Why You're Wrong—and Right—About Abortion
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I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. Me being a mother of eight children, I am pro-life. That being said, that's a personal choice. It's a decision that you carry with you the rest of your life. You know, I wanted so bad to be a mom, but I wasn't ready for it. And I definitely wasn't ready to be pregnant.

Before you go and say you are certain

You have to not engage with the worst arguments, which is what you're probably engaging with. Young lady, you don't have to be a murderer this morning, young lady. You insert four suppositories and it expels the mass of cells or whatever. You have to sit there and figure out what the best argument is. And I thought one of the many reasons that the abortion argument is pitched in screams... Hey, hey!

I don't care about your weird, very narrow definition of what a baby is and when life occurs. It's because both sides know if they calmed down and listened, they would have to admit the other side. The best argument of the other side is a pretty good argument. Right now, in this particular chapter of my life, I've never felt so pro-choice and so pro-life in the same moment.

After years of discussions about sperm donors and research into egg freezing, my wife and I are trying to have a baby. And we're in our mid-30s. Well, she's in her mid-30s, and I'm sort of rounding 38. And this makes matters more complicated. I'm the age that my mother was when she had her fourth child. And at the same time that we are trying, and if you're two women, trust me, you really have to try to have a baby, which we never think of as a fetus, I'm reading a lot about new abortion law in Texas.

By now you've surely heard about this law, but it essentially bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy. This includes cases where the woman was impregnated as a result of rape or incest. Now, many women don't even know that they are pregnant by six weeks. So that's the first thing. But the other thing is that because of the weird legal loopholes that this law is designed to jump through, it incentivizes Texans to spy on each other.

And it does this by offering what amounts to a $10,000 bounty to private citizens who sue anyone who helps a woman get an abortion. This includes doctors, nurses, even a friend who drives a woman to an appointment. So abortion has been effectively outlawed in the second biggest state in the country. I've been pro-choice for as long as I can remember. And the new Texas abortion ban reminds me of exactly why.

But also, for as long as I've been in conversations about abortion, I've also been unsettled by the word games played by those on my side of this issue. In my view, at six weeks, the life growing inside of you is not yet a person, but it is also not just a clump of cells. It's somewhere in between. It's the potential for life. It's the potential for a person. And I think any conversation about this near-impossible subject needs to begin by recognizing that.

All of which is why when I got to my hotel room in Florida for a work trip, instead of hitting up the pool or going to the beach, I called up one of the most brilliant and wise women I know, my friend Caitlin Flanagan. Caitlin, who you may know from her unmissable columns in The Atlantic, offers stark accounts from American history, from her mother's life as a nurse, and from her own life that help me remember what exactly is at stake here.

I realize this is a sensitive subject and one that people have very different and very strong views about. So thanks for listening with an open mind. And thank you to Caitlin for discussing this important subject with me. Stay with us. Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Caitlin Flanagan, one of my favorite people. Welcome to Honestly. Barry Weiss, my actual favorite person. Thank you for having me here.

So, Caitlin, I like talking to you pretty much more than anyone that I know. And I could talk to you about anything. Really, I could listen to you and just laugh for hours. But I want to talk to you today about the totally uncontroversial subject of abortion. And I want to do that, yes, partly because of the new Texas law and also because, of course, abortion is always an important subject, especially for women.

But I want to talk about it because I think that the debate around abortion reveals pretty much more than any other how broken political debate and conversation is right now. Like if you believe one side or the other, you actually can't even step into the other side's shoes. You actually aren't even able to articulate how they've arrived at their position. Right. And the thing about you is that you've actually managed to do exactly that.

A few years ago, you wrote an essay that in my mind remains the most honest and good faith and clear-eyed piece about this subject. And it was called The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate. Why we need to face the best arguments from the other side. So to start with, why did you decide to dive into this subject? Why did you decide to take on this topic?

Well, you know, being almost 60, I was 12 when Roe v. Wade came down, so I have very clear memories of Roe.

women talking about this issue. And I remember as a small child, my mother just constantly saying, we have to have legal abortion. We have to have it. And I remember as a kid saying, well, what is it, mom? And I was at that age where you just, everything your mom says, you just, oh, she's the best. And she's like, well, it's when a woman is pregnant. And I was like, yeah, yeah, pregnant. And she doesn't want to be pregnant. I didn't ever thought of that before. And they take out the baby. And I was like, well, what do they do with it?

And she's like, well, take care of it. But I had this awareness that this was something, how could my mother who loved babies so much and,

How could she be so incredibly in favor of abortion? And it wasn't until I was much older that she began telling me her stories about it, which included being a young nurse at Bellevue in the 1950s. And on two separate occasions, she had to sit with young girls as they died from bad abortions.

And she said in both of those cases, one of the final things of their lives were being interviewed by New York City detectives who did this, who did this, who was the abortionist. But another time...

