Toxic chemicals, abortion rights, and a Nazi-era train law

19 Jun

Depending on where you are in Europe, your right to a safe abortion — and reproductive care in general — can vary dramatically. This week, we speak to pioneering abortion activist Rebecca Gomperts about why she's hopeful that we can fight back against these inequalities as well as crackdowns on abortion access in other parts of the world. We're also talking about a rebel campaign in Germany to defeat a draconian Nazi-era law, and some disturbing research into the stuff that gets sprayed all over your fruit and vegetables.

Note: We updated this episode's audio on June 20, 2025. The original version incorrectly stated that glyphosate is sprayed directly on many European crops, which is not the case.

You can find out more about Women on Waves here and Women on Web here. Read about the mifepristone study here.

Inspiration Station recommendations:

Secrets We Keep (Reservatet)
The Outlaw Ocean Podcast
Vessel, a 2014 documentary about Women on Waves
A Sense of Quietness, Eleanor McDowall's audio documentary about abortion in Ireland
Tending Grief by Camille Sapara Barton

Other resources for this episode:

'Carcinogenic effects of long-term exposure from prenatal life to glyphosate and glyphosate-based herbicides in Sprague–Dawley rats' - Environmental Health, June 10, 2025
'Revealed: Monsanto’s secret funding for weedkiller studies' - The Guardian, March 12, 2020
'Europe likely to miss most green targets for 2030' - Politico Europe, February 20, 2025
'EWG’s 2025 Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce' (USA) - Environmental Working Group, June 11, 2025

Producers

Morgan Childs and Wojciech Oleksiak

Mixing and mastering

Wojciech Oleksiak

Music

Jim Barne and Mariska Martina

KATY LEE:
Welcome to another episode of the Europeans, your delicious weekly smorgasbord of continental bits and bobs, some of them sweet, some of them salty, all of them fresh. I thought I'd do a food themed intro this week. Can you tell that I am very pregnant and very hungry?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I can. The smorgasbord is back.

KATY LEE:
It's back.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I feel like smorgasbord is like your semi-regular go to in these intros of the show.

KATY LEE:
Would you like me to say charcuterie board, tapas?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Oh, also nice.

KATY LEE:
Yeah, those are other options. Sorry, I should, I should shake it up a bit. But well, I haven't got much time to do that because this is my last week before I head off on maternity leave listeners.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Don't leave me!

KATY LEE:
I'm afraid I have to because I have to pop a baby out of my body. But I will be back later in the autumn. And in the meantime, everyone's in very capable hands.

Dominic is going to be joined by Katz and Wojciech until then, and maybe another surprise guest host or two. Stay tuned. And you'll also be hearing my voice at least once when I'm away, I hope, because there are some pre-recorded bits and bobs that are hopefully going to be airing in the coming weeks.

But yeah, I'm torn between being very sad that this is my last time podcasting for a while and also feeling very relieved that this is my last week at work because I would describe my current status as over-relaxed. Like, I haven't really done anything to prepare for this baby's arrival. It's kind of worrying. Like I haven't sorted his clothes out. I've done nothing.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Well, I appreciate that you've spent all your spare time preparing for the fact that you're leaving this podcast because I actually feel unlike during your first pregnancy, this time we're quite well prepared.

KATY LEE:
Very well prepared.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Famous last words. But who knows what Europe is going to look like when you're back. I mean, there's so much that's happened even in just this past week, not only in Europe, but in the world.

Some of that we're going to talk about now, some of that we're not going to talk about because I guess, yeah, there's enough being said about Iran and Israel already. It does seem that there are a lot of people riled up in Europe at the moment. A lot of Europeans have been taking to the streets to protest. There were these huge red line protests in the Netherlands and Belgium against Israel's actions in Gaza the past weekend. Some of the biggest protests we've seen here in the Netherlands anyway, in many years. There were also these protests against over-tourism in Spain, Portugal and Italy. So yeah, summer is hotting up and people are taking to the streets.

And amidst it all, of course, we shouldn't forget that everyone was very busy celebrating the 40th birthday of the Schengen area.

KATY LEE:
Oh, yeah.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
At the end of last week.

KATY LEE:
Happy birthday, Schengen.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah.

KATY LEE:
What did you do to celebrate?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
What did I do?

KATY LEE:
Did you cross a border?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
No, I didn't cross any borders, actually. If you don't know what Schengen is, by the way, it's that 4.5 million square kilometers of Europe that abolished border controls 40 years ago and now awkwardly is starting to bring them back.

KATY LEE:
Awkward.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Happy birthday.

KATY LEE:
We're having a midlife crisis at 40. We are. Anyway, we're talking about some other stuff this week. What's on the agenda?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yes, we love not talking about the things that are top of the headlines. And later on in the show today, Katy will be joined by our producer Katz Laszlo and they will have a conversation with a European women's rights superstar, the Dutch doctor and founder of Women on Waves, Rebecca Gomperts. Rebecca has dedicated her working life to helping pregnant people terminate pregnancies, even when it's not legally possible in their home country. Recent research from Exporting Abortion suggests that over 5,000 Europeans have to cross borders each year in order to access abortions.

Rebecca is a big deal. She was even on Time magazine's list of the most influential 100 people in 2020. So keep listening to hear this broad ranging discussion about abortion rights and reproductive health care later on in the show. But first, it's time for Good Week, Bad Week.

[MUSIC]

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Let's start with Bad Week. Who's had a bad week, Katy?

KATY LEE:
Well, this week's Bad Week is brought to you in collaboration with our radio friends at Euranet Plus. And before I go any further, if you’re listening to this on Friday or afterwards, you’re actually listening to a corrected version of this Bad Week, because it turns out I said a couple of things that were inaccurate, which I’m very sorry about. And here at The Europeans we take misinformation really seriously. So what you’re listening to right now is the corrected version, with many thanks to listener Fabienne, she’s an agronomist who has actually studied what I’m about to talk about. So thank you so much to Fabienne for helping me to fix this. So, it’s been a bad week for those of us that eat industrially produced fruits and vegetables, which unfortunately is the vast majority of us. And that is because of a pretty damning new scientific study into the links between the chemical glyphosate and cancer. This study was done by a load of scientists from across Europe and the US, but it's been led from Italy.

And before I go any further, can I just ask, do people talk about glyphosate much in the Netherlands? Because I feel like there's been loads in the French news about this chemical in recent years. But if I say glyphosate to a British friend, there's a decent chance they would just look at me blankly and have no idea what I was talking about. Do you know what it is? And does it get talked about over there in the Dutch-speaking world?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I think it does get talked about quite a lot here because also there's so much fruit and vegetable farming in the Netherlands in all these huge greenhouses. But yeah, I honestly don't know so much about it. I mean, it's the chemical that's used in Roundup, right?

