Speaker 1: Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that is only
Speaker 1: ever introduced properly once, and it's this time. So you've
Speaker 1: got your one. Yeah, thank you. This is the only time, Sovie.
Speaker 1: Next time I'm going to be back to just shouting
Speaker 1: the name of a dead dictator or screaming incoherently. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't have it any other way, Robert. This is our one.
Speaker 1: This is our one. And that good introduction was to
Speaker 1: celebrate our very special guest for today's episode, Samantha McVeigh
Speaker 1: of stuff Mom never told you. Oh, I feel so
Speaker 1: special thing. Thank you. Thank you, Samantha uh not related
Speaker 1: to friend of the pod to McVeigh had to do it.
Speaker 1: I knew it was coming. I was really really scared.
Speaker 1: Spelled differently, I'm adopted. Let's just go and put those
Speaker 1: two caveats in there. Yeah, I mean, you know, we
Speaker 1: always bring up we always bring up old cousin Timmy
Speaker 1: when we can't. Who doesn't Cousin Timmy and Uncle Ted
Speaker 1: um are our north stars. No, Um, you know we're
Speaker 1: not talking of out terrorists today, Um, But in a
Speaker 1: way we kind of are. We're talking about a bunch
Speaker 1: of people who thought that they were doing good things
Speaker 1: and wound up having a larger negative impact than any
Speaker 1: single terrorist I've ever heard of. And that's always a story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: mostly yeah, actually absolutely yeah. Well and white women and
Speaker 1: white women. There's a white woman who's factors pretty centrally
Speaker 1: into this story as well. But yes, mostly white men.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, so um have you ever heard Samantha of
Speaker 1: the Dalkon Shield? I have not to me. Oh this
Speaker 1: is a bad story. Oh no, break our friendship. That's
Speaker 1: just beginning. Yeah, no, it's gonna shatter everything. Hell, here
Speaker 1: we go. None of this is going to be good,
Speaker 1: so obviously, Samantha. The The I U D or intrauterine
Speaker 1: device is a very popular form of birth control, at
Speaker 1: least from like a user satisfaction. Yeah yeah, most people
Speaker 1: who get them tend to be happy with them. Um.
Speaker 1: Gynecologists emphasize that the devices are extremely safe and effective,
Speaker 1: and in fact, by some counts, the basic idea behind
Speaker 1: an i U D, which is a device you insert
Speaker 1: into the uterus in order to like, you know, stop
Speaker 1: pregnancy from happening, goes back. It could go back as
Speaker 1: far as a thousand years. People have been doing versions
Speaker 1: of this for a long time. Can I just say
Speaker 1: I'm so excited that you have me on for this episode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it could be more fitting. Sophie
Speaker 1: could job Robert, great job. Sophie nailed it on this one.
Speaker 1: All I did was read about a horrible, horrible tragedy
Speaker 1: for three days. So obviously, modern i U d s
Speaker 1: tend to be hormone based, which works better with the
Speaker 1: caveat that it can cause some health issues. Um. The
Speaker 1: Marina would be the best modern example of that. There's
Speaker 1: currently a big class action lawsuit brewing against Bear Pharmaceuticals. Um.
Speaker 1: The device has kind of a nasty tendency to perforate
Speaker 1: the uterus of its wearer, which keep that in mind.
Speaker 1: We'll be talking more about that in a minute. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's also issues with the synthetic hormone the Marina releases, progestin.
Speaker 1: There's another set of lawsuits that argues this can cause
Speaker 1: idiopathic intercranial hypertension UM and basically things that mimic tumors UM,
Speaker 1: which you know has happened to someone pretty close to me.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's it's it's it's it's messed up, um,
Speaker 1: but also still kind of being litigated. We don't know
Speaker 1: exactly that it's the I D that caused it, but obviously,
Speaker 1: like you know, any kind of medical device, there's issues,
Speaker 1: and I don't think, um, you know, it's possible bears
Speaker 1: culpable to some extent in you know, hiding aspects of it.
Speaker 1: But it's also possible that they did nothing wrong, and
Speaker 1: that just just you know, when you have a device
Speaker 1: out like this that's hormonal, over the course of years
Speaker 1: you start to realize their side effects. That's a pretty
Speaker 1: normal part of medicine. There's always like at least five
Speaker 1: percent or less chance that you hear that extra warning. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: So I don't like, I certainly you know what whatever
Speaker 1: is actually happening with the Marina. We don't really know
Speaker 1: the full extent or the full case of it yet,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't seem like a case where people were
Speaker 1: just going off whole hog and doing something they knew
Speaker 1: we're going to hurt people. The story of the Dalkon
Speaker 1: Shield is a very different tail. This might be one
Speaker 1: of the darkest stories in the history of contraception. A
Speaker 1: sci fi name for a bad weapon. Yeah, it sounds
Speaker 1: like it sounds kind of like a spaceship actually like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I expected to be on star trucks. Someone tell me, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it'd be a Romulan vessel maybe yeah, maybe Cardassian. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, Samath and I went. There was a moment
Speaker 1: of boss, Yeah, what have I got myself into? Okay,
Speaker 1: keep going. So the first modern i u D was
Speaker 1: invented in nineteen o nine by a German guy. It
Speaker 1: was made out of silkworm gut, and it was not
Speaker 1: very popular. Um probably not hard to see why. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know that it was a bad i U D.
Speaker 1: But silkworm gut doesn't seem like something you would want
Speaker 1: to put in your body. Um, I don't know. Uh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Ernst Graffenberg, who was another German, invented the ring i
Speaker 1: U D not long after. He's also Graffenberg is the
Speaker 1: namesake for the g spot um. Yeah. And as a result,
Speaker 1: he was very unpopular in Nazi Germany, both because he
Speaker 1: was yeah, focused on like the fact that women could
Speaker 1: feel pleasure and on stopping you yeah. Yeah. The Nazis
Speaker 1: also weren't a big on the concept of contraception um,
Speaker 1: because that meant less German babies, which was not not
Speaker 1: not there not there. Yeah, yeah, there there were, of
Speaker 1: course exactly specific genocides. Um an anti genocide for one
Speaker 1: group of people. I guess so not that probably shouldn't
Speaker 1: even go down that so relatively decent. I U D
Speaker 1: started being invented in the early sixties, and the device
Speaker 1: has gained rapid popularity among people with uterus is in
Speaker 1: a desire to avoid getting babies and said, uterus is um?
Speaker 1: You do? I don't know this state of affair, you do?
Speaker 1: I m hmm, I don't know. I'll allow it, but
Speaker 1: I don't think. I think it's uterus is um. I've
Speaker 1: never had to say the plural. So this state of
Speaker 1: affairs continued until nineteen seventy one, when of parmaceutical Giant
Speaker 1: named A. H. Robbin's debut, the Dalkon Shield. The Dalkon
Speaker 1: Shield featured a revolutionary design and like it, like, hmm,
Speaker 1: what's a bad revolution? Um, they're all pretty great. Imagine
Speaker 1: a bad revolution. It was not. It's not a good revolution.
Speaker 1: It looks like Yeah, I'm trying to picture one. Keep going. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to get this word picture in my head
Speaker 1: so I can follow along. I'm gonna actually suggest Sophie
Speaker 1: finds a picture and sends it to you. While I
Speaker 1: describe it, some people, most people will describe it as
Speaker 1: looking like a crab, I actually think it looks more
Speaker 1: like a trilobyte. Um. It's a tiny piece of plastic
Speaker 1: with like five spiky legs, and the legs are meant
Speaker 1: to stop it from coming free um once it's once
Speaker 1: it's inside of you. Um. But it kind of looks
Speaker 1: like the trilobite, the silhouette of a trilobite. Like you
Speaker 1: look at it and it immediately looks like something that
Speaker 1: shouldn't be inside a person. Okay, so I'm thinking of
Speaker 1: the Matrix, that thing that comes out like absolutely, yes,
Speaker 1: it does look like the thing that comes out of
Speaker 1: Neo's stomach in the Matrix. You're going like, I don't
Speaker 1: have a uterus. But as soon as I saw it,
Speaker 1: I was like, that should not be in a person.
Speaker 1: Oh no, it crawled and it's going to it looks
Speaker 1: like a monster. Okay. I love that story honestly, which
Speaker 1: is yeah, as much like a space invader as it
Speaker 1: does like a crap um. So yeah, the legs were
Speaker 1: kind of meant a hooking place inside of your uterus,
Speaker 1: and it also had a string, which was how it
Speaker 1: could be removed later, and we'll talk more about the
Speaker 1: string later. Like obviously a lot of I U d
Speaker 1: s have strings, they tend to do them differently than
Speaker 1: the Dalkon shield did for a very good reason. Did
Speaker 1: you just did you just open the image because you
Speaker 1: just made a face? Oh yeah, what do you think
Speaker 1: of that? That looks like like a shoehorn with like
Speaker 1: an old school what is happening? We can debate on
Speaker 1: what it looks like, but it definitely looks like something
Speaker 1: that should not go in a person. I think, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's you don't put that in yourself. You're really bored.
Speaker 1: I mean, if that's the thing, you do you but yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, I not no, no shame, but like
Speaker 1: if that is your thing, you're probably going to the doctor.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, so um yeah. As I stated, the legs
Speaker 1: were kind of meant a hooking in place inside of
Speaker 1: your uterus and had a string um and most importantly
Speaker 1: for what's going to come next, the shield was invented
Speaker 1: by two male doctors, Hugh Davis and Erwin Learner. Uh
Speaker 1: Davis was the gynecologist, and he was a major opponent
Speaker 1: of the pill which was new at the time and
Speaker 1: at the time had a lot of problems. They've just
Speaker 1: been like a big like congressional trial over it because
Speaker 1: it had been the company's selling it had misrepresented the
Speaker 1: side effects UM and I think they make like that
Speaker 1: it's better now, but obviously there's still side effects to
Speaker 1: the pill. UM. So there was a big back lash
Speaker 1: against the pill because the companies that has been like
Speaker 1: this thing, it's just consequence free birth control, and it
Speaker 1: absolutely is not. And so people were there was a
Speaker 1: big backlash against the pill. And Davis, this guy in
Speaker 1: ecologist who makes the Dalkon Shield, is both like doesn't
Speaker 1: like the pill and also sees an opportunity in the
Speaker 1: backlash against it. UM and so he and this guy
Speaker 1: Learner form a company called the Dalkon Company, and they
Speaker 1: start marketing their shield as an alternative to the pill
Speaker 1: without any side effects UM, unlike the pill, which had
Speaker 1: side effects. Let me guess that that's factually incorrect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it didn't wind up being true. So I just really
Speaker 1: hung on the back that's called the shield itself, like
Speaker 1: the name of the naming of it altogether, the whole thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, to be fair, it kind of looks like
Speaker 1: a shield. It does kind of look like a shield.
