Making Sense with Sam Harris - #199 — A Conversation with Caitlin Flanagan

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

Sam Harris and Caitlin Flanagan discuss the ethics of abortion, the fact that universities with immense endowments are laying off staff during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Woody Allen autobiography, the moral hypocrisy of Hollywood, the lessons of "Tiger King," and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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No questions asked. I am back with Caitlin Flanagan. Caitlin, thanks for joining me again. Thanks so much for having me again. So, let's see here. There are many things we want to talk about. I guess I'll just flag, you have an article coming out in The Atlantic that we can't speak about yet because it's currently embargoed,

as things occasionally are. And so we'll get to that next time. And people will marvel at our restraint in this conversation. They already do, I'm sure, in each of our individual lives. We are models of restraint. So anyway, I look forward to that. But that prompted us to talk about an older article that you wrote, actually not that old, just in the December 2019 issue, which I had never read. I think I'd heard echoes of how this had gone off like a bomb in the press, which is to say it was controversial for reasons that'll be obvious, but I had not read it, so you sent it to me last night, and it's really an amazing piece, and the title is The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate. Let's start with that. We've got a bunch of other things we want to talk about, but I want to take that at the top, because it's just, in addition to being an extraordinarily important social policy debate, and also just an extremely interesting ethical puzzle to reason through. The way we talk about abortion and the way we just reliably fail to reason about it honestly

and ethically reveals more or less everything that's wrong with our politics. And this is something you bring out in your essay in a very vivid way. So what prompted you to write about abortion six months ago? Well, abortion's always been on my mind as an important subject. My mom was a nurse in New York City in the 50s at Bellevue Hospital, and she sat with two girls, as she always called them, hospital, and she sat with two girls, as she always called them, as they died from bad abortions. You know, an abortion is, it's the kind of thing that, done correctly in a medical office by someone who knows what he or she is doing, very easy procedure to get right. Without those preconditions, it's an incredibly easy procedure to get wrong, principally in terms of sepsis, you know,

a really severe, pervasive infection that's very, very lethal. And what made those infections even more lethal in the days of illegal abortion was that you had committed a crime. So as your temperature is rising degree by degree, and if you had any other kind of medical procedure, your family would have rushed you in to get medical care. These women couldn't do that. They knew that they had committed a crime and the person who had performed the abortion would never help them. They were never to contact him or her again. And so it was just a very, very, very terrifying thing for young women.

And this was in the days that she was doing this work, just, you know, being an RN, she wasn't really called to what we would now call, I guess, reproductive justice or anything like that. She was just a young, young woman who would, you know, always wanted to be a nurse. And she was seeing that young girls right in front of her, these two who died, all they tried to do was have a private sexual life in some way. You know, it could have been a forced sexual encounter. You know, she didn't know. We'll never know. But that in those days, the consequences of being single and pregnant were devastating. If you weren't getting an education, that would be the end of that. If the person who got you pregnant was known to your family or the community, you might be forced

into a marriage with him and he into one with you, him into one with you. And no matter how abusive and horrible you both might be to each other, that was the way things were handled. and horrible you both might be to each other. That was the way things were handled. And so there was just this very terrible period of really high deaths that we, as a culture, we don't have a great much memory of them. They've kind of faded from the cultural memory. Someone, I'm 58, and my mother didn't have me till she was 36. So I've got a bank of cultural memories from my mother, who's long since dead, that was really delving back into the 30s and into the 40s of what this really looked like when you had women desperately trying to end a pregnancy.

So I'd always been interested in that on the one hand. But on the other hand, I really remember because I remember when abortion was very much in the news in the years preceding Roe v. Wade. And I was a very small child. I mean, a young kid. I don't know what, 10 or something. And I would always hear my mother was super politically active and a very good woman. I would hear her saying to people, abortion, abortion, abortion. We have to have it legal. abortion, abortion, abortion, we have to have it legal. And I really remember being in the backseat of the car and saying to my mom, well, what is abortion? And she sort of, my mother's MO to any sexual question was to give you far too much information so that you would never ask anything again. And so she kind of tried to think how in the world can you translate this incredibly complicated situation to a child? And she said, well, it's when a woman is pregnant and she doesn't want to be pregnant. So they take the baby out and it doesn't live.

