Kayla Montgomery: 00:00
And he’s like, “Do you know about the Executive Council?” I was like, “Do I ever?” So I sent him our podcast, and he hasn’t listened yet, but he’s very excited. He’s like, “This is crazy. Why doesn’t Planned Parenthood get more money?”

Liz Canada: 00:12
Oh my God.

Kayla Montgomery: 00:13
Let’s go.

Liz Canada: 00:14
We can all agree. That’s going to be the perfect opening for this episode, actually.

You’re listening to New Hampshire Has Issues, and I am your host from the future, Liz Canada.

My first-ever episode was with my boss, Kayla Montgomery, who is back today. And on that first episode, we talked about whether or not New Hampshire has the right to abortion.

Spoiler alert: no, we do not.

But if you haven’t listened to that episode, there’s more to it than that. And today, we circle back. Because back then, we talked about how Governor Ayotte had promised to veto any new abortion restrictions. If anything got to her desk, she was going to veto it.

Well, a bill is headed to her desk right now: House Bill 232. It’s an anti-abortion bill. And as I say these words, it could be landing on her desk. If you want to do something about this, you can call her. You can urge her to veto it, or you can use the link in the show notes to send her an email to urge her to veto it and keep her promise.

So this episode is about House Bill 232, but it’s also about reproductive health care and how to support it overall — and how to support health care in our state overall.

Because here’s the thing: what Granite Staters want is to be able to access and afford health care. Granite Staters do not want to go bankrupt because they need to go see a doctor. They do not want the health centers in their communities to close. And they do not want to have to drive an hour to be able to see a provider.

And on top of all of that, they also don’t want abortion restrictions, by the way.

So this episode gives a few ideas of how state leaders can act to support health care overall in our state — more than just stopping the bad bills in the State House, more than stopping these abortion bans that legislators keep introducing every single year. We need more action than that.

If you’d like to support this podcast, please visit patreon.com/nhhasissues. The link is in the episode notes as well.

And if you are curious how your state representatives and your state senator voted on reproductive health care, Planned Parenthood New Hampshire Action Fund legislative scorecards are now available and in the show notes as well.

All right. Thank you for listening.

Welcome to New Hampshire Has Issues, the podcast that dares to ask: Can Kayla Montgomery come on this podcast too much?

The answer is no.

The limit does not exist. The limit does not exist.

We are so delighted. So, Kayla, welcome back.

Kayla Montgomery: 03:34
Thank you, Liz. It’s great to be here. It’s delightful. 

Liz Canada: 03:38
Third time is the charm.

As a reminder to listeners, Kayla Montgomery is the Vice President of Public Affairs at Planned Parenthood — there are so many P sounds in this — Vice President of Public Affairs at Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, Planned Parenthood New Hampshire Action Fund, and my boss in my day job.

Kayla Montgomery: 03:56
And I’m super happy to be here.

Liz Canada: 03:58
And so happy to be here. Thank goodness you’re so happy to be here. Thank you so much for being here.

It is June, end of June 2026. You were the first guest on New Hampshire Has Issues.

Kayla Montgomery: 04:09
An honor. By the way, do I get a tag? Did I get a tagline?

Liz Canada: 04:14
Oh, do you want a tagline?

Kayla Montgomery: 04:16
Yeah, I do.

Liz Canada: 04:17
Okay, go for it, please.

Kayla Montgomery: 04:18
Okay. Welcome to New Hampshire Has Issues, the podcast that dares to ask: if we just don’t think about it enough, will the problem go away? That’s not a very good one.

Liz Canada: 04:33
I like the buildup to it, though. I was really excited about where that could have gone.

Kayla Montgomery: 04:38
Okay. If I think of something, I’ll come back to it.

Liz Canada: 04:39
We’ll come back to it. We’ll circle back.

So it’s June 2026. You were the first guest on the podcast way back when, I think end of April 2025.

Kayla Montgomery: 04:50
We were so young then.

Liz Canada: 04:52
We were so young. So session is over. The legislative session is over for this biennium. So folks were elected in November 2024. They took office in January 2025. They have now governed for two years.

In our first episode, we talked about how Governor Kelly Ayotte had made a campaign promise to veto any new abortion restrictions, anything that is anti-abortion. She made that promise very publicly.

Kayla Montgomery: 05:20
Very publicly.

Liz Canada: 05:21
Both in her campaign and in many ads, and also in her inauguration speech. So my question for you, Kayla, now that we are at the end of session: what happened?

Kayla Montgomery: 05:32
Great question, Liz. First of all, it’s like you do this often.

Well, it was a long session. It’s a long biennium. We did a lot of things, you and I. We did a lot over at the State House. My favorite parts of being over there are the laughs.

