← Equipped for Life Podcast
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- [00:01]
A
We are back with Monica Snyder from Secular Pro Life. And I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while because a lot of pro life people do not know that you have a whole degree in training in not online pro life debate,
- [00:19]
B
a master's degree in arguing on the Internet.
- [00:21]
A
Right. That might be the doctorate you got effectively. But we have a lot of interesting things to talk about today. And this is going to probably get kind of nerdy, but this is great because I love talking to experts about things and there are things I've wanted to ask you about this ever since you told me that you got into. Today we get to finally, I get to learn things from you that I've been wanting to learn from you for a long time, but we never have the time to talk about, or we always talk about other things, but we just get to do it in front of an audience now. So tell me about your background in training in forensics.
- [00:51]
B
Yes. So I, I got my bachelor's degree in chemical biology from UC Berkeley and then I got my master's degree in forensic science from UC Davis with a focus on the DNA side. The program was set up that you could, you know, subspecialize. I did an internship with Sacramento county and then I ended up working at a private forensics lab in California. Before. Before this job, Before Secular Pro Life. I work for Secular Pro Life.
- [01:18]
A
Right.
- [01:19]
B
And it was a wonderful job. It was actually, to be frank, if a few other things in my life had been a little bit differently, I probably would not have come to work for Secular Pro Life because I loved that job so much.
- [01:31]
A
What did you love about it and what were you doing?
- [01:33]
B
So I was training. I was under training to become a DNA analyst. I was not a full fledged DNA analyst yet. I had the right educational background, but not, you know, the experience. And so I was working as their evidence technician in the meantime. There were so many things I loved about the job and frankly, the people I worked with were so wonderful. But the thing that really set it apart was that it was a private forensics lab. Now, most forensics labs are affiliated with specific police stations and stuff, and there's not many just standalone private forensics labs. So most forensics labs, they work with certain departments and, you know, those police officers will bring them evidence and they'll work cases and they'll work with that city or whatever, their attorneys and things like that, which is fine, there's some pros and cons to it. But the lab I worked for, it's not affiliated with any particular department. And that meant that, first of all, frankly, we could be way more efficient. We didn't have to follow specific protocols implemented by a state that doesn't like, you know, you can have top down problems where they don't really get how things are working at them. We could pivot if things aren't working correctly. We can try new things and test them out and validate them and see if they're good. There are people that work at that lab that go to conferences showing they've validated new methods of things.
- [02:40]
A
Oh, wow.
- [02:41]
B
But especially it was important to me because that meant we choose our clients. And so we did prosecution cases, we did defense cases, we did cold cases, we did Innocence Project cases. And I think that kept the people who worked at that lab very neutral. Forensic scientists, just like all human beings are just human beings. And when you play, I think when you play too much for one team all the time, it's hard for you to stay neutral. We talk about this in the abortion debate. And so I thought our lab had a pretty even handed perspective of things because we'll see prosecution cases of heinous, really upsetting. And, you know, you try to put all that out and just do your job. But we're humans, we have emotions. But then you also see defense cases and Innocence Project cases going in the other direction. It just helps you be realistic about the limitations.
- [03:27]
A
Explain to people who have not heard of the Innocence Project. Tell them what?
- [03:30]
B
That the Innocence Project is a project looking to exonerate wrongfully convicted people. It's pretty. I don't know if political is the right word, but it's an advocacy project. Yeah, um, they published the. The two people who founded it. I think it was two people. A couple decades ago, they published a book called Actual Innocence. And that's a very specific term. There's legal innocence, which is where you did the act in question, but you might not be culpable because of things to do with your mindset or your knowledge. And so you're legally innocent. Or you did the act in question and you were culpable, but there were procedural issues, violations of your constitutional rights or whatever, where you have to be found innocent. Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about actual innocence, which is when you didn't do the act, you weren't even there actually innocent. You were actually innocent. You did not do the thing. Okay. And they wrote a book called Actual Innocence that went through the different major contributing factors that lead to people who are actually innocent. Getting imprisoned. And to be fair, the book is clearly an advocacy book. It's written to make you very emotional. And I definitely had, when I read it, I definitely had notes like I'm check that citation, you know, whatever. But it was still very instructive. It inspired me to go into forensics in the first place. I was still at Berkeley when I read it and I was thinking, I've always wanted to be in a justice oriented position. I used to think about becoming a lawyer once upon a time. But I love science and forensics is the theoretically. It's the wedding of science and justice, you know, truth seeking. I want to know that I'm right, you know, and so I find scientific endeavor very reassuring because if you're doing it correctly, you're just trying to find out what really happen. Yeah, you're not on a team, you're on team truth if you're doing it correctly. So I was working for a private lab that got all these different kinds of cases and it was very educational, both scientifically and socially. And also the people I worked with were just flipping top notch people, both their personalities and their abilities. And I was just, I felt so lucky to be there and I loved that job. Now I wanna caveat and say I would not consider myself a forensic expert. You know, I was understudied to become a DNA analyst and we ended up for a variety of reasons having to do with my family and stuff, we had to leave California. And so I didn't get to keep doing that. And now I work as the executive director of Secular Pro Life. And I also love this job for some similar reasons, you know, trying to figure out what's really going on. It is a very different job. Yeah, I still consider it justice oriented.
- [06:02]
A
Yes.
- [06:02]
B
You know, absolutely. But I do miss that job. It was a really great. Also, also, when you tell anyone anywhere that you're affiliated with forensics in any way, your social credit immediately goes up.
- [06:12]
A
That's so cool.
- [06:13]
B
When you tell them you are affiliated with anti abortion activism.
- [06:15]
A
It doesn't way.
- [06:16]
B
It does not. And then you tell them also you're an atheist and they're like, I don't even know what to do with you. Like, so I miss that too. I'm not gonna lie.
- [06:23]
A
Yeah. But anyway, could you describe just a little bit more of like what it is that you actually were doing while you were working there? Like, like I understand that you could have gained a lot more experience if you had few, if you had been there longer, but you were professionally doing things you Got training.
- [06:39]
B
My primary job was I was the evidence technician and I had to track chain of custody for lots of different things. I had to make sure that we knew who was picking up evidence. And you and I were briefly talking about this before the recording. Chain of custody is a big deal.
- [06:50]
A
Yes.
- [06:51]
B
And you know, these. It's a huge deal. And various, you know, attorneys and police officers and different people are bringing us their evidence. They have to bring it to us in a very specific way. Um, we have to receive it in a very specific way. We have to know where it is at all times. There's all these systems to keep track, and then we have to return it to them. And one of the challenges in my job is a lot of times people will bring you evidence and once they get the test results, they don't care about that evidence anymore. They just needed the test results and they still have to come take it. Okay.
- [07:22]
A
You can't just like throw it away.
- [07:24]
B
We can, they can give us in writing permission, like just destroy it. But if they don't give us that permission, you have to come.
- [07:31]
A
Of all the emails that people are probably not prioritizing responding to is the one from the lab.
- [07:37]
B
I'm not kidding at all. This was good prep for my current job because I learned how to get people to respond to my emails.
- [07:45]
A
You know, what's the trick? Tell me the trick. How do you get people to respond to your emails? They will not respond to my emails.
- [07:50]
B
The trick is you send them your initial whatever email. That's several paragraphs, carefully crafted. Whatever. The trick is when you send the follow up, you reply to your initial email with a single line. Because first of all, it bumps it back up because people like me, I meant to respond and I forgot and now I'm seeing it again and immediately I'm like, oh, shoot, I already saw that subject line before. That's the first thing. And you feel bad because you. And then you see that was nine days ago or whatever it was, because in your mind it was yesterday, but actually it was 17 days ago. And then the second thing is the single line response makes. If they weren't sure if it was a mass email, now they know it wasn't.
- [08:24]
A
Yeah.
- [08:25]
B
And that really helps. A single line. Just. Hey, just seeing if you got this. Yep, I was a little bit more aggressive sometimes, but anyway, I've been sometimes just doing.
- [08:32]
A
Following up and then like one of the smiling daily emojis.
- [08:35]
B
I don't do any emojis. No emojis ever. Get your stuff. No. In this job, actually, my employers were like, you gotta give him more time and you gotta be nicer. But that was a big part of my job. I also helped create the different reagents and things that we used in the lab for stuff, because I have a chemistry background and I was helping them with that. And then I was also under training to do serology. You first learned serology testing?
- [08:58]
A
What's that?
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B
Body fluids, blood type, semen, saliva, urine, even. Sometimes there's even some things we can do, like all this stuff. You learn serology testing first, but a lot of urine.
- [09:10]
A
And crime scene. Is there a lot of criminals peeing on their.
- [09:13]
B
There are different reasons that you might have stuff, and none of them are happy. So the big thing for us is DNA. DNA is the gold standard in forensic technology. There's actually whole sub discussions about, like, envy and different problems with different categories of forensics and who gets the most resources and attention based on.
- [09:29]
A
Oh, interesting. Okay. Let me ask you this.
- [09:31]
B
Yeah.
- [09:32]
A
About this a little bit. But I already had spent some time looking into this because I'm just super into what is real versus what's on TV and movies. Like I was telling you, like, YouTube knows that I love the videos of some expert telling me what's real and what's not real. And so I know that there is actual forensic science. And then there's what most of the people think that forensic scientists are doing because they have watched tv.
- [10:00]
B
Sure.
- [10:00]
A
Because they've watched CSI or whatever. What is the one? There's a really dumb movie. Ncis maybe.
- [10:05]
B
Or.
- [10:06]
A
No, there's one that my wife was watching that's, like, particularly dumb.
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B
I have no idea.
- [10:11]
A
Bones. Bones. So. And I haven't seen this and Dexter. I've seen Dexter. Remind me.
- [10:17]
B
What's funny about Dexter is that in that show, Dexter just does all the forensic.
