When Fear Blocks Access to Care: with U.S. Sen. Tina Smith on My Body. My Pod. Episode 11

🔍 A Closer Look

In Minnesota, that reality has come into sharp focus. Recent federal operations and fatal, public shootings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti have sparked grief, outrage, and nationwide protests—turning the state into a flashpoint in the broader struggle over immigration, civil rights, and government overreach.

That climate of fear shapes daily life—where people go, who they trust, and whether they seek medical care at all. Health care providers have said that people are increasingly skipping their prenatal visits, citing concerns about ICE raids.

But Minnesota isn’t just where these harms are visible. It’s also where communities are organizing, demanding accountability, and creating a playbook for how we can resist policies that threaten safety, dignity, and access to care.

In this episode, we cover:

🚨 What’s happening in Minnesota—and why many see it as a testing ground for a broader authoritarian playbook.

🏥 What providers are seeing as patients skip prenatal visits, avoid clinics, and disappear from care systems because they’re afraid to be detained or targeted.

📹 The weaponization of power—including intimidation of observers, journalists, and communities, and the distortion of laws meant to protect people.

🏛️ The fight over the ACA Tax Credits and Medicaid—and the extremist push to hold people’s health care hostage in order to push new abortion restrictions.

🗳️ Why organizing still works—and how winning elections is the clearest path to protecting and restoring reproductive freedom nationwide.

❄️ How Minnesota is showing the country what resistance can look like—from mutual aid networks to grassroots organizing that turns fear into action.

🛬 Big Picture: Overlapping Barriers to Care

Abortion bans don’t exist in isolation. They intersect with immigration enforcement, racialized surveillance, financial and systemic barriers to health care, and everyday fear—reaching into clinics, exam rooms, and the most personal decisions people make about their bodies and their futures.

For communities of color, immigrants, and undocumented people, abortion bans collide with surveillance, and the threats of being violently targeted. The result isn’t just denied or delayed care—it’s compounded harm, trauma, and preventable health risks.

Overlapping systems are creating barriers to reproductive care:

• Climate of fear from ICE raids: Fear of criminalization for seeking abortion care or pregnancy outcomes, combined with fear of being deported or unfairly targeted makes it so clinics and exam rooms become places of anxiety instead of safety.
• State abortion bans: 1.9 million undocumented immigrant women live in states with abortion restrictions, leading to 1 in 5 patients now traveling out of state to access abortion care, some up to 700 miles away.
• The Republican-made health care crisis: Trump and Republicans have created a health care crisis, stripping health care from 15 million people, with 22 million people facing sky-rocketed costs.

Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, low-income, LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, young people, rural communities, and people with disabilities are disproportionately harmed by these overlapping barriers to care.

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MY BODY. MY POD. WITH MINI TIMMARAJU.