Carl Sagan's widow on Trump and the anti-abortion movement: Shouldn't they oppose masturbation?

Ann Druyan wrote a classic 1990 op-ed with Sagan about the science behind abortion rights.

Carl Sagan is arguably the greatest science communicator of all time — and his widow, Ann Druyan, has important things to say about science and abortion rights.

Sagan is best known today for narrating the 1980 docuseries “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” which after having been seen by more than 500 million people in 60 countries remains the most widely-watched series in public television history. The astronomer and planetary scientist also wrote popular science books including “The Dragons of Eden” in 1977 (about the evolution of human intelligence), “Broca’s Brain” in 1979 (about debunking bad science), “Cosmos” in 1980 (to accompany the TV series), “Pale Blue Dot” in 1994 (a sequel to “Cosmos”) and “The Demon-Haunted World” in 1996 (more debunking bad science). On a personal level, I adore Sagan for writing the 1985 novel that introduced me to him, “Contact,” as well as the underrated 1997 film adaptation I was lucky enough to see in theaters.

Throughout his 40-year career, Sagan consistently advocated widespread science education and scientific literacy. This brings us to Druyan, Sagan’s wife for 15 years (from 1981 until his untimely death from cancer in 1996). In the late 1970s, Druyan was the creative director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project, which created the golden discs affixed to the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft. Druyan has continued to “Cosmos” franchise after Sagan’s passing, and won a litany of prestigious awards including the 2004 Richard Dawkins Award, the 2014 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming, the 2015 Producers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Producer of Non-Fiction Television, the 2015 Writers Guild Award for Documentary Script (Other than Current Events), the 2017 Harvard Humanist of the Year Award, and the 2020 National Geographic Further Award.

While I could have spoken to Druyan for hours about each individual topic from the previous two paragraphs, I instead focused on a 1990 editorial Sagan and Druyan co-authored for Parade Magazine about abortion. The two scientists, contemplating at the time the Christian Right’s crusade against women’s reproductive rights, presented a scientific case for abortion.

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.

Rozsa:

When describing how President Trump has rolled back abortion rights during the first year of his second term, the Center for Reproductive Rights focused on his use of pseudoscience, such as calling birth control an abortifacient, or having the FDA investigate the abortion pill. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Chief Justice Alito explicitly used Christian teachings to justify his position. To what extent can we thus say that the war on women’s reproductive rights is one and the same as the war on science?

Druyan:

It’s a facet of that war, but I feel like this administration is a war on all of us and on women, on every living thing, actually. And so, yes, it’s part of the war. It’s anti-scientific. All of the positions that he takes are not only not grounded in science, they’re not even grounded in reality. And so, you know, if you hear someone speak who is so mendacious, who lies virtually every single time you hear him speak, it’s no wonder that the administration and Trump personally are completely disinterested in any scientific argument about abortion. He is, of course, always appealing to the most base in all of us, the most fearful, the most ignorant. And so that’s his M.O. And why should abortion be any different from any of the other subjects?

Rozsa:

It’s an important difference because, in my opinion, it is one with so much Christian Right hate behind it. And I say this as someone who spent years of his career as a Salon Magazine journalist focusing on climate change. And I know that the Christian Right is glomming onto that. They’re glomming onto anti-science arguments about vaccines. They’re glomming onto anti-science arguments about all kinds of issues. But abortion is special because it’s rooted in their hate for women. Also think of their war on immigrants. Think of their war on the poor that is also rooted in hatred and fear, and in pseudoscience. They use eugenics to justify their hate of immigrants. They use laissez-faire economics to justify their hate of the poor. I would argue that those are pseudoscientific arguments.

Druyan:

You’re making my argument. It’s all of a piece. Yes, abortion, all of it is—it’s kind of an assault on reality. And think of what they tried to do to public education, to higher education. There’s no area — CDC, health on any level. There is no exception to their attitude, which is the flight from reality and the flight towards prejudice, bigotry, fear, ignorance. That’s all of it. And it’s all of a piece.

But you know what’s interesting to me, in studying the question of abortion, as you kindly alluded to the piece that Carl Sagan and I wrote together in 1990, we did extensive research because we were taking a bit of a stand. And we wanted to be sure that that—if you look, Hitler and Stalin, both were two of the most determined right-to-lifers in history — this is one of the first things that Stalin did.

So I don’t see the hatred of women and the rejection of their rights as being necessarily something that is only found in a particular kind of economic system. I think it starts with agriculture and it begins very early in human history. And it’s part of a kind of a warfare that dominance hierarchies have waged on women.

