Transcript

Season 1: Episode 2

Abortion on Trial

Hosts: Gillian Frank & Lauren Gutterman

Guests and Additional Audio: Dr. Kenneth Edelin/Johanna Schoen/Mary Ziegler/Frank Susman/Newscaster/Dr. Mildred Jefferson

Dr. Kenneth Edelin:    This was after the Supreme Court had handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, which struck down and eliminated every restrictive abortion law in America. Um, nine months after that ruling came down, a young 17-year-old girl came to the hospital with her mother. Uh, she was a high school senior. She found herself pregnant. She and her mother made the decision, uh, that she should have an abortion. They came to the hospital, and we provided those services. At the time, they were certainly legal. Um, mm, she was about 17 weeks pregnant according to her last menstrual period. I performed the abortion procedure on her, uh, in that October of 1973, some 10 months after Roe v. Wade. And then in April of 1974, I was indicted for manslaughter.

Lauren Gutterman:     That was Dr. Kenneth Edelin, an African-American obstetrician/gynecologist. On February 15, 1975, an all-white and almost entirely Catholic jury in Boston found Dr. Edelin guilty of manslaughter. According to the prosecution, Edelin had killed Baby Boy Roe, a 24-to-28-week-old child. The prosecution argued that Baby Boy Roe had been removed, while living, from 17-year-old Alice Roe’s uterus. They claimed Dr. Edelin failed to provide this newborn with lifesaving care. Edelin, however, believed that he had aborted a nonviable 21-to-22-week-old fetus, and his lawyer argued that no person ever existed, so no person was ever killed. The 1975 trial of Dr. Kenneth Edelin hinged on two questions. First, did Dr. Edelin abort a fetus or did he murder a child; and second, was Dr. Edelin’s duty to his patient or to the fetus that she carried? These questions and the ways they were answered helped shape the modern debate over abortion. I’m Lauren Gutterman.

Gillian Frank:             And I’m Gillian Frank. This is Sexing History, a podcast about the ways that the history of sexuality shapes our present. Although abortion is legal thanks to the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, it is far more difficult to access abortion in the United States today than it was 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Between 2010 and 2016 alone, numerous states enacted a total of 338 new abortion restrictions. Some of these required women to receive mandatory counseling, endure significant wait times, undergo ultrasounds, or, if minors, notify their parents. The antiabortion movement also introduced fetal heartbeat bills and legislation that redefined the meaning of fetal viability and when precisely life begins. The history of Kenneth Edelin’s case helps us to understand how these incremental strategies to limit abortion access became central to the antiabortion movement.

Lauren Gutterman:     For most of us, the arguments of the antiabortion and abortion rights movements are well known. We know that antiabortion activists believe that the fetus is a child, and that abortion is murder. We understand the abortion rights argument that access to abortion enables a woman to control her body and her future. But this debate is less than 40 years old, and Americans had to learn over time to think within these frameworks. On September 21, 1973, a 17-year-old daughter of West Indian immigrants came to Boston City Hospital with her mother, seeking an abortion. Legal documents provide little detail about this young woman, who’s identified only as Alice Roe.

Dr. Kenneth Edelin:    At the end of September of 1973, a young 17-year-old girl was a senior in high school, and her mother came to Boston City Hospital. She was pregnant. According to her last menstrual period, she was about 17 weeks pregnant. She was seen by one of my attending physicians, and he judged her to be 19 or 20 weeks pregnant. She was a senior in high school, and she was going to be the first person in her family to go to college. And she and her mother came to Boston City Hospital asking for help so that she could fulfill her dream and her family’s dream for her. The attending physician called me in, introduced me to this young girl and her mother, because I would be taking care of her once she came into the hospital.

And although I was used to, with a great difficulty, seeing the desperation that many women felt who came in for abortions, there was something different about her. In her eyes, I also thought I saw fear. And during my time when I got to know her, and interview both her and her mother, I found out that they were keeping this pregnancy a secret from her father. He was known to be a violent man, and they were afraid that, at the very least, he would throw her out of the house, but they were also afraid that he might do her physical harm, so they conspired to keep the pregnancy and certainly the abortion from her father.

Lauren Gutterman:     Though Alice believed she was only 18 weeks pregnant, the doctor who examined her noted that she was 21 to 22 weeks along. He assigned her abortion to Dr. Kenneth Edelin.

