#199 — A Conversation with Caitlin Flanagan
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Summary
In this episode, Caitlin Flanagan joins me to talk about her new essay, The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate, and why abortion should be talked about honestly and ethically. She also talks about her own personal experience with abortion, and how it shaped her writing about it. And she tells us about the tragic story of a young woman who died from an abortion in the 1950s and 1960s, and why we should all pay attention to the stories of other women who died as a result of abortion, even if they didn t have access to abortion services at the time. And we talk about why abortion is a terrible thing, and what we should be doing to prevent it from happening in the first place. This episode was edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and edited by Alex Blumberg. Our theme music is by my main amigo, Evan Handyside. Additional music by Ian Dorsch and our ad music is courtesy of Epitaph Records, courtesy of Fugue Records, and our sub-par soundtracks are courtesy of SoundCloud, which is owned by SoundCloud.org. Thanks for listening to the Making Sense Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to Making Sense Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Become a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron of the making sense podcast: bit.ly/support-makingsensepod and help spread the word around the word "making sense everywhere else! Get exclusive ad-free listening to her new podcast recommendations and more of her work on Audible and social media platforms everywhere she writes about the podcast making sense of it everywhere she listens to it! Thank you, Sam Harris and I am making sense, and I hope you like it, too, and she gets it on her own podcast, too! and I'm grateful for all the love and support, too much of it, you can help spread it everywhere else she does it, I'm making sense and she's kind of cool, too good of it's cool, she says so much so that she's good at it, and it's good enough to do so much more than that she says it helps me say so much of that, she's great, good enough, good thing, good things, and so much good that she helps me, too she's enough of it too much good, good stuff, etc.
Transcript
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So if you can't afford a subscription, there's an option at samharris.org to request a free
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But I guess I'll just flag, you have an article coming out in The Atlantic that we can't speak
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about yet, because it's currently embargoed, as things occasionally are.
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And people will marvel at our restraint in this conversation.
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They already do, I'm sure, in each of our individual lives.
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So, um, anyway, this, uh, I look forward to that.
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But, uh, that prompted us to talk about an older article that you wrote, actually not
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that old, just in the December 2019 issue, which I had never read.
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I think I'd heard echoes of how this had gone off like a bomb in the press, which is to say
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it was controversial for reasons that'll be obvious.
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But I had not read it, so you sent it to me last night, and it's really an amazing piece.
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And the title is The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate.
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We've got a bunch of other things we want to talk about, but I want to take that at the
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top, because it's just, in addition to being an extraordinarily important social policy debate,
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and also just an extremely interesting ethical puzzle to reason through, the way we talk about
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abortion and the way we just reliably fail to reason about it honestly and ethically reveals
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more or less everything that's wrong with our politics.
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And this is something you bring out in your essay in a very vivid way.
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So what prompted you to write about abortion, you know, six months ago?
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Well, abortion's always been on my mind as an important subject.
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My mom was a nurse in New York City in the 50s at Bellevue Hospital, and she sat with two
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girls, as she always called them, as they died from bad abortions.
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You know, an abortion is, it's the kind of thing that, done correctly in a medical office
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by someone who knows what he or she is doing, very easy procedure to get right without those
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preconditions. It's an incredibly easy procedure to get wrong, principally in terms of sepsis,
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you know, a really severe, pervasive infection that's very, very lethal. And what made those
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infections even more lethal in the days of illegal abortion was that you had committed
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a crime. So as your temperature is rising degree by degree, and if you had any other kind
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of medical procedure, your family would have rushed you in to get medical care.
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These women couldn't do that. They knew that they had committed a crime, and the person
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who had performed the abortion would never help them. They were never to contact him or
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her again. And so it was just a very, very, very terrifying thing for young women. And this
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was in the days that she was doing this work. Just, you know, being an RN, she wasn't really
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called to what we would now call, I guess, reproductive justice or anything like that. She was just a
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young woman who would, you know, always wanted to be a nurse. And she was seeing that young girls
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right in front of her, these two who died, all they tried to do was have a private sexual life
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in some way. You know, it could have been a forced sexual encounter. You know, she didn't know,
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we'll never know. But that in those days, the consequences of being single and pregnant
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were devastating. You would be thrown, if you were getting an education, that would be the end of
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that. If the person who got you pregnant was known to your family or the community, you might be forced
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into a marriage with him, and he into one with you, him into one with you. And, you know, no matter how
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abusive and horrible you both might be to each other, that was the way things were handled.
