Part Two: Abortion and its Defenders: From Weimar to the Bay

In part two, Margaret continues to talk with Samantha McVey about the syndicalists who ran a network of 200 clinics in Weimar Germany and the feminists who defended Roe-era clinics in California

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Cool People, the
Cool Cool Thing with the snow. There's only forward. I'm
your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this is a podcast about
cool people did cool stuff with this title that probably
is the same as what I just said. And my
guest today is the host of cool Stuff your mom
wasn't cool enough to know about, Samantha mcfae.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
I love this. Thank you so much. I'm so glad
to be back on with y'all. This makes me Yeah,
this is well.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
I guess I should do the rest of the introductions
with me. Today is my producer, who's always been my producer.
We've always been at war with Oceania. Okay, No, I
shouldn't do that make people think that Sharen is a
permanent producer. Sharen is standing in today for Sophie because
Sharen is awesome. The producers sharene Hi Serene.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
I'm technically a producer because I do book the show,
so I am a producer.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
She's booked all my shows for you. Hell yeah, I
think that's something I have done.

Speaker 3 (01:00):
No, but I'm here and I like the three of us.
I feel like this is a very safe space. You
know what I mean like, I feel very safe with
both of y'all. This is a nice little trio we have.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Yeah, I like it. Let's just stay here.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
Yeah, just stay, just just talk.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, this is now a twenty four to seven live podcast.
You'll be able to hear us sleep.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
I grind my teeth. I'm sorry in advance.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
It's fine. I can go back to sleep.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Danny stress. Yeah, it's attress anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:33):
Well, the other person who has to stress about the
show is Daniel, our audio engineer. Hi, Daniel, Hi, Danel Trian.
We can't go forward and take say high Danel.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Oh Hi, Sorry, I really had a brain fart there.
I haven't said Oh no, I don't hate that. I'm
saying that again. I said that. That's the second time
I said that week.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Brain farts out, Uh fog, brain fall.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
No, no, no glitching. I glitched glitch high Danel, love you, Daniel,
Thanks Danel.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
I met Danel one time, the only time I've ever
been in the studio in California. A little helped us out.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
Yeah, it was the best man. Daniel's the man.

Speaker 2 (02:07):
I bet he doesn't remember us, though, I bet Daniel does.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
I would bet money he's the best, he remembers.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
Yeah, Hi, Daniel.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
Our theme music was written for us by unwoman. And
this is part two of a two parter, although usually
I say that to be like, well, what the fuck
are you doing? There's no way you coul possibly understand
what I'm about to talk about unless you listen to
part one, And this time is not really true because
I'm telling two distinct stories on a similar topic. Last time, well,
in some ways, it's just a continuation of the thing

(02:37):
that we talked about a year and a half ago
when we talked about the Jam Collective, and then on
Monday we talked about the groups of lay organizations in
Germany that performed a million abortions a year and never
got written about in English history. And now we're going
to talk about California, which no one ever talks about. Actually, yeah,

(03:02):
where is this? It's this state they made up to
feature in a new movie called Civil War that comes
out this year.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
Oh my god, that's a separate episode altogether.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
Are you all going to do an episode sharing's the
host of It Could Happen Here, which actually talks about
current events unlike me? Are you all going to talk
about the movie Civil War?

Speaker 3 (03:21):
I mean, I would love to. I don't know, I've
got I think it's a Robert question, to be honest. Yeah, okay,
but that would be really fun. I would like your
take on it, too, though I have some takes. I
have some takes.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
Okay, all right, California, many people have heard of it.
You are doing something right or at least interesting when
history remembers you as part of the Army of Three,
or if people remember you as the first abortion rights
activists in the US, which again we talked about this
last time. I am one hundred percent certain these are

(03:53):
not the first abortion rights activists in the United States.
But you know what, you're doing something right. If people
remember you that as that, it's not their fault they
got called that. Pat McGinnis, Rowenna Gerner, and Lana Clark Fallan.
In the mid nineteen sixties in the Bay Area, they
set up two complementary organizations. One had the catchy name

(04:16):
really just I'm just so over how people name things.
I guess that's what it really comes down to. They
set up the Society for Humane Abortion, which is fine,
it's a SAHA, and they also set up the Association
to Repeal Abortion Laws. Errol and that's fine. Those are
fine names. Saha was the above ground advocacy arm and

(04:38):
Errol did the crimes when in doubt. Every movement is
stronger when the illegal and legal components work together to
support each other. And I am the first person to
ever come up with that idea, get it because first,
and I'm totally the first person should be credited. Yeah, absolutely,
every now and then people like credit like me with

(05:00):
having and I'm like, no, I just repeat the stuff
that I've learned from people anyway. Yeah, totally, I invented everything.
It started with Pat. Pat was a white woman who's
raised Catholic and poor in Ithaca, New York. She was
born in nineteen twenty eight. She joined the army, and

(05:20):
she got in trouble for hanging out with a black soldier.
I think they were fucking. It was like fraternizing with
a black soldier. I assume everything is cod for fucking.
I don't know whether that's true or not. It's fair,
and so they like punish her by sending her off
to some day Like when the state controls you because
you're in the army, they can just be like, now
you've got to go work over there or whatever. She
got out of the army, she moved to the Bay

(05:42):
and by nineteen sixty one she was an abortion rights activist.
And the way she started doing this she just started
standing on street corners and talking to strangers about abortion.
She just was like, Hey, you want to talk about
how it shouldn't be illegal and shouldn't be dangerous to
have abortions in this country? And people would be like, yeah, okay,
and like, what an it's not outdated? What an old

(06:05):
fashioned but not outdated way to start making change?

Speaker 2 (06:09):
You know?

Speaker 3 (06:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
I feel like she was taking on like old school
preachers who used to just standing in the middle of
the street and start screaming at you about going to hell.
So she's like, you know what, let me try this
in my tactic. Let me see do you know about
abortion and why should be uh legal?

Speaker 1 (06:23):
Yeah? Yeah. And it wasn't quite soapboxing, which is that weird.
I'd learned so much about soapboxing from doing the show,
because you have people talk about the like literally stand
out a soapbox. It turns out that was like that
was just twitter before you had twitters. You would go
to the public square and there'd be like forty people
standing on soapboxes. You just go walk around like people
were really bored before the invention of TV.

Speaker 2 (06:43):
You know, they do that at college campuses, or they
did when I was in college, and that's been that's
been a minute. That could be around the same time.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
But they did that too. There was probably hackey sacking,
did redude.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
Oh they were yelling about everybody going to hell oh oh,
but some of them may be hacky sacking that problem.
That's about the time frame. Okay, okay, oh, I feel outdated.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
I don't know. I just assume that everyone still does
exactly the same things that we did when we were kids.

Speaker 2 (07:06):
Thank you, and I from the same generation, so I
appreciate that you're kind of on point with my life.
And I feel both sad and validated.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
So.

Speaker 1 (07:18):
Pat By nineteen sixty two, she starts a group. I
have a feeling this group is just her, but I'm
not one hundred percent certain. The Citizens Committee for Humane
Abortion Laws, And basically her argument was, and this is
an entirely solid argument, fewer people will die if abortion
is legalized, and also what if people owned the inside
of their own bodies, Like she literally phrased it, as

(07:42):
like people own their own internal organs.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
I'm like, points made.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
That makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, And
so she started doing media talks and conducted opinion polls
and shit, and she ran a service where people could
ask her about abortion by mail, and so like, I
get it why she's called the first abortion tried activist,
and like, I'm sure I've covered a lot of people
talking about fairly similar things in the nineteenth century or whatever.
But she was just like on the ground working as

(08:09):
an activist alone, and like, more fucking power to her.
In nineteen sixty four, Rowenna Gerner showed up at her
apartment just like cold called stranger and was like, hey,
I hear you're the lady trying to do something about
abortion that rules.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Can I help make friends?

