(00:00:02):
My husband tells me that men can't see mess.

(00:00:05):
As far as I can tell, he does appear to have eyes.

(00:00:09):
He also tells me that men are naturally more visual than women.

(00:00:12):
And that's why I need to look a certain way and why he can't be expected not to stare at women.

(00:00:18):
Seems to me the real goal is to naturalize whatever men want.

(00:00:22):
It doesn't matter what the story we tell is about women and men.

(00:00:25):
It doesn't matter if it's internally consistent or not.

(00:00:28):
It's always about keeping women down.

(00:00:32):
Hi, I'm Zahn Valines, and this is the Liberating Motherhood Podcast.

(00:00:37):
Today,

(00:00:37):
as you might guess based on that listener story,

(00:00:40):
we are going to be talking about how bad ideas about women have oppressed women

(00:00:43):
throughout history and continue to be weaponized today.

(00:00:47):
Before we get started, I have my usual administrative reminders.

(00:00:51):
This podcast depends on reader support,

(00:00:54):
which you can offer in the form of heart reacts,

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positive reviews,

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and shares on social media.

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Comments and other engagement also really help boost the podcast visibility by

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giving these awful social media algorithms what they want.

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And if you're a super fan,

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you can become a paid subscriber on Substack or on Patreon.

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Paid subscribers get at least eight extra essays a month, plus a bonus podcast episode.

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They also get access to the private Liberating Motherhood support community.

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To sign up, visit zon.substack.com or patreon.com slash liberatingmotherhood.

(00:01:28):
I'm here today with my amazing guest, Sarah Rudin.

(00:01:31):
Hi, Sarah.

(00:01:32):
Hello.

(00:01:34):
I'm so excited to have you here,

(00:01:35):
and I'm going to tell listeners a little bit about you before we get started.

(00:01:39):
Okay.

(00:01:40):
Sarah Rudin is a leading translator of the ancient literature of the West.

(00:01:44):
In a career spanning both essential Greek and Roman classics and sacred literature,

(00:01:49):
she has set new standards for accuracy,

(00:01:51):
stylistic integrity,

(00:01:53):
and accessibility.

(00:01:54):
Her work,

(00:01:55):
including cultural and human rights journalism,

(00:01:58):
is deeply concerned with questions of power and truth in accordance with her Quaker

(00:02:02):
faith.

(00:02:03):
She has won Guggenheim, Whiting, and Silver's grants and numerous other awards.

(00:02:07):
She has a PhD in classical philology from Harvard University.

(00:02:12):
A few of her books include I Am the Arrow,

(00:02:14):
The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath,

(00:02:17):
Paul Among the People,

(00:02:18):
The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time,

(00:02:22):
The Face of Water,

(00:02:23):
a translator on beauty and meaning in the Bible,

(00:02:26):
and Other Places,

(00:02:27):
a book of poetry.

(00:02:28):
Today,

(00:02:29):
though,

(00:02:29):
we are going to be talking mostly about Sarah's new book,

(00:02:32):
Reproductive Wrongs,

(00:02:34):
a short history of bad ideas about women.

(00:02:36):
The book is out this week.

(00:02:39):
So,

(00:02:39):
Sarah,

(00:02:40):
I really enjoyed your book,

(00:02:42):
which is saying something because oftentimes these sorts of historical books can

(00:02:46):
feel overwhelming and kind of needlessly dense,

(00:02:49):
but it's

(00:02:50):
It's so accessible and it's so entertaining.

(00:02:52):
So tell me a little bit about the book,

(00:02:55):
how and why you decided to write it,

(00:02:57):
what you feel it is about and what you hope it accomplishes.

(00:03:03):
Thank you so much for your very kind words.

(00:03:06):
The book is my contribution to the fight for women's rights in this very difficult time.

(00:03:14):
And I wrote a book because I really can't do anything else.

(00:03:19):
My skills are verbal.

(00:03:21):
To a really ridiculous degree, I'm a verbal and writing person.

(00:03:27):
I seem to have some kind of brain damage.

(00:03:32):
I have practically no sense of direction.

(00:03:36):
I've been lost in my own home.

(00:03:38):
I can't drive.

(00:03:39):
So there are a lot of practical things I can't do.

(00:03:43):
So I went for what I thought would be very safe for me in the way of education and career and

(00:03:49):
I started French at 14, Latin at 16, German and Greek at 18, and just kind of kept on going.

(00:04:02):
I did classics,

(00:04:03):
a PhD at Harvard University starting at the age of 21,

(00:04:08):
and I expected to be just spending my life in libraries.

(00:04:13):
But I had a very interesting time after I got my PhD.

(00:04:23):
There was the usual tight job market for classicists,

(00:04:27):
and a job came up right at the end of apartheid at the University of Cape Town,

(00:04:32):
South Africa.

(00:04:33):
So I went down there,

(00:04:34):
did a phone interview,

(00:04:36):
went down there sight unseen,

(00:04:38):
and I stayed for 10 years.

(00:04:39):
Wow.

(00:04:41):
And so that was my political awakening.

(00:04:47):
And I love South Africa.

(00:04:50):
I got conscientized,

(00:04:52):
as feminists of an earlier generation would say,

(00:04:57):
and woke up to all of the problems of the developing world.

(00:05:08):
And, you know, and then I came back here, 2000 and 2005.

(00:05:15):
Not sure, you know, what I could do, except write books.

(00:05:19):
So I started, I had already published three, so I more rapidly published some books.

(00:05:30):
And

(00:05:31):
Again, I was working in my little area of language.

(00:05:37):
But I found a way to politicize that because I began looking at sacred literature

(00:05:44):
and asking,

(00:05:45):
well,

(00:05:45):
what does it really mean?

(00:05:47):
What does this word really mean?

(00:05:49):
And I got to translating or retranslating the Bible and other sacred literature.

(00:06:02):
with a view to

(00:06:05):
unearthing where our notions come from, where our political culture comes from.

(00:06:12):
And of course,

(00:06:13):
I encountered pretty quickly how distorted it was,

(00:06:18):
particularly in the interests of men,

(00:06:24):
in the interests of anti-Semitism,

(00:06:28):
and in the interest of authoritarianism generally.

(00:06:34):
So, yeah, I'm bumping along on this route.

(00:06:37):
And then the crisis of this is a very long background.

(00:06:42):
I'm sorry.

(00:06:43):
This is great.

(00:06:45):
I'm getting to the point here.

(00:06:51):
Then Donald Trump happens.

(00:06:54):
And I thought about where these crazy ideas about

(00:07:02):
reproductive rights come from?

(00:07:05):
How on earth did people get these insane notions that they have?

(00:07:12):
And I knew that there were a couple of anti-abortion poems by Ovid,

(00:07:17):
who was a first century BC poet,

(00:07:23):
early AD as well,

(00:07:26):
in the court of Augustus,

(00:07:29):
the first Roman emperor,

(00:07:31):
who was the first

(00:07:35):
real modern Western authoritarian.

(00:07:40):
So right out of the blue,

(00:07:45):
anti-abortion propaganda springs up when authoritarianism is on the rise in the

(00:07:53):
West.

(00:07:55):
Okay,

(00:07:55):
you'd had these god kingships of the Near East,

(00:07:59):
fine,

(00:08:00):
they were pretty fragile,

(00:08:01):
they didn't really last,

(00:08:02):
but there was something kind of clingy about the authoritarianism that the Romans

(00:08:08):
founded.

(00:08:09):
And...

(00:08:14):
Christian authoritarianism springs out of that almost directly.

