Science Vs - The Abortion Underground

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

REBROADCAST. The Supreme Court is set to rule on a major abortion case this year, and the court could decide to overturn Roe v. Wade. Already, places like Oklahoma, Texas and Idaho are rolling out major abortion restrictions. So today, we’re going back to the pre-Roe years, when one group of women got fed up and decided to take their health into their own hands. We talk to “self-helpers” Carol Downer and Francie Hornstein, who led a movement for safe abortions and education for women by women. Here’s the link to our transcript: https://bit.ly/3v5d23E This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Editing help from Caitlin Kenney, Kaitlyn Sawrey, Sruthi Pinnamaneni, Jorge Just, Lulu Miller and Chris Neary. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard and Bumi Hidaka. Music by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Recording assistance from Anny Celsi. Protest tape courtesy of Pacifica Radio Archives. A huge thanks to all the scientists we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr. Sara Matthiesen, Professor Verta Taylor, Professor John DeLancey, Professor Carole Joffe, Professor Johanna Schoen, and Dr. Denise Copelton. And special thanks to Michele Welsing and the team at Southern California Library, Dr. Becky Chalker, Jonathon Roberts, Jim Aspholm, Odelia Rubin, Alice Kors, the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. Heads up, this episode has some pretty graphic descriptions in it, so take care if you're listening with little ones around. The Oklahoma legislature has approved a bill that would lead to a near total ban on abortions in the state. Under the bill, those who perform abortions could face up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. Just this week, Oklahoma passed a law banning basically all abortions,

except to save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency. It's the latest in a long line of U.S. states pumping out new rules to restrict abortions. Several years ago, Mississippi made most abortions illegal after 15 weeks. Then Texas banned abortions essentially after six weeks, before some people even know they're pregnant. And now many more Republican-controlled states have been tightening up their abortion laws. South Carolina.

Idaho. West Virginia. Ohio. Georgia. So the question is, could Florida be next? And this is all about to come to a head in the next few months. It's expected that the Supreme Court, which now has a conservative majority, will make its decision on whether the Mississippi law will stand.

And whether Roe v. Wade, the ruling that makes abortion legal across the U.S., will be overturned. In the meantime, in Texas, where their abortion law is already in effect, researchers are seeing more and more Texans traveling across state lines for abortions. And they're also seeing a large spike in people buying abortion pills online from, say, overseas pharmacies. So what could happen here if all these lawmakers get their way and abortions become basically illegal across large parts of the U.S.? Well, today we're dropping an episode that we made a few years ago. It's about a woman caught in the world before Roe v. Wade, where abortions in the US were much harder to get.

And she actually ended up doing abortions herself, even though she's not a doctor. But then, almost accidentally, she created this movement that was about so much more. And all of that is coming up just after the break. And what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. That's right. I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jana Levin.

I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back. All right, let's just jump in. I want you to meet a woman named Carol Downer. Please knock loudly.

Carol is in her 80s now. I'm at her house in Los Angeles. Hello! It's very cute. There's a big cactus out the front. Lovely to meet you. It's wonderful to have you here. It's cos to have you here. It's cozy inside.

Carol has set out this lovely spread of baked brownies and cubed cheese with little toothpicks. It feels like we're back in the 1960s, which is where I want to start our story. Back then, Carol was pretty traditional. She had four kids and things were quite tough. Between them all, somebody was needing my attention 24-7. You know, the baby was waking up in the night and then, you know, my middle one was having her nap in the afternoon and then Laura needed to be gotten ready to go to school and come back. So between all of them, it just, there was just not a time to really sleep. On top of that, things with her husband weren't great. The marriage wasn't working out and they decided to get a divorce. Carol was also

going through this period of mild depression. And then she found out she was pregnant again. It was 1963, and even though it was illegal, she decided to get an abortion. It was harrowing. I had, well, first of all, finding someone to do it. Carol asked around and a friend gave her the name of a man who she figured was a doctor. She remembers going to this address on a large thoroughfare in Los Angeles. Let's just say his office was an empty room on Central Avenue with one exam table in the middle of it and a tray of instruments. And that was it. He didn't tell Carol what he was doing, just had her lay on the bed, take off her clothes

below the waist and spread her legs. The procedure itself was just excruciating and I could hear it and I could feel it. Hundreds of thousands of women are estimated to have had an illegal abortion each year in the US during the 1960s, and Carol was now one of them. When it was done, she went home. And I went to bed and I went immediately to sleep and I didn't wake up until the next morning.