Speaker 3 (08:24):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
The subtext here is that she knew where the apartment was.
I think that the like asking questions by mail was
just out of her own apartment. I cannot imagine. I
think that the anti abortion movement didn't really pick up
speed until the seventies and eighties, you know, because it
was already illegal. It's so hard for me to wrap

(08:48):
my head around someone not using a po box for
asking me about crime. Here's my address, you know, right.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
I wonder she thought that much through as much as like, eh,
this is gonna give everybody a chance to talk to me.
So I was really going to do this. We'll see.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah, she's working great. And the day she shows up,
she sits down and starts helping with the mail and
the two started referring people to abortionists and now they're
doing the crime part. They built a kit that was
a detailed reviews of every provider available, many of whom
were like in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Japan. Japan actually

(09:25):
was a routine procedure at this point, whereas in Mexico
and Puerto Rico is illegal, but it was like easier
to do, you know. And they provided guidance for how
to navigate the whole process. That was like here's what
to do in the cab. There's going to be people
as soon as you ask for this address, the cab
driver is going to try and like take you to
a different provider because he gets a cut if you
go to a different provider. Here's how to tell him

(09:47):
that you're not don't want to go to someone else,
you know, and coached people through the process of controlling
their bodies. When they got reports of providers threatening or
sexually assault patients or whatever, they were like, they'd write
to the provider who was acting up and be like,
wouldn't it be a shame if we started putting your

(10:07):
home address and full legal name in our document instead
of this you know, other place and basically threatened doctors
in the good behavior? Yeah, like it it never works. Yeah.
In nineteen sixty five, Lana Clark Fallon joined and met
like literally there was like out pamphleting in the rain,

(10:28):
and this woman came up and was like, y'all, rule,
can I join the meet?

Speaker 3 (10:33):
Cues that are happening in this in this history are incredible.
They're great.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
Absolutely, you want to meet your people, spend years standing
on street corners telling oh, that's really sad, but it worked.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
You know, I don't know if that applies today, kids,
So don't necessarily do that right now, No wrong.

Speaker 1 (10:53):
Just stand on the corner and talk about the need
for crime, like my upcoming pamphlet the need for ECOCEP anyway, so.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
It's gotta be on the nose.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yeah. So then they built a legal strategy. They were like,
we don't like that this is illegal. How do we
make it legal? And they were like, well, we don't
have like a ton of resources, and let's get ourselves
arrested and we'll take it to court and be like
what we're doing is not fucking wrong, which is a
common legal strategy from for bottom up legal change right

(11:25):
top down. You can just hire people to go bribe people.
And I almost aid Hollywood, but what's the Washington. And
so they wanted to get arrested so they can have
their day in court. And so they they wanted to
set precedent about how abortion needed to be legalized. So
they would do these like publicly available talks and tire
that are entirely illegal about DIY abortion right. And they

(11:47):
would go up to cops and invite them and be like, hey,
I'm giving a crime lecture that's illegal for me to
give later at the following address in case you want
to come. Cops would come, learn how to learn birth control,
and then leave.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
I was gonna say, is this one of those like
sitcom moments of them just never being able to be
arrested and the couse of being like stop, stop, stop,
just just just go to your thing, just stop.

Speaker 1 (12:14):
It took a year whe to successfully get arrested for
actively breaking this law.

Speaker 3 (12:20):
I'm going to go and assume that these women are
all white. These are three white women, so that you're
using your privilege, right, you know what I mean, like
like go to jail.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
But they didn't realize how privileged they would be. They
really did assume this is going to work. Surely, Surely,
this one time they will arrest us, not thinking, oh no,
I'm a white girl who's coming in being all cute
about let me tell you.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Yeahpecially, yeah, no, totally. And it took them a year.
They finally successfully got arrested two of them. That which
is enough that was there, like thank god, yeah, finally,
but the case took so long that ROV went passed
in the meantime. But they did help set California precedent

(13:06):
for like California specific legal legalization of abortion, which obviously
became important again really recently. So they were cool as holl.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
Very cool.

Speaker 1 (13:21):
Now we're going to stick to California, but we're going
to go down to another imaginary city, Los Angeles. Yeah,
no one's ever heard of Los Angeles. It's just it's
the city that exists only in the movies. I think
it's like Gotham. Yeah, it's a joke because everyone in
podcast world except me lives in Los Angeles. I mean, actually,

(13:42):
none of the people whatever, I'm not telling anyone. All
three of us live in Los Angeles. At the following address,
so we talked about some of the people were about
to talk about Last Time You're On, but I want
to go into a little bit more detail and or
like different detail about them because they're just it's cool,
and I learned some cool stuff they did I'll talk
about and it ties into the stuff we're going to
talk about a little bit later. Okay, So, the feminist

(14:04):
movement of the sixties an awful lot. They also did
an awful lot wrong, and we'll talk about some of that.
But one of their favorite tactics was called consciousness raising.
And it's one of these tactics that again kind of
like it's like soap boxing. Soap boxing doesn't make any
sense in the modern world. It's hard to imagine, right,
It's hard to imagine I'm going to go into a
public square, stand on a box and talk and people
aren't just going to like even throw money at me

(14:25):
or call the cops. But that was a big thing
that people did consciousness raising. They were like, patriarchy keeps
women isolated in homes controlled by men. So let's just
get women together under the right circumstances and talking about
the right things and with the right prompts that can
be revolutionary. And they were right, Like a lot of

(14:50):
things that have happened in this world have happened because
marginalized people just get together and compare notes an awful lot,
and like there's like revolutionary like the larger scheme of
things about like pushing social issues, and there's just a
lot of people who realized that their husbands were pieces
of shit who were able to fucking leave. You know.
Consciousness raising got women together to break their isolation, and

(15:13):
it helped folks realize their own agency. And it also
led to the next cool people to discuss, who ran
what was called the self help movement and relatedly, menstrual extraction.
So in nineteen sixty nine, this story did not get
This part of the story did not go out the
way I wanted it to. In nineteen sixty nine, five
women started hanging out with an illegal abortionist named John

(15:35):
Gwynn in Los Angeles and John Gwynn kept going to
jail for abortion, but he was like, whatever, it's the
right thing to do. It's also my job. Got a crime, doctor,
Got do crime as a doctor. We talked about him
before because he invented some game chambers in abortion, like
suction abortion or a way to do it specifically, and

(15:56):
he started making certain types of early abortions way the
fuck safer. A year later, nineteen seventy, he actually get
himself arrested on purpose in a similar way as the
other women we talked about. With the women that we
talked about, because he wants to challenge abortion laws, and
the way he did is really fucking neat. He just
set up an abortion clinic, like put a sign out

(16:18):
front that was like abortions, get them here, abortions here,
they're free. Yeah. It was called the Community Service Center
and Women's Abortion Clinic, and it was a free abortion
clinic in Los Angeles, just like, hey, crime doctor here,
if you need any crimes done.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
Don't even need a coupon, just come on in.

