Part 1: The Viability Line

More Perfect

WNYC Studios

Wnyc, Scotus, Perfect, History, Court, More, Documentary, Courses, Supreme, Education, Society & Culture

4.8 • 14.7K Ratings

🗓️ 8 June 2023

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When the justices heard oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the landmark abortion case, one word came up more than any other: viability. The viability line was at the core of Roe v. Wade, and it’s been entrenched in the abortion rights movement ever since. But no one seems to remember how this idea made its way into the abortion debate in the first place. This week on More Perfect, we trace it back to the source and discover how a clerk and a couple of judges turned a fuzzy medical concept into a hard legal line.

Voices in the episode include:

• George Frampton — former clerk to Justice Harry Blackmun

• Judge Jon Newman — Second Circuit Court of Appeals

• Khiara Bridges — UC Berkeley School of Law professor

• Alex J. Harris — lawyer, former member of the Joshua Generation

Learn more:

• 1973: Roe v. Wade

• 2022: Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Supreme Court archival audio comes from Oyez®, a free law project by Justia and the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School.

Support for More Perfect is provided in part by The Smart Family Fund.

Follow us on Instagram and Facebook @moreperfectpodcast, and Twitter @moreperfect.

Transcript

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0:00.0	A heads up, this episode starts with a story of pregnancy loss.
0:05.6	I'm Julia Lungoria, this is more perfect.
0:15.3	How old are you when you got pregnant for the first time?
0:18.6	Today's episode comes from producer Gabrielle Perpe.
0:21.6	It was 34.
0:23.6	It was 34.
0:25.2	And it starts with a woman named Margo.
0:28.7	She's never set foot in the Supreme Court.
0:31.2	But in 2014, when Roe v Wade was still law, her first pregnancy made her confrontal
0:37.4	line the Court drill.
0:40.2	That story began when she was about nine weeks pregnant.
0:44.3	So at nine weeks was when I started writing weekly letters to my baby.
0:51.2	What kind of stuff would he write?
0:53.2	I think I talked about snap dragons and how you can make them open like mouths.
0:57.2	So how excited I was to show her how to do that when you squeeze the sides of snap
1:02.0	dragons mouths that we can make them talk.
1:08.4	I kept up the weekly letters until I ran out of pages in that journal.
1:14.9	Then at 18 weeks, the trouble began.
1:19.3	One of the ventricles in her brain was measuring on the high side of the normal range.
1:24.7	The scan showed that something was wrong with her baby's brain development.
1:28.2	So doctors asked her to come back in a few weeks for a follow up scan.
1:31.8	By 22 weeks, it was in the severe range and there were other abnormalities.
	...

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