David Remnick: Emma, you seem to be broadcasting from the ballroom.

Emma Green: Yes, we have a New York City closet that is almost the size of habitability. This could count as a studio in some parts of New York City, but it's one of our closet.

David Remnick: Exactly, maybe you could put a stove and a shower in there, too.

I talked the other day with Emma Green, who took her microphone into the closet. Emma joined The New Yorker as a staff writer last fall, and I asked her what's been on her mind lately.

Emma, you've covered academia and cultural conflict and politics and religion, and lately you've been writing, no surprise, about the pro-life or anti-abortion movement. How did you come to start reporting on this?

Emma Green: It's been one of my sub-beats for a long time, and just from a writerly perspective, I've always found this question, the abortion question, to be one that really has so much space for exploration. The political conversation is locked into these binaries, but when you take it out of that frame and start talking about abortion and asking questions about abortion in a way that's personal, that gets the really hard situations that people can get in, I think it really shows us something about the human condition. It shows us something about life, some of the hardest situations in life, and sometimes the most wonderful situations in life.

David Remnick: In order to help you understand and help our listeners understand the pro-life movement, I think you've chosen the three things to share with us that you think will give us some deeper perspective. Which one of those would you like to talk about first?

Emma Green: We'll start with this book, and just for fair warning, this is a book that was written by one of my neighbors, but even if she wasn't one of my neighbors, I would have loved this book. It really changed the way that I thought about abortion. It's called High Risk, and the woman's name is Chavi Eve Karkowsky. She is a maternal fetal medicine specialist in New York, and she was writing about all of the ways that as an MFM, someone who regularly is dealing with not only abortion, but also really, really tough situations with high-risk pregnancies, how her frame around pregnancy questions has changed over her life as a doctor. Here's a little excerpt from her book, a scene that really stuck with me.

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"Some of us are calling it a baby. Some of us are calling it a fetus. Some of us are calling it "it," though we catch ourselves when we do. None of us feel good about any of this. We're all talking to Annie Riley but really to her whole family. She's pregnant, 23 weeks and 0 days by our best estimate. Until yesterday, she was having a normal, uncomplicated pregnancy. Then yesterday, when she was running errands, her water broke. She came to see us, and while being evaluated, she became uncomfortable. Now she's in labor. We are trying to stop the labor, this complicated process by which our body works to eject the contents of the uterus. Our treatments for this situation are old and not terribly effective. Right now it looks very much like she will be delivering within the next few hours or days.

So we're in her room, talking and talking about the pregnancy, about the fetus, about the baby. Is it a baby or a fetus? That's the thing, really, the crux of the matter. We need her to tell us."

Across America there are somewhat different standards around when a fetus is viable outside of the mother's womb. The earliest that hospitals will do it really is 22 weeks. Most hospitals will definitely try to offer life-saving care at 24 weeks, but this woman is in the gray zone. She's at 23. What Chavi is describing is this experience as a doctor relying on the patient to say, is this a stillbirth? Is this a situation where tragically with the one in pregnancy and went into labor before it was ready, and we know that the baby's going to die and we're going to do comfort measures, we're going to let this be a loss, or is this a situation of a really, really, really, really premature baby?

That line not really being clear even to Chavi who has the highest level of medical training that you can have in the field of obstetrics and gynecology, that was really powerful for me because it showed that often, when it comes down to it. the way that we experience pregnancy, pregnancy loss, the decision to terminate a pregnancy, to not move forward, there is a level of ambiguity there. It's not so defined and scientifically determined.

David Remnick: Emma, so the first is High Risk, because that book sounds fascinating. What's your second?

Emma Green: I want to point the listeners towards an expert who I rely on all the time in my reporting. Her name is Mary Ziegler, and she is just fabulous. She writes about the pro-life movement. She's written about it from a money perspective, from a legal perspective, from a history perspective. She's a legal historian. There was a tweet that she wrote on the day that Dobbs came out. This was June 24th.

She said, "I have 12 minutes free for the first time today, and it's beginning to sink in, and to me that was like, Oh, this is really hitting her in the historical sense." She started offering perspective that day in the next few days trying to help people understand the long tail of this. She wrote, "Will there be a backlash to today's decision? Don't expect to know in 2022." In 1973, Roe was only the third story on ABC. Isn't that amazing?

David Remnick: It is incredible.

Emma Green: It's incredible. Steven's answered zero questions on Roe in 1975 in his confirmation hearings. Backlash is unpredictable, takes time, and is shaped by many other actors. Framing the way that that history comes to bear, I think she is one of the best experts out there when it comes to understanding the pro-life movement.

David Remnick: Finally, Emma, you've got another book to share. Could you tell us what it is?

Emma Green: This book is Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade. The author's name is Daniel K. Williams. I picked this out because more than many, many other books, this book helped me to understand that the politics of the pro-life movement haven't always been Republican, and they haven't always been Republican in the way that we think of the Republican Party in 2022. It mixed up my assumptions about the ideological motivations of the pro-life movement and how it got it start in the 20th century.

"The solution to the woman's problems is neither to offer her abortion nor merely to prohibit it, but rather to demonstrate that there are humane alternatives." This is from a brochure from the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life, and it's from 1971, and it goes on. "This means that we must provide counseling, medical care, financial assistance, homes for unwed mothers, adoption agencies, and effective welfare programs."

Today, we think about the pro-life movement as being tied 100% to the Republican Party, and it's a Republican Party that is in large parts anti-government, believing that the government should be small enough to fit in your pocket. It's hard for us to imagine a broad-scale pro-life movement that on the one hand argued against abortion, but on the other hand, really, really vigorously wanted social safety net programs, wanted housing programs, financial assistance, medical care, all sorts of programs provided by the government that would help mothers and babies.

Moreover, I think it's even harder beyond that to imagine a pro-life movement that also paired with anti-war protest. Daniel K. Williams, the author, is explaining the evolving politics of the pro-life movement that was very much rooted in the progressive anti-war pro-social justice, pro-racial justice movements of the 1960s and '70s. I think we see remnants of that in some neighborhoods of the pro-life movement today. I don't think it's disappeared, but from a political level, I think it's really interesting to understand that the way that the pro-life movement started, and especially where it was prior to Roe, directly prior to Roe, is not the same as the place politically where it is today in 2022.

David Remnick: If I can ask you one last question, after all of your reading, all of your reporting, what do you think is missing from the anti-abortion pro-choice debate?

Emma Green: I think that there are a lot of assumptions on both sides about the motivations and desires of either team. The framing by people who are most involved in this issue from a organizational activist perspective often goes like this. On the pro-life side, they accuse people who are pro-choice of being baby killers, of being hostile to the sacredness of life, to having lots of sex and not wanting to embrace the consequences. Just lowest common denominator. On the other side, on the pro-choice side, there's often the narrative that the pro-life movement is 100% about misogyny, about control. It's about hating women.

I would say that while there can be grains of truth, perhaps that you can extract from those narratives, when I have met up with activists, and most importantly, when I've met up with real people who are grappling with these decisions, those frames do not at all seem to match what I find. I try to stay in that gray zone as a reporter, trying to hold uncertainty, to hold openness to what different people's experiences lead them to believe about some of these really fundamental questions, and just try to be as good of a listener as I can so that I'm not bringing some preconceived frame and putting that on someone.

David Remnick: Emma Green, thank you so much.

Emma Green: Thanks, David.

David Remnick: Emma Green is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and she recommended Chavi Eve Karkowsky's book High Risk, Daniel K. Williams's Defenders of the Unborn, and Mary's Ziegler's Twitter feed. You can find it all at newyorkerradio.org.

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