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Emily Winderman, "Back-Alley Abortion: A Rhetorical History (JHU Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Marshall Poe
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- [00:28]
Dr. Emily Winderman
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Marshall Poe
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Emily Winderman about her book titled Back Alley A Rhetorical History, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2025, which is a really interesting book because it examines something that sounds. Well, it's both Very fast to say. And kind of a lot of us sort of think we know all about what it means and how we got to this point. Right. The phrase back alley abortion, it's three words. It's not that many syllables. It conjures up a very specific, a very politically salient image that's been around for quite a long time. But of course, with any sort of image, especially a politically relevant one, it had to come from somewhere. It had to come up at some time. And this book helps us figure out exactly how we ended up in this place where it's a phra that gets thrown around in the media, in politics, in schools, in everyday conversation, without necessarily critically examining, like, wait a second, what? Why is that the phrase? How did we get to this point where we all seem to know what it means? What does it mean? Turns out these are some really interesting questions, so we obviously have a lot to discuss. Emily, thank you so much for joining me.
- [03:23]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Oh, thank you so much for having me, Miranda. It's so great to be here.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm very pleased to have you as well. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit? Tell us why you decided to write the book? What were the questions that sort of motivated this whole project and investigation?
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Dr. Emily Winderman
Yes, absolutely. So my name is Emily Winderman, and I am an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. I specialize in rhetorics of health and medicine, specifically reproductive justice, infectious disease, and histories of criminalized abortion. So the way that we understand how that. How understandings of criminalized reproductive care were made and how it got talked about.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That definitely is relevant to this book. How did you end up with this project particularly?
- [04:12]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Well, you know, in many ways, it started with chapter four, the chapter about Kermit Gosnell. That was a dissertation chapter of mine, and I was really, to me. So in rhetorical studies, right, we are big on placing our texts in context. And so I asked a colleague of mine, hey, have. I'm really trying to contextualize this case. Are you aware of any rhetorical histories of back alley abortion? And he goes, well, no. And I said, well, I'm going to write that. And off I went, digging through a number of archives to try to see how it worked, where it circulated, and how we come to understand this rhetoric that doesn't really necessarily reflect the nuances of when abortion was a crime. Hmm.
- [05:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay. That's always a very interesting place to start of, like, oh, where can I go read about this? Hang on, wait. What do you mean it doesn't exist? It Needs to exist. Well, I guess that's my next project.
- [05:15]
Dr. Emily Winderman
I guess I have to do that. Right? Exactly.
- [05:18]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
All right, so let's start to unpack this term. You discuss in the book that before we get to back alley abortion, we start with back alley. So what's that discourse? What sort of affect is being pulled into it? Where is this beginning?
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Dr. Emily Winderman
Absolutely. So the back alley as the physical, the non space between buildings. Right. And in urban settings, had a long rhetorical life of its own before ever becoming articulated with abortion care. And really I had this realization when I was trying to figure out where do I start trying to trace back alley abortion is that allies I found were talked about in such strikingly similar ways to criminalized abortion, even when they so rarely mentioned abortion. So I had a lovely research assistant who was helping me just try to get sort of find a needle in a haystack, really. And he helped me find this poem called Ally's Past and Present from a progressive era journal of the cement era. And so it was basically a trade publication that was lauding cement and what cement could do to beautify cities. A very niche sort of thing. And so this poet, I don't know if he was a poet or not, but Charles Sincler wrote this poem called Alley's Past and Present. And if you give me a moment to read it to you, I just want the listeners to kind of imagine. To not think of an elephant, but to really imagine that this has nothing to do with abortion. Because it doesn't. So if you give me a moment.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, let's do it.
- [07:05]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Yeah. So an alley was once a spot where cats were wont to meet. They much preferred the alley to the brilliance of the street. With dissonance they flung their feline toasts upon the night and no one ever stopped them, for the alley was a sight. The alley was the birthplace of the weasel and the rat and here in sweet seclusion they increased and took on fat. The common housefly breeded and disease germs multiplied. And people often wondered why so many people died. Nor was this the alley did to make a boob of man it clutched with sticky hands at wheels. To stop them was its plan. It gave delivery costs a boost. It dirtied up the floors and sometimes when it was wet, it kept some folks indoors. But muddy alleys happily will soon be memories still rife with putrid odors Flung upon the summer breeze. The spirit of progression has declared disease must go and with it muddy alleys Sanitation's deadly foe. All hail concrete. The master alley Built for horse and man alike in rain and drought, and serves the dog, cart or the van in cleanliness it stands supreme, and sightliness alone it lends the alley dignity it never before had known. The concrete alley real estate a higher value gives it puts the ban on dust and dirt. But best of all, it lives to render worthy service, holding back the hands of time, resisting shock and friction with a courage quite sublime. Economy, endurance, sanitation and relief from black ill smelling muddy runways, therefore are, in brief, the reasons good and mighty, why concrete and nothing more should beautify the pathway to the yard and kitchen door. So I found this poem and I couldn't believe it because it occurred to me that although the phrase back alley abortion was not being used, it was a dead ringer for what I considered to be back alley abortion rhetoric, which was san, you know, unsanitary, getting care in unsanitary spaces with practitioners who were immoral, incompetent, using tools that were not sanctioned, and really doing criminal behavior in spaces that were not surveilled by sort of dominant medical authorities. And that led me on a wild goose chase to kind of look at and see what we could learn about how alis were talked about before they ever really metaphorically referenced abortion care.
