Liberating Motherhood

The witch trials did not target women—at least not explicitly. Yet somehow it was almost all women being executed and abused. This includes little girls. The witch trials are a case study in how the law can be gender-neutral, while still being highly gendered. 
In this podcast episode, I speak with Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell, creators of the Witches of Scotland podcast, about their new book, How to Kill a Witch. The book draws parallels between the witch trials and today, offering lessons that have resonated for hundreds of years. More than being a lesson in history, though, this book shows us that the people executed were actual human beings whose lives and suffering mattered. In this episode we discuss a range of topics, including: 

How authorities justified the witch trials, and what they reveal about collective thinking, gender bias, and what we are willing to do to people we dehumanize. 

The parallels between the witch trials and how we treat women today. 

Whether something similar to the witch trials could happen again. 

The endless horror of interacting with men in public. 

Parallels between the witch trials and the public depiction of Lindsay Clancy.

How being “crazy” is the new witch allegation against women. 

The dynamics of victim blaming.

False confessions, and why they continue to happen today.

It’s crucial for us to acknowledge that this kind of frenzy isn’t just for bad or crazy people. It’s something we can all get swept up in—and on a smaller scale, most of us have been swept up in harmful groupthink, dehumanization, and vilification. 
It’s easy for us to view abusers as certain kinds of people, or abusive behavior stemming only from certain ideologies. But the truth is that abuse only ever comes from the idea that certain behaviors can justify abusive treatment. And perhaps the crucial lesson of the witch trials is this: as soon as you are willing to justify abuse of even one person, it’s much easier to convince you to abuse just about anyone. 
About Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi

Zoe Venditozzi grew up in North East Fife in Scotland and attended the University of Glasgow to study English. Following stints as letters editor at The People's Friend and selling answer phones at BT, Zoe qualified as an English teacher in New Zealand in 1999. 
Shortly after she moved back to Scotland where she started a family, worked in various schools and gained a Masters in Writing from the University of Dundee. After publishing her debut novel, "Anywhere's Better Than Here", Zoe kept teaching (in lots of settings including schools, universities, museums, libraries, children's homes and on the HMS Unicorn) and also became a writer in residence at Roxburgh House in Aberdeen and Reader in Residence for Dundee Libraries. 
Zoe joined Claire Mitchell KC on the Witches of Scotland campaign in 2020 and has co hosted 70+ podcasts episodes of the same name. Since then, Claire and Zoe have worked hard to redress the historical wrong of thousands of people being accused and many executed, for being witches. Claire and Zoe's book, "How to Kill a Witch - a Guide for the Patriarchy" will be published in May 2025. Zoe still writes fiction and is particulary interested in death, psychic phenomena and the horrors of womanhood.
Claire Mitchell has an honours degree in law from the University of Glasgow. She was a solicitor in private practice from 1996 and was called at the Bar in 2003. She became a Queen’s Counsel (QC, now KC) in 2019. She was President of the Scottish Criminal Bar Association from 2016 to 2018.
Mitchell leads the ‘Witches of Scotland’ campaign with Zoe Venditozzi to seek posthumous justice for women historically convicted and executed as witches in Scotland. The campaign used social media to reach the public and a petition to the Scottish Parliament as a way to influence policy makers.
The campaign has three goals: a pardon for those convicted, a formal apology from the Scottish government, and a national memorial. Mitchell hopes that laws used to dispense historic pardons can be used in these cases, as they have been done for the people in Salem, Massachusetts. 
Zoe and Claire are the authors of How to Kill a Witch. They also host the popular Witches of Scotland podcast. 
Zoe and Claire’s book, as well as all books I talk about on the podcast, are available at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop. The LM Bookshop also offers a vast range of book recommendations in numerous categories.

Right wing opponents of women’s rights and bodily autonomy cannot win on the facts, so they’ve decided to create a fact-free world. And sadly, they’re winning the battle. Even media coverage of abortion often contains errors, and many of us have mistaken beliefs and ideas about pregnancy termination, even if we identify as pro-choice. 
Ushma Upadhyay, an abortion researcher, joined the podcast to discuss common misconceptions about abortion, as well as what the research actually reveals. Some of the topics we cover include: 

Research on the benefits of access to abortion, and common misconceptions about abortion. 

The increasingly important role of telehealth abortion, particularly as anti-choice terrorists become more aggressive and dangerous.

The far-reaching effects of abortion stigma, and the notion of abortion as something other people (not people like you) do. 

The Turnaway Study, which compares what happens to women denied abortions to women who go through with their abortions. 