KATY LEE:
Yes. So glyphosate is the most widely used weed killer in the world. And so, it is used as a weedkiller by the farmers who grow a lot of the fruit and veg that you buy in the supermarket. It’s not used directly on the fruit and veg, I should clarify, because it does kill most plants. It can only be sprayed directly on a few specific crops that are genetically modified to be resistant to it. Now, we don’t actually have much in the way of genetically modified crops here in Europe, there are major legal restrictions on that, but we do in some cases allow the import of genetically modified crops. So if you eat, like, genetically modified cereals from abroad, it’s possible that they’ve come into direct contact with glyphosate. But if you bite into an apple that has been grown here in Europe, it won’t have been sprayed with glyphosate, but it is possible that the farmer who grew it has used it in the field.

Now, funnily enough, glyphosate was actually patented in the 1960s as a chemical that could be used to clean pipes with. But then in the 70s, the US chemical company Monsanto realized that this stuff worked really well as a weed killer. And they marketed it indeed under a brand name that you might be familiar with if you are a home gardener. And that brand name is Roundup.

Pretty quickly glyphosate took over the world. Its use has become incredibly widespread over the last half century or so, not just in the form of Roundup, but also in other brands. It is just everywhere. You know, this stuff is very effective at killing unwanted plants. It's relatively cheap. So the use of this chemical became a really major factor in how the modern world ended up with such cheap, industrially produced fruit and veg.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
And it's a pretty controversial chemical, right?

KATY LEE:
Yes, that is putting it mildly. And that is primarily because over the years, there has been mounting scientific research suggesting that exposure to glyphosate increases your risk of developing various forms of cancer. Now, that is a claim, of course, that the very powerful chemicals companies that produce glyphosate have denied vigorously.

Originally, it was Monsanto that did all of that kind of lobbying work. And then in 2018, Monsanto got bought by a German company called Bayer. Bayer is an absolutely huge company. It notably makes Alka-Seltzer and aspirin, loads of other medicines and health products. Its annual revenues are in the region of $50 billion. It is an insanely big company.

And when it comes to these weed killers that it makes, Bayer has a lot of incentives to push back against the body of evidence that glyphosate causes cancer. And that is primarily because it is desperately trying to reduce its legal bills. Bayer has already had to pay out something like 10 billion euros in lawsuits brought successfully by people who have argued that they got cancer because of exposure to glyphosate. And reportedly, there are something like 67,000 lawsuits pending over Roundup. So the company's legal bills over this product are just going up and up and up.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
But I don't understand, like, why do they still keep making it if they keep being sued successfully by people who say they got cancer because of this product?

KATY LEE:
Yeah, it's a really good question. I guess the answer has to be that glyphosate-based weed killers are still very profitable, right? They are sold in such high volume still around the world that for now, it is still worth all the effort, all of the legal bills, all of the lobbying to keep regulators around the world from banning it.

Just to give you an idea, I had a quick look through Bayer's annual report from last year. And in the last three months of 2024 alone, they sold $615 million worth of glyphosate products. So over the course of the year, these products are bringing in what, like at least a couple of billion?

For now, Bayer are digging in, they are sticking to the fight. And that means that they and the other companies that sell glyphosate-based weed killers, they have a strong incentive to challenge the evidence that these products cause cancer. Now, that is something that the industry has done for years, by either aggressively challenging the studies that have been done, but also very shadily by funding their own research that produces somewhat convenient results that muddy the waters.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
The oldest trick in the book.

KATY LEE:
Oldest trick in the book. Like there is documented evidence of Monsanto secretly funding academics to produce studies that coincidentally ended up arguing that if you banned glyphosate, it would be really bad for, you know, the world farming system and for the environment generally.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Sounds like Monsanto definitely didn't fund this latest study, though.

KATY LEE:
We can be sure of that. Now, I'm not going to suggest that all of the research that does imply a link between glyphosate and cancer has been absolutely perfect. There was notably a study about the glyphosate cancer link that got retracted in 2014 after its design was found to be flawed. And this idea of the evidence being quote-unquote not good enough, that is definitely at the heart of why glyphosate remains the world's most popular legal weed killer. So even though studies have been piling up about cancer links, there has been heated debate about the quality of that evidence and whether it is statistically significant. The industrial lobby has argued very hard that it isn't.

And that is why in 2015 you get this landmark decision by the World Health Organization's own cancer research agency classifying glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans. That would seem to be a pretty big step towards this chemical getting banned, no? If the World Health Organization is saying this.

But then just a few years later there is a study done by the EU's Food Agency and Chemicals Agency and that study finds that there is not enough scientific evidence for a ban. It is interesting to note that the EU report took into account research that had been paid for by the chemicals companies. So make of that what you will.

But anyway, on the basis of that risk assessment the EU very controversially takes a decision in 2023 to reauthorize the use of glyphosate for 10 years. So until 2033. So this chemical is still very much in use across Europe. The law does allow EU member states to ban it on a national level, but no country has actually managed to do that. There are some restrictions from country to country. Here in France, for example, you can't buy Roundup anymore as an individual gardener from a garden center. But you can still buy glyphosate-based products if you are a commercial farmer and you can spray it all over your fields.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
But so, we're talking about it this week because there has been a study that has found decisively that there is a link between this chemical and cancer?

KATY LEE:
Yes. So this study was published last week in the journal Environmental Health and it involved loads of different researchers from both Europe and the US, but it was coordinated by this Italian cancer research body, the Ramazzini Institute, which is based in Bologna. It was a study done on a thousand lab rats over two years—and I'm not going to get into the ethical debate over animal testing here because frankly we could talk about that for hours—but this is the biggest animal study ever done on the link between the use of this chemical and the risk of developing cancer. The rats involved in the study were given various different doses of glyphosate either in its pure form or they were exposed to the most common commercial brands, Roundup here in Europe and Ranger Pro in the US.

But the important thing is that all of the doses that these rats were given were at levels considered by EU regulators to be safe. And all of these rats, no matter what the dose was, all of them had a statistically significantly higher chance of developing a tumor. In all of these groups there were more tumors than in the group of rats that got no glyphosate at all.

So pretty damning. Bayer, it must be said, have already unleashed their lobbying efforts against the study. They have said that it has methodological flaws, but there are numerous scientists who were not involved in the study who have come out in the media and said that it looks solid and, you know, it has a big sample and it shows pretty clearly that there is a higher risk of cancer if you ingest this chemical.

Now, once again, a lot of your supermarket fruit and veg will not have come into direct contact with glyphosate, this chemical might just have been used on the field where it has been grown to kill weeds. But that makes it difficult to know to what extent it’s been contaminated, you know? It depends a lot on how this chemical might have been used in the process. And in general, when it comes to trying to minimise the chemicals and pesticides that we’re actually swallowing, there are a couple of things you can do, you can wash your fruit and veg of course. You can peel it. That will hopefully get rid of most of the pesticide residue.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Well, it depends on the fruit or vegetable, right?

KATY LEE:
Depends on the fruit and veg and it depends on the pesticide as well. Like some pesticides do get absorbed into the flesh of the fruit and veg. You still don't really know if you buy an apple from a supermarket the extent to which it has been penetrated by pesticides. And that's kind of disturbing.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Is there any chance that, like, following the publication of this study glyphosate could get banned in Europe?