Speaker 1 (16:37):
Yeah. It was open for five days, so longer than
I expeah, I know, and then all of its employees
were arrested of course, John Gwynn, who was twenty nine
years old, was like, yeah, I've done about two thousand
abortions so far in my life. And to be very
he's also already been to jail for it several times
at this point. And even when he charged money, he

(17:00):
charged it like the like three hundred I didn't write
the actual amount, but I read it earlier. It's like
three hundred bucks or so, which is about half of
what hospitals charge for abortions at the time. And well,
you because you could get one in a hospital wasmatically
necessary and then it costs about twice what he was charging.
This man should be cool people who did cool stuff.

(17:22):
Sometimes I talk about men on the show and then
find out that they're awful halfway through researching them.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:29):
In nineteen seventy two, John Gwynn, thirty one, shot his
twenty one year old girlfriend to death.

Speaker 2 (17:34):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (17:35):
He says they were arguing about her using drugs and
she pulled a gun on him, and during the resulting
struggle he accidentally shot her. I have no reason to
believe him, and neither did the course system. Yeah, to
be fair, I have no reason to believe the courses.
To me, either my instinct is fucked this guy, and
I'm real sad about it. Yeah, but before all that, oh,

(17:58):
in nineteen sixty nine, these five women are like hanging
out being like yo, crime doc, Like, what's your crime doc? Ways,
And he's like, well, I'm using this new technique using
suction to extract an early pregnancy. And they're like, way,
that looks easy as shit, and he's like it is
easy as shit. And they're like, we're going to do it,
and he's like okay. And these women they were involved
in above ground organizing for abortion rights too. They'd throw

(18:20):
abortion rights rallies where women from the crowd could come
up to the microphone and just shout to the world
that they'd had abortions and they weren't ashamed, you know,
which is like one of these things where people are like, well,
why are you proud of it? Cause it's illegal and
it shouldn't be. That's why, like, I wouldn't be proud
of having gotten my tonsils out because it's it's legal.
And you know what else is legal? Srean are all

(18:42):
of the things that being advertised legal or some of
them crimes I cannot legally comment on that actually.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
But you know what's going to happen in the future.

Speaker 1 (18:52):
That's true.

Speaker 3 (18:53):
Everything is on the internet forever.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
So yeah, maybe these are crimes. Do whatever the ad is.
What they're saying in the subtext is steal the following product.
That's what they're telling you. Don't, no, don't, don't, sorry,
don't steal the following product. It's only cool to talk
about crimes, not do them. Here's ads and we're back.

(19:28):
So these women, they're like, oh, we've were learning how
to do these pretty effective abortions, you know, these these
early stage pregnancy section abortions. So in Los Angeles has
a conference about abortion, those for physicians, and so these
five women they marched up onto the stage unannounced, like
took the stage and announced to the room, quote, doctors,
we're gonna do it ourselves. Women are gonna take this back.

Speaker 3 (19:51):
Is that a direct quote?

Speaker 1 (19:53):
That is a direct quote of a person describing it, Like, oh,
the participant describing years later, she might have been paraphrasing.
I spent a while trying to figure out whether this
is a direct quote or not, Like it is a
direct quote from the person who said it talking about
it later.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
Okay, I can take that yeah, yeah, good job.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
And then they did that. They did it themselves. And
also one of the cool things of it is they
didn't have to murder any barely adult girlfriends in the process.

Speaker 2 (20:29):
Oh well, no win.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
No twenty one year olds were shot during the resultant
oh dear god thing. So in nineteen seventy one. A
couple years later, they had a meeting and it was
a room packed full of women. I think it comes
out of consciousness raising circles. They and one woman, Carol Downer,
is one of the original five. She holds up a

(20:53):
little suction machine which is at this point just a
syringe and a straw and the name of the straw.
Someone got mad at me for mispronouncing last time. But
I want to ask you, how often in your life
do you say canula?

Speaker 2 (21:05):
Oh? Yeah, neverula. That's the one thing I learned about
podcasting is you realize how quickly you don't know how
to say so many things. Oh yeah, wow, like so
many words. I'm like, I've never said this word out loud?
Am I in the second grade?

Speaker 1 (21:18):
Yeah, you would think that if it was spelled canula,
it'd be pronounced canula. But it's canula, which I can
see now that.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
It ANYWAYX really messed us up.

Speaker 1 (21:28):
Yeah, I know, like that works if you speak Spanish.
They were like some reasonable language, a bastard language, three
languages in a trench coat. So I bet Carol knew
how to pronounce this word. And she pulled out this
machine and everyone was like a little scandalized and a
little bit worried and squeamish. She like describes like people

(21:50):
were like faces were turning green. They're like, oh, I
don't know, you know. So she laid down on the desk,
lifted up her skirts, spread her legs, and showed people
how to insert it and let people come up and
look and their whole candy.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
To herself, yeah, that's the talent.

Speaker 1 (22:05):
And she was just like, well, that's what they teach.
Their whole thing is that they de scandalize a woman's
body from each other and are like, this is a
thing that we can hang out with with each other,
and it can be straight women and gay women together
and it's not a sexual thing, and we can like

(22:27):
do that because there's all this stuff about lesbian politics
and all this, so I can talk about that a
little bit. But and so she inserted it, and she
let people see come up and look and be like,
this is how it works. And then this menstrul extractor
it could be used to remove the mensies, which had
the side effect of preventing pregnancy if one, you know,

(22:49):
if a pregnancy was beginning to start, it would whoops,
make that not be the case. It wasn't a perfect
device yet. It had two major problems. One, if air
went the wrong way, it was like hella dangerous. And
it also and it didn't have a safeguard against that
when murder doctor, I don't normally call abortionist murderers. This

(23:11):
guy is separately and unrelatedly a murderer.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
He killed a twenty one year old everyone, Just in
case you came again to this, he's not talking about
it because he's an abortion.

Speaker 1 (23:21):
Yeah, that part was cool. So the murder that that.

Speaker 2 (23:26):
Part, the murder, the actual killing of a woman, Yeah, okay,
moving on. Uh.

Speaker 1 (23:33):
And two, if there was more material than would fit
in the syringe, you'd have to empty it and reinsert
the whole thing. And so it was just like not
a perfect machine. And so these women were like, why
don't we just fix it? And so these feminist lay
practitioners saw what was needed, and they invented a whole
less new thing. They added a one way valve so
it was no longer dangerous, and they added a mason jar,
and so suddenly it was safe and effective.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
Yes, I've seen the pictures of the with the mason jar. Yeah,
it just popped into MyDD.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
They're so interesting. They've like largely gone out of style,
I think because of the rise of medicated abortions, which
is like, well, if anyone who's listening, don't assume that
the medical practice is fifty years ago, is like, should
be your go to modern at home abortion practice revolves
around medicated abortion, and go look into that on your own,
and don't get your medical information from some translator who
doesn't have a univerus who reads history books for a living.

(24:23):
That's my claim about that. There you go. So this
machine it isn't it isn't an abortion machine. It's a
menstrual extraction machine, which happens to also make you not
pregnant in case that was happening, And you can remove
your menzies all in one go. And that's how they
pitched it, and that's how they kind of got away
with doing it legally. Is they like what. No, it's

(24:43):
for this, you know right. They called the machine the
dell M, which stood for dirty little Machine. I didn't
know this part last time, really because a doctor had disparagingly.

Speaker 2 (24:54):
Called it that a dirty little machine. I really think
this is the punk band name that you're you're sid
telling me.