Johanna Schoen:         Kenneth Edelin was an obstish—obstetrician and gynecologist and an abortion provider. Um, he grew up as the youngest of four children in segregated Washington, DC during the 1940s, and when he was 12, his mother died of breast cancer, and Edelin became determined to become a physician and save women’s lives. He attended Columbia College in New York City, and then he went to Meharry Medical College in Tennessee, and there he learned about the close connection between racism, poverty, and poor health, and he also witnessed the death of a 17-year-old girl from an illegal abortion. And all of these experiences together furthered his commitment to women’s health, including his commitment to providing abortion services.

Lauren Gutterman:     That was Johanna Schoen, Professor of History at Rutgers University and author of Abortion after Roe. In 1973, there was nothing illegal about getting a hospital abortion during the second trimester of pregnancy, but the law had gray areas. A few months earlier in Roe, the Supreme Court said that states could no longer ban abortions, but Roe also stated that the state might have an interest in protecting the life of the fetus at the point of viability, when the fetus could live outside the womb with or without artificial aid.

Mary Ziegler:              Uh, so Roe and Doe struck down the laws at issue in each respective case. Roe held that the right to privacy, uh, recognized in the Constitution was broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy. Uh, the Court also significantly rejected the claim that the fetus was a person for the purposes of the 14th Amendment, which would have es-essentially meant no abortion rights, or abortion rights overcome by state interest and regulation. And the Roe—the Court further held that, uh, there—states had no compelling interest in protecting life from conception sufficient to ban abortion or regulate abortion as heavily as Georgia had done.

Uh, th-then the Court proceeded to set out a legal framework that could be applied in future cases. That was, uh, later known as the trimester framework. So in the first trimester, the states had really very little ability to regulate abortions. In the second trimester, the government could do so, but only, um, in the interest of protecting women’s health, and then it was only after the point of fetal viability or when a child could survive outside the womb that, uh, the government could act to protect its interest in fetal life. So what that meant in practical terms was that the vast majority of abortion laws that were on the books at the time were struck down, and there would be a kind of cottage industry [laughs] in litigation going forward, figuring out exactly what Roe would mean when it came to the new restrictions that abortion opponents began introducing l-literally within months, if not earlier, of the Court’s decision.

Gillian Frank:             That’s Mary Ziegler, Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at Florida State University College of Law and author of After Roe: the Lost History of the Abortion Debate. In Roe, the Supreme Court sidestepped the difficult question of when life begins. Antiabortion activists, however, were eager to answer this question. If they could get judges and a wider public to agree with their answer, they knew they could limit the period when a pregnant woman could receive an abortion.

Lauren Gutterman:     These debates would all come into play following Alice Roe’s abortion. After Alice Roe checked into the hospital, Dr. Edelin and his supervisor attempted to perform her abortion with a saline induction. When that procedure was unsuccessful, Edelin performed a hysterotomy. He made an incision into Alice Roe’s uterus through her abdominal wall to remove the fetus and placenta. After doing so, Edelin recorded no heartbeat or sign of life. He estimated that the fetus was 22 weeks old, and sent it to the hospital’s pathology lab, where it was preserved in a bottle of formaldehyde. Shortly afterwards, Boston-based antiabortion activist Thomas Connelly received word from a hospital employee that there were two big babies in bottles at the Boston City Hospital’s morgue.

Gillian Frank:             Thomas Connelly had been waiting for a case like this one. In 1970, he cofounded Massachusetts Citizens for Life and served as the organization’s director. After the Roe decision, Connelly wanted to do everything he could to prevent abortions from happening in his city. He set his sights on Boston City Hospital.

Dr. Kenneth Edelin:    Boston City Hospital was the place where poor women, black women, Hispanic women, would come for their healthcare. When these patients showed up at other institution or at other doctor’s offices without insurance, without Medicaid, the cry was always, “Send them to City Hospital.” And on January 22, 1973, it was as if something had blown open the doors and the windows of Boston City Hospital. Women from the poorest neighborhoods of Boston flooded our hospital. I don’t know where they had gone prior to Roe. Some of them were able to scrape together the few dollars that they could get to take a bus to New York state, which had liberalized its abortion laws in the late ‘60s, and they would be able to scrape together enough money to pay for it. Some women self-induced. Some women found illegal abortion providers. But suddenly, with Roe v. Wade, it was legal, and they could come to Boston City Hospital. We were flooded.

