Speaker 1: Also media Welcome to it could happen here the only
Speaker 1: podcast where anti British discrimination is a way of life? James,
Speaker 1: are we allowed to say that? Do you remember the training?
Speaker 1: I haven't done yet.
Speaker 2: I was giving that training my full attention throughout the
Speaker 2: duration of the video. Every single time I've watched It's
Speaker 2: good various employees for the last half decade or so,
Speaker 2: there was no there was no section on anti British discrimination.
Speaker 2: Yet again, another example that victimized.
Speaker 3: Last time I took that training, there was a straight
Speaker 3: up anti Asian racism in it that they didn't address
Speaker 3: at all. So I'm assuming if that's okay, then anti
Speaker 3: British racism was fine.
Speaker 2: Like some shit in those videos, which is wild.
Speaker 1: Okay, there you go.
Speaker 2: I think that's a lady who's literally called Karen and
Speaker 2: they do her wrong in the in the in the video.
Speaker 4: See I am.
Speaker 5: I am definitely pro British discrimination. But you do get
Speaker 5: a point for having Peter O'Toole, so at least it's
Speaker 5: it's it's not all the way because the o'tool factor
Speaker 5: keeps you from the full might of my wrath.
Speaker 1: Frankly, go, yeah, I'm sure that's the case.
Speaker 5: I'm Garson Davis and joined by Mia Wong, James Stubven,
Speaker 5: and Robert Evans. This episode, we are talking about babies.
Speaker 5: Should there be more?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 2: M hmm.
Speaker 1: We're on a pro natalist kick. We're going to have
Speaker 1: that off putting couple who look like vampires but like
Speaker 1: not any of the good kinds on the show. Very
Speaker 1: excited to have those people on. They seem nice. But
Speaker 1: before we do that, we all decided maybe we should
Speaker 1: talk about other pro natalist policies in world history and
Speaker 1: how well they've worked generally.
Speaker 5: We're going to start by talking about what the US
Speaker 5: policy might be, or that the people proposing US policy,
Speaker 5: and then we will discuss how those policies went historically.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so like to start with Trumps.
Speaker 5: Besides one executive order in February supporting IVF, the new
Speaker 5: administration has yet to tackle pro natalist concerns on the
Speaker 5: policy front, but a collection of lobbyists, activists, and influencers
Speaker 5: are vying for the president's ear while proposing a multitude
Speaker 5: of plans to grow the number of heterosexual marriages and
Speaker 5: incentivize childbirth. The pronataists certainly think that the new administration
Speaker 5: is at the very least ideologically sympathetic, if not in
Speaker 5: cahoots with their agenda. The main inns on the pronatalist
Speaker 5: front have come from the Peter Thiel tech right wing
Speaker 5: of the White House Right. This is like JD. Vance
Speaker 5: and previously Elon Musk. Musk has been doom posting for
Speaker 5: years about how a drop in fertility rates could be
Speaker 5: leading to a large scale population collapse, and at an
Speaker 5: anti abortion rally this past January, Vance addressed the crowd
Speaker 5: saying quote, I want more babies in the United States
Speaker 5: of America, more happy children in our country. And I
Speaker 5: want beautiful young men and women who are eager to
Speaker 5: welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.
Speaker 6: Uh huh. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And you got to like whatever you're listening to one
Speaker 3: of these things, you got to like have a little
Speaker 3: parenthesies anytime anytime someone says baby, there's a little parentheses
Speaker 3: there that says white.
Speaker 4: This is this is real Nazi shit.
Speaker 5: Like yeah, A lot of this, a lot of the
Speaker 5: stuff that's certainly like based on like like great replacement
Speaker 5: rhetoric that the alt right, like Trojan Horst and like
Speaker 5: pushed forward in like twenty eighteen, which is now so
Speaker 5: widely normalized thanks to I mean really, Musk has done
Speaker 5: a lot of work in normalizing great replacement stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Tucker calls into Carlson of course.
