interviews
The Uniqueness of Electrification in The United States
by Gretchen Bakke
September 10, 2021
This interview with Gretchen Bakke, author of The Grid, and visiting professor of anthropology at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems at Humboldt University in Berlin. , Humboldt University, Berlin Germany, was conducted and condensed by franknews. This interview was originally published in February 2019.
frank: I have your book here, it's such a great framing piece that simplifies something so complicated.
GB: Incredibly complicated.
I would love to talk about energy democracy. How people want to move forward, and what sort of policy needs to be in place.
I think when you talk about energy democracy, it's not quite the same thing as equity.
I've spoken to some people who incorporate equity into their definition of energy democracy. They say, in trying to fix certain systems, we need to also engage people who have been marginalized from energy systems in the past. But it is also definitely its own issue.
One thing that's remarkable about systems everywhere, is that there's some sort of universal electrification. Just the idea. That idea seems to be an early 20th-century idea. Places that didn't get a grid in the early 20th century have a very partial and elite system. If you look for example, at Lagos in Nigeria, what you have is rich people on the grid, and poor people on a generator system. Even poor people means middle-class people, right? There's still a grid there, but it's like two or three generators, a bunch of cables, and it runs for one building or maybe two buildings. It uses heavy fuel oil, usually diesel, so it's a much more polluting thing.
The fact that there already is universal electrification, even though it's not profitable for companies is something that in my experience, everybody wants to preserve.
I never talked to anybody, the entire time I was doing research, that thought some people should have electricity and other people shouldn't.
I did talk to people who thought it might be wise, as the system is redeveloped, overhauled, or given a new shape at the lowest levels, to think more about the quality of electricity as being matched more closely to the needs of the user. This is maybe true, but it's also a sneaky way of saying Facebook should have more reliable, more stable voltage, with no interruption whatsoever, and the home user should not.
The question is, once you open that door, how far can you go with it before you start to actually develop two parallel systems? It might be true – it might be that I personally don't need to have the same quality of electricity as the US military. But give an inch and they take a mile. You don't want that to happen. I think that's one question. I think the other thing, and this is what I would guess you're interested in talking about democracy, is thinking about the way in which the electricity systems are becoming more individualized, especially with rooftop solar, and how that sense of ownership, or control, over the electrons that you make can be produced, while maintaining this universal system.
Absolutely.
The dream version of it is that everybody has solar, everybody has some kind of small wind, everybody is connected to a big grid, and everybody has some kind of storage, and thus has the capacity to run off their own electricity when they want, when it's cheaper, or when the big system is down. But also has the capacity to feed into a public electricity system. This is perfect. It's hard to manage, and it's hard to figure out how to pay for the grid if you do that, because you still have exactly the same giant infrastructure, but the way you make money off of it is removed.
In this ideal, is it a combination of public and private sectors maintaining the larger infrastructure, and the individual running their personal solar on the home?
If it was really ideal, the individual could choose to run it or not. The only way that that kind of system can actually work is with some pretty serious AI. When I was finishing the book, people were always talking about an orchestrator. What we need is an orchestrator to make all of this complexity work together. It was still this idea that it would be a person. What I’ve found in the three years since, is now there’s an assumption that computers can do this. Computers can make it so that whatever is happening on the level of the individual, the small scale producer doesn't actually take down the larger grid. You could just have a button that said, “I'm available to go off the grid if needed”, on your phone, I guess. I always imagine a real button on the wall, but this will be on your phone.
Then if there is too much demand, the orchestrator can just flip you off, and you can run on your own system, because it's two o'clock in the afternoon and you live in Phoenix, you need air conditioning. You have your air conditioning, but you also have your solar. Solar and air conditioning are so nicely married to each other. That's the ideal, but then the question is, where are all the ways that it can go wrong? Where we lose democracy, actually, and we lose equity. Even though there's some sort of dead reckoning sense of where we want to get to.
We tend to think of renewable energy as good, but eventually those companies will accumulate the same amount of wealth and power as coal or oil. The question becomes, like you said, what are the challenges and how do you move forward?
And how does democracy need to be reformed? Because if you think of it as kind of old school democratic, then a house can be an entity that can vote somehow forward into a management structure, which then represents it up. Along the way, you can do that with little company forms. Like I have my own little electricity company, and this is how much I make. My block is represented by this other kind of electricity company, and that goes up. It's not rocket science, we know how to do democracy in that way.
The question is, does democracy in that way work? Does it only produce a trickle up of funds and a trickle down of responsibility and risk?