Gillian Frank:             In the winter of 1973, roughly eight months before Alice Roe came to Boston City Hospital for her abortion, Thomas Connelly began a secret investigation into the hospital’s abortion practices. He discovered that a group of four doctors were conducting medical research using aborted fetuses, and he learned that many Catholic nurses and hospital personnel were morally opposed to performing abortions. In particular, they were concerned about Dr. Kenneth Edelin.

Lauren Gutterman:     Edelin was the first African-American chief resident at Boston City Hospital. He was also one of only two doctors in the hospital willing to perform abortions, which put him in Connelly’s crosshairs.

Johanna Schoen:         1973, when Roe happened and Edelin performed this abortion, physicians at Boston City Hospital not only performed abortions; they also conducted fetal research. And there were four physicians at Boston City Hospital who conducted research to determine whether two common antibiotics taken by a pregnant woman crossed the placenta and entered the bloodstream of the fetus. In June of 1973, just a couple months before Edelin, um, performed the abortion he was charged with, uh, the four Boston City Hospital scientists published their research results in the New England Journal of Medicine, and antiabortion forces saw the article and took note. They were already upset at the rising number of abortions performed at Boston City Hospital after the Roe decision, and abortion opponents sent outraged letters about abortion and fetal experimentation to the Boston City Council and called the Assistant District Attorney Newman Flanagan’s office, claiming that the Boston City Morgue held two big babies in bottles, as they described them.

Lauren Gutterman:     That summer, Connelly and other antiabortion activists in Boston publicized what they had learned. They organized a citywide letter-writing campaign pressuring their state representatives to address abortion and fetal research at Boston City Hospital. In response to their actions, eight months after Roe versus Wade, Boston City Council member Albert “Dapper” O’Neil called a hearing to review abortion and fetal research at Boston City Hospital. He ran ads in Boston newspapers and sent letters to antiabortion activists to draw attention to the hearing. Hundreds attended the hearing, which lasted over five hours. Thomas Connelly was among the antiabortion activists who testified. He declared that the researchers at Boston City Hospital had destroyed innocent human beings numbering in the thousands, and he described in gruesome detail how researchers use the bodies of aborted fetuses to study the impact of antibiotic drugs. A representative from the Boston Archdiocese who spoke at the hearing claimed that the researchers had treated the babies like experimental animals. Boston City Hospital nurses also told horrifying stories about seeing breathing aborted fetuses.

Gillian Frank:             Believing that the doctors at the hospitals were committing crimes, O’Neil sent the testimony to the Suffolk County DA, Newman Flanagan. He convinced Flanagan to investigate. Flanagan learned about the two preserved fetuses in the morgue. He instructed a medical examiner to perform an autopsy to see if the larger of the fetuses had been alive when it was aborted. This larger fetus belonged to Alice Roe, and the state medical examiner estimated that the fetus was more than 20 weeks. The medical examiner also discovered that there was partial expansion of air cells of the lung, which suggested to him that the fetus had breathed after it was removed from the uterus. The DA’s office concluded that they were dealing with a case of murder or manslaughter, and set out to prosecute Kenneth Edelin. On April 11, 1974, a grand jury indicted Dr. Edelin for performing an abortion on Alice Roe.

Dr. Kenneth Edelin:    One of the nurses stuck her head in the door and said, “Ken, the District Attorney’s on the phone, and he would like to talk with you.” I sa—“Phew, it’s finally gonna be over.” Went to the phone and picked it up. “Doctah,” he said in his South Boston/Irish brogue, “This is Newman Flanagan, and I’m calling you to tell you that the grand jury has indicted you for manslaughter. And I’m calling you now before you hear it on the news tonight, and I’m also telling you that I’m not sending the police around to arrest you, because of your position at the hospital.”

The next thing I remember, I was sitting in my apartment, which was across the street from the hospital, devastated. Why me? I faced 20 years in jail, loss of my medical license, not being able to finish my residency training program. The hospital immediately suspended me from my training program. Why me? I had been brought up in a family in Washington, DC, where we always waited at the corner for the light to turn green because a walk on the red light was illegal. We would—we were taught from early on never to do anything that would bring shame or embarrassment to the name, and we were always told as I was growing up that we had to be a credit to the race. And there I was, indicted for manslaughter.