And I'm like, my mom, when you're 10, your mom is just this perfect, beautiful, radiant goddess creature. And I was like, that doesn't sound good. And she's like, well, change the subject. But the reality has become more and more and more clear of that childlike intuition or sense, I should say, as sonography gets clearer and clearer and clearer. We're looking into, we're getting a view into something that's really hard to hold in our minds if we're in any way pro-choice, which I am, which is that this is not a clump of cells from, I mean, someone like Ben Shapiro

would say, we're just clumps of cells, but it is very recognizably human from an incredibly early state. And we had a quite interesting gender divide on this at the Atlantic because we were finding images of a 12-week fetus. And all the women, many of the women who were, I think, to a woman pro-choice, I think our whole office is, I don't know, I shouldn't be making claims. How do I know? Maybe somebody isn't pro-choice and doesn't feel comfortable to talk about that. So I shouldn't say that on anyone's behalf. But the women pro-choice that I know were saying, oh, wow, this is really hard to look

at. The men were saying, this doesn't really move me. And I don't see this being the compelling argument, just having this image. So that was really interesting as well. But I really thought ultimately that the reason we can't talk about abortion, and we'll probably never be able to, is that it's one of those situations where the best argument of each side is a damn good argument and almost airtight. and almost airtight. And the argument, the best argument of the pro-life side, to me, it's not a religious argument because everyone has a different religion and everyone has a different set of beliefs. And religious beliefs aren't supposed to set public policy

in America. But the sonograms are incredibly powerful scientific fact. And you can't look away from them. And these knowledge that really only medical people had who would attend to, say, very late-term miscarriages or any kind of miscarriage where you would have to be conducted in a hospital with a DNC and so forth, they kind of knew what a 12, 14, 16, 18-week fetus looked like. But even then, it's a bit desiccated with the time of a miscarriage and so forth. But we're all looking at it. And we have a very ambivalent idea about it because if the baby is wanted, everybody likes to

run now to get one of these new 4D sonograms, which is like the first baby picture, those very beautiful, incredibly detailed sonograms that you can now get like in a mini mall, they'll set up shop for that. So that's the argument. The other side is women truly die from abortions. It'll be a different kind of death in the main if it ever becomes illegal again in America. A lot of things have changed. Access to antibiotics have changed. much harder than the middle and upper class, socioeconomic upper and middle class. And all sorts of things happen in the lives of a woman, a life of a woman. You know, of course, there's issues of rape and abuse and all of that. But there's just also the fact, as I brought up in this piece with a piece of evidence, there's kind of a moment in some women's life where I just can't cope with this now. I just can't. I'm overwhelmed. And the conditions in my life, whatever they are, I'm not speaking for myself. I'm speaking for a woman in this situation,

whether it's the nature of my relationship, whether it's my fears about the future, whether it's that I finally got through some really horrible postpartum depressions with my first two or three, whether it's I need to get away from this man and if I can get my kids to kindergarten age, I can go back to work. Whatever it is, there is such a world of entirely legitimate reasons to get some help and terminate this pregnancy. And if you don't have it legally, if you don't have it, as I say, you can have this procedure done so safely. You know, a little prophylactic antibiotic, I believe, goes home with a lot of women just to completely ensure. And far from being told, as an illegal abortionist would say, the number one rule

in every account you will ever see is never give my name to anyone and never contact me again. The opposite is true. If you have any temperature, if you have any discomfort, you're to call back, and we have a 24-hour line. You know, they're not letting women die of sepsis. So this is the real conundrum. Both sides have an excellent argument. And where I've netted out is, I have accepted that in abortion, we lose the baby, but I'm not going to lose the woman too. That's where I have netted out. But other people will net out differently. But I think it's incumbent on any of us who takes a public or private opinion on this in terms of counseling a friend or voting a certain way. I think we really need to think through the opposite side of our own position and see either what strengths it might have that we

haven't acknowledged or what ways that our positions could be tailored to some of these absolutely true, very sad, desperate situations that both sides of the equation present us with. Yeah. In your piece, what you also just did here is make it obvious that this is a ethically complicated situation, which is not what happens politically. The political ends of the spectrum treat abortion as though it was just a knockdown case against the other side. It was so trivial and so clear that it need not even be expressed. So if you're religious, life begins at the moment of conception or abortion is murder, and we don't have to talk about why we're against murder,