(00:08:20):
And so you get this series of propaganda gambits against women's reproductive

(00:08:28):
freedom,

(00:08:29):
and that is freedom going both ways,

(00:08:31):
freedom not to have children,

(00:08:33):
freedom to have children.

(00:08:35):
There was a cult of celibacy, which condemned women and their whole domestic role.

(00:08:43):
Their whole reproductive role,

(00:08:46):
well,

(00:08:46):
reproductive role was the only thing that they had left,

(00:08:49):
and it was very,

(00:08:50):
very restricted and controlled.

(00:08:53):
Yeah.

(00:08:53):
And this this goes on,

(00:08:55):
you know,

(00:08:56):
straight up to today when you have very,

(00:08:58):
very weird anti-abortion propaganda.

(00:09:02):
So,

(00:09:02):
you know,

(00:09:03):
here here I was writing a book about it and I was lucky to find a wonderful

(00:09:11):
publisher in Norton Liveright.

(00:09:14):
And they shepherded this book through.

(00:09:17):
It was a bit difficult to conceive,

(00:09:21):
to execute,

(00:09:23):
because I was doing something that really hadn't been done before,

(00:09:26):
which was examine a whole social history through a really limited number of

(00:09:31):
documents.

(00:09:32):
So I had to pick out the documents that were most important,

(00:09:35):
figure out what was most important about them,

(00:09:38):
and do this by example.

(00:09:42):
And, you know, I counted counted a lot of really weird authors.

(00:09:47):
But the thing was, these were really authoritative authors.

(00:09:52):
These were classic authors like Augustine, who was really the father of Catholic Christianity.

(00:10:02):
Charles Dickens,

(00:10:04):
of course,

(00:10:05):
needs no introduction,

(00:10:07):
but he was very,

(00:10:09):
very important in his attitude toward very large families,

(00:10:14):
toward adoption.

(00:10:17):
And yeah, and then on and on it goes.

(00:10:21):
So yeah, I had a lot of fun with the book.

(00:10:24):
I'm having a lot of fun sharing it.

(00:10:26):
I'm just very excited.

(00:10:29):
And for me, I want my contribution to be that people think that

(00:10:39):
more comprehensively about what people are saying to them that people can

(00:10:44):
understand where these ideas come from and what they are trying to achieve because

(00:10:55):
we are going to be acting out these ideas if we don't understand and combat them

(00:10:59):
better

(00:11:01):
That's a huge contribution.

(00:11:03):
Um, and I, I think your book is really successful at doing that.

(00:11:07):
I,

(00:11:08):
so the thing that I,

(00:11:10):
I like about this book specifically,

(00:11:11):
but kind of the thread I see in your work more broadly is we,

(00:11:17):
and especially men have this idea of history as this like set of facts and it's a

(00:11:22):
set of facts that you have to memorize.

(00:11:24):
And there's like only one correct view.

(00:11:27):
Um,

(00:11:29):
And that's not actually how it works.

(00:11:30):
So while I was reading your book,

(00:11:32):
I was thinking about this really unfortunate research that I had to do last year

(00:11:37):
for an article I was writing that required me to read part of Men Are From Mars,

(00:11:42):
Women Are From Venus.

(00:11:44):
So I'm going to tell you a story about this and then I'll explain why I'm sharing this.

(00:11:48):
So

(00:11:49):
The book starts with this like absolutely horrific story of the author just

(00:11:54):
brutally emotionally abusing his wife as she recovers from giving birth and from

(00:11:59):
severe childbirth injuries.

(00:12:01):
You know, he goes back to work early.

(00:12:03):
He leaves her alone without pain medication or help.

(00:12:06):
And then he screams at her for seeking help.

(00:12:09):
So he tells this story about himself at the beginning of the book.

(00:12:13):
And then his explanation for why all of this transpired is just,

(00:12:18):
well,

(00:12:18):
you know,

(00:12:18):
women are more emotional than men and men are more rational.

(00:12:22):
And if both parties just understood this, it would somehow fix things.

(00:12:25):
And somehow his abuse is a sign of his rationality.

(00:12:29):
So like this book sold millions of copies.

(00:12:31):
And so clearly lots of people accepted the author's version of events.

(00:12:34):
But to me,

(00:12:35):
the opening narrative is just transparently a story of an abusive man,

(00:12:40):
like justifying his abuse.

(00:12:42):
So

(00:12:43):
I bring this up again because the lens through which we see stories is so important.

(00:12:49):
You know,

(00:12:49):
and we focus a lot in history with like getting the facts as if there's one set of

(00:12:54):
facts,

(00:12:54):
but what the facts are shift depending on who tells the story.

(00:12:58):
And critically for our most honored texts, it shifts with who is the translator.

(00:13:03):
So I would love it if you could talk to me a bit about that because I love how your book

(00:13:09):
Focus is not just on what's happening to women,

(00:13:11):
but why it's happening and how it upholds larger systems of power rather than just

(00:13:16):
kind of like reciting long lists of things that happened.

(00:13:21):
Right.

(00:13:22):
Yeah.

(00:13:22):
Well, shall I talk to you a little bit about my work as a translator of the Gospels?

(00:13:28):
I have...

(00:13:30):
I'd love to hear it because,

(00:13:32):
you know,

(00:13:32):
for me,

(00:13:33):
I mean,

(00:13:33):
I am like I was raised Catholic and I was raised kind of like a progressive

(00:13:38):
questioning Catholic.

(00:13:40):
And I grew up very frustrated that I was having to read these translated texts that

(00:13:44):
I could not translate back to their original and just had to accept what was in

(00:13:48):
them.

(00:13:48):
And I love it that maybe you have kind of a different offering there.

(00:13:54):
Right.

(00:13:55):
Yeah.

(00:13:55):
No,

(00:13:56):
it's absolutely remarkable how much the canonical translations of scripture repress

(00:14:04):
women's point of view and repress people,

(00:14:07):
women's communication.

(00:14:11):
One of my favorite...

(00:14:14):
stories in the gospel is the story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman.

(00:14:20):
So she's Canaanite.

(00:14:21):
She's a pagan.

(00:14:23):
She lives on the coast of Judea.

(00:14:28):
And so she is untouchable to Jews on several counts, religion, ethnicity, gender.

(00:14:39):
But Jesus encounters her when he visits her city and she throws herself at him.

(00:14:48):
She's grabbing his knees.

(00:14:50):
She's a suppliant in one version or both, I forget.

(00:14:56):
And she wants a healing for her daughter, sight unseen.

(00:15:02):
And in a standard translation,

(00:15:07):
uh, Jesus calls her and her people dogs.

(00:15:13):
And he says, you know, the dogs don't, the bread is, is for, um, the children of Israel.

(00:15:20):
Um, and, um, we don't, we don't share that with dogs.

(00:15:27):
Now in the actual Greek, and I've, I've never found an act, an accurate translation of it.

(00:15:35):
Um,

(00:15:37):
In any canonical version, kunaria, the Greek word kunaria is translated simply as dogs.

(00:15:46):
So especially from a Judaic perspective, that's a horrible insult.

(00:15:52):
Dogs are filthy.

(00:15:54):
Dogs are useless.

(00:15:55):
Dogs mate in the street.

(00:15:57):
You don't have pet dogs.

(00:16:01):
This is the sort of Middle Eastern Semitic version of the dogs.

(00:16:05):
They don't use them in herding or as pets, so they are outcast.

(00:16:13):
But the Greek version,

(00:16:18):
which is written by someone whose cultural basis is Europe,

(00:16:26):
uses the word kunaria.

(00:16:29):
which means little doggy.

(00:16:31):
So it's a cute comic word.