And when I awakened, I could hear the birds outside singing. And I remember being really happy because I was still alive. And I didn't even myself realize how afraid I was that I would die. Carol had heard of women who had had botched abortions, that used coat hangers or knitting needles and bled to death. But for Carol, her ordeal wasn't over yet. And what happens next is a little hard to hear. The guy who did her abortion told her to call him back in a week, so she did. He

picked up the phone and said, look, they're between your legs and you will see that there is a little strip of gauze that is hanging out of your vagina. Carol had no idea, but this man had filled her vagina with gauze, those bandage strips. He didn't tell her why, but it was possibly to stop her from bleeding. And now, this guy was telling Carol... You need to take that out. I went in the bathroom,

and I started to pull it. Well, what I found was that it was all hardened. And, you know, in order to pull it out, it was like pulling something as sharp as a razor out of my uterus. I went into cold sweats, you know, with the pain. And I could only do it, you know, a tiny bit at a time. Oh, my gosh. What were you thinking at that time?

Just how to get that thing out. However long it takes, you'll bear it, and that's just how it is. Carol recovered. She ended up getting remarried and actually went on to have two more kids. And as the years passed, more and more stories started coming out about horrendous back-alley abortions. And it fueled the fire of an already growing movement, where women were saying,

we have had enough. Free abortions on demand! Free abortions on demand! Women have a fundamental right to control their own bodies and to control their own lives. We learn that we have the power to change, to change the conditions that oppress us. Carol starts getting curious about all this. She's hearing these reports on the radio of women protesting.

And then one day she hears that a national feminist group is holding a meeting nearby. And I said, well, I've got to go to that. And that night when I went home, I told my husband, and he drove me to the meeting. And it was around here that she has an epiphany. She'd spent all her life trying to be this perfect woman. It got to me all of a sudden, you know, that drip, drip, drip of accommodating,

you know, men was having this negative effect on me. And I realized then that, no, you're not that sweet, you know. In fact, you're pissed. You're pissed. Right. And I realised that I just had to start fighting. Carol sets her sights on abortion laws, first fighting to change them. But then she gets a different idea. A radical idea. You see, Carol had always assumed that the people doing illegal abortions like hers were mostly doctors. But then she found out that a lot of them didn't have any medical training. They were just randos out to make a quick buck. And so Carol starts thinking to herself, well, if these bozos can do it.

Why don't we just do the abortions ourselves, you know? I, a non-doctor, and my friends, who also were not doctors, we could do it ourselves, just as the same way that we can master how to cook and sew and garden and do other things in this life. These are skills we can learn together. Okay. Only problem?

Carol doesn't have any idea about how to do an abortion. Even basic female anatomy was basically a black box. Carol didn't know her uterus from her urethra. And so to learn how to do an abortion, Carol goes underground. She gets in touch with an illegal abortionist in L.A., and this guy lets her hang around this clinic he'd set up on Santa Monica Boulevard. So happened that this clinic was located across the street

from a coffee shop where the police love to go in and have their coffee and donuts. This clandestine clinic was pretty sparse. As Carol remembers it, there was a single lamp and it had an exam table with stirrups. And that's where this guy would do abortions and other gynaecological procedures. The first time Carol went there, he was inserting an IUD into a woman's uterus.

And Carol remembers this moment so clearly. He put this instrument called a speculum into this woman's vagina that kind of opens it up, enough for Carol to peek in through the vagina. And when she did that... It was mind-blowing. I went weak in the knees. I was just that bowled over by the whole experience.

And I realized how easy it was to see, how simple, simply constructed it was, how healthy and beautiful and accessible. There was that aha moment. Carol could see a pink, almost donut-shaped thing with a little opening. It was the cervix. And she realises that this opening is the key to the uterus. It's the key to figuring out how to do abortions.

