Why US abortion rights are under attack

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: Why US abortion rights are under attack

Lilah Raptopoulos
A few weeks ago, an unnamed source at the US Supreme Court leaked a bombshell document. You may have seen it. It was all over the news. The document was a draft decision in a case called Dobbs versus Mississippi. It was written by Samuel Alito, one of the court’s conservative judges. What the draft said is that the judges plan to uphold a state ban in Mississippi that made it illegal to have an abortion 15 weeks into a pregnancy. But more importantly, it also said that the court planned to end the federal protection of abortion altogether. It was going to overturn Roe vs Wade, the 1970s law that protects abortion access across the United States. People were shocked. For one thing, leaks of opinions are extremely rare. But more to the point, Americans don’t want Roe overturned. About 65% of Americans have said they support it.

Rhiannon Hamam
I think that the leak is, in no uncertain terms, a good thing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Rhiannon Hamam
I think more transparency about what the Supreme Court is doing when it’s making its decisions is important.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Rhiannon Hamam
And I think things like nationwide protests and demonstrations happening just in reaction to the draft leaking, right . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Rhiannon Hamam
 . . . show conservatives at least that this is a right that most people in the United States want to protect.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Rhiannon Hamam. Rhiannon is a lawyer, a public defender in Texas. She’s also one of three hosts on the popular podcast 5-4. Its tagline is: A podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. Rhiannon has been watching abortion law for a long time. So when the leak dropped on May 2nd, she was disheartened, but she wasn’t surprised.

Rhiannon Hamam
Well, look, you know, in a, in a lot of ways, like I said, first of all, reproductive justice advocates have been saying this for a long time. But . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Rhiannon Hamam
. . . Say in the South, in the Midwest of this country, conservative lawmakers have been allowed, even under existing law, to make more and more restrictive laws about abortion. That mean that across the country, abortion providers have had to shut down. People have to drive already out of state in many instances to access abortions. And so when you’re talking about the right to an abortion in many places, depending on where you live geographically in the United States, you already live in a post-Roe world.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
We’re dedicating today’s entire episode to abortion. First up is Rhiannon. She lays out why the end of Roe has been coming. She explains how we got here and what’s at stake. Then we hear from three people providing abortion services on the ground in three of the states that will be affected the most: Alabama, Wisconsin and Illinois.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

So the US Supreme Court consists of nine judges. Each is appointed for life by the sitting president. This happens when a judge retires, or often it happens when he or she dies. You probably heard that Joe Biden promised he would appoint the first black female judge when he was running. He’s now done that, and she’s a liberal. She supports reproductive choice, disability rights and healthcare. Donald Trump got to appoint three Supreme Court justices and they’re some of the most conservative judges the court has seen in decades. You get the idea. Roughly speaking, liberals appoint liberals. Conservatives appoint conservatives. It’s a political sport with massive stakes. In theory, though, being a judge is apolitical. The justices are revered as the wisest minds in the land, meant to be impartial and outside of the establishment. John Roberts, the current chief justice, has said that the judges are like baseball umpires. They just call balls and strikes. But frankly, they’re not.

Rhiannon Hamam
What is clear to us and so many, especially when decisions like this are being drafted, is that the Supreme Court is a political body just like the other branches of government, although it tells itself and it tells the public otherwise.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s Rhiannon again, talking to me from her home in Austin, Texas. Rhiannon, as you can tell, is not an impartial observer either. She supports a right to abortion. Her politics are on the left. She believes that the whole problem with the law is that lawyers are all pretending it’s apolitical when it’s not. Rhiannon also thinks that the current Supreme Court is weighted far to the right of centre, that it’s been hijacked and that abortion and Roe v Wade in particular is the jumping off point that got us here.

So I’m gonna start with a pretty broad question, which is basically how you would explain what’s going on with abortion rights in the US to a global audience. I’ve got family in Greece and they’ve been texting me like, I don’t understand what’s going on.