(00:16:34):
It doesn't mean puppies,

(00:16:35):
but it seems to mean,

(00:16:37):
um,

(00:16:38):
lap dog,

(00:16:38):
cute little dog,

(00:16:40):
or it's an endearment for a dog.

(00:16:42):
Uh, you know, Oh, you little canarian, you know, Oh, you little cute little thing.

(00:16:45):
Um, so that's the word that's put in Jesus's mouth in Greek.

(00:16:53):
Okay.

(00:16:53):
Yeah.

(00:16:53):
So he's, he's not speaking Greek.

(00:16:56):
Um, because, um,

(00:16:59):
He's speaking Aramaic.

(00:17:02):
That's his native language.

(00:17:05):
But we get this text that goes a very long way to soften the tradition of what he

(00:17:12):
said to this woman.

(00:17:15):
So this is very early Christianity.

(00:17:17):
Women are participating very vigorously, outspokenly.

(00:17:22):
They're treated more as equals in Christianity than they have been until the 20th century.

(00:17:32):
Um, so the, the author takes great pains to, to soften this.

(00:17:38):
So, um, uh, Jesus calls her people, cute little doggies, not dogs.

(00:17:45):
And she responds by saying,

(00:17:47):
um,

(00:17:48):
yeah,

(00:17:48):
well,

(00:17:48):
even a little doggies,

(00:17:50):
you know,

(00:17:50):
get the scraps under the table,

(00:17:53):
which is a comic,

(00:17:54):
uh,

(00:17:55):
that's a comic trope in,

(00:17:57):
in,

(00:17:57):
um,

(00:17:57):
Greek and Latin literature,

(00:17:59):
um,

(00:17:59):
You know, that during a feast, the dogs eat till they bloat.

(00:18:02):
You know, they lie on their backs groaning.

(00:18:08):
So that comic trope is adapted here in this story.

(00:18:13):
And then Jesus is shown answering, all right, yeah, because that was a good one.

(00:18:22):
It's a rough translation of what he says.

(00:18:26):
Yeah, that's a good one.

(00:18:27):
So I'm healing your daughter.

(00:18:28):
And so he gives the daughter long distance healing and the woman goes back and the

(00:18:33):
daughter's fine.

(00:18:33):
Yeah.

(00:18:36):
So, yeah, often...

(00:18:41):
The later version,

(00:18:45):
and we're talking about early modern translations when we talk about English

(00:18:50):
translations of the Bible.

(00:18:52):
So we come clear up to the Renaissance when we start getting the important

(00:18:58):
translations,

(00:18:59):
the influential ones.

(00:19:00):
Those are often more bigoted than the original translations.

(00:19:05):
ancient ones because the text and the thought has gone through the medieval period

(00:19:13):
the late antique period and the medieval period when christian misogyny has become

(00:19:25):
absolutely ravenous and when it's gone completely insane when women become the gate

(00:19:32):
gate to hell

(00:19:36):
When women are not good company,

(00:19:37):
when you wouldn't even speak to a woman,

(00:19:39):
this is privately and formally.

(00:19:43):
So the church fathers have established this in late antiquity,

(00:19:50):
and later Christians just run with it.

(00:19:52):
It doesn't start coming apart, really, until the Age of Enlightenment.

(00:20:00):
Yeah.

(00:20:01):
So I want to,

(00:20:03):
I've got this fire in the belly to look at the text for myself in the original

(00:20:10):
language to translate them very,

(00:20:14):
very carefully and just try to

(00:20:21):
Get a sense of the mood,

(00:20:23):
the thoughts,

(00:20:24):
the social context of the author and fit that in or not fit that in to the history

(00:20:32):
of ideas.

(00:20:34):
And to look critically then at what ideas we are getting.

(00:20:40):
We just get them and we get them often in ritual form.

(00:20:44):
They're part of the liturgy.

(00:20:45):
So these are holy.

(00:20:47):
These are part of prayers and rituals.

(00:20:50):
So we don't we're not supposed to question them.

(00:20:54):
We're supposed to just absorb them.

(00:21:01):
But, you know, that's a bit crazy.

(00:21:03):
You know, if you could just see, for example, the original language of the Ten Commandments.

(00:21:11):
It's not commandments at all.

(00:21:15):
The Hebrew word means matters.

(00:21:19):
And that can be matters for discussion.

(00:21:23):
There's another word,

(00:21:24):
if you want to say commands in Hebrew,

(00:21:28):
there are certain ways to say that very,

(00:21:31):
very clearly.

(00:21:32):
That's not what's said in the Ten Commandments.

(00:21:35):
The Ten Commandments are more like prose.

(00:21:41):
They keep trailing off into discussion of the relationship between God and human

(00:21:49):
beings and between human beings of different kinds.

(00:21:53):
strangers, our own community, foreigners, servants, and so on, even animals.

(00:22:02):
My drive is to dig into this stuff and to understand it better and,

(00:22:08):
you know,

(00:22:09):
to bring it to the politics of today and say,

(00:22:11):
well,

(00:22:12):
you know,

(00:22:12):
look what we've been taught to believe.

(00:22:14):
Look what's been pounded into our heads.

(00:22:17):
And, you know, look again at the mindset of the people who wrote it.

(00:22:26):
In some cases, they're more open-minded than we are.

(00:22:29):
Yeah.

(00:22:31):
Well,

(00:22:31):
so you talk a bit in the book,

(00:22:33):
but you've also spoken here about how,

(00:22:36):
you know,

(00:22:37):
a lot of the Christians who were propagating this ideology and translating early

(00:22:42):
versions of the Bible,

(00:22:44):
they seem to have a lot in common with like Andrew Tate incels and like red pill

(00:22:50):
sorts of people.

(00:22:51):
And I'm like, I'm really struck by that, how those ideologies of women as objects who are not

(00:22:59):
interesting to have relationships with,

(00:23:02):
who are not people you want to associate with,

(00:23:05):
keeps cropping back up throughout history and that the people who endorse that

(00:23:10):
ideology are maybe the people who are giving us our sacred texts.

(00:23:15):
Right.

(00:23:16):
Yeah.

(00:23:17):
Well,

(00:23:18):
I have I've found,

(00:23:19):
you know,

(00:23:20):
actual sacred literature generally better than the secular literature when it comes

(00:23:27):
to women,

(00:23:28):
you know,

(00:23:29):
particularly the Gospels.

(00:23:31):
particularly Paul, translators have not served them well at all.

(00:23:40):
But when you go out into,

(00:23:42):
say,

(00:23:43):
secular literature or pagan literature,

(00:23:46):
which is both secular and sacred at the same time,

(00:23:52):
that's where you get the really poisonous

(00:23:58):
And the church fathers, of course, semi-sacred literature.

(00:24:05):
That's where you get the really poisonous ideas about women.

(00:24:10):
And, you know, as you say, they...

(00:24:14):
coordinate so horribly, so creepily with the same stuff that we're being told today.

(00:24:22):
Now, Ovid, okay, he's in the late first century BC, and he pulls this idea out of his ass.

(00:24:33):
We don't know where else he got it,

(00:24:34):
but he decides that abortion is the worst crime in the history of the world.

(00:24:39):
Abortion is

(00:24:40):
equivalent to genocide.

(00:24:42):
It's a potential genocide every time a courtesan, you know, has an abortion.

(00:24:51):
And he says,

(00:24:52):
you know,

(00:24:53):
abortion is a threat to the whole sacred history of the world,

(00:24:57):
which is centered on Rome and its empire.