Speaker 1: Weird cooking crab shield, key chain shield. Yeah, horrible, horrible,
Speaker 1: definitely horrible. So yeah, the pharmaceutical giant Age Robbins, though,
Speaker 1: buys into dal cons like marketing scheme and purchases the
Speaker 1: shields because they want the rights to sell it and
Speaker 1: manufacture and stuff. Um. And they launched like an unprecedented
Speaker 1: ad blitz, the biggest ad campaign that had ever preceded
Speaker 1: a contraceptives release onto the market in the United States
Speaker 1: is launched by a Age Robbins to sell the Dalkon shield.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from the Embryo Project now to
Speaker 1: talk about that. In nineteen seventy one, the Age Robbins company,
Speaker 1: producers of the cough medicine robotus and bought the device
Speaker 1: from Davis and put it on the market. The Age
Speaker 1: Robbin's company began selling the shields in the US and
Speaker 1: Puerto Rico and launched a large marketing campaign for the device.
Speaker 1: The campaign emphasized the safety of the i U D
Speaker 1: compared to traditional contraceptive pills. According to reporter Robert Thomas,
Speaker 1: prior to government regulation of birth control, many Americans were
Speaker 1: concerned with the safety of birth control pills and sought
Speaker 1: safer alternatives. The manufacturers of the Dalkon Shield capitalized on that,
Speaker 1: claiming that the device was safer than existing methods of
Speaker 1: birth control. So that's you know, kind of including method. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm just that's the safest method obviously. The only method
Speaker 1: with no consequences is the pullout method of the time,
Speaker 1: as long as you pull out fast enough, right behind
Speaker 1: the bastards is sponsored by the pullout method. I'm glad
Speaker 1: to be a part of this. You know, fake sponsor
Speaker 1: we've had. Well, the pullout method is like heavily sponsored
Speaker 1: by raytheon, raytheon. The more kids you have, accidentally, the
Speaker 1: more targets we have for missiles. Um, yeah, sorry, good,
Speaker 1: you're so good at this. The ad reads alone, fake
Speaker 1: or real said, I don't know what it can't stop advertising,
Speaker 1: So yeah, the big ablets comes out and the shield's inventus. Like.
Speaker 1: The guys who actually made the Dalkon Shield had conducted
Speaker 1: an internal study before they sold it to Age Robbins,
Speaker 1: and their studies showed that the device had a failure
Speaker 1: rate about one point one percent, and other i U
Speaker 1: D s on the market had a failure rate of
Speaker 1: two to three percent, so they were they advertised of
Speaker 1: like effective better than all the other I U D
Speaker 1: s um That was another big part of their of
Speaker 1: their claim to fame. It was billed as completely safe, reliable,
Speaker 1: in consequence free, and since it was mostly plastic, it
Speaker 1: was made in the same factory as Chapstick, another Age
Speaker 1: Robin's product. It retailed for four dollars and thirty five cents,
Speaker 1: which made it one of the most affordable methods of
Speaker 1: long term birth control on the market. So that all
Speaker 1: sounds fine. One point one percent failure rate, cheap, affordable,
Speaker 1: made with the chapstick people. How do they give the
Speaker 1: chapsticks that help you to load that up with chapstick
Speaker 1: it yourself? Yeah, chapsticks. You get a discount if you
Speaker 1: use if if they let you, if you use a chapstick. Still, yeah,
Speaker 1: that would be better than every time you say, I
Speaker 1: keep thinking of the Radish, the dikeon Radish, Oh, the
Speaker 1: dikeon Radish, Yes, and like it kind of has sprouts
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, it would be a say for a
Speaker 1: method of birth control than the Dalcan shield for sure.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen seventy one, the f d A was
Speaker 1: not the all powerful entity that it is today. Drug
Speaker 1: laws were looser, and since the shield was not a
Speaker 1: method of hormonal birth control, it wasn't regulated as a drug,
Speaker 1: so we got to skip the testing process normally required
Speaker 1: for medical devices that go inside a human body. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it kind of turns out, unfortunately, that giant pharmaceutical
Speaker 1: company Age Robbin's lied to everybody about a number of
Speaker 1: you know, my minor minor things. For example, they lied
Speaker 1: about the rate at which the device worked because the
Speaker 1: first study into the Shield's efficacy was flawed. It had
Speaker 1: been done by two scientists over a period of eight months,
Speaker 1: with just a handful of it with two people, and
Speaker 1: be like, oh, you didn't get fined in three months?
Speaker 1: Were good? Yeah, it was a tiny number of people
Speaker 1: and it was a short period of time. Um, and
Speaker 1: further study wasn't required by the f d A, so
Speaker 1: Age Robbin's just didn't do any further study. Every time
Speaker 1: you say his name, I do think of like a
Speaker 1: bondvill Like every time you say his name, H. Robbins
Speaker 1: or yeah, the Probins, like the H. Holmes, Like it's
Speaker 1: it's like you there it is, Yeah, Age Robbins winds
Speaker 1: up racking up a body count similar to HH Holmes.
Speaker 1: Actually the story yeah so, um so H Robbins like
Speaker 1: these two scientists who invent this thing, you know, study
Speaker 1: a couple of dozen people over a few months and
Speaker 1: are like, this is the failure rate, and age Robbins
Speaker 1: sells it to millions of people without doing any further
Speaker 1: research on it because they don't have to, and companies
Speaker 1: don't do anything they don't have to. Um. And this
Speaker 1: is a problem because the first year's sales suggests the
Speaker 1: failure rate was actually something like five and a half
Speaker 1: percent UM, which makes it twice what other products on
Speaker 1: the market wore, and it would wind up actually being
Speaker 1: much higher than that. UM. So they pretty immediately know
Speaker 1: that it fails a lot more often than they're advertising,
Speaker 1: but they don't change their advertisements because that helps them
Speaker 1: make money now, H Robbins. Yeah, of course H. Robin
Speaker 1: also chose to keep on the d l the fact
Speaker 1: that the shield contained copper salts. Uh, those were an
Speaker 1: active ingredient in the Dalkon shield. Um, no big, no big,
Speaker 1: because if they told people about that, then it would
Speaker 1: have to be regulated as a drug and they would
Speaker 1: have had to go through FDA testing. So they just lied,
Speaker 1: you know, just you know, just slightly, just the book
Speaker 1: a little bit, just a little bit. Mhm. Why would
Speaker 1: you you know? This is a very dangerous grift. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's getting it's getting dangerous. Here. To obscure the fact
Speaker 1: that it included medical like it did include drugs without
Speaker 1: technically lying, sales people were instructed to tell clients that
Speaker 1: the Dalkon shield contained a confidential blending of ingredients, because
Speaker 1: if you say it's a secret O medient, it's the
Speaker 1: family recipe and please tell me. These people came around
Speaker 1: these sells people with like briefcases to show off their
Speaker 1: dynamic key chain. Oh yeah, no, I've actually seen some
Speaker 1: of the packaging for that. You just got a Dalkon
Speaker 1: shield at home? We would love a novel um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In three years, more than two point two million Dalkon
Speaker 1: shields were sold in the United States, making it the
Speaker 1: top selling I U D in the nation. Throughout the
Speaker 1: early nineteen seventies, A. H. Robbins and the devices inventors
Speaker 1: pocketed massive amounts of money, and all was well, except
Speaker 1: all was not well. That was a lie because the
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical giant knew from the beginning that things were horribly
Speaker 1: wrong with the Dalkon Shield. And I'm gonna quote here
Speaker 1: from a contemporary rite up in mother Jones. Only a
Speaker 1: few months after the Dalkon Shield went on sale in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one, reports of adverse reactions began pouring into
Speaker 1: the headquarters of the manufacturer H. Robbins. There were cases
Speaker 1: of pelvic inflammatory disease and infection of the uterus that
Speaker 1: can require weeks of bed rest and antibiotic treatment, sept semia,
Speaker 1: blood poisoning, pregnancies resulting from spontaneous abortions at topic, tubal pregnancies,
Speaker 1: and perforations of the uterus. In a number of cases
Speaker 1: the damage was so severe as to require hysterectomy. There
Speaker 1: were even medical reports of Dalkon shields ripping their way
Speaker 1: through the walls of the uterus and being found voting
Speaker 1: free in the abdominal cavity far from the uterus. So
Speaker 1: that's not ideal. Yeah, So this went on for how long?
Speaker 1: How many and of associated this I mean, we'll get
Speaker 1: to the end numbers. But you know, they they sell
Speaker 1: millions of these before anything really blows up in the
Speaker 1: media about it. And when I say sell millions of these.
Speaker 1: I mean millions of these were put into people's bodies. Um. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: didn't have a clue that this was going to be problematic. Well, no,
Speaker 1: some of them did. Actually, there were doctors who noticed
Speaker 1: the shields flaws almost immediately and planned parenthood. Advocates of
Speaker 1: Arizona made this note in a write up quote, not
Speaker 1: everyone who laid eyes on the Dalkon shield got a
Speaker 1: warm and fuzzy feeling from it. Those feet gave many
Speaker 1: people The HEB. Gbs Dorothy Lansing and O. B. G.
Speaker 1: Y In from Pennsylvania to right at the shield in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four, calling it a veritable instrument of torture.
Speaker 1: Grouse looking little device with vicious spikes that made removal
Speaker 1: very difficult for the doctor and painful for the user.