She and some roommates, all nurses at Bellevue, they had gotten a weekend share out at Fire Island. And a fourth girl they knew, also a nurse, said, hey, can my boyfriend and I use the apartment? You know, I just figured it was for a tryst because it was the 50s. Even though it was in New York, you still sort of had to be sort of circumspect about things like that. And they said, sure, of course.

And so at the end of the weekend, my mother and her friends came in and they thought, oh, my God, a crime has happened here. And strictly speaking, one had. And this young kid, you know, a medical student.

had performed a literal kitchen table abortion on his girlfriend. So your generation, the whole cultural memory of it, of what it was like before, is gone. You know, women my age at least had mothers telling us stories about it. Yeah, I mean, I have to say that the thing you just repeated from the essay is

I had to read it several times to understand what you were saying. I didn't at first understand why these women were being interrogated as they were dying. And they were being interrogated because they were facing possible charges for committing a crime, participating in a crime. And I'm so far removed that I...

you know, I was born in 1984 that I didn't even fully understand at first what I was reading. And their mothers couldn't come to be with them. They couldn't ask. They knew they couldn't ask for family members in case they would be implicated.

And they were so stigmatized. It was seen as a very dirty, very filthy thing having to do, obviously, with women's sexuality and the idea of the freedom of women's sexuality. So because of that, I've just always read a lot of accounts of

of the pre-Roe v. Wade, say from the 30s, 40s, about what it was really like. And it's interesting. I often read celebrity memoirs. I'm always interested. And there have been more than one in which the most recent one I read was Sally Fields and where they talk very honestly about getting pregnant. And her parents were actually okay about it. It was before Roe. And they took her to Mexico.

The parents weren't allowed to come in with her. I think she was 17. And it was extremely common for these, I'll just use the term abortionists, to sexually molest the women that they were about to perform the abortions on. Because they were seen to be sexually loose women. They were seen to be completely at the mercy of the abortionist.

And Sally Field wrote about the fact that her parents had paid for her to get pain relief in the form of some kind of a nitrous, a mask over her nose and mouth. But she realized that the man was groping her breasts. One of the two men was groping her breasts.

And every time she took the mask off to tell him stop that, the pain was so intense that she had to put the mask back on knowing that he was going to go back to groping her breasts, her naked breasts while this happened. So what came to the writing of the piece is that, and I will turn my phone off, which is dinging there. My father, who was a very well-known professor and historian,

I would be probably like you wise girls. I'd go off on my rants to my parents. Like, I think this, you know, and I'd know like a teaspoon of information about something. And I was the world's expert. And my father would listen in that old Socratic way and nod and seem to be taking it on. And then he would say, okay, now what's the best argument for the other side? And he would get me every time. Like I would always forget he had that in his back pocket. And I would be so angry and I wouldn't, didn't want to do it.

And a lot of times I just refused. But it taught me the rhetorical importance of before you go and say you are certain, you have to not engage with the worst arguments, which is what you're probably engaging with. You have to sit there and figure out what the best argument is. And I thought one of the many reasons that the abortion argument is pitched in screams and why there's never any calm talk about it

is because both sides know if they calmed down and listened, they would have to admit the other side. The best argument of the other side is a pretty good argument. But it's also in the fact that

People's feelings about abortion are deep. They run really deep. People don't change their minds about abortion. It's a big deal. There's some Planned Parenthood woman who worked at Planned Parenthood a long time and then changed her mind about it. But people have very deeply felt opinions. And I think in some regards...

It's hard for them, as it was hard for me in thinking about this, it's hard for them to engage with the thing they don't want to think about. And I remember my mom's case, the minute I would say anything to her, but mom, the baby, she would cut me off. She did not ever want to hear. She could not tolerate anything.

hearing, in part, I think, because she'd been with these girls, but also because I'm so certain of this and I know you're going to say something that'll be upsetting to me and I'll never change my mind. So it's a huge, fraught, deep issue for people. I also think it's fraught not just from one side to the other. It's fraught inside of people in a way that they can't maybe always express. I mean,

I've always identified as pro-choice, even when I didn't understand. I had a vague sense, obviously, but not to the extent of what you explained in your essay about what women endured before abortion was legal in this country and before Roe v. Wade.

But the thing that always gave me pause and that always turned me off, and I remember when I was a student in college, this is when I started to hear these arguments, that people talked about abortion really casually. There were documentaries that were shown about people who'd gotten six or seven abortions. And this was like something that was cavalier. I mean, it was treated like another form of birth control. And I was also really attuned to the way that

almost lies were being told in terms of the way the language was played with. So calling a baby clumps of cells, calling the baby merely a fetus, you know, and all the rest of it. And I guess I wondered for you,

When you started to feel the kind of nuance of the topic, and of course I want to ask whether or not you identify ultimately as pro-choice or not, even though that phrase itself is a loaded one.

