>> i know we both believe in free speech but we're not asking you to give one tonight. we actually have thanks to the philanthropy, $5,000 check we would like to award to you. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> thanks. you may not want to commit this to euros so quickly. thank you again daniel, thank you all for coming and i think there will be time you can feel free to mingle and network after we are done here. and also purchase the book and he will be signing copies. thank you for coming tonight and appreciate you being here.

[applause] [inaudible conversations] >> every weekend booktv offers programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. keep watching for more here don >> caller: and watch any of our past programs online at booktv.org. >> katha pollitt 11 talked about her latest book "pro: reclaiming abortion rights" at the texas book festival in austin. this is about 45 minutes. [applause] >> good afternoon. this afternoon i have the great

pleasure of talking with katha pollitt who is running around our great nation promoting her new book "pro: reclaiming abortion rights" which is most definitely shaping the way that we talk about abortion rights in this country today and changing hearts and minds we hope. so i would like to invite katha pollitt to read for a bit and after that we will have a discussion and if there is time, perhaps take a few questions from the audience. thank you so much for being here on this beautiful but rather warm day. i am going to read the introduction to this book which is called "pro: reclaiming abortion rights" because it gives you a taste of what is to come in the book. i never had an abortion but my mother did. she didn't tell me about it but from what i piece together after her death from a line in her fbi

file which my father the old radical had requested along with his own, it was in 1960. like almost all abortions back then, it was illegal. the agent who kept her file wrote she was in the care of a physician for gynecological problems that spring which i like to think was his chivalrous way of protecting her from further investigations. perhaps he too was in the dark and only put down what he knew. for a while i was angry at her >> is angry at the dead for keeping their secrets until the is too late to ask questions and the way one can be angry at one's mother for having a life outside her child. i thought geode needs this bit of a woman to woman realism and honesty. instead of or at least in addition to details of the nine marriage proposals she had received by the time she met my father and falling in love with him at first sight and below been with him three months later

when she had just turned 21. knowing about her abortion might have helped me. it might have given me a truer sense of life as a young very romantic woman who had no idea what was what. when i asked myself why i was so preoccupied with abortion-rights for so long i wonder if learning about my mother's abortion, its illegality, the fact she didn't tell my father, the and no ability of her reasons for her feelings or the experience itself, i wonder if that is part of the answer. i find myself wondering who ever performed the procedure was a real doctor? was he kind to her? respectful? did he do his best not to cause pain? did she take someone with her? i remember talking witaid in thf there was a waiting room and took her home in a taxi after words and made her a cup of tea. it would have been so wrong if my tender, fragile mother had had to go through that all by

herself. what did it mean that my mother had to break the law to end pregnancy? it meant that america basically said to her it is the 20th century, we are going to let you vote and go to college and have a family and a job, not a great job, not the one you wanted because it is a job for men, but you can have your own charge account, and your own subscription to the heritage book club. but underneath all that normal forward looking mid-20sth century middle-class new york life is the secret underground life of women and that you must u are that duty at your peril. i wonder if my mother knew that her own grandmother died of an abortion after burying nine children back in russia during the first world war or her mother kept that family secret from her as she kept her secret

from me. women's lives are different now, we are in danger of forgetting how they used to be. legalizing abortion didn't just save women from death and injury and fear of arrest, it didn't just make it possible for women to commit to education and work and free them from shotgun marriages and too many kids. it changed how women saw themselves. as long as abortion is available to her even a woman who thinks it is tantamount to murder is making the chalets' when she keeps a pregnancy. teammates feel she has to have that baby, her parents or boyfriend telling her she has to do it. but actually she doesn't have to do it. she is choosing to have that baby. rosy wade gave women a kind of existential freedom that is not always welcome, indeed is sometimes quite painful, but has become part of what women are.

