Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Mayhem: The 1970s You Never Knew, Episode 5

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

The right to privacy, a 22-year-old who went by the pseudonym “Jane Roe,” and one of the most famous court cases in United States history. Join us as we learn what happened leading up to Roe v. Wade, the fate of Norma McCorvey following the Supreme Court’s ruling, and how this piece of history echoes in the present day. That is not the only ghost of 1973 history that is still relevant, though. If you’re curious about how an oil embargo in the 70s impacts today’s gas prices and oil reserves, and you’d like to better understand a piece of Israel's history and how it ties into present-day events, you’re in the right place. Writer, Host, and Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Writers and Researchers: Amy Watkin, Mandy Reid, and Kari Anton Production Coordinator: Andrea Champoux Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to Episode 5 in our series about the 1970s mayhem. Norma Nelson's father left when she was nine years old. Her mother suffered from alcoholism and frequently abused Norma. Norma dropped out of school in ninth grade, ran away from home, and was eventually made a ward. She was sent to Catholic boarding school, where she was sexually assaulted by one of the nuns and then by a family member. She married Woody McCorvey, who beat her when he learned that she was pregnant. After giving birth, Norma surrendered custody of her baby to her mother and began abusing drugs and alcohol. Eventually, Norma became pregnant again and placed that baby for adoption, left her abusive husband only to find herself pregnant for a third time at age 21.

And this time, she wanted an abortion. But before Norma could figure out what to do next, she met two ambitious women, gained a pseudonym, and became part of one of the most famous court cases in U.S. history, which of course was decided in 1973. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Abortion was largely considered a private issue in the United States until 1857, although some states like Connecticut made rules banning it after quickening, or when the mother began to feel fetal movement. Medicinal remedies for pregnancy were advertised in newspapers, sometimes coded as quote-unquote

relief for ladies. A woman might buy a little tin of 20 pennyroyal pills for $2, which is about $72 today, either over the counter or through the mail. This kind of thing happened for decades. And of course, women and midwives were using herbs to try to control conception and abortion for centuries before this. Anti-Vice Crusader Anthony Comstock was determined to put a stop to these practices. If women were allowed to access birth control, they would have relationships outside of marriage, and Comstock's religious beliefs did not allow him to tolerate such things. Even while he was a Union soldier during the Civil War,

Comstock would pour his daily whiskey ration, another vice in his mind, out onto the ground rather than drink it or share it. After the war, Comstock became a dry goods merchant, but spent much of his time lobbying Congress for stronger obscenity laws. The Comstock Act of 1873 made it illegal to send obscene material through the mail. No one really ever defined obscene, but it definitely included writings or tools related to contraception and abortion. Anne Lohman lived in New York City and in 1839 began calling herself Madame Restelle, female physician and professor of midwifery, and placing ads selling preventive powders for, quote, married ladies whose health forbids a too rapid increase of family. Madame Rostel was arrested in 1847 for allegedly performing abortions and spent a year

in prison on lesser charges. Rostel and her husband continued their lucrative business, but changed it to mail order instead of in person until the Comstock Act of 1873. After the Comstock Act was passed, Comstock himself was appointed special agent of the United States Post Office, allowing him access to people's mail so he could enforce the Comstock Act. In his case against Madam Restell, he pretended to be a customer so that he could bring her up on charges. She died by suicide before the trial began. In 1965, Supreme Court ruling Griswold v. Connecticut made it legal for married couples to obtain a prescription for contraceptive pills. This decision was based on the right to privacy,

which will come up again later in this episode. Between 1967 and 1970, more than a dozen states, including Mississippi, Alabama, and New Mexico, loosened their abortion laws. By 1973, legal abortions were possible under some circumstances in 17 states and completely legal in Hawaii. None of this information would have helped Norma Nelson McCorvey in Texas, though. Texas law at the time said that if a woman terminated her own pregnancy, she was not guilty of any crime. But those supplying the means for an abortion were considered accomplices and could be prosecuted. Lawyers Linda Coffey and Sarah Weddington, both in their 20s, were nearly ready to file a lawsuit about Texas's abortion laws. But they needed a pregnant woman who would step forward as a