Speaker 1 (25:02):
Okay, see, I have this rule, that Margaret's law. If
someone says that would be a good band name, after
someone says something, it's not true. That is Margaret's really,
but how dare you? Dirty little Machine would be a
good band name, Like, genuinely, that would be a good
trick me. No, No, normally because like normally like and

(25:22):
I think it's because we got poisoned by this whole
era of like crappy band names like Stone Temple Pilots
and like Dinosaur Junior and Smashing Pumpkins just like lo. Whoa,
that sounds like nonsense. That would be a good band name.
Nonsense doesn't make good band names.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
Well that's a good band name.

Speaker 1 (25:37):
No, what nonsense itself would be? Well that would be
if you're a hardcore band, you could be Margrets anyway,
So this dirty Little Machine could be made by more
or less anyone. So they made zines explaining how to
make it. You couldn't go to like better, Yeah, you

(25:58):
have to go to like to a medical supply place
get the parts, but it could be made with things
that you could purchase legally, you know. And they also
patented it, and this seems to be because they wanted
to keep it the method of its distribution decentralized and
not commercialized. So they wanted to be able to like
prevent someone from claiming financial ownership over it, you know,

(26:20):
because normally you hear about people like doing inventing cool
things and then refusing to take credit and not patting it,
and that's usually the cool thing. But in this particular case,
they were like, we want to protect this from economic exploitation.
And also specifically they were on this tip where they
knew that they needed to control to some degree because
they knew that they shouldn't let it be used as
a machine for eugenics and population control. Because they were

(26:44):
fucking smart and more intersectional than I would inherently assume
some white women to be in nineteen seventy one, you know, impressive.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
The fact that they saw beyond that is very uh
uncommon unfortunately, and.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
What I think it is. This is the best I
can guess. What I think it is is that it's
like not necessarily that like all the old like white
second wave feminists were all bad at intersectionality and more
that they didn't bake intersectionality into what they were doing,
and so a fuck ton of them were really bad
at it, but also a fuck ton of them were

(27:26):
also paying attention and good at it because they were
part of social movements that included other types of people.
That's like my best guess.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
So did this include other types of people, other marginalized people.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
They went pretty quickly around the world to promote this,
and one of the things that they like learned was
that they were like, oh, in a lot of places,
the women's struggle is to not be fucking sterilized, you know.
And they were like, cool, we're not about that. This
is a separate thing, you know. And so by going

(27:59):
around the world, they like and they also could have
looked in their own backyard, I think they did, you know,
they were like, oh, this also matters this other thing.
And then another part of this that I read a
bit about, and I don't remember how much of it
is in the script, is that a lot of the
women's self help group started with white feminism, and it
wasn't just like black women started doing it too, although

(28:20):
that's true. Black women started developing it in very different
ways that met their own community's needs. And one of
the ways that they did it that fucking rules. And
I think the start in Florida was that they started
making a movement that also was like far more actively
inclusive of like birthing centers. Really like kind of what
you were talking about before, Like when we talk about

(28:41):
the right to choose, we actually mean choose, not choose
what we not choose abortion, choose what you want, you know,
and so and so Black feminism did an awful lot
of work around that aspect of it. That's a little
bit off the I mean, it's something that I read
about all the time, but I'm not like looking at
my script when I say that. But yeah, they were like,

(29:03):
this is not a fucking eugenics thing. They were like
really upfront about it. So yeah, they started the women's
self help movement as a result, And you'd have these
parties where women would gather at someone's house and then
they would teach you how to do inspections of your
own body and other people's bodies, how to use a
speculum in a mirror and a flashlight to see and
monitor your own cervix and just like look in yourself

(29:28):
and figure out what's going on.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
That's so interesting. I don't know why, but have you
ever seen fry green Tomatoes?

Speaker 1 (29:35):
No?

Speaker 2 (29:36):
Anybody, wait, Okay, it's okay, it's very it's an ah
well in a lot of ways. But one of the
scenes is the fact that they're all examining their own
vaginas to learn to love themselves. And Kathy Bas's characters like,
oh my god, I gotta go type of situation, and
it was very like women love themselves, women take care
of yourselves things that it was very white, yeah centered. However,

(29:59):
I'm wondering I like back then, because I remember hearing
stories of women coming together and like really having that
movement of loving themselves and loving their bodies, so like
sitting around with each other but looking at them with themselves.
I wonder how many of these men translated as women
just looking at themselves when it was actual actually like
self help things where they're teaching each other how to

(30:22):
do these procedures, but men just dumped it down to oh,
women looking at their vaginas and moving on.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
Yeah, that that sounds true because like this was a
very like I mean, it wasn't like it was science.
It was folk science, but it was science. They were like, hey, look.

Speaker 2 (30:38):
But they were really learning about themselves and their bodies,
which was for such taboo.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
Look how this person's cervix is different than this person's
cervix and yeah, like totally, and like learning to track
when you're ovulating and track like monitor sexual health and
do all of this stuff. That was absolutely like like imagine,
if I love it, someone just never looked at their
own dick. Like I'm just imagining these men complaining about
like waiting looking at themselves. I'm like, the fuck you

(31:02):
thing men are doing like whatever.

Speaker 2 (31:07):
You know the joke about like measuring themselves or comparing
each other.

Speaker 1 (31:10):
Yeah, yeah, totally talking about Yeah I did measuring.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah I don't. There we go.

Speaker 1 (31:15):
That's the term that I don't care about. Yeah, it's
just not as good as an old fashioned pissing. I've
never been in a literal pitio in contest, but you know,
at least there's some skill involved anyway. So Okay, So
they started going around doing these things. There's a quote
from Lindsey Komy, who ran a woman's health clinic for

(31:36):
thirty years, and she describes it self help is a
continuum from learning cervical self examine, fertility tracking to learn
how to perform and then provide abortion care beyond the
walls of the clinic. It was always the movement's course
to teach simple practices with low risk, and then gradually
introduce more complicated practices, sometimes with more risk. And so

(31:57):
the thing that's interesting to me here are the paeril
between this and what was happening in like nineteen thirties Germany.
You have this the above ground thing that's happening is
people are meeting behind closed doors and talking about sexual health,
and then those same people are like, and here's how
to not get pregnant, and then oh if also if
you're pregnant, we'll figure out a way to deal with it,

(32:17):
you know. In nineteen seventy two, Carol Downer and another
woman were rested for practicing medicine without a license because
they were showing someone how to inspect their own cervix
and apply yogurt to treat a yeast infection, and Carol
fought in court like pled not guilty and won and
convinced the jury that the right to self exam is

(32:41):
not practicing medicine without a license, which is a ridiculous
thing to have to win. But I'm glad someone went
through the effort of getting arrested to prove that you're
allowed to look at your own vagina, right like, oh, cervix.
But yeah, So they had this thing they're doing, the
self help movement. And when Roe v. Wade became the

(33:01):
law nineteen seventy three, the folks in LA who developed
the Dell M they came out swinging. They set up
an abortion clinic like write the fuck off. Abortion was
legalized on January twenty second, nineteen seventy three. By February
they were performing legal abortions with a hired and licensed doctor.
Abortion activists in Oakland followed within months, and Menstreul extraction

(33:23):
didn't go away. It kind of went underground, but in
a supported underground environment where like the clinics would, I believe,
provide people with the materials that they needed to build
their d ms and stuff like that, and thousands of
women continue to teach each other the skills necessary to
manage their reproductive health. But it was done in conjunction
with the feminist health centers and clinics. And this is

(33:44):
that shit. I love that I invented where the above
ground and the underground work together as friends with sometimes
you need enough like firewalling, where like the people who
do the above ground shit don't know the illegal people,
you know, but like.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
Whatever, you're right compartment in life.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
Yeah. The Oakland Feminist Women's Health Center, which ran the
Oakland Clinic, started the previous year as one woman, nineteen
year old Laura Brown, and she answered the phone using
three different voices, so people didn't people didn't realize there's
only one woman running this whole thing, you know, by yourself.