KATY LEE:
Possibly. Although any decision is likely to take many years still. The European Chemicals Agency and the Food Safety Agency are going to review this study.

They're actually quite annoyed with these scientists at the Italian Institute because the EU knew that the study was coming. The preliminary results were announced two years ago. And to their credit, the EU agencies tried to get hold of the raw data so that they could start reassessing glyphosate earlier than this.

The scientists said no. We want to wait until the study is complete and has been peer-reviewed and published before we give the regulators the data. Which I guess is fair enough. You know, like, you don't want to give out incomplete data. That's just going to leave you even more open to attack from the Bayer lobbyists if it turns out there was a mistake. But anyway, it now seems like the Italian researchers are pretty much ready to hand that data over so that the EU regulators can look at it again and yeah have a think about whether or not to change the legal status of glyphosate. Because the current situation is that the EU agencies say that there isn't enough evidence that this chemical is dangerous to ban it across Europe.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
There is of course a push in the EU to make more of our farming organic, right? So I wonder maybe all of this evidence about glyphosate is going to encourage us to do that a bit faster?

KATY LEE:
Maybe. I mean we're currently on track to miss our own targets when it comes to going organic. There was this report put out by the European Environment Agency in February about where the EU is on meeting loads of its own environmental targets. Stuff like the speed at which we're reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, how we're doing in setting aside land for biodiversity projects. On both of these things, we are missing the mark, and that includes organic farming. By 2030, 25% of farming across the EU is supposed to be organic. The latest estimates suggest that in 2022 we were at just over 10%. So we're way off track. There's a lot of work to do within the next five years.

And generally you might have noticed that being green has been slipping down the agenda of the European Commission since Ursula von der Leyen and her new team took office at the end of last year. The mood has shifted, right? All of these ambitious environmental measures that really defined von der Leyen's last mandate, they're just not being considered as much of a priority now. We have more of a right-leaning European Parliament. The focus is more on migration as well as stuff like defense and dealing with Trump and Putin and Netanyahu. In some cases environmental legislation in Europe is actually being watered down, which is something I'd love to hear you guys talk about on the podcast over the next few months while I'm away actually. Can you make that happen? Thanks. Giving you some homework.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Give me some homework, yeah.

KATY LEE:
I don't know. I mean in the long term I think we're gonna have to have a conversation here in Europe about whether we think the added risk of getting cancer and potentially other diseases from pesticides, whether we still think the trade-off of having industrially farmed vegetables that are cheap to produce and cheaper on the shelves than they would be otherwise, whether we think that is worth it. But in the more immediate term, I kind of think that if we want to see changes on this, it needs to come from consumers, you know?

It needs to come from people voting with their wallets and saying, you know what, I could buy the cheapest stuff from the supermarket, or I could choose to spend more of my income on organic stuff. And let's be real, like a huge percentage of people will not be in a financial position to do that when they buy the groceries. Life is expensive enough as it is.

And it goes without saying that it sucks that poorer people are in less of a position to make choices that are healthy for them yet again.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, I'm often really shocked about how big the difference is, at least in Dutch supermarkets, between the organic and the non-organic food. Do you buy organic?

KATY LEE:
I'm trying to more and more just because of, like, working on this kind of thing has made me think, you know what, do I have an extra euro to spend on this? Probably.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
One of the things I do is I've looked into like which fruit and vegetables are more likely to contain more pesticides, herbicides or insecticides. And I discovered that strawberries are apparently some of the worst offenders.

KATY LEE:
Oh, I love strawberries.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Strawberries, you should really buy organic.

KATY LEE:
Okay

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Because they just like soak up so much of the nasty stuff. I heard some experts talking about how you should try and prioritize the fruit and vegetables that you eat most regularly. But also, indeed, look at this list of like the most dirty fruits and vegetables. My husband has this thing.

I don't know actually if he came up with it or whether he stole it from someone else. But he says he wishes the organic fruit and vegetables in the supermarket were called normal. And the other non-organic were like described as toxic fruit and vegetables.

That's a good reframing. It shouldn't be framed as a luxury product, organic foods.

KATY LEE:
Yeah.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
It should be the baseline.

KATY LEE:
Yeah. I guess it's because of that price differential, right? And you never really know how much of it is just because producers are like, oh, I can probably squeeze a bit more cash out of this middle class person that has a bit of extra money to care about that.

Like how much of that is priced into the markup? It’s a little bit depressing. But it sounds like you're doing your homework already, so you don't need me to tell you practical things to do. But yeah, just to wrap up this bad week on a practical note, what can you actually do in the face of this growing evidence that our food is being sprayed with stuff that comes with an increased risk of cancer? All of the things that you just said, Dominic. I mean, buy organic or pesticide-free produce if you can afford it. Look into the fruits and vegetables that have a higher risk of like having been penetrated quite deeply by pesticides. Wash your fruit and vegetables, people. And you can peel them too. That is a really good thing to do. But don't peel everything.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah.

KATY LEE:
Because you need some fiber too.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Exactly. Often the skin is the best part, the most nutritious part.

KATY LEE:
As always, The Europeans giving people clear advice! Let's move on from this depressing subject and talk about something else. Who has had a good week?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I'm giving good week to 110 people in Germany who were reportedly freed from prison last week thanks to a Berlin-based project called the Freiheitsfonds or Freedom Fund. They were all people who had been put in prison for not paying for their tickets on public transport.

KATY LEE:
I'm sorry, people get sent to prison in Germany for not paying for their train or bus tickets?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yes. Under section 265A of the German criminal code, anyone who deliberately avoids paying for their ticket on public transport can be punished with a fine or a substitute prison sentence of up to one year if they can't pay that fine.

KATY LEE:
Yeah, my God. I mean, like here in Paris, jumping over the metro barriers so you don't have to pay for a ticket…it’s kind of a national sport. I'm not condoning it as a behavior, but I'm just saying that the attitudes towards it are pretty relaxed.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Same. It's very rare that I go through the metro barriers in Amsterdam and there's not someone trying to squeeze very close to me behind me so that they can get through on my ticket.

KATY LEE:
Yeah.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
But yeah, I'm also not condoning it at all, but I really don't think people should be sent to prison for up to a year for that crime. And neither do the organizers behind the Freedom Fund. And they decided to make June the 12th, which was last week, Freedom Day, and they raised money from kind members of the public to pay the fines for these 110 people so that they could be released from prison.

They described their action as the quote-unquote largest prisoner liberation in German history. I haven't been able to fact check that, I'm afraid, but I'm taking their word for it.

KATY LEE:
I've just been looking up while you were talking what the penalties are here in France for fare dodging. And on the Paris metro, it's like 70 euros as a fine. On the train, if you are a repeat offender, apparently you can actually risk six months in prison in France. Who knew?

I can actually see a news story from 2023 about a guy who got jailed for three months after getting caught 48 times trying to take the train for free and not paying his fines. But from what I can see, that seems to be quite an exceptional case in France. I don't think there are hundreds of people locked up over that here.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
No, I don't think they are. From my research also, it seems like in France that happens very rarely.