- [10:21]
A
He's the blood splatter guy, but they
- [10:23]
B
just ask him about everything, like.
- [10:25]
A
Oh, yeah. He just seems to kind of, like, have this general knowledge, even though there's other people in real life.
- [10:29]
B
It's very niche. You know, I went to a blood spatter pattern analysis conference. Like, you can have a whole conference just about that. You know, there's all kinds of things. Yeah.
- [10:38]
A
I think in Bones, there's like. I think there's the thing. I have this. Okay. But I feel like there's a thing where it's like, here we just, like, put in this, like, little bit of something, and then it's like, here's a 3D creation of, like, the rest of, like, the missing DNA, it was like
- [10:51]
B
archaeological kind of thing, wasn't it?
- [10:53]
A
It was like, I think they're detectives. I think, I think they're like, they're looking for murderers.
- [10:56]
B
They're like trying to get all this information.
- [10:58]
A
Yeah, I bet. It's like old stuff. Yeah. But it's just like if you think CSI is sci fi, like it took bones, sort of like took it to like a sort of like ridiculous level.
- [11:06]
B
And this is very relevant because there's a phenomenon called the CSI effect where now it has pros and cons.
- [11:13]
A
I will say, what is the CSI effect?
- [11:15]
B
The CSI effect is the idea that the general public, because specifically of all these TV shows, they named it after csi, but all these TV shows has a misguided idea of what forensics can do, how clear it is, how easy it is to do, how often it comes up just all these things. That is bad for various reasons, especially if those people end up on juries.
- [11:40]
A
Yeah.
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B
But I will say on the flip side, they believe that these shows led to a significant increase in people studying forensics and becoming forensic scientists. And that is good.
- [11:49]
A
That's a good point.
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B
Because forensic science as an industry is dramatically under resourced all the time.
- [11:53]
A
It made it cool, like Jurassic park made archeology cool again and things like that.
- [11:57]
B
Pros and cons. But the CSI effect is. There's multiple published peer reviewed journal articles about the CSI effect and how to deal with it in the context. Mostly they're talking in the context of jerk. But I think that the phenomenons they're describing apply to the general American public. And I think it's important even in bringing it around to why we're talking about this on a pro life podcast in the abortion debate too. Because there are lots of forensics related questions that can come up in the abortion debate. You know, did they take abortion pills? Was this child born alive? And how do you determine these things so that can make sure that you are not implicating innocent people and that you are correctly understanding situations. So backing up for a second. The key takeaway is that we have to have a criminal justice system. It's better to have a system than not have a system. The more you can objectively and fairly systematize things, the more things are gonna be fair for people all around. And that's the goal and that's what we should strive for. Can't just not have one. But I do think the general public has not. There's no reason they would be thinking about this, but they have not thought A lot about the severe limitations of the criminal justice system. Some of them from a resource perspective, some of them from human fallibility perspective, some of them from just trying to figure out what systems do make sense. And you have to have the system, we should always be striving to improve it. But the limitations are sometimes quite upsetting.
- [13:20]
A
Can you talk a little bit about those limitations? I know we're going to get into the specifics with the abortion topic, but just help people who might just have a little bit of CSI effect just like that they have absorbed because they watched at least one of these shows. Like what are some of the.
- [13:33]
B
So there's a whole list. But first of all, people overestimate how often any criminal case will have very clear cut, scientific, physical, forensic evidence. In a lot of cases there won't be. Or what they have will be crap, basically. Okay, okay, that's the first problem. So we have this idea, I think, I'm speculating, that the public has this unexamined idea that if you think someone may have committed an act, will you just scientifically investigate it and then determine if they did or not? You know, and a lot of times the evidence isn't there. I'm talking about physical and scientific evidence. There's lots of other kinds of evidence, you know, but in terms of what people are thinking of when they think of the CSI effect, sometimes it's not there, sometimes it's there, but it's pretty poor quality. Sometimes it's there, but you don't know how to contextualize it. So a very common example of this, and this used to be one of my passion projects before I got into pro life stuff so much is rape, rape culture. In my internship I reviewed literally over a thousand criminal rape cases, trying to find patterns for our lab about what helped us get effective results and what didn't. And effective result doesn't mean guilty, it means determinative. It means you were able to find useful results that gave you useful information. It could be guilty or innocent, but you want to know what's going on. We spend so much time, we being the forensic industry, trying to figure out how to do that better. Because we have way more cases than we can process and even when we do process them, sometimes the results are not very conclusive. And so my project in this internship was to review a thousand rape cases and look at like 12 or 13 different factors within them and try to create a system systematic, like a spreadsheet basically and a statistical analysis and see if we could find patterns of what was like for example, in DNA, most of DNA is you take a cotton swab and swab different parts of the body, see if you find DNA. So in a standard rape kit, a rape kit is basically cotton swab, swabbing a whole bunch of different parts of a body. There's more to it than that, but that's mostly what it is. You could make a spreadsheet of all the different locations that a forensic nurse would swab.
- [15:35]
A
Right.
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B
And then you could analyze a thousand cases and see which of these locations was most likely to give you a conclusive result.
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A
Yeah.
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B
You know, so things like that anyway, you don't always. In the case of rape cases, Rape cases are very difficult to prosecute because forensic evidence will show if sex happened.
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A
Right.
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B
But most of the time it can't tell you if that sex was consensual or not. That's not something that we have a lab instrument to determine. Now there could be things like bruising or other stuff, but the public doesn't understand that that idea of rape, that idea that like some stranger just attacked you in an alley, that is not almost. That's usually not what's happening.
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A
Right.
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B
Usually it's mental and emotional coercion or a threat of physical violence without the action of physical violence with someone, you know. And if they say, yeah, we had sex and then why am I processing the rape kit?
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A
Right.
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B
Why am I processing the rape kit? The rape kit will tell me that. Yep. He said they had sex and they had sex. And then what do you do? This gets into the rape kit backlog. We can talk about that more too, where people wonder why there's all these rape kits that aren't processed. And there's a lot of.
- [16:40]
A
I would like to talk that about because I've been talking about that since I saw a news report. I was in Canada, this was how long I was like, is like eight or nine years ago or something like that. I see, the first time I see a news report about this massive backlog, it was like free police status.
- [16:57]
B
It was contextualized as a result of indifference or misogyny or. And I'm not saying those things don't happen, but the reality is that forensics labs are generally very under resourced. They have way more cases to process than they can. And the sad thing is the rape kit backlog made it sound like, you know, you've got 10,000 rape kits that are sitting on shelves, process them. But actually what's happening is you're getting larger and larger numbers of cases every year.
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A
Right.
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B
And so even as you're trying to process this back up and keep up with the cases you have, you're getting further behind every year.
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A
Okay.
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B
Okay.
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A
So this is. This is like a really, like, surfacey, like, analogy, but maybe that might be helpful for everyone emotionally. This is like what happens in my pantry at home. Okay. Okay. We have, like, a bucket thing for, like, the bread stuff. And what happens is all the freshest bread gets put on top.
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B
Okay.
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A
And, like, no one wants to grab for the oldest bagels or bread or whatever. And so eventually that stuff gets moldy because they keep on just like, there
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B
are whole papers, multiple papers written in forensics on trying to figure out how do we process all of this information without enough resources, and when we can't, how do we triage it? Whole papers on this?
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A
Yeah.
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B
And interesting. And that applies to multiple things. But for rape kits in particular, there's whole discussions of, like, okay, let's say, making these numbers up for simplification. Let's say that this Lab can do 100 rape kits this year, and we have a thousand. Which ones do you want us to do?
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A
Do you do the most recent ones? Do you do the newest ones?
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B
Do you do the. And so you start to triage, and you're gonna look at things like which ones are most likely to have probative evidence. That means evidence that will give you an actual result, you know? Cause a lot of them don't. I worked in this forensics lab where we. We were contracted to help with police labs rape kit backlogs. They would just send us huge amounts of them, and we would just. Our analysts would be like, oh, my gosh, here we go. Because a lot of it is you're doing the same testing the same over and over, and inconclusive, inconclusive, inconclusive. The stuff that ends up in the backlog is usually stuff where they had reason to think this is probably not gonna give us good information, depending on the.
- [19:05]
A
So it's not because it's necessarily old, and, like, the DNA old makes it
- [19:08]
B
more likely to be inconclusive. But it could be for other reasons too. You know, you could have someone who's experienced an assault, and the reality is most people aren't necessarily aware enough about what's happened to them psychologically or cognitively to just be like, immediately go get a rape kit.
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A
Right.
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B
Some of them do it quite a lot later, after they've showered multiple times after all these different things, you know? And so there's gonna be a whole variety of quality of evidence, depending on the circumstances of the situation. So you might be choosing some of them based on quality of suspected quality of evidence. You haven't tested it. And what's frustrating to me is when you read the articles about the rape kit backlog, they'll always start with a specific anecdote, a true story about a woman who had to wait a very, very long time. And then they caught this guy. And sometimes the guy had also assaulted other people. And they're like, why don't we do this more often? But they don't tell you the percent of how often that happens. So if I have a bunch of cases that are likely to be probative.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And a bunch of cases that aren't. And then we do these and we find that one guy and you write an article about it. Yeah. You're not saying as much as you think you're saying. Okay. Because while I'm doing all these, I'm not doing these.
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A
Right.
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B
Okay.
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A
Right.
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B
The solution to the rape kit backlog is to throw more money at forensics labs, which they did. And they started to reduce it. I know people. The place where I did my internship, there were whole positions that had originally created because of fund for the rape kit backlog. That had been going on for years.
- [20:19]
A
Wow.
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B
You know, and it was helping.
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A
I've heard there's stations that have. Have gotten down to zero. Like, they've actually, like, wiped it off the case.