Speaker 1: She refused to offer shields to her patients, of course,
Speaker 1: a female doctor. Female doctor. Yeah, there's a fe male
Speaker 1: doctor in here. But yeah, you suspect most of the
Speaker 1: first people to recognize it were the the lady O. B.
Speaker 1: G ns. Um. Now, those vicious spikes were not the
Speaker 1: worst part of the shield's design. Unfortunately, that would be
Speaker 1: the string. So, like I said, most I e d
Speaker 1: s have a string attached to them makes it easier
Speaker 1: to remove. Uh. The normally those strings are made out
Speaker 1: of a very particular kind of material that cannot transfer bacteria, right,
Speaker 1: because the uterus is is sterile, right, and you want
Speaker 1: to keep use that material. No. Um, they use nylon um,
Speaker 1: which is like they use Yeah, they use nylon wrapped
Speaker 1: in a sheath that deteriorated inside the body. Uh. And
Speaker 1: the string was not at each end and so not sealed. Um.
Speaker 1: Irwin Learner, who was the Dalcon Company's president, thought that
Speaker 1: the knot would be enough to keep bacteria from getting
Speaker 1: into the string. Uh. And it was not. Uh. And
Speaker 1: you know there were Yeah, there were a lot of
Speaker 1: people did a lot of people warned them that like
Speaker 1: this not like bacteria will get inside, it will travel
Speaker 1: up the string into the uterus. And they said, that's
Speaker 1: never gonna happen. It's fine, it's fine. They'll never know.
Speaker 1: It's fine. We have to figure we'd have to change
Speaker 1: the product, and that will cost money. By the time
Speaker 1: they figured out, I'll have their money. It's all good,
Speaker 1: all good now. One of the reasons Learner thought that
Speaker 1: the shield he'd helped design was safe was the fact
Speaker 1: that the uterus is again a sterile environment, which is
Speaker 1: why so many people use uterus as to clean their kitchens. Unfortunately. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, yeah, it's just the right tool for the job. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it gets nature's bleach to say it. So, the nylon
Speaker 1: in the string was not sterile, as I said, and
Speaker 1: bacteria were able to enter through that unsealed knot and
Speaker 1: apple up from the vagina into the uterus, crawling up
Speaker 1: the dalkon shield strings like Rapunzel's hair ladder, and the
Speaker 1: fact that there was actually a sheath around the string
Speaker 1: protected the traveling bacteria from cervical mucus, which is normally
Speaker 1: a barrier to bacteria. So that Planned Parenthood write up
Speaker 1: I found described the string on the dalkon shield as
Speaker 1: a bacterial expressway. In other words, they couldn't have designed
Speaker 1: a better device to transfer dangerous bacteria into the womb
Speaker 1: if they had tried, Like it's made for that. It
Speaker 1: really upgraded themselves, Like watch this hole, my beer, virus,
Speaker 1: this hole my beer. Yeah. No, we made you guys,
Speaker 1: your own little road and it's just for women. We
Speaker 1: love you so much. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the
Speaker 1: first publicized failures of the Dalkon shield came in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three, when the device had already been inserted into
Speaker 1: nearly two million women. Doctors with the University of Arizona
Speaker 1: Medical Center inserted a shield into a patient who wound
Speaker 1: up getting pregnant. Anyway, at this point in medical history, UM,
Speaker 1: it was standard procedure to leave the I U D
Speaker 1: in the uterus during a pregnancy. I think that's different now, um,
Speaker 1: but that's the way things were at that point. Um.
Speaker 1: And at this point, data was suggesting that that the
Speaker 1: Dalkon shields failure rate was closer to ten than to
Speaker 1: five percent. Again, the company had not updated any of
Speaker 1: their their marketing material. Now, unfortunately, this patient who got
Speaker 1: pregnant on the shield, UM the bacteria highway thing in her.
Speaker 1: The string introduced a bunch of deadly bacteria into her womb,
Speaker 1: and she started presenting with flu like symptoms, and three
Speaker 1: days later she miscarried her nineteen week old fetus and
Speaker 1: died from a massive bacterial infection. Uh. Yeah, So the
Speaker 1: head of obstetrics at the medical center where that woman
Speaker 1: died was a an O B G y N named
Speaker 1: doctor Donald Christian Um. He began screaming as loud as
Speaker 1: he could to anyone who would listen about the dangers
Speaker 1: of the Dalkon shields. So we do have one good
Speaker 1: male doctor and he was like, what the fuck this
Speaker 1: is like clearly a problem. Um, yeah, and he he
Speaker 1: took this on as a crusade. He started talking to
Speaker 1: guynetrologists and obstetricians around the country and gathering hundreds and
Speaker 1: hundreds of stories of Dalkon shield users who had been
Speaker 1: injured or killed by massive bacterial infections that started in
Speaker 1: their uteruses. By the spring of nineteen seventy three, he
Speaker 1: felt he had enough data to bring to the f D. A.
Speaker 1: Christian's goal was to get them to suspend sales and
Speaker 1: use of the Dalkon Shield until further research could be done.
Speaker 1: But being history's greatest monsters and also a bunch of
Speaker 1: cowards without the stones to assault my mountaintop compound, the
Speaker 1: FDA waffled, enraged in dismay, Dr Christian wrote a book
Speaker 1: length study into the shield titled Maternal Deaths associated with
Speaker 1: an intra uter and Device. Um. He wasn't great at titling,
Speaker 1: but he didn't he did. He did the work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: His study focused on four deaths and six life threatening
Speaker 1: infections suffered by shield users. Now. While he was working
Speaker 1: on his manuscript, other doctors and women's health advocates grew
Speaker 1: more and more aware of the Shields flaws. By nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four, seventeen deaths had been traced directly to the device,
Speaker 1: and the actual number was probably significantly highly. I think
Speaker 1: at least twenty four we know now, say how many
Speaker 1: people like we're told this is not the reason, it's
Speaker 1: because of your fault. You're never you did this wrong,
Speaker 1: You did this your dirty and you got sick, which
Speaker 1: is essentially what happens to women or of those who
Speaker 1: have have uterus is in general gets sold. Is your fault,
Speaker 1: you did this wrong. Sorry, yep, yep. So you have
Speaker 1: to assume, like seventeen is the minimum that had died
Speaker 1: at this point, and that's just hundreds and hundreds, potentially
Speaker 1: even tens of thousands um with some level of serious
Speaker 1: serious adverse effects like in a lot of cases like
Speaker 1: if you're getting um pelvic inflammatory syndrome, like your bedridden
Speaker 1: for weeks. Like this is the amount of human misery
Speaker 1: that has been caused by nineteen seventy four is pretty astonishing. Um,
Speaker 1: The estimate that I found is that for every million
Speaker 1: dollars A H. Robbins, the pharmaceutical company, profited from selling
Speaker 1: the Dalkon shield, their customers spent an estimated twenty million
Speaker 1: dollars on medical care due to the illness as it cost,
Speaker 1: which is pretty pretty bad. It's just it's just kind
Speaker 1: of like one more thing of like how little they
Speaker 1: care about women's health, people with you to help, like
Speaker 1: people in that general like gnecology. How little is actually
Speaker 1: worried about and even to this day obviously, yeah, like
Speaker 1: I think it's better, but not good now, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, and I'm certainly not saying it's absolutely
Speaker 1: better now. I won't know, but I haven't heard of
Speaker 1: one quite this bad. Although maybe the Marina will wind
Speaker 1: up being that bad, Like we don't really know at
Speaker 1: this point. Tell me that although, yeah, Probert, why I
Speaker 1: think people should look into that. There's something absolutely interesting
Speaker 1: lawsuits happening now. I know a lot of people who
Speaker 1: have them and have great, great experiences with them, but
Speaker 1: it does concern me a bit. Um. Those numbers are
Speaker 1: still astonishing, and things that are being figured out the best,
Speaker 1: and this is just so blatantly horrible. Um, Like you're
Speaker 1: talking by nineteen seventy four, when it's mostly still on
Speaker 1: the market, tens of thousands of women have been hospitalized
Speaker 1: because of their Dalkon shields. Like we're not talking about
Speaker 1: oh yeah, you know one percent of people or whatever
Speaker 1: are going to have a negative response, and that's a problem.
Speaker 1: But it's like within like this is a a sizeable
Speaker 1: chunk of the people who get the dal shield inserted
Speaker 1: have health consequences as a result of it, right, because
Speaker 1: we're not just talking about death, We're talking about all
Speaker 1: of the problematic issues that coscarriages and topic pregnancies which
Speaker 1: are nypermayors and for those who ye are wanting children
Speaker 1: and lots of children, all of these things. It's just
Speaker 1: such a heartbreaking thing. Well especially you have a lot
Speaker 1: of women who wanted children, who got pregnant and then
Speaker 1: or who wanted children at some point but didn't want
Speaker 1: them now got the Dalkon shield and because of complications,
Speaker 1: had their uteruses removed. Um yeah, it's just a real bummer.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, I'm gonna quote from Mother Jones again. The
Speaker 1: Dalkon shield was turning out to be far more dangerous
Speaker 1: than any other i u D already on the market.
Speaker 1: Later research in Canada and Jerry Many show that microscopic
Speaker 1: defects helped account for the shield's ability to slice into
Speaker 1: the uterine wall. Physicians found insertion was difficult, patients sounded
Speaker 1: almost unbearable. As early as February nineteen seventy one, a
Speaker 1: physician wrote to Age Robbins in reference to the insertion
Speaker 1: of the Dalkon shield. I have found the procedure to
Speaker 1: be the most traumatic manipulation ever perpetrated on womanhood. And
Speaker 1: I have inserted thousands of other varieties that would they
Speaker 1: keep doing this? Like what because? Because not to stop?
Speaker 1: It's like, quite well, we just kept pushing. It's fine,
Speaker 1: They're fine. They screamed a little bit, Everything's fine. I
Speaker 1: think these doctors are stopping. Like I think the doctors
Speaker 1: who are complaining like do it a few times and
Speaker 1: have a horror, realize that it's bad on everyone, and
Speaker 1: then say like, well, I'm not going to do this anymore. Um.