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And so there was just this very terrible period of really high deaths that we, as a culture,
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we don't have a great much memory of them. They've kind of faded from the cultural memory.
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Someone, I'm 58, and my mother didn't have me till she was 36. So I've got a bank of cultural
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memories from my mother, who's long since dead, that was really delving back into the 30s and into
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the 40s of what this really looked like when you had women desperately trying to end a pregnancy.
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So I'd always been interested in that on the one hand. But on the other hand, I really remember,
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because I remember when abortion was very much in the news in the years preceding Roe v. Wade,
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and I was a very small child. I mean, a young kid, I don't know what, 10 or something. And I would
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always hear my mother, who was super politically active and a very good woman, I would hear her saying
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to people, abortion, abortion, abortion, we have to have it legal. And I really remember being in
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the backseat of the car and saying to my mom, well, what is abortion? And she sort of, my mother's
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MO to any sexual question was to give you far too much information so that you would never ask
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anything again. And so she kind of tried to think, how in the world can you translate this incredibly
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complicated situation to a child? And she said, well, it's when a woman is pregnant, and she
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doesn't want to be pregnant, so they take the baby out, and it doesn't live. And I'm like my mom, when
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you're 10, your mom is just this perfect, beautiful, radiant goddess creature. And I was like, that
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doesn't sound good. And she's like, well, change the subject. But the reality has become more and more
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and more clear of that childlike intuition or sense, I should say, as sonography gets clearer and clearer
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and clearer. We're looking into, we're getting a view into something that's really hard to hold in
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our minds, if we're in any way pro-choice, which I am, which is that this is not a clump of cells from,
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I mean, someone like Ben Shapiro would say, we're just clumps of cells. But it is very
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recognizably human from an incredibly early state. And we had a quite interesting gender divide on
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this at the Atlantic, because we were finding images of a 12-week fetus. And all the women,
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many of the women who were, I think, to a woman, pro-choice, I think our whole office is, I don't
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know, I shouldn't be making claims. How do I know? Maybe somebody isn't pro-choice and doesn't feel
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comfortable to talk about that. So I shouldn't say that on anyone's behalf. But the women,
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pro-choice that I know, were saying, oh, wow, this is really hard to look at. The men were saying,
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this doesn't really move me. And I don't see this being the compelling argument, just having this
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image. So that was really interesting as well. But I really thought, ultimately, that the reason we
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can't talk about abortion, and we'll probably never be able to, is that it's one of those situations
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where the best argument of each side is a damn good argument, and almost airtight. And the argument,
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the best argument of the pro-life side, to me, it's not a religious argument, because everyone has a
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different religion, and everyone has a different set of beliefs. So if you, and religious beliefs
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aren't supposed to set public policy in America, but the sonograms are incredibly powerful scientific
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fact, and you can't look away from them. And these knowledge that really only medical people had who
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would attend to, say, very late-term miscarriages, or any kind of miscarriage where you would have to
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be conducted in a hospital with a DNC and so forth, they kind of knew what a 12-, 14-, 16-, 18-week
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fetus looked like. But even then, it's a bit desiccated with the time of a miscarriage and so
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forth. But we're all looking at it. And we have a very ambivalent idea about it, because if the baby
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is wanted, everybody likes to run now to get one of these new 4D sonograms, which is like the first
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baby picture, those very beautiful, incredibly detailed sonograms that you can now get in a
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mini-mall, they'll set up shop for that. So that's the argument. The other side is, women truly die
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from abortions. It'll be a different kind of death in the main if it ever becomes illegal again in
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America. A lot of things have changed. Access to antibiotics have changed. But it will be very
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regressive. It'll hit the poor much harder than the middle and upper class, socioeconomic upper and
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middle class. And all sorts of things happen in the lives of a woman, a life of a woman. You know,
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of course, there's issues of rape and abuse and all of that. But there's just also the fact,
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as I brought up in this piece with a piece of evidence, there's kind of a moment in some women's
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life where I just can't cope with this now. I just can't. I'm overwhelmed. And the conditions in my
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life, whatever they are, I'm not speaking for myself. I'm speaking for a woman in this situation,
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whether it's the nature of my relationship, whether it's my fears about the future, whether it's that I
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finally got through some really horrible postpartum depressions with my first two or three, whether it's
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I need to get away from this man. And if I can get my kids to kindergarten age, I can go back to work.