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B
I was in a pretty large urban area, but. But in any case, you might look at quality of evidence. You also might. There might be. You might have a rape kit for someone where they. The guy confessed. Why would I process that? You know, you might have one for someone where the woman said, I don't want to go through with this anymore. And look, prosecutors can still prosecute someone, even if the victim doesn't want to. But they also have to triage who they're gonna prosecute. And it's not gonna go very well for them if the people they were gonna have talk about it don't wanna talk about it. So there are also reasons of incompetence less often. But sometimes corruption, not believing people when they say different things happen. All those are real things that happen. But they are really overblown in the public narrative about why there's a rape kit backlog.
- [21:02]
A
Yeah.
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B
And so that's helpful.
- [21:04]
A
I'm glad to know that. Cause that is more nuanced than even I knew about this.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And I care a lot about it. I've talked about it.
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B
Forensics is a very interesting scientific endeavor. Cause normally when you are trying to do science, you want to have enough time to do it very carefully and methodologically. And forensics is tough because they simultaneously want you to be faster than all other scientists and more accurate than all other scientists. And people's lives are on the line. So it's like, yeah, you really have to have really robust procedures that you never ever deviate from. Anyway, I could talk about it all day.
- [21:35]
A
Yeah, this is good. Okay, so now I think that's probably enough table setting to then be able to kind of like. Let's take a look at where forensics touches the abortion debate. Especially like in an post ops world where you have some states that are trying to make abortion illegal and some states even kind of sometimes proposing legislation that would include legal consequences and things like that. And people start talking about like what would those roles look like if we're trying to like punish every woman who tried to have an abortion or even investigate them?
- [22:04]
B
Maybe more table setting then secular pro life has published a couple different pieces over multiple years.
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A
We will link to all of them.
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B
Yes. Where we have explained as clearly as we can why we oppose criminalizing women who get abortions.
- [22:18]
A
Yes. Oh, we also have a statement on this. We will also post it.
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B
We signed a joint letter. I think you guys did too.
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A
We didn't get sent this particular joint. Let me. I don't think we're on.
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B
It's on my mind. You just are on it.
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A
We would have if someone had sent it to me.
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B
There was a joint letter not long after Dobbs where basically a bunch of pro life organizations said we are against attaching criminal penalties for women in the United States.
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A
I was really glad it happened, signed it.
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B
And I will tell you that has got brought up to us many, many, many times since then.
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A
Maybe we can sign it after the fact. I don't know.
- [22:43]
B
I don't know. But there's a lot of different reasons people might feel this way. I don't think almost any of them have to do with not really caring about abortion. But for me personally, not all of secular pro life as an organization, but for me personally, my background in forensics informs my views on this. And so sometimes I do get a little overwhelmed when I'm trying to talk to other pro lifers about this because look, there are pro lifers who are like it's murder. It's the same as any other murder. We should be charging women with murder if they do it. And then there are pro lifers who are against it for a variety of reasons like that. And I think there's in between people who are like, I don't know how I feel about that, you know, and I want to be able to talk to them and explain where we're coming from. And I feel overwhelmed because 60%, maybe of my position on this is based on this. What to me seems like this whole other topic of forensics and criminal justice and stuff like that that I don't normally talk about in our work. How do I even begin to impart all of this other stuff that funnels into me being very skeptical about whether this is the right approach, you know, and sometimes I'll say I worry about the error rates in the criminal justice system. I worry about people being innocent people being investigated or incarcerated or found guilty. And people will say, well, that's a problem with all kinds of crimes. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I worry about that too.
- [24:00]
A
That's really, really concerning.
- [24:01]
B
You could be worried about that a little bit more.
- [24:03]
A
Way more. Way more.
- [24:05]
B
And so. But I do think there are particular reasons it's even more of a concern in this than in general. And we could talk about that more in a minute, but where would it come up? Abortion pills is huge now. This is huge. It's the majority of abortions in the United States. Abortion pills are the majority of abortions in the United States. The estimates vary between 60 and 90%. Unclear exactly how much. And it's on the rise. It's been on the rise since 2017. It's one of the major reasons that abortions continue to rise even after Dobbs, because the access is totally different, you know, and so pro choice and pro abortion activists will advocate that women can order abortions no matter where they live, under whatever circumstances. And they can. They will claim that they can screen them appropriately for whether this is safe for them medically to do, and that they can tell them how to do it safely, and they can tell them what signs to look for and all these things. And they will tell them over and over again. If you have to go to the hospital with a medical emergency in a situation where this is not licit, you do not have to tell them that you took abortion pills. You can just tell them you're having a miscarriage because it looks identical.
- [25:02]
A
Right?
- [25:03]
B
And as I'm speaking to you here today, that that is true. The physical process of miscarriage and abortion via pills are not distinguishable if you didn't already know who had taken what. That's the first point I want to make. I have talked to people who talk about investigations and criminal penalties and they're mystified why anyone would think this would involve investigating miscarriage. They're not like, yes, let's investigate miscarriage. They're just like, why would that be the case? We're looking for abortion pills. And I'm like, there's no test for abortion pills. There's no test for abortion pills.
- [25:34]
A
Okay, could there be like, is that a thing? Because like I said, could there be?
- [25:38]
B
I don't think it's forthcoming. But theoretically you would want some kind of test that the strips you put in your pool to test for chlorine. And they have drug tests for drug tests.
- [25:47]
A
They're like multi drug tests.
- [25:49]
B
Yeah, exactly. You're thinking of something like that right now. There's nothing like that. Poland, actually, in the last year or two, they had two studies. They did. And when I say studies, I mean one was literally a single woman that they tested and one was two. So this is literally just proof of concept.
- [26:03]
A
This study feels pretty generous.
- [26:05]
B
Maybe study. Well, it's peer reviewed. It's a proof of concept thing. It's like, is this a thing that you could do? And I wanna preface this by saying when I talk about this, people hear this as, we wanna test for abortion pills so we can criminalize women. And there are certainly people out there who feel that way. But there are other reasons you wanna be able to test for that. Including we were talking in the last podcast episode about if a woman thinks someone spiked her drink. There's actually a lot of analogies between the forensic perspective on abortion pills and date rape drugs.
- [26:31]
A
Because there are those guys that will try to abort their baby without her knowing.
- [26:37]
B
Maybe that didn't happen to you. Maybe you did have a miscarriage, but you're in a really dicey relationship where they said some concerning things and now you had a miscarriage and you're kind of, you know, wondering. There's a lot of analogies to date rape. Okay. And for spiking drinks and stuff. And so anyway, there could be reasons you'd want to be able to. But basically Poland did these two studies. They did one. Let me back up, if you don't already know, abortion pills are mifepristone and misoprostol. You take mifepristone to block progesterone, it detaches the embryo from the woman, can't get nutrients, can't get oxygen, and that is usually how the embryo dies. And then misoprostol basically induces contractions. Okay, so they did one test for mifepristone. One study was a single woman. They tested for mifepristone, they tested her blood. And the other study was, sorry, this is morbid, but they tested a woman who had had an abortion at like 20 weeks. It's not clear from this study that I read that the circumstances. But they tested her blood to see can we detect misoprostol in her blood. And then they found a dead baby in a dumpster. And they tested the placenta and part of his liver, also for misoprostol. And the test they were doing. This is relevant from forensic perspective. The tests they were doing are very resource intensive. It's liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. It basically means you take a liquid sample of something and you put it through a prostate, that separates the components out and then you feed them into a mass spectrometer. That basically it doesn't really matter how
- [28:01]
A
much of all these things are in it or something.
- [28:03]
B
It will give you very, very precise weights and some structural information about molecules. Okay, it's cool. It's very resource intensive. But they were able to detect, for the woman with mifepristone, they were able to detect mifepristone and some of its metabolites, like when a molecule is broken down. So it's like mifepristone and kind of broken up pieces of mifepristone in her blood using this method. And for the misoprostol ones, they could not detect misoprostol in the woman's blood. This was two days after she had taken it. They could not detect it, but they could detect metabolites of misoprostol in the placenta and the fetal liver. All of that to say there could be ways, forensically, maybe you could figure this out. I don't think they're forthcoming at all. Not just because right now the United States doesn't attach criminal penalties. That's not a reason because, like, you could have no criminal penalties against women and still want to be able to detect these things if someone's spiking a drink or something, but because this is a very labor intensive method. It requires these large, like, benchtop instruments. And I feel like sometimes when I talk to people about forensics and I say these things, they're like, well, but for justice, okay? There's not infinite money and time in the world like we were just talking about with the rape kit backlog. There's not infinite time to work on the cases you think are most important versus the other cases, you need to develop methods that are scalable, that are trainable, that are, you know, effective and relatively fast. And all these things. They did a pilot project on these three instances in Poland. And also in forensics also gonna have to go through, like, you need to make sure that you're not getting false positives, you're not getting false negatives. You do validation tests where you see if other people can get the same results that you did. You put known samples in and see if you get what you thought you should, and you put unknown ones in, and you put known positive samples in and known negative ones. Cause the other thing you have to is they just looked at these three people that they knew for both women, that they had taken abortion pills and they weren't sure for the baby that they found. But you also have to take ones where, you know, they didn't. And what do you see there? You know, like, you have to. You have to make sure everything is. We're finding what we wanna find, we're not finding things we don't wanna. And then for at least in the United States, for it to be forensically applicable, it has to go through court cases where they actually see if we think like literally has to be argued, is this a kind of evidence we can do? There's all kinds of standards for scientific evidence in courtrooms, or at least they're supposed to be.
- [30:08]
A
So, yeah, a couple questions about that.
- [30:10]
B
Yeah.
- [30:10]
A
You said that in one of these cases they were, when they were doing their tests or investigations, they were testing both the placenta and the fetal liver. How old would the unborn child need to be for them to be able to test this liver? Is this only like late term?
- [30:27]
B
I don't know. So the test I'm talking about, there were three babies. One for mifepristone and she was 20 or 21 weeks. One for misoprostol was 21 weeks. And I need to look more closely. I didn't see how old they said the baby was.