KATY LEE:
I mean, yeah, I mean, just generally, it seems like quite archaic to put people in prison for fare dodging.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, well, I mean, this piece of the criminal code is actually quite archaic. It dates back to the Nazi era, back to 1935. And it's also an incredibly unpopular piece of law.

A survey from Infratest that was carried out in 2023 suggested that more than two thirds of Germans think that ticket dodging should be decriminalized. And there was, in fact, a draft bill proposed by the previous coalition government under Olaf Scholz that was planning on doing exactly that, but it didn't get all the way into legislation. So the issue still requires political action from this new German coalition.

The people behind the Freedom Fund hope that this action, Freedom Day, will once again draw attention to what they describe as an inhumane system of substitute imprisonment. The Freedom Fund's actually been around for a while. They've been running since 2021, and the organizers claim to have freed 1,396 prisoners during that time, reducing a total of 254 years of prison time.

KATY LEE:
That is a lot of prison space that has been freed up by these people.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
It really is. And of course, a lot of money was paid via donations to cover these fines, around 1.2 million euros in total. But, and this is quite extraordinary, the organization claimed that all those shortened prison sentences that resulted from their initiative has saved the state 19.8 million euros.

KATY LEE:
Wow, because it costs so much money to keep people in prison.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, it costs the state around 200 euros per day that someone is incarcerated.

KATY LEE:
When you think about all of like the guard costs, as well as like the food and electricity of the prison…I mean, that is such a huge amount of money for the state to be paying to imprison people for something that is essentially a petty crime, right? Like, I mean, locking up rapists and murderers so that other citizens are protected from these dangerous people, sure, that makes a lot of sense to me. But do we really need to pay all of this money to protect society from people who didn't pay for their train tickets?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, I was quite shocked to hear that things can escalate to a prison sentence for these people who can't afford to pay the fine. And yeah, here I should be honest to mention that I actually have personal experience with being caught without a ticket on public transport in Germany.

KATY LEE:
Dominic, naughty.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, I was working in Munich a few years ago and traveling on the S-Bahn and I had picked up what I thought was my weekly travel card. But I was living there for a few months and I picked up the one from the week before.

KATY LEE:
Oh, did you?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
So a group of five rather intimidating men in plain clothes asked to see my ticket and I showed them my invalid ticket. And I got marched out of the train and taken to an ATM to pay them quite a large fine in cash.

KATY LEE:
Oh, my God.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
It was, of course, my mistake. I had bought a ticket, but I didn't have it on me. So I understand I had to pay a fine. But it was really intimidating being circled by these incredibly muscular men and treated like a criminal. So yeah, obviously, I've not been imprisoned. But I have experienced how the German authorities can be pretty heavy-handed if you don't have a ticket on public transport. And yeah. Of course, I understand that to some extent something has to be done to incentivize people to pay for their tickets, but to think that if I had been in a situation where I couldn't afford to pay that fine, that I would have gone to jail, that seems wild to me.

KATY LEE:
And I guess the people who indeed can't afford to pay that fine, or can't afford to pay for public transport in the first place, presumably a lot of the time that will be the poorest, most vulnerable people in society.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, well, exactly. According to Freiheitsfonds, 89% of the people who end up in jail are unemployed. 15% of them don't have a fixed address and 15% of them are suicidal. And yeah, I very much doubt that a jail term is going to help them with future work prospects or with their mental health. And I should mention that even though the legislation to decriminalize this practice hasn't passed in Germany at a federal level, quite a few cities and municipalities have changed the rules already and have decided not to jail people who are caught without a ticket and can't pay the fine. There are various different liberalizing policies in different places like Bonn and Leipzig.

And there is a particularly imaginative policy in Bremen, where people who have repeatedly been caught without a ticket and are affected by poverty, they only have to pay 10 euros a month for their transport ticket and the rest is subsidized by the state. This is, of course, something that costs the state some extra money, but it's much less money than if these people were put in jail for repeatedly not paying for their tickets.

KATY LEE:
Across Germany, how many people end up in jail every year with one of these substitute imprisonments because they couldn't pay their fine?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, I found it quite hard to find a precise number. But according to a report I read in the Frankfurter Rundschau, it's about 9,000 people each year.

KATY LEE:
Wow, it's crazy.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah. And actually, if we stay in Frankfurt for a moment, on Freedom Day in Frankfurt, according to Freiheitsfonds, they paid 1,230 euros to get one man referred to as Herr M released. And because they did that, he was able to attend the birth of his child two days later. So yeah, this grassroots project is really making a difference to people's lives.

KATY LEE:
That's really nice that they were able to do that. What is the likelihood that there will be a national change to this policy in Germany anytime soon?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Well, according to the Office of the Minister of Justice, Stephanie Hubig, who is from the Social Democrats, they told the Frankfurter Rundschau that they want to modernize the criminal law and they are examining which provisions can be eliminated from this section of the criminal code that I mentioned earlier. And it looks like the Greens, the left and the SPD in the Bundestag are all very keen to repeal the offending paragraph in the criminal code. But yeah, we'll have to wait and see when and if the political consensus coagulates into a majority and whether this can all lead to legislative change on the federal level.

KATY LEE:
I'm curious, how does Germany's fare dodging policy compare with other European countries? Like my assumption is that this is outlandishly strict, but is that actually the case?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, I think your hunch is correct. Broadly, it seems very unlikely that you'd be imprisoned for fare dodging in most of the rest of the EU. It can happen in theory in quite a few countries, but it seems like it happens very rarely.

I heard from our producer Morgan, actually, that in the Czech Republic, a lot of people end up with serious problems with debt because they get fines for not having paid for fares and those fines just keep increasing and increasing. Of course, Europe is not only the EU, and in Switzerland, it's actually not so different to Germany. Thousands of people end up in jail there each year due to fare dodging, often because they couldn't pay their fines.

KATY LEE:
Also because the Swiss trains are much nicer.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Maybe.

KATY LEE:
It's like, you should be punished for not paying for this amazing service, which is not true for Deutsche Bahn in Germany.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I don't think we can say that it's more justified because it's a better service. But quite interestingly, fare dodging has been booming in Switzerland in recent years. They have this infamous public list where they publish each year the names of anyone who didn't pay for their transport and got caught.

KATY LEE:
To, like, shame you?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
A name and shame, yeah. And last year, that list contained a million names, which is the highest number of names since the records were begun in 2019.

KATY LEE:
Also kind of defies the point of it, I think.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, true. Well, you could go through and like search for your enemies and be like, found you.

KATY LEE:
Does it really shame you if you're on a list of a million people that all committed the same supposed crime? I would question that if it was like 10 people, maybe.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Sadly, I think it might be a badge of honor for some people. It does, however, seem to tie in with a broader trend in Europe that more and more people are avoiding paying for their transport. And that is often because people can't afford it. We're still in a cost of living crisis in most of Europe. But yeah, it's also important to note that there is research suggesting that not all fare dodging happens out of financial hardship. Some people just think they don't have to contribute. Some people just want to get away with it.