one thing rosy way it didn't do was make abortion private. sometimes i look up from reading about the latest onslaught against abortion rights, while i have been riding this introduction, louisiana passed laws like those forcing dozens of texas clinics to close, missouri legislators has a 72 hour waiting period requirement for its sole remaining clinic and montana health center that perform abortions as part of a family practice was trashed beyond repair allegedly by the son of a prominent local abortion opponent. i think how strange justice perry blackman's opinion in roe versus wade was all about privacy but the most private part of a woman's body and the most private decisions she will never make have never been more public. everyone gets to weigh in, even, according to the five conservative catholic men the supreme court, employer. if the ceo of the hobby lobby

crafts store chain, a sick of the business, decides emergency contraception are banned by god he is entitled to keep them out of his health care coverage even though he is wrong about how these methods work. it is religion. facts don't matter. especially when the facts involved women's liberty. maybe the mistake was thinking that a woman could claim privacy as a right in the first place. man's home is his castle but a woman's body has never been wholly her own. historically it belong to the nation, the community, her father, her family, her husband. in 1973 when roe vs. wade was decided, marital rape was legal in every state. why shouldn't her body belonged to a fertilized egg as well? if that a cancer right to live and grow in her body why shouldn't she be held legally responsible for its faith and be forced to have a caesarean if

her doctor thinks is best or be charged with a crime if she uses illegal drugs and delivers a stillborn or sick baby? incidents like this have been happening all over the country for some time now. denying women the right to end of pregnancy is the flip side of punishing women for conduct during pregnancy. even if not punishing, monitoring. in the spring of 2014 a law was proposed in the kansas state legislatures that would require doctors to report every miscarriage no matter how early in pregnancy. you would almost think the people who have always opposed women's independence and full participation in society were still at it. they can't push women all the way back but they can still use women's bodies to keep them under surveillance and control. that gives rise to a wish. i find myself daydreaming this is something, some substance already in common use that women

could drink after sex or at the end of the month that would keep them not pregnant with no one the wiser, something you could buy at the supermarket or several things you could mix together, items so ordinary they would never be banned, that you could prepare in your own home that would flush your uterus and leave it pink and shiny and empty without you ever needing to know if you were pregnant or about to be. a brew of earl grey, or coca-cola with a teaspoon and adjusting cayenne pepper. things you might have on your shelves right now, just waiting for some clever person to put them together, some stay at home mother with a chemistry degree rattling around her kitchen late at night, something like the herbal concoctions to make a kincaid remembers from her childhood. this is a quote. when i was a child growing up on an island in the caribbean and

the inhabitants were mostly descendants of people forcibly brought their from africa i knew at different times my mother and her friends, all of them women, would gather together at some spots in our yard and talk and sit and drink some very hard, dark drink they made from various leaves they had gathered. without them telling me anything directly i came to understand that the potions the drinking were meant to sweep their wombs clean of any thing and then that would result in them being unable to manage the day to day working of their lives. that is this clearing of their room was another form of housekeeping. think of it at the end of the quote, think of it, no pharmacist's refusing to fulfill your prescription for birth control or plan b, no religious fanatics following you to the clinic parking lot screaming baby killer and taking down your license plate number, hoping to raise your blood pressure so high that you won't be able to

have your procedures that day, no need to notify your parents or get their permission, the hole a lab rat thing that governs the abortion today, gone. the french abortion pill was supposed to accomplish that. any doctor could prescribe it in his office and no one need be any the wiser >> host: 99, n.y. times sunday magazine cover story called it the little white bombshells that may well reconfigure the politics and perception of abortion, pushing abortions earlier and reintegrated with regular medical practice. it is the age old hope that a simple technological or scientific advance will once and for all resolve a social the issue. the fantasy that means forgetting that the new thing will be embedded in the existing system and involve the existing human beings. for a variety of reasons,

difficulties obtaining the drug, laws that made medication, abortion is heavily medicated as surgical ones, fear of abortion opponents, at few doctors involved in abortion care took up the challenge of prescribing it. that women want early abortions, that many women prefer medication to surgery, especially in rural areas it would be simpler and cheaper and less stressful for women to get a prescription from their local ob gene y n n to travel long distances to a clinic, it would be a good thing to free women from having to run a gauntlet of protesters, none of that mattered. what women want in their abortion care is simply not important. trust women is a popular model in the pro choice movement. it sounds a little sentimental, doesn't it? part of that old sisterhood is powerful feminism, it is fashionable to mock today. but it doesn't mean everyone is wise or good or has magical