- [09:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And I mean, is that poem representative? Like, how were they talked about? That sounds pretty nasty.
- [09:40]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Oh, I would say so. I think it's pretty representative. As allies really had three major discourses, I think, attached to them. Sanitation, morality, and criminality. And with that we have what I call the affective residue of sort of bad smells, unsightly visions, and that sort of sticky textile tactile residue that really back alley abortion comes to inherit in its discourses in the 60s, 1960s and their actor.
- [10:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's very helpful to kind of have discussed, but let's put a pin in it for a moment because of course, the other part of the phrase back alley abortion. What about the abortion side? How was that talked about or not talked about in the US at the same time we've got this dirty alley muddy poem running around, right?
- [10:39]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Absolutely. So instead. So abortions, criminalized abortions, really were understood through three dominant metaphors, mills, rackets and rings. And each of those sort of created very different relationships and understandings to issues like sanitation provider ethos and techne, or the, you know, the types of techniques that were being used.
- [11:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, do you want to tell us a bit more about kind of what that meant in terms of who was saying these things or who wasn't saying these things? Like, to some extent we might assume that abortion just wasn't being discussed, but that's not the case. Right, right.
- [11:22]
Dr. Emily Winderman
I mean, it was certainly being discussed and it was. So you have. Right. The folks that were really on the cutting edge of criminalizing abortion were certainly the American Medical association, but they. What I would say is the. The folks that were really using, say, mill based metaphors were in many ways like tabloid reporters who were talking about, say, what I write about is abortion mills in Minneapolis, the mill city. And so we find that these metaphors were often resonant with the locations that they were being talked about. But in the cases of rings, such as the Pacific Coastal abortion ring, that they also helped to really spatialize the larger scope of how far a criminal enterprise, you know, how large of a space that it would inhabit and how they might be sort of in cahoots with one another.
- [12:21]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
All right, that's definitely interesting because there's all sorts of connotations there of kind of shadowy or secretive or whatever. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be linked to those things around the alleys that you were telling us about earlier. Like that doesn't inherently mean kind of visually dark or muddy or rats or anything like that. So how do we get the combination of these things of the back alley and the abortion as a phrase?
- [12:46]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Right. So there's no. I really looked for some sort of smoking gun. And I really. The closest I came was in 1965. CBS reports puts forth a little, you know, primetime documentary series, a 30 minute little thing with called Abortion and the Law. And in Abortion and the Law, they never utter the phrase back alley abortion, but they start. They use all three of these metaphors, mills, rackets and rings. And they start to follow women who are entering and exiting the. Where they're ostensibly getting abortions through alleys. And so they have this sort of sinister, scary music. You have very shadowy views, but at the same time it's. They're really using the other metaphor. So this is a moment. Right. Although the phrase itself is never quite used. You see the image, right. Becoming articulated with the baggage that comes from the mill, racket and ring metaphors.
- [14:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I like this idea of baggage. Are there any other sort of rhetorical terms or connotations or baggage, I guess, that we want to add to this back alley abortion phrase? Anything we haven't mentioned yet that's being kind of drawn on here?
- [14:16]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Oh, sure. So what I talk about is the idea of affective residue, right? So residue is this idea of what I talk about is what remains after. We're not really talking about physical alleys anymore, but we're talking about. We're talking about back alley abortion. So what are the residual discourses, relationships, prejudices, and public feelings that abortion inherits as a function of it being connected to allies which themselves were deeply racialized spaces? Ways that historical resource deprivation was really connected to individual moral failures?
- [15:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay. Individual moral failures is definitely a key aspect of the discourse. Once kind of the phrase gets pretty embedded, especially when we're talking about this in very public discussions, for example, legal cases that get a lot of media attention. So obviously we have to talk about Roe v. Wade. How did this rhetoric influence those kinds of cases?