(00:25:00):
So if these women of myth and legend had had abortions after they were raped by

(00:25:09):
gods or had affairs with gods and got pregnant and they were destined to give birth

(00:25:14):
to the heroes who would champion Rome or found Rome,

(00:25:19):
then if these women had committed the crime of abortion, then they would have snuffed out

(00:25:31):
the providential history of the world.

(00:25:34):
The world is destined by the gods to be governed by Rome.

(00:25:38):
But if women had refused,

(00:25:41):
for example,

(00:25:42):
if the princess Ilya had refused to give birth to the twins who founded Rome after

(00:25:52):
she was raped by a god,

(00:25:55):
then we wouldn't have Rome

(00:25:57):
And the world would be just falling into nothingness because Rome is what holds the

(00:26:03):
world together.

(00:26:04):
And there's a parallel story that's told by the anti-abortion movement.

(00:26:14):
Okay.

(00:26:16):
Mary, she must have thought about getting an abortion.

(00:26:21):
What an inconvenient, embarrassing pregnancy for her.

(00:26:26):
Why didn't she just get rid of it?

(00:26:29):
Well, because of divine providence.

(00:26:31):
And had she gotten rid of it, we wouldn't have Christ.

(00:26:34):
The world would not be saved.

(00:26:36):
You know, we would all be going to hell for our sins.

(00:26:41):
Yeah, and there's...

(00:26:43):
I don't think there's a causal relationship between Ovid and between this modern

(00:26:55):
anti-abortion propaganda.

(00:26:59):
It's just that this is kind of the thing that bubbles up when men think defensively

(00:27:06):
about women's reproductive freedom.

(00:27:10):
Well,

(00:27:10):
so I have this theory,

(00:27:12):
and you may or may not agree with me,

(00:27:14):
it's sort of irrelevant,

(00:27:16):
but that the sort of origin of patriarchy is men's desire to control women's

(00:27:23):
reproductive labor and perhaps both

(00:27:26):
their desire to control the means of production,

(00:27:28):
women,

(00:27:29):
and also perhaps fear and envy of what women could do that they couldn't.

(00:27:33):
And I think that we really see that in this abortion rhetoric.

(00:27:38):
So while there may not be a causal relation,

(00:27:40):
we definitely see this idea just injected into the culture for thousands of years

(00:27:48):
that like the really,

(00:27:49):
really,

(00:27:49):
really bad thing is women controlling their uteruses.

(00:27:54):
Why are they so obsessed with this?

(00:27:57):
Well,

(00:27:59):
I think it does have something to do with the cult of celibacy,

(00:28:05):
where the point in which anti-choice propaganda gets worse and worse and worse over

(00:28:14):
the centuries.

(00:28:16):
And where it gets really,

(00:28:18):
really bad or starts to get really,

(00:28:22):
really bad so that women making reproductive choices are demonized.

(00:28:28):
They are the ultimate evil.

(00:28:29):
They should be tracked down.

(00:28:32):
tortured, killed, burned to death.

(00:28:34):
That's during the witch hunts, right at the dawn of the early modern period.

(00:28:41):
So this is the late 15th century.

(00:28:43):
The Renaissance not quite yet started.

(00:28:46):
Depends on how you date the Renaissance.

(00:28:49):
Anyway, there's a celibate monk, Heinrich Kramer, who writes the definitive story

(00:29:00):
handbook for persecuting witches and um he has a visceral um deeply deeply rooted

(00:29:14):
hatred of women

(00:29:17):
And like you said, this would be connected to his desire to control women, to punish women.

(00:29:26):
And it's a heightened emotion in his case because he's a celibate monk.

(00:29:35):
So he's forbidden from touching women.

(00:29:39):
Household is completely out of his sphere.

(00:29:43):
He can't control women.

(00:29:47):
And he apparently tries to through convents.

(00:29:53):
And he seems,

(00:29:55):
you know,

(00:29:55):
from what's been handed down to us about him,

(00:29:58):
he seems to have been either a rapist or a sexual harasser of nuns because he was

(00:30:06):
banned.

(00:30:06):
At one point, he was banned from convents, which is really, really extreme.

(00:30:13):
For them to have taken that step,

(00:30:15):
you know,

(00:30:16):
against a male cleric or male religious was really,

(00:30:22):
really extreme because I was assumed that,

(00:30:25):
you know,

(00:30:26):
the priest will need to go into this convent because they can't have mass

(00:30:30):
otherwise.

(00:30:33):
but he was banned um so um he um you know then um you know comes up with this idea

(00:30:42):
or um strengthens it we're not sure whether you know this is originally his idea um

(00:30:51):
but his idea that he pounds in

(00:30:55):
in this handbook of his, is that women are the destruction of the entire universe.

(00:31:04):
Because not only are they aborting and killing women,

(00:31:11):
mortal babies and dedicated them to Satan.

(00:31:17):
They are also mating with demons and that's breeding Satan's army.

(00:31:22):
So the implication of this is that when we have the apocalypse,

(00:31:25):
the human army is going to be too small and we'll lose to the demons.

(00:31:32):
I mean, this is really the idea.

(00:31:36):
So, so talk about imperialism.

(00:31:39):
Yeah.

(00:31:40):
You know, talk about wild, you know, supernatural distortions of the imperialist idea.

(00:31:47):
You know, our women need to beef up our army.

(00:31:49):
So they need to breed up a storm,

(00:31:51):
you know,

(00:31:51):
or we're going to be flushed down the historical toilet overrun by our enemies.

(00:31:56):
No, we are going to be overrun by supernatural enemies.

(00:31:59):
Yeah.

(00:32:00):
Because Heinrich Kramer's hatred of women has reached supernatural proportions.

(00:32:07):
I mean, it's just truly unhinged.

(00:32:10):
But,

(00:32:11):
okay,

(00:32:11):
I want to read something that you sent me that I think is on this point,

(00:32:17):
and it's amazing.

(00:32:18):
So we were talking via email about sort of the history of the anti-abortion propaganda and

(00:32:24):
the history of men's efforts to control what women do with their bodies.

(00:32:29):
And you sort of summed up your entire book with this paragraph.

(00:32:33):
And here's what you said.

(00:32:34):
Ovid, women could kill world-saving Rome if they wanted to.

(00:32:39):
The early Christians.

(00:32:41):
Women kill men's souls and endanger the coming of God's kingdom with their silly,

(00:32:45):
distracting demands for partnership with men and authority within the home.

(00:32:49):
God, that sounds familiar.

(00:32:51):
The witch hunters.

(00:32:52):
Women kill God's army in the womb and in the cradle.

(00:32:56):
The Victorians and the 1950s American housewife called.

(00:32:59):
Women will kill the home and drive men to barbarism if they don't marry early and

(00:33:03):
have lots of children.

(00:33:05):
the present day anti-abortion movement,

(00:33:07):
women kill American competitiveness,

(00:33:09):
holiness,

(00:33:10):
and the white future.

(00:33:12):
And it's just, you sum it up so well.

(00:33:15):
And you talk a lot about, you know, the right focusing on themes of genocide with abortion.

(00:33:22):
There seems to have always been this notion of women as genocidal maniacs or maybe

(00:33:27):
aspiring genocidal maniacs,

(00:33:30):
particularly at times where men are committing actual genocide.

(00:33:33):
Um,

(00:33:35):
And it's just so obviously false that women are the real threats to society,

(00:33:39):
family,

(00:33:40):
children,

(00:33:40):
the home,

(00:33:41):
whatever.

(00:33:41):
It's men.

(00:33:43):
But why is it so easy for these false ideas of women as the really dangerous ones to catch on?

(00:33:49):
Is it just that we have so much propaganda that we fertilize the soil with?