Rozsa:

That is an excellent way of putting it. And I’m glad you mentioned the editorial you wrote in 1990. I’m going to quote it right now. You observed that a future in which abortion rights are overturned “conjures up the specter of predominantly male, predominantly affluent legislators telling poor women they must bear and raise alone children they cannot afford to bring up, forcing teenagers to bear children they are not emotionally prepared to deal with, saying to women who wish for a career that they must give up their dreams, stay home and bring up babies, and worst of all, condemning victims of rape and incest to carry and nurture the offspring of their assailants.”

Do you believe that world is real now? And if so, is that by accident or design?

Druyan:

I think there are people who are working in a very concerted way to bring about this great leap backwards into the past. And so, yes, I mean, it’s not an accident. It is a piece, as I said earlier. And one of the things that Carl and I discovered in our research was that there was, of the Catholic Church, for instance, until 1869, not a word. Nothing. And in fact, if you read some of the early church writers, St. Augustine, various others, they are not against abortion.

And so this is a recent artifact of something that has roots in a much more ancient kind of power structure in which women do not have any freedom or any choice. And that’s one of the reasons, by the way, that even in this period of terrible darkness, the worst darkness of my lifetime, even in this period in the United States of kind of horror, I have so much hope because I was born in 1949. I’m 76.

And so I remember when the hatred of women and the fear of women was so intense and so chronic that the ridicule of women was our primary form of public entertainment. Every sitcom was how stupid women are. Women are so dumb. And I remember being a child in that world and resenting it fiercely. And luckily I had parents who really believed in me and who gave me a completely different sense of who I was and what my future was. But, as bad as things are, I can’t believe they’re not as bad as they were in the early ‘50s when I was coming of age and living in a completely racist, sexist, homophobic world.

Rozsa:

My fear is that we are heading there, not just through the overturning of reproductive rights, but through other Trump administration initiatives. Look at how they’re downgrading or firing women and people of color in the military because they assume that they are incompetent by virtue of their immutable characteristics. Look at the constant barrage of anti-feminist, anti-woke rhetoric from the Right. This is all part of a concerted effort to break down the idea that the world you grew up in in the 1950s shouldn’t be the world we return to in the 2020s.

Druyan:

Yes. But this is where I find the hopeful aspect, and that is, we’re talking about the most unpopular president in modern American history. We’re talking about someone who really has no real constituency anymore, besides the people who are completely crazy. That’s the feeling I’m getting. Maybe I live in a bubble, but I try to find people who really like Trump still and really like what he’s doing every day, and really want to go to war with Greenland and want to run Venezuela and want to be permanently impoverished. And I can’t find them.

Rozsa:

My concern is that his approval rating, though stuck in the high 30s and low 40s, is not low enough for him to feel as if he can’t do whatever he wants, because that base in the Republican Party, the MAGA movement, hasn’t budged.

Druyan:

Great point, great point, Matthew.

Rozsa:

Because if him sending an angry mob to murder them on January 6th, 2021 wasn’t going to sway them, nothing will.

Druyan:

Great point, great point, Matthew. And I know a lot of people whom I respect who feel the way you do, so my mind is open. But I have to say that what’s terrifying is when the mob—when the country becomes the mob—when the country, such as what happened in Germany, is really like, yeah, let’s do this, you know?

And I don’t think—I really feel like the American people are coming to the opinion that he is deluded. Now, of course, it could be that the algorithm is feeding me stuff that I want to hear. I’m sure that’s true to an extent. But you can feel—I feel, and others like Robert Reich—various people have been writing in the last month saying, we feel that sea change. We feel that turning away from this kind of madness.

Rozsa:

And I hope you’re right. But I disagree only because I think, from the perspective of Trump and his supporters, they only need each other, even if it’s two-fifths of the country waging war against the other three-fifths. If that two-fifths can control the military and the courts, if they can control the media—which Trump is trying to do through Larry and David Ellison — and other aspects through which we obtain information, like online search engines — then the three-fifths be damned. The two-fifths will just cudgel us into submission. That might be the way they look at it.

Druyan:

I don’t know. I’m sure you’ve been to the demonstrations recently, and in places—really unlikely places. I’m not talking about New York and Boston, I’m talking about throughout the country. And I feel like, as long as people feel that the economy is not serving them—and they’re feeling it more and more keenly all the time—the likelihood that they will be blessing this man and his monstrous government becomes smaller and smaller.