I think I always felt the nuance of it. And then I felt the reality, which was I was 22 and I really thought I was pregnant. I was on my own for the first time, working girl in D.C. And I really thought I was pregnant. And now I had a mother who would have been down in seven minutes and wouldn't have shamed me at all. But I felt this was such a terrible thing. And

And I remember calling Planned Parenthood and them offering me some times. And I'm like, well, I work all week. They're like, no problem. You can come on a Saturday. And I remember going up those stairs and just thinking they're going to shame me. They're going to ask me about my partner. They're going to want to know how I let this happen. And these two women, they were like, in my mind, I still see them as like these angels, these saints.

that they were so kind to me and that there was not a moment of judgment. And I was, oh, back up a little bit to say to your listeners, there really was a time that there were no home pregnancy tests. You could not find out if you just had a late period or if you were pregnant. You had no means of doing it without surfacing yourself and your situation to a medical clinic.

And fortunately, I wasn't pregnant, but just the kindness with which they treated me and the non-judgment and how much I'm sure that would have extended to me had I been pregnant and wanted to have an abortion. And I felt still at that point in time, there was a regard for the situation not being frivolous

Not being anything to brag about, not being anything to be, oh, I'm so tough I can have five abortions, but also nothing to shame a woman about, that this is a situation since the beginning of time that women have found themselves in and other women have helped them out of it.

So I just see the full picture of emotions. But what's working against the current pro-choice argument as it's currently constructed is our old tricky pal science, which is that babies are viable earlier and earlier. I mean, there are 24-week babies. Yes.

that they usually will have permanent vision problems because you'll have to put a lot of oxygen on board and neonates can't handle their, it oftentimes will make them blind, but they survive and they live and they're healthy. And we didn't have sonograms back then. There would be, sometimes a woman would need to have an x-ray and certainly a physician knew what a

three-month fetus looked like and what a four-month fetus. But it wasn't something you could just type up a few letters and see. And we didn't know so much about DNA. We had no idea that encoded into each one of those fetuses is, oh, this one will be good at music. And this one will have curly hair. And this one will be very stubborn and always, you know, bored in class and loves to run around. That the full...

you know, you could call it the soul or you could be scientific and just say DNA that a particular individual person has been created and is going to be, um, destroyed, destroyed. Um,

And that's and and I think in the past, in my past, there was still a sense that we don't we're not going to make light of this and we're not going to shame you. We're going to all admit that this is a this is a moment in your life you'll probably remember. And we're here for you. And the crass way that it's discussed now and the pride that young women take in it, how can they possibly be proud of?

How can they be proud to say, I don't care about that baby? I don't know how they can. Before we get to scientific advances and what we're able to see in a 12-week sonogram, all of which I want to talk about, Caitlin, can you paint a picture for us about

What was at stake for a woman back then who might have found herself unexpectedly pregnant? There was a moment for me that I will never forget when I was working at the Wall Street Journal and I had a colleague, a woman who was absolutely brilliant and ferocious and had a hugely wonderful independent life before her.

Before that was acceptable for a woman. And I remember that we were in a room meeting with a lot of men and the subject came up and afterward she came up to me at my desk and in detail told me the story about what had happened when she had gotten unexpectedly pregnant and having to go to Mexico and how she would never stand any argument that took away the idea of choice, the ability of women to choose. And

I didn't have women in my life of that age who had told me stories like that, although I'm sure they had experienced it. Maybe they just never shared it. So...

Is that a representative story? What was it like for women in your mother's generation? It was, and even before, it was like what it'll become in Texas, which is that if you are wealthy enough, you'll find a doctor and a private physician who will do it. And if you're not wealthy and you're desperate, you will find some kind of way to get this done at home or with a friend or with an abortionist. And

When you read these accounts, there are always three things that girls are told and women are told. You must never tell my name to anyone. If something goes wrong, you are never to contact me again. And the third one was just no further contact for any reason. So it was just, I'm going to do this thing to you. And the thing about abortion, Barry, is that in a clinical context,

It's a very easy procedure to get right, you know, with physicians and nurses who know what they're doing. They know what to look for in the kind of hour or two of observation. And there's usually most clinics will give, if not a prophylactic prescription for antibiotics, sometimes they'll even give them the bottle of antibiotics.

Because the only threat, the only danger really in a modern abortion is infection. And they'll say that's the one thing if you get any kind of a temperature, I want you to take this pill and call me. This is the 24-hour line. We're always here. And it might seem crass to say it, but it's like getting your wisdom teeth out. The one thing that you have to watch for is infection.

But these women couldn't go to the emergency room. And women in Texas aren't going to be able to go to the emergency room because they know they'll be asked constantly who performed it. And so women would wait and wait and wait. And when they showed up, it was too late. They were in sepsis.