And I read quite an interesting report on a study from Queensland in Australia—not European, forgive me. Anyway, I'll share a link to it in the notes because it's really interesting. And it basically concluded that ticket inspections are not the only answer to stopping fare dodging and the winning public trust. Investing in better service quality, reliability and community engagement can be just as effective at avoiding fare dodging as increasing inspections. Anyway, check that out if you really want to get into the weeds. But for now, I'm handing my Good Week to 110 Germans who were helped out by the generous people who donated to the Freiheitsfonds last week.

[MUSIC]

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
As you heard at the top of the show, Katy is about to go on maternity leave, and I'm going to miss her a lot. Fortunately, thanks to a group of amazing listeners who support us with a small monthly donation, we are able to continue in her absence with the help of our wonderful producers who we pay to help make this podcast sound professional and enjoyable. So thank you this week, an extra special thank you for everyone who's helping us keeping going whilst our podcast mum is away.

KATY LEE:
Podcast mum! I'm a mother of three. Well, soon to be mother of three. Two babies and a podcast, a beautiful baby podcast. Beautiful seven-year-old, actually. This is my oldest child.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
It'll be eight by the time you're back.

KATY LEE:
They grow up so fast.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Would you like to do the honours and thank our newest supporters, Katy?

KATY LEE:
Big thanks goes to, well, to everyone indeed who is helping this podcast keep going in my absence. But a special thanks to our latest supporters, Anja, Lionel and Mark.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
You can head to patreon.com forward slash Europeans podcast to see what it means to become a Patreon supporter and how to do it. Thank you.

KATY LEE:
Thank you so much.

[MUSIC]

KATY LEE:
I felt very fortunate to be joined for this week's interview by our producer, Katz Laszlo. Hi, Katz.

KATZ LASZLO:
Hi.

KATY LEE:
So Dominic decided to step out for this week's interview because it's about some topics that both you and I are particularly interested in. And our guest is someone whose work you have been following for a really long time. Can you tell us a little bit about her and why you've been so interested in her work?

KATZ LASZLO:
Yeah, I've actually, Rebecca's been on my radar for like 15 years. I studied biomedicine and worked in reproductive health before I transitioned into journalism. There was actually some overlap. And yeah, she's just been such an instrumental person in all kinds of work around safely terminating all kinds of pregnancies, whether it's abortions or unviable pregnancies or incomplete miscarriages. She has her own abortion clinic in my hometown of Amsterdam.

But the thing she's maybe the most famous for internationally is that she founded something called Women on Waves, which was a foundation that brought abortions to countries where it was criminalized using international maritime laws and collected women who needed care and took them into international waters where they could get the care that they needed. And then later, she also founded an organization called Women on Web, which was especially used in the States, where people could order abortion pills once they were invented in the 90s and have them shipped to their homes, even in states where it was more strictly regulated. And both of those organizations are still working.

KATY LEE:
Yeah, and if we want to think about how this work relates to Europe, I think abortion rights, it's one of those policy areas where, depending on the country in Europe that you find yourself in, your rights can vary dramatically. So, for example, Women on Waves, they notably ran campaigns where it docked boats off the coast of Portugal, but also Spain, Poland in the early noughties. And in countries like Spain and Portugal, you know, abortion legislation has really freed up quite a lot.

But in Poland, that's an example of a country where abortion rights have regressed in recent years. And it's important to say that even in European countries where abortion is kind of generally assumed to be legal, like in the Netherlands or Germany, it is still a feature of criminal law.

KATZ LASZLO:
There are also quite a lot of logistics that make it practically very difficult, even in places where it is technically legalized. So, for example, in Italy, many doctors refuse to do it, meaning that a lot of women have to travel for hours if they're looking for an abortion. So we wanted to ask Rebecca about these inequalities that still exist in Europe.

And we also really wanted to ask her about this quite innovative Mifepristone study that came out earlier this year. Mifepristone is a pill that is used in all kinds of different stages of pregnancy. It can be used for an abortion, for an incomplete miscarriage. It's also often used when women are bleeding during childbirth. So it's just, it does a lot of things around the womb. And what Rebecca is looking into now is that it's actually, it seems to also work as a contraceptive pill, which is exciting because there has been quite a low level of innovation on the contraception front in the past decades. So we want to do more.

KATY LEE:
Yeah, and one of the reasons that I think we're both so personally interested in this study, you and I, is that we both actually took this drug, Mifepristone, in less than ideal circumstances. So in my case, I took it because I actually had a miscarriage between my two pregnancies. And Mifepristone is often used to help evacuate the fetus after a miscarriage.

Are you okay with telling us a little bit about the circumstances in which you took the same drug, Katz?

KATZ LASZLO:
Yeah, in my case, it was actually a pregnancy I wasn't ready for, so I chose to terminate. And I'm really relieved that I had pretty simple access. But I also had a lot more complicated feelings that I really didn't expect and wasn't prepared for at the time.

It was a massive learning experience. And it caught me off guard because I worked in reproductive healthcare for years before and also afterwards. But I just learned so much that never came up up until that moment.

And it just all feels a world away from the politicised conversation we have around abortion and the way we could do that care better. And so yeah, this study and the work that Rebecca has spent her entire career doing feels like a big step in that direction.

KATY LEE:
Yeah, I mean, I can only speak for myself personally, but I have quite sad associations with this drug, Mifepristone. So I'm really excited by the idea of being able to use it in much more positive circumstances myself, you know, like maybe as a form of contraception that could work quite differently from what we're used to, as you're going to hear. It is still a form of contraception that typically would put the onus on women to do all of the work around not getting pregnant and also still rely on women to have to deal with the side effects of decisions around that on our bodies. Only so much can change at once.

But yeah, the early indications are that Mifepristone as a regular contraceptive would have fewer side effects than the pills that most women currently use and allow us to use it in a more flexible way than swallowing a pill every single day. So I am really excited to hear more about the study that Rebecca's organisation, Women on Waves, have been leading. But this is also a broader conversation about the state of abortion rights and reproductive rights in Europe as a whole and indeed the world right now.

[MUSIC]

KATY LEE:
Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us today.

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
Thank you so much for having me on The Europeans.

KATY LEE:
How did you get involved in reproductive healthcare in the first place?

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
So that was a long time ago. That's more than 25 years ago. So it's a hard question. First of all, I was confronted with the impact of unsafe abortions when I was doing internships in Africa where women were coming in severely bleeding, almost dying. And I was working there with a doctor who was helping them illegally. And then the other was that there was an abortion clinic around the corner of my house, which was one of the first abortion clinics in the Netherlands. And I happened to pass by and they looked for a doctor to help and I started working there. And then I started sailing with Greenpeace and that is how the two parts of my life came together, as an environmental rights activist and as an abortion rights activist. When the first idea was materialized, which was to provide abortions on board a ship in international waters.

KATY LEE:
Yeah, I mean, I wanted to ask you about this aspect specifically, like how did you get interested in trying to find these practical solutions to the fact that depending on what side of a border you might be on, a person's access to abortion and reproductive rights can really vary very drastically?

