On the most recent episode of Slate’s Amicus podcast, entitled “The Great Big Pre-Election Freedom and Democracy Show”, host Dahlia Lithwick speaks to Yale history professor Timothy Snyder about the cost of freedom:
You do say in the book [Synder’s new book “On Freedom”] that pointless dying is “un-freedom”. You talk a lot about maternal mortality rates in the US and generally about life expectancy in the US. I think we have to talk about the mounting tragedy of the women who die because of abortion bans. Because states do not think in terms of freedom for them and their own bodies. So as we’re talking, I’m thinking about Amber Thurman and I’m thinking about Candy Miller in Georgia. And the new reporting that just came out from ProPublica this week. Devastating stories about Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain, deaths that were entirely preventable. One miscarriage, well underway, that had it been treated like any normal miscarriage, Joseeli would be alive today. And her daughter would have a mother. And Nevaeh, who dies after trying to get care in three different emergency room. Doctors in Texas failing to treat her sepsis out of apparent concern that the fetus she was carrying had a heartbeat. Both Nevaeh and her baby Lillian died. And these deaths are so connected, Tim, to what you described as the ever-present violence in the background of freedom. This notion that children need to die in school shootings so we can be free. Women need to die in childbirth so we can be free. This weird acculturated sense that some enormous amount of preventable predictable death, including (by the way) your critique of the healthcare system in the US. All this is a marker of our “freedom”. I guess I would just love for you to talk about it for a moment because it is such an arresting and (again) cramped notion of freedom that I think the rest of the world finds to be utter insane.
Freedom at all costs is not freedom.