Speaker 1: But I'm wondering how many doctors just kept pushing and
Speaker 1: be like suck it up, which, by the way, women
Speaker 1: do here today about some procedures and being told you're
Speaker 1: not really in pain. You're making the ship up. So
Speaker 1: I can't imagine them when they're like, suck it up.
Speaker 1: I think it's most doctors do that because you you
Speaker 1: do have you do have good doctors like Christian, like
Speaker 1: this person who wrote that letter in nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: like the woman we heard from the lady ob Jua,
Speaker 1: and we heard from earlier. Um, who try to blow
Speaker 1: the whistle, who complain, who say this is unacceptable. But
Speaker 1: I think the bulk of people inserting them are just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it hurts, Like what do you what do you want?
Speaker 1: Like stop complaining? You know you all have sex. You
Speaker 1: have to have pain to have sex, and then obvious
Speaker 1: and then and then die in the operating table. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I wonder also for Dr Christensen, it took someone
Speaker 1: to die before realizing how bad this was, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean I don't know what his direct experience because
Speaker 1: he was the he was like the head of the
Speaker 1: unit at the hospital, so I don't know if he
Speaker 1: was actually putting them in, if this was the first
Speaker 1: time he maybe thought about it, Like I I don't
Speaker 1: know enough about the guy's actual history. Um, I just
Speaker 1: know that when when that happened, he went on the
Speaker 1: war path. But I don't know, like maybe he was
Speaker 1: putting it in for years before someone died. I really
Speaker 1: just I couldn't tell you many questions. So in of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America banned
Speaker 1: the Dalkon Shield from use in their clinics. They recommended
Speaker 1: it be removed from patients who had had it inserted.
Speaker 1: Even this came with harms to patients because the vicious
Speaker 1: spikes in the Dalkon shields side had a tendency to
Speaker 1: tear through soft tissue when yanked out. As deaths and
Speaker 1: nightmare stories of injuries mounted, the FDA begged Age Robbins
Speaker 1: to stop selling their Vaginal Death Crap, which is a
Speaker 1: pretty good name for a band. I was going to say,
Speaker 1: who's a boy vaginal? Yeah, solid metal band, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: the songs, or maybe it's just an emo band. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Dalkon Shield is not a bad band name either. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm still holding it. That's a Star Trek weapon, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I do think it's more of a Star Trek a
Speaker 1: Star Trek ship. So the company refused to stop selling.
Speaker 1: You know, they're horrible, horrible, poisoned i u D executives
Speaker 1: worried that doing so would be seen as an admission
Speaker 1: of guilt um and since tens of thousands of women
Speaker 1: were suing them for injuries, it would be expensive to
Speaker 1: admit guilt. So, because so many people are suing us,
Speaker 1: we can't stop selling this because then they'll win their
Speaker 1: cases against us for the injuries and we did to them, right,
Speaker 1: So I assumed there would be a lot of lawsuits
Speaker 1: and it would go so many, so many lawsuits. This
Speaker 1: company gets sued like you would not believe, well, like
Speaker 1: you would absolutely believe they're contempt for human life. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So ah, Proven's lawyers took the text the shield was
Speaker 1: no more dangerous than any other i U D. They
Speaker 1: argued that all the pelvic inflammatory disease cases tied to
Speaker 1: the shield had actually nothing to do with it. The
Speaker 1: company spokesman Thomas Poe told press, they have their experts,
Speaker 1: we have ours, which is a very capital something to say,
Speaker 1: well we got experts. Bring my people who have no
Speaker 1: degree in this, but they're gonna be really loud about it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's that oil industry ship where it's like, yeah, well
Speaker 1: we got scientists too, and we pay them to say
Speaker 1: what the opposite of what you're saying, but louder. Despite
Speaker 1: all of the US by the end of nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: the Dalkon Shield was effectively off the market. They kind
Speaker 1: of just quietly stopped selling it after a while. More
Speaker 1: than two and a half million and well stopped selling
Speaker 1: it in the US after a while. More on that later,
Speaker 1: more than two and a half million American women had
Speaker 1: the shields installed in their bodies. As many as two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand people testified that they had been injured by
Speaker 1: the Dalkon Shield and filed claims against Age Robbins. Some
Speaker 1: set counts say four hundred thousand, like a huge amount
Speaker 1: of the people who get this wind up with, like,
Speaker 1: you know, legal complaints against Age H. Robbins. So the
Speaker 1: pharmaceutical giant would spend a full decade fighting these cases
Speaker 1: tooth and nail, doing everything and its power to avoid
Speaker 1: any kind of legal consequences for its actions. Numerous company
Speaker 1: executives perjured themselves in court. Tens of thousands of pages
Speaker 1: of internal documents were destroyed and direct violation with court orders.
Speaker 1: FDA offices and Capitol Hill were flooded with AH Robbin's
Speaker 1: lawyers just doing everything that they could to slow down
Speaker 1: the process at which like they were mitigated because they
Speaker 1: knew eventually litigation was going to mean the end of
Speaker 1: the company and they wanted to suck as much value
Speaker 1: out of it as they possibly couldn't put it in
Speaker 1: the hands of their shareholders. Part of why they're delaying
Speaker 1: this so much is because they're selling it to other
Speaker 1: people outside the United States after they stopped the US. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you gotta keep that ship going before your companies destroyed
Speaker 1: by a river of lawsuits. That was no one was
Speaker 1: dark and griffty. Oh it's about Sopha. You have no
Speaker 1: idea how bad this is gonna get. It's gonna get
Speaker 1: so much worse. Well before we get to so much worse, right,
Speaker 1: you know what it is, right? Yeah, you know what
Speaker 1: won't so vaginal death crabs. God, I hope not um
Speaker 1: audible Lobster. Yeah, either way, we're back. And I'm thinking
Speaker 1: about Red Lobster because of what you just said, because
Speaker 1: they have a new Mountain dew Margarita, I really wanted
Speaker 1: to go. I went to the nearest Red Lobster to me,
Speaker 1: and it was across the river in Washington, and everyone
Speaker 1: in the line outside didn't have a mask and it
Speaker 1: was inside seating only. And I was like, no, that
Speaker 1: seems I don't want to get COVID for this margarita.
Speaker 1: Are you sure? Yeah? But really, I what about cheddar biscuits.
Speaker 1: I've gotten a lot of diseases for cheddar biscuits in
Speaker 1: the past, enough that I think I don't need that anymore.
Speaker 1: I'm starting to question what you're worth, Like what what
Speaker 1: we've all We've all gotten a little bit of a
Speaker 1: little bit of what you think, like hepatitis whatever. It's fine, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna go to red lobster and not get
Speaker 1: a disease. It's so bacon wrapt gallops that are kind
Speaker 1: of cooked. They are kind of cooked, and they only
Speaker 1: about a third of them have the haunt of virus.
Speaker 1: So that's a pretty good ratio. I mean, have you
Speaker 1: gone for shrimp thus come on, Oh yeah, no, you're
Speaker 1: definitely getting the hunt of virus. Is shrimp fust absolutely anyway?
Speaker 1: But man, them shrimps is cheap. That's so good. So
Speaker 1: in the end, the law did come for H. Robbins.
Speaker 1: In nine four, Judge Miles W. Lord ruled against the
Speaker 1: company and in favor of its hundreds of thousands of victims. Again,
Speaker 1: they're being sued in court by more than like a
Speaker 1: quarter of a million people at this point, which is,
Speaker 1: if that many people are suing you, you're in the wrong.
Speaker 1: Like I don't even need to hear about the case.
Speaker 1: So two fifty people are suing you, okay, but that's
Speaker 1: all like five of the population. You should you shouldn't
Speaker 1: be allowed in society anymore. Maybe it's fine. So um.
Speaker 1: Some of those victims were in the courtroom while Judge
Speaker 1: Lord read his his his judgment, and many of them
Speaker 1: wept openly as he read this. To the companies top executives,
Speaker 1: it is not enough to say I did not know.
Speaker 1: It was not me, look elsewhere. Time and time again,
Speaker 1: each of you has used this kind of argument in
Speaker 1: refusing to acknowledge your responsibility and in pretending to the
Speaker 1: world that the chief officers and the directors of your
Speaker 1: gigantic multinational corporation have no responsibility for the company's acts
Speaker 1: and omissions. Under your direction, your company has in fact
Speaker 1: continued to allow women, tends of thousands of them, to
Speaker 1: wear this device, a deadly depth charge in their wounds,
Speaker 1: ready to explode at any time. This is corporate irresponsibility
Speaker 1: at its meanest. Pretty good, many good band names in there.
Speaker 1: Yeah they're Veginale. Uh Se. Conviction is today because I
Speaker 1: feel like we do not hold obviously and I don't know,
Speaker 1: you know, of all people, enough heads of corporations irresponsible
Speaker 1: for these things, and they didn't then, like the company
Speaker 1: was destroyed, which is good, better or than like what's
Speaker 1: happening to Perdue, um, you know, for starting the opiate crisis?
Speaker 1: But they didn't. None of these guys went to prison,
Speaker 1: and they should have. Yeah, yeah, you put you put
Speaker 1: twenty of these guys in prison. Maybe we didn't have
Speaker 1: had an opiate crisis because maybe Perdue would have been like,
Speaker 1: oh ship, there's still Age Robin guys doing time for
Speaker 1: the vaginal depth charges. Like I don't know, I feel
Speaker 1: like those are narcissists who really believe they're the ones
Speaker 1: who get away with this, So it really doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: Maybe I say we still give it a shot and
Speaker 1: throw it. I'm not opposed to the don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1: So um, now, the company was set up to start
Speaker 1: a multimillion dollars and eventually think it was a multibillion
Speaker 1: dollar program to remove the shields from women and pay
Speaker 1: for them for their pain and injuries. Of the more
Speaker 1: than four hundred thousand lawsuits filed against the company were
Speaker 1: litigated or settled, and a lot of those were aggregating
Speaker 1: like thousands of cases together obviously, because you get that
Speaker 1: many people suing and you start like lumping them into
Speaker 1: class actions and stuff. The company was forced to declare
Speaker 1: bankruptcy in nineteen eighty five, and it collapsed under the
Speaker 1: way of so many judgments. By six and estimated hundred
Speaker 1: thousand American women still had Dalkon shields in their bodies.
