Part One: Abortion and its Defenders: From Weimar to the Bay

Wade fell down. That should not have been a house of cards because the Democratic Party never did anything to short up since it's precarity has been and continues to be one of the only ways they can get anyone to vote for an outdated capitalist party that essentially no one under the age of forty actually supports true story. That's my I like it.

like a bad word. But I'm kind of like, whatever, it shouldn't be a bad word. It's people who provide. Like, that's great.

places and times. Vymar Germany, which was the brief period where Germany was a republic between World War One and the rise of the Nazis, and then those decades in the US, the brief golden era of the US when the US is a republic, you know, when when abortion was legal in all fifty states in.

fucking starving, and everyone was fucking traumatized. They had just lost this war that they shouldn't have been in, and it's kind of their fault, but wasn't What wasn't like the random german on the street's fault, you know, right right, and during the nineteen twenties, so it's like famous for all the like well cabaret culture and all the like decadent art type stuff that's happening in a collapsing society, right, But there's also this wild political fighting going on between

anarchist communists, social democrats, monarchists, and fascists. Like all of these different groups are like, no, I'm going to be in charge. Now, I'm gonna be in charge, and they're all getting into fights in the street about it. Culture

was blooming. You have the first LGBT research center and gender affirming care facility in Western history, including like the first gender a firming surgeries for trans women and things like that which happened at the Institute for Sex Research, which if people want to hear more about, they can go and listen to our episode about gay resistance to Nazis. We talk all about that place and time. It's real neat except for the fact that I think this is

a little bit more commonly known. You know how like all the famous photos of Nazis burning books, all of those photos are of them burning books about transness basically, and like LGBT stuff because they torched the world's first

LGBT resource center. Anyway. Yeah, that's the fun part of like all of histories, is a dance between action and reaction and like positive and negative forces, and like I hate to think of things dualistically, but there's like bad stuff and there's people who fight the bad stuff.

world at this point except for the USSR. The Revolution legalized abortion, and then Stalin was like just kidding and got rid of it. But during this period abortion is legal in the USSR. And so you've always awesome folks living in Germany. You also have clearly less awesome folks who are going to take power in about ten years and they're like, well, how do we have abortions and talk about birth control when it's illegal? Who will do

these crimes with and for us? Elsewhere in the Western world, at least in the US, where I've done more research about it, the answer to who will organize crime is usually organized crime right kind of famously in the US for decades, probably at least a century, if you wanted an abortion, you went to a mafia doctor. Even the Jain collective, who we all love as heroes, their first doctors were almost certainly mafia. And don't want to conjecture

too hard with people who are still alive. Also, we talked about on our Stonewall episode and this is really just this whole episode is just to like go back and listen all these other episodes. We talk on the Stonewall episode about how the old gay clubs were mafia run back in the day. So like most places, the mafia was the one providing the services that people needed and were not available legally. Right, there's another group that's

really good at organizing crime. You ever heard of a narco syndicalism?

of it many countries. It's not many countries, syndicalism is more communist and arcosyndicalism believes in doing syndicalism in order to create a society without capitalism in the state, where like workers' councils collectively create society and fit form all of our needs and things like that, and arcosyndicalists have this like from a labor movement point of view, they have this reputation as like the wild radicals, right, who are a little too into direct action and they all

hate voting and shit, you know. For the rest of the anarchist movement, they're like kind of bureaucratic and boring, is the sort of reputation that they have because they're very organized. Okay, so they're perfect for this role. The union part gives them the organizational skills, the anarchist part

gives them the affinity for crime. So in Weimar Germany, abortions were done by lay organizations, that is, they were done by not doctors, not even like clinics necessarily, and these organizations, they weren't branded as an arcosyndicalist, but their leadership and their organizing principles came from that part of the labor movement. Basically, the women and sometimes men of the anarchosyndicalist movement were like, well, here's a need, we

know how to organize crime at large scale. That's what we do usually it strikes and sabotage and things like that. And then they left off the branding of like anarchism and syndicalism because this was about reproductive health first and foremost. And so they set up all these organizations and I'm just like, I'm now off script. I'm so fucking interested by this because there's like, well, I'll just okay, I'll

just get into it. This organization was done on a fucking massive scale, Like I'm not I love Jaane Collective right right, that's like one city and one clinic right. In nineteen thirty alone, these lay organizations performed a million abortions in Germany in one year.