Carol keeps going back to the clinic. She watches this guy doing several abortions for women who were pretty early along. He would take a speculum, crank open the vagina, put a tube through that opening in the cervix, and then kind of suck out the embryo. It didn't look that hard. That's what we discovered. This is a pretty simple procedure. It is well within the abilities of the average person. And so bit by bit, Carol kind of becomes an abortion apprentice. She starts doing a few

abortions herself, and then she wanted to recruit other women to do them too. So in the spring of 1971, Carol put an ad in a Los Angeles women's paper inviting women to come to a discussion on women's issues at a local bookstore. She kept it vague. About 30 women came. They sat in a circle.

And Carol is really pumped, and she starts telling them the nitty-gritty of how an abortion works. She was saying that if you do this right, it seemed pretty safe. And as I'm telling him this, these women are just very upset. I mean, some were white as a sheet. And the room was just, you know, you hear a pin drop. They were shocked and disapproving. And I couldn't blame them because all we knew at that time

was women dying from, you know, back alley abortions. These women just couldn't believe that abortions could be safe and easy, that it was possible for someone like Carol to do them. And standing up there, Carol didn't know how to convince them. But then she gets this idea right there in the bookstore. And that's when I told them, I said, well, I think you'll understand this better if you let me show you something. So I went over to the next room where there was a desk and I got up on the desk, lay back and I put the speculum in. Were you nervous?

I was petrified. Petrified. I mean, I thought they were going to think I'm, you know, an exhibitionist. But I just got to do it, because otherwise they're never going to understand. So I just steeled myself to do it. Carol scooches up her long dress, spreads her legs, opens up that speculum and invites the other women in the room to have a look. Tentatively, they walk over to the table and pretty quickly the mood turns. Far from thinking that I was, you know, had some kind of weird motives,

they thanked me. They were happy. They were laughing. Do you remember what they were saying? Well, things like, well, what is it? And what is that hole? And where does that go? And, oh, oh, is that the hymen?

I mean, the demystification was instant. And seeing the women, Carol realises something that she hadn't really thought about before. Although she'd come to talk about doing abortions, which in itself is a very extreme idea, in that room, she realised that just learning about the female body felt almost as radical, because these women had so little idea of what was going on down there.

The idea of looking at their vagina was so beyond the pale of any of... and I'm speaking of feminists and that's how profound this ignorance was. Academic articles that are written about this time talk about how so few women looked at their bodies and how many felt uncomfortable asking simple questions of their gynaecologist. One researcher wrote that doctors could be condescending and patronising.

In Carol's experience... I mean, the doctor was God, you know. It was really more a matter of not saying, not telling you anything. What did you think might happen if you asked the doctor questions? He would just say, don't worry about it, dear. You know, I'm the doctor and I'll do what's best for you. But back at the bookstore, with a speculum still in Carol's vagina, this was a totally different world.

And it just, the doctor was not God anymore, at all. The women saw that it was okay to be curious about your body, and in fact it was normal. And seeing how powerful this was, Carol now has a new plan. Yes, she still wants to teach women about abortions, but she also just wants to teach women about their bodies. And so just a few months later, Carol and a friend pack boxes full of speculums

and take this cervix show on the road. They travel to more than 20 cities, and at colleges, church basements and living rooms, Carol whips off her undies and pops the speculum in. And time and time again, when women came to these speculum parties, they had the same experience. It was totally eye-opening. I talked to a bunch of women who went to these parties. Before you could even be uncomfortable, somebody was just up on the dining room table and pulled

their pants down and put a speculum in and handed people a mirror and a flashlight to come look. And it was like, ooh, you can actually see in there because it's like this forbidden territory. And you don't know, only doctors and boyfriends or husbands had access to that territory. It was just like a bucket of cold water thrown on me. That last woman is Francie Hornstein, and she became a big part of this story. And by the way, she has a throat condition. It's a little funky, but I can be understood. Francie saw the speculum revolution at one of Carol's presentations in Iowa. We were just