Speaker 1: Think that long. Yeah. Yeah. The catastrophic and extremely public
Speaker 1: failure of the Dalkon shield nearly killed the i u
Speaker 1: D itself. By nineteen eight six, only one brand of
Speaker 1: iu D was still on the market in the United States.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen seventies, nearly ten percent of US women
Speaker 1: who used contraception used an i U D. Today that
Speaker 1: number is less than one percent. It's around one percent.
Speaker 1: And it's generally agreed that the main reason for the
Speaker 1: collapse and popularity of the i U D was the
Speaker 1: Dalkon shield that it created, Because obviously, like you hear
Speaker 1: that story, like, you're not gonna get one of those,
Speaker 1: you already get the horror story of the you know,
Speaker 1: floating i u D, which does happen. Yeah. In European nations,
Speaker 1: most of which never imported the shield i u D
Speaker 1: s remained popular. In the U S still has the
Speaker 1: lowest rate of i u D use of any Western nation,
Speaker 1: according to the Gutmacher Institute quote. The public health need
Speaker 1: for more whitespread use of the i u D is
Speaker 1: revealed in one simple statistic. Fifty of unintended pregnancies in
Speaker 1: the United States are the result of contraceptive failure or misuse.
Speaker 1: Because the i u D is almost impossible to misuse
Speaker 1: and is far less likely to fail from the pill,
Speaker 1: the condom, or the injectable. A national increase in iu
Speaker 1: D use that comes at the expense of such methods
Speaker 1: would reduce the number of unintended pregnancies. If some women
Speaker 1: choose the i u D instead of relying on natural
Speaker 1: birth control methods or chance, the number of unintended pregnancies
Speaker 1: should also decline. An industry sponsored survey of seven thousand
Speaker 1: U S women conducted in n revealed that many current
Speaker 1: i u D users had switched from the condom, the
Speaker 1: pill or withdrawal. So again, pretty significant consequences to this.
Speaker 1: Outside of the suffering of the people who have it
Speaker 1: implanted in them, there's just there's god knows how many
Speaker 1: millions at this point of unintended pregnancies have occurred as
Speaker 1: a result of this thing. Um, you know which it's
Speaker 1: it's It's just the amount of human shrapnel caused by
Speaker 1: Age Robbins is pretty astonishing. And you add that to
Speaker 1: the couple of dozen people we know died, the hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of people who are injured and rendered fertile,
Speaker 1: And yeah, Age Robbins in the Dalkon Company make a
Speaker 1: pretty solid bastard. But we're actually just scraping the start
Speaker 1: of this story, Samantha, don't barely gotten started. Yeah, between
Speaker 1: the word slicing and scraping in this is a slicy
Speaker 1: scraping thing. You said, Bacteria Expressway. Bacterial Expressway, which is
Speaker 1: another good band name. This is a great episode for
Speaker 1: that is a punk band. Oh yeah, Bacterial Expressway open
Speaker 1: for uterine depth charge back. So um. The United States
Speaker 1: Agency for International Development, or us AID exists to do
Speaker 1: exactly what the name would suggests. Help other nations to develop. Now,
Speaker 1: one of the ways in which nineteen seventies thinkers in
Speaker 1: the government felt poor nations needed help developing was it
Speaker 1: giving their populations access to contraceptives. And obviously this isn't
Speaker 1: necessarily nefarious. It's great to get a lot of people
Speaker 1: are poor the money for contraceptives given free contraceptives always
Speaker 1: a good thing. I am supportive of people having access
Speaker 1: to good birth control. Um not a problem, except it
Speaker 1: becomes a problem because of the way that they do it.
Speaker 1: So back in two horrifying stories of the Dalkon Shields,
Speaker 1: Deadly Flaws had first started going public in a big way,
Speaker 1: and it was immediately obvious. They didn't stop selling it
Speaker 1: for two more years. But the people at H. Robbins
Speaker 1: knew pretty much as soon as this thing got on
Speaker 1: the market that it was going to get taken off
Speaker 1: the market because it was hurting too many people. And
Speaker 1: they didn't stop selling it in the US because of that,
Speaker 1: God no, But they did immediately start looking at places
Speaker 1: they could sell it overseas in order to make sure
Speaker 1: that they had a long term way of making money
Speaker 1: off of the Dalkon shield because they're good people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So yeah. Yeah. Obviously, they still kept pumping out as
Speaker 1: many of these devices into the US market as possible,
Speaker 1: but being forward thinking capitalists, they started looking further afield
Speaker 1: for new markets from Mother Jones. With any other kind
Speaker 1: of hazardous product, the manufacturer might at this point have
Speaker 1: had to search out some sleazy broker to arrange a
Speaker 1: secret dump. Not so with a contraceptive device. The Office
Speaker 1: of Population within a I D had a budget of
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty five million dollars to spend on
Speaker 1: the purchase and overseas distribution of contraceptives. Director RT. Ravenholt
Speaker 1: was known to be a population control enthusiast who would
Speaker 1: ask few questions about a good deal on Dalkon shields.
Speaker 1: It was only natural for Robbins to turn to the government.
Speaker 1: Robert W. Nichols, Robbins director of International Marketing, wrote to
Speaker 1: the Population Office of a I D to interest them
Speaker 1: in placing this fine product with the population control programs
Speaker 1: and family planning clinics throughout the Third World. Nicholas sweeten
Speaker 1: the deal with a special discount, which dramatically illustrates the
Speaker 1: double standard drug companies apply to Third World consumers. The
Speaker 1: company offered a I d the shield in bulk packages
Speaker 1: unsterilized at forty eight percent off. So that's that's not
Speaker 1: a good side. So the word population controls as a lot,
Speaker 1: that's not a good side either. That's never never a
Speaker 1: good sentence or a phrase to hear A b I
Speaker 1: just love. It's like vaginal death crabs for everyone. How
Speaker 1: to discommit price unsterilized. You're welcome, no problems, There's no problem, Paul,
Speaker 1: have vaginal death crabs. Everyone. Also, this is going to
Speaker 1: remain in your vagina for a long while, hanging in there,
Speaker 1: hanging in If you try to root move it out,
Speaker 1: it's going to rip you up like a fucking shrapnel
Speaker 1: from a mortar. But it's okay because it's population control,
Speaker 1: because we've got to control that population of you kinds
Speaker 1: of people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So you did kind of
Speaker 1: hit on the fact that population control enthusiast is a
Speaker 1: terrifying thing to call someone. Um now that that actually
Speaker 1: refers to a specific intellectual movement within the Western civilization
Speaker 1: that goes back almost a hundred years. Um. See, so
Speaker 1: I had this written a little bit differently, but I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna go ahead and say, surprise, this is not
Speaker 1: an episode about the Dalkon Shield. That was just the introduction.
Speaker 1: This is an episode about the population control movement, and
Speaker 1: I just kind of wanted to, like a Dalkon shield
Speaker 1: like slide in secretly and then surprise you, m yeah,
Speaker 1: and I wedged myself in there, and now we're going
Speaker 1: to learn about there not going to be friends, Robert
Speaker 1: friends after that. Sorry, I feel like I trade Samantha. Yes,
Speaker 1: if I could flip this desk over in a dramatic way.
Speaker 1: You know, we talked about the bacterial super Highway, and
Speaker 1: now we're going to take a hard right turn onto
Speaker 1: the eugenics super Highway, because that's what this episode is
Speaker 1: secretly about. I just we also say that's an expressway.
Speaker 1: Keep going, Oh yeah, maybe a tollway. Get shittier. So
Speaker 1: the first concerted project to control world population started in
Speaker 1: the late eighteen hundreds and four colonizer dominated nations the
Speaker 1: United States, mostly California, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Now,
Speaker 1: in California, Canada and Australia, white people were increasingly terrified
Speaker 1: about the fact that Asian people were immigrating there and
Speaker 1: having babies in California. Asian immigration had actually been stoked
Speaker 1: by a US government policy. From the eighteen sixties, Washington
Speaker 1: d c. Had heavily pressured China's imperial government to make
Speaker 1: it easier for Chinese citizens to leave the country because
Speaker 1: we wanted workers and stuff. Um. The US actually argued
Speaker 1: that Beijing was treading on their people's quote inherent and
Speaker 1: an alienable right to change their home and allegiance by
Speaker 1: stopping them from leaving the country. So keep that in mind.
Speaker 1: The US government argued that restricting people from leaving China
Speaker 1: for the US was a violation of their inherent and
Speaker 1: inalienable right to change their home in allegiance. The only
Speaker 1: time you'll hear that from the United States government had
Speaker 1: left from well we know, well, yeah, because that's one
Speaker 1: where it's like, I'm totally on board with the United States. There.
Speaker 1: People do have an inherent right to change their home
Speaker 1: in allegiance. Um, they don't stick with that for long.
Speaker 1: From a Journey an article in the Journal of Past
Speaker 1: and Present by the Oxford University Press quote, disgruntled workers
Speaker 1: in California attacked Asian immigrants and in eighteen seventy seven
Speaker 1: began political mobilization, much to the alarm of East coast elites.
Speaker 1: Writing for The North American Review the following year, MJ
Speaker 1: D sought to justify anti Chinese attacks. Migration was not
Speaker 1: just another form of international trade, he insisted, and the
Speaker 1: frugal Chinese worker was not just another labor saving machine.
Speaker 1: Migration was a biological process. Centuries of overpopulation in places
Speaker 1: like India and China had produced people able to subsist
Speaker 1: on wages that would starve Europeans. Facing such competition, Whites
Speaker 1: would fail to reproduce. Dire consequences would therefore ensue should
Speaker 1: they withdraw the intelligence of artificial selection from the environment
Speaker 1: and leave the battle to the chances of natural selection.
Speaker 1: So that's pretty racist, wow, I mean it's fitting with
Speaker 1: the current administration, So go ahead. Yeah, I mean we're
Speaker 1: really really a blast the past there. But yeah, that's
Speaker 1: the argument there. That's why. So initially the government's like
Speaker 1: forcing the Chinese government to let more people come here
Speaker 1: because we need the workers. But then like white people,
Speaker 1: I feel like they're getting undercut, and so pressure the
Speaker 1: government to stop Chinese people from coming into the country.