As we move forward do you think we continue to use the grid as our primary infrastructure? Or do we move away from it?
The premise is, and the fact of the matter is, it's not replaceable at this point. It's simply not. We are replacing little tiny bits of it all the time, but the bigger system, you can't just build a parallel system next to it. It's too expensive to do that.
The thing that I really understood about the grid when I was writing the book is that nobody understands it.
There isn't any one person who understands how it all fits together. People understand their tiny little piece of it, and they understand the thing on either side of that tiny piece, and that's it. The expertise and the technology has the same structure. If we have 80% solar feeding into this grid, here's what happens when a cloud goes over at the level of five seconds. Now, this is a giant problem, and there's electrical engineers working on figuring out how to make the grid function in this case. There's a push behind the expert. At the expertise level, people are interested actually, in the larger infrastructure. And nobody else knows enough to get around it. It might just be like inertia when you sit there. One thing that I really have seen is that the way in which reforms are happening in the western part of the US, and the way that they're happening in the northeast are quite different. There are different logics at work that might actually, in 100 years, if we're still here, and not completely roasted to death, produce two systems with fairly different underlying structures.
What is the difference?
The west is inter-regional cooperation. The west is really like, how do you deal with the fact that you have hydro in the Pacific Northwest, and you have wind in the Dakotas, and you have all this solar on the south. It turns into this regional balancing of renewables that then depends a lot on people being able to take themselves off the grid in order to manage that in a reasonable way, but it's huge. That's why you have all these fights in California saying, we don't want to import any coal power from Idaho, and Idaho is saying, "We don't want to be part of this thing. You're going to force all of your renewables on us." The reason those fights are happening is because what's developing is, in fact, a very large regional balanced, renewable system.
What's happening in the northeast, because it's so much denser is, micro grids that can island themselves, but for the most part are interoperable. It's a very different shape. It's like a foam in the northeast, all these little bubbles that are stuck together. If this will happen, we'll see, but that seems to be the direction it's going. Whereas there's very few little bubbles developing in the west. What happens in the south is up for grabs.
Is one better than the other?
The grid is always about geography. It's always a local system. What you have available to you geographically determines what you're capable of doing. You can have pumped air storage in Alabama or Mississippi. The way in which the weather affects the grid is interesting. During Hurricane Harvey, one of the things they learned was that the solar panels stay on the house if the roof stays on the house. Really the weaker link is not how a solar panel connects, it's how the roof is connected to the building. These are things that in the West Coast, with the possible exception of the Pacific Northwest, are just not problems. The storms aren't that ferocious, but on the East Coast they are. There needs to be a reaction to that, that provides the resilience they all like to talk about. What they also found after Sandy, is that communities that had one house on a block that had electricity came back much more quickly. They had a sense of cohesion, of social cohesion, of neighborliness, and there was less sense of trauma, things will rebuild quickly, and everything worked better. In that in that case, you want to be able to have a micro-grid even if it's at the level of the home.
The idea of being islandable seems like a very good thing. People like to point to Wall Street during Sandy, which seemed islanded off.
They actually had generators in the basement, so everything was out except this one building, and people were really mad because they saw the lights on, and they're like, "Why do those guys have it?", assuming that they were prioritized to get electricity, but they actually had a generator system in their skyscraper, and on the ground floor in that skyscraper were all kinds of shops and restaurants that then served everybody. Everybody talks about this like, "We could go there, we could have kebabs."
At least we have kebabs!
They weren't islanded properly speaking, it's just that they had giant diesel generators in their basement.
They weren’t on their own grid.
Problem with that is, of course, you run out of gas.
Now, there's a race in the technology sector to figure out how to store renewable energy. I mean, we have batteries –
People love batteries. There's a lot of ways to store electricity that are less detrimental to the environment, but people do love batteries.
What was your initial motivation in writing The Grid?
The original motivation is kind of twofold, but they go together. One is that I felt like I saw a lot of people trying to intervene in the system who didn't understand what that meant, didn't understand what it was as a system. Those interventions were people putting solar on the roof, and then they're super mad that when their house blacked out. I know a lot of people who have bought diesel generators instead because during a blackout you get to have power.
It was also just this idea that you could make electricity into a commodity and make money off of it like anything else that has been so damaging to the system. There were a lot of interventions happening in the grid, and I just thought well, we need a primer. That's a super practical side of it.
The other side was this desire to try to tell the history of America in a different way. I was surprised how much the book ended up being a business history. I did not intend it to be that way, I was really like, "I'll have a technology history chapter, a business history chapter, legislative history chapter, and then we'll just sort of go forward.”