plaintiff. Linda Coffey first became interested in women's legal rights around abortion in high school when her class had to watch a film warning about abortions. Sarah Weddington was compelled by the issue because she herself had an abortion the year before she was married. Sarah and her then-future husband drove together to Mexico for the procedure in 1968. In February 1970, when Norma McCorvey met Weddington and Coffey at a pizza shop in Dallas, she was 22 years old, pregnant for the third time, and desperate. Norma agreed to be part of their class action lawsuit only after being reassured that it would cost her nothing and that her real name would not be made public.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Norma, now known as Jane Roe, and all other women who were or might become pregnant and want to consider all options. Jane Roe's lawsuit was filed against the district attorney of Dallas County, Henry Wade, because he was responsible for enforcing criminal laws, including anti-abortion statutes. Henry Wade, by the way, had garnered some national attention in 1964 for prosecuting Jack Ruby, the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald. And Lee Harvey Oswald was the man who shot JFK. And so it began. Jane Roe and Henry Wade, each standing in for a much larger group. Attorneys Weddington and Coffey claimed that the Texas law was unconstitutional and that the court needed to stop Wade from prosecuting doctors who performed abortions. On May 22, 1970,

at the federal courthouse in Dallas, Weddington and Coffey faced off against a couple of junior lawyers from the county prosecutor's office who argued that the unborn child's right to life outweighed the mother's right to privacy. Meanwhile, Norma McCorvey, whose baby was due before the case was decided, carried to term. This baby, a girl, was adopted immediately after she was born. The unanimous lower court decision was released in June 1970, declaring the Texas state statute unconstitutional because it was vague and overbroad. No doubt Coffey, Weddington, and McCorvey celebrated. It was a shallow victory, though, because Henry Wade continued to prosecute doctors who provided abortions, and most judges would not intervene. So Weddington and Coffey asked themselves, how do you stop the Texas DA's office if they won't comply with a court decision?

They submitted a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court in the fall of 1970, and then waited over a year for it to be heard. But then, by December 1971, when the Supreme Court was scheduled to hear the case, Justices Hugo Black and John Harlan had both retired, leaving only seven justices on the bench. The remaining seven justices decided to move forward with hearing Roe v. Wade because they thought it would be an application of existing statutes. Arguments began on December 13, 1971, and it turned out to be more than those seven justices bargained for. Weddington presented the harmful effects of unwanted pregnancies on women's well-being, lack of due process, the guarantee of privacy,

and the guarantee of privacy under the 14th Amendment as established in Griswold v. Connecticut. She also argued that one of the central tenets of the Constitution was to guarantee to an individual the right to determine the course of their own lives. Weddington then argued that doctors and patients had a constitutional right to make the best educated private decisions together without fear of prosecution, and that Texas law removed physicians' ability to provide the highest standard of medical care to their patients. Jay Floyd, the lawyer representing Texas, began his argument with a tasteless joke that fell flat. It's an old joke, Mr. Floyd told the court, but when a man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they are going to have the last word. No one in the courtroom laughed.

No one in the courtroom laughed. Floyd claimed that under the 14th Amendment, fetuses are classified as people and should therefore be protected as such. He also argued that nowhere in the Griswold v. Connecticut decision did it mention abortion. all happening in December 1971. But Supreme Court Justices William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell were appointed by Richard Nixon and joined the court on January 7, 1972. So just a few weeks after oral arguments, the court got two new members. And of course, the two new members had missed the oral arguments of Roe v. Wade. The court felt that it could not, under these circumstances, vote on the full merits of the case. In May of 1972, Justice Blackmun announced that he would like both parties to return to the court at a later date and re-argue the case, this time in front of all nine justices. Weddington and Coffey and Wade's office agreed to return to the Supreme Court in the fall of 1972. And of course, what happens next would change the course of U.S. history.

Before we get back to Roe v. Wade, let's look into some of the other things that were going on in 1973. Some of us may remember the days before the pay-at-the-pump option was available at most gas stations. And for those of you who do not remember, listen carefully. Youngsters gather around. carefully. Youngsters gather around because back then you had to pull up to the pump, get out of the car and walk all the way inside the gas station to pay. I mean, it was the injustice. It was terrible. But believe it or not, things got even worse for car owners in 1973. Things got even worse for car owners in 1973. During World War II, the United States had been the biggest oil producer in the world and for decades enjoyed low and steady gas prices.

By 1946, there was a car on the road for about one out of every five Americans. In the 1950s, oil and petroleum product consumption around the world nearly quadrupled from the decades before. In the 1950s and 60s, the first interstate highways were built. Americans bought big cars, and the all-American road trip on Route 66 became the ultimate vacation. Each state set its own speed limit, so drivers crossing state lines could quickly go from driving 40 miles an hour to driving 70 miles an hour. In 1953, gas in the U.S. was 29 cents a gallon. Over the next two decades, gas prices increased only 10 cents to 39 cents a gallon in 1973.