Liz Canada: 05:53
The laughs. There are a lot of laughs. A lot of comedy. We laugh a lot over there.

Kayla Montgomery: 05:59
You wore a pink sweater almost every time you were there.

Liz Canada: 06:02
Or a pink tie.

Kayla Montgomery: 06:03
Or a pink tie. It’s a pink sweater this time, though.

Liz Canada: 06:06
I like to walk in the room and have people be like, “Who’s that? What organization does that person represent?”

Kayla Montgomery: 06:12
No, it’s pink.

Liz Canada: 06:13
Oh, it’s pink. Could be anything.

Kayla Montgomery: 06:16
We did a lot of good work with coalition partners. It’s always nice to be in a room and know that you’re not alone. It’s nice to be in there and have patients and storytellers and friends and advocates and clinicians and everyone who is fighting for the same thing.

I think that certainly buoys us in the work that we do, but also it helps lawmakers see just how wide the support for reproductive rights is. It’s not just one group in there saying all the things. This is really affecting real people, and this is an issue that people care about regardless of their age or their income status or their party. This impacts people’s lives.

And it’s not just abortion. It’s access to the full range of reproductive health. So even though times are tough, and we had a lot of fights this year, it’s good to be in good company.

And I will say that we had a lot of wins. We really did an excellent job winning.

Liz Canada: 07:20
Oh my God, we did. It’s true. All right, say more about our wins, Kayla, please.

Kayla Montgomery: 07:26
Well, we started with 10 bills this year.

Liz Canada: 07:29
Yikes.

Kayla Montgomery: 07:30
Two of them were held over from last year. And they were two bad bills. To be clear, yes, there were a thousand bills, but ten that we were really focused on. They were a range of things. They went from a straight-out abortion ban to bans on the way certain providers get funding, or misinformation around medication abortion.

Liz Canada: 07:55
A lot of misinformation.

Kayla Montgomery: 07:57
A lot of misinformation bills. So there was a wide range of things that we were working on, and we really just did a lot of homework to get ready for those. So a lot of prep work for you and I.

Liz Canada: 08:08
A lot of prep work. Love homework.

Kayla Montgomery: 08:11
We love homework. We love when other people do homework. We love when we help people do homework. Big nerds over here.

Liz Canada: 08:17
Yeah. It’s kind of like having a podcast about all the issues of New Hampshire.

Kayla Montgomery: 08:22
Yeah, a lot of work.

Here we are at the end of session. Here we are, almost July. And nine out of 10 of those bills have been defeated, which is huge. I mean, it’s a great record. And when you include the bills from 2025, it’s 16 bills. So we’ve defeated a number of anti-abortion bills or anti-sexual and reproductive health bills.

There’s one bill remaining, which has had a long journey. It’s had a long legislative journey. Lots of little stops that it made along its merry way. And when that happens, when it’s a long journey, it’s not as straightforward. Sometimes a bill will start one way and you’ll testify on it one way, and then it gets amended, and all kinds of things happen, and it becomes an entirely different bill, which happens all the time.

This bill that we still have left to defeat, House Bill 232, is an anti-abortion bill. And it’s almost on Kelly Ayotte’s desk. If it’s not there right now, I mean, it could be there right now.

Liz Canada: 09:22
At the time of recording, we’re recording this on Thursday, June 25, 2026. My understanding is it’s not quite on her desk, but it could be literally by the end of the day, tomorrow, Monday, any of these days.

Kayla Montgomery: 09:36
There we go. So we need Governor Ayotte to uphold her campaign promise — and not just campaign promise, but her promise — to veto any anti-abortion legislation and veto it. She has to veto it.

Liz Canada: 09:52
Right. That’s what she has to do.

Kayla Montgomery: 09:55
Yeah, I would think so, based on all the things that she said publicly around bills like this. So I would assume, but you know what happens when you assume.

What we really need is for people to reach out to her office and tell her what they think about that, and that they also want her to veto it. Because the reality is, we know — we absolutely know — that Granite Staters are not interested in abortion restrictions. They’re not interested in health care restrictions at all. They’re interested in more accessibility, making sure that health centers stay open, making sure that people have the full range of health care available to them.

Liz Canada: 10:29
And they want to be able to go and get health care, period. Whatever that health care is, they want to be able to get it and be able to afford it.

Kayla Montgomery: 10:38
Being able to afford your health care is a really big deal. And voters want their lawmakers to be spending time working on that, and not on these bills that just restrict access.

So we will see, but we certainly need people to reach out and tell the governor how they feel about it.

Liz Canada: 10:56
Why would she not veto it, though? Make it make sense to me. Because it seems pretty straightforward.