But the uniqueness of electrification in the US is that it's always been for profit.
There are pockets that are not that way for historical reasons, and ideological reasons. The fact that the business community has been so interested in the book, I think it's been really good, I hope. I hope it's really good. Those were the two pieces. It really is this American story of a battle between freedom, independence, self-reliance, big money, and big government.
How do we determine what energy is worth? As you wrote, it's not tangible. It's not a banana.
One of the problems I have with the way these arguments are happening in the US is that what is it worth always, somehow only has one metric, and that metric is money.
But what is it worth to you that you have energy security? If there's a way you can have solar and not lose your power, which is not that complicated, what is that worth to you? A lot. What is it worth to stop carbon emissions? If you just get a lot of solar up, all you've got are the emissions that go into making those panels, and getting them on your roof, from China or wherever they come from. The singular metric is a part of capitalism – that we're not allowed to measure anything any other way. That's not true everywhere.
Not to glorify China because it does not need to be glorified at this moment, but I did see one talk by a Chinese electrical engineer, whose job was to make a new green city from scratch. Everything he presented had two metrics, how much it costs, and what the carbon emissions were. I was just like, "Okay, great, I don't care what the metrics are, but I'm so happy you have two of them so that then there's this possibility of saying, "Okay, how do I, in fact measure worth?"
Right. It's actually a much deeper conversation than just what technology is available, how much does it cost, and how much money can you make?
I think you really see that with the fires in California. How can you maintain a system that doesn't spark? What is the cost of that? It's not about just money.
I was thinking about how relevant The Grid is in relation to these California fires.
I think the thing to look at is the difference between the way in which Southern California Edison has been upgrading their system, and the way in which PG&E was not upgrading their system. At this very basic level of how a wire connects to a pole, how a wire connects to a transformer, if you're in a situation where any spark creates a fire, what's the necessary technology to not have any sparks at all, ever?
PG&E was just neglecting that sort of upgrade?
I don't know if they were neglecting it, but they weren't prioritizing it to the same degree that Southern California Edison has, and I would say at this point, it might be interesting to talk to Southern California Edison. Because there should be fires in Southern California too. It's not just bad luck that they're all happening in PG&E territory. There are sometimes fires in Southern California, but it's not the same. With the same frequency.
This is where energy democracy becomes a question. This is a public thing, this grid. I embrace this, the infrastructure, but also what it gives us, what it affords us, and if I'm the master of my house and I have my solar panels, and I live in Southern California or Northern California, I do not want to be the one responsible for hooking that system up, because I'm going to burn down everybody.
It's not like this Occupy Wall Street movement of electricity independence, we'll just destroy the entire country. One spark at a time. Even the companies do it wrong, and they're well trained people. I think there's a place for expertise in the future. If you want universal electrification, there's a place for expertise in there.
In terms of policy in the U.S., what do you think we need in order to move towards a more ideal scenario?
We need to stop using fossil fuels. I think what Governor Brown did wasn't little. It will be interesting to see if it sticks, but it was an interesting first trial, which is just, here's the date we'll be done. We're not going to put it in our cars, we're not going to put it in our electricity system, we're not going to extract it, we're not going to burn it, we won't import it. The fossil fuel businesses will be gone.
I recognize the current government does not want to do this, but the reason I say it has to happen at the level of policy, is that as soon as that kind of thing gets said seriously, there's a lot of innovation that starts to be funded. Things begin to change. I don't know if you've seen this yet, but you should, you will – you stop seeing a house with like two solar panels on the roof. Every single rooftop should have solar. Where you're moving away from private decisions about household electricity use being mimicked in the infrastructure into a larger, statewide decision. For example, if the car becomes electric, how do you deal with that? You need some people who conceptualize it, but you also need a lot of tiny little machines that are going to make these things interoperable with each other. This is a wonderful thing, you have the car, it can store electricity, and then it can charge at work, and then you drive it home, blah, blah. But it turns out that the cars are using their own electricity at precisely the same moment the sun goes down. Actually they are not a storage resource to a solar power grid, not at dusk at least. These little things, where you're like, "Oh, weird, that's not going to work." It was a great idea, it won't work. But those kinds of studies, and the kind of investment, if we're keeping capitalism for right now, that's necessary to make major change happen, will only happen when there's laws in place.
Right. And laws that say no fossil fuels?