- [15:28]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Oh, sure. So I would say that, you know, Roe v. Wade is very much a case that is grounded in a right to privacy. Right. A right for a pregnant person to have a medical procedure that is, you know, between she or they and their doctor. And the. This all sort of comes about because of a, you know, a professionalization crisis in. And who can. Right. Provide the abortions and who is qualified and who is sort of doing a good job, a bad job. Right. And that is, I think that's pretty. That ends up getting concretized in Roe, if that makes sense. So good.
- [16:26]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So good.
- [16:27]
Dr. Emily Winderman
So good.
- [16:28]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Emily Winderman
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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- [17:59]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Oh sure. So basically back alley abortion begins to morph after Roe because. Because back alley abortion is so tethered to abortions legality, you have the moment where for people for whom the right to have an abortion equates with the closure of an era of reproductive injustice. So these are more, you know, privileged people tend to be white people in the US who really their only barrier is access. Right. It's not medical racism and other other barriers such as that, you know, once the restrictions are removed, then back alley abortion becomes less of a. This is what we currently navigating and it begins to shift more towards. This is what we will return to if abortion is recriminalized. And so the temporality begins to shift from a present threat to a future horizon.
- [19:13]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm, okay. That's definitely interesting to add kind of the time element to all of this and obviously relevant with Roe v. Wade and how that changed lots of things. But that's not the only case that's important here. In fact, you have an entire chapter on the Gosnell case. Why?
- [19:29]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Yeah, so that case was really interesting to me because it was a, it was a case where. So just to sort of back up for readers in, in the early 2000s, right. I believe in 2010amulti agency search team rated a Dr. Kermit Gosnell's clinic in West Philadelphia. And it was, it, it was pretty horrific, right. They found, you know, a clinic that was not kept to Senate sanitary standards. There were cats in there. So hence, you know, sort of these weird resonances with that poem that I read there. It was, they found people who were having abortions that were left unattended. It was just a pretty heinous situation. And so they. He was indicted by a grand jury and he and many of his clinic workers and his wife stood trial and were convicted. And when I read the grand jury report, I was really struck by a statement that was in there that was, we members of the grand jury have number a number of perspectives on the morality of abortion. But we find common ground here in asserting what happened here was wrong and to taking steps for it to never happen again. And so that really, especially as a young grad student, I was like, oh my gosh, I think we found the. Did we just find the answer to an intractable controversy in my naivete? And the answer is no, we did not. Because what ends up happening is back alley abortion becomes this thing that on its surface could really orient people who were against abortion or, you know, or in favor of abortion access, rights and freedom. And. But what ends up happening is that the antis end up really weaponizing the case to shut clinics down rather than situate the Gosnell case in a larger history of medical racism and resource deprivation in the West Philadelphia neighborhood.
- [22:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can you tell us more about that weaponization? Like, how was it used to enact those ends?
- [22:10]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Oh, absolutely. So it was. So advocates, anti abortion advocates, I believe in, like Ireland, they created documentaries where they. They pulled snippets and vignettes out of the grand jury report. So I talk about the uptake of this report, about how they were using it and adding really, you know, sort of scary music to it, adding blood splatter, showing images. Right. That allowed them to really amplify the, the aesthetics of the situation rather than, you know, rather than attending to. Why was it that there was a clinic like this a block and a half away from the University of Pennsylvania, one of the Penn's hospitals. Right. And so they were able to sort of pick this up and create documentaries. And it ended up, this appeal ended up making its way in the Gosnell case ended up making its way into the 2018 Supreme Court decision Whole Women's Health versus Hellerstedt.
- [23:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Do you want to tell us more about how back alley abortion got used there?
- [23:26]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Sure. So the phrase itself, no, but the, the case of Kermit Gosnell, the did. And because of the power and the affective residue of the back alley that. That had been so firmly entrenched for so long that the sanitary discourses, the. The, you know, the criminal discourses and the, the moral turpitude. Right. Of Gosnell were really leveraged to say, well, we all know what happened here was wrong. And this ends up getting used to really implement further targeted restrictions on abortion providers or trap laws. And so it's really, what it does is continue a long history of black providers in particular, being sort of weaponized for abortion criminalization.
- [24:30]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And is that where we're still at now in 2025, especially after 2022?