By then, there were vehicles on the road for three out of every five Americans. In 1973, the petroleum markets were controlled by seven dominant companies, often referred to as the Seven Sisters. These companies have changed names over the decades, but in the 1970s, they were known as things like British Petroleum or BP, Gulf Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Texaco. The Seven Sisters worked together to control production and price in the oil market. They were especially dominant from the 1940s through the 1970s. Throughout the late 1950s, there were strikes, coups, and general unrest that disrupted the oil industry in the Middle East region, not to mention the conflicts surrounding Israel's existence. Frustrated with the Seven Sisters' stranglehold over the price

and availability of oil, more and more countries tried to nationalize their oil holdings. Iran, for example, announced in 1951 that it planned to nationalize the oil company owned by the British. The British government fought back and enlisted the United States in a plan to overthrow Iran's prime minister, leading to one of the first instances when the CIA was used to remove a government that was becoming hostile to Western powers and replace it with a leader that appeared to be friendlier. Countries like Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela felt cheated by Western companies controlling a product that originated in their country. They knew that they needed to join together in order to have any power against the Seven Sisters. So on September 10, 1960, Iran,

Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela met together in Baghdad and created the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, in order to gain sovereignty and ownership of their country's natural resources. Membership in OPEC grew to 13 countries by 1975, and before long, they were producing half of the world's oil. It turns out that 13 countries is sometimes too many cooks in the kitchen, jockeying for position and negotiating power, which destabilized the oil market and created fertile ground for major problems. As far as the oil industry goes, the U.S. was torn between two opposing countries. The United States needed Saudi Arabian oil to keep our refineries running and our cars on the road.

Ideologically, however, the United States was committed to defending the right of Israel to exist. Israel had shocked the world by fending off the Egyptian forces during the Six-Day War in 1967, expanding their boundaries and damaging Egypt's economy. Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt, formed a coalition with Syria and chose the day to attack Israel carefully. October 6, 1973, was the first day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement on the Jewish calendar, and many of the Israeli soldiers were away from their posts in observance of the day. Henry Kissinger, the Secretary of State, got involved in the Yom Kippur War because the Soviets were an unofficial ally of Syria and

Egypt, and the United States didn't want the war to escalate through Soviet involvement. After a proposed ceasefire failed on October 9th, the Soviets started to quietly resupply the Egyptians, Syrians, and Iraqis who were fighting. Seeing that the other side was being restocked, the Israeli government appealed to Washington, D.C. for help. On October 14th, planes carrying American aid and arms began arriving in Israel. Henry Kissinger spent the next 10 days performing shuttle diplomacy as he traveled between the Middle East and Washington multiple times trying to broker a ceasefire between the opposing sides. He was able to secure a resolution through the UN that ended the fighting,

but at a significant economic cost to the United States. In the statement announcing the embargo, OPEC said they would reduce production 5% every month until Israel evacuated the territories that had been annexed during the Six-Day War. When that threat didn't work, a full embargo was imposed in December 1973. An embargo, by the way, is the ban of trade or the sale of certain goods. In 1973, the United States held only 6% of the world's population, but we were using one third of all of the oil produced in the world. And gas prices rose quickly from 39 cents a gallon to 53 cents a gallon. One big difference between the high gas prices we've seen in recent years and 1973 though, is that back then prices were high and the embargo meant supply

was very limited. People were locking their gas tanks on their cars to prevent thieves from siphoning gas. The National Archives has a photograph of a man standing in front of a Buick Skylark holding a gun next to a sign that says, gas dealers beware, we are loaded for bear. It was not unusual at the end of 1973 to see service stations with signs out front saying, no gas. All of this was a very big problem. To have any hope of eliminating these problems, the Nixon administration knew that peace talks and oil negotiations had to happen simultaneously. The Yom Kippur War began and ended in October 1973, and the first Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement was signed on January 18, 1974. There really never was a final peace deal, but the promise of an end to the conflict was enough to get the oil embargo lifted in March of 1974. And all of this, my friends, is why we now have a strategic