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Whatever it is, there is such a world of entirely legitimate reasons to get some help and terminate
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this pregnancy. And if you don't have it legally, if you don't have it, as I say, you can have this
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procedure done so safely. You know, a little prophylactic antibiotic, I believe, goes home
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with a lot of women just to completely ensure. And far from being told, as an illegal abortionist
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would say, the number one rule in every account you will ever see is never give my name to anyone
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and never contact me again. The opposite is true. If you have any temperature, if you have any discomfort,
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you're to call back and we have a 24-hour line. You know, they're not letting women die of sepsis.
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So this is the real conundrum. Both sides have an excellent argument. And where I've netted out is,
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I have accepted that in abortion we lose the baby, but I'm not going to lose the woman too.
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That's where I have netted out. But other people will net out differently. But I think it's incumbent
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on any of us who takes a public or private opinion on this in terms of counseling a friend
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or voting a certain way, I think we really need to think through the opposite side of our own position
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and see either what strengths it might have that we haven't acknowledged or what ways that our
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positions could be tailored to some of these absolutely true, very sad, desperate situations
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that both sides of the equation present us with.
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Yeah. In your piece, what you also just did here is make it obvious that this is a ethically
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complicated situation, which is not what happens politically. The political ends of the spectrum
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treat abortion as though it was just a knockdown case against the other side. It was so trivial and
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so clear that it need not even be expressed. You know, so if you're religious, life begins at the
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moment of conception or abortion is murder and we don't have to talk about why we're against murder
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and we can liken the history of abortion here or anywhere else to the Holocaust or some other,
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you know, obvious atrocity and, you know, end of argument. Not acknowledging much less dealing
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compassionately with the ocean of suffering on the other side for which abortion in many cases
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is a very clear remedy. I mean, you just spelled out many of those cases, you know, rape or relationship
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chaos that is just completely incompatible with bringing a new child into the world. And then,
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but from the other side, and this is where, you know, well-educated liberal types have their own
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blind spot. The left has treated abortion as though it were simply a question of a woman's autonomy,
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right? Without any other ethical implications. And this is, you know, you might want to say,
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I mean, I think I probably would want to say that some of the insensitivity here has been born of
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necessity. It's a reaction to the dogmatism and authoritarianism of the right and the very real
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danger of tipping back into this awful history of, you know, women dying unnecessarily over
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botched abortions. And by the way, Sam, I would just interject, we have no idea how many died
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because it was very rare. A doctor worked out with a family. It was such a shaming thing for a death
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certificate to say abortion and for that to be in the public record that there was, it would be called
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peritonitis. It would be the big thing that was in the 30s. You see it all over and over. It's
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interesting that people didn't catch on that, oh, she ate tinned peaches, canned peaches, or canned
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tuna fish. And there was botulism in that. And that's what killed her. So we will never really
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know how many women died over and above the huge number that we know about.
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Yeah. So let's just go into how insane some of this history was for a second, because in your
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article, which is, I recommend obviously everyone read, it's not very long, but it was full of detail
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that I found astonishing and for some reason had never encountered. And also you link to an article
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by Katha Pollitt from 1997, which contains some information that I had never come across.
