Slow Burn review — podcast exploring flashpoints in history turns to abortion

Slow Burn, the podcast series from Slate about landmark moments in US politics, has a habit of hitting on lightning-rod topics and teasing out the lesser-known stories behind them. In its earliest incarnation, when it was hosted by Leon Neyfakh (he now presents Fiasco), it examined the Watergate scandal and shone a light on Martha Mitchell, the whistleblowing wife of the attorney-general John Mitchell, who alleged that she was sedated and locked in a hotel room on her husband’s orders (Martha Mitchell’s story has since been told in the TV series Gaslit). The series on the impeachment of Bill Clinton was among the first of its kind to treat Monica Lewinsky not as a temptress but as a victim. Three years later, Ryan Murphy’s drama Impeachment followed the same narrative path.

It’s with remarkable timing that the seventh season of Slow Burn, hosted by Susan Matthews, looks at the years leading up to Roe vs Wade. It arrives just under a month after a leak from the US supreme court of a majority opinion that could overturn the 1973 ruling that legalised abortion in America.

In keeping with past series, Slow Burn declines to take the obvious route in. In an episode entitled Get Married or Go Home, it opens with the lawyer, Nancy Stearns, sharing her recollections of the 1960s courtroom drama, The Defenders, which in one episode saw a woman in the dock accused of having an illegal abortion. After watching it, Stearns was moved to study law and went on to take a job at the Center for Constitutional Rights, where she worked to overturn state abortion laws.

It was Stearns who highlighted the case of 22-year-old Shirley Wheeler from Daytona, Florida, who, in 1971, was arrested and charged with manslaughter following an abortion. Wheeler reported that, following her arrest, police officers entered her cell and showed her pictures of a foetus which they claimed was her baby. Wheeler had entered into a correspondence with Stearns in the hope that she would be able to help her. As Stearns told the first ever gathering of the Women’s National Abortion Action Coalition: “We are responsible for keeping her out of jail.” Wheeler was found guilty and given two years’ probation, making her the first woman in America to be found criminally responsible for having an abortion.

As told by Matthews, Wheeler’s story and the politics that surrounded it make for gripping listening, all the more potent in the light of current events. Future episodes will feature the Catholic couple behind the pro-life Handbook to Abortion, and a Yale student who took on Connecticut’s restrictive abortion laws. Slow Burn doesn’t deal in chronological storytelling, preferring to parachute the listener into different flashpoints in the narrative. In doing so, it cuts straight to the human stories behind big political moments, and shows us how the past informs the present.

slate.com/podcasts