774: The Pink House at the Center of the World
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeper in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Okay, so Brown versus Board of Education, huge Supreme Court case, 1954, desegriates public schools in America, and Brown is Oliver L. Brown, a welder for the railroads and assistant pastor. There's actually 13 parents who brought the lawsuit, but he's the only one whose name is on it, not because he's first alphabetically. People think maybe the lawyer has picked him because he's the only dad on the list, all the other parents or moms. In 1973, Roe versus Wade, Roe is Jane Roe, a real name Norman McCorvey, working as a carnival barker, gets pregnant, she's already had two babies, girls, and whether people were raising. She doesn't want to go through that a third time. At a bar one night, someone tells her that there's this thing called an abortion. Norman tries to get one, but can't. It's illegal. It finally signs up as the plaintiff for the lawsuit, she says, because it's the only way she can find to get the abortion she wants. This year, the dad's decision that overturned Roe versus Wade, the plaintiff is an abortion clinic in Jackson, Mississippi, the Jackson Women's Health Organization. Well, on the day the clinic lost, and Roe was overturned, that's where we wanted to be. The people whose case was making history on the day history was made. For a decade, the clinic has been the only abortion clinic in Mississippi, many of the clients drive from hours away, small building, mint green roof, unmissable, super bright pink exterior, like the building is saying, yeah, we're here, deal with it. Recently, they haven't allowed press inside to record, but we ended up with a filmmaker, Macey Crowe, who filmed in the clinic starting in 2012 for a great and very nuanced movie that she made about abortion in Mississippi, and is back there now shooting another film. She was the only journalist who was allowed to be there that day, and she brought us along to witness and record these moments that no one else has seen or reported on till now. Well, we've made it about this, and what we have for you today is a special episode of our show. It is This American Life, by the way, from W.B. East East Chicago, I'm out of glass, and what we're going to do is we're going to start at the Mississippi clinic. That's basically the crash site for this massive cultural political boulder that just landed in all of our lives with the Supreme Court decision. And then after that, we're going to head out from the clinic, move up into Illinois, and then further out to Missouri, Texas, places and people who were hit by the shockwave of that impact in various ways, stay with us. I'm Macy Crow. This is Act One, the pink house at the center of the world. The people who work in the pink house at the corner of Fondron and State Street have known for a while history was coming for them. They just didn't know the exact date or what they'd do in the clinic on the day it happened. Would they immediately have to cancel patients? What would they say to people? Where would they go? We began this story a couple of days before the Supreme Court decision on a Wednesday night because their days are so busy and full.
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