(00:33:54):
Well,

(00:33:55):
men have been,

(00:33:57):
you know,

(00:33:57):
up to a couple of centuries ago,

(00:34:00):
men were almost the exclusive authors.

(00:34:05):
You know, even when women were literate, they couldn't publish.

(00:34:09):
So men have the exclusive capacity to spread these ideas around and women have not

(00:34:17):
been able to counter them.

(00:34:19):
Not until now.

(00:34:22):
And,

(00:34:22):
you know,

(00:34:23):
you're absolutely right about women,

(00:34:27):
men foisting their own aggression and their own crimes onto women through words.

(00:34:38):
Men are imputing to women their violence and their injustice and their arbitrariness.

(00:34:49):
And this actually becomes substantive, a substantive excuse for genocide.

(00:35:02):
And that's...

(00:35:08):
I think of the situation that's developing right now.

(00:35:13):
We've got a situation in the United States where we could have a real femicide

(00:35:23):
because the rule of law as far as women's reproduction goes is breaking down very

(00:35:30):
rapidly in the red states.

(00:35:33):
You have what could develop into a reign of terror against pregnant women.

(00:35:40):
You know,

(00:35:40):
focused,

(00:35:40):
of course,

(00:35:41):
on women of color and poor women,

(00:35:44):
women who can't can't fight back.

(00:35:48):
And the justification for this is genocide.

(00:35:52):
So you read the propaganda of the American anti-abortion movement and all over the

(00:35:59):
place,

(00:35:59):
genocide,

(00:36:00):
genocide,

(00:36:00):
genocide,

(00:36:01):
genocide,

(00:36:01):
genocide.

(00:36:03):
You know, tons of comparisons.

(00:36:07):
of the very ordinary,

(00:36:09):
very conscientious,

(00:36:11):
very well-run system of American reproductive medicine,

(00:36:17):
or it was that,

(00:36:19):
until a few years ago.

(00:36:22):
And that's compared to the Holocaust.

(00:36:26):
Absolutely shamelessly compared to the extermination of six million Jews.

(00:36:36):
So,

(00:36:36):
OK,

(00:36:36):
I really want to emphasize what you said about how accusing people of genocide is

(00:36:42):
often a justification for genocide,

(00:36:45):
because in my work with abused women,

(00:36:48):
what we often tell them is every allegation is a confession.

(00:36:53):
You know,

(00:36:54):
they they accuse you of what they are doing or what they're going to do,

(00:36:58):
because abusers always believe that their abuse is justified.

(00:37:03):
They always have to other the victim and assert that the victim has done something

(00:37:08):
to warrant the abuse.

(00:37:09):
And I think that this is so clear on a mass scale in your book and in your work

(00:37:16):
that we have this individual phenomenon with abusive men,

(00:37:19):
but we also have this collective phenomenon of every allegation is a confession.

(00:37:24):
We accuse women of engaging in genocide so that we can engage in femicide and so

(00:37:28):
that we can engage in mass genocide against anybody we have othered.

(00:37:33):
Right.

(00:37:34):
Yes.

(00:37:36):
I think that is absolutely true.

(00:37:39):
And that psychological paradigm,

(00:37:43):
when it expands to a whole political system,

(00:37:48):
it becomes incredibly destructive.

(00:37:51):
It becomes world destabilizing because the anti-abortion movement latches on

(00:37:59):
to the Holocaust and World War II for a reason.

(00:38:05):
And that reason is that genocide is a worldwide emergency,

(00:38:10):
especially when it's connected to a world war like World War II.

(00:38:17):
So the Allies during World War II fought,

(00:38:23):
and most people would say justifiably,

(00:38:25):
an all-out war against fascism.

(00:38:30):
They bombed German cities to ashes.

(00:38:34):
They dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, two nuclear bombs, and got away with it.

(00:38:45):
Because this was an emergency,

(00:38:50):
the fascist genocidal forces were set to destabilize and destroy the planet.

(00:39:00):
So you arguably had to act with extreme measures.

(00:39:10):
And Britain especially and the United States killed a lot of civilians,

(00:39:16):
a lot of innocent people in their pushback.

(00:39:21):
So the anti-abortion movement loves the example of the Holocaust because of the

(00:39:30):
extreme violence that was needed to push back against it.

(00:39:34):
So their reasoning is, it's an emergency.

(00:39:38):
Yeah, we're going to have innocent victims.

(00:39:41):
And yeah, that's really too bad.

(00:39:43):
And we don't mean it.

(00:39:45):
We're not cruel.

(00:39:48):
We're not destructive.

(00:39:50):
We don't hate women.

(00:39:51):
We're not out, you know, to control women to a fantastic degree.

(00:39:57):
We just need to do this to save our society from utter destruction.

(00:40:02):
And you'll see versions all over anti-abortion propaganda of today.

(00:40:07):
You will see this more or less spelled out.

(00:40:12):
Oh, it definitely is.

(00:40:13):
I mean, I see it.

(00:40:14):
Anytime I post any of my work on social media,

(00:40:17):
particularly about male violence or the thing that really sets them off is if I say

(00:40:23):
something like,

(00:40:24):
you know,

(00:40:24):
the biggest statistical threat to a woman is the man she lives with.

(00:40:28):
And they're on about genocide like before you can even finish the sentence.

(00:40:34):
And it's like they all go to a school where they get these scripts.

(00:40:38):
They're like robots repeating this stuff.

(00:40:41):
It's wild to me.

(00:40:43):
Well, you know, the anti-abortion movement is incredibly organized.

(00:40:52):
It is deeply rooted.

(00:40:53):
It has its own education system.

(00:40:56):
There are, you know, universities, which as one of their priorities...

(00:41:06):
will train people, brainwash them.

(00:41:10):
I'm going to use that word, brainwash them.

(00:41:13):
Under the guise of ordinary degree programs,

(00:41:17):
ordinary professional programs,

(00:41:20):
they will brainwash them.

(00:41:23):
with anti-abortion propaganda.

(00:41:25):
So this has been done ever since Roe v. Wade.

(00:41:31):
And these institutions have been built up very, very carefully.

(00:41:35):
They have periodical publications.

(00:41:38):
They have conferences.

(00:41:40):
The background to this stuff is pretty discreet.

(00:41:49):
But, yeah, you can find it.

(00:41:52):
And,

(00:41:52):
you know,

(00:41:52):
when you read about read the Frank version,

(00:41:55):
you read what these people are saying to themselves,

(00:41:58):
you know,

(00:41:58):
in publishing in documents that are read only internally.

(00:42:01):
It's extra horrifying.

(00:42:05):
Because,

(00:42:06):
you know,

(00:42:06):
none of the excuses that are given in public,

(00:42:11):
none of the moderate talk,

(00:42:13):
talk,

(00:42:13):
you know,

(00:42:14):
none of the false promises are bothered with in this environment.

(00:42:20):
You just say what you think about the rest of America and what you plan to do to them.

(00:42:25):
Absolutely.

(00:42:27):
It is truly horrifying.

(00:42:30):
Well, I will tell you, I went to Catholic schools and

(00:42:34):
And I went to a Catholic college because my goal was to just go to whatever place

(00:42:38):
gave me the biggest scholarship.

(00:42:41):
So I did all this in spite of being raised by very progressive parents and being,

(00:42:45):
you know,

(00:42:46):
pro-choice,

(00:42:46):
like from the cradle.

(00:42:48):
And it is astounding to me in hindsight, the amount of energy these schools spent on abortion.

(00:42:56):
All of our

(00:42:57):
Religion and philosophy and ethics classes were about abortion.

(00:43:02):
And you're right.

(00:43:03):
There would be the public facing talking points and then there would be the

(00:43:08):
internal talking points.