intuitive powers. it means no one else can make a decision, no one else is living her life. since she will have to live with that decision, not you, not the state legislature or the supreme court. chances are she's doing her best in a tight spot. dr. george tiller who provided abortion care in kansas and was one of the handful of doctors to perform abortions after 24 weeks were a trust women but. unlike the vast majority of americans, he did not assume a woman seeking an abortion was lazy or stupid. he did not december body ceased to be her own, in 2009 he was gunned down in church by scott brodeur, far right christian anti-government anti-abortion activists. he had the right to commit murder because as he told a

reporter, freeborn children's lives were in imminent danger. when roe vs. wade was winding its way to the courts and various state for reforming their abortion laws to permit abortions for rape, incest, field deformity and the like the radical feminist activist lucinda sizzler warned against half measures that left when regulated by the state and the medical profession. she feared qualifications of the essential rights would be extremely difficult to get judges and legislators to throw out later. and when meeting she held up a piece of paper representing the ideal abortion law. it was blank. she saw row vs. wade is a defeat and maybe she was on to something. would seem that the time to the small details has proven to be critical fault lines. the extraordinary deference paid to physicians and their judgment, preserve the idea that the woman's desire to end of pregnancy was not enough in itself.

it had to be approved by respectable authority figure, at that time almost always a man. wrote plays the medical profession under no burden to actually provide abortion care and indeed few doctors and few hospitals want anything to do with it. furthermore the acceptance of the near total ban on later abortions contains the germ of the ideas that the fetus had rights that from those of the woman. hy to see how these small seeds blossomed into the whole rigmarole we have today. which is all about this respecting women's capacity to make an independent judgment about their pregnancies. parental notification, judicial bypass, waiting periods, a crisis pregnancy centers, government mandated script levantine abortion propaganda that doctors must treat the patients and so on. she was wrong in a way too. had the supreme court agreed in 1973 that the proper abortion law was not at all we would probably have ended up close to

where we are today because of the power and determination of the anti-abortion movement and the qualms and hesitation and lack of engagement of most who are nominally pro-choice and yet it is just that hard to see women as belonging to themselves and yet women keep trying. they put up the rent or utilities to scrape together the $500 for the 1 trimester abortion, drive across whole states to get to a clinic and sleep in their cars because they can't afford a motel. they do not do this because they hate babies or they fail to see clearly what their alternatives are. they see the alternatives all too clearly. we lived as ellen wallis road in a society that is actively hostile to women's ambitions for a better life. under these conditions the unwillingly pregnant woman faces a terrifying loss of control over her face.

abortion, roe willis, is an act of self-defense. we don't see abortion that way because we don't think women have the right to a self. they are supposed to live for others. qualities that are seen and normal and desirable in men, ambition, confidence, outspokenness are perceived as selfish and aggressive in women especially once they have children. perhaps that is why when's privacy has so little purchase on the abortion debate. only a self can have privacy. only a self and had the quality. many feminist legal scholars including justice ruth beta ginsberg have argued the supreme court should have legalized abortion on grounds of the quality rather than privacy. pregnancy and childbirth are not only physical and medical experiences after all, they are also social experiences that in modern america justice when abortion was criminalize in the 1870s serve to protect women's ability to participate in

society on equal footing with men. would we be living in a different world today had abortion rights been based on the need to dismantle women's subordination? or with the same people who don't except women's privacy rights say if women can't be equal without abortion they will have to stay in their place? as i write, reporters describe the return of illegal abortion in states where clinics have closed. in texas women in the rio grande valley hundreds of miles from the clinic, no problem said judge edith jones of the 5 circuit, just drive back. they are going over the mexican border which causes miscarriage and sold over the counter as an anti ulcer medication. even where abortion is available some women can't or won't get to a clinic. they are undocumented immigrants and fear of arrest. they have no money, too much shame around abortion to risk being seen by someone who knows

them but now with clinics disappearing more and more women will have no choice but to turn to pills as women do in ireland and other countries where it is illegal for a woman to end pregnancy. some will end up in emergency rooms, some will be injured, some may die. this is what laws supposedly intended to protect women from dangerous clinics will have accomplished a. this is what the so-called pro-life movement will have done for life. as i mentioned there earlier, a single discovery or invention lives up to its promise of deep-seated social change. even the birth control pill, an immense advantage over the clumsy and fallible message that preceded it had fallen short, half of all pregnancies in the united states are accidental. still i imagine my mother sitting at the kitchen table in her pretty bathrobe with the blue and yellow flowers on an ordinary day in 1960 cutting out articles from the new york times