And if you believe that there are underlying economic forces that determine history, then I think there’s reason to hope. The inequities in American society were always great, but there was a huge middle class 50 or 40 years ago that had rising expectations of what the lives of their children and grandchildren would be. That’s not true anymore. Not only that, but the inequities between people who work for a living and the people who have incomprehensible amounts of money—who live in a completely different existence—that contrast has become much starker.

Rozsa:

But Trump and the media are clever at redirecting that anger toward immigrants or trans people or people of color or Jews or women or the liberal media. They are very skilled at taking legitimate economic grievances and transferring them toward illegitimate explanations that usually are rooted in hate and always serve their economic bottom line.

Druyan:

And absolutely true. You’re totally right. They have been very skilled, and we have not been as skilled in conveying our messages. Absolutely right. But I think we’re learning—our learning curve is—

Rozsa:

I don’t think we should blame ourselves for not being skilled. I think the problem is that we don’t have money. Dr. Richard Wolff, the founder of this nonprofit and one of my personal heroes, has said many times that the problem the left has is that our argument ultimately is not as profitable for the people in power as the arguments of the right. It is a serious structural flaw. And it’s not something that’s a moral problem or even a strategic problem. It’s just that we are arguing that the rich should have less, and the right is arguing that the rich should have more. Which one do you think is going to get more money from the rich? That’s the basic problem.

Druyan:

Well, as long as we’re depending on the rich, it’s not going to go well for us. Yes. We can’t depend on them, and that’s something that we have to be responsible for. We have to—I think we do have to sharpen our message, and I think we have to be absolutely vigilant and willing to schlep anywhere and do whatever we are called upon to do to say, no, not in our name. No, we will not. This is not acceptable. We have to do that. And my—

Rozsa:

And my concern is that—and this is the basic structural problem with capitalism—is that even when you had people initially opposing Trump from the rich who run the world, even when you had the Jeff Bezoses and the Mark Zuckerbergs talking a big game about their support for diversity and their opposition to fascism, once they started to sense that Trump might actually prevail, they quickly turned coat. And now Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are sucking up to him like puppies on a wolf’s teets.

Druyan:

And—and may I say, I never put my faith in those people. And we can’t do that.

Rozsa:

I don’t put my faith in them, but they control our lives whether we want them to or not.

Druyan:

We can’t be surprised that whatever pretense of equity they held, they dropped as soon as Trump became president. I mean, that is who they are.

And—but that is fundamentally why the left loses. It’s not about money—it’s that there’s not enough money, and there never will be enough money for that. There’s no limit. There’s never enough. And on the tiny pale blue dot that we live on, with finite resources, there’s no way that our current system can ever—

And by the way, I’m not saying that I know of another system that’s doing this—but what is called for, what we need, is a kind of thinking on timescales that no capitalist or communist or socialist society has ever been able to develop.

Rozsa:

See, that’s brilliant. Because that is brilliant.

Druyan:

And that’s the problem. You see, if we were thinking on the timescales of science—science is talking to us about 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution; the history of our planet and the history of life, four-and-a-half billion years, five billion years. And all of us—you, me, everyone—are alive because of an unbroken chain of life that goes back to the first couple of hundred million years of the existence of this planet.

And this is what we have to begin to keep sacred and to believe is our sacred duty as links in that chain for this moment: to protect this magnificent birthright that we’re all a part of. And there has not been a human society since perhaps the days of the hunter-gatherers that has internalized that preciousness.

And the fact is that the mentality of the super-rich—and I’m not talking about how they think or what they say, I don’t know them—I’m talking about how they live and how they treat the resources that really belong to all of us. And that’s the heartbreak: that people as foolish and selfish as they are could despoil, could ruin this legacy of which we are a part.

Rozsa:

I think you just put that so beautifully that any follow-up I might say will not live up to what you just uttered. That was amazing. Thank you.

It reminds me of why I fell in love with the TV show Cosmos. And by the way—oh, great—I’m not sure if you noticed this on my bookshelf. And also my mom, who is friends with your friend Stu Bossert and made this interview happen—hi, Mom— she saw this when it was in theaters with me and got verklempt when the words “For Carl” appeared at the end. And at that moment, I could see—I could hear—the voice of Cosmos in what you just said.

Druyan:

Well, I am perpetually verklempt because of the great goodness and beauty of Carl Sagan, and because of my unbelievable good fortune to have had 20 years with him and two kids. And yeah—this was a man who was up close so much more remarkable than he even seemed from afar.

