Matthew Remsky introduces "Imaginary Children," focusing on fetal remains as objects of dread in conspiracy discourse. Drawing from Rob Schenck's memoir, the episode details how Schenck radicalized after meeting a Tulsa pathologist distressed by disposing of aborted fetuses. Schenck pledged to transport named remains in medical containers within his overcoat to bypass legal restrictions, intending to display them at Buffalo demonstrations. This culminates in Paul Schenck presenting a preserved six-month-old African-American fetus, illustrating how children function as symbolic idols rather than persons in anti-abortion extremism. Ultimately, the segment reveals how the politics of reproductive rights transform biological life into potent political artifacts. [Automatically generated summary]
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod.
And you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
We've also got a book out, it's called Conspiratuality, How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, and it's in print, ebook, and audiobook format.
This is the first episode in a series called Conspirituality and the Imaginary Children.
Now, back at the end of March, I released an introduction to this series, so you can scroll back through your Patreon feed and look for that before jumping in here.
To recap that intro, this series will be looking at how children, as symbols, but not persons with their own internal lives, are at the center of conspirituality, anxiety, and discourse.
I'll be looking at two types of imaginary child in this landscape.
One is an object of dread, and the other is an idol of aspiration.
Now this first episode begins in the Dread category, and the title is Fetal Remains.
And it comes with all of the content warnings you would expect.
I'll be talking about abortion and, well, fetal remains, and about how two men, both leaders in the anti-abortion movement, invested real remains with passionate but imaginary desires that obscured from them how much harm they were causing.
It's about how one of them woke up from that fever, and how the other is still burning with it.
Chapter 1, Baby Tia.
You might remember my interview with former anti-abortion extremist Rob Schenck.
Now if that's hazy, the episode number is 199.
I want to open with an audiobook excerpt from his memoir, which is called Costly Grace.
This is from a chapter that recounts the period in which his more laid-back, love-and-forgiveness evangelicalism really began to radicalize through the politics of the war against reproductive rights.
In this passage, he's describing an escalation in his activism.
A fellow anti-abortionist has connected Schenck with a Tulsa, Oklahoma pathologist who is responsible for disposing of the fetal remains that come from the local abortion clinic.
The pathologist is a Christian and is tortured by this responsibility, and he wants the larger activist world to know, and he also wants the remains in his care to receive Christian burial.
So, a meeting is arranged.
You'll hear Rob refer to Paul, his twin brother, who actually preceded him into the anti-abortion movement.
The details are gruesome, and the excerpt is about 3 minutes and 16 seconds, so if you'd like to skip ahead, you can do that now.
We arrived at the deserted pathology lab.
Nothing prepared me for what I saw when he turned on the lights.
Lining the walls were plastic buckets filled with fetal remains.
The pathologist told me that before he destroyed them, he would place a name on each one's death certificate, usually just Baby Doe.
But he wanted to do something more, wanted the babies to have proper, Christian burials.
I knew our network included plenty of people likely to have contacts with church cemeteries where these babies could be interred.
Right there, I pledged to do everything possible to get them into caring hands.
The doctor said he would help me transport them wherever there were willing parties to bury them, in the process confronting the public with the reality of death by abortion.
We selected an initial four babies.
He helped me to pack them safely with special solution in medical containers.
The doctor then warned me it was illegal to transport them across state lines, so I stuffed them into the interior pockets of my overcoat to avoid detection at the airport.
Gently Displayed00:00:32
Among other objectives, Paul and I wanted to use the buffalo demonstrations to show the public what an aborted baby looked like.
During an afternoon press conference, we decided to display the largest baby I had brought from Tulsa, a perfectly preserved, fully formed African-American girl who was at approximately six months gestation.
Gently cradling her in his hands, Paul laid the baby out on a table.