I think law saying no to fossil fuels. That's what I think. The issue is, does it need to be across the board, like what California did? I find that interesting, in a good way. Does it need to be sector by sector? If there was no global warming, I think by 2100, we'd have renewable electricity anyway because once you build it, it's free. This is something that has been a shock to everybody that I've talked to. That the price per kilowatt hour is coming down to about zero. You still have to build the thing and there is some maintenance, but essentially, what you're paying for is the labor power to make it, and continue to make it work. I think that transition would happen, we'd figure out how to do it, we'd be at 100% renewables, people would start having electric cars because it's cheaper to use free electricity than it is to pay for gas. The shift would happen slowly.
Without global warming, we will be doing this anyway. The question is if we need legislation to make it happen, because we need it to happen faster.
That's a really interesting way of framing it because that doesn't seem to be the debate. The debate seems to be why should we do these things? Is global warming real? Who cares? This is how things function, any alternative seems impossible, new policy that’s ambitious is wild idealism, etc. etc. But framing this as what is already happening, climate change or not, is really interesting.
I guess the problem is just like when we lose coal – we should all be super attached to coal. But industries change.
Everything is an issue of perception. I like your idea of working backwards.
I think we'll move that way with capitalism completely intact. There's a lot of reasons to challenge the current world order, but we don't even have to challenge it.
It's like getting ready to go to the airport. Your flight is at 10, you need to be there at 8, so you leave your house at 7. If we're going to move to renewables by 2050, what are the steps that need to take place right now?
Exactly. But something needs to happen, and that's the thing, any kind of law is going to make a giant difference, but it seems to be very difficult to make a law.
Do you find one argument most compelling after all this research?
Of why we should have a law?
Of why laws should change? Of why our energy systems are important to focus on period.
No. I feel like I don't talk about things in terms of climate very much. Sometimes because I've been explicitly told not to, but sometimes because everybody gets really anxious. When you're talking about transforming the electricity system, people are like, "That's a funny problem". Engineers are all super excited, because they have a good job again, and they used to have a boring job, and the utility people are kind of scared, but they're also excited, because maybe they can change the way the company works.
The transformation of the electricity system is producing all of these very exciting problems for people who are in the industry. I think it's producing a lot of exciting opportunities for people outside the industry. There's a kind of hopefulness.
It hits the desire to tinker, that a lot of people have. There's not an ideological argument in it.
Part of that is, we need to retire all of our coal fired power plants for 2050 anyway. They've been retiring for a while, we've been replacing them with natural gas for a while, natural gas works differently than coal fire plants. We've already had to adapt the system to that, now we're not building as many, and we're building more renewables. But it's all outside of a conversation about good and bad people.
I feel like 2018 has made climate change a much more mainstream conversation than it was before. The weird weather piece of it, like, "Okay, we don't know about climate, but weather", we can tell you that it's weird. That might be just the beginning of a way in, where it stops being about having this abstract conversation about what lefty people believe rigthy people should do.
I feel like there is a holier than thou attitude that gets rolled in. People have a lot of other problems and desires, so for now, how can an energy transition not be about climate change? That's the slow path. But if we want to speed it up, then it has to be about climate change, and after that, it just turns to politics, and that's hard. I don't have a solution for that one.
We'll talk in five years.
Who knows what anything will look like in five years! The slow way is avoiding climate change in conversation, and the fast way is folding it into the conversation, and risking politicizing everything.
Really. I think what you said about the airport is really nice because there is the sense that the airplane will leave if you're not on it. That's essentially what the IPCC's latest report was – we have 12 years to do this. What do we do?
Do you feel optimistic?
I have decided that being optimistic is a more interesting story. I think it's really easy to talk about how you would fold up your life and future generations of your family and call it the death of humanity and all that. That may be where it all ends up, but at least for now it's not the more interesting story to tell or to investigate. Until it's hopeless, I would say I'm kind of in the, what are we doing? What is working? What is stopping us? How can we get around that? I feel like there are people who have believed that climate change is happening for a while, and now what they really want is action, and that group is growing every single day. People are just like, "Could somebody do something, please? Someone."
Anything.
Anything. Anything will be fine. I believe that each of those anythings, if they can be done, then opens up a whole new world of possibility. I can say, "Yes, we just need to get rid of fossil fuels, no extraction, no sale, no trade, no use." You can say that. I would be fine with just, we're going to stop having cars with engines in them.
Yeah.
I mean France said that. France is all nuclear, so they can. I guess it's still kind of how do we knock down a giant fireball, and while, by the way, we're doing that, try to make the world a little more equitable. The number one thing I would say needs to happen at the small level is that people with rooftop solar or small wind, need to be able to keep their lights on. That just has to happen.
How does that happen?