blown away. I mean, it was the most revolutionary thing. Why was it so important to you? I don't know how to describe it, but, you know, for men, their genitals are just right out there. But for women, like, well, nobody had ever shown women what their anatomy looked like. So that was amazing. Do you remember kind of straight straight like on your back? I know that we were just like levitating and we all bought our little speculum for $1.50 or whatever it was and took it home and then showed all of our friends. Carol was starting to create a movement that quickly became known as the self-helpers. They got together to teach themselves about their bodies. And they also wanted to push doctors and the

medical establishment more generally to treat women better, to listen to their female patients. And women like Francie totally upended their lives to be a part of this. I have never had a time in my life that I don't think any of us have that was so exciting and so uplifting that we were prevailing. But throughout all of this, Carol had never forgotten her original mission. And as she went around the country showing women her cervix,

she showed them something else too. How to do abortions. And that's coming up after the break. Welcome back. We've just met Carol Downer, who stumbled into a role as a revolutionary, leading a movement teaching women basic information about their genitals. They called themselves the Self Helpers. Late in 1971, just months after Carol showed off her cervix in the bookstore, she and some others started a women's health clinic in Los Angeles. They taught women

everything they knew about vaginas and then set out to learn even more. Here's self-helper Francie Hornstein. We learned to do pap smears from a physician who worked at the CDC, at the Center for Disease Control, who showed us, you know, who said, most doctors, they just stick this little, you know, wooden spatula in there, and whatever they get, they get. But this is the way you really do a pap smear, where you circle around the whole cervix, so you get cells from everywhere. So we learned, we really learned how to do things the right way. The self-helpers also learned how to do stuff

like inserting diaphragms and doing pelvic exams. And the whole point was that as they were treating women, they'd explain exactly what they were doing and encourage questions. And these clinics spread like wildfire, with at least 50 self-help groups popping up across the country. But while teaching women about their bodies, some of the self-helpers were also doing abortions.

Early on, they'd taken the abortion technique that Carol had learned and then tweaked it to make it safer and easier to use. Francie still has one at her house. She took it out. Well, we might as well do a demo. It's got a few parts to use. Francie still has one at her house. She took it out. Well, we might as well do a demo. It's got a few parts to it. There's a mason jar, and then it has tubing attached to it, which they got from an aquarium store.

It's about as thick as a pencil. There's a piece of plastic tubing. There's a valve and a plastic syringe, and it's all been kind of MacGyvered together. You pump up the syringe. it creates a vacuum in the jar. Another plastic tube called a cannula would get slipped in through the cervix to the uterus. When Francie showed me,

she put one end of the tube into a glass of water, which stood in for the uterus. If it was in a uterus, the gentle suction created in the jar would suck out what's in the uterus. If it was in a uterus, the gentle suction created in the jar would suck out what's in the uterus. You can hear the straw-like suction. And this type of abortion only works when the embryo is tiny, like smaller than a pumpkin seed,

in the first few weeks after you miss your period. And this method that they're using, it's actually kind of similar to the methods that doctors can use today. And as Carol and the self-helpers travelled around the country, they would teach women how to do this. Francie told me about the first time she saw the self-helpers use it. She knew someone who had just gotten pregnant and wanted an abortion. So one of the self-helpers flew to Iowa and did the abortion.

It was just like they had done it with the glass of water, except that it was in her uterus and stuff started to slowly come out the contents of the uterus. Francie says that this woman was fine afterwards, and this kit was working for other cases too, so Carol and the self-helpers kept using it. But for some, this abortion kit is extremely unsettling, and this was something I brought up with Carol. Some people listening to this, I think,

might get quite uncomfortable with this idea that, you know, your team didn't have medical training. How were you kind of defending the fact that you were doing abortions? It was very easy to defend because, for one thing, the reality of back alley abortions was there. So all of these very serious, horrible things were happening. It's hard to compare what the self-helpers were doing to all other back alley abortions that were happening at the time. We don't have good data here. Here's what we do know, though. If you were rich, according to many reports,

you could often get a safe abortion from a real doctor, and so that's probably better than one of Carol's abortion kits. If you weren't rich, though, your options for an abortion were dicier, and serious things did happen. Sometimes the people doing back-alley abortions would tear holes in the uterus, which could lead to hemorrhaging. Sometimes women would try to give themselves abortions by drinking bleach or turpentine,

and this could cause all kinds of damage. In fact, injuries from botched abortions happen so often that in some hospitals, special wards were set up where stretchers would line the holes and women would wait to get treated. From our research and conversations with experts, we couldn't find any evidence that women who got abortions from Carol's group had any serious problems.