Speaker 3 (34:20):
Oh I love that so much.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
Actually, yeah, Later it becomes the Women's Choice Clinic, And
it started before Roe V. Wade as a women's health clinic.
It was teaching cervical exams and menstrul extractions, and of
course it was illegally referring people to abortion providers. They
also ran an abortion hotline and when women would call,
it was very quickly not just one woman running this place.

(34:44):
When women would call and they'd be like, oh, I
need an abortion and also, by the way, I'm in
a domestic abuse situation, the women from this would just
show up in numbers to help the woman and move
all of her stuff out of the house safely. Which
is a thing that I believe is part of the condition,
is that everyone who's listening needs to be prepared to
do that at some point in their lives. If you

(35:04):
hear about someone who needs this help and is willing
and it is safe for them to get it from
you and a large group of people, join a group
of people to helpe anyone escape a domestic abuse situation. Anyway, Okay,
since your same generation as me, you'll remember this. You
remember in ninety two the famous Pat Robertson quote about feminism.

Speaker 2 (35:22):
Oh, Pat Robinson, such a he said so much? Which one.

Speaker 1 (35:25):
Okay, feminism is about a socialist, anti family political movement
that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children,
practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.

Speaker 2 (35:34):
Yeah. I think that became a pretty much a rally
cry for a lot of feminists at that point.

Speaker 1 (35:40):
Oh, I hit all of those notes. I mean, obviously,
I don't believe it's actually about killing children. I believe
it's about imborting fetuses. But it was absolutely a bunch
of socialists, not all of them, but many of them
were socialist and communists. They absolutely did abortions, They absolutely
hated capitalism. They absolutely helped so many women come out
as life lesbians.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
Right.

Speaker 1 (36:01):
I also found connections to early WIKA coming out of
this movement, and I just didn't have time to chase
that rabbit down that rabbit hole. But so even the
practicing which craft part, like, Eh, well, he's not wrong.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
Part of this, he's not wrong the fact that Pat Robinson,
of of course, because this dude was always on TV
trying to get all the old people's money. What he
doesn't understand is the reason WICKA or any other anti
Christian religion was actually on the rise is because of
the Christian trauma that the majority of these women had
gone through when any of these things applied to them.

(36:36):
So in actuality, they created. Yeah, that movement. Yeah, in
like from what I because like on my show, we
did like a literal ten part episode about Christian Christianity
and trauma and religious trauma, and we talked about the
fact that things like the purity culture, which only enhanced

(36:59):
rape culture, was part of the reason women have run
away from religion and leaders like Pat Robinson himself.

Speaker 1 (37:07):
No, that makes so much sense to me. I actually
want to go listen to that episode because that's the
kind of kick I'm on. Later, it was learning about
some of that shit.

Speaker 2 (37:14):
You know, there's so much trauma.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
Okay, So there's another origin to the abortion rights movement.
So we trace this one the women's self help right now,
we're gonna traces the Black Panther Party. Yes, and the
Black Panther Party had been doing its thing with the
medical world, which we've talked about a few times. We
did an episode about the Black Panther Party. We've also
talked about the Young Lords and a bunch of other

(37:37):
folks out east that are other groups of people that
have done a lot of medical access as their core
movement to work right. But in the Bay, the Panthers
ran free medical clinics and we're teaching lay people how
to do blood work in urine analysis, all part of
their theory of self health. And I love self help
because I don't know whether it was an intentionally a
riff on self help, even though it sounds like almost

(37:58):
the same, right, because it's a riff off of self defense, right,
They're like, well, we do self defense work, but we
should also do self health work. And we've talked about
a little bit earlier on this episode, but then also
in another episode, in a birth control episode, I talked
about where the Panthers at least started around birth control,

(38:18):
which is that they were largely against it. But I
want to talk about a little bit more. It didn't
start as a political party super keen on abortion access
and birth control because the Black community was fighting against
the genocide of force sterilization. And as you mentioned, there's
a mass campaign of force sterilization for decades and as
one of the most evil and least talked about things

(38:38):
in US history, and there was like all kinds of
things where it was like literally like well, if you
want to be on welfare, you have to get sterilized.
And obviously this disproportionately affected women of color, and often
people just directly did racial targeting and whatever anyway, but
black women, including some Panthers, still fought for bodily autonomy.
Despite the original position of a Black Panther party, by

(39:02):
nineteen seventy one, the Panthers changed their party line to
be against force sterilization rather than be against birth control,
and this was in response to women pushing for what
they needed from within the party, to quote Jennifer Nelson,
as the feminist message of a woman's fundamental right to
abortion became more widespread, and as Black women began to
forge a feminism of their own, the Panthers refined their

(39:24):
criticism to accept birth control and abortion when voluntarily chosen.
This gradual transformation came at the behest of Black women,
both in the party and outside of it, who rejected
the total condemnation of reproductive control for people of color
as genocidal and so this other origin. These people who
are used to fighting for their medical needs and are
doing all of this amazing community organizing work end up

(39:48):
coming together. By the end of the seventies, the Women's
Choice clinic in Oakland was black led, and occasionally it
was former Panther led. And what may or may not
be black led is stuff ads some of it that
was that was a weird one. That one is bad. Well, uh,

(40:12):
you know, actually, one of the ways that you reverse
economic extraction is to buy black owned buy from black
owned businesses and from worker owned businesses. And if we
happen to have any ads for that, then do that.
But even if we don't have ads from it, it's
a thing worth considering. Doing gears stuff. Yeah, do some

(40:37):
research first.

Speaker 3 (40:37):
That's a good point. That was tough.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
Okay, we'll just cut now, and we're back, and fortunately
we've all forgotten about how awkwardly Margaret did that.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
It was an awkward break because the conversation was serious
and something that's not talked about enough. I think that's
part of the problem, is when we have these conversations
about great up steps that they've made or revolutionaries that
for so long that so many other size or the
intersectional stuff has been left out because everybody wants a

(41:21):
pretty painted story, kind of like the whole voting rights
for women, the fact that they were freaking racist and
leaving out black women on purpose and women of color
on purpose, and then we still celebrate them because they
were like they did kind of good but we can't.
You know, I'm the DeBie Downer in the situation, but

(41:41):
like you remember, they're still assholes. Yeah, so it's hard. No,
it's like, good job, Margaret, you did great.

Speaker 1 (41:47):
Thank you. Every now and then, I think people every
now and then are like, oh what A wrote this
like suffragette and I'm.

Speaker 2 (41:53):
Like, fuck them. You know, I'm just kidding.

Speaker 1 (41:56):
Maybe I'll do the Suffragettes at one point, but it'll
be real complicated at best. And honestly, all my heroes
were not excited about them even at the time.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
The Whole and the Shone people did a lot for
the suffrage movement, so you should talk about them, okrash
Nations people that still exists.

Speaker 1 (42:11):
No, yeah, no, that's actually really interesting. The Hood and
Shone have come up a couple times on this show
because they're left down fucking cool and they schooled Marks.
But I didn't know about that particular connection. So I'm
going to ask you more about that once we're done.
So by spring of nineteen seventy three, this the Oakland
Clinic hired a woman doctor fucking finally named Jane Wiley,

(42:36):
and they opened Women's Choice and they set up a clinic, right,
so this is like they're only a couple months behind
the Los Angeles one. They charge one hundred and fifty
dollars for abortions, which is less than half the rate
of even friendly criminal providers, and it was a quarter
of the rate of a hospital abortion. They got a
mailorologist to start performing vi sectomies as well, which is good.

