[Gianna] Twenty-six states are likely to outlaw abortion
if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.
We're wondering where these women are going.
What it will do is do away with safe abortion.
[Gianna] And what about the right to healthcare?
Women's right to healthcare?
Male or female or otherwise,
there is no right to healthcare in the Constitution, no.
[Krishna] You pay your rent, you pay your electricity bill,
with money that you make playing a video game.
Every day, you play for three to four hours?
[Gabby] You're bringing ordinary people
into the fastest-growing digital economy.
[Jeff] 2.8 million people own Axies;
25% of them do not have bank accounts.
Do you really think it's fun for everyone?
dramatic music
[protestors shouting]
[all] Our bodies! Our lives! Our right to decide!
Our bodies! Our lives! Our right to decide!
Our bodies! Our lives!
Our right to decide!
Our bodies...
There are thousands of people protesting across the country
for their right to healthcare and against outlawing abortion.
I mean, the size of these protests represents
that a majority of Americans, around 61%,
say that abortion should be legal in some form.
What many people fear right now
is that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade,
which protected women's right to abortion
for the last 50 years.
In early May, the unprecedented leak
of a draft opinion
signaled the court's intention to overturn all
or part of Roe v. Wade.
The shock felt by millions of American women
underscores what could be a new reality
in this country-- zero federal protections
for this kind of medical care.
That would mean a total of 26 states,
more than half the country,
attempting to outlaw abortion overnight.
Including Louisiana.
dramatic music
[phone rings]
[Kathaleen] Hope Medical, how may I help you?
No, ma'am, unfortunately, we are fully booked.
There may be protesters
out on the sidewalk when you arrive.
If you see them, just ignore them and come into the clinic.
[Kathaleen] Yes, you can come here.
Unfortunately, we're fully booked right now.
It's taking anywhere from one to two weeks
for us to reach out.
[Gianna] Hope Medical Group for Women
is the last place to terminate a pregnancy in Louisiana.
As surrounding states have restricted abortion,
staff here have seen a roughly 70% increase
in the number of women coming in for care.
Okay. You're welcome. Take care.
[Gianna] Kathaleen Pittman has been
running this clinic for 30 years.
Hope Medical, this is Kathaleen.
How may I help you?
Do you ever have to turn women away?
We are. We are turning women away.
We're giving them numbers.
We're referring them to, you know, Colorado.
We're on the phones every day. People crying.
I mean, you know, because they can't get in anywhere.
Do you think, in a few months,
after 42 years of this clinic being open,
you could be closing your doors?
It's a distinct possibility, yes.
I mean, I'm very afraid of that, yes.
[Gianna] One in four American women
will have an abortion in their lifetime.
The women we spoke with asked to remain anonymous.
[patient] I can't physically,
financially take care of another baby.
[Gianna] This single mother of four,
who works more than 70 hours a week as a home nurse,
drove three hours from Texas to get to this clinic.
[patient] I don't know what I'm gonna do
to maintain this baby.
You're at your limits.
[patient] I'm at my limits.
[patient] I'm already a mother, so I know it's really hard.
Financially, I'm not where I want to be,
and I don't think I'd be able to take care of another child,
so I wouldn't want to bring a child into this world
that I couldn't take care of.
To perform abortion violence
on defenseless babies is unthinkable.
Abortion is murder.
We're gonna sign every piece
of pro-life legislation that hits our desk.
[Gianna] Anti-abortion lawmakers
have already introduced 546 bills this year.
Some criminalize abortion.
Others would make contraception illegal.
And one would allow individuals to sue anyone
helping a woman cross state lines to get an abortion.
We're at the Oklahoma State Capitol
to meet with Senator Nathan Dahm.
He's authored some of the strictest abortion legislation
in the country, which will force more women
to carry out their unplanned pregnancies.
What's clear is that these laws
will create an incredible financial burden.
What's unclear is who is gonna pay for this.
Dahm has been pushing to completely outlaw abortion,
including in cases of rape or incest, since 2016.
His most recent law makes it a felony for doctors
to even attempt an abortion.
They could face up to ten years in prison
and a $100,000 fine.
You're attacking this issue
from multiple different angles here.
How do these legislations collectively compare
to other laws in the country?
My Senate bill 612 is from conception,
with the only exception being the life of the mother.
So I believe it is the most pro-life piece of legislation
in the country right now that has been signed into law.
So how much public funding goes to these mothers in need?
I don't have the statistics.
I can get you those specific numbers.
But like I said,
there's not just public money that goes to it.
There's also private resources.
Churches and nonprofits and those entities
should be stepping up, and they should be
the primary ones to do that because they do better
with resources than the government does.
But I mean, I ask that because you're saying
that there's enough-- there's enough money,
there are enough resources for these mothers.
But you don't know how much public money goes to them?