Advancing New Standards of Reproductive Health, the organization with which Dr. Upadhyay works, publishes a voluminous quantity of data on abortion and reproductive health. Find direct links to some of Dr. Upadhyay’s work here. 
For almost a decade, I wrote a weekly column on abortion and reproductive justice. Most weeks, the column focused on new scientific research. It’s still a treasure trove of useful data and analysis. Find it here. 
About Ushma Upadhyay
Ushma Upadhyay, PhD, MPH is a public health scientist trained in epidemiology and demography. She is in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, & Reproductive Sciences and is also core faculty of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH).
Dr. Upadhyay was born and raised near Boston, Massachusetts. As a person of South Asian descent, primarily raised by her mother who immigrated to the U.S. from Tanzania, she is drawn to reproductive health from a social justice perspective.
Dr. Upadhyay has expertise in abortion safety, abortion access in the U.S., medication abortion, and state-level abortion restrictions. She was Principal Investigator of the landmark California Home Abortion by Telehealth study (CHAT), which examined the safety, effectiveness, and acceptability of telehealth for abortion. Currently, she is the Principal Investigator of the REACH study, which aims to understand the intersections of preferences and access in abortion care. She is also leading a study on interest in a late period pill.
Gender and health justice have also been a central focus of Dr. Upadhyay's work. She has developed and validated the Reproductive Autonomy Scale and the Sexual and Reproductive Empowerment Scale for Adolescents and Young Adults, both of which researchers can use to quantitatively measure people’s power in matters related to contraceptive use, pregnancy, and abortion.
She earned a BA in Public Communication and International Studies from American University, her MPH from Columbia University, and her PhD from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Why is having a child so increasingly out of reach, economically, socially, and emotionally? And for those who choose to have children, why does the burden feel so massive? 
Political realities influence our most intimate of choices, whether we want them to or not. Journalist Anna Louie Sussman is interested in how, when, and why people become parents, and in the political decisions that affect our experiences of parenthood. 
In her new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, she traces the factors that make parenthood so difficult through the stories of several people weighing the choice to become a parent. 
We cover a lot of ground in this interview, including:

How economic uncertainty puts parenthood out of reach for so many. This is a political choice, not an inevitability. So why is it the one we make? 

Whether parenting really is harder now than it was a generation or two ago. 

The shame of struggling in a culture that makes parenting feel impossible. 

Anti-child bias, its role in cultural life, and how child-free spaces exclude mothers and therefore women. 

How motherhood as an identity so often undermines everything else women do. 

The sickness of busyness: both the display and performance of busyness as a status symbol, and also “greedy jobs” that force us to be busy just to remain afloat. 

How the pressure to earn money turns our closest relationships into financial commodities, and forces us to put a dollar value on everything we do.

As always, you can find Anna’s book, and all books I recommend on the podcast, in the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop. 
About Anna Louie Sussman
Anna Louie Sussman is a journalist reporting on gender, economics, health, and reproduction, and a contributing Opinion writer at The New York Times. She is the author of the book “Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty,” which looks at the challenges people face in starting and growing their families. It builds off her New York Times Sunday Review cover story, “The End of Babies,” and was published in September 2026 by Dey Street Books.
Her first story, an engrossing account of the hunt for the perfect prom dress, appeared in Teen Vogue circa 1999. A decade later, she was reporting from the Middle East on women’s lives, and in 2011, became the senior writer and editor of Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s Women in the World Foundation.
Since then, she has reported extensively on finance and the economy, covering the shipping and energy industries for Reuters, and economics and the labor market for The Wall Street Journal. She researched and helped write “Fast Forward,” a book on how to advance women and girls in the global economy, with a foreword by Hillary Clinton.
She has interviewed Thomas Piketty about income inequality, heard a Yemeni imam justify contraceptive use with Quranic citations, and gotten Jeff Koons to explain why artists should embrace the market. She has reported on Polish women who can’t access their own frozen embryos, how abortion politics and the gruesome history of medical experimentation conspired to exclude pregnant people from clinical trials, and the brutal economics of egg freezing.
She has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, residencies, and awards, including from the Logan Nonfiction Program, MacDowell, the Fetisov Journalism Awards, the Kavli Science Journalism Awards, the Hambidge Center, the Greater Good Science Center, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the DeGroot Foundation, and others. She was a member of the 2022 Class of New America Fellows, the 2024 cohort of Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellows, and an Omidyar Network Reporter in Residence in the fall of 2024.
She has reported from two dozen countries in the Middle East, South America, Europe, Asia, and North America. She lived and worked for five years in the Middle East, spending time in Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Damascus, Tunis, Rabat, and Sana’a. She was born and raised in New York, enjoys reading and sewing, and was the parent of one outrageously wonderful dog, Stewie. She lives with her daughter in New York.