Rhiannon Hamam
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
 . . . In America, you know, it sounds like the majority of Americans are against this. And can you explain it? And I’m struggling to.

Rhiannon Hamam
Yeah. I think the easiest way to explain this might be in terms of movements, right? How, how political movements are built. And so the decision to overturn Roe vs Wade is a culmination of a decades-long project. The modern conservative legal movement really started as a reaction to the civil rights era, and it hit a boiling point when Roe v Wade happened. So conservatives designed a whole ideology in opposition to Roe vs Wade and these other civil rights gains. So it’s not just that they oppose Roe vs Wade on sort of personal, religious or other justifications. It’s that their whole legal philosophy derived from opposition to the expansion of civil rights in the mid-century in America.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You’ve probably heard that the 1950s, sixties and seventies were a time of big change in America, and the court had a big part in that. In the mid-1950s, the Supreme Court upheld Brown v Board of Education, a case that desegregated schools in the American South. Loving v Virginia, the case that upheld interracial marriage, was decided in 1967. Then in 1973, there was Roe.

News clip
Good evening. In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court today legalised abortions. Thus, the anti-abortion laws of 46 states were rendered unconstitutional.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And some conservatives thought these decisions interpreted the Constitution too broadly. After all, the Constitution doesn’t talk about interracial marriage or abortion, which of course it doesn’t. It was written hundreds of years ago. So they started organising around conservative legal thinking and court appointments. They saw an opportunity there and they wanted control.

You trace a lot of what’s wrong with the Supreme Court back to Roe v Wade. But like, what did the decision actually say? How did it justify allowing abortion?

Rhiannon Hamam
Yeah, really simply, Roe vs Wade says that there is a constitutional right to privacy protected by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and that the right to privacy includes the right to have an abortion.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Rhiannon Hamam
That, in a really basic sense, is what Roe vs Wade says.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And at the time, the court agreed on that? Like, it seems like the narrative around it has changed a lot. And now even liberals are saying maybe it’s not about the right to privacy, and that’s a bad justification.

Rhiannon Hamam
Yeah. Yeah. So at the time, there was a strong consensus on the Supreme Court. This was a 7-2 decision, meaning seven justices agreed with the holding that the right to privacy exists in the Constitution and that the right to privacy includes the right to have an abortion. That coalition of seven justices included some traditionally conservative justices as well. But you’re right. Since then, Roe vs Wade has been dragged through the mud, mostly by conservatives who are saying, you know, this was a ruling made by activist judges, activist liberal judges, and that what Roe vs Wade did was read in rights into the Constitution that are just not there.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm. Let me just jump in here with some basics about the role of the court. The US is a federalist system. We have 50 states and each one can pass its own laws as long as they don’t contradict a federal law or the rights provided by the Constitution. And the Supreme Court is the most senior body that decides if there’s a contradiction. For example, in Roe v Wade, a woman known as Jane Roe found out she was pregnant in Texas, where abortion was prohibited at the time. So she sued and the case went all the way up to the Supreme Court. They decided it was unconstitutional, and they explained the decision based on this one clause in the 14th Amendment, which they said provided women with a right to privacy. So that is how we got abortion protections. And the debate that came after is, is there a right to privacy? In the years that followed, conservatives have said there isn’t. And that’s made some liberals question it, too. But Rhiannon says that’s all just confusing the issue.

Rhiannon Hamam
Roe was correctly decided as is.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Rhiannon Hamam
I think people should read the opinion in Roe vs Wade and ask themselves why we bought in to conservative arguments that it was incorrectly decided at the time.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Rhiannon Hamam
Why do we assume that conservatives wouldn’t have developed equally strident and visceral attacks on the decision just because it was based on another part of the 14th Amendment, right?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Rhiannon Hamam
Conservatives don’t hate Roe vs Wade because it gave pregnant people the right to an abortion under the due process clause. They hate it because it gave pregnant people the right to an abortion.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. Can you talk about how Roe was undermined over time? This could be a whole episode, but briefly, sort of how did we end up now with this weird, confusing patchwork of different states having different levels of abortion rights?