(42:59):
If you are someone who can get a viseectomy and
you are committed to not having children, then you should
probably get a sect to me, it's a less invasive
procedure than what other people have options of. They use
their funds to support feminist causes that they raise with
this clinic, like the cause of annez Garcia, who was
convicted of murder for killing her rapist, and so the

(43:22):
feminist movement, funded in part by these medical clinics, got
her a retrial and a feminist lawyer and got her
off on self defense. Yes, and helped set precedent in
a person's right to use deadly force against sexual assault,
which is it's much harder to make that case, you know,

(43:43):
than like other particular things. But like when I I
think people know that I, like, you know, took a
concealed carry class and sometimes use firearms and stuff. And
the times that it is legal to use deadly force
is when yourself or someone else is being threatened with
deadly force or with a sexual assault. So thank you,

(44:05):
I know, as I'm sorry that you had to suffer,
but I'm glad you killed that man with a twenty two.
And also, how hard do you have to be of
a motherfucker to kill someone with the fucking twenty two.
That is not a killing gun anyway.

Speaker 2 (44:15):
I know nothing about guns, but props.

Speaker 1 (44:17):
Very small gun that's for shooting rabbits.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
Oh well, I got it done.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
Yeah. One of my friends who was shot was they're fine,
but they were shot as a teenager for with the
twenty two. They were shot for being gay, but they
were shot in the leg with hit and they were like,
I thought I got stung with a bee. I mean
they had to go to the doctor and it was bad,
and like people die when they get shot with twenty twos.

Speaker 2 (44:40):
But it's like they thought they got stung by a bee.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
Yeah, because they got shot in the leg with the
twenty two, and that's like a beasting. Yeah, it's real painful.

Speaker 2 (44:47):
You're like, ah, fuck, it doesn't sound like it's painful.

Speaker 3 (44:50):
You mean, like in the moment, it was like beasting.
It wasn't like after like it was a.

Speaker 1 (44:55):
Yeah yeah, no, No, it was a real wound and
they had to go to the hospital and it could
have been way worse. But like I don't know if
you're listening. I'm glad you're okay.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
So they got hate crime essentially.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
Yeah, yeah, one of my friends have got hate crime. Two.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
Margaret's like, yeah, yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
What the level of just dryness would do. Traumatic stories
that you tell maybe part of the classic delivery that
you give to us that I enjoy so much.

Speaker 1 (45:25):
Yeah, thanks appreciate it. So anyway I go see it.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
I'm glad they're okay.

Speaker 1 (45:33):
Shot and killed the man with the twenty two. Uh,
he deserved it. And when she got her retrial, she
was like, because her original trial, her defense was like, oh,
she wasn't thinking right in the moment and stuff, and
her retrial had a feminist lawyer, and the feminist lawyer
was like, that man needed shooting.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
Yeah, I mean to be fair. The jury was like, yeah,
even today, that's hard to do.

Speaker 1 (45:54):
I know, I know it is.

Speaker 2 (45:55):
Self defense cases are so often against women and general.
We talk about that woman who just took away guns
from her abusive husband and she got jail time because
he wasn't supposed and he had charges. But in the end,
like we talk about things like that, so I don't
blame the first lawyer of being like, you're not They're

(46:16):
not going to believe you. They don't believe women in general. No, totally,
let's do it this way, totally, let's plead insanity.

Speaker 1 (46:21):
No, you're you're right. I think she was a migrant
farm worker and yeah, but.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
Good on her, and congratulations, I well deserved.

Speaker 1 (46:31):
I know.

Speaker 3 (46:31):
It's fucking cool.

Speaker 1 (46:33):
I like started thinking about another one of my friends
who got hate crime and in his self defense case
went really badly. But that's a separate case. He ended
up he ended up going to prison for his own
hate crime. Oh my god, he's out now you're listening.
I think I owe you a chain mail shirt. I
promised him a chain mail shirt if he was found guilty,
because he needed one more than I did. What anyway,

(46:58):
Ye chain mail shirt. It's a nice shirt.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
It's chain mill Okay, yeah, legitimate cha.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
I think it's too late now kidding.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
It's probably slightlinessless necessarily than was before jail.

Speaker 3 (47:11):
Was this lousy chain mail shirt.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
Put it on top of it.

Speaker 1 (47:18):
Yeah, he's like, he's not into the same nerd shit
I am. He's probably was like, thanks, buddy, thanks for
that promise. I don't anyway, son Roe v. Wade. It
famously didn't fix everything, and now the right wing went

(47:38):
on the attack because now they were like, oh, we're
the underdog, says every right winger, ever while they're in
the process of murdering everyone. Over the course of the seventies,
evangelical has got more and more anti abortion, which means
I'm gonna talk really quickly about religion and abortion. It's

(47:58):
easy to think that when Christian's Protestant and Catholic have
always been against abortion, it's after all, it's again the
Bible or something right. It is not, and Christian opposition
to abortion is fairly new. To quote Bible scholar Dan McLellan,
there is no place in the Bible where full moral
and legal personhood is ever attributed to a fetus. The

(48:20):
Old Testament is very clear that a fetus is property.
If a man injures a pregnant woman in a way
that causes a miscarriage, he has to pay a fine.
If a man injures a pregnant woman in a way
that kills the woman, the man gets the death penalty
because life for a life. Because a woman is a
person and a fetus is a property very progressive of
the Bible in that particular moment. I'm not here to

(48:41):
defend the Bible as a source of moral wisdom, but
the argument is fundamentally not about when life begins. It's
about when personhood begins. Secularly, you could say full legal
and moral personhood. Theologically, you could talk about insulment right
when the soul enters the body, when a person is
a person. There's three times people consider. They consider a conception,

(49:03):
they consider the quickening when you can feel the fetus move,
and they consider birth. All three have their proponents and
all of the major monotheistic religions. Jewish traditions are more
likely to say that the breath of life enters at birth,
though a ton of conservative Jewish interpretations disagree. Protestantism of
the not An America kind is like usually it's like

(49:25):
birth that makes more sense. Evangelical right wing American Christians
are like, we fucking hate women, we don't care about life.
And then the Catholic Church, they've always been not particularly
excited about abortion, but it wasn't until eighteen sixty nine
that the church officially decided that there was no Catholic
doctrine against abortion until eighteen sixty nine before the quickening sorry,

(49:49):
so like most of the abortions that happen in our world.
And then they switched it over to conception in eighteen
sixty nine. So for more than fifteen hundred years of
its history, the Catholic Church wasn't quite as wildly controlling
of people's bodies as it is now, although it's never
had a good track record about that. But most US
Catholics fifty six percent of them, support legalizing abortion, even
though the Church kind of created the pro life movement here.

(50:12):
The Qoran is silent about abortion, and different Islamic traditions
have different views on the matter. It's silent on it
the same way that the Bible is silent on it
doesn't mean that most people don't try and interpret it
in certain ways.

Speaker 3 (50:22):
Whatever can I can I subject here?

Speaker 1 (50:25):
Please?

