March 17, 2025 • 14 mins
COUNTING BACKWARDS is a legal thriller by Jacqueline Friedland following the timelines of two women—one in 1927 and the other in the present day—inspired by the true stories of medical abuse, and women’s struggles for their civil and reproductive rights. Jacqueline Friedland is the author of four other titles, including HE GETS THAT FROM ME and TROUBLE THE WATER. She graduated Magna cum Laude from both the University of Pennsylvania and NYU Law School before going on to briefly pursue commercial litigation.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to get connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven Light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome and thanks for listening. To get connected with a
legal thriller for the next few minutes, following the timelines
of two women, one in nineteen twenty seven, the other
in the present day, inspired by true stories of medical
abuse and the women struggles for their civil and reproductive rights.
Our guest is Jacqueline Friedland, lawyer, teacher, and author of
Counting Backwards. Jacqueline Friedland, thank you for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Thank you so much for having me today.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Jacqueline Freeland is the author of four other titles, including
USA Today and Amazon bestsellers, He Gets That for Me
and Trouble the Water. So I thought we'd start with
the backstory. There's so much of it in this book, Jacqueline.
This book is fiction, but it's based on true legal
stories from the nineteen twenties and the twenty twenties. The
facts surrounding them are both fascinating and appalling.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
It's true. There was in nineteen twenty seven a Supreme
Court case called Buck versus Bell, where the government approved
in order to sterilize a seventeen year old young woman
who was deemed what they called then feeble minded, which
you might now call developmentally disabled, although all evidence is
(01:23):
actually to the contrary, and in fact, she was of
completely average intelligence and ability according to records, And so
Carrie Buck's case is actually still good law. And although
the specific statute that allowed for her sterilization has been removed, overturned,
taken off the books, the present day situation is that
(01:46):
back in twenty twenty, there were women at a detention
center down in Georgia who were claiming that a doctor
was sterilizing them without their consent. Now I have to
add that there is still an ongoing federal case action
about this situation, and none of the allegations have been proved.
But when I saw this headline, my mind immediately went
(02:09):
to Carry Buck, who I'd actually learned about in high
school and had been sort of has been remained in
the back of my mind ever since, because I just
it still boggles my mind that in the United States
of America a young woman could be sterilized like that,
And so I just saw this connection and decided I
had to tell a story that would spread the word
(02:31):
about these potentially crazy medical scenarios that go on.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
There's so much to talk about in this or about
these people and everything that surrounds it. Lots to unpack
detention centers. A lot of people don't have any experience
with them or really know what goes on or who's
kept there. You think it's just hardened criminals perhaps who
happened to be without their paperwork to be in the country.
What research did you do into that world?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
So one thing that I learned while I was doing
my research is that a lot of these immigration detention
centers and prisons too are not run and operated by
the US government, but they actually contract out the whole
project to private companies that come in and then run
the facilities. So I, in learning about that, was sort
(03:18):
of astounded. And then I found out that there are
also a lot of charitable organizations that help out the
people who are in these facilities, and they can they
have these kind of pen Pal programs where you can
do actual written letters back and forth or even video visits.
So through these organizations, I actually connected with people who
(03:39):
are actually still currently detained, and I learned a lot
about the facilities and you know what they like to
have for dinner and what their daily life is like.
And it's true that some of them are hard in criminals,
for sure, but there's plenty of people who just you know,
if they made a mistake on their paperwork, when they
could end up, you know, one one law after another,
(04:01):
it's sort of snowballs, and they can end up in
a bad situation and end up detained.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
And I think it's interesting to point out as well
that in these detention centers their rights because they are
not citizens. If they're not citizens, they don't have the
same rights as you and I might have.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Perhaps that is true, but I would like to think
that as Americans we protect certain basic human rights, like
the right to reproduce regardless of who you are or
where you are.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
That is true. They also, what I think I was
getting to was the point of they don't have necessarily
the right to a lawyer, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Oh, yes, that's true that when an American citizen is
arrested and accused of a crime, you know, everyone knows
the miranda rights and they get if they can't afford
a lawyer, one will be appointed to them. That is
not the case for people who are in the America
I'm sorry, who have immigrated to America and are alleged
to be here illegally, they have either to defend themselves
(04:56):
or to find somebody who can pay for a lawyer
for them.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
And that story is told in the book through the
character of Jessa. Can you talk a little bit about Jessa.