We haven't finalized our budget for this year.
I mean, every year, we do have a budget
that we do allocate money for that.
But knowing that you were gonna, you know,
outlaw abortion this year,
why not get that funding in place last year?
I mean, it's like you're waiting for women to be
in incredibly desperate positions before you help them.
No, we did not know any of these bills
that were going to pass.
Well, I knew I would be working on it,
but in this legislative process,
you never know what bill will ultimately make it
across the finish line.
[Gianna] It's often in the states outlawing abortion
where it's hardest to raise a child.
The Oklahoma legislature allocated $3 million this year
to what Dahm sees as the solution--
pregnancy resource centers, or PRCs,
clinics that offer diapers
and baby clothes along with counseling.
That's enough for each mom who has a baby
after an unintended pregnancy
to receive one month's supply of diapers.
It's not enough.
Without additional support from private funding,
many American moms may not be able
to afford food or housing.
[Courtnie] Good. It's better than cold gel.
[Courtnie] Yeah. Yeah.
Oh, my gosh.
-Aww. -[Juli] You hear it?
Yeah, I do hear it.
[Gianna] Courtnie Barker is 29 weeks pregnant.
She's spent most of her pregnancy at The Cottage,
a PRC and maternity home that dissuades women
from getting abortions by offering resources
like regular meals, housing, job placement,
and parenting classes during pregnancy
and a year postpartum.
-Can't wait to see his face. -He's gonna be so cute.
[Juli] I know. It's gonna be awesome.
Every new mom experiences a lot of stress.
Is there anything that's making you nervous?
I've actually had a couple of emotional breakdowns.
But I'm doing better than I would if I was alone.
We're the second owners of this property,
and we knew when we saw this place
that this was gonna be The Cottage.
[Gianna] The need for the services
Juli Merciez's program provides
will likely increase dramatically.
I know our legislators, and I know their intention
is to be
the most pro-life state in the United States.
What does it mean for you all?
You'll continue doing what you're doing,
but I would imagine there are gonna be more women
that are gonna be saying, "Hey, Juli, we need a bed."
We need to be looking at,
what does it look like a year from now?
What does it look like three years from now,
as we have to say no or turn someone away more frequently?
What do we need to do, in terms of raising the funds,
building the facilities,
being ready for the increase of numbers?
[Courtnie] This is my room.
I, like, made a little place and put stuff everywhere.
Does anyone live with you in here now?
Not right now.
Are these clothes for your little one?
Yeah, this is probably his first home outfit.
I think it would be cute.
[Gianna] In addition to the stress
of her unplanned pregnancy,
Courtnie recently hit rock bottom--
unemployed, homeless, and struggling with addiction.
She's now in recovery.
What was it like when you found out you were pregnant?
It was really exciting, and then it became more about,
what am I gonna do to be self-supporting?
When you learned you were pregnant,
was there any part of you
that considered terminating the pregnancy?
Actually, there was.
I mean, it's always been an idea,
but I was really more looking at adoption.
I was, like, sleeping on a park bench a year ago,
six months ago, and I want to be
a soccer mom all of a sudden?
Like, mentally, that doesn't make sense to me.
So there's just a lot of emotional preparations.
If you didn't have help from these organizations,
where would you be?
I would be in a really bad place, to be honest.
[Gianna] Should this law take effect,
thousands of women may be forced to give birth.
On average, The Cottage serves just ten women a month.
While important, it's a drop in the bucket.
As women bear the trauma of this public health crisis,
researchers say the economy will also feel a shock.
The Institute for Women's Policy Research
found that state laws like those in Oklahoma
cost the country $105 billion annually due to women
leaving the workforce, reduced earnings,
and time away from work.
If these laws were lifted,
an additional 505,000 women would enter the labor force
and earn about $3 billion per year in taxable income.
The economic effect is striking.
I think if you don't know anyone who's had an abortion,
it's because nobody's told you that they've had an abortion.
And it's across all socioeconomic groups.
[Gianna] Dr. Diana Greene Foster
led the largest study to date on the impact
access to abortion has on people's lives.
Women make up 57% of the workforce,
so what happens when they're denied access to an abortion?
What we see from our data is that people who are denied
an abortion have a sharp increase in not working,
a sharp decrease in full-time employment,
and over 50% are no longer working at all.
So there'll be more families trying to raise kids
without enough resources to pay for basic living needs.
There's nothing good in that for the economy.
Thirty-six million women live in the 26 states
that will likely outlaw abortion.
The scale of this is enormous, and it just makes me think
that, you know, all of us will feel this impact.
Yes, this will result in more kids
being raised in poverty,
more women dying of maternal causes.
This is a long-term problem that we--
that will be largely hidden from us.
There's no catching up.
When you have a newborn baby
that you don't have enough resources
to take care of, there's no making up for that.