There’s so much to talk about. You know, this was a mensch through and through. And I think the reason people still love him nearly 30 years after his death is because that goodness emanated from him. You could sense it. And watching Cosmos or reading Contact or any of the books that he wrote or that we wrote together—he was magnificent. And I can never wrap my head around how lucky I was to know him.

Rozsa:

He changed millions, or perhaps even billions and billions, of lives. And he also, in my opinion, was—in a secular sense—a prophet. And I’m not using the word prophet lightly.

Let me quote “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”:

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge even to ourselves that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

Now, I agree with everything you’ve said about the importance of science and humanism and the—your belief in the majority being decent. But my concern is that that large minority, which by your own husband’s words has been bamboozled, will never admit that they’re wrong for exactly the reasons that he wrote.

Druyan:

Some of them will not. Some of them are lost causes for us because they cannot be touched. And the reasons for that are probably complex and multi-leveled, but most people, I think, do know what’s right and what’s wrong. And I believe in small-d democracy truly. And you can’t hold that belief if you don’t have a deep respect for humanity.

Rozsa:

I agree with that as well. I’m also going to quote another passage that your husband wrote, which speaks to the future. He said in that same book, “The Demon-Haunted World,” “the dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media. The 30-second soundbites, now down to 10 seconds or less [and imagine what he would’ve thought of TikTok and YouTube], owest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Druyan:

Celebration of ignorance. Exactly.

Rozsa:

That is, and I’m going to bring this full circle to the issue of women’s reproductive rights. The MAGA movement’s approach to it—celebrating ignorance of women’s biology, celebrating ignorance about the procedures and about the medications that are used, celebrating ignorance about the fact that women are just as capable as men in STEM fields, are just as capable as men in the military, are in fact the equal of men. It’s—they have to deny all of the science. And in my mind, women are being very much hurt by this. And I’m curious, when you and Carl wrote that essay for Parade Magazine in 1990, was this the world that you feared would happen if Roe v. Wade was overturned?

Druyan:

Yes, we did. But I have to say, we did not have an inkling of how bad it would be. You know, I am a complete materialist rationalist. I don’t have a mystical bone in my body except for maybe fortune cookies. I love fortunes. We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what would happen now. And I’ve often thought if I ever saw Carl again, and I have no expectation that I will, but how would I tell him what has happened in the last 30 years? It would be heartbreaking. I think he would cry. And it makes me cry when I think of how far we came from our dream, our shining moment, and how far this administration has pushed us backwards.

And my comfort here is that history does not move in a straight line. It just doesn’t. It’s not like an upward trajectory. It’s a pendulum. And the pendulum was swinging our way for many years. Not all the way, not as far as I would like to go. But compared to the ‘50s, as I said earlier, there was a sense of a growing enlightenment. And what Trump has done from the moment he walked on the national stage, he has pushed us as far back as he possibly could. And it’s really nauseating. It’s horrifying. And I just have this sense that from now on, we are going to see his diminished capacity, the fact that he is feeble, the fact that he is inarticulate, the fact that he tells such crazy lies every time he speaks, where “I’m gonna get you a thousand percent reduction in prices,” just like an infant, like a child. And I feel like after a while this gets old and people become immune to it because they’ve heard it so many times.

Rozsa:

I am—you and I agree philosophically, but I am far more cynical about human nature than you. I think that might be where we are disagreeing. And the reason I am so cynical is because I am oversaturated every day with the—the garbage pumped out by the pro-Trump media. And then I hear people regurgitate that garbage onto me and try to pass it off as filet mignon. Everywhere I turn. I live in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. It’s inescapable. Where do you live?

Druyan:

I live in upstate New York and in a fairly isolated rural area, although we have a couple of universities nearby, but still—

Rozsa:

Is Trump beloved there?

Druyan:

No, hated everywhere I go. Everywhere. Everywhere. In fact, the last No Kings demonstration, there were so many people in the demonstration, you could not get downtown. You could not, because every street was so choked with people demonstrating.

Rozsa:

And I—I have met not one, not two, but three people—one of them a friend, and the other two people I’ve just interacted with in the course of casual conversations—who have specifically said that they love Trump because of what he did to reverse abortion rights. Everything else aside. They don’t care because he overturned abortion rights. They are for him.