the one hundred and fifty and the fifteen thousand numbers. I'm under the impression one hundred and fifty thousand is the like the broader overall activist support, and fifteen thousand would be like people who are like more directly like, this is what they do, you know, they're very active.

I was given out condoms again. Ah, I'm not bad. Yeah, but it's not really a secret that this above ground but still a llegal organization was where people went when they needed abortions. They also didn't charge money for abortions. Oh wow, a million fucking I just for ten years, one hundred and fifty thousand people came together to organize

the entire country's abortion service illegally, safely and free. Theyized they used anarchist organizing principles and anarchist organizers, but they didn't label their organization as an anarchist thing, and not everyone engaged with it would have identified as an anarchist right, And it's fucking like unknown it at least in English language.

What's interesting that we have to wrap our heads around every single time we try and cover any of these issues, Like, for example, when we try and cover like trans issues, you can't just be like, oh, in eighteen eighty there's this translating and mean the same thing that you mean when you say in twenty twenty four, right, because our social conceptions around these things, around sex and gender and all kinds of things are constantly shifting, and people are

fighting for bodily autonomy, but how people frame that fight changes over time, and it hasn't always been the same. I'm kind of curious when in your work with like because you all did, I mean, you all did a Jane episode, And I'm just kind of curious, like how much you when you talk about like old feminism, how often do you have to engage in and talk about eugenics and like how big of a problem this was in the old feminist movement.

as well. We kind of understand the background of planned parenthood and the conversations we have about that because we praise planned parenthood, but we also know that there's some ugliness, as we talked about previously, yeah as well, So overall, like, yes, we talk about the dark side of all of it,

which makes us kind of bad guys to everyone. And I say we Annie and I who is the other co host, because I have been called out for saying things that they feel are offensive because they don't want to be associated with that type of feminism when in actuality it still is so when we talk about like abortion rights, but then when we talk about sterilization against the people women of color specifically, and what that looks like and why they did it, people don't really want

to hear that truth because they don't want to face the fact that, yes, this is an argument against abortion rights in a way, not really, but it can be turned to that point that we've had this many conversation, but we have to be understanding and sensitive to the fact that when it comes to reproductive rights, we're talking about every part of it being right, whether it is choosing to have a child or choosing to abort a fetus, like those are two different things, but the same side

of the coin type of thing, I guess, so we talk about it in realms of yes, we're uncomfortable because for me, even though I'm a woman of color, I'm also you know, very headonormative sis gender in that level. So I have to talk about being uncomfortable when it comes to talking about LGBTQ rights in general or any queer rights in general. But like I'm now just having this long dip about this, but because it's not simple.

It is simple, and it isn't simple when it comes to the fact that people want to bend what they think is their true rights or true beliefs. And now oftentimes sometimes if you're a person who have any type of privilege, then that means that you are taking advantage you could be you're probably taking advantage of someone else who are in the marginalized community when you do these things.

the default of that. You know. But you know what else is really uncomfortable being supported by advertisers on an anti capitalist show. So that thank you, Transition So here's some of those unless you have cooler zone media, in which case your money went directly into my dog's football and you don't have to hear ads. But here they are anyway, and we're back.