- [30:40]
A
The misoprostol one was 21 weeks. Isn't that too old for misoprostol to be used?
- [30:44]
B
I mean, legally? Yes. I mean, I don't know if you saw that case a couple years ago in Britain where she lied about how far along she was and took abortion pills and she was like 32 weeks.
- [30:53]
A
Oh, wow.
- [30:54]
B
You could still try it. It's not supposed to be.
- [30:57]
A
It's not going to be as effective. Right. Or something like that.
- [30:59]
B
It's also could be. It's not approved for use that far. But if you, if you are following some of the more hardcore abortion advocates, they're arguing that, you know, studies have shown, or research has shown that this is safe and effective not just through 10 weeks or 12 weeks, but all the way through the end of the second trimester. And in some parts of the world where they have a harder time accessing mifepristone, they do misoprostol inducing labor.
- [31:19]
A
It doesn't seem too surprising that we could test fetal livers at 20 weeks, but like, could we do that at like 11 weeks or 12 weeks?
- [31:27]
B
Probably. You do not need large samples at all to do genetic testing. This isn't genetic testing. But I study DNA. Okay. This is the chem side, but I would imagine you wouldn't need a huge sample to. I'm not sure.
- [31:41]
A
Okay. It's interesting though.
- [31:42]
B
I'm not sure how much you would need. You do need more than you do for DNA.
- [31:45]
A
So, yeah, answer this question from a certain kind of pro life person who would say, okay, you're saying that this kind of testing is very resource intensive. Why should I care? If we're investigating potential baby killings, then why should I care about it being expensive to do that or resource heavy to do that?
- [32:08]
B
Any resources you allocate to this, you're taking away from something else.
- [32:11]
A
Say more.
- [32:11]
B
It depends on what you care about. So, for example, using the rape kit backlog as an analogy, okay, you're a forensics lab that can handle 100 rape kits in a year. Making this up, you have a thousand. You have a way to screen them, an initial screening that suggests that this group is probably probative. You're probably gonna get good evidence from this group. Okay, and this group probably not. Now, somewhere in this group, there'll be some that you could have gotten good evidence from. And you can zoom in on that case and say, why shouldn't that woman get justice? Why should that rapist walk free? He can go hurt more people. Why don't you care about. What we're really talking about is if you want me to do this group, which is not as probative, then these guys are walking free. Are not going to do. There's no, there's no situation here where you can just say, well, just do it. Just do it. Compared to what? Look, any employee who has had more than they can get done in their job already knows what I'm talking about. When you ask your boss, listen, you gave me these six tasks I can't do all of them. What's the priority? Well, they're all the priority. Okay, bro, you're not hearing me.
- [33:13]
A
Classic, you know, dumb boss and like a Dilbert cartoon or a diverse, like all of them, okay?
- [33:19]
B
Some of them aren't going to get. Do you want any say in which ones those are? You know, or like when I used to be in school and I'm. I'm trying to get like, I want, I want A's everywhere. And so sometimes you have to optimize for like the lowest possible A you can get just by the skin of your teeth. And I'll go to some teacher and I'll be like, listen, I need to know my grade in this class because I'm trying to figure out, right, which finals to focus on. They're like, you should care about all your finals. Are you kidding me?
- [33:42]
A
Right? Wasn't a math class going to be helpful?
- [33:45]
B
So similar here. I'm not saying we don't care. We do care. Even Pro Choices should care about being able to detect potentially illicit abortion pills. You know, there's a use case for this, but we have to contextualize it with where our resources are going all the time. This actually also gets into some of my hesitation with attaching criminal penalties for women.
- [34:05]
A
Yeah, I think that's where I was going too.
- [34:06]
B
You know, you're talking about over a million abortions a year. And important to this conversation also separately, in addition, over a million miscarriages a year. Okay, Even if you did attach criminal penalties to women, and I have ethical objections to that, that as well, on a practical level, you're definitely going to have to triage. You're definitely going to have to triage. Even if you narrow it to only people that you have any kind of maybe some reason to suspect it was an abortion, not a miscarriage, you're still going to have overwhelming numbers. And how are you going to triage that? And remember, whatever resources you're putting toward this are being implemented by people who were also working on other cases, other criminal justice cases, other cases of people needing support in their community. Like other things, these resources aren't coming out of a vacuum. The criminal justice system is very under resourced. And whatever, whatever we decide to work on means we're not working on something else. That's no one's fault. That's how it is. But just be realistic that that's what you're saying.
- [34:58]
A
Yeah.
- [34:58]
B
Okay. So it could be the case that you think that investigating, you know, I don't know tens or hundreds of thousands of pregnancy outcomes to try to figure out which ones are abortions or not is more important than whatever else all of those police and forensic scientists and lawyers were doing before that. I think that's a hard sell. Okay. And then you do get right back to the rape kit backlog analogy. Because what's really going to happen is as you look into all of these these, you're going to have a really low probative value. It's going to be really hard to definitively say. And then what gives me the chills is sometimes when I have these conversations with people, when I talk about the limitations of resources in the justice system and how we need to be very careful because we have definitely convicted innocent people before and we're trying, you know, executed, executed people sometimes. The response is that the justice system wouldn't be so expensive and time consuming and difficult if we just, just lowered our safeguards.
- [35:49]
A
Right.
- [35:50]
B
You know, that's not how they phrase it.
- [35:51]
A
Let's just make it we can execute them in only six months now or whatever. Right, exactly.
- [35:55]
B
So like, so secular pro life takes no official position on the death penalty. You can be pro or anti death penalty and work with us. We have no official position on that. I personally say that I'm against the death penalty. In practice, there are theoretical use cases like I sympathize with, but in practice, similar to everything else we're talking about with my experience with forensics, don't think it's a good idea. And I don't think it's a good idea largely because we have definitely convicted actually innocent people before. And you're never gonna get a zero error rate in the justice system. But you would need to come at me with a really strong argument for why we need the death penalty to justify the non zero error rate of innocent people on death row. And I don't think there's a very strong argument for that. And so sometimes I'll talk to people people don't know. And I consider myself a political conservative and I find that conservatives, including me, usually do care about like how much are things costing? Like guys, you know, we have to actually talk about how much money things cost.
- [36:48]
A
Used to, I don't know about like right now, but at least it seems like at least used to historically.
- [36:52]
B
That would be the thing. You know, we're like, I don't know how much reputation are there that many
- [36:55]
A
fiscal conservatives on either side of the aisle right now?
- [36:58]
B
I'm not talking about politicians. There are plenty of fiscal conservatives out in the world, right?
- [37:03]
A
Who would rather that the politicians were all.
- [37:05]
B
The point is.
- [37:06]
A
Okay, got it.
- [37:06]
B
When I talk to conservatives about the death penalty, okay, the two arguments I make are, one, guys, we recognize the government's incompetent, right? Like, we. We know that, right? I don't like to send mail through the post office. I take pictures of my letters before I mail them in case they never arrive. Why would we then say, except for here, it's fine? That's the first argument I make. And the second argument I make is it's crazy expensive. It's so much more expensive than keeping someone in prison for life in prison. And people don't believe that when you first say it because it doesn't intuitively make sense. You're thinking about the actual cost of food and bed and whatever, of keeping someone alive. But it's crazy expensive because we have a really robust appeals, especially for death penalty cases. And then sometimes the response is, well, they shouldn't have that many appeals. I'm like, okay, no.
- [37:52]
A
Why. Why would you say that?
- [37:54]
B
Yeah, because I think most of the time they have. No, they don't know about how many innocent people have and the way these things can happen. Like, did you know one of the major contributing factors to wrongfully convicting actually innocent people is false confessions?
- [38:08]
A
Yes, I was about to say that. But most people don't, so.
- [38:10]
B
Most people don't. And include myself when I first started looking into this stuff back in the. Like, how could that possibly be the case? Why would you ever. Why would you ever. I was reading a study just yesterday in preparation for this podcast where they were talking about how in the cases of exonerated people, and I. I mean, actually innocent. I don't mean you got a different verdict because they did jury selection wrong. I mean, actually innocent.
- [38:30]
A
Yeah.
- [38:31]
B
When false confessions were involved in those cases, the average interrogation time was 16 hours. That's the average. That means some of them were longer. And what will happen is the psychological and mental effects. Sex. Some people just want this to stop right now. Some people start to think maybe they did, maybe they're crazy, maybe they misremembered. Sometimes police, and I'm not saying on purpose, but sometimes police will accidentally mention details that they don't realize they mentioned around them, and then those persons will repeat them back and they'll think, oh, they only. And like, like, to be very clear, I think most of the time I forget what the name is for this phenomenon, but you know where you say, don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
- [39:08]
A
Incompetence.
- [39:08]
B
I think that's usually true.
- [39:09]
A
Usually true.
- [39:10]
B
I think that's usually true across industries. Okay. I don't think it's very common at all for investigators or police officers, whoever, to be like, screw that innocent guy. Like, no, no, it's. That's not common. But there are. Mistakes have been made.
- [39:24]
A
There's a lot of biases.
- [39:25]
B
There's a lot of biases.
- [39:26]
A
There's not this.
- [39:27]
B
But there's a lot of psychological impact. So think. Think of yourself as you're the lead investigator on a really, really heinous crime.
- [39:33]
A
Yeah.
- [39:33]
B
You know, know, child assault and murder or something. Right. In a smaller community where everyone knows each other and they're like, find who did this immediately. Right. You're under so much pressure and you probably. Ethically, you want to also. And then you don't have a lot, and you find someone where there are some things that make, like there's a reason you're looking at them more. And it doesn't have to just be like, racism. It could be like circumstantial evidence or whatever. That. And you start pulling on that thread and people do this all the time. Not just police. People do this all the time. You've decided that you can, you know, you can feel it in your heart that, you know, we just. We just had this happen a couple weeks ago. There was a. There was a story of a college cheerleader and a dead baby was found in her closet. And at the time that the story broke, it was not clear what the gestational age was. It wasn't clear if this was an abortion or a miscarriage or a stillbirth or a live birth, an infanticide. Like, it just wasn't clear what was going on. And. And I made a video saying, this is obviously horrible. There's no happy version of this, but we don't know what happened yet. Let's find out what happened, you know, if we can. And some of SPL's followers were saying things like, you're right, we should wait to get more information, but I have a gut feeling that this was an abortion. And I'm like, this is how wrongful convictions happen. And I'm not blaming that commenter. It's human nature.