She's our lawyer with a lot going on.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
So Jessa is a young woman who has been very
directed her whole life. Her parents both perished in a
car crash when she was very young, and she sort
of channels her grief into being driven in her career
in a large way. And when she begins working in
this law firm, she's doing great and she's her goal
(05:29):
is she's got to make partner by her seventh year there,
and she makes one big mistake early on and it
seems like that may not happen for her. But her
other big goal is to have a child, and she
thinks that if she has a biological child, you know,
maybe she will hear her mother's laughter in the sound
of her daughter if it's a daughter, or see her
(05:50):
father's you know, the glint of his eye or something.
And she's a little bit obsessive about it. And so
while she is going through this fertility journey, this is
when she goes she takes a pro bono case because
she realizes if she's not going to make partners, she
might as well use her career to do more good
in the world. And so she takes on a pro
bono case that's supposed to be just a straight forward
(06:13):
deportation case that somebody, the client wants a stay of deportation.
And when she goes into this facility and meets her
first client and they start talking about the fact that
the client is in premature menopause. It's Jess's so focused
on fertility and reproduction as it is that she fixates
(06:35):
on it and discovers a lot more going on.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
We're speaking with Jacqueline Friedland. She's a former teacher of
legal writing and lawyering Skills at the Benjamin Cardozo School
of Law, with the master's in Fine Arts from Sarah
Lawrence College, and she's also an author of the book
we're speaking about today. It's called Counting Backwards. You're listening
to get connected on one oh six point seven light FM.
I' Nina del Rio and let's talk about the other
(06:58):
woman in the book, who's story is told through the
eyes of Jessa, whose story is told through the eyes
of Carrie, who is Carrie going back one hundred years
in time now.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Carrie is a girl, young girl who was born in
Virginia in the nineteen twenties, and she is Her father
disappeared when she was young. Her mother had two children
after her from potentially different fathers, nobody really knows. And
Carrie's mom was allegedly an alcoholic, and there were allegations
(07:29):
that she was a prostitute, and at some point she
ended up institutionalized, which happened to women back then in
Virginia who couldn't afford to pay for anything and who
were what you know, they got called sexually promiscuous and
got put away. And so Carrie ends up as a
foster child and goes to live with this family called
(07:49):
the Dobs. And while she's living there, she has there's
a moment of sexual assault that results in her becoming pregnant,
and this family does not want an unwed girl living
in their home pregnant, and so she ends up in
the same institution as her mother, and unfortunately, as when
(08:10):
she was a foster child. She was allowed to go
to school through sixth grade, and then they said that's enough.
Now you're just going to be sort of like a
housemaid and to help us with chores on the farm
and around the house. And so she's really basically uneducated,
and she has no money and no resources, and she
becomes completely dependent on the state to care for her,
(08:32):
and it results in her falling victim to being the
test case for this new sterilization law.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
She was sent to a place called the colony, and
ironically her mother had also been sent to this place
called the colony. As you point out, when women were
considered to be promiscuous, they would have been perhaps sterilized.
And I said, perhaps because I don't really know a
lot about this. How what do we know about this
this time when women were forcibly sterilized.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
So a lot of it, unfortunately, goes comes down to money.
There were people didn't want to pay their taxes to
support women whose morals they may be disagreed with or
judged too harshly. So they would say they would have
arguments where they would say, rather than supporting, you know,
more offspring of this woman who's just going to be
(09:24):
sleeping around the neighborhood. Let's just sterilize her, and then
once we can put her, we can then release her
from the institution because she's no longer at risk of
having more children, who we will become wards of the state.
So it happened to poor women, it happened, you know,
to marginalized women, and there were something close to like
(09:44):
seventy thousand sterilizations just after Carrie Buck's case.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Unfortunately, have you come to any conclusions doing this work
during the research, et cetera about why people seem so
obsessed about controlling our own choices about reproduction and bodily autonomy.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
I wish, I wish I could like have an answer
to that, because I really clearly there's a power dynamic.
I think there's a financial dynamic. I think that I
really can't. I don't have an answer.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
It's fair. It's like it's it's in everybody's head, like
why are we still in this place where the pendulum
swings back and forth all the time.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Yes, One thing that was crazy to me when I
was doing the research for this book is that the
family that Carrie goes to live with, they were actually
called the Dobbs, family, and the court case that overruled
Roe versus. Wade just coincidentally was the Dobbs case. And
so I almost I asked myself at the time, is
that too on the nose? Should I change the name?