Essentially the problem is that if there's any electricity feeding into the system, when the men working on the system try to bring it back up, they get electrocuted. There just needs to be a switch, essentially, that automatically takes anything generating electricity off the system. There are places where this is being discussed more seriously, but if you have a diesel generator that already happens. You can do it with solar.
You can do it...
Yeah. To run a microgrid with solar power is more complicated technologically than with a diesel generator. With diesel, you actually have to go turn it on, and in that act of turning it on, you make a signal that says this house is an island. But with solar, it just stays on, there isn't any break. There would have to be some sort of artificial break put in, like maybe your power goes out for 45 seconds and then comes back on again. I don't know how it would work, but I could tell you that it's not so complicated.
It's a legislative problem, and it's a systems engineering problem, but it's not a technological problem.
I think the argument that everybody starts with is the good one, which is that electricity is everything – it's money, it's information, it's family, and some ways it's communication. It's the sense of how you're connected to the world. Just the idea of a blackout is a ridiculous misnomer, because the lights are not what matters anymore. If the electricity goes out you don't have running water anymore in your house. It's become this completely essential substructure of everything that we are and do.
Of course we should be interested in it.
We can't remove it anymore.
interviews
The Politicization of Abortion
by Karissa Haugeberg
March 21, 2020
Hi Karissa, so happy to speak to you today. Would you mind starting by introducing yourself and telling us a bit about your background?
Sure. I'm Karissa Haugeberg. I am an assistant professor of history at Tulane University. I teach courses on US women and the law and also the history of medicine in the United States. My first book was about women's participation in the US anti-abortion movement from 1960s until the early 2000s. My next book project will be about the history of nursing since 1964 in the United States.
Incredible, I was hoping we could begin by framing abortion in a historical context. As far as I understand, it's gone through different legal phases: from unregulated to regulated and then to a reform of that regulation. Is that correct?
Yeah. I'll just begin with this: women have always had abortions. That in and of itself is not a new phenomenon. Women have always sought them no matter what the legal status of abortion has been.
Until the 1820s, women were permitted to have an abortion before quickening. Quickening was the moment a woman recorded that she felt the fetus move. Basically, people had to trust a woman's judgment and what the woman was saying. As long the woman claimed that she hadn't felt the fetus move, no crime had been committed.
And that is until when?
Until about 1821.
Okay, wow. So when did contemportary abortion law come about and why?
The first more contemporary anti-abortion law was passed by Conneticut in 1821. What's interesting about that first wave of abortion laws is that they were largely poison control measures and they did not target women. The laws resulted from concern about unregulated salesmen who were selling abortifacients. These were herbal remedies or pills that were actually unsafe and were sometimes harming and killing women. It could be argued that really the intent of the laws was to protect women's health, protect them from these unlicensed, unregulated entrepreneurs.
There was a really thriving trade of abortion practice in this time. Typically, women just went to their networks of other women, similar to the advice networks set up for figuring out who to deliver your baby. It wasn't uncommon for the midwife to also be an abortion provider. There was just very little attention paid to this.
During the conversation during this time, whether it's between a woman and their physician or amongst the family, is there any moral argument being made or is this something that's detached and medical?
There was not a whole lot of moral discourse about abortion, the exception being the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has been pretty consistently anti-abortion, but they didn't have a lot of political sway in the 19th century. They weren't politicians for the most part, they weren't influential lobbyists, so this moral argument was pretty small and limited to the Catholic Church. One thing to keep in mind is that Catholicism is associated with immigrants in the early 19th century, and for middle-class white Protestant Americans, this just was not one of the moral issues they were talking about.
Things started to change in the middle of the 19th century. It was physicians who really led the charge to criminalize abortion in the way we now think of there being anti-abortion laws, ones that target both women and providers.
What was the response of physicians?
This coincided with the professionalization of medicine in the United States. We were really late to the game. Physicians in Europe already had to be members of a guild, go to college, pass exams in order to be admitted to practice medicine. In the United States until the middle of the 19th century, a person could go to college for a year, graduate from high school, hang out a shingle and call themselves a doctor. That was perfectly legal. Physicians, beginning in the 19th century, tried to professionalize and have national standards: make everyone graduate from college, make people pass an exam in order to be admitted to the American Medical Association.