- [40:49]
A
Right. It's a human nature thing.
- [40:50]
B
It's human nature. I saw pro life organizations saying, I bet it was abortion pills based on nothing. Okay. And so that's your response. Yeah. But so, you know, this investigator, there's this heinous situation. You start pulling on this thread, and there's a lot of pressure, and you start to convince yourself it's them. And confirmation bias is bad all the time, but really bad in the Justice.
- [41:07]
A
Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.
- [41:09]
B
It is. And then what will happen, too? This is so. This is so upsetting. And I'm speaking of real stories. Okay. Yeah. Sometimes an innocent person will be convicted, and actually innocent person will be convicted. And sometimes years later, there will be new information brought to light that shows that this person is innocent to any objective person. Or at least. Or at least shows that you should definitely take another look at this. And the prosecutors involved or the investigators involved will resist tooth and nail. The less generous interpretation is they're just worried about their careers. I think a slightly more generous interpretation is they can't bring themselves to fathom that they have done this when they probably did not do it on purpose.
- [41:46]
A
Like, they want to put their own head in the sand.
- [41:48]
B
They need this person to have been guilty. Otherwise they.
- [41:50]
A
And it's.
- [41:51]
B
It is kind of similar to like when. When you need abortion to be okay. Cause you had one, you know, and so there have been cases where. And this has gone all the way to the Supreme Court. We're talking about. What rights do people have when they've already been convicted? Because you have very clear constitutional rights in the process. You know, trial by jury, right to a speedy trial, all these things. But then you're convicted, a jury of your peers looked at all the information, convicted you. That's how the system's supposed to work. And then after the fact, what rights do you have? There's been whole. This has been adjudicated extensively without necessarily, like, the Supreme Court actually has been very back and forth about some of these things over decades. Decades. Right. There was a case I read about when I was in grad school that made me so mad, where essentially long and short of it is, this guy was wrongfully convicted and they find you. Spoiler. You find that out later. But as he's going through years of like, insisting, like, this is crazy, I didn't do this. A lot of times wrongful convictions happen from cases from like, the late 80s or earlier, before we had the tech we do now. And then DNA technology started burgeoning in the early to mid-90s. And all of a sudden they're like, wow, we actually can get way more information than we used to. And do we just go forward? Do we relook at other stuff? What's the tria?
- [42:57]
A
Right, right.
- [42:57]
B
And so a lot of wrong conviction Cases are when they took totally new tech that didn't exist when that happened, and go, look again. And it was wrong, you know, and so this guy. There was this guy. I want to say it was Alaska. It could be wrong. But this guy who was wrongfully convicted, he's like, I want to have my stuff retested with this new tech.
- [43:13]
A
Yeah.
- [43:13]
B
You know, and they were like, you don't have any right to do that. You know? And they're like, it would be so expensive if we just let everybody in prison be like, retest my stuff. You know? And the vast majority of them would be guilty. And they just, you know, screwed around, causing problems. Right. And he's like, I'll pay for it myself. And they're like, no, that's not fair to people who can't afford to pay for it themselves. Okay? And this whole thing went back and forth. I don't remember exactly how it got to the point where they eventually did it and he was innocent. But, like, can you imagine? You know, you're like, just let me. Just let me look at it. What are you afraid of? What are you afraid of? If you're right, it'll just show that you're right, you know? And I believe this is purely speculation on my. Paul, this is me assigning motives. Okay? I'm assigning motives. Don't do that. I think some of it was motivated reasoning because they didn't want to take another look because they were a little bit worried. And the other thing you have to think about, too, we think about this in terms of that poor innocent man stuck in prison for a crime he didn't do. That's valid. But also, remember, every time you convict an innocent person, whoever actually did it wasn't convicted.
- [44:05]
A
Right?
- [44:05]
B
Okay, right again. This is in a closed system. So it's not like, oh, we accept some innocent convictions in order to get justice. There's a double injustice here. A double injustice. So I was learning all this before and during graduate school and the other things I learned even since then. This shouldn't surprise you, Whoever's listening right now. Think of the industry that you work in. Think of what you know about it. The people who don't work in it don't know.
- [44:27]
A
Yeah, okay.
- [44:28]
B
Any industry, anything. Okay. I talk about this a lot in the abortion debate, in the context of the medical industry, because I feel like when we're in the abortion debate, we enter this weird space where we talk about pro choice doctors as if they are have perfect knowledge, perfect interpretation, unquestionable ethical Intentions. If a pro choice doctor said it, that's it. Right, Right. That is a laughably ridiculous thing to think. And not just about pro choice doctors. Any doctors, pro life doctors, any human beings. Okay. I've mentioned before, I have a lot of family that are doctors and nurses. Not related to repro stuff. Just. And they're just humans. You know, these hospital systems or whatever, they have tons of bureaucracy, they have incompetence, they have mistakes, they have ego, they have exhaustion. They have all these things. So does the justice system. I want people to understand that if we have a justice system, there will be some amount of. We are going to convict innocent people because we're imperfect and we should always be striving to minimize that as much as possible. You know, it is going to happen. I would like it if people questioned like, so what is the acceptable ratio? You know, Blackstone famously said, better for 10 guilty people to go free than one person person be convicted. I think. Don't quote me. Google it. I'm pretty sure it was Ben Franklin who said actually it should be 100 to 1. Maybe it wasn't Ben Franklin. Somebody said that. I said it just now.
- [45:43]
A
I'm not gonna say who it was because I'm not positive, but I remember reading a book from a kind of popular right wing type person a long time ago who was. Who was quoting that and was basically pushing against and being like, it is worth some innocent people if he can get some criminals at least trying to
- [46:01]
B
like what society has decided. And it's not a ridiculous thing to say. Again, the concept of a closed system. Let's say that you were like any single innocent person convicted is too high a price to pay. So we just shouldn't have this system. Which is like a noble thought. I'm not making fun of you, but what you are saying then is a lot more innocent people will suffer in other ways for other reasons.
- [46:21]
A
I'm feeling closer to Franklin. Ben Franklin on it. Like I'm. You can actually give a number.
- [46:26]
B
You know, like there's something.
- [46:27]
A
So I just want. I want people who are thinking about it that to properly empathize what it's actually like to be the innocent person stuck in prison for effing decades.
- [46:40]
B
Keep in mind, like a lot of these people have families.
- [46:43]
A
Yeah.
- [46:43]
B
And the generational effects are enormous. I mean, oh man, don't get me wrong, that's true. When they're actually guilty too. You know that's true all the time. I'm just saying, look, we have to have a criminal justice system. We have to have a process. We have to see justice. I agree, But I want us to do it very humbly.
- [46:59]
A
Yes, yes.
- [47:00]
B
You know, we have to do this. And like I said, remember earlier when I said I'm against the death penalty in practice and not necessarily in theory? I fully empathize with people when they see a horrific injustice and they're like, get that guy right? 100%. 100%. With you, I understand. But that instinct, that righteous indignation, justice rage instinct that we all have, it's not necessarily a bad instinct, but it is so powerful and it makes it very easy for us to not care about the collateral damage on the way. And so I'm not just empathizing with it. I feel it. I have that, you know, But I get frustrated when we're talking about some of these things because. So, like that cheerleader with the baby, where they're like, I have a gut feeling it was abortion pills. What do you mean? What if it wasn't? You know, I mean, maybe it was.
- [47:50]
A
And what is that gut feeling coming from? Is it like, because he was a cheerleader, like, what is that gut feeling coming from?
- [47:56]
B
Who knows? You know, Leadership Institute. I'm pretty good friends with Dina Espenscheid of the Leadership Institute. She is a team player. Love that lady. And she does trainings where she talks about Jonathan Haidt and how we have intuition first and reasoning later. And she does this great thing. I've been on her trainings multiple times where she'll ask people, I won't drag you through the whole thing, but she'll show them this kind of interesting commercial, and then she'll ask them a question about it, and they'll give her the reaction. And then she'll say, why? And then they'll be like. And she's like, I don't need you to tell me why. I just wanted to see the hesitation, you know, because we have the first reaction and then we have to think about why. And that's how we process. And that's the same thing with this. The same thing with journey juries. It's the same thing with judges. It's the same thing with attorneys. All of that. Okay.
- [48:35]
A
For the pro life people that have been thinking, like, it would be plausible to in a state where abortion is completely against the law. And they're like, it seems like we could investigate all of these things. Like, can you. Like, what would it actually take? If Texas or Alabama or someone we're going to try to, like, we are prosecuting everybody. We're gonna like, we're gonna do the whole nine yards. What would that.
- [49:01]
B
Actually, that is such a huge question.
- [49:04]
A
So I bet is basically impossible.
- [49:07]
B
So it depends on what level you want to take it to stick it to foals. So the dystopian one that I think some pro choicers accuse us of wanting is this idea that, like, you're gonna use apps to monitor everybody's pregnancies and then figure out if they had a pregnancy loss and then check if it was a real pregnancy loss or if it was actually whatever. And I think the pro lifers who want to see criminal penalty for women, they think that's a ridiculous thing to say. They think that that's such a straw man. That's not what they want.
- [49:33]
A
I don't think it's ridiculous.
- [49:34]
B
I don't at this point, I don't necessarily think it's ridiculous, but I don't think that's what they're going for. Okay. I don't think it's what.
- [49:40]
A
Who's they?
