What the History of Abortion Can Teach Us About Project 2025
A discussion with the novelist and historian Jessica Cale, host of the "Dirty Sexy History" podcast.
Jessica Cale, my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast, is the host of the “Dirty Sexy History” podcast. She’s the author of ten works of historical fiction, including the Southwark Saga, and numerous nonfiction pieces. She earned degrees in Ancient History, Medieval Studies, and Creative and Media Writing at Swansea University while climbing castles and photographing mines for BBC History magazine. She appears in Netflix’s The Lost Pirate Kingdom.
On “Dirty Sexy History,” which has become one of my go-to podcasts, Cale interviews historians, authors, academics, and other experts on historical figures, topics, and movements that veer beyond what we’re taught in high school. The titular “dirt” can be literal (disease, parasites, blood), figurative (crime, scandal, the occult), or moral (drugs, booze, gambling). She is interested primarily in the history of contraception—something that, frankly, I’d not much thought about—and her podcast, therefore, is primarily about the history of women: how they lived in the past, how they navigated societal roles and broke through barriers, how contemporary men treated them (usually not well).
I was particularly interested in hearing Cale’s thoughts on what history can teach us about our present moment here in the United States, with a Republican party hijacked by MAGA, a MAGA party hijacked by radical religious weirdos, and those weirdos devising ways to use the powers of the presidency to subjugate women.
Here are three takeaways from a discussion that also touched upon pirates, syphilis, medieval penitentials, 19th-century free love cults, incels, and coitus reservatus:
In the 19th century, life for women was actually pretty good—which is what triggered the Leonard Leos and Sam Alitos of that era to devise anti-woman legislation, especially regarding abortion.
There are some episodes of “Dirty Sexy History” that make me viscerally upset, learning the sort of horrors women were put through, mostly for having personalities and being cool. We cover some of that on today’s episode. But life wasn’t all bad for women two centuries ago.
“I think a lot of people assume that all women in the 19th century would just kind of get married young and just kind of have babies and be housewives,” Cale tells me. “And it’s just not that simple. A lot of women did think for themselves. I mean, we have the suffragists kind of starting out. You have women running newspapers. You have women writing about free love and [being] free thinkers. People pushing back against the church. You have women qualifying as doctors for the first time. You have women working as abortionists. There were opportunities for women. And because women were kind of taking advantage of these, I mean, that’s actually what drove the anti-abortion movement.”
The (male) doctors who formed the American Medical Association in 1847 saw the midwives and abortionists, all women, as competition. That drove the anti-abortion movement as much as any religious belief. The prohibition laws that went on the books at this time, Cale says, are, at least in part, “a response to women having that kind of freedom. They do want women having more children. They do want them staying in the home and being restricted to taking care of the kids instead of going out and becoming doctors or running these radical publications like some of them did…”
Today, the anti-abortion movement is cloaked in religiosity and pseudoscience about when life begins. But the real impetus, then as now, is male control of women’s bodies.
Project 2025 seeks to re-create an America that never was.
Taking rights away from women doesn’t suddenly make all women submissive helpmates. All it does is make their lives less safe. The “tradwife” thing was always horseshit. You’re not gonna believe this, but Leonard Leo, Kevin Roberts, and the other weirdos pushing Project 2025 and railing against abortion, contraception, and women’s suffrage know as much about women as the medieval monastery monks who wrote the penitentials.
“What’s interesting about that,” Cale says of Project 2025, “is that this world that they say they want to go back to—it doesn’t exist. It absolutely doesn’t exist.”
She continues:
But the arguments do. So when you go back to the 19th century, what you see is people making these same arguments, right? No, the early anti-abortion movement—it wasn’t about the sanctity of life. It was because they were afraid that white Anglo-Saxon Protestant women weren’t having enough children. The birth rate was going down, and they were afraid that they were going to get outnumbered by other races. That appears in a lot of writing at the time. This is something that these anti-abortion people were really worried about. So they wanted to force basically these white women to have as many children as possible, whether they wanted to or not. So the eugenics part of it and the race portion of it—that’s major.
In the era the weirdos wax nostalgic about, abortion was an accepted fact of life.
“Now, this kind of past that they talk about—that they want to go back to, you know, when women were not using birth control, or abortion didn’t exist, or abortion was a crime, or whatever it is that they’re saying? I mean, it’s not true,” Cale says. “People have been using contraception since the beginning of time. You know, abortion has been very, very, very common, always, in every era. And even banning it towards the end of the 19th century—it didn’t work. Now, there was that 20-year period where all the states were passing these anti-abortion laws. But I mean, critically: they did not work. People continued getting abortions, right? Except they became, you know, kind of less safe.”
In Michigan in the 1890s, Cale notes, a study found that one in three pregnancies in the state ended in abortion. One in three pregnancies. In a state where abortion was illegal!
Abortion, she says, “was so, so, so common and so accepted, and the public was not against it…it was just a fact of life. So, you know, you can’t really say, ‘Let’s go back to the good old days, when no one ever [had abortions],’ because they were still doing that, and they were doing it lot more frequently than they are today. The major difference, though, is that it was more likely to kill you.”
The Project 2025 push to criminalize pornography is really dangerous.
Judge Potter Stewart famously said, of obscenity, “I know it when I see it.” Anthony Comstock, the anti-vice crusader of the late 19th century, was not as perspicacious. That sad dude thought everything was pornographic: paintings by Titian, kissing scenes in novels, diagrams in medical textbooks.
Kevin Roberts, the radical Catholic weirdo who heads the Heritage Foundation, wrote in his introduction to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership that pornography is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” which, like, I don’t know what his browser history looks like, but that’s not something most of us get off on.