(10:46):
You know, it is fiction the story, but I just
felt like it was such a strange coincidence I had
to keep it in the book.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
That's very interesting. And also this, these two stories get
to the point of the the impact on the lower
years who take these cases on. Can you talk about that,
why the you know, these cases really impact their professional
lives and personal lives in such a way that can
be terribly problematic when they're just trying to apply the law.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Well, there's multiple ways it can be problematic. First of all,
not you know, when when Jessa goes into this detention
center and starts to realize there's a pattern of medical malpractice,
she goes back to her big corporate firm and says,
we have to bring a class action. And the firm,
you know, they don't want to get political, they don't
want her to be wrong, they don't want to go
(11:33):
out on a limb, so they say no. So there's
that aspect that you know, there's lawyers have to think
about their own careers, and you know, but there's also
the emotional impact on the person who's representing people who
are being wronged by a country that you know, we
all presumably love, and I, for me, I do love America,
(11:57):
and I do feel so lucky to live here and
be a part of this amazing country. And I also
because of that, I think it's so important that we
highlight where we can improve. So that was and I
hope that the lawyers who take these cases feel the
same way. You know. It's sort of like if you
have a child who's misbehaving, you don't just kick them
(12:18):
out of the house. You teach them, and you know
you love them, and you say, we have to work
on this issue.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
It's also that thing of if you don't see anybody
stepping up, maybe you should step up. But it's easy
for you to say and much harder for you to do.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Right exactly because you're putting everything at risk in your
own life. You know, maybe your spouse doesn't support your choices,
maybe you're going to lose your job, maybe you don't
have enough hours to devote what you need to in
order to help the people properly. There's a lot of issues.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
What has been the feedback so far on this book.
It's again, it's a thriller, it's a novel, it's historical fiction,
but it is a topic that is so personal and
also so political.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
I'm thrilled with the feedback so far. What I'm hearing
over and over again is this book is so timely,
and it's so important, and it affected me so deeply,
and I'm going to be thinking about it for a
long time, and people are calling it a call to action.
And one thing for me that's a big surprise is
how timely it actually is. Because you know, there's a
long lead time from when you finish a book to
(13:16):
when it actually gets published. So I figured by the
time the books actually hit shelves, you know, obviously, so
much of this would be solved, and it clearly has
not been. So I hope people will read the book
and start thinking about what we can do.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
The book is Counting Backwards by Jacqueline Friedland. Thank you
for being on Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven Light FM. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website where
downloads and podcasts at one oh six to seven lightfm
dot com. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to get connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven Light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Welcome and thanks for listening. To get connected with a
legal thriller for the next few minutes, following the timelines
of two women, one in nineteen twenty seven, the other
in the present day, inspired by true stories of medical
abuse and the women struggles for their civil and reproductive rights.
Our guest is Jacqueline Friedland, lawyer, teacher, and author of
Counting Backwards. Jacqueline Friedland, thank you for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
Thank you so much for having me today.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Jacqueline Freeland is the author of four other titles, including
USA Today and Amazon bestsellers, He Gets That for Me
and Trouble the Water. So I thought we'd start with
the backstory. There's so much of it in this book, Jacqueline.
This book is fiction, but it's based on true legal
stories from the nineteen twenties and the twenty twenties. The
facts surrounding them are both fascinating and appalling.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
It's true. There was in nineteen twenty seven a Supreme
Court case called Buck versus Bell, where the government approved
in order to sterilize a seventeen year old young woman
who was deemed what they called then feeble minded, which
you might now call developmentally disabled, although all evidence is
(01:23):
actually to the contrary, and in fact, she was of
completely average intelligence and ability according to records, And so
Carrie Buck's case is actually still good law. And although
the specific statute that allowed for her sterilization has been removed, overturned,
taken off the books, the present day situation is that
(01:46):
back in twenty twenty, there were women at a detention
center down in Georgia who were claiming that a doctor
was sterilizing them without their consent. Now I have to
add that there is still an ongoing federal case action
about this situation, and none of the allegations have been proved.
But when I saw this headline, my mind immediately went
(02:09):
to Carry Buck, who I'd actually learned about in high
school and had been sort of has been remained in
the back of my mind ever since, because I just
it still boggles my mind that in the United States
of America a young woman could be sterilized like that,
And so I just saw this connection and decided I
had to tell a story that would spread the word
(02:31):
about these potentially crazy medical scenarios that go on.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
There's so much to talk about in this or about
these people and everything that surrounds it. Lots to unpack
detention centers. A lot of people don't have any experience
with them or really know what goes on or who's
kept there. You think it's just hardened criminals perhaps who
happened to be without their paperwork to be in the country.