as she loves to do. see like the benson and hedges and her very are -- very hot drink while the sun pours into the windows facing the street. i wrote this book because i wanted to put real women, women like my mother back at the center of the way we talk about abortion. abortion opponents had been very effective, shifting the focus of moral concern on to the contents of women's will. women who seek abortion had been pushed into the shadows, one thing for a rape victim to speak up, or unwanted pregnancy that turned into a medical catastrophe, this wasn't the right time for me or two children or one or none or not enough. and apologize for not having a baby, just because she happens to get pregnant. as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's

life from first period to menopause. and to say yes to every psycho the knocks on her door. even like most women who have abortions including my mother, she already has children. there is deep contempt and disregard for the seriousness of motherhood as well. >> in just a few minutes. we move into q&a. >> really? what happened to this? >> we will -- we had 45 minutes set aside and with the last 15 minutes for q&a and we are very close to that. >> that is not what we weren't told. >> we have almost half an hour. we have until 4:45 ended is now 20 after 4. >> in the last 15 minutes if we could set that aside for q&a i will come back and give you a little bit of advance notice in

front of that so you can wrap up where you are so we can move into that if that is okay with you. >> okay. so anyway that is a case of the book and this introduction concludes with a rousing call for people to start speaking up and getting active because the other side is very active and vocal and i hope this book encourages people to do that. >> right off the bat let me say first of all it is such a thrill to talk to you and i wish we had a long time to talk. i have to say i can't remember a time, last time i read any book i found as exciting and engaging as i found "pro: reclaiming abortion rights". i never read a book that make me feel like abortion is something that is good. like it is a good thing for women.

that to meet, when i read that, that felt extremely liberating to me, as someone who has had an abortion, to be able to think about that experience in a way that isn't shameful. i can tell you i never said that to a group of people obviously. i don't know. it feels huge ended feels important to me to have this kind of conversation. i felt exhilarate did reading this book, i felt a empowered reading this book and to -- not as a woman's issue but as a human issue. it was an issue of justice. it was really extraordinary, and i'm enormously grateful to you for writing this book. and it is funny.

[applause] >> as you read this book, you will feel like you can say that. like we have a right to our bodies, we have a right to make these decisions and this book will have you on your feet. i don't know how many of you have read it but i guarantee you as soon as you finish you will be on your feet and you should be writing a love note for her. it is very funny. it is funny, the only way that you can write about material that is so deeply important and profound and serious because people don't have a conversation. >> it is so true. i tried to flip the paradigm little bit, and a marker of our terrible decadent society, going to hell in a handbasket too much abortion, abortion is a good

thing for society, it is good for women to -- good for women to have their education and work and dreams, we lose so much social -- social capital and so much talent because women have children who earlier when they are not in a good situation to have them, it is good for men not to be distantly connected to children they don't want to be connected to and good for children to be wanted and good for society just to have families that are able to structure themselves in a common, rational way. planned parenthood and abortion is be essential for that. that is why one in three american women by menopause, this is not something that is just about that -- that i should

say. the cold hearted, child eating career woman, this flourishes because our side has been intimidated. >> you make a wonderful point in the book that most women who have abortions are mothers or will go on to the mother's. and who have children, they're the same woman, then a different point in their lives. >> and a raw lost, and has been able to focus, and less a. abor. i think that it is important we put it back into a real life practical context of everybody's life.

>> can you tell us how to talk about it in a better way? i was realizing that i am a loyal and pro-choice, pro abortion, and demand, with the apology. i found when i was reading it to my office seems pro-choice. but when someone asks me, oh, yes, a really awful thing, the worst possible into a real life no stuff practical same all the sttuff ir don't mean but i don't want to appear to be negative or take e. too firm of a stance. i need a newlk way to talk abou abortion. how can i refrain the discussions so that it sounded powerful, don't sound middle of the road. and don't know how to express