Speaker 1: Like that's the basic way that things go in the
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds, So that same year eighteen seventy seven
Speaker 1: there started to come out because you know how the
Speaker 1: way that like all culture really flows. This is one
Speaker 1: of the things I say that a couple of times
Speaker 1: that Andrew Breitbart got right, politics is downhill of culture. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: So what hat starts happening in the culture in the
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds that leads to all of these like
Speaker 1: Chinese exclusion acts and stuff. Is this flood of novels
Speaker 1: and short stories that are like trying to warn white
Speaker 1: people of an invasion of Europe in the United States. Um, Like,
Speaker 1: that's this big thing that starts happening in the media
Speaker 1: right now. So you've got like this mix of like,
Speaker 1: you know, people who were I guess their modern equivalent
Speaker 1: be the guys writing for The Atlantic, you know, um
Speaker 1: like Connor Friedersdorff and the Then you know people like
Speaker 1: Steve Bannon like writing like racist fiction about how Chinese
Speaker 1: people are going to Uh it's it's white genocide ship right,
Speaker 1: Like it's it's always been the same fear are you
Speaker 1: talking about today? Right? Yeah? Yeah, it's it's it's changed, right, Okay, okay, yeah. Quote,
Speaker 1: Chinese were depicted not as nationals of a particular country,
Speaker 1: but as a hoard or flood, a force of nature.
Speaker 1: This image also featured in European journalistic and fictional accounts
Speaker 1: of migration. The German geographer Friedrich Retzel, perhaps the first
Speaker 1: European to draw attention to the Chinese question in California,
Speaker 1: would go on to popularize the notion of Levin's realm.
Speaker 1: Do you know what that? You get? You guys? You
Speaker 1: guys know Levian's realm? Right? Everybody remembers that from high school? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did not realize that's where that concept had started.
Speaker 1: Pretty good, waiting for the big Yeah, I'm one of
Speaker 1: the big finale. Let's keep going. Yeah, yeah, that's coming.
Speaker 1: We gotta build up a bit. So obviously, the term
Speaker 1: lead in round was one of Hitler's chief talking points.
Speaker 1: The literal meaning of the term is living space. Hitler
Speaker 1: pointed to the US, which had genocided its way into
Speaker 1: possession of a vas continent and argued that Germany deserves
Speaker 1: that kind of space too. But the actual term Leban's
Speaker 1: round had originated in California from these Europeans and like
Speaker 1: American white people who were seeing Chinese people immigrant and
Speaker 1: being like they're crowding us out. Like that's actually where
Speaker 1: it started. Um Historian Matthew Connolly notes it suggested the
Speaker 1: word Leban's round suggested that biological processes of growth and
Speaker 1: movement underlay politics and were more fundamental than mere political borders.
Speaker 1: So Leban's round wasn't just a matter of physical space.
Speaker 1: In fact, it wasn't mostly a matter of physical space,
Speaker 1: because California is still empty today. Most of California, nobody
Speaker 1: fucking lives in, like as big as Los Angeles is,
Speaker 1: like it's it's it's a huge land mass, so it's
Speaker 1: like the whole continent. Like these these people who started
Speaker 1: using this term weren't actually short on space. Um, living
Speaker 1: space meant more directly physical and course not not physical,
Speaker 1: but philosophical space for white people and white culture and
Speaker 1: white jeans to spread. That's really what Yeah, exactly, exactly
Speaker 1: exactly yeah. So yeah. On a ground level, anti Asian
Speaker 1: sentiment in this period was driven by working class white
Speaker 1: people who were angry that Chinese immigrants were undercutting their
Speaker 1: wages and taking jobs. But on the loftier philosophical level,
Speaker 1: that politics kind of flows downstream from it was a
Speaker 1: question of the survival of the white race. Now then
Speaker 1: is now white supremacist ideologues were happy to take advantage
Speaker 1: of poor white resentment over economic trouble and turned this
Speaker 1: into a boiling race hatred. In eighty five, all this
Speaker 1: race baiting boiled over into a series of mass expulsions
Speaker 1: of Chinese immigrants all across the West Coast. Further inland,
Speaker 1: there were even murders and straight up massacres. There were
Speaker 1: ethnic cleansings in California of of of Chinese communities. Um
Speaker 1: White supremacist writers defended the killers, describing their actions as
Speaker 1: an example of workers expressing their citizenship. The expulsions and
Speaker 1: the violence were positively compared to anti Jewish programs in Europe,
Speaker 1: as both Jews and Chinese immigrants were depicted by racists
Speaker 1: as quote disease carrying cosmopolitans who excelled in economic competition.
Speaker 1: It was the same basic thing you know that you
Speaker 1: saw happening with anti Semitism. I'm not gonna lie, it's
Speaker 1: just kind of like, are we doing this again today?
Speaker 1: Except yeah, like Chinese immigrants is like this is too
Speaker 1: familiar in a way we never stopped. Uh yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I think the focus is, yeah, the threat of
Speaker 1: white hierarchy, whether or not they're going to be decimated.
Speaker 1: No longer exists as if that could possibly happen, especially
Speaker 1: in the next generation or so. But interesting, there were
Speaker 1: actually well, and it's it's this matter of like the
Speaker 1: fuel for the movement comes from poor white workers who
Speaker 1: are getting edged out of jobs by people being paid
Speaker 1: less than them. But the problem isn't the people being
Speaker 1: paid less than them. The problem is, for example, the
Speaker 1: fact that there's all sorts of holes in our labor
Speaker 1: market whereby certain types of people who are not documented
Speaker 1: citizens can be treat did subhumanly by companies without any consequence,
Speaker 1: and it's just cheaper for them to not treat people
Speaker 1: or pay them properly, right yep. And companies like State
Speaker 1: Farm who love to advocate for special cards for immigrations
Speaker 1: who don't have citizenship rights but can be underpaid, paid
Speaker 1: taxes and no longer be recognized as individuals. Hey, it's great,
Speaker 1: it's good, it's a fine. Yeah, it's fine, everything's fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's on fire. Yeah, I mean I wish everything we're
Speaker 1: on fire. Sometimes do do you do? You know what?
Speaker 1: What what is most likely not on fire? This is
Speaker 1: my worst, my worst way, you know what? I wouldn't
Speaker 1: set on fire. Samantha. There we go the products and
Speaker 1: services that support this podcast. That would be biting the
Speaker 1: dog that feeds me. I really wish we could transition
Speaker 1: like that. All you gotta do is believe in yourself,
Speaker 1: like we're bad. So we're talking about racism, so new
Speaker 1: legal it's always and individuals and you know, different racial people.
Speaker 1: Let's go population. I love is a melting pot, as in, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I won't make a cannibals. Yeah. New legal barriers were
Speaker 1: added to Chinese immigration by the same government that had literally,
Speaker 1: like a decade earlier, lobby the Chinese government about the
Speaker 1: inherent freedom of human beings to change their face place
Speaker 1: of residence. That ship switches around real damn fast. Chinese
Speaker 1: migrants had to develop new ways of faking their identity
Speaker 1: paperwork in order to gain entrance into the United States. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: immigration officials developed an ever more sophisticated and invasive system
Speaker 1: of tracking people, which Matthew Connolly, who's a great historian,
Speaker 1: describes as a prerequisite for modern systems of population control.
Speaker 1: So all of this human monitoring ship that we deal
Speaker 1: with today really does start in order to stop Chinese
Speaker 1: people from immigrating to the United States. The whole infrastructure that,
Speaker 1: like ice is the is the current manifestation of begins here,
Speaker 1: which is great just somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. So, by nineteen
Speaker 1: o eight, America's top racist president, Theodore Roosevelt, was calling
Speaker 1: openly for Asian immigrants to be banned from entering not
Speaker 1: just the United States, but all English speaking nations. To
Speaker 1: say that about Teddy enough, Yeah, we're just talking about
Speaker 1: the parks he made. But no, yeah, he tried to
Speaker 1: ban every Asian person from English speaking nations. Pretty cool. Uh,
Speaker 1: And you know this is not just a US is
Speaker 1: bad thing because elected leaders in Canada and Australia expressed
Speaker 1: significant solidarity with Roosevelt's idea. White folks everywhere, Yeah, good
Speaker 1: on the solidarity bodies. Yeah, that's my favorite rom com.
Speaker 1: Let's go Yeah. White people everywhere cheered when Roosevelt dispatched
Speaker 1: the White Fleet to the Pacific. Now, the White Fleet
Speaker 1: was a U. S. Navy squadron named for the color
Speaker 1: of the holes on its ships, not for the white race,
Speaker 1: but kind of for the white race, um, and it
Speaker 1: was dispatched for the most part as an international goodwill exercise.
Speaker 1: Like the United States was starting to become a world
Speaker 1: power at this point. We built this big, modern fleet.
Speaker 1: Roosevelt wanted to sail it around the world and have
Speaker 1: it stopped in like twenty or thirty countries and you know,
Speaker 1: do diplomatic visits and just be like, hey, the US
Speaker 1: is here. We're gonna be in the Pacific more like
Speaker 1: we're a real country. Like check out how cool we are,
Speaker 1: which is you know, I guess fine broadly speaking, Um,
Speaker 1: and most of those trips were very pleasant, you know,
Speaker 1: the US expressing gets good will and desire to trade
Speaker 1: with everybody. We were not a world military power at
Speaker 1: this point. We weren't an invade people all that. I mean,
Speaker 1: the Spanish American war accepted had not done a huge
Speaker 1: amount of that is not nearly as much as we
Speaker 1: would do at this point. So it was mostly about trading,
Speaker 1: except for when it got to Japan. Um, because Roosevelt
Speaker 1: had sent it to Japan too, threatened the Japanese government
Speaker 1: to stop them from sending Japanese or letting Japanese people
Speaker 1: come over to the United States. Um, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: pretty bad. Um have a special white cloak they are, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean why not? Yeah, Yeah, it is a little
Speaker 1: on the nose that name, especially since when Roosevelt ordered
Speaker 1: them to intimidate the Japanese government, he specifically said that
Speaker 1: they were there to protect white civilization. Um. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a big reason for this was that the Empire of
Speaker 1: the Rising Sun had just beaten Russia in a war
Speaker 1: in like nineteen o five, which is the first time
Speaker 1: that an Asian power beat a European power in a
Speaker 1: modern conflict. Like the Russian like north fleet sailed into
Speaker 1: the area around like the coast of China where the
Speaker 1: Japanese were, and they this huge like they just got
Speaker 1: massacred by the Japanese navy, um, which like absolutely shocked
Speaker 1: the hell out of every anybody in Europe at the time,
Speaker 1: because like this is like colonialisms at its height at
Speaker 1: this point. They are not used to having to like
Speaker 1: have any sort of conflict that's a real fight with
Speaker 1: anyone who's not a white person, and it really scares
Speaker 1: the hell out of racists, um, which the Japanese Empire
Speaker 1: was too at this point. Like it's like we're talking
Speaker 1: about good are terrible? Yeah, talked to the Okinawans about that, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it was two imperial powers going to war
Speaker 1: with each other, and then another imperial power threatening that
Speaker 1: imperial power to not let everybody's bad. It's nineteen you know,
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, definitely not heroes. Yeah, so um yeah.