(00:43:09):
And it's true brainwashing because I even found,

(00:43:14):
again,

(00:43:14):
as a progressive child and then a progressive college student who was very

(00:43:18):
pro-choice,

(00:43:19):
you know,

(00:43:19):
they didn't change my mind,

(00:43:21):
but they started to make me frame abortion as something that was like distasteful,

(00:43:25):
at least.

(00:43:26):
And so if they can kind of do that to me, I mean, I obviously don't feel that way anymore.

(00:43:31):
But if they can do that to me, they can do that to anybody.

(00:43:33):
It is it gets in there very deep and they start very young.

(00:43:38):
Right.

(00:43:38):
Yeah.

(00:43:41):
This is really,

(00:43:42):
really interesting to hear about from you about because this is something that,

(00:43:47):
you know,

(00:43:47):
I don't know about.

(00:43:48):
I was raised United Methodist by pretty liberal parents.

(00:43:53):
So I don't have any sense of how the education system works, you know, from early on.

(00:43:59):
Um,

(00:43:59):
but,

(00:44:00):
um,

(00:44:00):
yeah,

(00:44:01):
I believe you when you tell me this,

(00:44:03):
because I was sort of dealing as,

(00:44:05):
as a frequent visitor with evangelicals and with Catholics at their institutions,

(00:44:10):
you know,

(00:44:10):
and I,

(00:44:11):
I also,

(00:44:11):
um,

(00:44:13):
wrote for one of their journals,

(00:44:15):
um,

(00:44:15):
uh,

(00:44:16):
on cultural matters and got close to an editor,

(00:44:18):
um,

(00:44:21):
and,

(00:44:21):
you know,

(00:44:23):
wrote for,

(00:44:23):
for Catholic magazines as well.

(00:44:26):
Um,

(00:44:29):
I tended to find a lot of open-mindedness on other topics,

(00:44:38):
even on topics that are supposed to be quite controversial,

(00:44:44):
such as gay rights.

(00:44:46):
And I was able to tell my evangelical editor at a banquet surrounded by people

(00:44:55):
Catholic and evangelical people, very conservative.

(00:45:00):
You know, I was I was able to tell him right out loud, you know.

(00:45:05):
Don't bother.

(00:45:09):
Tell your friends not to bother offering me a teaching job because I will not.

(00:45:15):
you know sign their ideological pledge because my my agent is openly gay and he's a

(00:45:24):
good and decent person and I will not entertain the idea that he's going to burn in

(00:45:28):
hell because of who he loves

(00:45:30):
So I said that, and he accepted it.

(00:45:32):
And I did find,

(00:45:33):
you know,

(00:45:34):
in many other environments that there was a degree of tolerance toward gay people.

(00:45:43):
There was theological tolerance, too.

(00:45:45):
You know, as a Quaker, I could say, well, you know, I don't believe in hell at all.

(00:45:49):
And they would say, yes, fine, we're kind of sympathetic to that, and we're evolving, too.

(00:45:54):
And, you know, you'd get all of this, and they would mean it as well.

(00:45:58):
They would be accepting...

(00:46:00):
of these views,

(00:46:01):
if they came up among,

(00:46:03):
you know,

(00:46:03):
their own parishioners or their own fellow congregants,

(00:46:08):
it was fine.

(00:46:10):
You know, and their institutions were slowly evolving as well.

(00:46:13):
I write about this in the book.

(00:46:18):
But,

(00:46:19):
you know,

(00:46:20):
you say the word abortion or reproductive rights and there's an immediate shutdown.

(00:46:28):
Oh, it's it's it's unbelievable.

(00:46:31):
Yes, they're absolutist.

(00:46:34):
They are absolutist about this.

(00:46:36):
They will not discuss it.

(00:46:38):
And the absolutism goes to surprising directions.

(00:46:43):
The absolutism extends surprisingly far in their political goals.

(00:46:52):
So I've been reading that,

(00:46:56):
you know,

(00:46:56):
whole large group of academics,

(00:46:59):
you know,

(00:46:59):
who get together to discuss strategy and

(00:47:04):
for um the anti-choice movement um want it want all contraception to be illegal

(00:47:12):
even condoms oh yeah it's they call them abortifacients

(00:47:17):
And,

(00:47:17):
you know,

(00:47:17):
condoms,

(00:47:19):
they say,

(00:47:19):
you know,

(00:47:19):
you're you're interfering with the possibility of pregnancy and therefore

(00:47:24):
undermining God's will.

(00:47:26):
It's like, well, they don't say that about antibiotics.

(00:47:29):
It's just so clearly skewed towards keeping and getting women pregnant.

(00:47:34):
And so I'll tell you,

(00:47:35):
I had they Catholics are so strange about this that even when you get kind of like

(00:47:43):
abortion adjacent,

(00:47:46):
it's like.

(00:47:47):
I don't want to say they can't think because that that sounds too dismissive.

(00:47:51):
There's this intense, visceral, emotional reaction.

(00:47:54):
So as someone who did,

(00:47:55):
you know,

(00:47:56):
12 years of hard time in Catholic school,

(00:47:58):
I have a ton of Catholic friends and a lot who are still practicing.

(00:48:03):
And we are our second child.

(00:48:06):
We lost our second child.

(00:48:08):
And but we found out we found out this was going to happen when I was pregnant with

(00:48:12):
her because,

(00:48:13):
you know,

(00:48:13):
they can do all kinds of testing and all of this.

(00:48:15):
And

(00:48:16):
I remember like sharing with friends and sharing on Facebook,

(00:48:20):
you know,

(00:48:20):
we've gotten this terminal diagnosis.

(00:48:22):
We're trying to figure out what to do, that sort of thing.

(00:48:25):
And my friends who are Catholic were so unable to see anything other than they had

(00:48:34):
to make sure I didn't have an abortion.

(00:48:36):
And so, you know, we got tons of messages of, well, doctors are always wrong.

(00:48:40):
And, you know, doctors try to convince you to have abortions.

(00:48:44):
And I'm sure if you just pray enough, it'll be OK.

(00:48:47):
And it was it was shocking because, like, these are the people who are supposed to value life.

(00:48:51):
So these are the people who are supposed to,

(00:48:54):
you know,

(00:48:54):
come in and be like,

(00:48:55):
oh,

(00:48:55):
this is so awful.

(00:48:56):
How can we support you?

(00:48:58):
But they're just totally have blinders on for the anti-abortion stuff because we

(00:49:03):
start with them when they're like three,

(00:49:04):
four and five years old.

(00:49:06):
And so they just can't see anything else.

(00:49:09):
Oh,

(00:49:09):
well,

(00:49:10):
you know,

(00:49:10):
the really scary thing about this to me is,

(00:49:15):
you know,

(00:49:16):
brainwashing that's effective to that extent,

(00:49:23):
you know,

(00:49:24):
does spread.

(00:49:25):
And it does, for example, kind of reach out to the anti-vax people that,

(00:49:33):
and coalesce with the the anti-vax movement so um you know there was one um paper i

(00:49:41):
read given it at one of these conferences um that was it was this was during covid

(00:49:48):
um and the

(00:49:51):
anti-abortion activist, an academic who gives this paper, decides to rip into the, you

(00:50:04):
provision for COVID,

(00:50:08):
um,

(00:50:08):
because,

(00:50:09):
um,

(00:50:10):
uh,

(00:50:12):
tissue from,

(00:50:14):
um,

(00:50:14):
aborted fetuses,

(00:50:16):
um,

(00:50:16):
was apparently embryonic tissue,

(00:50:18):
uh,

(00:50:19):
was used.