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
Well, I was at Greenpeace Boat as an environmental rights activist, and I was very interested in abortion rights. And so I was asking around. I wasn't very well informed. At that time, there was not so much information on the internet. And so when we were sailing with the Greenpeace Boat in Mexico, we were talking with women's rights activists and found out how complicated it was that abortion was banned. The suffering that it caused.

And so it was more kind of, hey, but, you know, if we are on a Dutch boat in international waters, then we could help. And that was the first time that we started thinking about different legal realities. And actually, it's not a new idea in that, I mean, ships have been used offshore for many other purposes, gambling, but also to avoid paying taxes, for example. So that has been done before. And it's just the first time that it was actually used to advance women's rights and rights to abortion. That's the novelty around it.

KATZ LASZLO:
As you said, you have worked in this area for decades now, and I'm really interested to hear about this long view. What are the major changes in abortion care that you have seen in Europe and beyond over the span of your career?

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
Well, we were part of that revolution, right? We were actually quite lucky to start at the beginning when medication abortion became available. Women on Waves was founded in 1999, and the medication abortion was registered in the Netherlands in 2000.

We did our first boat campaign in 2001, and we immediately understood what is the power of this medication. And we were young, and we didn't know that at the time. But we were riding this wave of the upcoming internet and medication abortion.

So I think we participated in making online abortion pills available. We were the first one that did it in 2005, so that women could order abortion pills online. This whole self-managed abortion care, putting the pills in women's own hands, no more gatekeepers. That was all the things that we started. Now it's a reality in many places where telemedicine is now, for example, the main form of abortion care in the United Kingdom, but also in many states in the United States. It's allowed, it's done.

So it's been a really interesting journey. And to see how the full potential of the abortion pills really became available. And now we want to go beyond that, which is we really want to work to something where abortion pills are actually available over the counter and not just underground, which is not the case, but also in regulated systems like in Europe or in the US or things like that, so that it will be available on women's own terms.

KATY LEE:
When you describe developments like that, the global picture seems pretty positive. But when we look at certain parts of the world, like notably the US or somewhere like Poland in recent years, it's easy to feel like the global picture for abortion rights is getting worse. Do you believe that to be true? Or do you take a less pessimistic view on things?

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
Well, no, I think I'm very pessimistic on the state of democracy in general. And women's rights are part of that. I think when we look specifically about abortion, the nice thing is there's abortion pills, right? You can take away the official right and it will have an impact on people. But it's a very different situation than it was 50 years ago when women had to resort to all kinds of invasive methods that are very dangerous, that led to infections and even death. That is not the case anymore. I mean, the abortion pills are there. They will be available, whether it's through underground networks or the Internet or above-ground networks that will continue to be there, no matter where. It's the Poland, it's the case in the US in the case.

The problem is that for the people that are less literate, it's more harder to find. So it will always cause some people not to be able to access the abortion care. People that don't have access to Internet, people that don't understand how it works.

On the other hand, if we compare it with when I started Aid Access in 2018, abortion access was worse. So concerning abortion rights, I'm really positive and optimistic because I think this is never going to change. For example, in Russia, they now also are taking mifepristone off the market. But then also there, the pills will flow in from India or any places.

KATZ LASZLO:
Some people are critical about the idea of making abortion pills accessible without speaking to a doctor, including some people who are not against abortion. But they are worried that people need more care, both in terms of the physical, but also the psychological and the emotional impact of terminating a pregnancy. What would you say to these people?

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
Based on my experience and also scientific research, we know that people are very capable of dealing with medication abortion themselves. If they need further support, many people speak with friends or family. I think it's by controlling access that people are creating anxiety.

And there's many things that people can use. They need to have instructions how to use it. They do that very well.

And so in that is really actually kind of a very fundamental distrust of women when you're already seeing things like that. And it's again, doctors like to have power and keep power. And that's what they do. And that is how abortion became illegal in the first place, 150 years ago. And that takes other forms now. So I'm very critical of doctors that are saying that there needs to be a provider in between. I think they are more concerned about their own role than about women's needs. And actual capabilities.

KATZ LASZLO:
The investigative journalism project Exporting Abortion recently published some findings that at least 5,000 European women traveled abroad to receive abortions every year. And maybe surprisingly, they weren't all women traveling from countries like Poland, but they were really traveling from all over the EU.

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
It's second trimester abortions. We know that.

KATY LEE:
Yeah. So I wanted to ask why would someone travel from a country where abortion is legal to go elsewhere?

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
It's only when they're too late to get access to abortions in their own country. And then they go to countries where it's possible, like the Netherlands or the UK or Norway, Sweden. They also have allow for later abortions.

KATY LEE:
What do you think is the biggest misconception about the way that abortion works in Europe?

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
I think many people don't realize that there are so many different laws. Many people think it's available, that it's a right. It's not. There's only one country in Europe where it's a constitutional right, and that's France. In the Netherlands, it's actually still a criminal offense. It's still in the criminal code. We have not been able to change that yet. And that is true for all the other European countries. It's still a criminal offense, and it's an exception in the law that women are allowed to have an abortion. And that is very problematic because it should be considered at least a normal medical procedure, if anything, but it's not.

KATY LEE:
We've seen the political right in Europe taking inspiration and money from anti-abortion campaign groups in the U.S. in recent years. In Hungary, for example, the government in 2022 adopted this, you know, the kind of law that already existed in several southern U.S. states where a person seeking an abortion is required to listen to a sonogram of the fetus before going ahead with the procedure. Tens of millions of euros in funding has also been flowing from anti-abortion groups in the U.S. towards Europe. Are you worried that this could contribute to a similar rollback of abortion rights in Europe to that that's been seen in the U.S.? If we look back 150 years ago, for example, before 1880, abortions were pretty available, also with medications, pills.

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
And then it was suddenly, everything was totally banned all over the world, U.S., Europe. The reason why that happened was because there was a birth rate decline of white women. And a fear of immigration.

We have the same situation now where politicians are calling for women to have more babies. And so we are facing a similar situation as we faced 150 years ago. So I think the change can go very quickly and it will be very hard to stop if it happens, because right-wing populist politics, it's directly connected with controlling women's bodies.

KATZ LASZLO:
I was curious about how we speak and feel about abortion has changed, depending on the technology that is available. So, for example, I read that in the U.K. and in the U.S., the law used to be that a woman could legally terminate her pregnancy up until she felt movement herself, which is many months into a pregnancy. And that changed as we were able to, you know, do sonograms and scan the womb, all kinds of other things. And now abortion is criminalized in some places as early as six weeks, which is really significantly earlier.

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
Well, from the moment of conception, as they say, actually.

KATZ LASZLO:
How much do you think that the way we think and feel and legislate about pregnancy is influenced by technology?

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
No, I think technology is used as an excuse, but the driving force is really to want to control women's bodies for pro-natalist politics. It doesn't matter what technology there is.

KATY LEE:
I'd love to talk about your latest project, which is a scientific study which you've already mentioned about the use of Mifepristone, the same pill that is used for abortions and also sometimes during miscarriages to evacuate miscarried fetuses. The study is about using this as a regular contraception. Can you tell us about why this is so exciting and what makes this different as a method of contraception?

