Meet Anoushka Chander

Anoushka Chander is a senior at Harvard College from Washington, D.C. studying Social Studies and African American Studies with a focus on women’s rights, racial justice, and the law. She works as an Assistant Producer and intern at Ms. Studios at Ms. Magazine, where she hosts The Z Factor: Gen Z’s Voice and Vote and helped produce Torn Apart: Abolishing Family Policing and Reimagining Child Welfare and United Bodies. At Harvard, she runs the Future Leaders in Public Service Conference for public service-minded high school students and is the lead singer in the all-senior pop/funk band Charles Revival. Her work has been featured in Vice News, the Harvard Gazette, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Ms. Magazine. She is excited to champion youth voices in every space.

Background Reading

• The Woman Who Fought the Texas Abortion Ban – The New York Times
• ‘We just have to keep fighting’: a shocking new film on the danger of US abortion laws | Documentary films | The Guardian 
• Olivia Julianna Is Optimistic About Texas, Rewire News Group

Transcript

00:00:21 Anoushka Chander: 

Generation Z. We’re the most diverse generation in American history. We’re the screenagers, the digital natives, the zoomers. We are the youth activist generation and the climate change generation but who is Gen Z really? Welcome to episode three of the Z factor, Gen Z’s voice and vote. I’m your host, Anoushka Chander. On this podcast, we amplify the voices of young people in America from students in Florida fighting book bans to young law makers in Tennessee working to end gun violence, to young people just trying to make it by each day.

Are you Gen Z? Gen Z was born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s. So, we are between the ages of 12 and 27. Our formative years were marked by a global pandemic, rapid climate change, rampant gun violence, democratic backsliding and movements for women’s rights and racial justice. 

When young women show up to vote on November fifth, poling shows that reproductive freedom will be top of mind. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade, abortion bans across the country have left over 20 million women of reproductive age without access to this fundamental healthcare. Today I’m joined by Olivia Juliana, a reproductive rights activist from Texas. Thank you so much for being here Olivia.

00:01:43 Olivia Julianna:
Thank you for having me.

00:01:47 Anoushka Chander:

So, you’ve been traveling the country talking to young voters, particularly young women voters. What are they saying? What are young women across the country worried about?

00:01:55 Olivia Julianna:
They’re mad, and they are scared, and they’re motivated. You know, they are very obviously concerned about abortion access. They’re very obviously concerned reproductive freedom but as I’ve done this kind of conversational work with young people the further and further we get from the Roe decision, that was very top of mind and I still think it is the number one issue for the most part for young women, but I think right behind that is affordability and the cost of living and the cost of being an adult

And I think that a lot of young women sometimes can feel very dejected from politics because they feel like the only time people are talking to them is when they’re talking to them about abortion and they’re not talking to them about the other long term policy issues that have to do with their lives that they’re coming into. So, I have to say that those two things really just consistently have stood out amongst relatively everything else.

Another really big one is healthcare. You know, a lot of young women are really concerned about losing access to healthcare. If the Affordable Care Act isn’t returned or about getting onto their own healthcare once they turn 26. And so, I think that we, you know, in politics specifically we’ve got to do a lot better job at campaigning and speaking to young women for the fullness of who they are as a person and not just the fact that they are a young woman because I think the way that we’re campaigning to is very different than the way that men are campaigned to, and I think that we need to be more cognizant of that going forward.

00:03:47 Anoushka Chander:
Totally. So, I’m curious what does it look like when you reach out to young women? Where are you talking to them? Is it on social media? Is it in person? Is it in schools? Is it, you know, just on campaign stops? Where are the places that you’re having these conversations with young women?

00:04:03 Olivia Julianna:
Yeah. So, for me it’s a mix of all three. It’s mostly dominated by social media conversations I’m having. You know, I get a lot of comments, a lot of direct messages. I get tagged in a lot of posts and I’m constantly tracking all of that stuff because you know you never know what kind of questions someone might be asking you. I’ve gone to colleges all over the country to talk to young people. I’ve gone to a lot of colleges here in Texas in the last few months as we come up on this election. I’ve been to two universities in particular, University of Houston and Baylor, and these are two completely different schools. 