Speaker 1: Well, and Musk's family goes into this, right, like this
Speaker 1: is the kind of thing like his grandparents were involved in.
Speaker 1: Like it was a little bit less of like the
Speaker 1: standard great replacement shit and a little more like focused
Speaker 1: on like we need to be breeding high IQ white
Speaker 1: people together. Yeah, you chant like that, that is that
Speaker 1: is what he inherits. He comes by it honestly, I
Speaker 1: guess you could say.
Speaker 5: Well, and oftentimes printles rhetoric is also tied in with
Speaker 5: like the tradwife and like loss of traditional family structure
Speaker 5: type stuff.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: Vance has laid blame at childless cat ladies and.
Speaker 5: Referred to our quote unquote broken culture that tax masculinity
Speaker 5: and turns our nation's youth into androgynous idiots.
Speaker 4: Hey shout out.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've also started referring to women with kids as catless
Speaker 1: child ladies as a result of this.
Speaker 4: I think he's.
Speaker 1: Reactions action, I don't know, they very negatively.
Speaker 2: Robot.
Speaker 5: A declining birth rate has also been attributed to women
Speaker 5: in the workplace who are not getting married and raising
Speaker 5: kids at home from an early enough age, and some
Speaker 5: of this rheteric has rubbed off on Trump right and
Speaker 5: Trump at seapack in twenty twenty three, he said, quote,
Speaker 5: we will support baby booms, and we will support baby
Speaker 5: bonuses for a new baby boom.
Speaker 4: I want a baby boom cool.
Speaker 5: Trump has floated a five thousand dollars cash quote unquote
Speaker 5: baby bonus to American mothers after delivering a baby, calling
Speaker 5: this proposal a good idea.
Speaker 1: Well, Garrison, that's almost three months at a preschool.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I'm sure that's enough.
Speaker 1: Not quite three months at a lot of preschools, like,
Speaker 1: not even great pre schools. It's very preschools and unbelievably expensive.
Speaker 5: The actual cause of like of a declining birth rate
Speaker 5: is due to skyrocketing cost of living, so people aren't
Speaker 5: financially stable to have kids in their early twenties anymore,
Speaker 5: so instead they're waiting until their thirties.
Speaker 1: That's part of it at least.
Speaker 5: Yes, if you want people to have kids more, you
Speaker 5: should make the world more affordable. And a five thousand
Speaker 5: dollars baby bonist doesn't actually solve the key issues that
Speaker 5: would cause people to be worried about, you know, trying
Speaker 5: to like get buried and have kids at a young
Speaker 5: age in a world where that seems kind of like
Speaker 5: unfathomably expensive. Now, luckily Trump does have a few other
Speaker 5: ways of sorting of sorting out this problem. The new Big,
Speaker 5: Beautiful bud bill that recently passed the House will create
Speaker 5: quote unquote Mega savings accounts for new kids. And here
Speaker 5: Mega stands for money accounts for growth and in for
Speaker 5: growth and advancement.
Speaker 2: Just fucking stop stop it.
Speaker 5: So when parents are guardians open a new Mega savings
Speaker 5: account for their kids, the federal government will contribute one
Speaker 5: thousand dollars for babies born between January first, twenty twenty
Speaker 5: four and December thirty first, twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 1: That that'll help, great, great.
Speaker 2: I believe California also does it. Yeah, California have something
Speaker 2: called the California Child Saving Accounts Program, which already gives
Speaker 2: children like up to one thousand dollars. And I think
Speaker 2: it's like a college savings account from what I understand.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's that's pretty much what this is. Although specifically
Speaker 5: in the for the Mega accounts, it also lists home ownership.