Speaker 1: The fleet was met with protests in Japan, most of
Speaker 1: which were inspired by the fact that California had just
Speaker 1: passed a law segregating Japanese children out of white schools,
Speaker 1: Which is interesting because if you look at like that,
Speaker 1: you can find maps online that will show like which
Speaker 1: states had segregation which didn't, and California is always listed
Speaker 1: as a state that didn't have segregation. But Japanese and
Speaker 1: I think a number of other Asian people were segregated
Speaker 1: out of white schools in California. So it's not true
Speaker 1: that that California had no segregation. It's not surprising. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: absolutely not. I mean, the the the guy who was
Speaker 1: the first Supreme Court justice in Oregon who passed the
Speaker 1: Lash law saying that like black people had to be
Speaker 1: whipped if they didn't leave Oregon became the first governor
Speaker 1: of California, and one of the first things he did
Speaker 1: as governor of California was trying to kick all the
Speaker 1: Chinese people out of California. Um, so, yeah, it's pretty bad.
Speaker 1: It's pretty bad all the way down. Yeah. Yeah. History.
Speaker 1: Yeah it's fun. You get to learn new ways about
Speaker 1: how people sucked. Well yeah, that's about yeah what I
Speaker 1: feel like, the way people suck. Yeah, it's they never
Speaker 1: stopped finding ways to suck. It's remarkable. By this point,
Speaker 1: American intellectuals largely agreed that regulation of the quote composition
Speaker 1: of of immigration was necessary to safeguard the fertility and
Speaker 1: thus the supremacy of native stocks meaning white people. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote now from the Journal of Pasty Native Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, it's pretty wild, right, like my dudes, my dudes.
Speaker 1: That got me, That got yeah. Quote. In the United States,
Speaker 1: the Immigration Bureau one congressional approval for collecting statistics according
Speaker 1: to a list of races and people's rather than country
Speaker 1: of origin. This became a tool to prove the inferiority
Speaker 1: of racial groups and a model for like minded French
Speaker 1: officials in Canada, Australia, and several European states as well.
Speaker 1: Italians came to be known as the Chinese of Europe.
Speaker 1: Is happening? I love juxtaposition of this whole conversation. Keep
Speaker 1: going as an Italian descended person, I always love getting
Speaker 1: those like little glimpses of racism against Italians because at
Speaker 1: this point it's just it's just like like a little
Speaker 1: bit like funny. But yeah that at the time they
Speaker 1: were like, yeah, they were the Chinese of Europe. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's how you know, by
Speaker 1: the way, you're really racist when you start making gradients
Speaker 1: of white people, when you're like, oh, Hungarians. Right. So
Speaker 1: the category of people's requiring containment thus grew beyond Asians,
Speaker 1: defind not by nationality so much as by biology, that is,
Speaker 1: their supposed capacity to propagate on wages that would lower
Speaker 1: other people's living standards and fertility. Though Roosevelt failed to
Speaker 1: coordinate exclusionary measures, researchers and activists saw them as the
Speaker 1: beginning of a de facto policy of global population control.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twelve, the sociologist Edward All'sworth Ross, from whom
Speaker 1: Roosevelt had borrowed the idea of race suicide, which is
Speaker 1: again the genesis of white of the white genocide myth.
Speaker 1: That was the first term before white genocide, because genocide
Speaker 1: didn't really exist as a term at this point. Um
Speaker 1: it was race suicide. That was the thing that all
Speaker 1: of these guys like Ross were warning people of. That's
Speaker 1: what Zvelt believe, the white races committing suicide by letting
Speaker 1: Chinese people, in Italian people into our country. Yeah, talk
Speaker 1: about dramatic. Yeah, Like these guys are all fucking traumas. Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Ross argued that Northern European nations had to hold fast
Speaker 1: to every settlement colony and fill them with their offspring
Speaker 1: or else see them filled with the children of the
Speaker 1: brown and the Yellow races. He predicted that the world
Speaker 1: will be cut up with immigration barriers, which will never
Speaker 1: be leveled until the intelligent accommodation of numbers and resources
Speaker 1: has greatly equalized population pressure around the globe. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: need you to read everything in that accident from now on. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If any of this is sounding a bit Nazi adjacent,
Speaker 1: that's because it was the beginning. Yeah. Yeah, all of
Speaker 1: this ship had a huge impact of Adolf Hitler and
Speaker 1: other Nazi fingers. It was an American, like we just
Speaker 1: talked about how it was, it was a European living
Speaker 1: in California who came up with the term Leban's round
Speaker 1: to talk about white people being overwhelmed by Chinese people. Um.
Speaker 1: It was an American named Prescott Hall of the Immigration
Speaker 1: Restriction League who first started describing Asian immigrants to the
Speaker 1: US as bacterial infections, which is both interesting what we're
Speaker 1: talking about definitely, like I don't think you can be
Speaker 1: a Prescott not a racist, Like if it's just it's
Speaker 1: a law, it has to be. Yeah, the world would
Speaker 1: break if that weren't the case. So barely twenty years
Speaker 1: after Prescott defined Chinese immigrants bacterial infections, Hitler would refer
Speaker 1: to Jews as plague bacillus in a clear imitation of this. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: the terminology that that people like Prescott are using for
Speaker 1: Asian immigrants is almost identical to the terminology Hitler is
Speaker 1: using for Jewish people. And a lot of those Jewish
Speaker 1: people are immigrants. A lot of the people who he
Speaker 1: was like ranting about were immigrants from Russia, like Jewish
Speaker 1: communities in Russia who had fled from the Civil War
Speaker 1: into Germany, which was proved not to be a great idea.
Speaker 1: Although if you were a Jewish person in Eastern Europe
Speaker 1: in the early half of the nineteenth century or twentieth century,
Speaker 1: really no good options, you're kind of no matter what happens,
Speaker 1: get to the UK if you can, but you still
Speaker 1: might wind up in a concentration camp, which happened to
Speaker 1: thousands of Jewish people in the US. We don't talk
Speaker 1: about that that much either, um so, uh yeah. Hall
Speaker 1: argued for world eugenics in which fit and unfit in
Speaker 1: terms of individual people in races, would be primary categories
Speaker 1: the government would use to determine who could immigrate. Hall,
Speaker 1: in many others like him, who very much dominated immigration
Speaker 1: policy in this period, saw the state as in Connolly's words,
Speaker 1: merely a mechanism for controlling biological processes, whether through promoting
Speaker 1: the propagation of the fit or excluding and sterilizing the unfit. Remember,
Speaker 1: that's what the people running the United States government in
Speaker 1: the early part of the twentieth century, and particularly immigration,
Speaker 1: but all throughout the government see the US government as
Speaker 1: a mechanism for cot rolling biological processes, promoting the propagation
Speaker 1: of the fit and excluding or sterilizing the unfit. That's
Speaker 1: what the government does. Are talking about Miller, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we are talking about Stephen Miller, because he's he very
Speaker 1: much sees things that exact same way I'm just ding,
Speaker 1: even though he pretends his little Asian wife. But yeah,
Speaker 1: certain racists have admitted Asians into the pantheon of white people.
Speaker 1: Now it's yeah, as long as like you're the right
Speaker 1: kind of Asian, you know. Yeah, that's I think Stephen
Speaker 1: Miller's I'm gonna get myself in trouble keep doing so.
Speaker 1: Um Now, I'm going to guess most people are broadly
Speaker 1: familiar with eugenics movement in the United States. We'll do
Speaker 1: a deep dive on that at some point. What's important
Speaker 1: to talk about the day is how the eugenics movement
Speaker 1: splintered off into the population control movement. Remember we heard
Speaker 1: that term a bit earlier when we're talking about that
Speaker 1: guy Ravenholt from USA. It was a population control enthusiast.
Speaker 1: All of this is trying to explain where population control
Speaker 1: comes from, because it's actually like a distinct like like
Speaker 1: like school of intellectual thought, very racist school of intellectual
Speaker 1: Thought's school school of intellectual thought. Um, So, what we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about today is how the eugenics movement, yes,
Speaker 1: splintered off into the population control movement, which wound up
Speaker 1: directing US AID policy until the nineteen eighties and beyond.
Speaker 1: The process started when eugenicists realized that they had the
Speaker 1: most success in pushing their policies when they could find
Speaker 1: ways to make them appeal to the masses. Naked racism
Speaker 1: did not appeal to the masses, because while most Americans
Speaker 1: were racist, they didn't like to think of themselves as racists. Right.
Speaker 1: That's always been the key of racism in America is
Speaker 1: saying you're not a racist. That's why you know a
Speaker 1: lot of people right now, I just Trump, yeahs, I
Speaker 1: have a friend of Yeah. There's a reason Enrique Tario
Speaker 1: was the head of the Proud Boys, you know, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So instead of just nakedly appealing to racism, um eugenics
Speaker 1: advocates realized that they had more success when they appealed
Speaker 1: to improving maternal and child health and restricting immigration in
Speaker 1: order to protect jobs. Eugenicists could still push racist eugenic policies,
Speaker 1: but they wrapped them in a veil of concern for
Speaker 1: human welfare. In the wake of World War One, increasing
Speaker 1: numbers of white supremacist academics began ringing alarm bells about overpopulation,
Speaker 1: and this starts to become after World War One this
Speaker 1: is like really what the population control movement focuses on, Like, uh,
Speaker 1: we can't talk about sterilizing whole races. Americans don't like that.