- [24:35]
Dr. Emily Winderman
I think we're at a, we're at a different point now. Right. Because after the Dobbs decision, it's. We are no longer looking to the, like, the threat that abortion will be recriminalized once it, you know, all of the, you know, once the Dobbs decision was handed down, so many states began to really, you know, just put their trigger laws into effect. And you really have cases where the, where it's, you know, it's not a future threat, it's a present reality. So whereas I would say in the 2010s and it really, I would say culminated in the 2010s, but there's a much longer history to it. Whereas there were sneakier sort of less spectacle laden ways of criminalizing abortion through making, you know, through clinic restrictions that required a certain, you know, amount of space in hallways or different waiting periods, sort of these very quiet ways of criminalizing care slowly out of existence. There's now no mistake in what is really happening, which is a present threat or you know, a present promise of that criminality. So you see, like we were talking about earlier, that temporality has shifted again from this will be to this is.
- [26:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, definitely interesting to pick up that link around time. Is there anything else that you want readers and obviously listeners of this conversation to take away from the book in your research, anything we haven't mentioned yet or you want to further emphasize?
- [26:22]
Dr. Emily Winderman
I would say that back alley abortion is deeply fungible. Right. It's fungible because as we are moving through anything that is, you know, related to sanitary, moral and criminal themes. Right. You're gonna, you're gonna start to see it adjust with the context. And what I really wanna, I think, I want people to really think about is how, how back alley abortion, I agree with all of the historians, right, that have the, who have said that it really obfuscates the caring and compassionate providers that took very personal risks to provide illegal abortions during the pre Roe criminalized era. And what I want to say is that the dehumanizing care that so many, you know, leveraged back alley abortion to really, to, you know, to create a more, a better sort of health circumstance like that dehumanizing care is present in ways that back alley abortion really obfuscates. So for instance, we have the cases, you know, the present day cases of women in hospitals who are, who go to have their miscarriages managed or for whatever, you know, or that they are in hospitals and kept alive on ventilators so that their, their fetuses can, you know, be gestated to a point where they can be extracted while they are, while the women are effectively brain dead. Right. Let's not forget that hospitals are spaces where you're likely to pick up hospital derived infections, where medical racism is still just as rampant as it's ever been and where it can be often just as surveilled and so as we think about what does the back alley make sort of make us look away from? It's the sense that hospitals are clean spaces, moral spaces, and we should be troubling that in many ways. And then the other thing that we should also be thinking about is how if alleys have been places where, you know, that they haven't been able to be surveilled. Right. That they are spaces that the sunlight does not get to. We have to think about how back alley abortion or the, you know, the promise of back alley abortion is one that creates a, A, a further warrant for surveillance. So now that we are, you know, all of our phones track every move of where we are. The any sort of appeal to further surveillance is one that really builds upon and leverages an existing infrastructure in the US for further, further surveillance of pregnant people. So I, you know, I join, I think it's important that we know and we really unpack a phrase that gets used with, with regularity so that we can understand what we are deploying when we use it.
- [30:15]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's definitely useful to understand a term so that we, when we mean to use it, we use it and we don't use it when we don't mean to use it. So thank you for helping us get a sense of where this phrase comes from, given how relevant it remains in politics today. And obviously because of that, I imagine you could continue to kind of watch the news and see all the ways in which the phrase comes up and analyze that and, and maybe you will do that, but maybe you're working on something else next. So what are you up to now that this book is done?
- [30:43]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Oh, well, now that it's done in many ways, back alley abortion was, it was a way of thinking about how providers were stigmatized. And so what I have really turned to since is to really uplift providers and people in the state of Minnesota. So Minnesota has long been, especially after Dobbs has been dubbed a safe haven state. So while many states in the Midwest and throughout the country were criminalizing care, Minnesota expanded and protected access in a number of ways. And that led to the state being really sort of being claimed as a safe haven. And so I have an oral history project called Healthcare Care under Crisis where we are really critically interrogating whether and how people, providers of both abortion care and gender affirming care, because the stigma and criminalization of the two travel in tandem with one another. We are really interrogating and what, how people are grappling with that safe haven rhetoric and what we are finding is that it is some people really align with that phrase. And people are they. They don't. And so our goal now is to really create an archive of stories such that when people write about the post DOBBS Moment, say 30 to 50 years from now, they are able to hear from the activists, the providers, the abortion fund managers, rather than the journalistic stories that are written about them. So it's important for us to archive those stories so that we don't lose the, not only the devastation that is this moment, but the, the really the story of resilience and power that is being pushed forward because people in Minnesota are not taking the Dobbs decision lying down. And we're really privileged to be able to document those stories.
- [33:04]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds like a very interesting and important project, so best of luck pursuing it. And of course, while you do so, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Back Alley A Rhetorical History, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2025. Emily, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to tell me about your work.
- [33:24]
Dr. Emily Winderman
Oh, thank you so much. This has been great. I really appreciate you having me.