Speaker 5: Oh cool, because this is like a big This is
Speaker 5: a big part of this pronatalst thing is you need
Speaker 5: to like own a home. We get in a straight marriage,
Speaker 5: start having kids in your early twenties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sure, make Instagram videos of yourself chopping would badly
Speaker 2: like we understand.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 5: The big beautiful budget bill also prohibits Medicare funds. We're
Speaker 5: going to planned parent hut great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, let me tell you, one thousand American dollars, even
Speaker 2: with compounding interest, isn't going to do shit to buy
Speaker 2: you a home anywhere in the United States.
Speaker 5: Now, the Heritage Foundation's Devasit Center for Life, Religion, and
Speaker 5: Family have pushed for a policy that exponentially increases the
Speaker 5: child tax credit for each additional child a married couple has.
Speaker 4: This is a little bit.
Speaker 5: Similar to a policy proposed in twenty twenty three by
Speaker 5: Republican Representative Brian Slaton of Texas, who proposed increasing property
Speaker 5: tax cuts for married heterosexual couples who have never been
Speaker 5: divorced and have four or more children starting after marriage.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot of caveats.
Speaker 1: There, Jesus Christy, Yeah, okay, sure, yeah, no, this sign
Speaker 1: is are we taking issue with this?
Speaker 2: That is some Yeah, this is part of my British
Speaker 2: arity trade. We developed our own religion so that dudes
Speaker 2: could get divorced. It is, it is. Yeah, it is
Speaker 2: a bill of rights for British guys.
Speaker 5: Obviously a lot of a lot of caveats in there
Speaker 5: so that you can have your little like tread Christian family.
Speaker 5: But four kids would equal a forty percent cut. Ten
Speaker 5: kids would equal no property taxes at all.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, shit, that's hard to argue with. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is property taxes. You also have to own the
Speaker 2: property to begin with to be paying property tax.
Speaker 5: Yeah, all of these yea, all these people want you
Speaker 5: to be like homeowners with a stay at homework.
Speaker 2: This is like, this is what they want, but they
Speaker 2: don't want to actually do things to meaningfully make home
Speaker 2: ownership accessible.
Speaker 5: No, this is just like self selecting for like well
Speaker 5: off white Christians, right like yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. Yeah,
Speaker 5: Slaton said in a statement quote, with this bill, Texas
Speaker 5: will start saying to couples, get married, stay married, and
Speaker 5: be fruitful and multiply unquote.
Speaker 2: For Fox's sake.
Speaker 4: It's a disaster.
Speaker 3: And yeah, I mean and like a lot of this
Speaker 3: stuff is too is it's this is the sort of
Speaker 3: flailing reaction to like one of the things that actually
Speaker 3: drives like declining birthrates, which is not having teen pregnancies
Speaker 3: like significantly decreases birth rates because it turns out they're like, oh, yeah, right.
Speaker 3: It turns out a huge part of like why birthrates
Speaker 3: is so high is just direct social coercion. And if
Speaker 3: you stop having that or like you know, the amount
Speaker 3: of the coercion decreases, then yeah, like fucking birthrates are
Speaker 3: gonna decline because women aren't being forced to have babies
Speaker 3: like and you know, and so they're trying to do
Speaker 3: all this like you know, unhinged tinkering bullshit to sort
Speaker 3: of like deal with the fact that if you don't
Speaker 3: force people to have children as teenagers, they won't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because life, they quickly realize there's things in life,
Speaker 1: like you know, drugs and stuff. Yeah, they'll go back
Speaker 1: to the club.
Speaker 4: In March, Trump called himself the quote unquote fertiliz.
Speaker 5: They president, and the White House is expected to soon
Speaker 5: release a report on how to expand access and affordability
Speaker 5: of IVF. Now this is where things get sticky insert pun.