Frank Susman:           Never before had a doctor ever been charged—well, they were charged with illegal abortions before Roe versus Wade, but those—you know, everybody thought we-well, that’s a crime, so there was no big deal as far as publicity. Um, but no physician has ever been charged with a crime of doing an abortion after Roe. This is the first time it ever happened, plus the fact that it was sort of a new definition of birth.

Gillian Frank:             That’s Frank Susman, one of Kenneth Edelin’s lawyers.

Mary Ziegler:              So prosecutors, um, and the right-to-life advocates who were aligned with them took the position that, uh, Edelin had crossed the line into something Roe v. Wade didn’t protect. They took the position that Roe predominantly allowed women to terminate a pregnancy, but didn’t in any way guarantee fetal death, and they argued that, in Edelin’s case, uh, he had performed a-a-an abortion by hysterotomy, which is a-an operation similar to a cesarean section, but the fetus ha—or child, as they would have said—had been born alive, and that Edelin had killed the child, our fetus, outside of the womb, and th-there—that would have otherwise survived. So m-m-prosecutors were, I think, kind of probing the gray area, or one of the gray areas, anyway, that Roe had created.

Gillian Frank:             The doctor’s indictments had a chilling effect on access to abortion in Massachusetts. Boston City Hospital temporarily stopped providing abortions, and that same month, the Massachusetts House Committee on Judiciary Affairs proposed a law requiring parental consent for minors seeking abortions and spousal consent for married women. It also banned research on fetal tissue and criminalized abortions performed after 24 weeks of pregnancy, except in medical emergencies. By August, the state’s legislators had passed these new regulations over the governor’s veto.

Lauren Gutterman:     When Edelin’s trial began in January 1975, the odds were already against him. All of the jurors were white, and almost all were Catholic. None were doctors, and only three were women. The media reported that because of Edelin’s light skin tone, many jurors did not realize he was African-American. But an alternate juror later told lawyers that several members of the jury had privately used racial slurs about Edelin and African-Americans in general. Edelin’s trial also played out at a time of explosive racial tensions in Boston.

Newscaster:                Governor Francis Sargent of Massachusetts today mobilized the state National Guard and asked the president to send federal troops because of the crisis in the Boston School System. For 23 days there’s been trouble because of a court order to integrate certain Boston schools. Because of Sargent’s orders, some 450 Massachusetts National Guard troopers have been activated, but in Washington, a White House spokesman said federal troops should only be used as a last resort.

Gillian Frank:             While battles over school busing shook the streets of South Boston, battles over the politics of abortion and the origins of life unfolded in the courtroom and in front of the media. The case rested on one fact: An infant could not be the subject of homicide unless it had been born alive. The language that was used to refer to Alice Roe’s fetus and to Edelin’s actions during the abortion became incredibly significant.

Mary Ziegler:              And-and so, a-as you can imagine, one of the key issues in the Edelin trial was what exactly this abortion by hysterotomy involved. Um, if it was an abortion, which was what the defense was contending, then Edelin’s actions were covered by Roe, and he w-wouldn’t have committed a crime; he would have helped a woman exercise her fundamental Constitutional rights. If the child had been born live, or even viable, and Edelin killed the child anyway—I’m using the word “child” here because that would be the relevant term—then Edelin would have committed a crime. It would have been more like in-infanticide rather than abortion.

Johanna Schoen:         The trial itself centered around the question whether Edelin had killed a live baby, as the prosecution charged, or whether, as the defense claimed, he had performed a legal abortion which resulted in a dead fetus. Hence, the status of the fetus was central to the meaning of the death. The question was, what is it a fetus or a male child or a baby boy? Was it an unborn person or was it fetal tissue?

Gillian Frank:             Had Edelin removed a fetus or a living baby from Alice Roe’s uterus? Had Edelin, in other words, performed a legal medical procedure to abort a fetus, or had he delivered a baby and then killed it? These two alternative versions of what had happened during Alice Roe’s abortion were evident in the very language the prosecution, defense, and witnesses used during the trial. Officially, the DA’s office charged Edelin with assaulting and beating a male child to death. The prosecutor sought to convince the jury that Baby Boy Roe had been removed from Alice Roe’s uterus alive, and died because Edelin failed to provide it with lifesaving care. The defense sought to prove that no crime had occurred, and that there was no victim; without a baby, there was no crime. Edelin’s defense attorney argued that Alice Roe’s fetus had not been viable, had not been born alive, and had never been a person under the law. He called his witnesses, leading obstetrics and gynecology experts, to testify that Edelin had performed an entirely legal and medically sound surgical procedure.

