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This is a bonus episode of Lancelide.

If you're new to the series, we recommend you go back to episode one of our story.

Trust.

When it comes to the canal, we bought it, we paid for it.

There is an issue summed up by one word that ascended in power and importance over the course of the 1970s.

And while you've heard how other fights over textbooks, integration, the Equal Rights Amendment, led to new battle lines between the parties, this issue became the jewel in the crown of our political divide.

The issue is abortion.

I can find no evidence whatever that a fetus is not a living human being with human rights.

No topic takes up more oxygen than abortion, or has less middle ground between the parties.

That was not always the case.

And the way it became the case is essential listening.

This is a bonus episode of Landslide about how today's abortion debate arose, or was created during the course of our story, how the fight for and against abortion rights came to map so neatly onto the political parties and the other fissures in American politics.

I'm joined by UC Davis Law Professor Mary Ziegler, the foremost historian of the U.S. abortion

debate. She starts by looking at what people used to believe, what the argument over abortion

looked like before today's battle lines formed. And from there, we'll

figure out how it evolved. You'll occasionally hear people argue that Roe v. Wade created the

pro-life movement, and that isn't true. Abortion already was a political issue. And it became one

in part because states were starting to reform criminal abortion laws from the

19th century. But it was primarily kind of a state-by-state issue, and there was no coherent

national partisan alignment. There were prominent Democrats opposed to legal abortion and

prominent Democrats in favor, and the same went for Republicans. So I think

...