that as strongly as they are an that is an issue.n >> of abortion has been made such a shameful thing to do that it is like the wonderful st ellg columnist ellen goodman settle , long time ago. women can do anything they want as long as they feel guilty about it. i think there is a lot of guiltn and shame attached to abortion f because of the way we talk about it and because of the push back from the anti-abortion movement which our side has not been able to successfully counter. there is the idea for example, one reason you might feel terrible about having an becaus abortion is because you were careless with birth control. everybody knows even if you wert not careless, because birth orn control is not perfect but think about it this way. from the time you had your firse

period to the time you have your last period which could be as late as 50, you have to be preventing pregnancy every single month except when you want to get pregnant. >> a little more than 30 years.n >> an enormous time to practice any thing perfectly.or. really. really> . vigilan i talk about that in the book.k tigers of vigilance we demand or women, perfect performance withi at the same time we demand women be incredibly hypersexual. young girl, supposed to be hot virgins, go all the way, how does that work out? it doesn't work out well for anyone. so hon someday their will be better birth controls. it will never be perfect. we just have to accept than any unit. women should not let themselves be put in the

position of someone else judging them as careless. this is ridiculous when. most women have children, and the ones who do not want to should not harbor it is a really big commitment. [applause] >> do you think it is important for women who have had abortions or are very supportive of abortion rights to stop trying to make a case for having had that abortion? should just be enough to say i needed an abortion? >> that is a big thing, that is a apologizing. it would be a really good thing if women to the extent that they can do that given their own personal situations, could talk about it. it would help so much with k and lesbian rights. when people could see oh i

thought theys were spending their lives having anal sex in back houses but now i see it is my colleague. at least when he's at work he is not doing that. my cousin is a lesbian, i think -- not my cousin, i am imagining somebody else, my imaginary cousin. it really changed how people saw gays and lesbians. the stereotypes flourish in the silence that we have left. for example, when they are not sane women who have abortions are career women, they are saying women who have abortions are confused. they are confused. they don't know what they're doing and being pushed around by other people. that is why we need these restrictions. i think women really need to say i wasn't confused. i wasn't pushed into this by

anyone else. i made a decision. the idea, another thing is the idea about regret, a huge thing now, we all regret things we did in life. most women did not regret their abortions. every study ever done has shown most women feel a sense of relief and have done what was best for them. [applause] >> there are women who regret their abortions and go to state legislatures and tell their stories and state legislators want that abortion anyway are happy to hear from them. the point is we all regret things we have done. that is not a way to make the law. there are people who regret their divorces. nobody would say yes, mary regrets her divorce but don't make divorce illegal for everybody. that is not the way the world works. you make a decision and if you are unhappy affair words you have to deal with that. >> we only have another 12

seconds for me to ask you a question. i am wondering what would be the one thing you would like people to take away from the book, if there was one thing you wanted people to leave here knowing or feeling or be leaving, what would you like that to be? >> abortion is now and always has been part of the fabric of american life and we should acknowledge that and live with it and stop giving women such a hard time and instead help women with what they need to be, not have children when they don't want them, with a good bird control and help them when they do which we do so little of in this country, less -- [applause] >> time for q&a. >> happy to take your questions. if anyone has a question they

would like to ask, please stand in line and we will get as many as we can. >> hi. i happen to know a woman who became pregnant from being raped and she had the child. she is the first person to stand up and say no one should make that decision for someone else. her daughter is now an adult and feels the same way but they have had people tell them that they should be opposed to abortion. you touched on this a little bit, but it amazes me that women are being told how they should feel about something and i was hoping you could just kind of address that part of it.

>> you raise an interesting question. there's a lot of social coercion around abortion. you are supposed to feel a certain way, you are supposed to feel regret, you are supposed to say it was the most difficult decision you ever made. how realistic is that? you don't want to have a baby, your college student, you get pregnant, suddenly is the most difficult decision i ever made because maybe i should have that baby, i don't think that is the way it works. most women have abortions come to the decision pretty quickly, they have an abortion as soon as they can, something all these restrictions make harder than ever and they should not be made to feel oh, i have to summon up this guilt and shame after the fact. it is horrible that women are saying to this woman who was raped and had a baby and that is fine if that was her choice and say you should be anti-choice because really we should be forcing all rape victims to have babies. that is a very different thing than someone who does that

voluntarily for whatever reason. >> you were talking about the main takeaway for the book but for me affordability is a huge issue with having a child and there is such hypocrisy with legislators who are so pro-life, yet they are against maternity leave, the state we are in right now leads the nation in child and insurance, most families can't afford a pediatrician yet these women who are seeking an abortion simply because they don't have the economic means to raise a child that is considered such a selfish act, how do we combat that hypocrisy? >> i talk a lot about motherhood in the book because i putting one of the things the anti-abortion movement says when they say you are having an abortion as a matter of convenience, they are really saying having a child is no big deal, anyone can do it, a