Anyone from Texas knows, you know, Baylor is a private religious school and historically has not been the most accepting and open of differing personalities and differing ideas. The fact that I was even allowed to go to Baylor to speak to students was a huge deal. University of Houston, I’ve gone and down round tables with students to talk about the Texas senate race and really shocks people when I bring up these conversations to them and you know they ask me what is the main thing that you’re hearing from these students and most of them outside of the obvious social issues that young people tend to be much more progressive on they’re talking about how difficult it is for them to commute to school and how expensive the cost of their education is, and that’s consistent whether it’s in person conversations or whether it’s on social media.

Young people really are just eager to figure out how to solve these problems that they’re facing and they really are oftentimes I find thankful that there’s somebody who can actually voice these concerns to politicians because sometimes they feel it can be very inaccessible and difficult to do that.

00:06:07 Anoushka Chander:
Absolutely, and I think that accessing so many people’s different opinions on social media and you know people are coming to you because you have a platform on which you’re sharing how young people are feeling. And so, that’s so important. So, I want to ask you a little bit more about your social media advocacy work. You know, you’ve gone viral for calling out anti choice politicians. You’ve used social media to turn Republican attacks against you personally into strengths and wins for reproductive rights. So, I’d love to hear about those experiences. What has it meant to you to be someone with a social media platform using your voice for good?

00:06:47 Olivia Julianna:
Yeah. You know, this all happened by accident. I never thought that it would turn into what it has. You know, I started posting on TikTok in June July of 2020 talking about an election that I wasn’t even old enough to vote in. I turned 18 a week after the 2020 presidential election but I understood the moment that we were in and I really wanted other young people to understand it too. And so, you know, I started doing that and I just consistently kept at it for a few years, and I never would have imagined that it would have blown up to what it was where, you know, I’m able to do those things. I’m taking on Matt Gates or we’re fundraising for abortion funds. 

Raising two million dollars. You know, there are a lot of people who were able to get healthcare and able to get out of bad circumstances because of that money that everyone raised but also just being a kid from where I grew up.  I grew up in a very small town, Needville, Texas. My graduating class was like maybe two hundred and something people, and I just lived in this little farmhouse, and I didn’t think that it was possible for me to get out of this kind of life that we predetermined for me. I was going to go to school. 

I was going to become a teacher. I was going to move back to my hometown and I was going to be an English teacher at my high school, and you know I would have been happy doing that but now, you know, my dreams always politics. It was always engaged in politics. So, now I get to do all these things, you know. I spoke at the DNC. I’ve done collabs with vice president who I think is about to be the president of the United States, Kamala Harris. And so, social media has just really completely changed the trajectory of my life and it’s really hard, and I don’t think a lot of people realize this but there’s a lot of political creators out there.

There’s a lot of young political creators out there with decently large platforms but most of them are men. You know, I look around in a lot of these spaces I’m in and oftentimes cross platform I’m’ the only young woman who has the following that I have, and I don’t think that that’s a coincidence because to be transparent it has not been easy. It is incredibly difficult and I feel special and privileged that I get to represent young women. I get to represent young Latino women, queer women, Texans, but it has been vicious the reactions that I get on a daily basis, especially after the DNC are just atrocious and I really wish that we could create a better ecosystem and a more supportive ecosystem for young women in politics, so that they know that this kind of stuff isn’t okay but also that we’re calling it out when we see it.

And so, I think that’s why it’s been so important to me to not give into a lot of these attacks is because I don’t want other young women to think that they should give into them either.

00:10:05 Anoushka Chander:
I think that’s such a powerful point Olivia because as we know there’s so many factors that go against women’s decision making. In order for them to make a decision to go into politics they have to make a conscious choice to open themselves up to personal attacks and it seems like you’re experience with social media has been very similar. And so, it’s incredibly inspiring to see you as you said not giving in and continuing to raise your voice and talk about the things that are important for young women. 

And I’m curious, you know, you’ve talked a bit about how your role as a content creator but what about for those of us who are content consumers? What role do you think that social media plays in raising awareness among young voters and can we find accurate information about politics, about you know our healthcare, about voting online because there’s so much misinformation now. So, how do we kind of parse through what’s real and what isn’t?

