Abortion

‘Roe v. Wade’ Anniversary: Relive the Pivotal Moments of Landmark Case

The We'll Hear Arguments podcast takes you inside the Supreme Court during oral arguments.

[PHOTO: Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo both wear headphones sitting at a desk in front of a microphone]
Rewire News Group's #TeamLegal, Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo, are hosts of the podcasts We'll Hear Arguments and Boom! Lawyered. Rewire News Group

For previous episodes, you can listen here.

Well everyone—we did it. We laughed, we cried, we made a threesome joke, and we are now about to embark on the grand finale of our first season of our podcast We’ll Hear Arguments. We’re so excited that you’ve joined us, and we’ve got something special for you this week: a reality TV-style creunion episode to wrap it all up.

And what reality TV reunion would be complete without a white guy of whom you’re kind of like, “I can’t totally figure out why he’s there or what he’s adding but I’m gonna trust the process”? Today we welcome our show’s producer, Marc Faletti.

Join Marc, Imani Gandy, and Jessica Mason Pieklo as they relive and rehash all the most dramatic, pivotal, and downright batshit moments of Roe v. Wade. They tie together all the legal threads of the previous four episodes, like fetal personhood and privacy. And Imani and Jess reveal the jokes that ended up on the cutting room floor, including an entire bit about the state of Texas’ obsession with “promiscuous sluts”—a callback to an iconic SNL moment.

Finally, they look beyond Roe to what came after: critical restrictions on abortion, like the Hyde Amendment, and subsequent Supreme Court cases that further shaped what abortion access looks like for millions of people across the United States. Cases like Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the undue burden standard was born (pun intended), and Gonzales v. Carhart, in which the Court upheld a gnarly quote-unquote “partial birth abortion ban.”

We hope you have enjoyed this journey through Roe v. Wade as much as we have, and we cannot wait for you to enthrall all your future (post-pandemic) dinner guests with wonky trivia about abortion and the balancing test and Justice Thurgood Marshall. Thank you for listening, fellow law nerds.

Transcript