Lauren Gutterman:     The prosecution called to the stand prominent antiabortion activists who sought to convince the jury that in performing an abortion Edelin had murdered a child.

Frank Susman:            I mean, all - all of the experts, a-all physicians, on the side of the prosecution were all well known right-to-lifers. They weren’t just OB/GYN physicians. They had made their own mark, had publicly identified as avid pro-lifers.

Lauren Gutterman:     Among those who testified was Dr. Mildred Jefferson, the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and a leader of the antiabortion movement.

Dr. Mildred Jefferson:            I will not accept the proposition that the doctor should relinquish the role of healer to become the new social executioner. It is unconscionably unfair that the victim selected on which to test this social remedy of expendable lives is the most defenseless member of the human family, the unborn child, who cannot escape, cannot riot in the streets, and cannot vote. As a woman, I’m ashamed that the voices raised loudest in this demand to destroy the unborn children are those of other women blinded by an all-absorbing selfishness. These women are trying to force the society to grant them rights without the responsibilities that our social contract demands, and privileges without the payment that our moral order commands.

Lauren Gutterman:     Edelin’s attorneys attempted to show the jury that the testimonies of the prosecution’s witnesses were not based on medical knowledge, but rather on political beliefs. In one particularly heated exchange with Jefferson, one of Edelin’s attorneys, Frank Homans 25:29[jk1] , pressed her to provide the name of a single textbook by a recognized medical authority to support her argument that Alice Roe’s fetus had been born. She could not. In addition to the powerful testimony of the antiabortion activists who took the stand, the prosecution relied on a photograph of Baby Boy Roe to persuade jurors.

Gillian Frank:             In his closing remarks, the prosecution encouraged the jurors to examine the photograph and decide for themselves whether it was a picture of a fetus or a baby boy. The prosecutor said, “He tells you that he took out the fetus; the subject. Is this just a specimen? You tell us what it is. Look at the picture. Show it to anybody. What would they tell you it was? Use your common sense when you go to your jury deliberation room, and humanize that.”

Frank Susman:           I mean, the picture was - the picture was an absolute great prop for the prosecution. The jury could actually see, you know. And there was really - there was really no way to really object and expects it to be, uh, you know, refused. It was actually—you know, it was a re—a central part of the case.

Lauren Gutterman:     The judge instructed the jury to consider two questions: Did the fetus draw breath outside its mother’s body; and if so, did Dr. Edelin cause its death in a reckless manner? On Saturday, February 15, 1975, after a day of deliberations, the members of the jury reached their verdict. They found Edelin guilty of manslaughter.

Johanna Schoen:         Well, the images and photographs of the pe—fetus were so important because those opposed to abortion and fetal research believed that the image of a fetus offered a powerful symbol supporting the belief that personhood began long before birth, so in the end, photographs of the fetus swayed jurors to conclude that the fetus was a baby, and that Edelin was guilty of manslaughter. Since the fetus looked like a baby, they concluded it must have been a baby, and they found Edelin guilty.

Frank Susman:           This was o-obviously in Suffolk County, Boston, the, uh—which is very Catholic. It took two-plus weeks just to pick a jury. Uh, they all had feelings one way or the other about abortion, and it was a fairly antiabortion jury, and, uh, they came back to deliver their verdict after the five or six weeks of trial. Uh, the judge asked, you know, d—asked the foreperson to stand, which he did, and he asked find guilt or not guilt, and, eh, the-the vehemence at which the foreperson spoke and says “Guilty” was [laughs]—shocked - shocked everybody.

Lauren Gutterman:     After the trial, juror Anthony Alessi, a 30-year-old foreman for the New England Telephone Company and a father of three, explained that the picture of the fetus shaped the jury’s final decision. “None of us had ever seen a fetus before. For all we knew, a fetus looked a lot like a kidney.”

Gillian Frank:             Juror Liberty Ann Conlin, a homemaker and mother from West Roxbury, explained, “The picture was very important. This was a baby. You know, when you’ve got all these very learned men, these doctors arguing between themselves about whether this baby was alive or not, it made it very difficult for us to decide who was right, so I’m sure the picture helped us decide that this was a baby.”

