight and Chesa Boudin on Progressive Prosecutors

How Americans are fighting back to protect abortion rights.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

May 12, 2022

A RiseUp4AbortionRights protest in response to the leaked draft decision of the US Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, in front of the US Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

It’s all up to the states now, where activists are fighting to elect pro-choice candidates and strengthen laws protecting abortion rights, and grassroots groups are preparing an enormous logistics operation to move people across entire regions of the country that are about to go dark on abortion access. Amy Littlefield, The Nation’s abortion access correspondent, weighs in.

We also have the elected district attorney of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, on progressive prosecutors and their opponents. Progressive prosecutors have been pushing for criminal justice reform for a while now, Boudin explains, seeking to end mass incarceration and deal with police misconduct, which began with the election of Larry Krasner in 2017, followed by Boudin in 2019, and George Gascon in 2020. Of course, the defeated law and order forces pushed back. In San Francisco, opponents have collected enough signatures to force a recall vote on Boudin on June 7.

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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