Rhiannon Hamam
Right. Yes, that’s a really good question. So, like I said, this is the culmination of a decades-long project to undo Roe. And a lot of conservatives actually thought that Roe vs Wade was going to be overturned by a case called Planned Parenthood v Casey. That was a case in the early nineties. It came down in 1992. And that decision actually upheld the right to an abortion, to the disappointment of many, many conservatives. And that case said that pre-viability of a foetus, a state cannot put restrictions on abortion that would cause an undue burden to the pregnant person seeking an abortion. So, for example, in that case, they decided that a Pennsylvania law that required married women seeking abortions to get consent from their husbands, that that placed an undue burden on the pregnant person, right?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Viability, by the way, means that a foetus can survive outside the womb. The court determined that that was 24 weeks. And an undue burden just means that it makes it too hard. It’s too much to ask the person who needs an abortion to get permission. In another case, a few years later, the Supreme Court said that it was also an undue burden to make abortion providers have hospital-grade surgery rooms, because abortion is a really safe procedure that doesn’t need it. And making abortion providers jump through those hoops just made it hard for many to stay open. So that decision protected abortion rights too. But the bigger story here is that conservative states kept passing restrictions on abortion despite Roe’s protections. The lesson they took away in the nineties was that the courts were entertaining what is and isn’t an undue burden at all, that some restrictions to abortion might be allowed. Basically, they realised they could just keep passing restrictions and then see what the courts would let stand.

Rhiannon Hamam
So on the one hand, Planned Parenthood v Casey upheld Roe, and it’s clear that many Democratic politicians were lulled into believing that the abortion right was protected and nothing more would be happening at the Supreme Court to really threaten that right. But we should be clear and it’s obvious from all of the case law that follows Planned Parenthood v Casey that the opposite actually happened.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Today, whether or not you can get an abortion if you’re pregnant depends almost entirely on where you live. Right now, if you’re in New York like I am, your right to access an abortion is written into state law. I could take the subway to get an abortion and be home later that afternoon. If I was in Texas, I’d have to drive for hours, and abortion is banned after six weeks. That’s before most people even realise they’re pregnant. And that’s not even getting into other obstacles.

Rhiannon Hamam
If you’re a poor person of colour, if you’re a trans person, if you’re undocumented, say. Let’s take an example of somebody in the Rio Grande Valley in far south Texas, close to the border with Mexico.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Rhiannon Hamam
You know, there is an abortion provider in the Rio Grande Valley. They are called Whole Woman’s Health. Depending on where you are in the Rio Grande Valley, that one abortion provider can be hundreds of miles away.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Rhiannon Hamam
If you’d like to go to another abortion provider, if you are an undocumented person in the Rio Grande Valley and you’re driving, when you’re leaving the Rio Grande Valley, you have to pass through a federal checkpoint that checks whether or not you’re a citizen, right? If you’re a trans person, a poor person already receiving poor healthcare for your needs, then your access to abortion is cut off.

Lilah Raptopoulos
If you’re still wondering how we got here, Rhiannon blames two legal doctrines which conservatives have been using to justify a very literal interpretation of the Constitution: originalism and textualism. Originalism is the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted in the same way it would have been understood at the time that it was written without correcting for context. So if you’re talking about the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, don’t worry about the difference between the muskets of the 18th century and the automatic weapons that we have today. All weapons allowed. And textualism means that you should interpret the Constitution based only on its explicit text. If the Constitution doesn’t use the word abortion, there’s no right to abortion. So here we are. It’s 2022. And the Supreme Court is made up of six conservative justices who mostly abide by these philosophies and three liberals.

So, Rhiannon, what is the decision that’s in front of the Supreme Court right now?

