When Hope Ngumezi wrapped his wife in a blanket at a Houston hospital, watching her bleed through two transfusions during what should have been a routine miscarriage, he had no idea she’d become part of a growing statistic: Black women dying preventable deaths under Texas’ abortion ban. As NATAL podcast hosts explain, stories like Porsha Ngumezi’s—who died after being denied a standard D&C procedure doctors say could have saved her life—are why Southern organizers have spent decades preparing for this moment, as former President Donald Trump’s potential return threatens to make Texas’ deadly restrictions the new national standard.

Audio docuseries NATAL passes the microphone to Black women, gender expansive people and families to share their stories on reproductive care. Now in its third season, which is co-published and supported by the journalism nonprofit The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the podcast is exploring the aftermath of the landmark Dobbs decision and what that means for Black families once Trump steps back into office.

This November, over 92% of Black women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, rallying behind her in her first days of announcing her campaign, and making a bold statement for the direction they wished to see the country take.

As they now face an incoming administration they didn’t vote for, amidst a Black maternal health crisis where Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related issues and a landscape of state abortion bans which disproportionately impacts Black women of reproductive age, the threat of the conservative agenda Project 2025 rings louder.

Executive producers and co-hosts Gabrielle Horton and Martina Abrahams Ilunga sat down for a Zoom call with Reckon to discuss season three and where reproductive justice goes next.

Note: Interview has been edited for clarity and length

Reckon: Season 3 of NATAL explored what care looks like since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and what that means in the aftermath of the 2024 election. What did you find?

MAI: I think the big banner of this season is that this work has been ongoing and will continue to happen, and that the folks who have been doing it have been prepared for this moment.

I think there’s a lot of folks around the country who were very surprised at their election results [and] by the Dobbs decision, but we were really fortunate to have Ms. Marie Leaner, who was a founding member of The Janes in our first episode, and she started organizing for abortion in the 60s, and she knew when Roe v. Wade passed in the 70s that it wouldn’t stick. People who started organizing around abortion in the 90s and in the early 2000s have been saying this has been like a ball that the movement had been expecting for a long time.

GH: This work hasn’t really looked much different after Dobbs [in the South], right? Maybe the severity has kind of spiked in certain ways, but a lot of the restrictions that seem very new for people in different parts of the country, or people who are just now maybe starting to think about or have conversations about abortion access or reproductive justice–these have been kind of conditions and landscapes that folks have already been navigating. They’ve been doing it with all of these hurdles and barriers already in place, and we’re just seeing how that’s kind of amplifying or spreading across the nation.

Reckon: There’s so many aspects of reproductive justice to talk about and they are all interconnected. Where do you think the focus needs to be first in order to better protect or improve conditions in the U.S. where people are facing pregnancy and what pregnancy means for them?

MAI: I don’t know if we can prioritize a focus, I think it’s more so borrowing from Black feminist frameworks and thinking about who is centered in this work. The abortion narrative that we see on a national stage very much centers white women– middle class, affluent, white women who have access to health care. It does not center Black folks, Brown folks, Indigenous folks, queer folks, and trans folks. There’s so many people whose stories and needs are just left out of the conversation and so I think for us, we’ve always started with ‘who are we centering?’ and bring it back to a Black center.

GH: I think a big part of how we get to who needs to be centered and who should be at the core of the sort of larger public conversation comes from the data as well. We know that the Dobbs decision and other restrictive policies disproportionately impact Black women and birthing people. We know what the numbers say.

Reckon: There’s so many topics NATAL touches on, from data surveillance to pregnancy criminalization to laws in general, is there a favorite topic you discussed or a topic that came out unintentionally that you’re glad you hit on?

GH: For our third episode I shared a little bit about the feelings that I’ve had to navigate following my own abortion over a decade ago, and it brought up a whole range of emotions for me. When I think about this season, it was definitely emotionally challenging for me, but being able to not just have courage to share or to make that connection out loud to listeners, and just knowing that there were all of these activists in each of our episodes [with] resolve and commitment to this work really inspired me to get comfortable with my own voice and my own story. We ask people to share their stories all the time, and we don’t always directly have a specific connection to the topic at hand.

