Chapter 4: Radio as Collage Art

Health Break, January 1, 1998

One cassette I found in going through archival materials was an episode of short module Health Break dated January 1, 1998. This segment offered information about elective abortion from a healthcare professional, identified as Ruth, working at Bloomington’s local branch of Planned Parenthood. We found the cassette in a box placed alongside episodes of Health Break on parenthood, adoption, and pregnancy prevention featuring the same guest. In it, the healthcare provider offered basic facts on the medical procedure of abortion and mentioned the debate on the procedure’s morality but did not express an opinion or judgment of her own, instead making an overall recommendation: “You can explore your feelings about abortion with a pregnancy counselor to help you make the decision that fits best with your values and personal situation.” 1998 marked the 25^th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, which made abortion legal throughout the United States. However, 90% of counties in Indiana had no abortion provider at the time, and the number of providers statewide had fallen 37% since 1982 (Arndorfer et al. 1998, 39). This episode of Health Break may not have been controversial considering the federal law of the time, but given the state’s overall socially conservative legislature, airing this episode on Hoosier airwaves as a healthcare feature—in series with the episodes on adoption, parenting, and pregnancy prevention, no less—makes a statement. Someone wrote Ruth’s script, Ruth herself read it, and the station aired it; at each of these points, someone made a decision about what (and who) needed to be made audible.

By the time I encountered the recording during my inventorying in 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization had overturned Roe v. Wade. Once that decision was made law, Indiana legislators had almost immediately put a near-total ban on abortion back in place (Associated Press 2023). As I listened in 2024, Ruth’s calm and informative presentation on abortion took on a different tone. If we were to air a segment on abortion now, on the same Hoosier airwaves, it would have little choice but to address the fact that most individuals seeking abortions in the listening area would have to cross state (or perhaps national) borders to get one, an option with possible legal risks and one not accessible to all patients needing such care (Cahn and Suter 2024). Listening back to the Health Break segment emphasized to me how recently this form of healthcare had been, if not easily and equally accessible, at least legal within the state of Indiana. It had a profoundly affective impact on me to hear a radio segment on abortion in Indiana meant to inform rather than polarize, as I expect it would for any listener invested in medical rights and gender-based inequities. Through our archiving practices at WFHB, we could hold on to this recording as a reminder of what was possible up until very recently: safe, legal abortions and frank, measured discussions about them on local media.

My second example in this section is itself a recording that reflects and comments on local situations past. It thus offers another layer of temporality that modifies the knowledge it produces in the 2020s as an item in the WFHB archives.