Rhiannon Hamam
Yeah, this is a case called Dobbs. Dobbs vs Mississippi. And what it has to do with is a law in Mississippi that was passed that bans abortions after 15 weeks. If that law is upheld, that would signal a huge kind of shift from what the law is right now, which is that a state cannot place undue burdens on abortion access before viability. Here, the state of Mississippi is saying, no, this is an outright ban on abortions after 15 weeks.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK. Let’s talk about the leaked decision. What does it say?

Rhiannon Hamam
Sure.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And what are some things that, what are some of your takeaways from it?

Rhiannon Hamam
Yeah. So the essence of the legal question that Justice Alito is answering is what is a fundamental right under the 14th Amendment? Is abortion a fundamental right in the Constitution like Roe and Casey say that it is? And what Sam Alito wants to do is to define fundamental rights as those that have already existed for centuries. (Laughter) And, and right. And, and we’re laughing because it’s an extremely regressive and backwards approach, right?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Rhiannon Hamam
Women’s rights have not been recognised for generations upon generations in this country, nor have the rights of racial minorities, certainly. And so what Alito is arguing is that a fundamental constitutional right doesn’t exist unless it’s always existed.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Rhiannon’s biggest notes, not surprisingly, are on the draft’s approach to gender equality and the idea that all people should have control over their bodies. She says Alito just totally dismisses it.

What about the way that he writes about it makes it sound like a pie-in-the-sky ideal?

Rhiannon Hamam
You know, he just kind of brushes it off, I think. He says, look, unmarried women aren’t so stigmatised as they were back in the day. It’s very easy to apparently access adoption services.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Who knew? (Laughter)

Rhiannon Hamam
Right. Right. So, so bodily autonomy, he’s not convinced that that is such an important ideal.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Do you think that Roe is definitely getting overturned?

Rhiannon Hamam
Yeah, I expected that it will be overturned. They have five votes to overturn Roe, Roe vs Wade. They have five conservatives ready to do that. I think that there’s a sixth conservative that is Chief Justice John Roberts who might not be on board. It is possible, although I don’t know if it’s likely. It is possible that Chief Justice John Roberts writes a very narrow opinion, saying that he does not want Roe vs Wade to be overturned, but in effect, still giving the green light to these extremely restrictive laws in states that want to restrict access to abortion.

Lilah Raptopoulos
To be clear, a narrow opinion would mean that the court doesn’t overturn Roe entirely, but upholds the 15-week ban which moves up the cut-off for abortions from 24 weeks. That may sound better, but it’s still a big change. The 24-week protection has been on the books since 1973. And this is inviting conservatives to keep chipping away at it. So what will change in practice? The simple answer is that things will remain the same in states where abortion is protected and get much, much worse in the states where it’s not. Even if Roe isn’t overturned, but especially if it is.

Rhiannon Hamam
The only possible conclusion is that extremely restrictive laws are going to be passed. And I only say that because you see it happening already.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Rhiannon Hamam
There is a law being discussed in Louisiana right now about criminalising certain forms of contraception. There’s a law being discussed in Missouri about prohibiting people from leaving the state to access abortion services. The list kind of goes on and on.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So Rhiannon, we’ve been talking about these really big ideas like originalism and textualism and what the right way is to interpret the Constitution. And I’m kind of curious what you say to people who like the Constitution, like who find it kind of comforting to have a document that they can refer back to. What do you say to them?

Rhiannon Hamam
Yeah, you know, I’m actually not an anti-constitutionalist. I don’t think we need to burn the document or anything. What we argue on the podcast and what I believe is that the Constitution should be interpreted differently than how originalists and textualist have interpreted it. You know, there’s no rule that you have to interpret the document the same way the slave-owning white male property owners interpreted it at the time. That is a rule that conservatives made up. That is an arbitrary rule. If that’s your preference for interpreting the Constitution, I disagree with you strongly. My preference is to interpret the Constitution as a promise, a promise about protecting individual dignity, the liberty of people, equality among people. And there’s no reason or rule that we can’t interpret that document expansively.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. My real last question, Rhiannon, is just I mean, so much of your professional life is based around the courts and the law and . . . 