[protestors shouting]
[Gianna] The Supreme Court will announce
their decision by early July.
Until then, millions of Americans brace
for what could be the end of their right
to a personal freedom.
Let's go!
suspenseful music
[Krishna] So there's this new kind of video game,
and it pays people to play the game.
And one of those games we've heard really took off
in this town in the Philippines.
So we're to see how popular it really is
and what it's doing to people's lives.
[person] speaking native language
You play Axie?
[Krishna] You've got it on your phone right now?
You've got it too.
Do you play Axie Infinity?
speaking native language
[Krishna] What do you make more money doing?
Selling slippers or playing Axie?
Same. Interesting. Okay, cool.
How many hours every day do you play?
You play for three to four hours?
Wow.
And do all of your friends play also?
Yeah.
[Krishna] During the height of the pandemic,
when upwards of 4.5 million Filipinos lost their jobs,
word apparently got around about a new video game
called Axie Infinity,
where you can make cash by simply playing the game.
Known as play-to-earn, it became incredibly popular.
speaking native language
[Krishna] To play, you need to buy in,
and it's not like buying a game cartridge
or a piece of software.
You gotta buy a team of in-game characters.
They're called Axies, and each one is an NFT,
or non-fungible token,
which assigns ownership to digital assets.
The reason you need to buy them
is so you can fight other players with Axies.
And when you win, you get a reward,
something called Smooth Love Potion, or SLP.
Do you earn the Smooth Love Potion?
-Do you earn SLP? -Yes.
Not bad.
Here's the thing about SLP.
It's not just points you rack up
like in a regular video game.
SLP is a cryptocurrency.
You can spend it in the game to buy more Axies
or even breed new Axies.
But crucially, just like you can exchange
Bitcoin for real money,
you can exchange SLP
for cold, hard cash.
-Do you play Axie? -Yeah.
You do? You earn money?
speaking native language
[Krishna] You bought a motorcycle!
speaking native language
[Krishna] But because of a video game,
you were able to move from a hut into...
-You really leveled up. -Yes.
speaking native language
[Krishna] And you use the money to, what,
pay overhead for the bar?
[owner] speaking native language
[Krishna] A big reason why playing Axie
worked out so well for some in the Philippines was,
they were early to it.
Back in 2020 and 2021, Axies were pretty cheap,
and you could buy a solid team for a few hundred dollars.
There was a low barrier of entry
and high return on your time.
But when it took off in popularity,
demand for Axies shot prices through the roof.
A competitive team of Axies will cost you almost
1,500 U.S. dollars these days.
That gave rise to a new kind of business--Axie rentals.
Gabby Dizon was given a team of Axies
as a gift a few years ago and saw opportunity.
So, you run, like, a rent-an-Axie shop.
[laughs] You could call it that.
We call it a play-to-earn gaming guild,
called Yield Guild Games, or YGG.
[Krishna] And how big are you?
[Gabby] So the community's over 100,000 people now,
and the guild is now worth a few billion dollars.
[Krishna] Gabby's company gives players
70% of their SLP winnings,
and they train players to get better,
win more battles, and get more SLP.
speaking native language
We're gonna be teaching to everyone
what is the new functionalities.
[Gabby] The education part is really key.
You can't expect to just show up
and be financially independent.
It takes a process. It takes learning.
Now we are offering a way for people to take part
of the fastest-growing digital economy.
And that's incredibly valuable for people,
especially in the developing world.
You're bringing ordinary people into the crypto economy,
allowing them to earn,
allowing them to become investors,
without having them pay out any money in the first place.
[Krishna] Jonelle is a street vendor.
He sells ice cream, duck eggs, and pork skins.
He started renting a team of Axies from YGG in late 2021
after hearing about people making money from it.
[Jonelle] speaking native language
Like this.
What does this video game mean to you?
[Krishna] Do you think that Axie Infinity
is a pathway for a better life for you?
[Krishna] Yes? You think so?
You're saving up for that?
[Krishna] According to Axie's parent company,
41% of their player base lives in the Philippines,
a further 6% in Venezuela, and 5% in Thailand--
countries with relatively weak currencies
and low average income.
While the short-term benefits of a windfall
of free cash are apparent, critics charge that
this could be a kind of crypto colonialism,
using economically desperate people as a proof of concept
for an unproven, experimental economic system
with no wage protection and little regulation.
Of course, the responsibility is now massive.
Because whenever our servers are down,
players are literally not able to feed themselves.
[David] It's, like, bizarre,
farcical science fiction
about capitalism, except it's real.
[Krishna] David Gerard is an author and journalist
who's been writing about crypto-based economics
for over a decade.
The way Axie works is, it creates magic beans,
crypto tokens, out of thin air.
What they're doing is digital sharecropping.
You get a poor farmer who has nearly nothing.
You own the land. You own the tools.