Abortion is murder, and we don't have to talk about why we're against murder. And we can liken the history of abortion here or anywhere else to the Holocaust or some other obvious atrocity. And, you know, end of argument. Not acknowledging, much less dealing compassionately with the ocean of suffering on the other side, for which abortion, in many cases, is a very clear remedy. I mean, you just spelled out many of those cases, rape or relationship chaos that is just completely incompatible with bringing a new child into the world. But from the other side, and this is where well-educated liberal types have their own blind spot, the left has treated abortion as though it were simply a question of a woman's autonomy, without any other ethical implications. And this

is, you might want to say, I think I probably would want to say, that some of the insensitivity here has been born of necessity. It's a reaction to the dogmatism and authoritarianism of the right and the very real danger of tipping back into this awful history of women dying unnecessarily over botched abortions. And by the way, Sam, I would just interject, we have no idea how many died because it was very rare. A doctor worked out with a family. It was such a shaming thing for a death certificate to say abortion and for that to be in the public record that there was, it would be called peritonitis. It would be the big thing that was in the 30s. You see it all over and over. It's interesting that people didn't catch on that, oh, she ate tinned

peaches, canned peaches, or canned tuna fish, and there was botulism in that. And that's what killed her. So we will never really know how many women died, over and above the huge number that we know about. Yeah. So let's just go into how insane some of this history was for a second, because in your article, which I recommend obviously everyone read, it's not very long, but it was full of detail that I found astonishing and for some reason had never encountered. And also you link to an article by Katha Pollitt from 1997, which contains some information that I had never come across. For instance, in Pollitt's article, she points out that, first of all, the numbers of abortions that were performed under the medical supervision of the time

was very high in the 19th century and up until the 20s, the time of truly sordid, dangerous, self-administered, you know, quote, back alley abortions. I mean, the peak of that was more in the 40s and 50s. And I mean, appallingly, you have like the Journal of the American Medical Association recommending that hospitals not provide medical treatment to women until they had confessed fully to, you know, who had gotten them pregnant, who had performed the abortion. medical inquisition before you administered life-saving or potentially life-saving treatment to a woman who had shown up at the hospital at death's door. I mean, it's just completely insane. But the piece of history from your article that I never knew was the role of Lysol in all of this.

I mean, your article contains an old Lysol ad, which is obviously, I mean, before I might want to read your description of it, you're describing this as just an obvious ad for self-administered abortion through Lysol. And I'm thinking, okay, there's no way the, you know, Caitlin's too deep into this topic. There's no way this really is going to be, at minimum, it'll be susceptible to another interpretation here. But then you see the ad, and this is just madness. This is like some counterfactual history of the United States that I never knew was possible. So just anyway, describe the wonderful branding of Lysol we have now. Well, the deal with Lysol was that, number one,

it contained a chemical compound called, I think it's phenol, P-H-E-N-O-L, very corrosive, excellent for cleaning. Came in to just tie all the storylines together. It was big during cleaning hospitals during the Spanish flu because it was so powerful. And women would use Lysol, and it was all but publicly stated explicitly in the ads, they couldn't explicitly state it, that douching with Lysol after sex would very much lower your chance of getting pregnant, which it did, you know, because some of that would trickle in through the cervix and its corrosive force. cervix and its corrosive force. But if you were pregnant and you found a way to get Lysol into the womb, you would perforce kill the baby. And anyways, or the fetus, whatever we want to, I know it's loaded language either way. But so the ad shows, it's a very beautiful piece of kind of

mid-century graphic art, a sort of middle-class looking white woman. Her hair is done, her nails are done, she has a wedding ring on. She's sort of what we imagine when we think about, oh, the wonderful post-war American suburbs where middle-class white people were leading this kind of enchanted life. She's like a June Cleaver type, younger than June, but that kind of person. And her head is, behind her, there's a calendar. Which is a brilliant detail. I mean, it's just, it's amazing how much information is conveyed in this photograph. Isn't it? I mean, American graphic art is, it's like the iconography of it. It's just incredible