Druyan:

Okay, so they have—they’ve focused on one particular issue, which is interesting, I have to say, because there are so many other pressing issues that are important, and if you say to them, well, how do you feel about—about us going to war with Denmark over Greenland? Do they say, ‘Yeah, let’s go’?

Rozsa:

They’ll say that there’s nothing worse than murdering babies. And when I argue that they’re not babies, and I will cite your 1990 Parade Magazine editorial, which makes a very persuasive argument that consciousness in every meaningful sense doesn’t exist until at the earliest the beginning of the third trimester, they’ll say, “Nope, life begins at conception. You’ll never convince me otherwise.” And that’s where the conversation ends.

Druyan:

Well, they should be—as we said in our article—they should be militant anti-masturbation. They should really take a stand because why wait to—

Rozsa:

But for most of these men, if they couldn’t masturbate, they’d never have any sexual experience at all.

Druyan:

Okay, well, fair enough. Well, we don’t want them then. They would really be grumpy [laugh]. If you think they’re bad now, they would be so grumpy. So let’s not—let’s not do that to them. But still, I mean, what can you say? These are people who are against SNAP, who are against early childhood development specialists. They’re against nutrition for the children of the underserved. How do they rationalize this? They never understand. It’s almost as if as soon as you’re born, you’re on your own [laugh].

Rozsa:

I think the way they rationalize it—to bring it full circle—is it’s about controlling and hating women. They—

Druyan:

Okay, but they don’t rationalize it that way. We do, we understand it to be that, but they don’t rationalize it that way.

Rozsa:

See, and maybe I’m a little more cynical. Maybe I’m the person who believes that secretly they are very conscious about what they’re doing, and everything they say publicly is deliberate nonsense. Again, that’s a cynical way of looking at it. But I think that they’re liars. And you know why I think that? Because Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett all appeared before Congress and swore that they had no intention of overturning Roe v. Wade. So I believe they are deliberate malicious liars.

Druyan:

They—no question. I’m with you on that, Matthew. A hundred percent. They—what their conduct is indefensible. And I don’t understand why the Senate holds the hearings and has people swear that they’re going to tell the truth. And when they demonstrably lie just to get their what they want, I don’t understand why they’re never held accountable.

But this is the problem. And I—I felt that this began, there’ve always been these contending forces of enlightenment in my view and reaction. And a kind of backwardness, those forces have always existed. But it feels to me as if, when it was clear that there would never be any consequences for any of the high crimes—of someone like George Bush going to war on a lie affecting countless lives, killing people, hundreds of thousands of people died, and there was never any consequence for him when we all knew—I was in New York with 700,000 other people demonstrating, and everyone was holding signs before we went to war — there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And when it proved to be the case, there was not any consequence for this man.

And I believe that if it’s so clear to us that Trump can conduct himself the way he did on January 6th, and instead of being punished for it, he can be given the highest reward in the land. It says to me that that’s our—the danger we’re up against is there is no consequence for a certain class of people in this society. And that’s wicked. And not only that, even if you don’t think it’s wicked, it’s counterproductive and it’s a danger to our future.

Rozsa:

I agree. And on that note, I’m going to close with my final question. Is there anything important you would like to say about this subject? We’ve discussed women’s reproductive rights and the war on science that I haven’t given you a chance to say with the questions I’ve raised so far.

Druyan:

I’ll leave this, and this is my very subjective opinion, which I cannot in any way back up with any kind of rock solid data. But just based on the women I know—we are going to get those rights back. And we are not going to stop until we do because we know what’s right. And we’ve looked at this deep and very profound question of whether or not it’s possible to be both pro-choice and pro-life. And it is possible, but to be one without the other is wrong. And we’re living in a situation where rights—this is very rarely happened in American history, it did during Reconstruction, another hideous period in American history, and it is now that we have rolled back hard fought rights that we won, legally.

We’re going to get them back. And I know the women I know are not going to stop until we do. And that’s true of many of the men I know too.

Rozsa:

I’m one of the people who is part of the Resistance and will fight to get those rights back. I hope that my cynicism about the cruelty of the two-fifths who still support Trump is misplaced.

Druyan:

Well, whoever is right or wrong about this situation, I want you to know what a stimulating experience it was for me to be talking with you. I’m so happy we did this, and, it’s an honor and I hope you get another chance someday to have more opportunities.

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Back Seat Socialism

Back Seat Socialism is a column by Matthew Rozsa, who has been a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently, he is writing a book for Beacon Press, “Neurosocialism,” which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.