You take the crops.
You give them a bit of money for doing the hard labor.
They stay in poverty, but they can make enough to live.
The story was, we've got a whole new economic model.
This is the one weird trick
that will let you get out ahead.
That's the promise of cryptocurrency.
So they get into Axie.
They start tapping away, grinding on the game.
They can only make money if other people get into it.
It's like a pyramid scheme based on their labor.
Is this a predatory system?
Because it's billed as a system where everyone wins.
It is mathematically impossible for everyone to win,
so yeah, that's the lie of a predator.
[Krishna] SLP has dropped in exchange value
consistently since its peak last July.
But that hasn't stopped investors from betting big.
Venture capitalists in the U.S.
are sinking massive amounts of money
into play-to-earn games like Axie.
We went to a conference in Los Angeles called NFTLA,
where spirits were high.
So this conference is bringing together investors,
speculators, and builders of play-to-earn games.
And we're here to learn why they're pouring
hundreds of millions of dollars into this space,
and how it relates to a bunch of people
playing video games in the Philippines.
[upbeat electronic music playing over speakers]
[cheers and applause]
[announcer] Welcome to NFTLA.
upbeat electronic music
[Sylvester Stallone] I'm so excited to enter this space
because there's so many things
that I have been shown that I want to share.
[Krishna] Play-to-earn games
are the new hot thing in the NFT space.
It's all part of the quickly evolving world of Web 3.0,
which is a concept of supposedly decentralized
ownership of everything on the internet.
[Liam] Every NFT or every card is an NFT itself.
It acts as an asset that you own.
We're talking about removing friction
and owning your own IP.
[Krishna] And all the financial tools
springing from this concept are getting billions
and billions of dollars thrown at them,
which can feel a little frightening
when it seems like no one
exactly knows what they're investing in.
I kept waiting for something new to come along
that I could NFT my way with into the fucking future.
[cheers and applause]
-Ladies and gentlemen, the Jiho. -Good morning.
[Krishna] This morning was a who's who
of crypto opportunists,
but we were here to meet one of the founders of Axie,
Jeff Zerlin.
[Jeff] I think I have, like, 600 Axies right now.
This is a mystic Axie. It's wearing a space suit.
There are only, like, 1,200 mystic Axies
in the entire universe.
Oh, wow.
I think each one of these is worth, like,
$50,000 to $60,000 right now.
'Cause they're rare. People just want them to flex.
There are around 2.8 million people who own Axies.
Six million have downloaded digital wallets
because of our game.
25% of them do not have bank accounts.
50% of them are totally new to crypto.
75% of them are totally new to NFTs.
Do you really think it's fun for everyone?
Like, everyone plays the game primarily
because they want to do something fun?
No, I think there are people
who definitely see it more as work right now.
But I think the more fun the game gets,
the more balanced the economy will be over time,
and the more economic opportunities there will be.
What responsibility do you feel to,
say, the 40% of your users who are in the Philippines,
many of whom are trying to make a living off of doing this?
We have a responsibility to all of our players
to create an awesome ecosystem with a fun game
and a balanced economy.
It's a huge weight that we take really seriously.
[Krishna] But that economy isn't backed up
by any insured bank or government's army.
On the day we interviewed Jiho,
Axie announced that it was hacked.
You've had a busy morning.
Yeah, it's been intense. It's been a hard day.
You want to tell us about it?
Earlier this morning, we realized
that the Ronin Network had been exploited.
[Krishna] Ronin is like Axie's currency exchange,
the way to turn SLP into real money.
It was drained of all the crypto and U.S. dollars
moving through it at that time,
resulting in the biggest on-chain heist
in crypto history.
Can you tell me the dollar figure? Like--
It was $600 million worth of cryptocurrency.
That's a staggering amount.
It's a very bad situation.
Whose money was it?
It was everyone's.
Like, everyone in the community.
[Krishna] For the millions opening crypto wallets
to get in on Axie's payout,
they've also opened themselves up
to a mindboggling amount of risk.
In April 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department's
Office of Foreign Assets Control
announced they suspect the North Korean
state-backed hacking collective Lazarus Group
to have been behind the hack.
Axie has said they will pay back customers
who lost their money.
What do you make of the hours
that people are spending playing Axie
with the hope that maybe SLP goes up?
It's really sad and horrifying
that people are spending their lives on this.
Everyone knows the music's gotta stop sometime.
Is it stopping now?
Can we keep it going a bit longer?
That's the sort of question
that keeps crypto people awake at night.
apprehensive music
[Krishna] But hack or not, for many Filipinos,
even the small chance that SLP will return
to its former value is enough to keep them playing.
Do you keep track of how SLP goes up and down in prices?
speaking native language
[Krishna] What do you think's gonna happen next?
With this game? With your life?
speaking native language
dramatic music