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For instance, in Pollitt's article, she points out that, first of all, the numbers of abortions that
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were performed under the medical supervision of the time was very high in the 19th century and up
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until the 20s. The time of truly sordid, dangerous, self-administered, you know, quote,
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back alley abortions. I mean, the peak of that was more in the 40s and 50s. And I mean, appallingly,
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you have like the Journal of the American Medical Association recommending that hospitals not provide
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medical treatment to women until they had confessed fully to, you know, who had gotten them pregnant,
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who had performed the abortion. It was literally like just an official recommendation of a medical
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inquisition before you administered life-saving or potentially life-saving treatment to a woman who
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had shown up at the hospital, you know, at death's door. I mean, it's just completely insane. But the
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piece of history from your article that I never knew was the role of Lysol in all of this. I mean,
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your article contains an old Lysol ad, which is obviously, I mean, before I might want to read your
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description of it, you're describing this as just an obvious ad for, you know, self-administered
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abortion through Lysol. And I'm thinking, okay, there's no way the, you know, Caitlin's too deep
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into this topic. There's no way this really is going to be, at minimum, it'll be susceptible to
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another interpretation here. But then you see the ad, and this is just madness. This is like some
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counterfactual history of the United States that I never knew was possible. So just anyway, describe
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the wonderful branding of Lysol we have now. Well, the deal with Lysol was that, number one,
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it contained a chemical compound called, I think it's phenol, P-H-E-N-O-L. Very corrosive,
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excellent for cleaning. Came in to just tie all the storylines together. It was big during cleaning
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hospitals during the Spanish flu because it was so powerful. And women would use Lysol, and it was
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all but publicly stated explicitly in the ads, they couldn't explicitly state it, that douching with
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Lysol after sex would very much lower your chance of getting pregnant, which it did, you know, because
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some of that would trickle in through the cervix and its corrosive force. But if you were pregnant
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and you found a way to get Lysol into the womb, you would perforce kill the baby and anyways, or the
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fetus, whatever we want to, I know it's loaded language either way, but so the ad shows, it's a very
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beautiful piece of kind of mid-century graphic art, a sort of middle-class looking white woman, her hair
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is done, her nails are done, she has a wedding ring on, she's sort of what we imagine when we think
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about, oh, the wonderful post-war American suburbs where middle-class white people were
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leading this kind of enchanted life. She's like a June Cleaver type, younger than June, but that kind
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of person. And her head is, behind her there's a calendar. Which is a brilliant detail. I mean,
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it's just, it's amazing how much information is conveyed in this photograph. Isn't it? I mean,
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American graphic art is, it's like the iconography of it is just incredible for the best of it.
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But so there's this calendar and day after day is crossed off and every woman in the world is
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certainly one who's in her childbearing years knows what that means. That means you're just
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waiting and waiting and waiting for the period to get your period. And she has her, and believe me,
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to your many, I'm sure all of your listeners are younger than I am, even in my lifetime, there was,
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there were no like home pregnancy tests. If you, God forbid, thought you were pregnant, you had to
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wait and wait and wait and then go see a doctor. You waited as long as you could.
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And fortunately for me, I eventually got my period, but, but she has her head in her hands
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and the copy is, I just can't face it again. And that's the headline. Yeah. And the headline,
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sorry. Graphically brilliant. And that concept of, I can't face it. And it really, I first saw this,
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it was last May. I'd known about kind of the Lysol ads and I had really studied the famous actress,
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Margot Kidder, who was the lowest lane in the first Superman movies and had a lot of, a very tragic
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life, maybe not unconnected to this. She wrote extensively about this abortion she had as a
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girl where they filled her womb with Lysol. And I thought, my God, what a hideous event. And then in
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May, when I saw this ad, I thought, my God, maybe it was a common event. And, you know, as terrible as
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the internet is, the things that it's great at are incredible. I was able to do the amount of
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research that in pre-internet days, I would probably have given up on, you know, I need to,
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I need to search all the medical journals in North America, possibly England from this, you know,
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bling, bling, bling, bling. There they are. New England Journal of Medicine, something in Albany,
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you know, put your credit card in. And here was this incredible, terrible, untold tale of women
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having Lysol, this, this absolutely poisonous, legitimately toxic fluid with this very pronounced
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smell filled into their uterus. And it would start, yes, it would kill the life of the baby fetus
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embryo, the fetus by then, but it was, would start shutting down the woman's organs. And the first
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case, this woman showed up, her urine was port wine colored. I mean, she was dying. She was in,
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when that was a typical way, women would show up. I don't know what's in the cathopis. She's,
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I often don't agree with her, but I think on abortion, I'm sure we're, we end up at this,
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I know we end up at the same place, but women would show up in the absolute final stages,
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of death by sepsis. They would be very often, my mother talked about this for the rest of her
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life, that those two girls were both interviewed by New York City homicide detectives, young girls
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who had had a sexual experience. And both of them, the cops wanted the name of the person who'd done
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it. And she said, both girls were so terrified. They wouldn't give the name because that's what
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they'd been told endlessly by the person. You may never give my name. Something terrible will happen
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to you if you did. So this light, these Lysol abortions, they did quite often work, but if
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they didn't, the chance for it becoming systemic was huge and very, very terrible deaths ensued because
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of it. And the, finally, the, let's call them the products of conception, the baby, whatever,
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when it came out, the fetus would smell very strongly of Lysol, which is just, to me, just a
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horrifying element of the whole situation. And it's sort of where the notion of a sort of abortion being
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a murderous thing, you can sort of see where that comes from. But going back to history, I definitely
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know what you're mentioning, Katha, talking about the notion of a confession. Instead of giving your
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medical history before they treat you, you have to provide a confession. Now, and nothing else,
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you know, if you go in and you've burned your hand on the stove, you don't have to confess anything
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before they'll treat you. You just say, so they can give you the best treatment possible if you're awake,
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what happened? But the whole notion that you'll hear on the right, or let me just say the anti-legal
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abortion group, is that can you imagine, that there's great anger that it came down to, obviously,
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a Supreme Court case. And they'll always say, could you imagine if the founding fathers had ever thought
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that their grand constitution would be used toward abortion? That is a fundamental ignorance about the
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nature of midwifery in the 17th and 18th century. It was completely normal for a baby that was born
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with a birth defect that was a survivable birth defect, but the midwife would make the decision
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herself. Later, when there was a physician, he would.