- [49:41]
B
Sorry. The pro lifers who are saying, why don't we have criminal penalties for women? I don't think that's what they're going for. Right. My understanding, and I, I say this like mid confidence because I'm, I'm not them and I don't want to speak for them. The like, equal protection types people. My understanding is that, that they have the impression if you just categorized abortion as homicide along with whatever other homicide laws you already had and it was treated the same way other homicide laws are already treated, then you wouldn't see tracking apps. You wouldn't be, you know, you would just treat it like, you know, if there's a death, you assume innocence. Unless there's some specific reason to think there might not be. And only then would you start to look into it. And then I'm not sure what they think happens after that because like I said, right now there's no test for abortion pills. Maybe it'd be the kind of thing for where, like, circumstantial evidence, like you find a, a receipt for abortion pills in the trash can or something like that, you know, or some. This is where it gets real dicey. Someone else tells you that they told them that they wanted to get an abortion, or someone else says really quickly
- [50:41]
A
become the neighbors telling on each other a thing and. Or abusive boyfriends.
- [50:46]
B
Abusive boyfriends, whatever. Well, and the other thing, too, technically speaking, I think most of the public thinks about criminal investigation. Like, you know, you do an investigation.
- [50:55]
A
Yeah.
- [50:55]
B
You get evidence you arrest someone, you charge them with a crime, you go to a court or you go to a trial with a jury, and you present all the evidence and argue about it. A very important point I want to emphasize. Sear this into your brain. 95%, somewhere between 90 and 95%, maybe higher of all criminal convictions. Never see a trial. Okay? They are plea deals. It's overwhelmingly plea deals. Now there are good and bad reasons for this. The good reasons for it are trials are like 10 to 20 times more expensive. Expensive. Can you imagine if we're only taking 5% to trial and it's already under resourced. You're screwed. Like, there's no way. Right? And a ton of those plea deals, that person is actually guilty. And this is better for them and the prosecutor because now we don't have to go through this whole expensive. And it's expensive for defense too. It's not just expensive for prosecutors, expensive for everybody. And a lot of times what prosecutors will do is they'll say, if you take this plea deal, I'll give you X penalty. If you make me take it to trial and I win, I'll get. Give you higher Y penalty. That's much worse. And then if the person is guilty, knows they're guilty, doesn't think they have a good shot, they're like, you know what? Done good. Yes, thank you. Like, so I'm not saying all plea deals are inherently.
- [52:03]
A
If they're innocent, there's a reason for them to be like, geez, this is a gamble.
- [52:06]
B
I don't really want to listen. You cannot, I don't think you can overstate the intimidation of trials where you have like a public defender and they're. Let me be clear. I'm not saying public defenders are incompetent. I'm saying they are dramatically overworked. Overworked. Dramatically. And their job is very emotionally exhausting. And I say this from kind of direct experience because, you know, I was the evidence technician. I received the evidence. Okay. And some of the evidence I received from public defenders. Normal, Monica, normal day to day. This is just my job, Monica. I'm like, what the heck is this? There's no chain of custody documentation. There's no contact information. Like it just came to us in the mail. Just a box with like a cell phone. What do you want me to do with this man? And I have to like hunt down who sent it and what even is going on. Right? That's very unusual. And that's very concern concerning. Yeah, okay. And then you find them, eventually they get back to you two weeks later and it's a public defender. They have too much going on. Okay. And this case is already not being handled with the kind of professionalism anybody would want for their own defense. I'm not blaming the public defender. I'm just saying you have a resource dichotomy that is profound. It's not a coincidence that. It's not a coincidence that people in prison are often lower income people. And people be like, oh, maybe lower income people commit more crimes. Super iffy, super iffy assumption there. Okay? So you have plenty of deals. And so you might have actually guilty people that are like, this is way easier. Yeah, let's do it. And that's the theory. And that's fine. That's fine. That's. That's better for everybody. You're going to have people who, they aren't sure if they are legally guilty, meaning they might have done something, but they don't think you're properly understanding the context or their mindset. And they're not sure how all the. And then there's like, how much do I trust a jury of my peers? And how much money do I have? And how long can this go on? And if I lose that guy, the prosecutor says it's actually going to be even worse. Gosh. I was reading a case recently for me, like in the last year where it was, was like, I'm gonna get it wrong. Take it for what it's worth. Take it with a grain of salt. Some kind of drug bust. Something happened where one woman who had small children at home and was promised probation went ahead and just pled guilty so she could take that deal. Everybody else pled not guilty because they thought the thing was BS For a variety of reasons. They all got off okay.
- [54:07]
A
This is like the prisoner's dilemma in real life.
- [54:09]
B
It was literally the prisoner's dilemma. And she didn't. And then later on, new information came to light to basically say this was bs and they still didn't vacate her they thing and she did get probation. But when you are a convicted felon, you enter into a whole new system. Even when you're not in prison, there's a whole other episode.
- [54:25]
A
Sucks. So there are some people that rather prison time than probation.
- [54:29]
B
Yeah. So anyway, these things are very. You don't have to read very many of them to start to at least not necessarily revamp your entire ideas of the justice system. At least be like, let's be careful.
- [54:39]
A
Yeah. You know, I imagine the prolifers that would be like, we could do this. I'm guessing that they're picturing that like every woman who has a. What looks like either a miscarriage or an illegal abortion when they go to the hospital. Then if the hospital is in Texas or Alabama, like post the laws, then the hospital, maybe they would just be required to collect, you know, evidence. Every time.
- [55:05]
B
Already mad while you're talking.
- [55:06]
A
Yeah, I understand. This is me, Steel Manning. Okay, you should respond to the Steel man. Cause I think that's where they're coming from.
- [55:12]
B
I realize now I never even answered your resource question a second ago, but.
- [55:15]
A
Well, let's do that then.
- [55:16]
B
Okay, so the Steve Steel man. First of all, most people who have miscarriages and abortions aren't going to hospitals. And if they know that you're just gonna, as a standard procedure, collect something
- [55:27]
A
from them, then they really are not gonna go to hospital.
- [55:30]
B
I don't know how familiar you are with some circle, some libertarian circles where they're like, do not literally ever talk to CPS for any reason, no matter what. And someone on the outside looking in is like, I got nothing to hide. You know, why wouldn't I? There's no upside to you to have CPS in your life the same as people like, don't ever talk to cops. Don't ever talk to you. Ever seen that? There's really viral YouTube video they call
- [55:51]
A
the professor guy in the college.
- [55:53]
B
Don't ever, under any circumstances, ever talk to cops. Out of a lawyer. And I say it's an extra. It was like a defense and a prosecutor, and they both were like, yeah, don't ever talk to cops. You know, and it's not because cops are evil, terrible people or even because they're trying to trick you into innocently being convicted. It's because there's no upside to you. Yeah, there's no upside to you. Because if. If you are in the situation where mistakes are being made or misinterpretations are happening, or someone had a gut feeling, right, that could ruin your life, you know, so. So just have an attorney. And this is the same thing. If you're gonna tell me that nurses, just as a standard procedure, are just gonna collect a specimen, assuming we even have the test, which we currently don't. But, like, if we did what you're really telling lots of women, we. We already see this right now. There is not a state in our country that attaches criminal penalties for women getting abortions. And a lot of people don't know that. And we've already seen people afraid to go get medical care because they thought that might mean they end up on the wrong side of the law.
- [56:50]
A
Is that already happening?
- [56:51]
B
Yeah. Amber Thurman. Not Amber Thurman. Sorry, Not Amber Thurman. Candy Miller. They don't know for sure. She didn't say I'm afraid of the law, but she. She did not go get medical help in this. I'm talking about people who actually took abortion pills and died.
- [57:05]
A
Yeah.
- [57:05]
B
And didn't get medical care. And people are like, maybe they're afraid because of your laws. And I'm like, we should also talk about how your abortion pills were dangerous. But anyway. But it could also just be people having miscarriages if they think that you can't tell the difference between miscarriage and abortion. And they're afraid. This is not just pro choice fear mongering. I have had. Had pro life activist friends.
- [57:20]
A
Yeah.
- [57:21]
B
Who I know and trust tell me, like, hey, this is shortly after Dobs. Hopefully it's decreasing. But shortly after Dobbs, they were like, hey, my friend in blah blah state just called me because he thinks his wife is having a miscarriage. And he wants to know, like, is it safe for them to go to the hospital? And I'm like, what are you. What are you talking about? Why wouldn't it be safe to go? And like, and these are pro life people. Like, everybody in this story is pro life.
- [57:40]
A
Yeah.
- [57:41]
B
It is fair of our opponents to point out what they call call chilling effects.
- [57:46]
A
Yes.
- [57:46]
B
Okay. That's a real thing.
- [57:48]
A
Yes, it is.
- [57:49]
B
I don't think it rises to the level of therefore have no laws, but it's a real thing. And if you are going to say, like, hey, as long as you're innocent, you have nothing to hide, why don't you just tell me you've never really looked at the criminal justice system. Okay. And let's say that you believe that. Let's say that was true. Let's say that it was true that as long as you're innocent, you have nothing to hide. Okay. I still have huge problems with the idea of women going through miscarriage, which I have done myself. It's deeply grieving. It's really upsetting. And then also have. Be like, also, did you. Did you kill your baby?
- [58:19]
A
Like, or. Just so you know, we have to collect some evidence, and if you're innocent, it's fine. But just in case we have to do this, even if you're confident that
- [58:27]
B
they're gonna find you innocent, like, it's, it's. Look, in the miscarriage and pregnancy loss communities, There's a lot of discussion about how much women are upset and men too. Parents are upset when they have to have some kind of medical intervention after their miscarriage. Missed miscarriage, incomplete miscarriage. And the paperwork says spontaneous abortion and the hospital doesn't mean anything by that. That is the medical term for a miscarriage. But I don't understand in the year of our Lord 2025 and we haven't all gotten the same page that you should at least warn your patients. This is the phrase we use. It doesn't mean the thing you think or just change it for patient facing paperwork. Just change it.