00:11:04 Olivia Julianna:
So, I actually talked about this quite extensively and I’ve said that I think that when it comes to looking at news sources or analyzing information that young people actually do a really good job at filtering out what is true and what isn’t true if they’re looking at news source. The most disinformation or misinformation for young people I think is consumed when they’re listening to things from a second party account. It’s when you have someone who is talking directly to the camera saying this thing happened without any substance behind it that that’s where the misinformation disinformation starts to spiral, and I think that is especially a problem specifically for young men who are consuming content from streamers and people who are making video game content, sports, content, people like Adin Ross, like Sneako. 

They are actively putting out far right propaganda and I think a lot of men who consume it, we’ve seen this gender gap kind of widen in the ideologies of young men and young women. I think this is the reason why and it’s because it’s not getting called out when it should and it’s not getting censored when it should and that’s the responsibility of the social media companies. That being said, you know, social media can be extremely effective in disseminating ideas and there is a hundred percent accurate information out there. It’s just people need to understand that just because someone is saying something to you does not mean it’s true and if something sounds wrong it probably is wrong and you need to probably look into it more but I think that, you know, people need to kind of see it more as collective organizing and knocking…it’s kind of like a digital version of knocking on doors, you know, especially when you have like Instagram which has deprioritized political content. 

Well, the way you have to structure content now is different. You know, it used to be okay if it’s styled in this way then Instagram would probably push it out to the explore feed. Instagram is not doing that with political content anymore but if you make content that is sharable enough people organically share that content and kind of organize in a digital way that people might not have been doing before. And so , the landscape has become more difficult to navigate as you have kind of right wing people start to play larger and larger roles, especially like Elon Musk and you know the Peter Thiels of the world but I think that young people have become incredibly well versed in adapting to these kinds of changes and navigating the landscape that these changes are happening in and I think that as time goes on I don’t think it’s going to be younger people that are the problem falling for the disinformation. I think it’s going to be older people that are having the problem with these new mediums that they’re not used to.

00:14:03 Anoushka Chander:
Absolutely. So, Olivia I want to turn now to your reproductive rights work in Texas. A recent study found that infant deaths in Texas increased after the state passed its Draconian abortion ban. So, what is the state of reproductive freedom in Texas and what are you doing to help women get the healthcare that they need?

00:14:26 Olivia Julianna:
There isn’t reproductive freedom in Texas. Like that is just the harsh reality is that people have a severe lack in understanding of how severe Texas’s laws actually are. Not only do we have one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, there is no exceptions for fatal fetal abnormalities. There is no exceptions for rape, and doctors who violate our state’s abortion ban could face up to life in prison. Not only do we have that law, but we also have a civil bounty abortion ban law, which means that any private citizen can sue any other private citizen who aids in abortion access, and the result of that is it is practically impossible to get abortion care in the state of Texas, and the two women whose stories I think really highlight the worst and most dangerous parts of what’s going on are Amanda Zurawski and Kate Cox.

Amanda Zurawski was pregnant and her and her husband desperately wanted to have a baby and she had complications. She ended up going into sepsis and she had to wait several days before she could access care and before a doctor felt safe enough to give her the care that she needed. She was so sick that her family was telling her goodbye because they weren’t sure she was going to make it. Eventually, she was able to get an abortion but at that point the damage done to her reproductive organs was so severe that now they’ve told Amanda that they think it will be extremely difficult for her to have children of her own.

The secondary story of Kate Cox, which a lot of people are more familiar with, is Kate Cox is pregnant. She had a fatal fetal abnormality, which means that her pregnancy was not viable. There was not going to be a baby that was born. So, she needed access to an abortion. There was a lawsuit that was filed. A district judge granted her motion for her to access abortion care and our attorney general filed an emergency petition to our state Supreme Court asking that they intervene and stop Kate from accessing abortion care, and then he put out a public statement saying any medical professionals who helped her would be prosecuted and he would make sure they were prosecuted.

So, you know, he followed that up by recently saying that he wants to access women’s medical records to see if they’ve crossed state lines so he can know whether or not they’ve gotten an abortion. You know, at this point this isn’t a policy opinion or a policy difference. This is laws that have gone way too far, that are criminalizing women, criminalizing their bodies. You have Republicans who were in the state house who have said that they believe that women who have abortions are committing murder and that we should pass a law in accordance to that. So, that’s where we’re at in the state of Texas. I’m going into the next legislative session fully expecting that Republicans in the state of Texas are going to try to pass an abortion trafficking law which means if you leave the state and you help someone likely who is a minor access abortion care then you are abortion trafficking. 