Johanna Schoen:         And in the end, conflicting expert testimony about the status of the fetus proved less relevant to the jury than images of the fetus. Fetal images and the pictures of this particular fetus convinced members of the jury that the fetus was really a baby.

Lauren Gutterman:     Edelin’s conviction sparked outrage. Fifteen hundred women marched to the Massachusetts State House to protest. The Boston Globe called Edelin a victim of judicial inadequacy, while the Washington Post called the conviction a disgrace and a shame. Though Edelin could have been sentenced to up to 20 years in prison, a judge sentenced him to a year of probation, and stayed that sentence until Edelin’s appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts had been decided.

Gillian Frank:             The following year, on December 17, 1976, the State Supreme Court reversed Edelin’s conviction. They voted to acquit Edelin, freeing him from the charge of manslaughter.

Lauren Gutterman:     After his trial, Edelin became a leader in the fight for women’s reproductive rights.

Dr. Kenneth Edelin:    I made a determination, sitting in that courtroom for those six weeks, that I was going not to be quiet anymore, but I was gonna speak out. And I made a determination then that they gave me a platform, and they really did not know that monster that they had created, and that I would use the platform or the notoriety of the trial to speak out against them and what they were trying to do to American women; that I would use the platform that I had been given to speak out so that physicians could carry out legal procedures for their patients.

Lauren Gutterman:     Dr. Edelin continued practicing medicine as a physician at Boston University Medical School. Between 1989 and 1992, he served as Chairman of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In 2007, he published a memoir about his case, and the following year, Planned Parenthood honored him with its highest award, calling him one of the heroes of the reproductive rights movement. Edelin died in 2013, and this past June, a public square in Boston was dedicated to his memory.

Gillian Frank:             Although Edelin never had to serve time, and even though the Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling implied that he should never have been indicted to begin with, antiabortion activists saw this case as a thin edge of a wedge for limiting Roe v. Wade. Following Edelin’s trial, hospitals in a number of cities began to place tighter limits on the timeframe during which an abortion could be performed. Other hospitals began requiring that expensive lifesaving equipment be on hand during second-trimester abortions. These measures made abortion more costly and less accessible to poor women.

Lauren Gutterman:     Antiabortion activists learned from the Edelin trial that they could focus on limiting the availability of abortion for low-income, minority, and underage women, rather than directly challenging Roe versus Wade. This strategy began to achieve results at the federal level in 1977, when Congress banned the use of federal funds to pay for abortions for women receiving Medicaid. Similar restrictions soon followed nationwide. But more than that, the Edelin case crystallized the way antiabortion activists talked about and represented abortion. Their vocabulary of babies rather than fetuses, and of murders rather than abortions, shaped the public’s image of what an abortion entailed and what was at stake, and antiabortion crusaders recognized that visual images were key to humanizing the unborn and convincing people that fetuses were children.

Gillian Frank:             This powerful fetal imagery was important for what it showed, human-looking fetuses, and what it didn’t show, the women who made thoughtful and difficult choices about whether to terminate or continue a pregnancy. The Edelin trial shaped how many Americans understood when life begins. It also taught many Americans to talk about babies, and not about the complex circumstances that led to pregnancy and abortions.

Dr. Kenneth Edelin:    For all those women who marched, for all those women who lobbied, for all those women who die, we say to you today your lives have always been our concern. Your sacrifice is our motivation. We will continue the fight, and our struggle will go on for as long as it must. And in the end, we win.

Gillian Frank:             Sexing History is produced by Rebecca Davis, Saniya Lee Ghanoui, Devin McGeehan Muchmore, Lauren Gutterman, and me, Gillian Frank. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter. Visit us at SexingHistory.com for a picture of Kenneth Edelin and a link to his memoir about the trial. Many thanks to Johanna Schoen, Frank Susman, and Mary Ziegler for spending time with us.

Lauren Gutterman:     Sexing History is made possible with generous funding from Allen Zwickler of the Phil Zwickler Charitable and Memorial Foundation. Created in honor of the journalist, filmmaker, poet, and gay activist Phil Zwickler, the foundation seeks to promote human rights, education, health, and the arts, specifically with respect to the gay and lesbian community, and generally with regard to those individuals and groups who need assistance to survive and be heard. Visit them at PZFoundation.org. I’m Lauren Gutterman.

Gillian Frank:             I’m Gillian Frank. This is Sexing History.

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 Erratum: The attorneys’ names were Frank Sussman and William Homans.