- [59:03]
A
I bet the better doctors and nurses do.
- [59:05]
B
They do. Some of them do and some of them, I've talked to doct doctors about this where they're like, they can't control that. So they just warn like it will say this, I am sorry.
- [59:13]
A
There's some that just do a lot more of that kind of extra care stuff.
- [59:19]
B
That's deeply upsetting. But then can you that's deeply upsetting to have them be like, hey, we're just gonna check and make sure that you didn't purposely do this when you're like so devastated that it happened. And I'm not saying that necessarily is enough to say we just should never look into anything. I'm just saying there's layers here. You're going to have cost to what you're talking about. About. And getting back to the triage idea. So you asked earlier and we got on a tangent. What resources would it take? Right. So let's suppose that you're only going to look into this if you have a reason to be suspicious. What would those reasons be? You know, because in real life, not theoretically this year there's been a couple different cases where there is a body of either a fetus or baby. Baby. I say that you don't call a born child a fetus. I just say we don't know, just stational age, you know, and like there was one, I forget which state it was in where they found an 18 week baby fetus, whatever, in a dumpster, dead in a dumpster. Right. Which like do not dispose of your child that way, even if it was a miscarriage. Right. But anyway, when that happens, sometimes they'll look at things like did she seem happy to be pregnant? You know, as circumstantial evidence. I get why they're looking for that, but do you understand the kind of, kind of social, societal level, social effects we are going to have if we start making pregnant women feel like they
- [60:40]
A
better proclaim their happiness every time, you
- [60:45]
B
know, in case, if they have a miscarriage, people are going to investigate them for murder. Like, and this is not even into the fact that it's not true that if you're of innocent, if you're innocent, you have nothing to fear. Right, we know that. Right, we know that. Hopefully you don't have very much to fear at all besides the psychological trauma of the investigation. But the reality is, no, you will. Look, the justice system will always have a non zero error rate. We should minimize it as much as we can. But you're kidding yourself. You think it's going to be perfect. And right now, at least abortion by pill looks exactly like miscarriage. If you attach criminal penalties for this, first of all, 100%, you will absolutely be investigating women who've had miscarriages. Yeah, 100%. How could you not? You don't know it's Schrodinger's miscarriage. Like you, you have to, right? And then secondly, when you do, please don't think that it'll just be like, oh, we'll do this, beep boop boop, scientific test, miscarriage or abortion and figure it out. Okay? Right now we don't even have a test for the pills. Even if we had this one. You don't have any idea the data limitations of this or whatever. By the way, there's an analogy to this with breathalyzers. There's tons of papers written about how accurate they are and how do you know? And did you double blind and are they being used correctly in the field? And these have huge impacts on people's lives. You know, none of it is ever perfect. We were also going to talk about like when you hear a story like the cheerleader, the college cheerleader and they found the baby in her closet and you're like, well, they need, let's wait for more information. Which generally a good vibe. But like, what more information do you think they're looking for specifically? They found a body.
- [62:05]
A
Right, right, right.
- [62:07]
B
And they need to investigate more. Some of that investigation will be circumstantial stuff. What did her text messages say? Did her roommate, did she tell her roommate she hated this baby, you know, or like, like some of it will be circumstantial and like digital trails and stuff like that. But in terms of the forensics, and this is morbid, I'm sorry, but, but like in terms of the forensics, if you're trying to determine if a child was born alive or not, mostly it's about trying to See if there is air in their body, did they breathe right? And yes, the lungs could also be ears, could also be stomach, you know, all this stuff. And there are tests you can do for it. But all of them have the same limitations, which is that it's possible if there was resuscitation attempts and gross but true gaseous changes during decomposition. There are false positive possibilities. They're also false negative. It could be that yes, they did breathe, but not enough, or the way the body was decomposing, that you can't tell. It's just not a sure thing. That's what I'm saying. We have all these different forensics tests and most of them it's like you're getting your best information you can. This is why there's a huge part, when you're training to be a DNA analyst, a huge part of your job is to, because you are supposed to be very good at conveying to a jury level understanding probabilities. You never just say, that's the guy. You never say that. You say like this DNA profile is consistent with this evidence to this level of certainty. You always do that because there's always limitations. I will say DNA evidence is like very, very exacting. But even so, you always, if you're being scientific and objective, you always convey it with, within the limitations of what you know. And so all of that to say that my experience with forensics, it is a wonderful endeavor, truth seeking endeavor, you know, and it does find useful information very often.
- [63:57]
A
Yeah.
- [63:57]
B
It's also has a lot of limitations. The methods, the interpretation, the data, the circumstances, whether they have the evidence or not. And then on top of that you have humans doing it, the investigators are human, all these people. And you get, especially for strongly emotional crimes, crimes, you're going to see more of these kinds of errors. So another thing that was interesting in the, When I, when you're looking at exoneration rates, like how many innocent people do we think are in prison? And obviously it's very imprecise. And it's not, it's not like 50%. It's like, you know, maybe it's 2 to 5% or something like that, you know. But one of the considerations with it is a lot of the exonerations that have happened have been for people on death row. And that's not surprising because we look at that much more carefully. We look at that way more carefully. There's all these appeals, there's all they have access to, all this like, like try again, try again stuff. What if, yes, some of Them have been for other people that aren't on death row. But there was one estimate that thought that it would be on the tens of thousands if we had the resources to look this closely at everybody, you know what I mean? And don't get me wrong, that's tens of thousands out of like how many millions of cases or something.
- [65:00]
A
I don't care.
- [65:00]
B
Exactly.
- [65:01]
A
That's the thing. It's like on the Benjamin Franklin side of that is I don't care too much.
- [65:05]
B
Well, the thing that frustrates me is we can debate what the ratio should be, Right. But there are reforms we could make that we should just do regardless of what we want the ratio to be. That would just help. So one of the things that was a pet peeve of mine. I don't know if this is still true because this is back when I was still in grad school. But as a standard practice, eyewitness misidentification is a huge contributing factor to wrongful convictions.
- [65:25]
A
People have no idea how unreliable eyewitness is.
- [65:28]
B
Super unreliable. And I don't mean lying. I don't mean lying. I mean they really, really believe it and it's incorrect, you know, and there are standard protocols you can do to improve it. And there are a lot of police stations that do this and not all of them, which is crazy. And so things like, just so you know, like say, say you're picturing the five person lineup, you know, and you're behind the glass, just like in the TV shows. Right. They should always say like, it could be none of these guys.
- [65:52]
A
Yeah.
- [65:52]
B
Okay. We don't want you to pick whichever one looks the closest to what you think you saw. It could be none of them. Right. The other thing is the police officer that is facilitating this should not know who it is. Okay.
- [66:04]
A
Yes.
- [66:05]
B
Yeah. That's a basic thing. Double blind. He can't accidentally give you tells or do things like are you sure? Or whatever. If he doesn't know. That's just standard. And there should be no controversy about this. This should be just such a simple basic. Obviously, but not everybody has done that. And then that doesn't even get into like, these are just, I think usually innocent mistakes or unforced ones. There's also corruption.
- [66:28]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [66:28]
B
You know, there's all kinds of, you know, people covering cya if they realize they've screwed up something, you know, it's a whole.
- [66:36]
A
I have an eyewitness testimony story. I don't think I've ever told this on the podcast. There's not that often a Reason to talk about eyewitness testimony not being reliable, but it's really relevant right now. I have a really good eyewitness testimony story. So we started eri. We're like a year into eri. We go and do our toughest outreach we've ever done at UC Davis. This is one where eventually some of the stuff got vandalized. 2015. Yeah, 2015.
- [67:03]
B
That's when I was going to grad school there. I mean, I probably wasn't on campus, but.
- [67:05]
A
Okay, so there was a big pro life thing for a couple of days that happened on campus maybe around the time that you were there and we were there. And it wasn't just. It was a complicated thing where we had kind of gone up to train a bunch of pro lifers in Sacramento. They weren't mainly, like, students, but it was like, you know, a bunch of kind of cool older pro lifers that wanted a training and then wanted to go and do outreach. And so we brought them all to do outreach. And, you know, you see Dave Davis wasn't thrilled. You know, the student population, the admin weren't thrilled that we were there. We ended up getting, like, the first day, like, everyone sort of protests us, and it's getting, like, hard to talk to people. And it was like a kind of like, gray area of like, is this, like, a free speech violation stuff or just, like, really obnoxious protests? But it was like, a lot is happening. And we made a judgment call that on the second day, we would allow the group we were working with to bring their graphics to signs. And it's just like, look, if in the end we were thinking about doing a test, I think it was Jacob's idea, actually. But it's like, look, if in the end, on the second day, we literally can't talk to people because there is no one able to come to talk to us, then maybe we'll try as, like, the last attempt. Like, we'll just show the truth and see if any conversations happen. And if not, then we'll just leave all that to say. The second day was rowdier than the first one. Eventually we did say, all right, go ahead and do your thing. And it did not bring the temperature down. And there was this one guy. There was this one guy, this, like, really big, like, looked like kind of like ex quarterback guy who I was more than 50% confident was going to hit me by the end of the day. Like, he was really, really angry.
- [68:42]
B
My gosh.
- [68:43]
A
And he had a lot of intense anger being directed at me. And this One other guy.
- [68:48]
B
Okay.
- [68:49]
A
This other guy named Don, who is kind of like one of the big kind of pro lifers.
- [68:52]
B
Okay.
- [68:53]
A
He was part of the graphic sign thing, so he was getting the brunt of it. But that guy could tell that, like, I was technically in charge. So sometimes he's, like, pointing right at my face and yelling. Like, this is like. He's really intense. And he gets really, like, I'm taking pictures at one point because he is up, literally, like, okay, I'm just. This is. This is how close? Okay. Just like, he is this close.