for the best of it. But so there's this calendar and day after day is crossed off and every woman in the world, certainly one who's in her childbearing years, knows what that means. That means you're just waiting and waiting and waiting for the period to get your period. And she has her, and believe me to your many, I'm sure all of your listeners are younger than I am, even in my lifetime, there were no like home pregnancy tests if you god forbid thought you were pregnant you had to wait and wait and wait and then go see a doctor you waited as long as you could and fortunately for me i eventually got my period but but she has her head in her hands and the copy is i just can't face it again and that that- That's the headline. Yeah. The headline, sorry.

Also graphically brilliant. And that concept of I can't face it. And it really, I first saw this, it was last May. I'd known about kind of the Lysol ads and I had really studied the famous actress, Margot Kidder, who was the Lois Lane in the first Superman movies and had a lot of, a very tragic life, maybe not unconnected to this. She wrote extensively about this abortion she had as a girl where they filled her womb with Lysol. And I thought, my God, what a hideous event. And then in May, when I saw this ad, I thought, my God, maybe it was a common event. And, you know, as terrible as the Internet is, the things that it's great at are incredible. I was able to do the amount of research that in pre-Internet days I would probably have given up on. You know, I need to search all the medical journals in North America, possibly England from this, you know, bling, bling, bling, bling. There they are, New England Journal of Medicine, something in Albany, you know, put your credit card in. And here was this incredible, terrible, untold tale of women having Lysol, this absolutely

poisonous, legitimately toxic fluid with this very pronounced smell filled into their uterus. with this very pronounced smell, filled into their uterus. And it would start, yes, it would kill the life of the baby fetus embryo, the fetus by then, but it would start shutting down the woman's organs. And the first case this woman showed up, her urine was port wine colored. I mean, she was dying. She was in, when that was a typical way, women would show up. I don't know what's in the catheter piece. I often don't agree with her, but I think on abortion, I'm sure we end up at this. I know we end up at the same place, but women would show up in the absolute final stages of death by sepsis. They would be very often, my mother talked about this for the rest of her life, that those two girls were both interviewed by New York City homicide detectives,

young girls who had had a sexual experience. And both of them, the cops wanted the name of the person who'd done it. And she said, both girls were so terrified they wouldn't give the name because that's what they'd been told endlessly by the person you may never give my name something terrible will happen to you if you did so this light these lysol abortions they did quite often work but if they didn't the chance for it becoming systemic was huge and very very terrible deaths ensued because of it. And finally, let's call them the products of conception, the baby, whatever, when it came out, the fetus would smell very strongly of Lysol, which is just to me just a horrifying element of the whole situation. And it's sort of where the notion of a sort of abortion being a murderous thing, you can sort of see where that comes from. But going back to history, I definitely know what you're mentioning, Katha, talking about the notion of a confession. Instead of giving your medical

history before they treat you, you have to provide a confession. Now, in nothing else, you know, if you go in and you've burned your hand on the stove, you don't have to confess anything before they'll treat you. You just say, so they can give you the best treatment possible if you're awake, what happened? But the whole notion that you'll hear on the right, or let me just say the anti-legal abortion group, is that can you imagine that there's great anger that it came down to obviously a Supreme Court case. And they'll always say, imagine that there's great anger that it came down to obviously a Supreme Court case. And they'll always say, could you imagine if the founding fathers had ever thought that their grand constitution would be used toward abortion? That is a fundamental ignorance about the nature of

midwifery in the 17th and 18th century. It was completely normal for a baby that was born with a birth defect that was a survivable birth defect, but the midwife would make the decision herself later when there was a physician, and they would turn away from the woman and they would cover the nose and mouth, and they would put that baby down, to use that language. There was no sense of this sacred individual importance of every single baby that a woman who would have many of them over the course of her life was going to, was being considered. So I don't think it's historically accurate to think, I mean, they'd probably be very stunned by a lot of things about today, but the idea that some pregnancies didn't go to term because a woman and a midwife got involved earlier on wouldn't shock them.