Speaker 3 (50:25):
There's a hadith, a lot of people that I know
who are Muslim, there's it's pretty like fairly accepted that
abortion is allowed because I remember, I remember there was
something in the Quran that is the reason why everyone
thinks it's legal in Islam. But the key reason that
Muslims think the procedure of like abortion is allowed is
that there are verses in the Koran that indicate that

(50:48):
a fetus is not a life until a soul is
breathed into it, and that doesn't happen at conception, that
happens later, and a lot of scholars believe it's between
forty days and one twenty days. So that's why the
majority of Muslim see abortion as allowed in Islam. From
my point of view, a lot of like Islamic feminists

(51:08):
are really proud of the fact that, like within Islam
abortion is allowed and they could like take care of
their own bodies. That's from what I understand.

Speaker 1 (51:15):
No, that makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, yeah,
And which is that that one hundred and twenty days
type thing is like overall what most of the religions
have kind of said until pretty fucking recently. Catholics were
more or less the first anti abortion crusaders in the US.
Eventually right wing evangelicals realized they could control people's bodies,

(51:36):
so they showed up in the seventies. And there's no
theological consensus among monotheists that abortion is a moral and
it's weird as shit that people use it to try
and control people's bodies. And the reason I want to
talk about it is because as if we talked earlier
about like the framing and understand how people like frame
interprets how they I don't know how to make sense

(51:57):
out of this. I wrote what I wrote in the script.
I don't know how to riff off it. Anyway. I
did get really fucking annoyed. I get really fucking annoyed
that people are like, well, the Bible says, and I'm like, one,
that is a list of moral ideas from a very
long time ago, which is a very interesting document that
people interpret all kinds of ways, and that's fine, whatever

(52:18):
the fuck, And to no, it doesn't shut the fuck up.
By nineteen eighty five, ninety percent of medical abortions were
done in standalone abortion clinics rather than in hospitals in
the United States. But then the anti chate movement was
getting fiery. The Arson started in nineteen seventy seven. Clinic

(52:39):
escorting started in nineteen eighty by the National Organization for Women.
Now they would walk patients into clinics past picketers, and
people still do this now. It is an absolutely worthwhile
thing to volunteer and do if you're looking for a
way to connect with community around you and get involved.
There are different organizations that run it in different areas.

(53:00):
Is I'm only aware of it in my area, so
I can't tell you how to get involved. By nineteen
eighty three, there have been more than twenty bombings and
arsens of clinics. By nineteen eighty five, the first women's clinic,
the one in LA that has come up a couple
of times, was torched and the fire department was like, what,
why would we think it's arson? We're not even gonna

(53:21):
look like was probably the restaurant. Restaurants always burned down.
What are you talking about? So there wasn't even investigation
and you can't even find it on the list of
like arsons of abortion clinics because it's not listed because
it doesn't count because no one investigated it. They reopened
in a new location. But more importantly, folks started coordinating.

(53:44):
Well more importantly to our story about cool people whatever,
I don't know, it's not more important. Another thing that happened.
People start coordinating for mutual defense and not just escorting.
Escorting is absolutely great. Escorting is absolutely a thing where
you do where you can't engage with the picketers right
do clinic Escortian like, your whole thing is to like
not let anything get more escalated and whatever, you know,

(54:08):
And they were like, well, we need some We also
need some rowdiness. They're really rowdy right now. The baddies
the antis. I can't use baddies as a bad thing
anymore because apparently slang has changed. This has come up
a couple times on the show.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
It's amazing.

Speaker 1 (54:26):
So they formed the CDC. The other CDC, they formed
the Clinic Defense Committee. Various leftist groups get their shit
together and started holding defense vigils outside of the clinic
in Oakland. And this is all kinds of groups. It's
anti imperialist groups and unions and feminist groups, it's communists
and anarchists. And suddenly the anti has got real quiet

(54:49):
because there was a whole lot of very angry and
non pacifist people out defending the place. And not shockingly,
one of the co founders of the CDC was a
former black panther how a radical black lesbian feminist. And
so they're like, oh, we don't want to go to
that clinic. They're scary there. Since this was a leftist group,

(55:10):
it had a ton of names over the years, the
CDC became bac AO R, and it became baco r R,
the Bay Area CORD and whatever. I didn't write down
what they stand for because they all have a million
fucking names and they're all the same name whatever.

Speaker 2 (55:29):
Similar.

Speaker 1 (55:30):
Yeah, yeah, but they're backhoor now. I'm gonna call them
backwar and backhor was cool as fuck. There are last
cool people we're gonna talk about this week. Sometimes they
did the militant thing. They would stand around looking and
being tough. Operation Rescue was the name of the main
ANTIS that they would call the anti abortion protesters that antis,

(55:51):
and Operation Rescue was like this place. They would organize
what they called hits, which is where they would get
hundreds or thousands of people to descend on a random
clinic and like it down and like block it and
do all this like and assault people. And it was,
you know, bad, and so they infiltrated back or infiltrated
Operation Rescue and other anti groups. Sometimes they did street theater.

(56:13):
They hold signs that said ladies against women and every
sperm is sacred, and would go and stand with the antis.
They were defending their own legal access to healthcare. But
soon enough they learned and took as one of their
core principles you do not depend on the police. That
is like a verbatim one of their principles. Because they
would get arrested themselves for blockading, for like preventing blockades

(56:37):
of private property they owned and legally operated. They had
a rapid response phone tree to get people out in
minutes to defend places where antis would hit on moss.
Sometimes they met at this place called the Long Haul,
which is an anarchist infoshop that's still running in the
Bay and therefore living up to its name The Long Haul,
so fuck yeah, good on you. Eighty eight Bakwar was

(57:01):
meeting there an anarchist artist couple that was in Bakor
who are still alive today, which also makes me really happy.
They put up posters all over the city. They designed
these bandanas for everyone in back or to where to
identify each other, which was like the feminist symbol instead
of a triangle made out of triangles and would say
like pro choice and backwar on it and stuff. You know.
They make these sick bandanas that everyone wore. Folks made

(57:22):
VHS tapes teaching tactics and started spreading them around the city.
To new activists. So people did amazing shit for the end.
I mean, people do amazing shit with the internet, and
the internet makes a lot of this way easier. But
they would have like spotters would do vigils at abortion
clinics near a payphone and if they saw someone, they'd
call the first person in the phone tree, who then

(57:43):
calls two people from the phone tree, who calls two
people from the phone tree.

Speaker 2 (57:47):
Phone trees. Man, that shit. The little parents, the school parents,
who yeah, use that. That's a weapon for real.

Speaker 1 (57:55):
Okay, So the only time I've ever used one was
a squad defense in the Netherlands where the cop came
and within like fifteen minutes there was like one hundred
and fifty squads outside while I was like inside sweeping,
and it was very nice.

Speaker 2 (58:08):
That's amazing, Yes, pohe and trees are powerful. Yeah, the
days the days of old.

Speaker 1 (58:13):
I know, NA use a signal group, which is better
and faster, don't get me wrong. Yeah, yeah, but it
fucking worked. Slowly, they got the numbers to start holding
back the hundreds of antis would swarm clinics, They got
a thous Eventually they're getting a thousand people showing up
every time the Antis tried to show up at a
clinic and one of their slogans was we don't write

(58:35):
letters were backhor which meant like, we're not writing letters
of the fucking senators here. Yeah, right, we're showing the
fuck up.

Speaker 2 (58:46):
Again. Old school tactics.

Speaker 1 (58:47):
Yeah. They developed clinic defense boards, which when I first
saw the drawing of them, I thought they were just shields,
but they're not. They're like two foot by four foot
pieces of plywood with like handles on the top and
the bottom and so therefore putting at your feet and
like stepping on and then holding on to and when
you get a row of people, you can build a barricade.

(59:08):
But it's not like a barricade that no one can
reach over. It's a barricade that no one can like
walk over, you know.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
Okay, yeah, And so you can use it to.