That's not to say that this is a risk-free procedure, though. For one, rarely women would get infections. Carol told me about the one time she saw this happen. We did an abortion procedure and it seemed to be fine. But a few weeks later, she came and told one of the women, she said, you know, it's kind of weird I'm getting this discharge. And we said, well, let's take a look. Well, we did, and she had an infection.

Carol said this woman was treated and was fine. Another problem was that sometimes the abortion didn't take out the entire embryo and they'd have to go back and do the procedure again. Still, to us, it seems like Carol's techniques were better than many of the alternatives that were out there at the time. But doing these underground abortions was very illegal, and the self-helpers knew it. They were taking precautions to avoid getting caught, like being careful with how they talked about their abortion kit. We didn't say abortion or whatever. We used other words.

They would call what they were doing menstrual extraction. And that meant they could say they were just extracting a woman's period rather than doing an abortion. But it turns out they could use all the code words they wanted. It didn't matter. Because by early 1972, the cops in LA were onto them. Police had gotten wind of what the clinic was up to and started an undercover investigation,

infiltrating the group and trying to catch them out doing an abortion. We got a hold of police records from the time and could see that for months, undercover cops documented everything they saw and heard. April 28th, 1972. I said I wanted information about a pregnancy test. She sent me into a room in the back of the building. At approximately 7.30pm, I entered the women's self-help clinic. She said, for security reasons, we will not do a period extraction on just anyone who walks in. Colleen told me she had three girls in Riverside

who wanted to start a self-help clinic. Their names and addresses are... And there's a weird detail in these reports that actually ended up mattering a lot. ...observed Carolyn Orilla Downer... At one point, a cop saw Carol putting yogurt into another woman's vagina. ...and treat it with some yogurt. Carol thought it would help her with a yeast infection.

After several months, the police were ready to pounce. On September 20th, 1972, ten cops barged into the self-helper's clinic and started grabbing up supplies. And the women were stunned. Here's Carol. Well, it was devastating. I mean, we were completely thrown off and we felt totally violated. For three hours, the police raided the clinic, confiscating six trunkloads of equipment,

including bags filled with speculums, rubber gloves and tools to make the menstrual extraction kit. Amongst it all, though, there was this kind of funny moment. That was when the police took a critical piece of evidence, a tub of yoghurt, strawberry flavoured. One of the women in the office protested. She said, hey, that's my lunch. So the police, they went to the fridge, took out the yogurt. Yeah, they took the yogurt. Anyway, so we were instantly notorious in Los Angeles.

When the police left, the women called other self-helpers around the country, telling them, we've been busted. Not knowing what to do, Carol says some women stashed their speculums. They were contraband. I mean, they felt like, you know, we didn't know how many, how extensive this could be. Things got worse for Carol quickly. She found out there was a warrant out for her arrest. She and another self-helper were charged with practising medicine without a licence.

The other woman copped to it, got a fine and a suspended sentence. But Carol decided to fight, and the case went to trial. Women protested outside the courthouse and sent testimonials from around the country, thanking Carol and the self-helpers for helping them understand their own bodies. Famous academics, a congresswoman, and doctors like the famous pediatrician Dr. Spock praised their work, saying that even doctors could learn from these women about how to talk to patients with more respect. On the first day of the trial, Carol remembers driving herself to the court, and the song, I Am Woman, came on the radio.

And I just was so happy. I felt so great because we were ready. By that time, you know, we had prepared. I was up for it. I was super up for it. And I sang I Am Woman at the top of my lungs all the way down. I am woman, hear me roar. You know, I realized that I wasn't facing anything worse than I had been facing my whole life.

But it was always in this nebulous ways, ways you couldn't really address. So now my oppressor had shown his face and I could actually engage him and fight. And that was a wonderful feeling. As the days of the trial went on, it took a seriously bizarre twist. It turned out that even with all their investigating, the prosecutors couldn't prove that Carol had ever done any abortions or other medical procedures. And so the case against Carol ends up centering on, well, the yoghurt.