And so when you take an abortion out of the clean, the sterilized, the observation, the blood pressure cuff to make sure that the blood pressure isn't suddenly dropping, when you take it out of all of those things and you put it in a motel room or you put it in a deserted office building and you put it in the hands of someone who doesn't have training,

and you're going to in some way open the cervix, in some way you're going to get a catheter through the cervix, you're going to have a pretty high chance that you could get infection in there. And that is something that would happen in the earlier abortions. In a later stage abortion, and I would say, I'm not a trigger warning person, but this might be really upsetting to hear, but when people talk about a coat hanger abortion, there is a point at which

something really has to be, when it's far enough along, inserted to tear up that fetus and to get it back out. It's excruciatingly painful. And that can start getting into scraping the wall of the uterus and routinely left women infertile for the rest of their lives. Oh, my God. I'm struck when you're talking about the number one thing that abortionists would say, which is never tell my name to anyone. I was reading...

for some reason or another, Gloria Steinem's memoir a few years ago. You know, and she's become annoying to me for any number of reasons. Because she's annoying.

She's annoying. And, you know, and she and the hypocrisy over Clinton and Lewinsky and all of that. But the book is devoted, though, to the man who gave her an abortion and basically granted her her life. And she notes in the dedication that he told her never to share his name. Now, of course, by now he's long dead, but it was.

It really moved me and it really stayed with me just to think about the fact that, you know, okay, yeah, now Gloria Steinem can be annoying. She could be a hypocrite. She could be a punchline, but wow, like she endured things that because of,

feminist of, you know, that came before me that I won't ever have to face, or at least I would hope so. And I think, you know, I'm living in an era, we both are, but I was lucky to be born into an era where, you know, I don't know if you've seen the OkCupid billboards around LA, they're also on the subways of in New York. And they boast like, you know, a

dating service for every single pansexual and every single non-monogamous. I mean, it couldn't be more liberated, at least in one sense of the word. And it's so frivolous and unserious and in certain ways fun. And then you think about this other generation of

for whom sex was so consequential. It was this life-changing risk. And there were always these jokes, always about the male sex drive and how far a man would go to have sex and, you know, constantly on the look and thinking of sex every five seconds. And my counterargument is, no, think of the female sex drive. Think of what she had to risk.

in order to be sexual with a man. And there's just a million different, they could be like, I mean, here's something as old as humankind, warfare, you could have a woman on a base whose husband's deployed and they've got kids and they're a family and she does what women and men have done through warfare, she slips.

She hooks up a couple of times because she's young and she's a sexual person and she finds out she's pregnant. Now she can destroy her family. She can split her children up into two households. She can have to tell her deployed husband in the middle of war that she's cheated on him and has someone else's child developing within her. Or she can

find a safe, respectful place to keep her family together. And so when you take all of these, when you take the very compelling argument or look at the developing fetus, and that's so powerful, but you can't look at either side of the debate without putting it in the context of

of a life, a human life, a woman's life. This is the condition of womankind. This is the story of who we are through time, across cultures. And this is the story of the fact that we carry the entire consequence of sex.

and we carry the danger of it. We carry reactions that men will have to it. And speaking about the relatively recent past, oh, through the 60s in many parts of America, you could not continue going to school if you were pregnant or college, forget it. You couldn't keep working if you were single and pregnant. And I read another book,

called The Girls Who Went Away. And a very common pre-Roe thing was when high school girls, kind of middle class, suburban high school girls got pregnant by their boyfriends. All of a sudden you found out that, oh, they're visiting their aunt for the rest of the semester. And what was going on was that they were being sent to these maternity homes where their accounts are heart-rending. You know, their mothers don't come to see them. They're horribly lonely. They don't have a lot of information. They give birth.

And they're allowed to see the baby for like 15 minutes. They are not given any choice to keep the baby. And I was reading all these accounts and there was this one that just got me. This girl went through all these things, just this life-changing, horrifying experience.

And she finally got back home and she wanted to go with that boyfriend who had got her pregnant. He'd never written her a letter and she'd written to him. And she just wanted to tell him. Maybe he didn't understand what she'd went through. And she starts telling him what had happened and being pregnant and this and that and seeing the baby and having it taken away. And he said, you're so bitter, Susie. You were never bitter. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You know, all of that.

is our female condition. And I think what's scary to me now is that it used to be the reason that abortion was something that was really in women's hands was that there was this kind of ebb and flow of the fact that women traditionally are more sensitive to and caring for children

than men traditionally were, but they're also the ones who need this service. And so between those two polarities, there was a very decent and forthright way to accommodate this service that needed to happen. And the one thing I say to these people in these southern states where

They kind of imagine that abortion, like, I don't know, it started in America in the 20th century. It is similarly as old as humankind. And, you know, the notion that the founding fathers would be appalled, like, you know, like, you know, General Washington, he's trying to Ford the Delaware. And it's like some messenger like, Sir, Martha is pregnant.