Is the thing that we you basically have this dark half a century between Darwin is like, evolution is real, and then people realize watching the nazis just like hammer home what eugenics is like really about At the end right the day, you know, that space in between is full of people in the right, left and center being like, wouldn't it be cool if we could kind of use

evolution to like make everything better? You know? And there's this thing that happens that I've ran across while researching this episode where people try to distance the historical eugenics movement, which they will call the part that believes that only the fittest should reproduce, and then the population control movement, which aims to bring down the overall population through birth control, but not in a targeted way as much as I've ever read, and I think that that, Okay, this difference

comes after World War Two and people start making that difference. But before then, everyone, including the people who don't want to believe that they're acting racistly or ablistically or whatever, are using the word eugenics to describe what they want, and they meant it in a very positive way for

whatever thing that they were trying to do. And the reason I want to talk about it is because, Okay, so over the years, states feudal, capitalist and socialist have all gone to great lengths to control our bodies and

our reproduction in whatever direction that they want. At that time, when the USSR legalized abortion, they were the first Western state to do so in nineteen twenty, and it was in part because they were like, hell, yeah, we believe in communism, inequality, and everyone's going to be able to make their own choices, right. But a lot of it was because everyone was fucking starving, so choosing to not have kids was seen as something that you would do

in solidarity with society at large. So they wanted to make it possible to act in solidarity with society at large. And if that is your own decision, If someone listening is like, I think that's too many people in the world and they decided not to have kids, that's great. Deciding that other people shouldn't get to have kids because you think there's too many people in the world, or the state mandates it, that's when it gets real fucking bad.

Right by the time Stalin got his claws into it, it's not quite just like early Bolsheviks were kind of okay, and then Stalin was a man of evil even though whatever. Anyway, people can hear my opinion, my negative opinions about even the regular Bolsheviks that are but whatever. By this time

Stalin gets his hands into things. Abortion was not only outlawed, but incentives were put into place to encourage people to have large families, because having lots of kids was something you should do in solidarity with society at large, and so the state wants to control whether people do or don't have kids. But the lever it's using is class solidarity. The lever it's using is like be you know, care

about the rest of the world right to me? You can just cut through all this bullshit by being like, hey, a person who's pregnant gets to decide if that's a condition that they want to continue to have. Like that is just the larger social conditions can influence it one way or the other. But at the end of the day, our bodies are choice. It's a good slogan, we can

stick with it. But the thing that in order to understand these German abortion providers, and also to understand folks were going to talk about in the sixties and seventies coming out of like Black Power movement and all these other kind of places, people weren't thinking about it necessarily in the same frame. We have to look at things through people's own framing, own lenses in order to understand them.

Two influences on people's framing about how they feel about abortion are religion, which we'll talk about later, and class consciousness. So in Weimar, Germany as its famous hedonism and all this shit, but culture wasn't a political People were thinking very consciously about what they do as it relates to these political questions, and specifically, the question of class struggle was like the fucking question in Europe and like the I don't know nineteen oughts to the nazis fucking changing

everything in a real negative way. That's my rant. So people tended not to see themselves solely as individuals, but also as actors within larger social frameworks like the working class or the communist party, or the anarchist movement, or the fascist movement or the monarchy, whatever the fuck right. People thought of themselves as part of a whole in

a lot of ways. And I'm going to quote this German anarchist synthelist Max Winkler, who wrote in a pamphlet as a birth control pamphlet that a union was distributing all workers. Organizations are concerned almost exclusively with economic and political issues. Both the parties and the unions view the

issue of sex as being insignificant, irrelevant. There once was a time when it was considered unrespectable to publicly address problems concerning sexual relations, and yet it is so tremendously important that the sexual issue be addressed without any trace of reticence, just as the hunger issue for hunger and love are the two polls around which all human life and drive revolve. These two issues are so closely entwined that it is hardly possible to discuss one without considering

the other. And so this was an introduction to a birth control pamphule that has union, the Free Workers' Unions of Germany, was publishing in the nineteen twenties. More prominent still than that union was a SYNDICALUS union called the Syndicalless Women's Union, which again very literal namers. That's what it was a union of You.

a women's strike. It was attempt at I don't know, it's complicated, and we'll get into it more in a little bit. But first, someone to talk about Millie, because Millie's really cool. And also I think the first person named Millie that we've featured on this show, I like it. This is a nice name. Goody. Milli was cool as shit.