Not at all. Not in the least. Yeah. Yeah. There's one thing you do in this piece, and you do it at the end in a very arresting final paragraph, which I'll let people read. you do it at the end in a very arresting final paragraph, which I'll let people read, but you bring the experience of men into the picture in a way that it had never occurred to me to do. I mean, we tend to talk about this as a problem of the ethical problem or the ethically interesting

facts are the woman's experience, how she got pregnant, and all of the chaos and suffering that may be attendant on that. Again, rape being the obvious case, and all the reasons why she might have not to want to be pregnant or deliver a baby into this world, and the questions of autonomy over her body, and the intrusions of the state and the other people's apparent interests in what she can do with her life and all of that. So the nexus of all of this is the woman, and on the other side, the obvious fact of taking, depending on how you think of it at what point in term, the life of an innocent baby who could have been viable at a certain point, or is potentially viable and has its own interests.

So that's the problem. But you bring the experience of men into this, and suddenly the reader understands that when you have women dying by the thousands, which was obviously the case due to illegal abortions, many of these women have men in their lives, you know, husbands in many cases, and they have existing families, right? I mean, the I just can't face it again moment is by definition, the story of a woman, very likely married, already having kids. And so you take the point of view of the man who has delivered his critically ill wife, almost certainly the mother of their existing children, to a hospital where she dies.

And after that tragedy, he simply has to go home and face raising the kids by himself, which you can imagine in the 40s just how fully unequipped the average man would have felt doing that. And that's part of this picture. The level of chaos introduced to the lives of men when this has gone wrong is something that literally I've never spent a second thinking about. But you bring it out so vividly here, and it's just, I mean, there's so much human suffering that awaits us if we imagine going back to anything like, as you say, with 21st century medicine, a back alley is not likely to be a back alley. But

if the people who want an absolute prohibition of abortion get what they want, it seems to me that no one is really thinking through the totalitarian horror required to truly prevent illegal abortions. And you have doctors going to prison as murderers. You have people still resorting to procedures that wind up killing women unnecessarily and rendering children motherless. And this is not just a woman's issue. There are men who will suffer immensely because of this as well. And so it seems to me that almost no one on the side of prohibition is grappling with these facts. But then to make this interesting, you pivot again to the reality of the image of the sonogram, which looks just like a baby, right?

Yeah, it is a baby. There's something that, I don't know, it's from the poets, I think, like calling out to like, that's us. That is a human being. That is recognizably a human being. And the more that we learn about DNA, the more that we understand that incredibly specific traits have already been determined in that infant, you know? You know, I've got one kid who could sit through, you know, two lectures at a second grade and I had another kid who was like, boy, his foot would be tapping, you know, 10 minutes in because he's just a very active, lively person, always has been. All that, you know, maybe there, I will infuse my child with the perfect set of beliefs, and they will replicate them. And then they come out, and they are actually their own person. And they have their own ideas about who they should be and how they should be. And all of that is extinguished at almost exactly the same rate as miscarriage. And when someone has a miscarriage, absolutely nobody goes up to her. I mean, I had one. I was very heartbroken. Nobody comes up to me and says, well, did you ever think about the child you lost and all the talents he had?

Did you ever think about the pain the fetus must have gone through as it was rejected from you? People just comfort you, and they help you, and they counsel you, and they tell you, don't worry, you'll have another baby. And so all of this language is just very interesting to think about. But 20% of pregnancies end in a miscarriage, and 20% end in abortion is our best statistics. So, you know, life is not easy to women in this whole world of reproduction. It really isn't. And it never has been. And the idea that abortion is the product of she, women, you know, horrible feminists, which, hey, I hate them too. So you got me there, on the most part. But the idea that it

was just to create a certain kind of callously lived sex life, and for some women it is, but far, far longer throughout all of human history has been women coping with all of human sexuality, which men don't really have to. And you mentioned this man in the article. And one of my newsflashes that will, like, my career will be evergreen if I just continually say this shocking piece of information that not all men are bastards. And a lot of men really love women. And if they're in a romantic relationship with a woman and over many years really love her and really care about her. And, you know, a lot of men, if they walked into the kitchen in the middle of the night and the wife had her head in her hands and she's sobbing and saying, I can't go, I can't face it again. the male way that women tell us they hate, but is actually in some situations extremely good.