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And they would turn away from the woman, and they would cover the nose and mouth,
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and they would, you know, put that baby down, to use that language. There was no sense of this
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sacred individual importance of every single baby that a woman who would have many of them over the
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course of her life was going to, was being considered. So I don't think it's historically
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accurate to think. I mean, they'd probably be very stunned by a lot of things about today. But the
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idea that some pregnancies didn't go to term because a woman and a midwife got involved earlier on
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wouldn't shock them. Not at all. Not in the least.
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Yeah. Yeah. There's one thing you do in this piece, and you do it at the end in a very arresting final
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paragraph, which I'll let people read. But you bring the experience of men into the picture in
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a way that it had never occurred to me to do. I mean, we tend to talk about this as a problem of
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the ethical problem, or the ethically interesting facts are the woman's experience, how she got
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pregnant, and all of the chaos and suffering that may be attendant on that. You know, again,
00:24:48.160
rape being the obvious case, and, you know, all the reasons why she might have not to want to be
00:24:54.480
pregnant or deliver a baby into this world, and the questions of autonomy over her body, and, you
00:25:01.720
know, the intrusions of the state, and, you know, the other people's apparent interests in, you know,
00:25:06.800
what she can do with her life, and, you know, all of that, right? But so the nexus of all of this is
00:25:11.600
the woman, and, you know, on the other side, the obvious fact of taking, depending on how you think of
00:25:17.640
it, at what point in term, the life of an innocent baby who could have been viable at a certain point,
00:25:23.880
or is potentially viable and has its own interests. So that's the problem. But you bring the experience
00:25:29.580
of men into this, and suddenly the reader understands that when you have women dying by the thousands,
00:25:37.680
which was, you know, obviously the case due to illegal abortions, many of these women have men in
00:25:45.200
their lives, you know, husbands in many cases, and they have existing families, right? I mean,
00:25:50.880
the I-just-can't-face-it-again moment is, by definition, the story of a woman, very likely
00:25:57.860
married, already having kids. And so you take the point of view of the man who has delivered his
00:26:04.220
critically ill wife, almost certainly the mother of their existing children, to a hospital where she
00:26:12.220
dies. And, you know, after that tragedy, he simply has to go home and face raising the kids
00:26:19.300
by himself, right? Which is, you can imagine, you know, in the 40s, just how fully unequipped the
00:26:26.660
average man would have felt doing that. And that's part of this picture. I mean, the level of chaos
00:26:33.140
introduced to the lives of men when this has gone wrong is something that, you know, literally I've never
00:26:40.220
spent a second thinking about. But, I mean, you bring it out so vividly here, and it's just, I mean,
00:26:45.840
there's so much human suffering that awaits us if we imagine going back to anything alive. I mean, as
00:26:52.660
you say, you know, with 21st century medicine, a back alley is not likely to be a back alley. But if the
00:26:58.960
people who want an absolute prohibition of abortion get what they want, it seems to me that no one is
00:27:06.280
really thinking through the totalitarian horror required to truly prevent illegal abortions.