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
First of all, in the last 70 years, no new contraceptive has been really developed. The hormones that were used to combine estrogen and progesterone, they were just little different formulations, but they were all based on, you know, any contraceptive method that is now used, whether it's the pill, the patch, the implant even, or the IUD that you can use with or without hormones. And so the problem with the combined contraceptives is that it has a much higher risk of thrombosis. It is three times higher risk for thrombosis, and thrombosis, it means that there's a blood clot developing in the veins. And the other thing is that there's an increased risk of breast cancer with every year that you're using combined hormonal contraceptives. We also know from other studies that have been done in other countries over the past 20, 25 years that the side effects are much less. The only side effect that has been recorded is less bleeding. Women will have almost no menstruation anymore, which most people prefer, actually.

KATY LEE:
Oh, yeah, I was going to say most women probably quite like that as a side effect.

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so it seems that it's a really promising contraceptive. But also you can use this morning-after pill. So either you use it weekly if you have a lot of sex or you just use it before or after you have sex when you have less frequent sex.

KATY LEE:
You don't seem to be showing any signs of slowing down in your work and your activism. What would you like abortion care and abortion policy to look like worldwide and reproductive rights generally by the time that you retire?

REBECCA GOMPERTS:
I'm never going to retire. Come on, it's impossible. No, I mean, I think I mean, I think that the ultimate way we have to go is that there are no laws anymore and that it's, you know, the medication is just available in any drugstore, like a painkiller.

I mean, that is where it has to be. And that is how safe it is, how we know that women can do it and the fact that it's still a criminal offence anywhere is outrageous. So we really have to fight for that.

[MUSIC]

KATY LEE:
Thank you so much to Rebecca for joining us. In the show notes you will find links to Women on Waves, Women on Web and also an article about the Mifepristone study that makes for really interesting reading.

KATZ LASZLO:
Yes, and we are also going to link to a documentary from the Deutsche Welle which is so fascinating about the different barriers to care in different countries in Europe, and there is a beautiful more artistic podcast by the amazing Eleanor McDowell on how abortion was legalized in Ireland, and I really think it's a must-listen.

KATY LEE:
I wondered how you felt, Katz, listening to Rebecca's response to the criticism around this idea that people should just be allowed to administer abortion pills solo at home. Because even among those of us who believe really passionately in a woman's right to terminate a pregnancy, that is an idea that doesn't sit comfortably with everyone.

KATZ LASZLO:
Yeah I feel mixed, and I also I talked to quite a few friends ahead of this interview about this who have personal experiences. And I completely understand why Rebecca is driven to make access much easier and more autonomous because in practice the so-called care around abortions often isn't in service of the pregnant person. Like, it's mostly questioning whether the woman is sure and creating barriers, and at worst is just basically kind of undignified. And there are a lot of women who don't need that much support, but there are also a lot of women who both need easy access and more extensive follow-up care. And I can't speak for Rebecca because we didn't talk about that explicitly, but sometimes I feel like understandably it feels too risky for abortion activists to talk about the many women who do have hard feelings afterwards. I understand why that feels complicated to talk about because we've just had to fight so hard for access, it feels constantly under threat, and limiting access is clearly not going to help because, I mean, having a child against your will or having even more barriers is not going to support a woman who's having difficult feelings.

But right now, if you're looking for information on feeling sad or any kind of, yeah, anything more complicated, it's really hard to find anything that isn't from anti-abortion movements and mixed in with the argument to limit access, and I guess what I would wish for our future on this whole subject is that it gets less taboo and less politicized so that we can actually have a conversation about aftercare that is separate to debating the right to access. And listen to what pregnant people need and what their full experience is.

KATY LEE:
Yeah, because I wonder if I might just ask you briefly about your own experience of that in the Netherlands, because here in France, you know, I haven't had an abortion, but I did have a miscarriage, and during that process, like, repeatedly I was offered, like, follow-up care with a psychologist, and as far as I understand that is supposed to be standard practice for people who have abortions, too, right? It is supposed to be offered systematically. I’m not sure if it is, but it is supposed to be there as an option. Like you're not forced to see a psychologist or a therapist, but you should know that the option is there, and I think we've spoken about a little bit you and I, and I feel very spoiled now because I kind of assume that this would be the case in every country in Europe, where this care is available. And clearly from the Netherlands it isn't.

KATZ LASZLO:
Yeah, I think honestly this conversation has just been so politicized that I don't even know if it's therapy is what we need, or I don't know. But something I find quite astonishing is that I was more informed than most people are because of my education, but still I was hit by a really unexpected wave of grief afterwards, and I just really didn't expect and wasn't prepared for that because I had been sure. And given what this conversation is about publicly, I expected the decision and the access to be the hard part. But instead, for me, what was so much harder was afterwards, and it took me, I mean, probably a year to even figure out that it was grief. Like, I just couldn't understand why I felt the way I felt because I was relieved about the medical care that I had gotten and, you know, having a child against my will would have been so much worse.

And through my work I learned that quite a lot of people have a similar experience. I am far from the only one. And I mean, I've heard the same thing from several friends living in France, and yeah, I just I just feel like surely we can do better than this. Because it's so taboo, it also means that just people in your life and in the world are not very good at supporting people through this kind of experience.

And years later, like completely randomly, I was reading a book about grief, and I stumbled into this interview with this abortion doula coincidentally, who put into words something that I had never seen written anywhere. So they say, “Grief is the most common emotion people share with me. For people who have not had an abortion or do not have these conversations, they can assume, ‘Oh you're grieving because you made the wrong decision’ or ‘You're grieving the baby,’ which can also be true, but what they miss is the grief of having to do it alone. The lack of space to have conversations. The grief of wanting to parent but not right now, and being upset that it happened in this moment. Then there is the grief of our bodies. I wasn't meant to be pregnant at all. Why was I pregnant? Or feeling that our bodies have failed us. The grief of unsupportive partners, and those who may not want the pregnancy to go on. The grief of not being in partnership, or the grief of being in partnership that feels all wrong. And the abortion brings that all up. All those statements can be true in different contexts for each of us. There’s just so much grief and it is often unspoken.”

KATY LEE:
I think that's really well put and very beautiful. Thank you for sharing, Katz.

KATZ LASZLO:
Absolutely. That is a passage from Tending Grief by Camille Sapara Barton. I'll also include a link in the show notes.

[MUSIC]

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
It's time to roll into the Inspiration Station, the segment of the show in which we discuss some European cultural recommendations. What have you been enjoying, Katy?

KATY LEE:
I started a new Netflix series that I can hopefully take into my maternity leave and watch at three o'clock in the morning while wrestling with a screaming newborn. It is Secrets We Keep. Have you watched it slash heard of it?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
No, it has been recommended to me, I think, by The Algorithm.

KATY LEE:
The Algorithm. Yeah I think it's quite up your street.