In that process of trying to take away business from midwives, but also delegitimize them. They understood abortion and labor to be lucrative. It was a way to establish that relationship with a future client. If a physician delivers a baby, that's perhaps who those women will turn to when those children get sick or when their spouse gets sick. It was a targeted business decision and it was about establishing their authority. To establish their authority, they argued that abortion was profoundly dangerous, which it really wasn't. It was safer than actual childbirth. Physicians also began to use the moral rhetoric that we now associate with ministers. They started talking about how it was just so immoral that these women were making this decision. Several of these prominent physicians would say things like, "Abortion is murder, but it's sometimes necessary. That's why you need a physician to intervene, to figure out if this is an acceptable time to commit this act." They almost provided this moral authority to arbitrate whether it was permissible or not.
What's the response then from women at the time?
A lot of their critique of the way that men were treating women got wrapped up into the way they were talking about abortion. It wasn't until well into the 20th century that marital rape was considered a crime, so a lot of these feminists pointed out so long as men are just entitled to their wives' bodies, these women are always going to vulnerable. It's going to put them at risk of needing abortions if they want to control their fertility because this is before there's reliable birth control. That's part of the context that they're thinking about when they think about abortion. They see abortion as potentially dangerous and that it seems really unfair that women have to subject themselves to this potential danger because of all these factors, these ways in which women lack equality.
Right. Is family planning a part of the conversation at this point, also? Obviously, you're saying there's lack of access to reliable birth control. Is that a consideration from women in this discussion?
That’s a really good question and, in a sense, one could argue that the history of abortion demonstrates that women have always sought to plan their families. We can look from the perspective of 2020 and say, "Yeah, it looks like those women were committed to family planning." They wouldn't have used those words to describe what they were doing, but that's it. That is what they were doing.
In the 19th century, a lot of women who got abortions were married women who were trying to control the spacing in between children, arguing that in order to be good moms, they needed to not have five children under the age of five. Alternately, women who were single often turned to abortion in order to remain marriageable because it was so hard to find a partner who was willing to marry you if you had a child out of wedlock. The rhetoric of family planning really gets popular in the 1910s and 1920s with Margaret Sanger's activism.
That makes sense. By the 20th century, every state in the United States has classified abortion as a felony.
That's correct. Again, it's physicians who drove that campaign. They're the ones who lobbied state legislatures to criminalize abortion. Those criminal abortion statutes were really serious. In a lot of states that made providing or even seeking an abortion was a felony offense. More abortion providers were prosecuted than women, and the reason for that are twofold. One, often the thing that triggered these prosecutions was a woman dying, so there wasn't a woman there to prosecute. The second reason is when a woman did leave, let's say there was a dragnet and the police where criminal abortions were being performed, they would often offer women a plea deal if they agreed to testify against the person who performed the abortion.
Right. Yeah, they're getting the little guy to slip.
Exactly.
Culturally and, I guess, politically, what propelled us from this place where every state has classified abortion as a felony to Roe v. Wade?
One thing that plays a big role in abortion access is the state of the economy.
When the economy was not doing well during the Great Depression, authorities for the most part turned a blind eye and the abortion rate spiked. This was true globally, people, in todays terms, were attempting to practice family planning when they could not put food on the table. Abortion was still illegal, but authorities really diminished prosecutions because they understood that if people are suffering and then they go after this source of relief, it would be enormously unpopular. Conversely, when the economy was doing well, there tends to be this renewed emphasis on promoting family. Think about the baby boom of postwar America. There was a renewed crackdown on criminal abortion in the 1950s and 1960s. That's really when we see the underground market, the unregulated market really taking off in the United States.
When prosectutions start ramping off, doctors stopped providing abortions because they're afraid of going to jail or losing their practice, so this teeming criminal enterprise opened. Low and behold, you see the death rate just spike because instead of turning to physicians, women are increasingly turning to underground, unlicensed people. This is where you hear these horror stories, or if you've ever seen that photo of the woman who's lying in a pool of her own blood on the floor, that's taken in this era in the 50s and 60s. Hospitals end up having to open up entire wards called septic wards to treat women dying of blood infections, like bacterial infections from using knitting needles or ingesting Lysol, trying to throw themselves down stairs.
It is also coinciding with more women going to college, so they're wanting to delay their pregnancies in order to maybe go to law school or medical school. Women's lives were changing so much after the war, and yet these laws remained unchanged. Suddenly, affluent white people started to see their daughters dying, friend's daughters dying, so there was real public outcry.
One additional factor is that there was an outbreak of German measles. When women contract German measles when they're pregnant, it can result in birth defects or a loss of a pregnancy. Americans came into contact with women who had wanted pregnancies, were mothers, and then were suddenly in this position to want an abortion and couldn't get them. There's something about being, again, affluent white middle-class mothers who want another child need an abortion that suddenly makes Americans more sympathetic to the issue. This propelled state legislatures at the state level to begin liberalizing abortion laws.