petroleum reserve, the largest emergency supply of crude oil in the world, stored underground along the Gulf of Mexico. The oil embargo is also the reason Nixon imposed the first national, more fuel-efficient speed limits of 55 miles an hour on interstate highways. The oil embargo ended, but in some ways, we still feel its effects. And here's another interesting tidbit from 1973. Did you know that something happened that year that's connected to my personal nemesis, President Andrew Jackson? On December 28, 1832, John C. Calhoun, vice president under Andrew Jackson, became the first vice president to ever resign from office, citing policy differences with Jackson as his reason for leaving. When Calhoun resigned, there was no plan in place to replace a vice president under those circumstances,

so the U.S. was without a vice president until March of 1833, when Secretary of State Martin Van Buren was sworn in. I mean, I guess it's a good thing that nothing bad happened to Andrew Jackson during that time. It's a real good thing. Throughout the centuries, though, the office of the vice president was empty more than 20% of the time. Either a president died and the VP had to be elevated to being the president, or the vice president died, or in the case of Calhoun, resigned. And there was no way to replace them. or in the case of Calhoun, resigned, and there was no way to replace them.

It wasn't until 1967 that the 25th Amendment was ratified. The amendment says, whenever there's a vacancy in the office of the vice president, the president shall nominate a vice president who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both houses of Congress. by a majority vote of both houses of Congress. Turns out, this amendment came in the nick of time, because by 1973, another vice president was facing resignation, which had not happened since Calhoun. In the first week of August 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew became the subject of a federal investigation with the potential to be charged with several dozen felonies.

The Nixon administration, come on now, so much corruption. accused of taking payments in exchange for civil project contracts that were handed out to various engineering and design firms in Maryland where he was formerly the governor. Basically, a deal would be made between Agnew's people and someone at the engineering firm that needed work. If the firm made a substantial contribution to Agnew's campaign, they won a contract to make $50,000 worth of improvements to the freeways. And in turn, that engineering firm would kick back 5 to 10% of that $50,000 to Agnew. Agnew insisted he was innocent and asked if the president believed him. Agnew insisted he was innocent and asked if the president believed him. President Nixon paused and then told him he had complete confidence in him and that they would get through it together. Later that same day, Agnew received a visit from White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig,

who explained that President Nixon also felt that if Agnew were to face an indictment while still in office, his ability to fulfill his duties would be impaired, creating an unprecedented situation, and that Agnew should keep the best interests of the country in mind. Spiro Agnew was incensed. Nixon seemed to be talking out of both sides of his mouth. On August 8th, the investigation became public, and Agnew gave a press conference to insist repeatedly that he had nothing to hide. What Agnew would soon find out was that his former commissioner of roads, who had also briefly been on his vice presidential staff, Jerome Wolfe, had kept very

detailed records of every illicit payment. Wolfe had multiple notebooks containing every payment, the name of the company involved, the project it was related to, and the date of the transaction. The notebooks were a prosecutorial goldmine, and they were also Wolfe's get-out-of-jail-free card. These notebooks showed evidence that Agnew had received payment of $1,000 a week from state contractors while he was the governor of Maryland. They also showed a total of $50,000 paid to Agnew in 1970 or 1971 after he had become vice president. Spiro Agnew hired his own lawyers rather than using the White House counsel, who were busy trying to defend President Nixon against Watergate. Press speculation about the relationship

between Nixon and Agnew ran rampant in the weeks between early August and mid-September, maybe because Nixon had largely remained silent. Even when Nixon and Agnew finally met again on September 22nd, the press was not allowed to report on or discuss the meeting. Journalist Dan Rather got the following statement from an unnamed White House official. Mr. Agnew is convinced he has done nothing wrong. He does not want to quit, but has indicated he may be willing to do so if the president insists and if he, Mr. Agnew, can be assured that he will not face indictment or prosecution. Late 1973 was a uniquely bad time for Agnew to have to resign because Congress was deep into its investigation of Watergate and quickly losing trust in Richard Nixon, who was refusing to hand over the tapes Congress had requested. Senator Ted Kennedy voiced concerns.