Let me just say, we kept a lot of bills off of her desk, did we not? How many did you say? Sixteen bills?

Kayla Montgomery: 11:10
Yep.

Liz Canada: 11:11
So she has this one. Also, kudos to everyone. Kudos to everybody in the coalition and the legislature that stopped these bills. It would make no sense to me if she didn’t veto it.

Kayla Montgomery: 11:23
Yeah, I agree. I agree. But she’s not talking to me about it.

Liz Canada: 11:29
Stranger things have happened, I suppose. So I guess we’ll see. We’ll see what she does. It would just make absolutely no sense for her not to veto it.

Okay, so I guess what we’re saying here is everything’s fine, then, Kayla. If we defeated all of these bills, which we did, there’s one bill remaining, and we expect that she would want to keep her promise to Granite Staters and veto it. So is everything fine and dandy when it comes to reproductive rights and health care in New Hampshire?

Kayla Montgomery: 12:00
Oh, I wish. I wish that we could just say, “Hey, we’ve defeated these bills, and so it’s all good.” I think that’s one really important piece of the puzzle. Making sure you’re stopping restrictions is really important in order for providers to be able to focus on doing their jobs and patients to be able to get the care that they need. That is really important.

But there’s so much more than just policy that the legislative branch is looking at. We have faced such an onslaught of attacks. And by “we,” I just mean health care in general — but especially providers of sexual and reproductive health have faced an onslaught of attacks throughout the years through the New Hampshire Executive Council, through the Trump administration.

Liz Canada: 12:51
What’s the Executive Council? Just kidding. That was your second episode on this podcast.

Kayla Montgomery: 12:57
There’s so much more that doesn’t really get talked about in the same way that a piece of policy does. Because the reality is, delivering health care in any state is difficult. And there are lots of pieces to it.

For providers who have been around for a long time, the goal is to continue to provide care to Granite Staters, regardless of their income. For decades, providers like Planned Parenthood and Lovering Health Center and Equality Health Center have been providing care.

And we’re talking about the full range of care. So everything from miscarriage management to STI testing and treatment, to cancer screenings, to vaccinations, to well-person exams, and taking care of people regardless of how much money they have.

If they come in and they say, “I can pay absolutely zero dollars today,” these providers are still taking care of them.

Liz Canada: 13:51
And that is keeping communities healthy. And that does not happen everywhere. That does not happen in every doctor’s office or health center. People often cannot get care because they cannot afford it.

Kayla Montgomery: 14:04
And if they can’t get the care, they just go without. They push it out. And every time you push out your health care, it gets more and more expensive. Then people wind up in the emergency rooms, and people are just less healthy in general.

So we’ve continued to provide this care for folks, but it’s getting harder and harder when you don’t have any support or any buy-in from the state. And that’s really what’s going on here. It’s a lack of a stake in the ground from the state of New Hampshire. It’s not even just the money. It’s the fact that it definitely seems like there’s no support for the work that sexual and reproductive health care providers are doing for Granite Staters right now.

Liz Canada: 14:48
It’s not enough to not have bad bills pass. It’s not enough to stop the bad bills because there are so many other variables at play for health centers to stay open, for providers to be able to provide the care, for patients to be able to access it and afford it.

Kayla Montgomery: 15:06
Yes, stopping bad bills is one thing, but it is not going to solve the problem. And when you look around at what other states are doing in a post-Roe world — now it’s been four years without Roe — we know that health care, delivery of health care, has changed dramatically from the fall of Roe, but also from COVID and all kinds of different things that have changed how we deliver health care in this country.

We’re seeing states really stepping up and supporting these providers and making sure that they can do their job, and protecting patients, and protecting providers, and finding creative funding solutions to make sure that health centers don’t close, raising Medicaid reimbursement rates and supporting in the meantime.

Because right now, Planned Parenthood affiliates across the country can’t be in the Medicaid program because of the HR1 “Big Beautiful Bill.”

Liz Canada: 15:59
Derogatory.

Kayla Montgomery: 16:00
Derogatory.

So we’re seeing states really step up and get creative and prioritize health care delivery.

Liz Canada: 16:08
And has New Hampshire done that?

Kayla Montgomery: 16:10
New Hampshire hasn’t done that. New Hampshire hasn’t done any of that.

Liz Canada: 16:13
Okay. All right.

Kayla Montgomery: 16:15
And it’s not — of course, sexual and reproductive health care providers are one piece to this puzzle, but it is a really important piece. It’s really important for public health.

And I fear that the longer we go, and the longer we pretend like nothing’s changed, the harder it’s going to be for these providers to stay open and to be able to take care of our most vulnerable Granite Staters. Because that’s what a lot of these providers are doing. That’s what federally qualified health centers are doing. They’re seeing patients who don’t have anywhere else to go, don’t have anywhere else to turn.

