Dr. Bhavik Kumar: To me it’s all connected. It’s subtle but it’s overt at the same time. And those things in high school which at the time felt trivial and silly, and when you’re in high school, that’s all you know, you don’t know how things really work outside of there. But the other things in that high school, this was early 2000s, the other race dynamics were in the parking lot. The white people all parked on one side, the folks of color parked on another side. Same thing in the cafeteria, it was just a split down the middle. The way folks moved was very different and obvious. Who their parents were, which kids had superintendent parents, which kids had parents and family that were in power, what policies they implemented. Little things like dress code– what the white girls got to do, how short their skirts were when they were cheerleaders, who the cheerleaders were. All those silly high school sort of things tell you how the world operates and who gets away with what. It just felt very clear to me, even though it wasn’t connected to abortion, that as I moved through college and then med school, that those things were true through and through. And again, I wasn’t as rooted in the politics in Texas. But once I was going through Med Students for Choice and learning more about how things were in the South compared to the [East and West] coast when it came to abortion, I was like “Oh, this all makes sense. This is the same sort of folks that are doing the same things.” Even though it was at the high school level, and it was assistant principals and superintendents, it’s the same type of stuff that’s happening in our legislature. It was intuitive to know that it’s the same people that I see close proximally in these sort of spaces, that you’re seeing in politics and in other positions of power. It’s whiteness. To name it. It wasn’t foreign. I also want to name what was important is, I understood how corrupt they could be. And I saw that play out in trivial ways in high school, where it was cheating on a test. Somebody gets– the person who got caught cheating on the chemistry test– she was able to still take the test, and the max score she could get was a 70. She got a 50 or something. But ultimately, she wasn’t expelled. She wasn’t taken out of that class. And I thought, “What if that was me? What if that was somebody who didn’t have their mom as the assistant principal of the school?” And when I think about abortion now– who gets criminalized, who is afraid in different ways, who has access, who doesn’t– and it’s all the same things. Whether its high school or it’s this bigger scale. You see if from the get-go. This is how you grow up. The other thing I’m thinking about was that initial Med Students for Choice conference. That’s the same theme again. It’s like, “Oh, this is the same politics playing out. It’s about race.” Race was there from the get-go. Even though I didn’t understand race in the context of abortion until much later on. It was easy to understand when you recognize what’s going on. You start seeing the statistics of who’s accessing, who’s not able to access, where care is available, where it’s not available.