We also have traffic ordinances in some places here where these local governments have passed laws saying if you are traveling for abortion care you are not allowed to use the roads and streets in our local ordinances. So, you know, our senate candidate here, democratic senate candidate Colin Allred he says this a lot with is true. He says how do we enforce this? Are we just going to start like pulling women over and asking them what is the reason for your travel? Are we going to have cops start carrying pregnancy tests on them so that they can test women at will, and that’s where we are. 

When I talk about this people think I’m being hyperbolic. I’m not being hyperbolic. You can look like you said at the infant mortality rates at the maternal mortality rates to show this. Women and children are dying because of these laws. This is not prolife. This is anti-women and pro control. And so, it’s really hard to do reproductive healthcare work in the state of Texas right now because it’s been criminalized so inherently. And so, the people that have had to pick up a lot of slack are abortion funds. Abortion funds have had to pick up a lot of the slack in helping people get care, whether it be helping people get funding to travel out of state, if that’s a plane ride, if that’s a car ride, covering the cost of the hotel on top of the procedure itself.

You can’t get the government…if you have Medicaid it won’t pay for it. And so, you know, platforming and uplifting abortion bans for people in Texas is the most effective way for them to get care directly. You know, there is now over the counter birth control that we have here. O pill is over the counter. FDA approved. You can buy that here in places like HEB and CVS and Walgreens I think. The truth of the matter is that the best thing we can do to help people in Texas is by organizing politically to keep people out of office who’ve allowed for this to happen.

I think the Texas state legislature it’s going to take a really long time to get us in the position for us to do that on a state basis. Citizen-led ballot initiatives are not legal here in the state of Texas. And so, we can’t put it on the ballot like a lot of other states can. So, we really are relying on at this point the federal government to be able to pass a bill to codify Roe v. Wade and that’s why, you know, I talk to people who live in some other states like you know Michigan or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania and you know they’re a little hesitant on a lot. Vote for me. Vote for the women in Texas who are going through this so we can try to make a difference because if you think it won’t happen in your state, like these policies that have happened here are the ones that Republican judges and Trump loyalists have been pushing for.

You know, Ken Paxton has been rumored to be Trump’s pick for attorney general and you know I think people really need to consider that when deciding where they want to be at in politics. So, it’s been incredibly difficult but I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to see some serious federal legislation in the next few years to address this problem.

00:21:27 Anoushka Chander:

Wow Olivia, thank you for giving us so much that frankly horrific but accurate summary of what’s happening in the state of Texas and thank you for your hard work to uplift abortion bans and work to elect legislators who are going to protect women’s reproductive freedom, and you know, I’ve been hearing from young women and seeing reporting that we’re making decisions about college, about our voting, about our lives based on the status of reproductive rights in certain states. 

So, you know, some women are deciding I don’t want to go to X college because it’s in a state with an abortion ban. Others are deciding who they’re going to vote for in the ballot initiatives that they’re going to support based on, you know, being in favor of bodily autonomy. So, how do you think abortion bans are impacting young women’s decisions about their own futures?

00:22:17 Olivia Julianna:
Yeah.  I mean I wouldn’t want to move here either. You know, I was born and raised in this state. This is my home. This is why I’m here. If I didn’t have any ties to the state of Texas I wouldn’t stay here. I would not want to raise a family here because of these laws. And so, I completely understand why there are young women out there making these choices and there are young women out there who are making these choices. We have seen a decline in the percentage of out of state young women coming to Texas colleges and this is why. 

We know young women are going to vote because of abortion access a hundred percent. I just really think people need to understand that that is intentional. I firmly believe that the Republican super majority legislature here in the state of Texas is purposefully trying to socio engineer a long-term conservative state because of how much the state of Texas has changed. Every presidential election since 2008 the margin of victory for Republican candidate has halved. In 2018 Beto O Rourke only lost his election to Cruz by two point six percent. 

Colin Allred right now, this senate race that we’re having at this very moment currently it’s tied. It’s statistically tied in the polls. They know that the state of Texas is changing and what I have told people consistently is that I believe by the year 2030 in that election year we will elect a democratic governor and a democratic state slate. I really do believe that, and I think that them passing these laws is them intentionally trying to keep that from happening by keeping more liberal-minded people out of the state.