They say, let me help you. Let me figure this out. Let me help you solve this problem. And it's our problem because, you know, we're both pregnant. I made you pregnant. You know, our, you know, physical Congress made you pregnant and so resulted in your being pregnant and our being in this situation. So it's something that can be handled in a very moving way by men. Yes, I want to bring up two things that you don't mention in the piece, and they seem to me to be relevant to the ethical question of where one draws the line here in terms of admitting that abortion is the most ethical remedy to a non-optimal situation, all things considered. And so at the extremes, it seems to me that it's trivially easy to answer. I mean, if you're talking about a merely fertilized egg, you know, day one, that's not a human being. You don't have to worry about the

possibility of suffering. So using an IUD or anything that is essentially performing an abortion at the earliest possible stage, you know, the morning after pill, this is not an interesting ethical question, and no one's a murderer for doing those things. If a person thinks that, well, then that person has religious ideas which make no sense, and they especially don't make sense in light of the fact that, as you pointed out, although not in these words, God is the most prolific abortionist of all. I wouldn't say that that position has no sense, the religious position. It's certainly not my position, but I can certainly see an argument outside even of their religious faith that would say, this is us, this is the

spark of us, this is the beginning of us, what we do to the least of us, et cetera. I mean, it's not my belief, it's not your belief, but I could see it being, I could see a situation in where it's not absurd. To me, it is a bit absurd, but anyways, I just have much more interest in, I'm always kind of interested that maybe people are right about things. So I always hold space that they're right about that, but I don't believe it whatsoever. Well, it's just you can create a situation where you have dozens of zygotes in a Petri dish, and it becomes especially absurd. This is an argument I made, I believe, in Letter to a Christian Nation. When you just think about the implications of genetic engineering,

literally every time you scratch your nose, you're engaged in a holocaust of potential human beings given the right manipulations. Oh, yeah. At that extreme, everything's a potential human being practically. Any human cell with a nucleus can be engineered to be another person who could be viable given the right developmental course. So it's just one of the slippery slope arguments. But then on the other side, you have a very, very late-term, quote, abortion, which is indistinguishable from infanticide. And so it's somewhere between those extremes where we have

to talk about the ethics of abortion and where one is tempted to see it as a remedy, a family planning, chaos averting remedy for people, not a very clear line between an easy decision and a hard one. And I'm tempted to look for this line in terms of the possible experience and suffering of the fetus. So, you know, just neurologically speaking, developmentally speaking, you know, there are reasons to believe that the brain structures responsible for the experience of physical pain are developed. And here we're talking about, you know, brainstem structures, the reticular formation especially, and the thalamus, but these are subcortical structures, right? There's no reason to believe you need a cortex or even a cerebrum to feel pain, or at least there's good reason to

believe that pain can be mediated before those structures are developed, this all begins to come together around 15 weeks in utero. So, and again, this is not a matter of scientific certainty at this point that this is the moment where the lights could conceivably come on with respect to the experience of pain, but before 15 weeks and after, you know, that's an area where the structures we know mediate pain and pain responsive behavior have knit together. And so there is something to distinguish a first trimester from a second and third trimester. And certainly when you get into the third trimester, you're talking about a being who has cerebral hemispheres that begin to show EEG synchrony, which is a kind of landmark a fetus can't feel pain or can't likely feel pain. And as you push that closer and closer to the moment of conception, you know, if we're

talking about eight weeks or seven weeks or five weeks, then concerns about the suffering, I mean, you know, whatever a sonogram image might do to you intuitively, the concerns about suffering are less and less reliably founded. And the fact that it looks like a baby, the concern shouldn't be that it has fingers and toes as much as whether it has a more fully developed brainstem and thalamus when you're talking about the prospect of this little being suffering or potentially suffering anything that could happen to it and therefore having interests that can be, you know, destroyed by a decision someone makes and all of that. I'm not saying this completely exhausts any ethical debate.

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