is pregnant and she needs you, you know? No, these books, midwifery, when you look at midwifery texts from the past, oh, there was, it was routine even through the early 20th century. If a woman, you know, there were no sonograms, there was no amnio, there was no, no way to know if you had say a profoundly damaged child with some profound limiting condition in which he'd live maybe a month or something. It was commonplace.

common for the doctor to turn his back to the woman without her seeing and to suffocate the baby and then say, very sorry, your baby had this and didn't live, which is paternalistic and horrible in 18 other levels, but

I just think all of those things have to be thought about. And I'm a conservative enough. I'm enough of a conservative to say, I don't think the state should be the one to make the decision whose story is compelling enough that she's the one that gets an abortion. I think an individual makes her decision and she'll know what to do. She doesn't get good information. It's, it's, um,

try to say to any Planned Parenthood that there's such a thing as regret for having an abortion. That is absolutely not true. That has never happened. There is considerable regret in, I mean, considerable numbers of it. It's often in the early stages when you're coming down from all those hormones. So you're like in a, almost a mini postpartum state. And there can be oftentimes if someone later in life is having infertility, they think back on that child. There can be a sadness. It can be a sad thing. And it's,

if Planned Parenthood would get its head out of its butt and say, yes, a lot of women have this feeling. And so one of the many services is, look, here's a number. We have a group. We have a social worker who comes once a week. If you have those feelings, we're here for you. Instead, their relentless, relentless politicized message is,

It's just the it's like getting a tooth out. You're going to have zero feelings. And women are left feeling very isolated if they're not on board with shouting their abortion. One of the details from your essay that has stuck with me in the few years since I read it

was the detail about Lysol. Can you explain what Lysol has to do with the conversation about abortion? Yes, for sure. So one of the, you know, being a student of these cases, I knew that the actress Margot Kidder, if you, well, you don't remember this, Barry, but there was once a movie, The First Superman with Christopher Reed. I know who this is, yes. Okay, and there was Lois Lane and she was played by Margot Kidder. Anyways, she...

She came forward in one of these books to give her story, got pregnant, was told to take all her clothes off, and her womb was filled with Lysol. And by the way, sidebar on Margot Kidder, she was someone who suffered with severe mental illness, and she was very much stigmatized in the movie community and very much held out as being a nut and did some kind of nutty things in terms of jobs. But I thought, you know what?

Here's a woman who had to have Lysol pumped into her uterus by a stranger in a motel room. I think that would have a long-term mental effect on someone, especially if there's no help for it. But anyways, I thought that that was just this one creepy abortionist. And then I found an academic had put up a couple of these ads showing that Lysol, starting in the 20s,

All the way through the 50s for sure. And people know, like, we know Lysol now is a cleaner, a cleanser, and we have Lysol wipes for, you know, the pandemic. Are you kidding? The pandemic was literally the years of Lysol. Exactly. But the Lysol of today is not the Lysol Margot Kidder had pumped into her uterus. It was full of carbolic acid. Housewives using it to clean were always told, you have got to be very careful. You can burn your hands.

But in this one ad, you see this woman who's bearing her face in her hands. She's a blonde. And the copy at the top is, I just can't face it again. And it seems horrible.

way more high stakes than like a dirty kitchen. So there's lots and lots of these ads that you can clearly tell Lysol is commonly being used. It was used as a contraception, but it was also very commonly used for a home abortion. And I read that ad differently because she was obviously like a housewife, like she had her hair done. She looked like, you know, the women in all those 1950s sitcoms and, you know, and she said, I just can't face it again. And the way I read that is,

There are times when a woman has had a couple of children and maybe she had terrible postpartum depression or maybe being with really small children. And all I ever wanted to do was be with small children. And I was an at-home mother. And there were times when I was like, I can't believe this is a thing. Like, how can this be a thing that I am home all day and it feels like 12 hours have passed and it's half an hour. It's really hard to be home with small kids.

For whatever reason, I read it as saying, I can't face being pregnant again. And, you know, and maybe, and there's a time in a woman's life when your youngest gets old enough that you start getting your life back a little bit. You know, you take the kids to school and you can have a cup of coffee and you can think about getting to your job, back to a job or to education. And I read it as sort of one of the many, many, many cases in a woman's life that the

The pro-life side will not ever admit to, which is just they would say, oh, she's going to have that baby and she can just give it up for adoption, which P.S. some women are able to do and they are very wonderful people who do it. Other women find it excruciatingly hard and a pain for the rest of their lives.