And we’re seeing already — we’re starting to see health centers close, especially in the North Country. And we need to step up and do something. And we’re not seeing that.

Liz Canada: 16:58
So what is your vision for the future here? We’re going into the summer. This legislative biennium — which is the least sexy two words to put together ever — but we’re at the end of this legislative cycle. There are no more bills before the next election.

So what’s the future look like for reproductive health care in New Hampshire? What are you hopeful for, even?

Kayla Montgomery: 17:23
It’s a great question. I think that state leaders need to prioritize health care. There are so many things that need to be prioritized right now. We know that. But if you’re not safe and healthy, you can’t really focus on anything else.

And it is the role of government to make sure that people are safe and healthy through various ways. Everybody has a different idea of what that means. So what investments can we make now? What do we want to prioritize? What should our budgets look like? Can we raise Medicaid reimbursement rates, which will help providers be able to see more patients? Or do we want to continue down the path of less of everything?

And we have these incredible providers, like Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, who really know what they’re doing.

Liz Canada: 18:06
They do.

Kayla Montgomery: 18:07
They really know what they’re doing, and have been around for a really long time, and have these great networks of folks that they can work with. We have providers who have been in their town providing care for their community for 25, 30 years. They see patients, and then they see their daughters, and then sometimes they even see their granddaughters.

People who have been around for a long time — they have the network. They know who to call. They can call this hospital or this public health department in order to get something. If they don’t have it, they know what to do. They know how to take care of people. People know them. They’re a fabric of our community.

And we need to be able to keep that local health care. When a health center closes in a community, it leaves a big hole. It leaves a big gap. And people just don’t really know where to get their health care all of a sudden.

You can say, “Oh, well, there’s a clinic available 45 minutes from here,” but 45 minutes is a long way, especially if you can’t drive to get there.

Liz Canada: 19:04
There’s some work to be done. Bottom line I’m hearing here: one anti-abortion bill heading to Governor Ayotte’s desk. She promised to veto anti-abortion bills, so this should be very easy for her.

And also, there is work to be done to support and strengthen the public health network in New Hampshire overall. It’s not enough to just stop bad bills.

Kayla Montgomery: 19:30
I’m really proud of the work that the coalition around reproductive rights in the state has accomplished this biennium. We’ve done a really good job of defeating bills, but also educating voters on what’s going on and reminding people that we don’t really want to be spending all of our time defeating these bad bills. We really want to be advancing laws and advancing health care and keeping people healthy.

I think we’ve done a good job of that, and I think we really need our state leaders to think that same way, too. It’s not just enough to defeat bills. In fact, they could actually stop putting those bills in, and that would save a lot of time.

Liz Canada: 20:12
That would save a ton of time.

Kayla Montgomery: 20:14
I’d be out of a job.

Liz Canada: 20:16
Yeah, great.

Anything that you wish that you had said that you have not?

Kayla Montgomery: 20:21
I don’t know. I feel like it’s a mini episode, so I don’t need to say much.

Liz Canada: 20:25
I feel like we’ve covered the things that we needed to cover. We talked about 232. I like that we didn’t really talk about what it was. We didn’t need to. It’s an anti-abortion bill. Bottom line. What else is there to say?

You either make a campaign promise and a promise to the Granite State that you’re going to veto an anti-abortion bill, and then you do it — or you don’t. It’s an anti-abortion bill. What else needs to be said?

Nothing.

I am once again encouraging Governor Ayotte to come on the podcast. We would love to talk to her. You can either have Kayla here on the podcast with us or just you and me. Governor, I’m here. I’m available. That’s what I’m saying. Not taking any vacations.

Kayla Montgomery: 21:12
New Hampshire Has Issues, the podcast that dares to ask: when’s Kelly Ayotte coming on the pod?

Liz Canada: 21:18
That’s the tagline. There it is.

What are you going to come on the podcast for next? I like this twice-a-year Liz and Kayla catch-up.

I want you to watch Widow's Bay.

Kayla Montgomery: 21:30
I know.

Liz Canada: 21:31
What was the other thing that I wanted you to watch?

Kayla Montgomery: 21:34
Hacks.

Liz Canada: 21:35
Oh my God, Hacks!

Kayla Montgomery: 21:37
I just don’t have a lot of time these days.

Liz Canada: 21:39
Okay, well, what if instead of working — you know, if they would stop filing bad bills, we could watch more TV.

Kayla needs to watch Hacks. She needs to watch Widow's Bay.

Kayla Montgomery: 21:50
Just let me watch Hacks.