Samantha Bee’s Abortion Blind Date
Gloria Riviera and Bee talk about their new podcast, The Defenders, which explores the reproductive rights battlefield and celebrates the heroes keeping abortion accessible.
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 d
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.isparate justice movements, and makes it all clear and—somehow—wryly funny.