It's just not ever a simple thing. And pregnancy isn't just either, oh, you put on your pretty, you know, pregnancy pee in a pod outfit and you do the right thing. Or you're a horrible murderer and you do a terrible thing. Pregnancy is connected with

deep, deep women's issues. And I do trust a woman herself to be the one to make the decision. But I think this whole ghoulish thing of women pretending or stating that it's nothing, it's the products of conception, it's a parasite. So I think that there are two reasons for that. You know, the obvious one is that

You kind of have to play a semantic game. You sort of have to trick yourself or trick the people you're trying to convince about the nature of what this is in order to make the most compelling political case. Because the reality of this, even if you are pro-choice as I am, it's a horrible choice to have to make. And you want to maybe paper over the reality of what it is. And then I think the second thing, and this is just something I've been thinking about

a lot about as I confront my own biology is that I think there are so many tools of modern life that allow us to be more removed than anyone else in history from the reality of our bodies and the reality of the fact that in the end of the day, we're animals. And if anything, I think that young women, you know, have just an incredible array of tools that

to allow that distance that other women in other times and places didn't have. The number of young women who don't want children, climate change, this or that, but they don't want a baby. And to me, I was an extreme case of wanting a baby. Like, I just could not imagine that.

what my life would be without children, without wanting a baby. And I thought, I wonder if this is this new feeling that women are, you know, more like men in a lot of ways. And the

They don't feel a deep calling to have babies. And I wonder if that's part of why there's also an ability to be so cavalier as to have seven abortions. And on the show Shrill with that wonderful actress, Addie Bryant. She's wonderful. Yes, I watched the first season, but not the second. Okay, so as you may recall...

Yes, old women were also watching and keeping track of the violations of norms of decent behavior. But anyways, in an early episode, her boyfriend says he'll only have sex with her without a condom. And I'm like, oh, what a jerk. And then, you know, she's like, oh, she goes along with it because she wants to be with his boyfriend. I'm like, oh, that's.

terrible. And then the next episode, she's having her abortion. And on the one hand, I was like, oh, I really like the way this is shown. There's absolutely no morality about it. It's very simple procedure. She's being supported by the medical staff. But on the other hand, I thought,

I don't know if I'm really okay with this, with someone, a couple, deciding the man doesn't want to wear a condom. And so the baby's going to have to get destroyed. You know, I thought, where are we going with this culture that that's the okay and good thing? After the break, more from Caitlin Flanagan. Let's go back for a moment. You talked about being...

I think you were probably around your early teens during Roe v. Wade. I would like to say I was 11. So yes, I didn't really, I wasn't really pressing in my immediate life, but I knew my mother was very happy. Yeah. I was going to say, do you remember the day of the decision and your mom's reaction or maybe your dad's? I don't remember the day. Um, but I certainly remember that, um,

My mom was like, thank God. Thank God. And my dad was more, I don't know about him, but I remember him telling me that when he got to college, he was giving, he went to Amherst College back when it was like a preppy sort of place. Um,

And being given by everyone said, if you need a doctor in New York, we've got the guy. If you get a girl pregnant, this is a guy on Park Avenue who will help you out and make sure that it gets done. And there's an article in two articles written in The Atlantic in the past that were written by anonymous people.

person, two different people, we assume one of them is on the wall in Jeff Goldberg's office and the title, and this is the Atlantic monthly is I married a Jew. It's like, it's just like strange tales of the, you know, supernatural, but then another one,

I assume by a different person. The years are far enough apart. But it was a, you know, middle class, presumably white woman saying, I had an abortion and these were the steps I went through. And, you know, it was clear that, you know, she got turned down by the first two doctors and they were kind of shamed her about it. But eventually there was a doctor who said, yes, I'll do that for you. And I think that what was happening then in the past was the same regressive policy we're going to see happening now, which is that

If Ted Cruz's wife gets pregnant, um,

Oh, just even think of having sex with Ted Cruz. I mean, ultimate price to pay for your country. But and decides, I mean, this is crass. I shouldn't be joking about her. But if a woman of means gets pregnant, they'll be a doctor in a nice clinic, in a regular OBGYN. And as I say, it's a simple procedure and it will be taken care of. And if you're not, if you don't have money, if you can't take drugs,

three days off from your fast food job to get together somebody with a car, with the gas money, with the, in some states you have to spend the night, or you have to come back the next day for observation. Those girls and women are the ones who will be in these horrible situations. And the fact that the United States, that abortion is now legal in Mexico, right?

And that we could have our American girls going to a third world country to get a procedure done with whatever danger might come with that because they can't get it in their own home state. That's pretty galling to me. So just to sort of round out the conversation about abortion, you know, I think we've made it pretty clear in this conversation that

the reasons that I think both of us identify as pro-choice. But you write, and I love this line from your essay, you write, the argument for abortion requires many words. And I would add words like liberty and autonomy and freedom and liberation, words we've been talking about in this conversation. And then you say, the argument against it doesn't take even a single word.