Rhiannon Hamam
Unfortunately, yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I guess like, how do you feel? How are you feeling these days?

Rhiannon Hamam
(Deep sigh) Sorry.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Rhiannon Hamam
I feel angry. I feel really angry. But when I go to sleep at night, I am reassured that, I am reassured by the power of the people, and I know that already the people have made very clear that they’re unhappy with this decision. I believe in the power of underground abortion networks. I believe in the power of abortion funds who are committed, no matter what, to providing safe, accessible abortion to anybody in this country who needs one. And so I am extremely angry as a woman, as someone who has had an abortion in Texas. But I am also reassured.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it.

Rhiannon Hamam
Yeah, thank you for having me. This was, this was a pleasure.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Thanks.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
So I’m gonna be honest. Abortion rights are a really hard thing to cover because it’s so expansive and there are so many parts. Even in the time we’ve been preparing this episode, at least one state, Oklahoma, passed a new ban restricting almost all abortion. And abortion itself has changed a lot. Often it’s now a matter of taking a pill. There’s no procedure. But you still need to be able to access in-clinic care or be mailed the pill or have a doctor available to help you through it. So it’s still really all about where you live.

So we spoke to three abortion providers in three states that are most affected, to hear what it’s been like and how they’re preparing for what’s to come: in Wisconsin, in Alabama and in Illinois, which will become the nearest state for abortion care for people upward of 650 miles away.