During this time, 50s, 60s, I feel like the prespective on abortion was divided along religious lines. There was a section of Catholic voters opposed to abortion access that were a really big part of the New Deal Democratic coalition. You look back at Barry Goldwater, who was staunchly pro-choice. How did it become then contentious along the party lines as we see it today where it seems the GOP takes the conservative, anti-choice stance? I can't really imagine a Democrat being elected to state legislature or senate or anything with a non-pro-choice perspective.
No, absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. There's such a profound realignment that is kind of stunning if you look back at it.
This was due to the fact that the Democratic party was the home for many Catholics. How did this all change? A large part of that story has to do mostly with the realignment of the Republican party. In the late 1960s, several of Richard Nixon's strategists knew they had a very close reelection coming up. Their goal was to try to animate new voters to come out and vote for Richard Nixon.
At the time evangelicals were somewhat of an afterthought politically, but Nixon's team figured out if they could mobilize Evangelicals to come out and vote Republican, that would be a significant enough wedge of voters that it could enable Nixon to win. They had to craft Nixon into somebody that could be considered to champion their values. They argued that school prayer was under assault, they decried the legalization of birth control as leading to changes in gender, they pointed to the feminist movement as changing families away from the traditional American family, and they argued that “traditional” America was being upended by programs meant to promote desegreagation. Abortion became one of these issues. An issue that Nixon previously didn't seem to care about suddenly became pretty central.
After Nixon was impeached, Gerald Ford represented the more typical Republican politician over there. He was deeply uncomfortable talking about abortion. That wasn't part of partisan politics, so he signaled a return to how it had been. Some people within the Republican party looked at Ford and his unwillingness to embrace this more Moral Majority right position, and say, "Aha, look what happens when you step away from this emerging coalition. You lose." They made sure that wouldn't happen again, so one of the most robust parts of Ronald Reagan's campaign was to very aggressively court the Evangelical right and the Moral Majority. The Moral Majority was happy to align with him. They saw if they could get out the vote for him, they could maybe help select judges. It's in 1979 that the Republican party for the first time adopts a pro-life plank as part of the Republican platform.
It's so late. That's so crazy.
Yeah, but it took a while to get there. It starts with Nixon, it's really uncomfortable, it gets to Reagan. Even in that time, it's still deeply uncomfortable within the party because you have all these Ford-type people and George H. W. Bush-type people who were either pro-choice or thought it was uncouth to talk about abortion that way.
Right. You deal with that in private, please.
Exactly, that's a private issue. There were a lot of Republican politicians who openly identified as feminists and it wasn't a cynical feminism. They promoted gender equality. They were deeply uncomfortably with what was happening. You just basically see a reckoning unfold in the Republican party. Basically, that very conservative faction won. By the time you get to George W. Bush, there is no question. If you want to win a primary, you basically have to be anti-abortion. As part of that reckoning, they were basically able to take conservative Catholics away from the Democratic party. The degree to which the Democratic self-consciously became the party of choice, one could make that argument, but there's almost a way in which that's what they were left with. They were almost a reactionary party to the party that was taking the oxygen out of the room, which was the Republican party through its realignment.
The Democrats, they then affirmed a pro-choice plank one year after the Republicans did. I want to say it's '79 is the Republican party, then 1980 is the Democratic party. You just see them following suit or following the lead of the Republican party.
Right. The Republican political line, by this time, it is morally reprehensible and it's a moral religious argument that they're making.
Absolutely. In this time period, in the '70s and '80s, you're not hearing as much about abortion is a horribly dangerous thing. You hear that a little bit in the grassroots, but as far as major politicians, they're definitely just using very moral religious rhetoric to make these arguments that they are saving babies.
That makes a lot of sense. Again, by this time, what is the women narrative? How are women talking about abortion and access to abortion and what it means to the feminist movement, obviously, during the same time period?
Right. The feminist movement is just so radically altered by this time, by the 1960s and 1970s. One of the major things we have to remember historically is that the pill had just been made available, an effective form of birth control in the 1960s. Women began to see how the ability to control reproduction meant the ability to complete college. It meant the ability to go to law school. It meant the ability to go get on the career track maybe to becoming a manager in a company. They very clearly saw the links between that ability to control reproduction, the ability to control one's body, and the ability to control one's destiny. You weren't destined to have to get married in order to survive economically.
By this time, what's the physicians' stance? Has that changed?
That's changed dramatically. Whereas physicians led the movement to criminalize abortion in the 19th century, they were among the groups that were calling for the decriminalization of abortion by the late '60s.