MAI: There’s something special about allowing folks to have that intimate space and asking them questions about the work, but also allowing them to bring their personal storytelling into it and giving them a chance to reflect and find commonalities.

GH: I will have to say one of our biggest gets was Ms. Marie Leaner because she’s in her 80s. To just even be able to get a commitment and participation from an elder—that was our celebrity, you know?

MAI: She brought me to tears, like I was amazed that we were able to have that time with her, and she was singing at the end of the interview, and it was just like, oh my gosh.

Reckon: In episode three you talk about the Deep South serving as a North Star for how we can move forward. Can you talk about the knowledge that Southerners and reproductive justice leaders in the South have and how we can apply that to this ongoing struggle that we have across the country?

GH: As we start to get more and more into the history of Black maternal health in this country, the history of Black birthing in this country, you can’t escape the immense knowledge that African and Black midwives have kept so many alive over the centuries that they brought with them as they traveled across the U.S., landing in places like L.A. or New York City, wherever. A lot of those traditions are all kind of coming from the South.

When you hear episode three with Tanya [Smith-Johnson, executive director of Birth Future Foundation] and with Jenice [Fountain, executive director of Yellowhammer Fund], that’s really a fusion of the past couple of seasons for us really doing more of our own homework and really understanding and honoring the legacy of Southern knowledge, Southern organizing, Southern leadership and a lot of that at the hands of Black women and Black queer folks who have been long organizing and not even just for abortion justice and access.

MAI: In that episode, Jenice and Tanya say two things that really stick out. Tanya says that Mississippi, where she’s based, is what the rest of the country is trying to become. So when you think of these restrictive abortion regulations and policies and bans, they’re looking at Mississippi as the model and the whole country should be looking at what are folks doing in Mississippi to fight this, if you’re worried about the direction that your state is going in.

There are people who have been doing this work for decades and they know how to navigate it, they know what we’re up against, and they have all this knowledge. And then Denise says, if you can organize in the South, you can organize anywhere. If you can move money and resources and get people to where they need to be there, that’s something that can be extrapolated across the country.

Reckon: In your eyes, what does a Trump presidency mean for Black women and Black people who can become pregnant over the next four years?

MAI: The first thing that comes to mind is how are we caring for each other? What do our care networks look like in the face of Trump, or Project 2025 or whatever ever may happen. Babies will need to be born. Pregnancies will need to end, and that’s just a fact of life. So what are we doing to make sure that happens? How are we plugged in?

For me, it feels like it can’t be something where it’s like everyone’s hands are up anymore. It feels like we need to just be involved, have a pulse of what’s happening, know where the resources are and contribute to aiding in those resources, because these are topics that literally can touch anyone and everyone.

GH: I think we all know the truth is that we’re going to see and experience more chaos. We’re going to see an influx of attacks, whether that’s physical, whether that’s verbal, or even what Congresswoman Cori Bush said in our final episode, policy violence.

But I think to Martina’s point, what we hope to make clear through this season is what we’re witnessing around us is people are thinking more collaboratively. People are thinking more about what care can actually look like, because we’re missing a whole lot of services. We’re talking about a country that doesn’t have family leave, medical leave, and we don’t have childcare. Folks are struggling to pay for diapers and just basic necessities. We’re seeing the ongoing crumbling of social safety nets.

Reckon: Manifesting a season four for NATAL, what would you like to accomplish in your next season?

GH: I think like so many organizations, everyone’s struggling for funding right now and how to find value-aligned partners who can support the production of these stories so that we can do it at a high level and we can make sure that our team is cared for in the process. So I think trying to figure out more sustainable pathways to making sure that we continue to document these stories is something important to us.

MAI: We’ve been thinking about what storytelling can look like in different kinds of spaces and different kinds of formats and bringing people together in person. This year, we had our first partnership with the LACMA Museum in L.A. and we did a series of doll-making workshops with a renowned doll maker, Dr. Cynthia Davis, and thinking about doll-making as a vessel for storytelling, as a vessel for ritual healing.

We’re starting to think about how we can take NATAL into different kinds of formats, into different kinds of spaces, engage folks in different kinds of ways, but always around storytelling, care, and traditions.