Conspirituality - Bonus Sample: Imaginary Children #1: Fetal Remains
Aired: 2024-05-06
Duration: 05:12


=== Fetal Remains (04:51) ===

[00:00:02]  This is a sample of our Monday bonus episodes.
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[00:00:17]  You can also access these full bonus episodes on Apple Podcasts.
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[00:00:24]  Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
[00:00:35]  I'm Matthew Remsky.
[00:00:37]  We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod.
[00:00:42]  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.
[00:00:52]  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.
[00:01:02]  This is the first episode in a series called Conspirituality and the Imaginary Children.
[00:01:09]  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.
[00:01:18]  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.
[00:01:33]  I'll be looking at two types of imaginary child in this landscape.
[00:01:37]  One is an object of dread, and the other is an idol of aspiration.
[00:01:42]  Now this first episode begins in the Dread category, and the title is Fetal Remains.
[00:01:48]  And it comes with all of the content warnings you would expect.
[00:01:52]  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.
[00:02:10]  It's about how one of them woke up from that fever, and how the other is still burning with it.
[00:02:20]  Chapter 1, Baby Tia.
[00:02:23]  You might remember my interview with former anti-abortion extremist Rob Schenck.
[00:02:29]  Now if that's hazy, the episode number is 199.
[00:02:33]  I want to open with an audiobook excerpt from his memoir, which is called Costly Grace.
[00:02:39]  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.
[00:02:51]  In this passage, he's describing an escalation in his activism.
[00:02:57]  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.
[00:03:08]  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.
[00:03:21]  So, a meeting is arranged.
[00:03:24]  You'll hear Rob refer to Paul, his twin brother, who actually preceded him into the anti-abortion movement.
[00:03:32]  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.
[00:03:40]  We arrived at the deserted pathology lab.
[00:03:43]  Nothing prepared me for what I saw when he turned on the lights.
[00:03:47]  Lining the walls were plastic buckets filled with fetal remains.
[00:03:51]  The pathologist told me that before he destroyed them, he would place a name on each one's death certificate, usually just Baby Doe.
[00:04:00]  But he wanted to do something more, wanted the babies to have proper, Christian burials.
[00:04:06]  I knew our network included plenty of people likely to have contacts with church cemeteries where these babies could be interred.
[00:04:13]  Right there, I pledged to do everything possible to get them into caring hands.
[00:04:18]  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.
[00:04:29]  We selected an initial four babies.
[00:04:31]  He helped me to pack them safely with special solution in medical containers.
[00:04:36]  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 Displayed (00:32) ===

[00:04:47]  Among other objectives, Paul and I wanted to use the buffalo demonstrations to show the public what an aborted baby looked like.
[00:04:55]  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.
[00:05:08]  Gently cradling her in his hands, Paul laid the baby out on a table.