What changed?
They were doing so for two reasons. One was they were getting that uptick in women coming into the emergency room dying of criminal abortions. They were first-hand responders watching criminal abortion was doing to young women, so they were horrified by what they were seeing. But a second reason why they led this campaign is that they were so afraid of being prosecuted for making the wrong decision. For example, if a woman came in suffering from a miscarriage and needed a D&C, there was always this specter of worry, "Will people think I'm really just performing an illicit abortion and using this as a cover?" or, "What do I do when my state only has an exception for the life of the mother, but I know her health may suffer, and I go ahead and perform this. I'm technically not complying with the law. Am I vulnerable to being prosecuted?" Because the law just didn't match ordinary human experiences, these physicians believed that they weren't able to exercise their professional judgment. They resented that and they were afraid, so they worked with the American Law Institute to try to reform state criminal abortion codes so they didn't feel as nervous just doing their profession.
Right. Where do the nurses come in and fit between the two groups. As an overwhelmingly female dominated industry in the medical field, it seems that they would be staunchly pro-choice. But that is not the case at least in the 1970s, could you elaborate on why that is?
When I was writing my first book, I kept coming across all these images of pro-life nurses, or anti-abortion nurses. They formed some of the first anti-abortion groups. I was just so stunned by this because there were all these physicians who were advocating for the decriminalization of abortion. Why were nurses so different when they were working in the same hospital, working with the same group of women? One of the things that I discovered was that in the late '60s and early '70s, many nurses did not have bachelor's degrees. Instead, after high school, they entered 3-year hospital-based nursing programs, like a nursing school. There's a really strong corelation between the amount of education a person has and their attitude about abortion. The more education one has, the more likely they are to be pro-choice. That's one possible explanation for why nurses tended to be more anti-abortion than women in other professions, like social work or teaching, or compared to men in healthcare.
As I investigated more, I learned that it was more commonplace for women to get a second-trimester in the '60s and '70s; that's for a lot of reasons. It's something that's gone down a lot. But at the time, the procedure for performing a second-trimester abortion was called a saline abortion. Among the things that I learned is that the way that that was administered is the physician would often inject a woman's uterus with a saline solution and then leave the room and basically have minimal or no contact with that woman ever again. It was left to the nurse to stay with woman while she labored and eventually had a miscarriage, so delivered a baby that was stillborn, or was dead from the saline. There were ways in which this could be... if a person is not trained to deal with this, it was stressful. Some of these nurses weren't even trained, like given directions about how to dispose of these fetuses. It's not totally shocking that they found this to be upsetting. They resented this new workload that they had because, again, there was a massive influx of women as soon as abortion was decriminalized initially.
Yeah, no. That makes a lot of sense.
Okay.
Do you see a way to decouple the moral religious grievances that come with the abortion conversation from the conversation entirely? Is there a way that this can be something that is less polarized, that is less extreme, that is less difficult? Ultimately, is this always going to be a central stance of the Republican party? Do you see a way that that changes?
In the short term, I don't see the Republican party abandoning this because it's been such a successful strategy for ensuring that they have a very stable, loyal base. Think of Donald Trump. A lot of people wonder how is it that a person who is a philanderer, in many regards pretty immoral in his personal life, definitely not religious, how was he able to garner the support of so many Evangelical Christians? It's because of his promise to nominate anti-abortion judges.
From just a very cynical political calculation, I cannot imagine why a Republican would abandon that base. One thing I often find myself thinking about is, if we're being honest about this issue, in many ways, opposition to abortion is a religious belief.
It's a belief about morality and when life begins. If we were to value a strict separation of church and state, I think it's possible to have political discourse that isn't about this issue. For example, if we agree that this is a moral religious issue, it's then inappropriate for us to have it at the focal point of public policy... to regulate it, to make it go away. Conversely, if we think about the right to abortion as a public health issue, it's inappropriate to take it away on grounds that are religious, right? If we're foregrounding the ways in which this is key to keeping women's health safe, a moral argument is inappropriate. Again, if we can think about our obligation to separate personal moral religious beliefs from issues of the state secular issues about health, I think that would be tremendously helpful and important.
Right.
If we're going to keep our attention on like the medical reasons for abortion, there really are not really compelling reasons to regulate it.
And is that something that you can see happening or are we too sort of...
I do not see that happening because in a variety of contexts, including gay rights, the courts had been more permissive of religion and The Affordable Care Act.
So, I do not really see there being an end in sight to this so long as the courts continue to value religious expression over the ability to be free from religious controls.