For centuries, our ethics—and especially our bioethics—have left out the most marginalized, treating white men and other powerful groups as the default and the norm. 
Wylin Wilson, a chaplain, former death doula, and ethics professor at Duke, seeks to change this. She writes about how we must center the powerless in our bioethics, and what we must do to ensure that systems of care serve them. Because when we build systems that better serve the oppressed, we build systems that better serve us all. 
When I began planning my interview with Wylin, I anticipated talking mostly about our crumbling health system, and how we build something better from the ashes. We did into this quite a bit. 
But early in our interview, I realized Wylin had deep wisdom on another subject of great importance: how we can actually live our values as feminists, activists, anti-racist advocates, and people aspiring to do better. 
I have often remarked that it’s very easy to be a good person until you encounter other people. And then, you have to deal with the mess of other humans. Grappling with the imperfections, annoyances, and outright cruelty of others enables us to flex our own decency muscles. It tests our values. 
This test of values is, I think, where many of us falter. We lash out at people for disagreeing with us. We slot people into “good” and “bad,” and justify abuse of the bad. We replicate the very norms supremacy culture has taught us—and we label that replication feminism or activism. I fight these own tendencies in myself, and have often struggled with how to work through impulsive harmful acts. 
Wylin has much to say about the emotions, the unconscious biases, the lifetime of lessons that cause us to make these harmful decisions. Her work on love as a practice, as a skill, is revelatory to me. We can get, do, and be better, but first we must acknowledge where we are getting things wrong, then flex our muscles of decency and love. 
We dig deeply into how we can be the people we aspire to be, but also so much more. In this podcast, we talk about a wide range of topics, including:

How we can learn to better navigate difficult interactions and treat all people in a way that reflects our aspirational values. 

Love as a skill, and kindness to others as a practice we can get better at. 

Racism in medicine and healthcare. 

Why it is so difficult to acknowledge your own biases, and how we can push through our resistance to examining our own shortcomings. 

Why healthcare providers are often resistant to acknowledging the shortcomings of the medical system, and what needs to happen for that to change. 

Grief as a gift that connects us to something deeper, and to our shared humanity. 

Wylin’s “ministry of presence”—the importance of being fully present with another human being. 

As always, you can find Wylin’s work, as well as the work of everyone featured on the podcast, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop. 
About Wylin Wilson
Wylin D. Wilson is Associate Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School where she teaches Womanist Bioethics within the Theology Medicine and Culture program. She is author of Economic Ethics and the Black Church and Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women’s Health.
Learn more about Wylin at her website.

When women are overloaded with the endless burdens of household labor, we tell them to go on strike or lower their expectations. But this advice pretends that women are arbitrarily creating work for ourselves, and that if we just hung fewer wreaths or stopped making cookie dough from scratch, everything would be better. 
This trivializes women’s labor, and ignores the reality: Women have become the social safety net, doing without pay and without acknowledgment all of the tasks our communities refuse to acknowledge and our governments refuse to fund. 
It’s not an accident that women are overwhelmed. In the absence of a real social safety net, the obligations don’t disappear. Kids still need support and advocacy; families still require work. And that work falls almost entirely to women. 
In this episode, sociologist Jess Calarco and I talk about: 

How we have transformed political obligations into individual ones, and why we pretend political failings are individual shortcomings. 

How we transformed women into an individual and undervalued social safety net. 

Why the caregiving never really ends, and how it extends well beyond child care. 

The interventions that might finally fix this. 

I absolutely love Jess, and I hope you’ll buy her book, Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. You can find her book, all books recommended on the podcast, and an assortment of reading lists on the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop page. 
About Jess Calarco
Dr. Jessica Calarco is a professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an expert on inequalities in family life and education, and the author of four books, including Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.

Calarco’s latest book, Holding It Together (Portfolio/Penguin, 2024), reveals how we force women to be America’s social safety net, what the weight of that responsibility is doing to women, and why so many Americans believe the myth that we’re doing just fine. The book combines historical and policy analyses with original survey data and vivid portraits drawn from more than 400 hours of interviews with families from a wide range of backgrounds.
Calarco’s first book, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (Oxford, 2018), received the Pierre Bourdieu Award for best book in the Sociology of Education. Her book Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research (University of California, 2022) is coauthored with Sociologist Mario Luis Small, and won the Outstanding Publication Award for best book in Methodology. Calarco is also the author of A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum.
As an active public scholar and the recipient of numerous early career and teaching awards, Calarco strives to make sociological insights accessible and relevant to broad audiences. She not only publishes in leading sociology and interdisciplinary journals but also writes for high-profile media outlets—including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Inside Higher Ed, CNN, and NBC News—and offers workshops related to her research and teaching, including workshops aimed at promoting equity and empathy in college and graduate education.
Calarco received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Sociology and Education from Brown University.