End Riff

Nathan Connolly: Joanne, this question of abortion rights is one that has been a sharp debate for quite some time. I wonder what it tells us about the nature of debate and disagreement in American history.

Joanne Freeman: Well, this makes me think about the many ways in which there are a lot of different threads of conversation all plugged into this one issue of abortion. There’s a question of religion. There’s a question of women’s rights. There are any number of other threads we could throw in, partisanship and everything else. They’re all highly charged. There’s a long tradition of them being highly charged in American history. This issue brings them together in a really powerful and yet murky kind of way.

Nathan Connolly: When I was in college, I was in some ways grappling with these processes through the combination of growing up in the Catholic church and coming of age in that space, but also arriving in university life where a whole host of questions, as we know, get thrown on the table for reconsideration. It was in that space that I came in contact with a mode of argument about abortion that made the following. I’m curious to get your thoughts on it.

Nathan Connolly: That in fact, abortion was considered to be a male solution to the “problem” of pregnancy insofar as it was an act of violence that basically ended a life, and that a feminist action around a pregnancy would mean or include carrying a baby to term, but also advocating for a whole host of social investments around the pregnancy itself: improved access to healthcare, and improved treatment for women who might have to leave work, or thinking much more thoughtfully about the adoption system. In other words, that as coming out of a Catholic church and going to a Catholic university, the way in which we should institutionally think of ourselves as feminists was maybe moving off of the abortion option and thinking much more about the civic meaning of pregnancy itself.

Joanne Freeman: And social change, it sounds like.

Nathan Connolly: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And again, this is not an argument that you hear very often, but it was one that I recall being at least a creative response to an otherwise stark black/white debate.

Joanne Freeman: Wow. No, I can’t say that I actually have heard that argument before. I definitely was not aware of any argument like that back in the ’80s when I first became aware of this issue. I hadn’t thought about it until just this moment when we brought together the fact that evangelical Christianity and women’s rights and civil rights were all bound together. This is the first issue for me that really, I suppose, made me an activist. In the past, I guess I had always assumed that this was mostly a question of women’s rights for me. But I think the religious side of it also probably caught my attention, that something on both halves of that equation as someone who’s a woman and as someone who is Jewish, made me wonder what this debate really was about and made me wonder about what it meant for women and people like me.

Joanne Freeman: It’s interesting because I had a slow entry into deciding what I wanted to do about the issue. I was alarmed, I think, in the ’80s as it was becoming politicized and it felt like lines were being drawn in a way that I wasn’t comfortable. But I wanted to know what I thought about abortion before I took action on it. A friend worked at a women’s health clinic. I actually went for a day and worked at that clinic, really not doing much more than helping women go in and out of different rooms. I think I took some people’s temperature maybe. I mean, I was really just sort of facilitating people moving about, but mostly, I just wanted to be at a clinic that performed abortions and see what that meant and see who these women were and see what was happening.

Joanne Freeman: If I remember correctly, I held one woman’s hand through an abortion.

Nathan Connolly: Wow. Wow.

Joanne Freeman: Right. I wanted to know what it meant. I left that experience feeling this was not something flip. Because I think my sense of the debate at that moment was that people were saying women are just haphazardly using abortion because, hey, it’s easy and we don’t have to worry about being pregnant. That’s not what I saw. That’s not what I saw. I think I left that experience feeling this was not an easy choice for people to make, but it was a choice that people were taking seriously. Then I began to investigate what other people were doing who felt like I did. I actually ended up being part of a, at the time I think we called it Clinic Defense.

Joanne Freeman: Basically just there were groups of us that were put in front of women’s health clinics that performed abortions with the thought that we would just make sure people could get in and out who wanted to get in and out. It was a very organized process. I mean, we had a lot of conversation about it. We learned how to stand up to people. Passive resistance, and other things to do so that we would not ever accelerate into violence if something ever happened. Most of the time this meant really, really early Saturday mornings, me standing with a bunch of really cold people wearing layers of clothing in front of women’s health clinics and nothing happening.

Joanne Freeman: But then there was one Saturday when we were the target. The clinic that I happened to be at was the target and we were attacked by busloads of people. I never have had an experience like that before or since. It was so surreal because there were people running at me, some of them with Bibles, screaming at me that I was a bad Christian. I half wanted to laugh. Partly, I was like, “Well, you got something there. I really am not.” It was such a dramatic example of what we started out by talking about, Nathan, where that was not a conversation I was having by standing in front of that clinic. What I was doing was trying to help women who had made a choice carry that choice out.

Joanne Freeman: There was a man with a Bible running at me and telling me I was a bad Christian. I’m sure from his side he didn’t pick up on my half of that conversation either. But it was such a dramatic example. It was so powerful and immediate of the ways in which people … The issue means a lot to people, but it means that in such different ways. So Nathan, what’s really striking to me is that above and beyond the issue itself, the Supreme Court decision is just as complex and just as tangled. It seems as though when people talk out in the public sphere about what will or won’t happen to Roe v. Wade, more often than not they say that if it gets overturned, it won’t be all in one fell swoop. It’ll be bit by bit because it’s such a tangled issue and it evokes such strong feelings that there might not actually be a way, oddly enough, despite all the strong feelings or because of all the strong feelings, to eliminate it any other way.

Nathan Connolly: Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean if you think about it just in terms of the abstract Constitutional questions, the right to privacy is a huge cornerstone of American life more broadly. So folks are going to absolutely want to fight along that axis. You think about as the decision was being decided and hammered out, there were social movements that were in the streets literally shaping the mind of judges in the court. And the language of the decision itself moved and evolved in response to that grassroots effort. That effort has not gone away in the half-century since this decision.

Nathan Connolly: So again, on that line as well, I think you’ll see it be an extraordinarily gnarly set of conflicts to wind this down or to protect it. There’s also, I think, the question as we constantly come back to of just people who are very mindful of the human costs on both sides. So there too you’ll have people who will want to step outside of the narrow frame of the law and constantly cast the debate in bigger moral terms and in terms of who we are as a country. For all those reasons, I think you’ll see a number of really important smaller decisions that are being decided in the wake of the Roe case. In some ways, it’s an even bigger decision than that of Brown, which is Brown still is the law of the land.

Nathan Connolly: No one is rolling back or touching the notion that separate is not equal, even if in fact, we haven’t really done the work to really let desegregation happen the way that it was perhaps most imagined by its advocates. But Roe is very different. Roe is that we’re going back into the case law and into the court of popular opinion and relitigating this thing constantly.

Joanne Freeman: It’s a reminder about something that I think it’s easy to forget, although I suppose less easy nowadays. But I think there’s a tendency to think of Supreme Court decisions, all capital letters. It’s things that are declared and then law has been established. What we’re really talking about with all of these major Supreme Court decisions, but particularly with Roe, is the ground level, real-life implications of those decisions and how even a decision once made isn’t necessarily permanent, that there’s always the possibility for better and for worse of change and that that is worked out on the ground and not in a court.

Nathan Connolly: That’s it for today. But let us know what you thought of the episode. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Special thanks this week to the Johns Hopkins studios in Baltimore.

Joanne Freeman: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Johns Hopkins University, and The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 10: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University.

Speaker 10: BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.