Dr. Kristin Lyerly
My name is Dr. Kristin Lyerly, and I am a board-certified obstetrician-gynaecologist who also provides abortion care in northeastern Wisconsin. I’m currently providing primarily abortion care at Planned Parenthood in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. And we have added extra days, extra hours, extra staff, extra everything to ensure that patients can get access as promptly as possible. Here in Wisconsin, we have a law that was implemented in 1849. Wisconsin became a state, by the way, in 1848. This is a really, really old law. And as soon as Roe falls, we are taking this law very seriously. We have to because we have to protect ourselves as healthcare providers and we have to protect our patients. So when we receive the word that this is actually happening, we have to shut down all abortion care in the state. At this point, there is still an exception for the life of the mother, but that requires likely three physicians to sign off. It is not only burdensome to patients, but it’s really dicey for physicians who will be facing the possibility of criminal charges just to provide normal healthcare to our patients in some of the most challenging circumstances that people will face in their lifetimes. We are left at this point with only four clinics that can provide abortion care. Two are in Milwaukee. One is in Madison. One is in Sheboygan, which leaves a huge part of the state without any access to abortion care. I take care of people who travel 3 hours in each direction because they live so far away from any centre that’s able to provide this kind of care. But then they have to come back for a second visit, which is required by Wisconsin law. Recently, I gave a patient $20 so she could put gas in her car and get back home after her second visit. So many of these people who we take care of have so little. What are they gonna do when this goes away? When I was training in Madison just ten years ago, we admitted someone from the middle of the state with a crochet hook in her uterus. And this was before all of these abortion restrictions started piling on. That’s what I’m worried about. Everyone knows about the “hook” abortion. (Sigh) I just don’t want to see women who will be desperate because they’re facing dire consequences — they’re in complicated relationships, often, domestic violence is involved — doing desperate things because they don’t feel like they have any other options.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Robin Marty
So my name is Robin Marty. I currently live in the state of Alabama, but that’s a new place for me. I actually have spent most of my life in the Midwest and spent the last 20 years in Minnesota until I ended up with a job with a group known as The Yellowhammer Fund in May of 2019. Alabama passed a total complete abortion ban. It was the first ban of its kind, and it had no exceptions for any point in gestation, no exceptions for cases of rape or incest, foetal anomaly. And the only exception was if a person literally had their life at risk at that moment. That was this point that pushed me over the edge and made me realise that I couldn’t be a reporter any more. I couldn’t just be a writer. And now essentially I run an abortion clinic in Alabama. We recruited a wonderful doctor who moved to Alabama from out of state, which makes us one of, I believe, two clinics in the entire south that has a doctor that actually lives in the state that they provide in, because usually it’s too volatile to live there. And because of that, we can do abortions five days a week. Abortion is fairly expensive. First-trimester abortion is $750. And while that’s cheap as a medical procedure that you’re paying out of pocket, obviously most of our patients are, 75% of them are either at or below the federal poverty level. Most of them are blacks. Many of them already have children. They’re working multiple jobs. They are trying to balance childcare. So all of these are additional burdens that are very difficult for them to face. If you happen to receive Medicaid or you have private insurance in Alabama, it is illegal for either of those to cover abortion. When Roe v Wade is overturned, Alabama is in a really, really bad shape. Unfortunately, Alabama is one of the states that has a pre-Roe ban on abortion and that pre-Roe ban was never struck from the books. That means that literally the moment the Supreme Court says the words Roe v Wade has been overturned, technically our state can go ahead and enforce that ban. Anything that we do that is abortion-related will then be illegal. We have to stay open because patients are gonna need a safe place to go for aftercare. When we’re talking about the end of Roe v Wade, the entirety of the South will be without legal abortion. Florida may hang on for a little while, but that’s looking more and more unlikely because they do have a very conservative state Supreme Court. When that happens, there will be no legal abortion from the West Coast of Texas all the way to the ocean. So when we have an entire region where abortion is criminalised, that means that any person who does not have a successful pregnancy is going to be considered a potential criminal.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Marie Khan
My name is Marie Khan. I’m with Midwest Access Coalition. We’re a practical support abortion fund, which means we assist folks, especially facing travel costs, safe lodging costs, and then food and child care support who have to travel outside of their state or within their state to access abortion care. We specifically support folks that are travelling to, from and within the Midwest for abortion care. And that means in 2022, during this time period where states are attacking abortion rights and Roe is crumbling, we especially, we’ve seen folks, pregnant people travel from Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, already to reach out for care. And we are expecting many, many more, Kentucky, Tennessee, as far down as Florida. Individuals in these very populated areas and even in rural communities in areas are going to need to travel north and towards the Midwest for safe abortion care. So we’re looking at ways to be a resource with what Illinois has, volunteer drivers to try to cut down on the expensive costs for Ubers and Lyfts from the airport. Because now we’re having more people fly in than we have had before. In addition we have people still driving, people still taking bus and trains. At Midwest Access Coalition, we’ve been able to support everyone who reaches out to us who’s eligible within the, the area of the country we support. But we’re at the point now that we’re going to have to start instituting caps monthly because you don’t have enough, you don’t have enough slots at clinics, period, for the number of people that will need care across socio-economic standings. And there’s not gonna be the funds for the hotels, there’s not gonna be the funds for the cost of the abortion. And there’s not gonna be the appointment slots available for people to get care within the gestational timeframes they’re trying to meet. So I guess what, yeah, what I would want, like I would want I want people to not give up and still try to engineer solutions and fight back within their state.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. I’m including links to learn more about our guests in the show notes. Please do share this show with your friends and on social media. If you like listening, that’s really the best way to support us. It really helps people find the show. Also, keep in touch. Let me know what you’re reading or watching or interested in culturally right now. You can email us at FTWeekendPodcast@FT.com or on Twitter, @ftweekendpod. And you can find me on Instagram and Twitter @lilahrap. You can see behind-the-scenes podcast stuff on my Instagram. Also in the show notes is a link to the best offers available on a subscription to the FT, including 50% off a digital sub. Those offers are at FT.com/ftweekendpodcast. Make sure to use that link. I am Lilah Raptopoulos, and here is my incredible team. Katya Kumkova is this episode’s VIP and our senior producer Lulu Smyth is our assistant producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Zoe Sullivan is our contributing producer and Topher Forhecz is our executive producer. And thank you as always, goes to Cheryl Brumley and Renee Kaplan. Take care, and we will find each other again next week.

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