Abortion rights have been propelled to the political forefront ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Since then, at least 14 states have made the often life-saving procedure illegal, but one rising star within the Democratic Party is pushing to change the tide. 

Over her five years in office, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has been a vocal proponent of reproductive rights, which hasn’t been easy in a deeply purple state. In 2023, she signed a bill repealing a law she referred to as “rape insurance” that she fought against as a state senator a decade ago. 

In some ways, she’s still in disbelief that reproductive rights are in question at all. 

“It’s shocking to be in a situation where the right that I’ve had my whole life is now very much in jeopardy for my daughters,” she told Katie Couric in an exclusive interview for her podcast, Next Question. 

In the wide-ranging interview, Whitmer discusses what it would take to legalize abortion nationwide and why the fight is far from over. You can also catch the full interview below to hear what she says about speculation on whether she’ll run for president, as well as her new book, True Gretch: What I’ve Learned About Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between.

Katie Couric: So let’s talk about 2013 — you were serving as Michigan’s Senate minority leader, and that year, state Republicans tried to push through a bill requiring women in Michigan to buy extra health insurance for abortion coverage. It was “rape insurance,” as you called it. On the day the bill came up for a vote, you tossed aside your prepared remarks. Why? 

Gretchen Whitmer: I was getting ready to speak. We had a situation where the majority party, the Republicans, would not hold a single hearing, let women testify, let doctors and nurses testify, like no conversation. 

They just wanted to jam through this new policy. And I thought, I have a mic, I need to use it. And I was trying to talk my colleague into telling his and his wife’s story. I thought maybe that would engender some sympathy or at least open up some minds. They’d been desperately wanting a family. She’d gone through IVF. She had a miscarriage, but it wasn’t complete, so she had to go to the hospital to have an abortion, even though it was a desperately wanted pregnancy. Had the law been what they were pushing through, their insurance would not have covered the $30,000 hospital bill. I asked him if he could tell the story, but he couldn’t. It was just too recent and too hard. 

I remember walking back to my desk thinking, “God, how could I ask him to bare himself to the world when I, too, have a story that might resonate with people?” And so I decided to share the story for the first time publicly that I was raped when I was in college as a freshman. I grabbed two of my staff people, one woman and one man, and I shared with them what had happened. I said, “I’m thinking about telling this on the floor.” And the woman I work with said, “Don’t do it. You’re not going to change a single vote.” She wanted to protect me because she was savvy and knew what would happen. And the man said, “I have no advice. You’ve got to do what you think the right thing to do is.” 

I told the story, and it didn’t change a damn vote. I remember after the vote came, one of the guys on the other side of the aisle came up to me and said, “You’re so brave. My wife, too, was raped when she was in college, and I wish I could have voted with you.” And I heard that from him. I just was like, “You’ve just acknowledged that I cast the right vote, and you wish you could have, but you didn’t.” And it was gutting. But by the next morning, I got into the office, and we’d had hundreds of phone calls, emails, and faxes. This was 10 years ago, so faxes were still quite a thing.

That’s when I realized, “OK, I laid myself bare, but I gave voice to something that needed to be given, and people felt seen, heard, and represented.” That was, for me, the good part of doing it. And 10 years later, we kept the fight up. And as governor of Michigan, I got to sign the repeal of that law on the ten-year anniversary of it. 

Which was so awesome. As a woman who believes deeply in reproductive rights, thank you for that. 

Well, thank you. It was a good opportunity to show people that these fights are hard. It can feel very demoralizing and discouraging, but we’re right on these issues, and we can win them. That might take longer than it should, though. 

I’m also the mother of two daughters. You have Sherry, 22, and Sydney, 20. How concerned are you? 

It’s shocking to be in a situation where the right that I’ve had my whole life is now very much in jeopardy for my daughters. In Michigan, we would have reverted back to a 1931 law with the Dobbs decision. But I said, “We’ve got to scour everything and see what we can do here.” So I filed a lawsuit, and we had an injunction from the day the Dobbs decision came down. I took a lot of crap for filing that lawsuit because people said, “Oh, it’s an overreaction. They’re not going to do that.” But we ignored that. We went ahead and did it, and we never lost the right in Michigan for a minute. It gave the activists and advocates the opportunity to collect signatures. We had it on the ballot, and we won overwhelmingly in Michigan, just like other states where the people have been given an opportunity to weigh in. They say, “hell yes, we expect to have these rights.”. 

But it’s still very precarious. If you look at the language in the Supreme Court opinions, whether it was the miffy [mifepristone] opinion or this new Idaho opinion, where they can give emergency medical care, that’s a positive, but if they then say, “We’re not going to do anything more on this,” it’ll still very much be in play even in a state like Michigan or New York or California, where we think that this is settled; it’s not.

So, if who’s on the Supreme Court doesn’t really change anytime soon, can there be a federal law? 

Well, we have to have a Democratic majority in both the House and the U.S. Senate and a president who would sign the bill. President Biden is the only one running now who would actually sign a bill that restores our reproductive freedom across this country. 

But how likely would it be that that would pass, given the complement of the House and Senate, even on a good day, even if the Democrats control both houses? Don’t you need two-thirds? 

Yeah, you need a supermajority. And that’s not in the foreseeable future, sadly. But what is in the foreseeable future is the next presidential election and the opportunity to appoint more justices as these cases come back. 

As a lawyer, Gretchen, how do you feel about the Supreme Court today? 

I feel really, really unsettled by everything that’s happening with the Supreme Court because — as a public servant, as someone who’s taken an oath to the Michigan Constitution, the U.S. Constitution, as a lawyer and an officer of the court — I take all of these ethics and responsibilities very seriously. I know that confidence in our Democratic institutions is plummeting. And now that applies to the court as well. And it’s scary because those are the underpinnings of this democracy. And if I’m not confident in the court that I’ve been raised and educated to revere, I don’t know how anyone can be. And I think that’s very worrisome. They have some ethics laws that they have to follow and get held accountable too, because I think this is just really corrosive for our democracy. 

Jodi Kantor did a lot of reporting on this for The New York Times, and I interviewed her, and she said that these ethics laws basically didn’t have any meat to them. It’s high time for these justices to be held to account for some of their behavior. And they’re so biased, obviously. How do you find a Supreme Court justice in this day and age who isn’t biased one way or another? 

They went into Congress and said that Roe was the settled law of the land — they flat-out lied to Congress. It’s really stunning when you step back and think about all the different ways in which the standards, ethics, and confidence in these institutions have been eroded. It’s really destructive when you’ve got three appointees who say one thing and do the other and betray the people. 

So we’re kind of in a bit of a bind when it comes to abortion rights. 

And yet, where we are isn’t locked in. It could definitely slide backward. And I think that’s the big concern I have talking to Michiganders who worked so hard to get us on the right side:  It could all be for naught with a future Supreme Court ruling. 

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This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.