KATY LEE:
It's a Danish noir series, a genre that you will already be very familiar with, and it is set in a very fancy neighborhood on the outskirts of Copenhagen. The protagonists are these very wealthy Danish families who have Filipina nannies, so it's a crime thriller that also touches on a lot of the power dynamics and huge income disparities within the households of these ultra-privileged Danes who hire nannies to look after their kids. These nannies are from countries like the Philippines in the global south, and, you know, that they're paid like minimum wage to work these really long hours. So you see these problematic power dynamics up close in this show which is very gripping. It is about one of these nannies going missing. And something that caught my eye about the show is that it has a crazily high Rotten Tomatoes score. Like, it's literally a hundred percent for now. Although maybe that will change as more people watch it.

It's six episodes, and I'm only one episode in, but I am definitely going to finish it. It is extremely watchable, especially if you're the kind of person who likes crime thrillers and Nordic noir as a genre. The one thing I'll say that's less positive about it is that this is yet another prestige TV show about extremely rich people. Like, if you've seen and enjoyed shows like Big Little Lies with Reese Witherspoon or The Perfect Couple with Nicole Kidman—

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
White Lotus.

KATY LEE:
Yeah, exactly. These are all shows where it's like, their lives are perfect, they have beautiful houses and then someone gets murdered.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, why is it that it's so addictive to watch rich people on TV?

KATY LEE:
I don't know. I mean, like, I'm not immune to enjoying like the very fancy interiors of the houses and the hotels where these TV shows are set, and, you know, the contrast between their beautiful houses and their less beautiful morals. But I do find it quite troubling, like, how much prestige television these days revolves around the lives of the ultra-wealthy.

Like, do Netflix executives just think that all people want to watch is aspirational TV about super-rich people whose lives are completely out of touch with those of normal people? Is it that the Netflix executives are living something close to these lives themselves so they think it's normal? Like, where is it coming from?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
No, I really think it is that people want to kind of live vicariously and experience these glamorous lives and then also see that actually they're awful. That being rich doesn't make you happy.

KATY LEE:
Do we want to do that all the time though? Oh, you do. Okay fine. Well, I don't know personally, like I watched Adolescence as a lot of people did, and I think one of the things that made it such a TV sensation earlier in the year is that it is about a normal family who don't have an infinity pool.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
The absence of the infinity pool probably was key to Adolescence's success. That is a hot take that I have not heard yet.

KATY LEE:
I find it quite disturbing that this was something that was refreshing about it. Anyway, I am really enjoying Secrets We Keep. It is very gripping. It's very stylish. Do I need any more series about super-rich people in my life? Probably not. Like, I might try to give them a bit of a break after I finish this one.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, I also just started watching Sirens on Netflix, which is also about rich people.

KATY LEE:
Oh yeah? Any good?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
I can't talk about it because it's not European. Sorry.

KATY LEE:
Okay, ban on Sirens. What have you been enjoying apart from Sirens?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
This week I wanted to talk about an investigative podcast that was brought to our attention by listener Justin on the Patreon community chat. I'm loving it over there at the moment. People are recommending loads of things.

It's a podcast about the lawlessness of the high seas called the Ocean Outlaw Project from CBC and it's based on eight years of reporting at sea by the investigative reporter Ian Urbina. The second season has just dropped, and I listened to the first episode and a half so far, and the first three episodes of this season come from the awful humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean Sea, and they look into what Ian Urbina describes as Europe's shadow immigration system. He digs hard into the Libyan coast guard who he says are doing the EU's dirty work.

I agree with our Patreon supporter Justin who warns that it's a pretty harrowing listen, but I also think it's very urgent and vital listening, and it's really excellently produced and reported. So I really recommend you check it out. I'm definitely going to keep listening. It's called the Ocean Outlaw Project, and you'll find it on any podcast platforms out there.

KATY LEE:
Excellent. I'm going to add that to my list.

[MUSIC]

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Well, we're almost at the end of this episode of the Europeans, but before you go, I wanted to leave you with a happy ending, a bit of cheerful news to leave you with a pep in your step. This week I've got yet another beaver-related happy ending. Forgive me.

KATY LEE:
We love your beavers.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah, I'm just a bit obsessed with these amazing dam-building, ecosystem-engineering animals. The happy beaver news that landed last week comes from Portugal, where the organization Rewilding Portugal announced that the beaver is back in Portugal more than 500 years after they last appeared in the country.

KATY LEE:
Wow, that's very cool.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
It's really cool news, and it's happened after two decades of rewilding work for beavers in neighbouring Spain. Beavers were actually spotted very close to the Portuguese border already back in 2023 so it's really excellent news from this rewilding organization that they have not only spotted signs of beavers but they've actually seen the beavers themselves. They put some secret cameras and captured some video footage of a very sweet beaver happily swimming through Portuguese water.

KATY LEE:
Yay! Can I just say this is a Schengen story. This is a great happy birthday Schengen story.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
It is!

KATY LEE:
Beavers crossing the border without their passports and making a new home in Portugal.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
You're so right. I hadn't even thought of it. At least the beavers don't have to show their passports even if some of us do now.

I've talked about beavers a lot on the show before, so yeah, apologies for boring you with another beaver story. But just a quick reminder that these animals are remarkable ecosystem engineers whose dam-building activities create wetlands that boost diversity, improve water quality and enhance the resilience of river habitats. Their structures that they make naturally store water and release it gradually. They reduce flood and fire risks and help combat drought. They offer crucial ecological services that no modern technology can match. So hooray for the beavers being back in Portugal.

KATY LEE:
Hooray for the beavers!

[MUSIC]

KATY LEE:
That is it for this week and that's it from me for a little while now. I'll be back in the autumn. I don't have a specific date yet. I guess it's just like whenever my brain is something close to being functional again. You know, who am I kidding? It'll be before my brain is fully functional again. I'm going to have two kids under the age of two, so it's going to be a while before I can say sentences what sound good. But I'm really looking forward to listening to the Europeans while I'm away. Last time I was on maternity leave it was the highlight of my week, like, walking the baby around the park and listening to you guys. I got to experience the Europeans as a normal listener, which is really cool, and yeah, we have a great team running everything while I'm away, so the show could not be in safer hands. I can't wait to listen.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Well I'm definitely going to miss you a lot, but I really wish you a wonderful time over the next few months, bringing a new European into the world. And we will indeed keep going without you. We did it before, we'll do it again. But just promise that you'll come back at some point, okay?

KATY LEE:
I'll be back eventually. I'm also going to be scrolling our social media feeds while I'm away. Where can I find you guys during my absence?

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
You can find us on Instagram, on BlueSky. I'm actually going to take over the Mastodon account. That's one of your jobs that I'm willing to do.

KATY LEE:
You should be excited about it. It's nice there.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Yeah come and be nice to me on Mastodon…and patient with me, because I don't know how it works. We are also on YouTube. Don't forget to check us out there. You can sometimes see our faces. You could watch some old videos of Katy speaking if you miss her.

Anyway, we're going to be off next week, but we will be back the week after without Katy, so keep listening even though she's not here. Thank goodness to our wonderful team of producers and alternate co-hosts. But for now, bon congé maternité, Katy.

KATY LEE:
Aw. Merci, c'est gentil. Et à bientôt.

DOMINIC KRAEMER:
Bis bald.