12-year-old can do it, somebody living on the streets can do it, they do say that. the fact that we do so little to help mothers and children and families and children is just a disgrace. we don't have paid maternity leave, we don't have day care, cut cut at anything that would benefit mothers and children and you know where that happens the most is in the states that are the most anti choice. [applause] >> there is a complete correlation between the states where the status of women is the lowest and where restrictions on abortion are the highest. so that if a state with few women in the legislature, state where the gap between men and women's wages are particularly high, a state where they do very

little for women's health and children's health, that is where these restrictions are happening. it makes a picture, doesn't it? that abortion is -- let's push women back. we don't care about mothers or children or you. that is the message there. >> i have been marching around this issue for 30 years now and i have never been more depressed about where we are. one thing i ask you to expand upon, i have come to the conclusion one of our challenges is it is not a woman's issue. was a man at the beginning his started the problem too but yet i still continue to see that men are not included in this conversation. i literally encourage people to post on a website who impregnated them when they were in college because they are now the agents of my heart, they are

pillars of society but somehow it still carries 20 years later that she had the abortion and there isn't any conversation about who impregnated them. i mean that as how do we bring men into this conversation? >> you have done a great job and died of your idea of who impregnated me. >> let's get that going. >> this is another way, this is another piece of evidence that this is really all about within and women having sex because there is no sanction for men. abstinence only classes are all about the girls staying version than day have sex they are dirty forever like an old kleenex everybody has sneezed into. the burden is specifically on

women, the shame and guilt is specifically on women and taking care of the child is specifically on women too. >> when i graduated from college i didn't know i was pregnant and i decided to have an abortion. i did it, i understood what i was doing and i knew if i didn't do it i felt i was going to have to be am burdened with the responsibility of living with my parents forever. i felt like i was going to have to make a choice to live in a certain level of poverty and be supported by my parents and i didn't want to do that. i didn't tell anybody except the gentleman who was part of the process. he was fine. so he was supportive with it and we did it and i asked very dumb questions at the clinic and people looked at me very crazy. how old was that? i wanted to know. i am a biology major.

i wanted to know. when i went home i manage it very carefully. it was my decision. i would have made a great mother. i still believe i would have been a great mother but i believe my choice was the right choice at the right time. like you, i think i told may be one other person and i was drinking very heavily. there you go. it is on tv now. [cheers and applause] >> i think my question would be how do we get these young women to feel like it is their responsibility and they should carry the responsibility with dignity? >> i don't understand the question. do you mean the responsibility, you have a responsibility to yourself if you do not want to have this child, you should have

an abortion? wanting it is enough reason to have the abortion and they should be more vocal about that? we were talking earlier about what the problem is, that so many people who have had abortions don't feel they can talk about it and therefore there is an enormous part of the population that things they don't know anyone who ever had an abortion. one in three women. maybe that was getting it. >> one little story is when i began this book tour after i read women come up to me, middle-aged women, said i had an abortion and never told anyone except for you. and i said what do you think would happen, and everyone told my best friend. what do you think would happen if you told your best friend? she said i think she would probably tell me she had an abortion too. all our secrets are the same.

there are ways in which we are locking ourselves up in silence, if we reached out a little bit we might learn we are not so alone. i am always for that. >> there is always talk from the anti-choice side that women are going to regret it, the pressure caused by abortion that you never be able to get pregnant again. have there been any studies comparing the anxiety, the difficulty of raising children versus having an abortion? [applause] >> that was more a comment, an excellent point.

abortion is always compared to some rosy never never land. life isn't like that. anyway i want to thank everybody for coming today and those great questions. [applause] >> thank you all very much for being here and for joining us, shortly after she leaves here, if you