00:27:14.020
And, you know, you have doctors going to prison as murderers. You have people still resorting to
00:27:21.220
procedures that wind up killing women unnecessarily and rendering children motherless. And this is not
00:27:28.960
just a woman's issue. There are men who will suffer immensely because of this as well. And so
00:27:35.780
it seems to me that almost no one on the side of prohibition is grappling with these facts. But then to
00:27:43.820
make this interesting, you pivot again to the reality of the image of the sonogram, which looks just like
00:27:53.360
It is a baby. There's something that, I don't know, it's from the poets, I think, like calling out to
00:27:59.800
like, that's us. You know, that is a human being that is recognizably a human being. And the more that
00:28:09.140
we learn about DNA, the more that we understand that incredibly specific traits have already been
00:28:17.320
determined in that infant. You know, you know, I've got one kid who could sit through, you know,
00:28:23.800
two lectures at a, you know, at his second grade. And I had another kid who was like, boy, his foot
00:28:28.540
would be tapping, you know, 10 minutes in because he's just a very active, lively person, always has
00:28:33.880
been. All that, you know, maybe there's an artistic talent that's settled. It's all in there. That's,
00:28:40.380
you know, and we all know as parents that in the beginning, we think I will infuse my child with
00:28:45.480
the perfect set of beliefs and they will replicate them. And then they come out and they are, they are
00:28:50.380
actually their own person and they have their own ideas about who they should be and how they should
00:28:55.320
be. And all of that is extinguished in abortion. But I also say it's extinguished at almost exactly
00:29:03.520
the same rate as miscarriage. And when someone has a miscarriage, absolutely nobody goes up to her.
00:29:09.780
I mean, I had one, I was very heartbroken. Nobody comes up to me and says, well, did you ever
00:29:14.140
think about the child you lost and all the talents he had? Did you ever think about the pain the fetus
00:29:21.300
must have gone through as it was, you know, rejected from you? People just comfort you and they help you
00:29:27.100
and they counsel you and they tell you, don't worry, you'll have another baby. And so all of this
00:29:33.060
language is just very interesting to think about. But 20% of pregnancies end in a miscarriage and 20%
00:29:40.440
end in abortion is our best statistic. So, you know, life is not easy to women in this whole
00:29:47.920
world of reproduction. It really isn't. And it never has been. And the idea that abortion is the
00:29:55.720
product of she, women, you know, horrible feminists, which, hey, I hate them too. So you got me there,
00:30:04.660
but on the most part. But the idea that it was just to create a certain kind of callously lived
00:30:11.840
sex life, and for some women it is, but far, far longer throughout all of human history has been
00:30:18.800
women coping with, you know, all of human sexuality, which men don't really have to. And you mentioned
00:30:25.880
this man in the article, and one of my newsflashes that will, like, my career will be evergreen if I
00:30:31.460
just continually say this shocking piece of information, that not all men are bastards.
00:30:36.640
And a lot of men really love women. And if they're in a romantic relationship with a woman,
00:30:43.340
and over many years really love her, and really care about her. And, you know, a lot of men,
00:30:50.000
if they walked into the kitchen in the middle of the night, and the wife had her head in her hands,
00:30:53.140
and she's sobbing and saying, I can't go, I can't face it again. A lot of men sit down and say,
00:30:58.700
in the male way that women tell us they hate, but is actually, in some situations, extremely good,
00:31:05.480
they say, let me help you. Let me figure this out. Let me help you solve this problem. And it's our
00:31:12.420
problem, because, you know, we're both pregnant. I made you pregnant. You know, our, you know,
00:31:17.580
physical Congress made you pregnant, and so resulted in your being pregnant, and our being in this
00:31:23.880
situation. So it's something that can be handled in a very, a moving way by men.