Speaker 1: That's a little bit too naked. When you talk about genocide,
Speaker 1: Americans are like, well, I don't really like I don't
Speaker 1: I'm racist, but I don't really like to think of
Speaker 1: myself as pro genocide, right, I mean, I'm come on,
Speaker 1: pro I'm pro live. We can't say that, so instead
Speaker 1: you say, no, we just we overpopulation is bad. We've
Speaker 1: got to stop over population, and then you start pushing
Speaker 1: exactly from Connolly quote. The Cambridge economist Harold Wright called
Speaker 1: for a world policy in regard to population problems, but
Speaker 1: worried that national rivalries were leading in precisely the opposite direction.
Speaker 1: The influential demographer A. M. Car Saunders thought that war
Speaker 1: would inevitably result from differential growth rates among nations and
Speaker 1: races unless declining populations were provided with some form of
Speaker 1: international guarantee. Similarly, the former MP and editor of the
Speaker 1: Edinburgh Review Harold Cox thought that low fertility nations needed
Speaker 1: to band together to defend themselves against any race that
Speaker 1: by it's too great fecundity is threatening the peace of
Speaker 1: the world. The psychologist and future leader of the International
Speaker 1: Planned Parenthood Federation CP Blacker worried that Asia and Russia
Speaker 1: might become a solid block determined to shake off the
Speaker 1: yoke of the Western powers end of America. Birth control
Speaker 1: offered the only way to avoid a second World War,
Speaker 1: this time between East and West. But this required that
Speaker 1: every culture accepted like the whole block, just the block. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And of course Russians aren't white in this period either,
Speaker 1: not white enough, you know. Um. Yeah, when you start
Speaker 1: to study white racism in this period, you realize that,
Speaker 1: like from the late eighteen hundreds of the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: there were about eleven actual white people on the planet.
Speaker 1: It's just a really fancy club. You have to be really,
Speaker 1: really really perfectly fit, right, Yeah, yeah, because you lose
Speaker 1: your whiteness if you're poor and until they need your
Speaker 1: help to like hurt other people, then you get to
Speaker 1: be white again. Yeah, as long as you have to
Speaker 1: be at the front of yea, possibly being hurt first. Yeah. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're not gonna be expendable. Its expendable people, of course
Speaker 1: you do. Why not? Yeah, you have to go invade
Speaker 1: Stalin grad Yeah, nicely so. Biologist Raymond Pearl addressed the
Speaker 1: International Eugenics Congress, projecting our thought ahead for a moment
Speaker 1: to that time, at most a few centuries ahead. We
Speaker 1: perceived that the important question will then be what kind
Speaker 1: of people are they to be? Who will then inherit
Speaker 1: the earth? Here into is the eugenic phase of the problem.
Speaker 1: Man in theory at least has it now completely in
Speaker 1: his power to determine what kind of people will make
Speaker 1: up the Earth's population of saturation. This is the way
Speaker 1: these guys are thinking, is that, like we, this tiny
Speaker 1: group of the very widest, richest people in Europe can
Speaker 1: determine what the entire population of the world will look
Speaker 1: like in the future by controlling eugenics. That's the goal, right,
Speaker 1: Obviously pretty cool stuff. Pearl said that it was pointless
Speaker 1: for eugenesis to go about their old tactics of urging
Speaker 1: the fitter classes of people to have more children as
Speaker 1: some sort of transcendental social duty. He also told them
Speaker 1: that simply targeting the obviously unfit would mean that meaning
Speaker 1: the disabled for sterilization was not a good tactic. Instead,
Speaker 1: the poor and unfit had to be stopped in mass
Speaker 1: from increasing their numbers. One of Pearl's strongest allies in
Speaker 1: this would be a woman named Margaret Singer. Margaret is
Speaker 1: the woman who popularized the term birth control. She went
Speaker 1: on to found the organizations that would eventually become the
Speaker 1: Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and as it happened, her
Speaker 1: advocacy would, years after her death, help spread millions of
Speaker 1: on millions of unsterilized alcon shields to uterus is all
Speaker 1: over the global South. And we will talk more about
Speaker 1: that in part two. It will be fun. How are
Speaker 1: you doing? How you doing, Samantha. I'm I'm digging all
Speaker 1: of this in. I'm just first of all, all of
Speaker 1: the different names and there is that I have I
Speaker 1: get to I get that note. I mean like I
Speaker 1: get to use as my band names and or screen
Speaker 1: names somewhere. That's definitely gonna be happening soon. Uh. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm enjoying every bit of this level of building up
Speaker 1: of what hierarchy and supremacy is. It's quite delightful this
Speaker 1: little chain as a little uh adventure maze that you
Speaker 1: put me on. I am glad to hear that we
Speaker 1: seek to please heat people here in our horrible stories
Speaker 1: of genocide and forced hysterectomys as one of the brown
Speaker 1: yellow people who may be infesting the nation's Uh, I
Speaker 1: will tell you I have been one that have been
Speaker 1: inundated and not breeding. You're welcome. I guess I'll tell
Speaker 1: Raymond Pearl that when he stops having been dead for
Speaker 1: half a century. I mean, you know, I want to
Speaker 1: give somebody some satisfaction and enjoy in their life. That's
Speaker 1: how I did it. You're welcome. Uh. God, Yeah, it's weird.
Speaker 1: There's like this is this is a tough one because
Speaker 1: like a lot of the history we're talking about is
Speaker 1: misinterpreted by anti birth control advocates, by like like hardcore
Speaker 1: Catholic and Christian advocates. You just think that like like
Speaker 1: who want to demonize plant parenthood, and they're wrong actually
Speaker 1: about what's bad Like Margaret Sayinger, there's a lot that's
Speaker 1: sucked up about her. They always lie about her, like
Speaker 1: and say stuff that she didn't actually say in order
Speaker 1: to condemn her with their stuff. She said. It's just
Speaker 1: a different kind of bad um. And the reason they
Speaker 1: don't say the bad stuff she actually did is that
Speaker 1: it's very similar to the bad stuff they say, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's kind of the whole like beginning of everything,
Speaker 1: whether there's the suffragette movement and how racist and fucked
Speaker 1: up the whole community was from get go. But they
Speaker 1: did do some good work, and you have to sit back, yeah,
Speaker 1: taking back through like, Okay, how awful is this and
Speaker 1: how do we need to correct it? It's kind of
Speaker 1: like it's a it's a constant change in trying to
Speaker 1: justify I guess I don't even know the word justified,
Speaker 1: but trying to look back at how awful people were
Speaker 1: in history, historical contacts on who they were and what
Speaker 1: it was, but trying to also say, yeah, I guess
Speaker 1: they did do some good things too. You have to
Speaker 1: be fair without whitewashing. So like the you know, with
Speaker 1: with the abolitionist movement, you have to point out like
Speaker 1: these people were on the right side of history. It
Speaker 1: was a critical fight and a heroic fight, and it's
Speaker 1: good that they did it. Also, a huge chunk of
Speaker 1: them were abolitionists because they didn't want black people anywhere
Speaker 1: near them, right, Like, that's that, and that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that it wasn't good that they were abolitionists. It just
Speaker 1: means that, like, let's be honest about what they were
Speaker 1: and like, it's same thing with the suffragettes. A lot
Speaker 1: of the absolutely we're fighting on the side of his
Speaker 1: story and like doing the right thing, and it's good
Speaker 1: that they were there. A ton of them were racist
Speaker 1: as hell, you know, just see Harriet Tubman's Ain't I
Speaker 1: a woman's speech? Right, Like it's yeah, And that's the
Speaker 1: same thing with the abolition is it's not that they
Speaker 1: didn't do a good thing. Is literally they just didn't
Speaker 1: like people. But then yea, well, it's like you you
Speaker 1: go back to the civil rights movement and a number
Speaker 1: of like the black men who were like prominent the
Speaker 1: civil rights movement, we're very misogynists and like that. People
Speaker 1: people are not never perfect or even all that great usually,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't like what matters is, you know, the
Speaker 1: broad sweep of what they attempted to accomplish. You can't
Speaker 1: expect people to be perfect as long as they're fighting
Speaker 1: to make the world better. No one's going to make
Speaker 1: the world perfect, and nobody is perfect and like, and
Speaker 1: we definitely need to make sure you know the truth
Speaker 1: of it all before we ideal idealized people in any list.
Speaker 1: But as a rule, don't make statues of people. I
Speaker 1: am never going to sit in a fetal position and
Speaker 1: making sure no one comes near my vaginant with a
Speaker 1: what was it a vagina? Is it a vaginal death crap? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Or a uterine depth charge? Both? Again? Great band names,
Speaker 1: best bed named ever, Samantha, You got any plugg doubles
Speaker 1: to plug before we roll out apart one? Well, if
Speaker 1: you guys want to find me on social media, I
Speaker 1: am under McVeigh Samantha on Twitter. Are Sam McVeigh at Instagram.
Speaker 1: You can see the pictures of my dogs because that's
Speaker 1: pretty much the only thing that hangs out with me
Speaker 1: now since we're in quarantine and never will leave. Or
Speaker 1: you can check me out on Stuff I've Never Told You,
Speaker 1: which is an intersectional feminist podcast, So if you're afraid
Speaker 1: of that, you probably will like it. But with heart.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, check out Stuff Mom Never Told You on iHeart.
Speaker 1: Check out Samantha on the interweb net dot com. Send
Speaker 1: her your favorite band names, um, send me your favorite
Speaker 1: band names. Start a band, uh and come back on
Speaker 1: Thursday to hear more about the population control movement Margaret
Speaker 1: Sanger And finally, the conclusion of our horrible story about
Speaker 1: the Dalcock shield um. All that and more coming up