What research did you do into that world?
Speaker 3 (02:56):
So one thing that I learned while I was doing
my research is that a lot of these immigration detention
centers and prisons too are not run and operated by
the US government, but they actually contract out the whole
project to private companies that come in and then run
the facilities. So I, in learning about that, was sort
(03:18):
of astounded. And then I found out that there are
also a lot of charitable organizations that help out the
people who are in these facilities, and they can they
have these kind of pen Pal programs where you can
do actual written letters back and forth or even video visits.
So through these organizations, I actually connected with people who
(03:39):
are actually still currently detained, and I learned a lot
about the facilities and you know what they like to
have for dinner and what their daily life is like.
And it's true that some of them are hard in criminals,
for sure, but there's plenty of people who just you know,
if they made a mistake on their paperwork, when they
could end up, you know, one one law after another,
(04:01):
it's sort of snowballs, and they can end up in
a bad situation and end up detained.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
And I think it's interesting to point out as well
that in these detention centers their rights because they are
not citizens. If they're not citizens, they don't have the
same rights as you and I might have.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Perhaps that is true, but I would like to think
that as Americans we protect certain basic human rights, like
the right to reproduce regardless of who you are or
where you are.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
That is true. They also, what I think I was
getting to was the point of they don't have necessarily
the right to a lawyer, that sort of thing.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Oh, yes, that's true that when an American citizen is
arrested and accused of a crime, you know, everyone knows
the miranda rights and they get if they can't afford
a lawyer, one will be appointed to them. That is
not the case for people who are in the America
I'm sorry, who have immigrated to America and are alleged
to be here illegally, they have either to defend themselves
(04:56):
or to find somebody who can pay for a lawyer
for them.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
And that story is told in the book through the
character of Jessa. Can you talk a little bit about Jessa.
She's our lawyer with a lot going on.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
So Jessa is a young woman who has been very
directed her whole life. Her parents both perished in a
car crash when she was very young, and she sort
of channels her grief into being driven in her career
in a large way. And when she begins working in
this law firm, she's doing great and she's her goal
(05:29):
is she's got to make partner by her seventh year there,
and she makes one big mistake early on and it
seems like that may not happen for her. But her
other big goal is to have a child, and she
thinks that if she has a biological child, you know,
maybe she will hear her mother's laughter in the sound
of her daughter if it's a daughter, or see her
(05:50):
father's you know, the glint of his eye or something.
And she's a little bit obsessive about it. And so
while she is going through this fertility journey, this is
when she goes she takes a pro bono case because
she realizes if she's not going to make partners, she
might as well use her career to do more good
in the world. And so she takes on a pro
bono case that's supposed to be just a straight forward
(06:13):
deportation case that somebody, the client wants a stay of deportation.
And when she goes into this facility and meets her
first client and they start talking about the fact that
the client is in premature menopause. It's Jess's so focused
on fertility and reproduction as it is that she fixates
(06:35):
on it and discovers a lot more going on.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
We're speaking with Jacqueline Friedland. She's a former teacher of
legal writing and lawyering Skills at the Benjamin Cardozo School
of Law, with the master's in Fine Arts from Sarah
Lawrence College, and she's also an author of the book
we're speaking about today. It's called Counting Backwards. You're listening
to get connected on one oh six point seven light FM.
I' Nina del Rio and let's talk about the other
(06:58):
woman in the book, who's story is told through the
eyes of Jessa, whose story is told through the eyes
of Carrie, who is Carrie going back one hundred years
in time now.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Carrie is a girl, young girl who was born in
Virginia in the nineteen twenties, and she is Her father
disappeared when she was young. Her mother had two children
after her from potentially different fathers, nobody really knows. And
Carrie's mom was allegedly an alcoholic, and there were allegations
(07:29):
that she was a prostitute, and at some point she
ended up institutionalized, which happened to women back then in
Virginia who couldn't afford to pay for anything and who
were what you know, they got called sexually promiscuous and
got put away. And so Carrie ends up as a
foster child and goes to live with this family called
(07:49):
the Dobs. And while she's living there, she has there's
a moment of sexual assault that results in her becoming pregnant,
and this family does not want an unwed girl living
in their home pregnant, and so she ends up in
the same institution as her mother, and unfortunately, as when
(08:10):
she was a foster child. She was allowed to go
to school through sixth grade, and then they said that's enough.