So long as the president himself is so clearly under the cloud of the possible disclosures on the tapes, grave questions exist as to the propriety of the president choosing his own successor, meaning it wasn't entirely clear if Richard Nixon should be trusted to choose a new vice president. On September 28th, after one day of grand jury hearings, Spiro Agnew filed a lawsuit to stop the hearings. He claimed that under the Constitution, a sitting vice president could not be criminally prosecuted. The next day, he proclaimed his innocence again and said that he would not resign even if he was indicted. On October 5th, the Justice Department released a 5,000-word document outlining the legal justification for indicting a sitting vice

president. The one bright spot in the memo was the open offer from the Department of Justice to conduct impeachment proceedings instead of a criminal trial. That would mean, of course, that Agnew would be out of office, but he wouldn't go to jail. The Department of Justice launched a full investigation into Agnew's financial history, a full investigation into Agnew's financial history, going back nearly a decade, and Agnew quietly began talking with them about the terms of a plea bargain. And on October 9th, Agnew walked into the White House to meet with President Nixon and offer his resignation face to face. Agnew admitted that he was guilty of failing to report $29,500 of income while he was the governor of Maryland. That's like almost $200,000 in today's money. He agreed to plead

no contest to felony tax evasion and resign. The next day, October 10th, 1973, Agnew's one-sentence resignation letter read, I hereby resign the office of Vice President of the United States, effective immediately. The judge sentenced Agnew to three years of probation and a $10,000 fine. Two days later, thanks to the relatively new 25th Amendment, House Minority Leader Gerald Ford was nominated by President Nixon to be the new vice president. The nomination was approved without much drama, as the worst thing Ford's political adversaries could say about him was that he wouldn't have any late night drinks with them unless it was a glass of milk. any late night drinks with them unless it was a glass of milk.

Many thought that the May 2022 leak of Supreme Court Justice Alito's draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson was a once-in-a-lifetime event, but no, it turns out there were two leaks regarding abortion cases before the Dobbs leak. Almost exactly 50 years before the Dobbs leak, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote a memo to his colleagues in June 1972 saying that he was against delaying the hearing of Roe v. Wade during a presidential election year. The Washington Post obtained the memo and published the story. Despite Justice Douglas' now public argument, the hearing was delayed until October 11, 1972, when Sarah Weddington was able to re-argue Jane Roe's case in front of the Supreme Court, this time with all nine justices. Jane Roe's case in front of the Supreme Court, this time with all nine justices.

The assistant attorney general for the state of Texas this time around was Robert Flowers, who argued that because Jane Roe was no longer pregnant, the case should have been dismissed because it was moot. Weddington had already addressed this by reminding the court that Roe was pregnant when she filed the suit and stating that, quote, it is not possible to pause pregnancy for the timing of the court. In Texas, the women seeking abortion were not subject to prosecution like doctors were, but Weddington argued that women were appealing to the Supreme Court for the redress of harm that had been done to them by state interference that forced them to carry unwanted and unsafe pregnancies. These women,

Weddington argued, suffered irreparable financial, medical, emotional, and physical harm that no amount of money could ever compensate for. Robert Flowers once again argued on behalf of Texas that the case hinged on the argument about whether or not a fetus was a person. And he said that a fetus is indeed a person protected by the 14th Amendment. If you're not aware, Supreme Court justices often interrupt the attorneys as they're speaking to ask them questions. And the justices challenged the attorneys with questions of who should decide what constitutes personhood. And they asked for examples of instances when a fetus was granted the full rights of the 14th Amendment. Flowers replied that we can only go back to what the framers of the Constitution had in mind. Justices replied that the framers

didn't write the 14th Amendment. It was added later. Justice Marshall pointed out that there were no other laws on the books that specifically prohibited a surgery besides abortions. He asked why an abortion was the only operation a doctor could perform that would bring on prosecution. Flowers claimed that the reason was that it was the only surgery that could take a human life, and then Justice Marshall pointed out that brain surgery could also kill a person. On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court released its decision, but it turned out that a second leak had occurred, and a story about the decision was published in Time magazine before the official release of the Supreme Court opinion. A clerk for Justice Lewis Powell had talked to a reporter from Time magazine, and they had agreed that the story would only be published after the court's decision was officially announced.