- [69:18]
B
Oh, yeah. That's like.
- [69:19]
A
That's too much away. Inches away. It's crazy. It's inches away. So I'm like, I think he's either gonna hit Don or me. Like, one of these things is more than likely to happen.
- [69:30]
B
If you kissed him on the cheek,
- [69:33]
A
I think that would have been battery.
- [69:36]
B
Yeah, you're right. Go ahead.
- [69:37]
A
I don't think it would have gotten better, but I'm like, I think an assault battery is probably gonna happen. The campus security's gone. By the way, the campus security had been here like, an hour ago. And I'm looking around, like, where did they go? They've disappeared.
- [69:50]
B
Stories about campus security ever.
- [69:51]
A
So anyway, all this is happening, and I'm worried. We're all kind of watching this. I've got video going. Pictures are happening. And eventually a pro choice person comes up to the guy who's really intense and, like, whispers in his ear and basically is able to get him, like, clearly, like, I'm watching, like, it's an activist who's like, please get, like, stop, stop. This is going to get worse. We don't want, like, yeah, good. Good for them. Got him to kind of like, let's walk away. That kind of. It was good. Here's the point. All that to say that's the foundation. So a few days later, Tim and I are back in the office in Fresno. We're processing the pictures and the video. We're getting ready to write an article about this thing. And Tim's talking about the guy coming right up next to Don and mentions how he had put his hand on Don's shoulder. And I said, I didn't ever see him touch Don. I just saw him get really, really close. And Tim's like, oh, no, no. He actually, at one point, he touched him. Yeah, he put his hand on his shoulder. I said, I don't think so. He's like, I guarantee it happened. You might have just missed it. So we pulled the video. We went through all the pictures. And then we actually pulled the video and we watched it together. We watched, like, three minutes of video together. And Tim's face, by the end of it, shocked.
- [71:03]
B
Shocked, because he remembers that he remembered.
- [71:05]
A
And he said, we confirmed no physical contact ever happened.
- [71:09]
B
Yeah.
- [71:10]
A
And Tim's said, I would have sworn to a jury.
- [71:14]
B
Yes.
- [71:14]
A
That I saw him touched on.
- [71:16]
B
And this is what happens. A similar one. My sister witnessed, like, she was, like, walking in her neighborhood, and a car hit a light pole, and the guy got out and ran away or something. Something. I don't know.
- [71:26]
A
Yeah.
- [71:27]
B
Very quickly. She's like, okay. And then the cops come later, and. Or she calls the cops, or I forget. The cops come and she's talking to him, and she says a light pole ran away. I don't know. And then they catch the guy. He was running from them for something. I don't know. And he's sitting with handcuffs in the back of the cop car, which, by the way, is a terrible way to do eyewitness identification. Okay. They bring her to be like, is that the guy? And a lot of people would. Subconsciously, it's like, well, he's arrested, so I guess he's the guy. Right. But my sister, she was like, I don't know. I didn't really see his face, you know? And they asked her, like, five times, and it wasn't like they were angry or anything. They're like, but do you think that's the guy? She's like, I don't know. I don't know. I didn't see him. His face. Right. And now, like, less aggressive people than my sister, who is quite aggressive, you start to feel like you're being unhelpful, like you're being annoying, like you're being rude, you know, or something. And. And I don't think anybody involved in that was purposely trying to set someone up.
- [72:22]
A
Yeah.
- [72:23]
B
And I kind of feel like that makes it worse. Okay. Because I think that stuff happens all the time. And there's a lot of situations, I think, within the criminal justice system. And I don't just mean police. There's like, police attorneys, forensic scientists. Right. You come across cases. And this is much harder for the police, by the way, because as a. As a forensics person, you're reading a paper file. Rarely do we interact with the direct parties involved. So it's a little bit easier to just be objective. But even for me, it was my job. I forgot to say this. My job was to intake new cases, to summarize them, to take them to the lab manager and ask her who she wants me to assign them to. I have to read all the cases. Right? You do get a little used to it. You do. And even amongst the baseline, your standard problems, sometimes we get a case where I'm just like, I'm thinking about it for days. You know, you can't get it out of your head. You start to wonder like, well, somebody's got to do this job. But holy just. And so that's for forensics. The police actually interact with the victims.
- [73:19]
A
Right.
- [73:20]
B
You know, and the people who've been hurt and the emotions you feel as a normal human being are going to make it hard for you to do your job correctly because your job is to.
- [73:29]
A
I'm really glad you're bringing that up.
- [73:30]
B
Objectively assess what's going on.
- [73:32]
A
Yeah.
- [73:33]
B
You know, and again, I will say it's not necessarily the path that you see some horrible situation and you. And your heart goes out to these victims and you're like, I'm just gonna string someone up for this. That's not really usually the mentality, but it makes you very vulnerable to all kinds of cognitive biases, especially heat of the moment, especially if there's pressure. And by the way, the stuff in the abortion debate we talk about is like that too. So in the case where they found the 18 week baby in the dumpster and they. I was so mad about this. Find out after the fact that the prosecutor's office suggested, recommended to the police that they not make any arrests until the investigation is complete. Did they listen? No. I don't know why. So they arrest this woman who, who she's. It was her baby. Like she birthed the baby. That part is clear. Right. They arrest her, they hold her for a while and then the autopsy stuff comes back and it shows there's no indication that this child was born alive. There's nothing really legally. There's not really a reason to hold her. And they let her go. And the prosecutor's office releases a statement like, we are not prosecuting this case.
- [74:37]
A
Yeah.
- [74:38]
B
You know, we recommended against the arrest. We love the, our police department, but like we don't, we don't think this is the right call. But you could tell when you read the statement because for me, where I'm sitting, I'm like, no, we're not prosecuting this case. Can you guys wait a second? You know, but for them, they were like, we understand. I could tell by the way they wrote the statement that a lot of people in their community were furious with them for not Finding a reason to protect prosecutor.
- [74:59]
A
So they're having to feel like.
- [75:00]
B
So they were saying, listen, we're not going to prosecute.
- [75:02]
A
We're doing our best.
- [75:03]
B
They. Well, not the arrest, but their statement, I don't remember exactly how it was phrased, but it basically said, we're not going to prosecute. This case doesn't violate our state laws. We understand that this is a very emotional case for a lot of people. We've received a lot of calls about it. We respect that. But our job is to enforce the law as written. And they were right to say all of that. And that was absolutely correct. But my point is that commission saw a dead baby and their totally normal, understandable human reaction was like, this is not okay. Right. And that's fine. That is correct. That's the correct response. But what happens then is you're like, who will we punish? You know, I get, I say this, this is me. I'm that person too. I say it fully sympathetic. Okay? We have to get our righteous justice feelings to work with our brains and, and figure out a way to make this as safe as possible for a societal level thing. These aren't the only reasons, but these are major contributing factors to my perspective on this. And I think that the vulnerability in particular. I didn't say this explicitly earlier, but it is true that all crimes, you could get the wrong person doesn't mean we don't investigate them. That's true. It's also true that there are other crimes where there could be an innocent explanation that looks very similar, that can happen. But I think the frequency of abortion and misconduct, miscarriage, the dramatically similar physiological situation, which is not equivalent. One person told me, like, well, that's like, you know, with child abuse, you don't just not investigate child abuse. And I was like, okay, but there are specific kinds of injuries that are considered indicative of abuse. And there are other injuries that it's like, it could be abuse. But actually this happens to kids all the time and they are different. Whereas with this, with miscarriage and abortion, they look exactly the same. Okay. The frequency, the similar and the heightened emotional situation. When you're talking about children dying, we're all like rightfully hyped up in ways that are different from a lot of other kinds of crimes. And all of those things to me. And then, so frequency similarity, height and emotional situation and then the resources. Right. I just think there are probably certainly more practical ways and also I think more just ways to try to figure this out. And I don't think any of that that means I don't care about this. It means I care about a lot of things, you know, so we are
- [77:20]
A
allowed to care about innocent people, too. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can try to like it. Okay, just two kind of quick thoughts as we land the plane. One, if on a pragmatic level, if pro life people are aware that it is optically rough on the pro life movement when ProPublica publishes things about Amber Thurman and people like that, can you imagine the optics of dragging a bunch of women through court systems?
- [77:47]
B
I mean, the abortion rights side is already trying to make it like this is already happening. Like that's the narrative they're already going for. They're not even waiting for us. Right? They'll go for it.
- [77:54]
A
So imagine how much easier it'll be if we actually do it then.
- [77:56]
B
Because right now I can spend way too much of my time explaining why ProPublica is full of crap. Okay? Because they are. But you, the pro lifers argument for this, you're basically saying that they shouldn't be.
- [78:07]
A
Right.
- [78:07]
B
You know, that it should be legit. Yeah, that would be harder.
- [78:11]
A
This has been good. We finally got to have the forensics conversation we've been talking about doing for. For, like, years now. I think we've kind of talked about doing this sometimes. So I'm really glad. I'm really glad that we did this. So thank you for being able to. I just can't imagine most people don't know so much more now than they did before. If nothing else, the difference between CSI and reality is a really good thing and how that ties to the abortion debate. So I love this. This is one of the most unique conversations that we've had in a long time.
- [78:37]
B
So thank you for having me for it. I appreciate it.
- [78:39]
A
Okay, we'll see you guys in two more weeks for round three.
- [78:43]
B
Maybe not. Yeah.
- [78:45]
A
Thank you for listening to the Equipped for Life podcast, a project of Equal Rights Institute. Equal Rights Institute uses speaking, writing, YouTube videos, podcasts, online courses, and campus outreach to help pro life advocates in the areas of practical dialogue tips, relational apologetics, pro life philosophy, and sidewalk counseling. If you've been helped by this podcast, please consider supporting it by making a donation at equalrightsinstitute.
- [79:19]
B
Com.