interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
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.