But the announcement of the Supreme Court's decision was delayed by a few hours, and the magazine had already gone to print. Chief Justice Warren Burger was irate and established the famous 22nd rule, saying that any clerk caught talking to a reporter would be fired in under half a minute. When the decision finally did come out, it revealed that the Supreme Court was split seven to two, and that the majority found that the Texas law banning abortion was unconstitutional. Justice Blackmun wrote the majority opinion. Justice Blackmun was uniquely positioned to understand medical intricacies the court believed, as he'd been the head of legal

counsel for the Mayo Clinic earlier in his career, seeing firsthand some of the medical malpractice issues related to botched abortions and mistreated miscarriages. The decision for Justice Blackmun was also quite personal. His daughter got pregnant in college and had to drop out and marry her boyfriend, but shortly after suffered a miscarriage. As part of his opinion, Blackmun explained how Jane Roe was explicitly harmed by the Texas law that banned her from ending her pregnancy. He pointed out that women have had abortions as far back as we have written medical history. Norma McCorvey didn't tell anyone that she'd been Jane Roe until

years after the case was over. She spent most of the 1980s as the voice of the pro-choice movement, so it was a shock when in 1995 she announced that she was pro-life. However, in a documentary filmed shortly before her death, McCorvey was brutally honest about her conversion in the 1990s. McCorvey said that she'd been lying. She said, I took anti-abortion advocates' money, and they put me out in front of the camera and told me what to say, and that is what I would say. The documentary's director asked at one point if it was all an act, and McCorvey

replied, yeah, I was good at it too. In 2003, Sarah Weddington said, I thought that by this time, the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the controversy over abortion would have gradually faded away, like the closing scenes of a movie, and we would go on to other issues. I was wrong. The immediate effects of the Roe v. Wade decision were about as split as the results of a 1973 Gallup poll showing 46% of the people supporting legalized abortion and 45% being against it. The Roe v. Wade decision was overshadowed in the news because former president Lyndon B. Johnson had died on the very same day the opinion was released. The White House's response to the Roe v. Wade decision was no comment, but the rest of America wasn't shy about responding. Hospitals around the country

immediately began receiving calls from women asking, when can I get an abortion? Responses varied from place to place because the Supreme Court's decision said that women could now legally ask for abortions and doctors could not be kept from performing them, but it did not say that doctors were required to perform abortions. Boston Hospital for Women, the country's oldest hospital focusing on women's health, immediately changed its policy so doctors there could provide abortions. Other doctors and hospitals either stood morally against abortion or didn't have the tools and training to perform them, leaving some women to hunt around to find

doctors to help them, and sometimes they traveled great distances. Right to Life groups started planning to lobby for a constitutional amendment, while a group of Catholics in Virginia proposed the symbolic gesture of excommunicating Justice William Brennan, who supported the majority opinion and was the only Catholic on the Supreme Court. On the flip side, a shuttered abortion clinic in Detroit immediately opened and doctors there performed 20 abortions on their first day. Planned Parenthood and other health organizations pledged support for opening more clinics. Fifty years after the Roe v. Wade decision, leaks out of the Supreme Court happened again. As I mentioned earlier, in May 2022, Justice Samuel Alito's draft majority opinion

was leaked, revealing that the Supreme Court would likely reverse the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. And the Supreme Court has still not been able to uncover the source of the leak. Abortion access now varies widely by state, and it is once again mostly illegal in Texas. Let's wrap up 1973 by talking about a few other things that were going on that year. On July 12, 1973, a fire broke out at the National Personnel Record Center in St. Louis, Missouri and burned for 22 hours. Many St. Louis residents had to stay indoors to avoid the heavy smoke, and firefighters could not enter the building until 48 hours after the fire started. The flames destroyed 80 percent of Army records for those

discharged between 1912 and 1960, as well as 75 percent of Air Force records for personnel discharged between 1947 and 1964. The first cell phone call was made on April 3, 1973. Martin Cooper was head of communications at Motorola, and he hefted a two-and-a-half-pound brick-sized phone to his ear in order to demonstrate how it worked. President Nixon signed the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, and construction began in November 1973. Eventually, there would be an $8 billion 48-inch pipe covering 800 miles in order to move oil from northern to southern Alaska. And finally, how do you feel about spiders, my friends? If you don't care for them, perhaps you'd like to see them launched into space.

Well, I'm here to tell you that's already been done. In 1973, a space station named Skylab was launched into space carrying a number of biology experiments. High school student Judy Miles had suggested learning whether spiders can spin webs in the weightless environment of space, so two female cross spiders named Anita and Arabella made the journey. And guess what? Spiders can spin webs in weightlessness. And stay tuned for the next episode in this series, when Ford and Rockefeller take over the White House and Nixon

has to find something else to do in the midst of a global economic recession. I'll see you again soon. The show is written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reed, and Kari Anton. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder, and it is executive produced and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. If you enjoyed today's episode, we would love for you to hit the subscribe button, leave us a review, or share this episode on your favorite social media platform. All of those things help podcasters out so much. We'll see you again soon.