(00:50:20):
Um, some of this was, um, uh, tissue from a discarded embryos from fertility clinics.

(00:50:32):
So, um,

(00:50:35):
He had this whole plan,

(00:50:38):
you know,

(00:50:40):
political and legal for,

(00:50:43):
you know,

(00:50:43):
throwing a Molotov cocktail into the research for the vaccine and into vaccine

(00:50:50):
provision,

(00:50:51):
you know,

(00:50:52):
should the vaccine be developed.

(00:50:54):
Yeah.

(00:50:55):
So I'm not quite sure at what point of vaccine provision he came in here,

(00:51:03):
but he had a whole sort of horrifying scheme,

(00:51:07):
which would have gotten a lot of people killed.

(00:51:10):
It had to do with refusing the vaccine and also refusing quarantine.

(00:51:17):
I was thinking about this a lot when I was reading your book with,

(00:51:22):
you know,

(00:51:22):
there's the anti-vaccine stuff because it's aborted fetal cells.

(00:51:26):
And so there's there's what I and you and probably most of the listeners think of as morality.

(00:51:32):
So morality is things like we don't spread diseases to people.

(00:51:35):
You know, we support our friend whose baby is dying.

(00:51:38):
We don't abuse women.

(00:51:39):
You know, these are all the things that we take for granted.

(00:51:42):
Yeah.

(00:51:43):
But then this sort of propagandized religious morality comes in and cannibalizes

(00:51:51):
actual ethics that actually improve human life.

(00:51:54):
And the thing that this reminds me of in your book is you talk about St.

(00:52:00):
Augustine.

(00:52:02):
And as a recovering Catholic and as a philosophy major,

(00:52:06):
I've read enough Augustine to just permanently destroy my brain.

(00:52:10):
but the story that i have been told about augustine is very different from the

(00:52:15):
story that you tell and and the story that i have been told is that he was this

(00:52:19):
like hedonistic monster who was you know having all this debauched sex and he was

(00:52:26):
just a bad guy and then he found god and glory be hosanna in the high he became a

(00:52:33):
saint

(00:52:35):
The story you tell is so much more compelling.

(00:52:38):
It's that he was this, like, loving partner and father.

(00:52:41):
And then he found God and he abandoned that.

(00:52:45):
And this,

(00:52:45):
to me,

(00:52:45):
is an example of the,

(00:52:46):
like,

(00:52:47):
propaganda morality cannibalizing the real morality.

(00:52:50):
It seems like finding God made him a worse person.

(00:52:54):
Right.

(00:52:54):
Yeah.

(00:52:55):
Well, the actual, you know, it's...

(00:53:00):
You know,

(00:53:01):
the lies,

(00:53:02):
the propaganda lies told,

(00:53:05):
you know,

(00:53:05):
about all these authors are just kind of astonishing.

(00:53:09):
You know, it's not too hard.

(00:53:12):
I'm a translator of Augustine.

(00:53:14):
I translated the Confessions,

(00:53:15):
you know,

(00:53:16):
so I had to go into his life and his thought to some degree,

(00:53:20):
read up on him.

(00:53:22):
as background,

(00:53:23):
and,

(00:53:24):
you know,

(00:53:24):
it's perfectly factual,

(00:53:27):
easy to learn,

(00:53:28):
you know,

(00:53:29):
that he had maybe a short time of running around,

(00:53:35):
and that included some homosexual experimentation.

(00:53:38):
It was probably less than a year.

(00:53:40):
It was very, very ordinary for Roman students at the time.

(00:53:47):
Probably nearly all of them, you know, sold more wild oats than he did.

(00:53:54):
But he wasn't, he simply wasn't like that.

(00:53:58):
He felt very guilty about it, even at the time.

(00:54:02):
And then he latched on to a woman that he really loved.

(00:54:07):
And he was devoted to her,

(00:54:10):
but much more devoted to their child,

(00:54:15):
the child that they had together.

(00:54:19):
And so,

(00:54:20):
yeah,

(00:54:21):
his getting religion was,

(00:54:24):
as you say,

(00:54:25):
was a disruption of his faithfulness and his really high quality performance as a

(00:54:34):
family man.

(00:54:36):
Um, you know, he took this woman with him to, to Italy.

(00:54:38):
Um,

(00:54:41):
um,

(00:54:41):
he was devoted to educating his child the same or even more so than if the child

(00:54:47):
had been,

(00:54:47):
um,

(00:54:48):
legitimate.

(00:54:49):
Uh, he had big plans for the child.

(00:54:53):
Um, it broke his heart, um, and almost shattered his religion when the child died.

(00:54:58):
Um,

(00:55:02):
So,

(00:55:03):
yeah,

(00:55:04):
we've got to think of him as a broken family man and broken by religion,

(00:55:09):
you know,

(00:55:09):
rather than a,

(00:55:12):
you know,

(00:55:12):
skirt chase or tamed by religion.

(00:55:14):
Yeah,

(00:55:16):
I mean,

(00:55:16):
we see this,

(00:55:17):
I feel like I see this a lot in,

(00:55:19):
you know,

(00:55:20):
readers email me constantly with their problems.

(00:55:24):
And one of the most common themes that I see is that they had an okay marriage,

(00:55:30):
or at least not an abusive one.

(00:55:32):
And then the husband finds religion and finds God,

(00:55:35):
and he just becomes an absolute fucking monster.

(00:55:38):
Like, it's wild to me.

(00:55:42):
Right.

(00:55:43):
Yeah.

(00:55:43):
It's as if the religion becomes a license.

(00:55:48):
Yes.

(00:55:48):
Yes.

(00:55:49):
I think it is.

(00:55:50):
I think it does.

(00:55:50):
Yeah.

(00:55:53):
And the...

(00:55:59):
One of the most disturbing things that I see in anti-abortion propaganda of today

(00:56:05):
is this Dietrich Bonhoeffer story.

(00:56:08):
I don't know whether you've come across it.

(00:56:10):
Okay, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

(00:56:15):
He's a Protestant clergyman.

(00:56:19):
He's opposed to the Nazis.

(00:56:21):
He flees to America for a while, then he goes back.

(00:56:26):
And he gets involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.

(00:56:30):
Yeah.

(00:56:32):
they don't really think very deeply about what it would mean if they succeed and

(00:56:39):
what it would mean if they fail and they failed.

(00:56:43):
And failing was probably worse than succeeding.

(00:56:49):
Anyway, they cut out this little bit of the Bonhoeffer story.

(00:56:55):
And that little bit is that he agonizes and he's a pacifist and he doesn't believe in murder.

(00:57:00):
So I,

(00:57:01):
How can he sign on to this assassination?

(00:57:06):
And his reasoning is that national socialism is an absolute evil embodied in Hitler.

(00:57:20):
So you can kill Hitler for the greater good.

(00:57:24):
Right.

(00:57:25):
So what's extracted from the reasoning is we can commit murder for the greater good.

(00:57:35):
We even commit murder for the greater good.

(00:57:38):
And so it's not that...

(00:57:45):
The anti-abortion movement says in public,

(00:57:47):
oh,

(00:57:47):
yes,

(00:57:48):
oh,

(00:57:48):
horribly unfortunate,

(00:57:49):
you know,

(00:57:50):
that some women are dying of miscarriages for care,

(00:57:54):
lack of the care that's denied them in emergency rooms.

(00:57:58):
But, you know, this is just a misunderstanding.

(00:58:01):
And it's the fault of, you know, the...

(00:58:04):
the pro-choice movement, for the pro-abortion movement.

(00:58:11):
It's their fault.

(00:58:12):
And this is just a mix up and we're going to straighten this out.