All joking aside, this broad application of the “pornography” label is very dangerous.
Cale says, “They’re talking about, like, they want to outlaw porn and they want to arrest anybody who is producing it. Now, I mean, this is very concerning because obviously, you know, like, you shouldn’t do that. There’s nothing wrong with sex work and porn isn’t, you know, in and of itself wrong, [provided that] the people involved are consenting adults….If you don’t want your kids looking at it, don’t let your kids look at it.”
She continues:
But the Comstock Act tried to criminalize this kind of obscene material. And like today, there was some debate over what is obscene. So with these people talking about outlying porn now, [it] seems to apply really, really broadly across the board. They are applying it to not only actual—what we would think of as Pornhub stuff, but they’re talking about romance novels. They’re talking about any kind of book that contains scenes where people are kissing. They’re talking about gay and transgender identities as being inherently pornographic. And that’s crazy. I mean, it’s obviously not fair. It’s not porn.
You know, your existence is not inherently sexual, but they’re really kind of pitching it that way, right? Like drag shows are pornographic, they think. And if you’ve ever been to a drag show, you know it’s not. I mean, it’s just a bunch of people wearing wonderful dresses, singing Dolly Parton songs. There’s nothing pornographic about it. It’s fine, you know?
But so the Comstock Act, as they are trying to outlaw porn being sent through the mail and these kind of, you know, “dirty pictures,” right? Anthony Comstock was on this crusade against this stuff. And the problem with it, though, is that he could not identify porn. So he would kind of think that everything was porn. So at one point, he arrested publisher D.M. Bennett for possessing a book on the propagation of marsupials, because he thought that that was pornographic. He couldn’t tell the difference between hardcore porn and, like, a medical text.
These prudish crusaders are marked, then and now, by an inability to distinguish the obscene from the workaday. Comstock couldn’t tell an explicit photograph of two people screwing from a medical diagram; Kevin Roberts can’t tell his ass from his elbow.
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
S7 E21: Piracy, Penitentials, Comstock, and Flatware (with Jessica Cale)
In this, the penultimate episode of Season 7 of the PREVAIL podcast, Greg Olear discusses (for a solid 20 minutes, which is probably too long, if we’re being honest) the events of the week: Donald’s earsay, Joe’s departure, Kamala’s ascension.
Then, he welcomes Jessica Cale, the host of the DIRTY SEXY HISTORY podcast, to talk about her background as a novelist and historian, the castles of Wales, piracy, syphilis, medieval penitentials, the Oneida colony, the Comstock Act vis a vis Project 2025, the history of abortion, and more. Plus: the safety is off.
Follow Jessica:
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Check out ROUGH BEAST, Greg’s new book:
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Photo credit: Mathew Brady, ca. 1864. Series: Mathew Brady Photographs of Civil War-Era Personalities and Scenes.
Since today's topic isn't directly about the recent election travesty, I guess it's OK to comment -- because, on the subject of women's places in history, I'd like to add a story that maybe shouldn't be lost...
During wartime, United Airlines lost so many of its (all male) pilots to military service that it couldn't spare any of tge remaing male pilots to train much-needed new pilots, so it allowed a woman pilot to train virtually all of its many in-coming (male) pilots. War ended, CEO tried to get that woman a well-deserved union seniority number so she could fly the line as a regular United pilot. Union refused. It was decades until, in 1978, the courts forced air carriers to hire women. There are several other aviation stories of what women were allowed to do in the "old days" -- but only in various temporary, desperate situations ended. Then the women were unceremoniously dumped.
A small but relevant tale: not until I received my first pilot license did my mom tell me she used to fly, herself, in open-cockpit "barnstorming" planes. But not for pay. Her first husband, however, had been a "real" pilot. (And died in an airplane crash.)
Moral of stories: in aviation, at least, there were moments in history when women were allowed some interesting, challenging jobs, but only temporarily, for the convenience of men. Also, there were a few women -- most notably, Amelia Earhart -- who were allowed to be novelties -- perhaps because they made a lot of money for male-owned newspaper barons and other businessmen?
But in aviation, at least, when even a small number of women began to become a genuine and apparently permanent, ongoing, growing threat to prestigious, high-paying "male only" jobs, we were no longer "cute," "novel," or handy, easily discarded solutions. At that point, things turned ugly in earnest.
In the 46 years since 1978 when I was hired as one of the first women line pilots allowed an ALPA seniority number, permitted to fly for a major air carrier, the mysogynists have, albeit very slowly, lost. Women pilots appear to have become permanent, airline and military cockpit fixtures.
Bush took our pensions, slashed pay in half, and the job lost its luster, but now, with mass, government-forced retirements, a severe pilot shortage has restored and improved the higher pay levels -- and a much greater percentage of newhire pilots are women.
Same dynamic in corporate boardrooms and medical schools. Women are no longer cute novelties or temporary fill-ins.
And so, almost inevitably, it's time for male power brokers to attempt to intervene with their 2025 sledgehammers, to beat us back.
The big question: will their new effort be just a final, dying gasp of the powerbroker "old white guys," or will they succeed? Not by themselves, surely. Will they succeed because there are enough brainwashed women voting to help them?
Weren't all early productions of Shakespeare's plays actually drag shows?
On another but related topic, I wish someone would do a deep dive into the development, marketing, prescribing, and use of Viagra and its cousins. A few courageous elected women occasionally question the legality and insurance/Medicare/Medicaid payment for sexual enhancement drugs for men at a time that birth control and abortion for women are being eliminated. There are so many layers of hypocrisy here and I'd like to read about the history, reasoning, and ethics of, say, offering free Viagra to unmarried men.