She and her siblings, including another anarchist feminist birth control activist named Rose Witcop, They made the mistake of being born in Ukraine in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties as Jews. So they were like, this isn't the best time and place to be us. We don't want to be here anymore. So when Milly was sixteen years old, she moves by herself to London, worked in a sweatshop to save enough money to get her three sisters and her parents to London away from the pograms that were

happening in Ukraine. Like, I can't imagine me at sixteen doing any of those things successfully. She could have quit right then and been a fucking hero as far as I'm concerned. And there's so many, you know, I mean, obviously the world is full of these stories, but they're all fucking amazing stories. There's people who help their families escape from very bad situations and that is an amazing

thing to do. But she kept going. She joined a Jewish anarchist newspaper, The Worker's Friend, which was the widest circulation Yiddish language newspaper in England at that time, at least according to one thing I read another thing. Whatever. Anyway, I had this problem when everything's like, oh this is the biggest, or this was the first, or this.

know who's controlling the narrative. You don't know what's been hidden, what's not been discovered yet, and so everything's under a caveat of what seems like a first but that could change at any moment, and they are most likely other people who've already done it, and probably people who are marginalized and are not going to ever get credit.

specifically Europe. It was the first time it happened in Europe that we know about, that we know about, but anyway, whatever, this wide circulation Yiddish language newspaper in England called The Worker's Friend and it was built around a larger group called the Worker's Friend Group, which was basically just people working together to provide mutual aid and care for like this poor immigrant, you know, anarchist worker population. She meets

this fellow named Rudolph Rocker and they hook up. They get fake hitched, common law hitched in leftist feminist tradition at the time, they refused to get legally married. And I was very excited as soon as whenever I hear someone like Rudolf Rocker is more famous than her, normally other he's going to live in her shadow. During this episode, I was very excited to notice that he's only like three years older than her, because whenever I hear about like oh and then this man with a beard, I'm.

But the time that we brought him up before was his speeches and the anarchist unionism in the early twentieth century in London that he promoted led to the connection between the Irish, Catholic and Jewish working class that about twenty years later came together to smash the ever loving shit out of British Fascism at the Battle of Cable Street. And it was directly just to retell like one of

my favorite stories in history. Basically, like, while the Irish stock workers were starving because they were on strike, and the Jewish textile workers had just resolved their strike. The Jewish textile workers took in the poor starving Irish kid who couldn't afford food at home, and like watched them for like five years or like however long for the strike to resolve. I don't I don't have this script

in front of me. And so then later when the fascists were like, hey, Irish, you're like basically white unlike those Jews, am I right? The Irish were like fuck you. They fed me when I was twelve, you know, and then they had like just organized together and beat the shit out of these fascists. Anyway, I love it. And that's how Rudolph Rocker came up last time, and it's just one of my favorite stories. I want to tell it every chance again.

did it to impress Millie, is my best guess. Yes, yes, the two tried to move to New York City in eighteen ninety eight, but they were turned away and deported like literally back on the same ship that they came in on, because they weren't married and refused to get married, and they since they didn't let the state sanction their love, they were deported. And this became this like the newspapers and shit covered it, not in this like what the

fuck why didn't we let these people in? But instead this like scandal about those fucking leftists who won't get married.

She and her partner edited two Yiddish newspapers. There's The Political Worker's Friend and then there's a more cultural one called Germinal and during World War One they ran a soup kitchen together because everyone's like just fucked and starving, and basically anner because I've been doing food out bombs forever. And then first her partner and then she got locked up for opposing the war World War One. When they got out, they were like, all right, fuck London, let's

go to Berlin. That seems kind of cool right now. Right it's nineteen eighteen or so, and they're like, Berlin's suddenly the Weimar Republic and it's really cool. They're like they get invited to help go start in arcosiniclist unions and they're like, that sounds like our jam. So they do and they helped form the FOUD the Workers whatever, blah blah blah, and Millie helped start not only Berlin Women's Union but also the Syndicalists Women's Union to unite

