Show Notes: Texting, Episode 7
"Compromise and the Slippery Slope" - Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's "The Question of Abortion"
Here, at long last, are the show notes (with timestamps) to episode 7 of Texting! Link to the original podcast audio on Substack or YouTube as you take a deeper dive into Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s essay on abortion!
00:00 - opening theme
00:34 - introductory remarks
1:15 - Tomek on Estonia
2:09 - the Estonian origins of Skype
2:20 - “the second city, Tartu”
2:30 - Gustavus II, who appears in my Postcards from the Nordics and founded the university at Tartu:
2:54 - Estonia supports Ukraine . . .
4:44 - . . . and is in NATO
5:58 - Tomek’s itinerary: Tartu > Riga > London
7:30 - “Shyness is one of the characteristics of the Estonian people” (according to Tomek’s friend Veiko)
7:38 - intro to the topic at hand
8:18 - “a recent Supreme Court decision”: a reference of course to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization
9:08 - “both parties will use it to fundraise”
9:33 - “the influence of money on abortion policy”
9:41 - “the reason that abortion was initially outlawed . . . was basically a ploy for the newly founded American Medical Association to monopolize the abortion market”
10:33 - “this was the time that America transitioned from an agrarian to an industrial economy”
12:04 - “quickening”
12:20 - “birth person”?
14:03 - Melville’s The Confidence-Man:
17:52 - “new knowledge of embryology had shown the fetus to be human even before quickening”
18:21 - what was considered “a danger to the woman” was typically “interpreted based on your economic standing”
18:38 - “the back alley or the coat hanger”
19:28 - “there’s another shift in the 60s . . . this time the AMA are actually on the side of [those] arguing for reproductive freedom”
20:08 - “it seems like throughout American history there have been these reactions to reactions occurring over and over again and it never seems to be resolved”
20:33 - “Roe v. Wade was actually the compromise position . . . it represents the kind of mediation between these two extremes of ‘always’ and ‘never’”
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