00:31:30.660
Yes, I want to bring up two things that you don't mention in the piece, and they seem to me to be
00:31:37.080
relevant to the ethical question of where one draws the line here in terms of admitting that abortion
00:31:44.600
is the most ethical remedy to a non-optimal situation, all things considered. And so at the
00:31:53.180
extremes, it seems to me that it's trivially easy to answer. I mean, if you're talking about a
00:31:58.540
merely fertilized egg, you know, day one, that's not a human being. You don't have to worry about
00:32:07.560
the possibility of suffering. So using an IUD or anything that is essentially performing an abortion
00:32:15.180
at the earliest possible stage, you know, the morning after pill, this is not an interesting
00:32:20.100
ethical question, and no one's a murderer for doing those things. If a person thinks that,
00:32:25.280
well, then that person has religious ideas, which make no sense, and they especially don't make sense
00:32:31.220
in light of the fact that, as you pointed out, although not in these words, God is the most
00:32:38.560
I wouldn't say that that position has no sense, the religious position. It's certainly not my position,
00:32:43.640
religion, but I can certainly see an argument outside even of their religious faith that would
00:32:51.800
say, this is us, this is the spark of us, this is the beginning of us, what we do to the least of us,
00:32:58.460
et cetera. I mean, it's not my belief, it's not your belief, but I could see it being, I could see a
00:33:06.140
situation in where it's not absurd. To me, it is a bit absurd, but, but anyways, I just, I just have
00:33:13.340
much more interest in, in, in, I'm always kind of interested that maybe people are right about
00:33:18.960
things. So I always hold space that they're right about that, but I don't believe it whatsoever.
00:33:23.660
Well, it's just, you can create a situation where you have dozens of zygotes in a Petri dish,
00:33:29.800
and it becomes especially absurd. This is the argument I made, I believe, in Letter to
00:33:36.100
a Christian Nation, when you just think about the implications of genetic engineering, literally
00:33:40.560
every, every time you scratch your nose, you're engaged in a, in a holocaust of potential human
00:33:46.740
beings given the right manipulations. At that extreme, you're, everything's a potential human
00:33:53.280
being, practically. You know, any, any human cell with a nucleus can be engineered to be another
00:33:58.400
person who could be viable given the right, you know, developmental course. So it's just,
00:34:03.860
it's a, it's one of the slippery slope arguments. But then on the other side, you have, you know,
00:34:08.420
a very, very late term, quote, abortion, which is indistinguishable from infanticide. And so it's
00:34:14.460
somewhere between those extremes that where we have to talk about the ethics of abortion and where,
00:34:20.000
where one is tempted to see it as a, a remedy, a family planning, chaos averting remedy for people,
00:34:28.800
not a very clear line between an easy decision and a hard one. And I'm tempted to look for this line
00:34:38.780
in terms of the possible experience and suffering of the fetus. So, you know, just neurologically
00:34:49.540
speaking, developmentally speaking, you know, there are reasons to believe that the brain structure
00:34:55.840
is responsible for the experience of physical pain are developed. And here we're talking about,
00:35:01.840
you know, brainstem structures, the reticular formation, especially, and the thalamus. But
00:35:08.660
these are subcortical structures, right? There's no reason to believe you need a cortex or even a
00:35:14.540
cerebrum to feel pain, or at least there's good reason to believe that pain can be mediated before
00:35:20.960
those structures are developed. This all begins to come together around 15 weeks in utero. So,
00:35:29.460
and again, this is not, this is not a matter of scientific certainty at this point, that this is
00:35:34.320
the moment where the lights could conceivably come on with respect to the experience of pain.
00:35:38.920
But before 15 weeks and after, you know, that's a, an area where the structures we know mediate pain
00:35:48.180
and pain responsive behavior have, you know, knit together. And so there is something to
00:35:55.700
distinguish a first trimester from a second and third trimester. And certainly when you get into the
00:36:01.260
third trimester, you're talking about a being who has cerebral hemispheres that begin to show
00:36:07.480
EEG synchrony, which is a kind of landmark that many people now associate with the possibility of
00:36:13.340
consciousness. So just neurologically speaking, I think you can make a good faith argument that
00:36:20.240
before 15 weeks, there is reason to believe that a fetus can't feel pain or can't likely feel pain.
00:36:30.140
And as you push that closer and closer to the moment of conception, you know, if we're talking about
00:36:34.940
eight weeks or seven weeks or five weeks, then concerns about the suffering, I mean, you know,
00:36:40.940
whatever a sonogram image might do to you intuitively, the concerns about suffering are less and less
00:36:49.880
reliably founded. And the fact that it looks like a baby, that concern shouldn't be that it has
00:36:56.800
fingers and toes as much as whether it has a more fully developed brainstem and thalamus when you're
00:37:03.920
talking about the prospect of this little being suffering or potentially suffering anything that
00:37:09.660
could happen to it. And therefore having interests that can be, you know, destroyed by a decision
00:37:14.860
someone makes and all of that. I'm not saying this completely exhausts, you know, any effort to be
00:37:21.720
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