The argument is a picture. You know, anybody who looks at even a 12-week fetus and says, I don't see a person, I don't see a human fetus,

is lying. There is a moment there where, to use an old expression, like calls out to like. That is the most vulnerable of us. And that child is in there unfolding on his own timetable,

By very early on, certainly by 12 weeks, he has eyelashes, his ears have begun to form, and the most human of all things has begun to form his profile, his face. And so obviously the essential argument is I totally get where the pro-life people are saying that's a separate human being with a separate brain and identity. And I totally get where the pro-choice people are saying it's a woman's body.

She gets to make the decision about what happens. And that is a conflict that's never going to be resolved, ever. I mean, you talked before about sort of the inconvenience of... The inconvenient truth of science. And, you know, with scientific progress comes the fact...

not only a viability outside the womb, but we know that at 18 weeks, an unborn baby can hear its mother's heart beating. By 27 weeks, they can hear sounds and voices. I mean, it's kind of become increasingly impossible to play the semantic game and to not confront the truth of what it's about. Why this is one of the many reasons that we are ending science.

I mean, it's all around me. Like, I am really glad that I got to live in post-war America, but it's all around me that science is not compatible with the new ways that are promoted loudly of how we should live and the values that we have. Well, let's say more about, well, so we're obviously living, especially me and you, in neighborhoods where believe science signs are literally every other thing.

step that you take believe the science believe the science and yet you hear you are saying that we are abandoning science so explain what you mean you said it so brilliantly a few weeks ago um the day during the pandemic after the murder of george floyd and as the as the protests were going and as um and there were protests right here where i live and and i was saying oh boy at

We've been told so much that if you're not wearing a mask, you're going to get COVID and die. And there were plenty of people masked, but there were also plenty of people who were not masked. And when 1,200 epidemiologists, like actual epidemiologists, not Don Lemon, you know, actual epidemiologists said, oh, this is more important than wearing the mask. Racism is a more important pandemic. And that's when I said, okay,

oh, we're already at that point in the destruction of science. We're already here when physicians who have spent all this time and cultural capital convincing us about wearing masks are suddenly wanting to be on the right side of history and will say, oh, it really doesn't matter that much. We need to get this more important thing done. And I thought, hmm, they must know

That these people aren't going to all die from marching without the masks. They must know that because they're not going to take it on the chin that they are the ones who put out a letter that may have killed people who were trying to conduct an important protest. So I thought, oh, they've known all along that we don't really need the masks outdoors. And that's when I thought, OK, all right.

It's over. It's over. You know, you know, and then people who believe that a man can get pregnant, so they reject science.

QAnon, they obviously reject reality. It's the fantasies. It's the end of science. And once you get rid of science, then you can really get your medieval times banquet going. Yeah, and I don't, it's science, but it's also more than that. It's like flagrant lies have been repackaged as truth. And things that are obviously true have become impossible to say out loud. Right.

It's like the people that are willing to say the truth in sort of an ocean of lies are so detested for it. I mean, to me, the J.K. Rowling thing being only one of so many examples on the question of feminism and women and the subject. But you know what I think? This tiny, tiny, incredibly mighty army that consists of Barry Weiss and Yasha Monk

and Thomas Chatterton Williams and Abigail Schreier, people who have been willing to say, I know this is going to make me loathed. I know there may be times it makes me physically unsafe. I know that this might have ramifications for my children and I'll have to be careful about, you know, so that they're not having the fallout from it. But despite all of those things,

I'm not going to take it I am going to tell the truth I'm going to ask the questions I'm going to stand up courageously and just tell the truth and each time you guys do something like this more and more people hear and more and more people go oh it's possible to do that it's possible to do that

One more break, after which I grill Caitlin on whether or not she considers herself a feminist. Stay with us.

To me, abortion is sort of inextricably connected to my identity as a feminist and the ability to have that choice. And I've always assumed that you identify as a feminist, but you never know. I mean, I think of Megyn Kelly as the embodiment. It's like Megyn Kelly insists she's not a feminist, even though her entire life is enabled by feminism. And I guess I did want to ask...

just for the record, do you identify as a feminist? And if so, any particular wave? Well, I always love it when somebody suggests that I might be a TERF and I'm like, I'm offended. I'm not a feminist, but... TERF meaning trans-exclusionary radical feminist. You know,

Obviously, words become unmoored from their original meaning, and that's the natural process of language. What's happened now with words like feminism, it's not just the evolution of the English language. It is a direct conscription of words and definitions. And I will just say the thing that feminism means that's in the dictionary, yes, I certainly believe in the political, social, and economic aspects

equality of women to men and to all others that beings that may exist. And I still think that women, well, fortunately, we're being a race. So I guess the whole problem solved, Barry. Like, well, sorry, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, you know, job well done. But did you see what the ACLU did the other day? No. What did they do? They've done a lot of insane things, including calling for the banning of books, book banning

Bye, my friend. But the latest thing they did is they took this famous quote of RBG's on the anniversary of her death. And it was from I think it was from her confirmation hearing. And she said something like the decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman's life, to her well-being and her dignity. It's a decision she must make for herself. And it went on.