00:24:16 Anoushka Chander:
Absolutely. That’s super fascinating. So, Olivia, you’ve also spoken openly about your identity as a queer Latina woman. So, how does your identity factor into how you’re using your political voice?

00:24:30 Olivia Julianna:
Yeah. You know, someone said this to me one time and it kind of just stuck with me is I’m not necessarily a Latina activist but I’m an activist who happens to be Latina because most of the things I talk about are not specific to just my community but my community has informed the way I talk about these issues. I think that, you know, I kind of take a step back and I look at national politics a lot of the time and I think the way that Latinos are talked to is just so wrong. I think it’s just so wrong and it’s not genuine I think to the experiences that so many of us have had because you know I’m not second generation.

You know, my grandfather grew up here in the United States. So, my family has been here for few generations. And so, the cultural experience that I have as a Mexican American is very different than some other people who are first or second generation. My experience is much more based in Texas culture than it is in Mexican culture. 

And so, for me a lot of that has been the lessons that my grandparents and my dad taught me that they learned from being immigrants, which is, you know, the values of hard work but especially and specifically the values of community. 

When my dad was a kid and my grandfather was a kid, this farming community that I grew up in, you know, a lot of the white families would not do business with the Mexican families that were in that town. And so, there were very few, you know, white farmers who were willing to work with my grandfather and my great grandparents. And so, the community of Mexican immigrants that were living there together they really had to rely on each other a lot, you know, to build up their homes and to build up their communities. 

Even with church, you know, they weren’t allowed to go to the Catholic church that was there in town, so they went and started their own, which is funny because I didn’t even grow up Catholic. I grew up Baptist, but I think that that sense of community and understanding and checking in on each other and keeping it very close to the vest has been really really instilled in me, and I think that’s why I have such a tight knit circle that I keep close because I know that at the drop of a hat anything can happen and I think we need to have each other’s backs. And so, I think that’s been the biggest way that that’s impacted me and how I approach everything.

00:27:38 Anoushka Chander:
That’s amazing Olivia. So, you know, let’s say when November fifth comes there’s record youth voter turnout and the issues that Gen Z cares about are prioritized. They are on the agenda then what? What is your vision for the future of our generation?

00:27:55 Olivia Julianna:
Oh my gosh. You know, I would love to see, you know, like 65 percent youth voter turnout. I think that would be great. That would be amazing, but I think that the future of our generation that would happen is I think we would finally start to see some legitimate institutional inclusion of young people. what I mean by that is a White House youth policy council. You know, I think we would start to see young people included in congressional hearings and this kind of thing. I think that if young people turn out we really will have a seat at the table in a way that I don’t think that our generation really has had up until this point.  And so, I’m very hopeful that you know we’ll see a lot of young people turnout and if not then back to the drawing board before the midterms. So, we’ll see. 

00:28:52 Anoushka Chander:
Totally. So, final question Olivia. I’m asking this question of all of our guests. I’m asking you guys to tell me what your political walk on stage song would be. So, for example, Kamala Harris’s is Freedom by Beyonce. So, if you were going up giving a speech what’s the song you would walk on stage to?

00:29:12 Olivia Julianna:
Immediately I have one because I think about this in my head all the time and it is Diva by Beyonce. 

00:29:23 Anoushka Chander:
Oh my gosh, love we’ve got the Beyonce going. That’s fantastic.  Well, Olivia thank you so much. this has been a wonderful conversation. I’m sure our listeners have learned so much. I certainly have and I’m just so grateful that you took the time to speak to us today.

00:29:38 Olivia Julianna:
Of course. Thank you for having me.

00:29:48 Anoushka Chander:
Thank you for joining us on the Z Factor, Gen Z’s voice and vote, a podcast by and for Gen Z. I’m your host and producer Anoushka Chander. The Z Factor is a Ms. Magazine and Ms. Studio’s production. Michele Goodwin is our executive producer. Our producers for the Z factor include Alison Whelan, Morgan Carmen, and Roxy Szal. Our in design by Brandy Phipps, sound engineering by Natalie Paredes and music by DimmySad and SKH Sounds. We’ll be back next week with more episodes about what young people across America are thinking, feeling, and experiencing. See you next time.