all of the local and arcos Syndicalists women's unions. She hung out there until nineteen thirty three when the Reichstag fire happened, and she was like, I like, really shouldn't be in Germany right now. It seems like a really bad idea for me as a very prominent Jewish anarchist, right,

so she dipped. Her husband comes with her. I mean it probably wasn't good for him either, but you know he was German at least, or I mean whatever anyway, And so they moved to an anarchist commune in upstate New York, where they continued to be cool for decades and just organize. After World War II, the whole commune constantly put together aid packets for the anarchists in Germany who had somehow survived the fucking war. And she lived to be seventy eight. She died in nineteen fifty five,

and just did so fucking much. Her sister Rose stayed in London and published anarchist feminist text about birth control and kept getting interested for it and was cool too. But back to Germany and the Weimar Crime ring, and by that I mean back to ad break time. Now go and we're back. We're talking about vymar Germany, all right. So you have these syndicluss unions. They're distributing information about birth control, pushing for this child burying strike basically, we

won't have kids until conditions approve. And the social Democrats were on this too, just credit where it's due. Radicals would write pamphlets with names like how can we promote to the cultural decline of births as far back as nineteen thirteen, and this pamphlet sold thirty one thousand copies. And this is kind of what I'm talking about, that framing and how it's so important to understand it from

their perspective. You know, it's sketchy and all of the like trying to control who gets to have kids goes really badly, but it's like worth seeing where they're coming from about it. The ideas that birth control can be a proletarian weapon because the sheer replaceability of workers and

soldiers was part of why conditions were so bad. In a very similar way as it also was a feminist move in which like this is like in the same way that like workers will, the one thing we can withhold is our labor right from the class, A lot of different feminist perspectives are like, well, the thing that we can withhold is well, reproductive labor is the most

annoying misidea mislabeled Marxist term of all times. But they can withhold having children, which doesn't count as reproducive labor because anyway, whatever fucking complicated as terms not written by women. Clearly maybe it was I don't know, Fewer workers meant less competition for the same jobs, and it also meant that both women and workers felt like they had more

control if they pushed this line. I also think that they mostly just were like, I don't want to have kids right now, and like I kind of want a fuck, but like, so what if we just find a way to make that happen. And then we're like, yeah, it's like for the revolution or something, am I right? And they're like, yeah, totally, you're cute, Hans, get over here

with your mustache. And so they started getting talks left and right, these like women's unions, right, and they're finding that sometimes women would come and like they would join the union just long enough to get I think you have to be a member to come to them. So they joined long enough to get like the free condoms and the advice about how to not get kids, and then they would dip, which is like, yeah, fair, whatever what do you expect.

while before this anyway, there were clever loopholes and laws that said birth control could be discussed behind closed doors, and so they would have like these closed door meetings. But by nineteen twenty three, in nineteen twenty four, it's no longer the businesses, and it's no longer the unions. It is now these lay organizations that I was talking about. They take over as the companies back off. They don't actually the unions don't back off. The unions become these

lay organizations. The Free Workers of Germany founded a group called the vsl or Association for Sexual Hygiene and Life Reform and they were like, we swear it's a totally separate group. It's totally not just our union, like we promise, And the cops were like, no, this is quote an association closely connected with the Syndicalists, which recruited its members primarily from such circles, so they're not fool in anyone.