Now you're just going to be sort of like a
housemaid and to help us with chores on the farm
and around the house. And so she's really basically uneducated,
and she has no money and no resources, and she
becomes completely dependent on the state to care for her,
(08:32):
and it results in her falling victim to being the
test case for this new sterilization law.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
She was sent to a place called the colony, and
ironically her mother had also been sent to this place
called the colony. As you point out, when women were
considered to be promiscuous, they would have been perhaps sterilized.
And I said, perhaps because I don't really know a
lot about this. How what do we know about this
this time when women were forcibly sterilized.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
So a lot of it, unfortunately, goes comes down to money.
There were people didn't want to pay their taxes to
support women whose morals they may be disagreed with or
judged too harshly. So they would say they would have
arguments where they would say, rather than supporting, you know,
more offspring of this woman who's just going to be
(09:24):
sleeping around the neighborhood. Let's just sterilize her, and then
once we can put her, we can then release her
from the institution because she's no longer at risk of
having more children, who we will become wards of the state.
So it happened to poor women, it happened, you know,
to marginalized women, and there were something close to like
(09:44):
seventy thousand sterilizations just after Carrie Buck's case.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Unfortunately, have you come to any conclusions doing this work
during the research, et cetera about why people seem so
obsessed about controlling our own choices about reproduction and bodily autonomy.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
I wish, I wish I could like have an answer
to that, because I really clearly there's a power dynamic.
I think there's a financial dynamic. I think that I
really can't. I don't have an answer.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
It's fair. It's like it's it's in everybody's head, like
why are we still in this place where the pendulum
swings back and forth all the time.
Speaker 3 (10:25):
Yes, One thing that was crazy to me when I
was doing the research for this book is that the
family that Carrie goes to live with, they were actually
called the Dobbs, family, and the court case that overruled
Roe versus. Wade just coincidentally was the Dobbs case. And
so I almost I asked myself at the time, is
that too on the nose? Should I change the name?
(10:46):
You know, it is fiction the story, but I just
felt like it was such a strange coincidence I had
to keep it in the book.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
That's very interesting. And also this, these two stories get
to the point of the the impact on the lower
years who take these cases on. Can you talk about that,
why the you know, these cases really impact their professional
lives and personal lives in such a way that can
be terribly problematic when they're just trying to apply the law.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Well, there's multiple ways it can be problematic. First of all,
not you know, when when Jessa goes into this detention
center and starts to realize there's a pattern of medical malpractice,
she goes back to her big corporate firm and says,
we have to bring a class action. And the firm,
you know, they don't want to get political, they don't
want her to be wrong, they don't want to go
(11:33):
out on a limb, so they say no. So there's
that aspect that you know, there's lawyers have to think
about their own careers, and you know, but there's also
the emotional impact on the person who's representing people who
are being wronged by a country that you know, we
all presumably love, and I, for me, I do love America,
(11:57):
and I do feel so lucky to live here and
be a part of this amazing country. And I also
because of that, I think it's so important that we
highlight where we can improve. So that was and I
hope that the lawyers who take these cases feel the
same way. You know. It's sort of like if you
have a child who's misbehaving, you don't just kick them
(12:18):
out of the house. You teach them, and you know
you love them, and you say, we have to work
on this issue.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
It's also that thing of if you don't see anybody
stepping up, maybe you should step up. But it's easy
for you to say and much harder for you to do.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Right exactly because you're putting everything at risk in your
own life. You know, maybe your spouse doesn't support your choices,
maybe you're going to lose your job, maybe you don't
have enough hours to devote what you need to in
order to help the people properly. There's a lot of issues.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
What has been the feedback so far on this book.
It's again, it's a thriller, it's a novel, it's historical fiction,
but it is a topic that is so personal and
also so political.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
I'm thrilled with the feedback so far. What I'm hearing
over and over again is this book is so timely,
and it's so important, and it affected me so deeply,
and I'm going to be thinking about it for a
long time, and people are calling it a call to action.
And one thing for me that's a big surprise is
how timely it actually is. Because you know, there's a
long lead time from when you finish a book to
(13:16):
when it actually gets published. So I figured by the
time the books actually hit shelves, you know, obviously, so
much of this would be solved, and it clearly has
not been. So I hope people will read the book
and start thinking about what we can do.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
The book is Counting Backwards by Jacqueline Friedland. Thank you
for being on Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven Light FM. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website where
downloads and podcasts at one oh six to seven lightfm
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