And the ACLU wanted to prevent RBG from committing wrong think from the grave. And they changed it to this. The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a person's life, to their well-being and dignity. It is a decision a person must make for themselves. In other words, they erased the word woman and any female pronouns at all. This is the American Civil Liberties Union literally saying,

putting words in RBG's mouth. I mean, she said this in 1993. Yeah. No one was talking in gender neutral pronouns. No one had pronouns in their bio. And she was talking about women and the idea that they did. Like, I don't know what else to call this other than just utterly disgusting.

And what's most astonishing about it is that it's Orwellianism coming from the very institution that is supposed to protect our free speech rights and our ability to offend people. And, you know, no longer is the ACLU defending the rights of the neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois. They are spending their time, indeed, revising the...

I'm posthumously revising the quotes of the liberal lion of the Supreme Court. End times. End times. I mean, I feel incredibly indebted to the feminist movement because no part of my life, literally every single part of my life is indebted to it.

And that's why I am upset at women who, because I was joking around, but who say they're not feminists, because you may not have fought the fought and you may not use that word, but you can get a credit card. You can...

You know, you can get a job, you can have a bank account, you can have an abortion. So you can wear pants. As my sister Susie says, you can get your period without being called a witch. I mean, it's everything. It's everything. And yet I find myself, and we've alluded to this a few times, like running up against

some of the, I mean, the bill of goods that feminism sold me. And the main way that I'm running up against that is, as you know, and as you text me constantly to ask whether or not we're pregnant yet, of course, you're going to be the first to know as my honorary mother. But I don't like this description of me is constantly pestering you about that because I think people should be respectful during the process, but I do expect to be told immediately. I absolutely love it. It makes me feel so loved. And, you know, it's,

in many ways, I think the most important part of life. So I absolutely love that about you. And one of the things, though, that I feel like both Nellie and I are confronting as women in our mid-30s who were sort of raised on essentially girl boss feminism and the idea that biology is not really a real thing is that I have never felt more aware of my biology and more aware of the differences that

distinguish me and my vagina having body from that of a man. And I think that one of the reasons maybe that there's a lot of smart young women I know who don't necessarily identify as feminists is sort of because they've seen through some of the excesses or maybe some of the lies that feminism has told. And I'm wondering if you're worried about a backlash to feminism or if the tide will turn against it.

Or perhaps really the real fear is what you've been explaining, which is the erasure of women entirely. Women aren't going to be erased. Here's what's happening. The West is ending. And there are huge parts of the world where there is no deceit about what a woman is. A woman is a chattel. And those men will be the men who will take over this world because we will have given up on

on the enlightenment, on logic, on reason, on all of the things that created freedom as we know it. We are raising a generation of people who are so ignorant of history and so ignorant of what they're experiencing that this whole thing is going to be handed off to a culture that, trust me, knows what is a man and what is a woman, and we're not going to like it. We're

If we don't get our act together and start, you know, saying the truth about things and, um,

I just today I saw that the Golden Gate Bridge was closed down for more more rights needed for undocumented people. And I've got a long history of being, I would have to say, on the right side of working with the undocumented people of California. But I was like, so San Francisco found the literally only functional piece of San Francisco left, which was the Golden Gate Bridge. I'm going to close that shit down. And it's like when of all.

the pressing things like maybe the drug addiction maybe the very high murder rate maybe like let's close down the bridge so we don't have to walk through human shit um this is the issue this is the moment so here's my closing thing

I grew up in a time when hating America was cool. I grew up in Berkeley. I was part of it. You know, we ripped up American flags and we sewed them into our jeans or we got our older sisters to do it because we never did learn the women, the arts, but, um,

But it was cool and fun. And there was every reason to be very disgusted at America because of Vietnam and the draft and what we were doing in Southeast Asia. But America was so strong.

And the Enlightenment values were so strong that America could handle being hated by a particular swath of its population. We're not that strong anymore. You know, hating America is a luxury we can't afford anymore.

and it's no longer a group of hippies that, you know, we don't like the way they look or whatever coming into our neighborhoods. It's the fact that the people who hate America in this country are stronger than the people who love it, and many of the people who love America are people I wouldn't really want to hang out with because they're kind of like these ghoulish right-wingers, and I'm more and more thinking that

You know, whoever was the first country to establish equality,

was going to get it wrong because it happened in a non-modern world. And of course, we got it wrong with slavery. The first, whoever went first would get it wrong. And whoever went first, the lights would go out first. But I think in the future, I hope enough literature is left to know that in the countries that still kept it and were able to make and were able to have a citizenry that respected their country, I hope they know that we're the ones that did it.

Caitlin Flanagan for president. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Barry. As always, if you'd like to drop us a line, email tips at honestlypod.com. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week.