(00:58:15):
But the real reasoning,

(00:58:16):
you know,

(00:58:17):
behind these deaths and the acceptance of them and the crackdown,

(00:58:22):
you know,

(00:58:22):
the worse and worse measures that are going to lead to more and more deaths is that

(00:58:26):
they have reasoned it out that it's acceptable for them to cause death

(00:58:34):
because in the cause of saving innumerable babies, in the cause of preventing a Holocaust.

(00:58:40):
Well,

(00:58:41):
their framing is it's you're killing,

(00:58:43):
you know,

(00:58:44):
one or five or 10 or 100 women and you're saving,

(00:58:47):
you know,

(00:58:48):
thousands of babies.

(00:58:50):
And I don't think they're even like that.

(00:58:53):
I don't think they're that secretive or shameful about it.

(00:58:56):
You know,

(00:58:57):
they uphold when I was probably 10,

(00:58:59):
they were teaching us about Gianna Mola,

(00:59:02):
who's this Catholic saint from the 1940s,

(00:59:06):
who was canonized because

(00:59:09):
Her fourth pregnancy threatened her life.

(00:59:12):
And rather than have an abortion,

(00:59:15):
she chose to die and leave her child without a mother and give birth.

(00:59:19):
And so the message clearly there is that the life of the child trumps the life of the mother.

(00:59:27):
But, you know, you can you can.

(00:59:30):
tell what the actual calculation is and what the actual sentiment is behind this rhetoric.

(00:59:38):
Because in a situation like this one,

(00:59:43):
and probably also in the past situation when abortion was legal,

(00:59:47):
up to Roe v.

(00:59:49):
Wade,

(00:59:49):
or legal in a lot of the country,

(00:59:52):
was that you weren't preventing abortions right you weren't saving babies you were

(00:59:57):
um you know the back alley abortions uh would endanger the life of the mother often

(01:00:03):
kill the mother and of course um um the the fetus would perish too um so you had

(01:00:11):
all of that going on um and then you had large number of women traveling to to have

(01:00:18):
abortions

(01:00:18):
Right now you have medication abortions,

(01:00:20):
which are still,

(01:00:21):
you know,

(01:00:22):
widely available in red states through telehealth.

(01:00:27):
So you have this huge,

(01:00:30):
you know,

(01:00:31):
campaign that's very costly in women's lives and in welfare of women and families.

(01:00:40):
Yeah.

(01:00:43):
And,

(01:00:44):
you know,

(01:00:45):
might lead to a civil war,

(01:00:47):
you know,

(01:00:47):
because of political destabilization,

(01:00:50):
because women are not going to accept the degree of control and punishment that

(01:00:56):
they're in for.

(01:00:58):
So you have,

(01:01:00):
you know,

(01:01:00):
if you do all the calculations correctly,

(01:01:04):
you probably,

(01:01:05):
you have no net savings of fetuses' lives.

(01:01:09):
Well, I can tell you that we don't.

(01:01:11):
There was a study that came out, I think it was 2017.

(01:01:14):
I'll find it.

(01:01:15):
I'll send it to you.

(01:01:16):
And I'll also put it in the show notes.

(01:01:18):
that compared countries with restrictive abortion laws and countries where abortion

(01:01:23):
was completely banned to countries with liberal abortion laws.

(01:01:27):
And what they found is that the countries with the most restrictive abortion laws

(01:01:32):
had the highest rate of abortion because the laws didn't stop abortion.

(01:01:36):
Instead,

(01:01:37):
what they did is they created these miserable conditions that led to even more

(01:01:42):
abortions.

(01:01:43):
You know,

(01:01:43):
you had second and third and fourth generation abortions of children raised in

(01:01:46):
poverty and in terrible

(01:01:48):
circumstances so it's it's not actually about abortion it never has been or it's

(01:01:53):
never been about ending abortion i'll say that it's right yeah it's it's um you

(01:02:00):
know the the um pro-choice activists are are absolutely right it's about punishing

(01:02:07):
women it's about controlling and punishing women

(01:02:11):
And it always has been in one way or the other, as your book shows.

(01:02:15):
So I'll ask you,

(01:02:16):
I have one final question for you in this moment of immense historical darkness.

(01:02:23):
You know,

(01:02:24):
I kind of delayed reading your book for a while after I got it because I was like,

(01:02:30):
it's just going to make me upset to think about all these things that have happened

(01:02:33):
to all these women.

(01:02:35):
And there is a lot of darkness in it, but

(01:02:38):
It's a darkness that kind of offers hope because it weaves this thread through all

(01:02:44):
of history and shows that like things are always changing because we change them.

(01:02:49):
And I liked how your book made me feel connected to like historical figures as real people.

(01:02:56):
And so even though there's like all this darkness in it, it did close making me feel hopeful.

(01:03:03):
So here's my question to you.

(01:03:06):
How do you look at all this misery?

(01:03:08):
How do you write about all this misery and still sustain hope to keep pressing on?

(01:03:15):
Well, you got to somehow have a sense of humor about it.

(01:03:22):
And you can make that a really angry sense of humor.

(01:03:25):
That's fine.

(01:03:26):
That'll work.

(01:03:27):
I heard something wonderful on YouTube today.

(01:03:29):
The Danish foreign minister directed at Donald Trump and MAGA America words that he

(01:03:39):
said they would understand,

(01:03:42):
which were,

(01:03:43):
fuck off.

(01:03:46):
I know.

(01:03:47):
Simple to the point.

(01:03:49):
Simple to the point.

(01:03:50):
You know, as far as greeting it goes, here's language that you understand.

(01:03:55):
Fuck off.

(01:03:56):
I love it.

(01:03:57):
The time has passed when we try to keep having discussion with people we know will

(01:04:02):
never have it with us.

(01:04:04):
The time has passed when we tie ourselves in knots trying to be polite and constructive.

(01:04:13):
The time has come to fight.

(01:04:15):
And for those of us who are committed pacifists,

(01:04:20):
who do not fight in a bodily sense,

(01:04:23):
we have to fight with what we have.

(01:04:26):
And that's with our language and that's with our truth.

(01:04:31):
Beautiful message.

(01:04:32):
I love that.

(01:04:33):
And,

(01:04:34):
you know,

(01:04:34):
when you were when you were opening the podcast and talking about why you wrote

(01:04:38):
this book and why you write books generally,

(01:04:41):
you said it's because it's what I can do.

(01:04:44):
And that's all anyone can do is what they can do.

(01:04:47):
Right.

(01:04:49):
And when you do what you can,

(01:04:51):
your mood lifts,

(01:04:54):
your heart lifts,

(01:04:56):
and you meet people who are of your mind and people who are sympathetic and people

(01:05:03):
who are fighting with you,

(01:05:06):
each person in his or her own way.

(01:05:09):
And then you really feel hope.

(01:05:15):
But the time certainly has passed when we can lie to ourselves about what is going on.

(01:05:23):
We have to face head on what we are dealing with,

(01:05:27):
what we're going to be dealing with for a long time now.

(01:05:31):
Yeah, I think that's a good note to end it on.

(01:05:33):
Sarah, thank you so much.

(01:05:35):
It has been such a gift to have you on the podcast.

(01:05:38):
I hope everyone goes out and buys your book.

(01:05:40):
It's going to be out this week and it's really remarkable.

(01:05:44):
I'll put all of Sarah's information in the show notes and I will be back next week

(01:05:49):
with Soraya Shemali.

(01:05:50):
Sarah, just thank you.

(01:05:52):
Thank you so much.

(01:05:53):
Thank you.

(01:05:53):
This has been lovely.