In nineteen twenty eight, the VSL and other lay organizations come together and form a union of lay organizations called the Reich Association of Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene. I think Reich in this case doesn't mean anything sketchy, and it stands for r V, or rather r V is what it is abbreviated as. And this group is strictly neutral in regards to politics and religion. But we all

know where it came from. And the elected chairman was a member of the Synthicalist Union, and they ran sexual counseling centers all over the country in more than two hundred locations, teaching sex education, distributing contraceptives, and performing abortions. Very few physicians in Germany at the time would fuck with abortions. So this is why, like in a lot of other places, it's like crime doctors, but they're like doctors, or they're pretending to be doctors, or they perform the

role of doctors, but that's not there. They're not licensed or whatever, you know. But overall in Germany, the physicians weren't fucking with it. Either they were anti choice or they were anti I go to jail now. And so

lay people trained in the performance of abortions. To quote Hans Schmidtz whose parents were anarchists, and he's just like describing what he saw as a kid, father was active in the League, the local lay organization, the League for the Protection of Mothers and Social Family Hygiene, because why would you name your group anything other than that? Back to the quote, Secretly the League also aided women in getting abortions. There were several women who could be called

upon when abortion was to be performed. My mother had quite a bit of experience in this and was one of these women. Naturally, we were not allowed to be around, but the apartment was so small and it could not be concealed from us. A couple of times my mother sent me to fetch doctor b. He came when there were complications, and unfortunately for any listeners who are considering this, running a massive crime ring does have some negative consequences.

Oh no, I would argue overall, it's worth I'm not doing it anyone listening. I'm not doing it.

mispronouncing that name, in which case you shouldn't. The chairman of the RV was sentenced to prison at one point. I'm not sure how long he went to prison. And you ever heard that depressing thing where? Okay, so like the Nazis came to power, this is the main depressing thing. They killed a fuck ton of people, right, and they put a lot of people in these camps right famously, and some of the people they put in were in

for being gay. And then after everyone was liberated, the gay prisoners had to stay in jail because what they had done was illegal before the Nazis too. You ever heard that it's a terrible fun thing.

the three syndicalists that this guy knew. But at least one of the other abortion providers or activists spent time in Nuremberg after the war, charged with abortion and was not freed because see what he had done, whether she or what they had done, was a crime. But again, million abortions a year, saving so many lives, just countless lives. These women performing these abortions. They were quote no Bunglers, according to the paper, or the paper is quoting a

person who saw it happen. They knew what the fuck they were doing, and they did it for free and go ahead.

liberation and sexual autonomy was not just a theory. They had vivid conversations all the time, and they were also just fucking And there were plenty of women who were like, we believe in free love, but it actually needs to be love. All these fucking shitty, horny men are trying to use these political put points just to fucking run, and we think that sucks. There were, of course also

women who were doing the same thing too. But it's interesting to me because it mirrors these discussions I've read about late sixties discourse and how HIPPI men were like one hundred percent down with women's liberation on two specific issues, abortion access and birth control, anything that reduced their responsibility and to increase their access sexual access to women. Hippi men were a lot less consistent about their support of

other feminist causes for some weird person surprise. So it's just enoughing ever changes moment for me.

We're not doing this anymore. But it's very similar to that level. I'm like, interesting, and the government's like, please, for the love of Jesus, will give you more money, have a baby.

don't have to make laws around it. You don't got to do shit. All you gotta do is give people the right to choose about whether or not they get to stay or get pregnant. Right. Problem solves itself, it does.

know about it. It didn't people didn't even know it was tied into the radical labor movement because they didn't talk about it, or at least I mean, I don't know. Maybe they didn't. They're probably insuffer maybe like German radicals.

It was released this year. Nope, last year? Oh god, what year is it? Twenty twenty three? Goddamn y'all. This is where I'm like, still twenty twenty three? Yeah, no, okay, anyway, last year we publish published.

silver inlay on the cover and all that stuff. And so if you want to play a tabletop role playing game or do what I did when I didn't have any kids as friends as a kid, you can just read it and imagine you live in that fantasy world. But it's called pan Number City. It's published by Strangers in the Tangled Wilderness, and it is available if you type in Number City or Strangers in a Tangle don't. I'm not going to give you a U are l.

No one types in URLs. Although now that Google is turning into an abyss machine that doesn't provide useful search information, maybe you are ls are going to make a comeback. That's my plug. I'm also on substack and Twitter and on Twitter and Instagram, and.