A cop had actually seen Carol putting it into a woman's vagina, and so the legal question was whether, by putting yoghurt into someone's vagina, Carol had been practicing medicine. This made headlines around America. Time magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times, they all reported on it. And it became known as the Great Yogurt

Conspiracy. The trial lasted five days and soon the jury was ready to make its decision. The foreman stood up and soon the jury was ready to make its decision. The foreman stood up and announced the verdict. Not guilty. Oh my gosh. Of course everybody reacted and the judge had to tell us all to be quiet.

What was the feeling in the room? Well, very wonderful. Because we were on a roll. And that really put us into this primo place, you know, to get this message out. And women were doing menstrual extraction around the country. We really were poised to make it a real game changer. Just weeks later, the case of Roe v. Wade was decided, effectively legalizing abortions in the United States. And that meant that after the trial, menstrual extractions,

a.k.a. the MacGyvered abortion kit, stopped being a big part of the self-helper's work. But the self-helpers, they didn't let their knowledge go to waste. Several years after the court case, Francie, who you met before, wanted to have a baby. Francie and her then-girlfriend, Yael Raph Peskin, both told me about it. I had been talking about wanting kids for years. I said,

look, either do something about it or stop talking about it. Francie figured, hey, if I can fit a diaphragm, do pap smears, and even do abortions, I can get myself pregnant too. So Francie and Yael got sperm from a friend of a friend. They grabbed some parts of the menstrual extraction kit, tweaked it, and made it kind of release sperm near Francie's cervix instead of sucking out the contents of the uterus. We just put it on, drew up the semen and spritzed it in, and that was it. It worked.

And in the fall of 1978, Francie had their son. Yale remembers the moment well. He said, is that my baby? It was like, he's yours, he's ours. I just thought, you know, how could I have made something so beautiful? That was my first thought. So, anyway. Wow.

It was a happy story. And you can trace it all back to a woman seeing a cervix for the very first time. Nobody's whipped off their pants and shown you their cervix in all this. Yeah, I could do that. Have you never seen your cervix? I've never seen my cervix. Oh my gosh, we have to do this. You have a speculum?

No speculum. Francie, we're going to just bring you up on the... on feminist charges of no possession of a speculum. Can you get them on Amazon? I'm sure you can. On feminist charges of no possession of a speculum. Can you get them on Amazon? I'm sure you can. Yeah, all right. I'll invest. I'll invest. I'll send you an email. Okay, good. It shouldn't be difficult. You should be able to do it. All right.

Yeah. Okay, well, you go home and get back to us. All right. All right. all right. It's a deal. All right. So, hello. Okay, so I just got my speculum in the post. Okay.

Wow. All right. So I'm going to, let's give it a go. In it goes. Oh, jeez. Oh, wow. That's Science Versus. Now, as always, if you want to know more about anything in this episode,

you can find the transcript in our show notes, and it's got all of our citations in it. And if you want to know facts about abortions today, like whether they're safe, as well as when a fetus has a heartbeat and can feel pain, then you should go back and listen to our episode, Science vs. Abortion. And another podcast to listen to next week, a podcast called Not Past It, which is our sister Gimlet show, is publishing an episode about a top secret abortion conference. It happened in the US way back in 1955

when it was extremely dangerous to talk about this stuff. So that's coming out next week, Wednesday, April 13th on Not Past It. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Meryl Horn, Rose Rimler and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Editing help from Caitlin Kenny, Caitlin Sori, Shruti Pinamaneni, Jorge Just, Lulu Miller and Chris Neary. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly.

Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard and Bumi Hidaka. Music by Bumi Hidaka, Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. Recording assistance from Annie Selsey. Protest tape courtesy of Pacifica Radio Archives. A huge thanks to all the scientists we got in touch with for this episode, including Dr Sarah Matheson, Professor Verda Taylor, Professor John Delancey, Professor Carol Joffe, Professor Johanna Scohan and Dr Denise Coppleton. And a special thanks to Michelle Welsing

and the team at Southern California Library. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.