Speaker 1 (59:17):
Well protect a corridor for patients to get in and
out these clinics. And so they show up and they
have these huge signs that be like the clinic is open,
you know, because people would show up and obviously they'd
be like, oh, there's a thousand people here hate me,
and it is awful that, you know, people had to
face that down, but there was a thousand people there

(59:37):
to protect their right to access to right, and they
went on the offensive too. They would pick at the
churches that harbor Operation Rescue. They learned street theater from
Act Up, the coolest Fuck AIDS Awareness Direct Action group.
I can't wait to talk about one of these days.
They infiltrated Operation Rescue meetings for information and occasionally they

(59:58):
disrupt them. The last story I'm going to leave with
is that there's a story of this anarchist lesbian from
New York. I had to hide her mohawk under her hoodie,
I think, and her and two other women put on
very conservative, like buttoned down floor length skirts so she,
don't get me wrong, I'd love a floor length skirt.
And then they would sneak into the meeting right and

(01:00:23):
then dropt stink spray chemicals into the air vents, which
is like really noxious, and it cleared the space and
moments unfortunately, the three women ran out and they got
kind of ideed, and two of them got caught, and like,
the one woman spent five days in jail and the
third woman got away. The third woman was like fuck this,
I'm out of here, and got away successfully, right, and yeah,

(01:00:45):
they were just fucking cool. And so like every time
shit that's bad happens, we can respond and we can
mitigate the worst of the harms and we can and
we learned so well when we like not just work
intersectionally but work in coalitions, you know, like work in

(01:01:06):
ways that are like, oh, well, of course, Like when
black feminists start doing this work, it's going to look
different and it's going to work. We can learn so
much from that group. And when you know, queer folks
are doing this, it's going to be a little bit different,
like and it's like they're learning from Act Up and
they're doing it makes me happy when skies are full

(01:01:27):
of evangelicals.

Speaker 2 (01:01:33):
Well, as you said, it needs to be above ground
and below a little bit of legal with the criminal
and what we learn is their tactics and there are
methods to do both and it's okay, yeah, and sometimes
it's necessary. Yeah, as Margaret invented, Yeah, the.

Speaker 1 (01:01:51):
Inventor of crime. Uh every crime. No wait, no, there's
a lot of bad ones. Yeah, I know, because like
usual yeah, like yeah, no, no, it turns out crime
is a really bad way of determining something's moralness. It
turns out some stuff is illegal because it's bad, and

(01:02:13):
some stuff is illegal because society.

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
Sucks, right, right, So we're talking about the ones that
makes you know, society.

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):
Yeah, that's that's what. Yeah, break, that's what he's break
them all talking about, don't shoot your girlfriend, piece of ship.
Every time there's a man in a story.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
Literally murders adult, it never ends well.

Speaker 1 (01:02:35):
Like Mike.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
Yeah, like Mike from the original uh Jane Collective And yeah,
we like and we like him, but we don't Nick Mike.
But we don't like him because we know he was shady.

Speaker 1 (01:02:47):
Yeah who knows otherwise, But that one thing he did
was good.

Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
On that documentary. He was actually on it. Oh really,
Oh yeah, you need to go back. I told I
see you and Sophie that email, Like, y'all you watch
this something Nick Mike is.

Speaker 1 (01:03:02):
On here, I do because everyone should go back. And
there's a callback to our episode we did about Jane Collective.
Those as very He was described as handsome by one
Jane participant, and I have forever on referred to him
as the very handsome man who rides around on a
scooter and performs abortions and then taught women how to
do it and then dipped, which is like, if you're in.

Speaker 2 (01:03:22):
A thought, maybe he owed money to the mob or something.

Speaker 1 (01:03:25):
Away for him. That's my theory that might.

Speaker 2 (01:03:29):
Have been on It may have been on the show
where they say he owed money and that's why he
doesna appeared.

Speaker 1 (01:03:34):
Yeah, it makes sense, but you don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:36):
Got to go.

Speaker 1 (01:03:37):
You need to go watch it. There's so much written
about Jane, which is great. I'm like, yeah, I'm not
trying to.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
Well, unfortunately, it's more relevant today than and they're still alive,
so the chunk of the collective is still.

Speaker 1 (01:03:50):
Alive, which rules.

Speaker 2 (01:03:52):
So unfortunately they have to see this again. Though.

Speaker 1 (01:03:55):
Here's to everyone who's currently doing clinic escorting, making yes
information about self medicated abortions or self administered medicated abortions available.
Here's to everyone doing all the hard work. Here's to
all the crime doctors. Here's all the doctors who did
it while it was legal but still not safe. And

(01:04:18):
here's to you, Samantha McVeigh. What did you do that
people can hear about?

Speaker 2 (01:04:25):
Well? I am on a podcast called Stuff Mom Never
Told You, where we talk about specific organizations that you
can support in this times, such as National network of
abortion funds Abortion Funds dot org, which will often lead
you to necessary information if you so need. Celebrating different
organizations like Los Libres, who was run by Veronica cru

(01:04:48):
Sanchez and they are a big organization in Mexico that
are providing medication and help to the US as they
know we are in the shit show. Yeah, and she
has been celebrated because she continues and has advertised that
she will help the US Texas just in case y'all
need to know Leslie Brace once again. Yes, you can

(01:05:10):
find me on my show. You can find our book.
We talk about the Jaine Collective as well as well
as as the Honea Shonees which I mentioned previously, which
is a very interesting, uh. First Nations people who helped
us become where it was for the women, for many
of us women. And yeah, you can find me on
Instagram McVeigh dot Sam if you like pictures of sad dogs.

(01:05:33):
Because I just gave her a bath, that's one picture.
She hates bath. As well as we have stuff I've
never told you Instagram and TikTok and kind of the
dying Twitter that we barely use.

Speaker 3 (01:05:48):
Yeah, thanks Sam. Mamtha was close close those close.

Speaker 1 (01:05:57):
The Instagram name o Sam.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
Yeah like Bay Sam. It's true.

Speaker 3 (01:06:03):
Yeah, well I got it right. Uh no, that was
I always learned so much on the show, even ass
like a listening so wow, not everyone sucks. Not everyone sucks.

Speaker 2 (01:06:14):
Know this makes me happy.

Speaker 3 (01:06:16):
Yeah, thanks for being on the show. Thanks Margaret for
being Margaret.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
Thanks, yes, yeah giving me all this good information. You
were as always the right guest for this, and I'm
very happy hmm, always happy to be here.

Speaker 3 (01:06:30):
I told you it was the Samantha episode.

Speaker 1 (01:06:32):
And if you want to hear Sharen talk about stuff
sin Scharen won't do our own plugs, I'll do it.

Speaker 3 (01:06:38):
I'm one of the rotating hosts of it could happen here.
I'm on Twitter at shiro Hero six sixty six and
then Instagram it's just shio hero. But uh yeah, follow
this show too. What's the what's the show's handles? Does
this show have handles?

Speaker 1 (01:06:52):
Handles?

Speaker 3 (01:06:52):
I should know that.

Speaker 1 (01:06:53):
No, we just use cool zone social media. Great, go
follow cool zone Media and cooler Zone. Go subscribe to
cooler zon media because then you get all of the
ad transitions and none of the ads. That's our tagline,
all right, that's it. Next week More Stuff, Bye cool

(01:07:16):
People Who did Cool Stuff is a production of cool
Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (01:07:20):
For more podcasts from the cool Zone Media, visit our website.

Speaker 3 (01:07:23):
Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.