Speaker 5: There is hot debate amongst advisors and think tanks on
Speaker 5: the religious ethics of ivf Right. There's no real consensus
Speaker 5: among the pronatalst voices who are lobbying Trump. This sort
Speaker 5: of breaks down into the new tech right versus the
Speaker 5: more religious Christian family sector of conservatism, and Vance is
Speaker 5: kind of caught in the middle of this, but these
Speaker 5: groups may end up compromising to form an alliance. Now Heritage,
Speaker 5: the Heritage Foundation recommends a program to use government funds
Speaker 5: for education that promotes quote unquote natural fertility, teaching women
Speaker 5: how to track their mental cycles using charting courses to
Speaker 5: both help get pregnant and avoid using birth control. They
Speaker 5: propose that food, nutrition, and lifestyle chain could improve quote
Speaker 5: unquote natural conception. Instead of using assisted reproductive technologies, Heritage
Speaker 5: proposed to something that they call restorative reproductive medicine as
Speaker 5: a holistic approach to treating infertility through quote unquote hoonon
Speaker 5: balancing and dieting and nutritional adjustments, environmental changes, and surgery unquote.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you just need some fucking uh some of those
Speaker 1: some of those baby teething pills Highlands made that kill babies.
Speaker 1: That's that's what you get to take. It's a holistic
Speaker 1: approach to you. Some put a bunch of random chemicals
Speaker 1: and lead in your body from an unregulated supplement company.
Speaker 5: Heritage itself critiques IVF as failing to address the underlying
Speaker 5: causes of infertility as well as you know, out of
Speaker 5: concern for embryo.
Speaker 4: Personhood rights for fuck sake.
Speaker 5: So they advocate for embryo adoption and have proposed legislation
Speaker 5: to make the production of embryo spares.
Speaker 4: Illegal embryo adoption because they believe that these are like
Speaker 4: full like people.
Speaker 5: Now, on the other side of the you know, pro
Speaker 5: natalist right, you have people like the vampire couple that
Speaker 5: Robert mentioned. Simone Collins, a pronatalist activist and failed Pennsylvania
Speaker 5: congressional candidate.
Speaker 1: She could still pull it off. Stay in line if
Speaker 1: your vote hasn't been counted.
Speaker 5: People her and her husband are self described quote unquote
Speaker 5: techno Puritans, and she is the.
Speaker 2: Fucking super shit. Like, put these people on a boat
Speaker 2: and send it across the Atlantic, Like, can they get scurvy?
Speaker 2: Have they already got? They look a little bit like
Speaker 2: they may already have scurvy. To be fair, they do
Speaker 2: look like they have scurvy. Constantly they deprive them of
Speaker 2: lime juice and save the world from a fucking.
Speaker 1: Put them on the next starship and see how far
Speaker 1: up it gets.
Speaker 4: No, they won't get that.
Speaker 2: Let them try. I support the human spirit.
Speaker 5: Collins is also the former managing director of an exclusive
Speaker 5: Peter teal In social club called a Dialogue.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 5: She has called the new administration quote unquote inherently pronatalist
Speaker 5: and has sent several draft pronatalist executive orders to the
Speaker 5: White House, one of which would award a quote unquote
Speaker 5: National Medal of Motherhood to mothers with six or more children.
Speaker 2: This is some churchescu shit, Like, I know we're going
Speaker 2: to talk about that, but Jesus Christ.
Speaker 5: She herself wants at least seven kids. And she claims
Speaker 5: to use special technology to select embryos with high IQs,
Speaker 5: which relates back to what Robert was saying earlier. Yes,
Speaker 5: so they use IVF to to specifically select the embryos
Speaker 5: that they think are like naturally predisposed to have more
Speaker 5: desirable traits, including high IQ's. They have not discussed the
Speaker 5: exact method. That's why it's called special technology.
Speaker 2: They're looking for one with the big head or something,
Speaker 2: So you don't know. I guess I'm not even that
Speaker 2: far along that they win the IVF.
Speaker 4: So that's abways pretty fucked up.
Speaker 5: And then I guess finally, one of the few things
Speaker 5: that actually has happened in advancement of this ideology was
Speaker 5: way back like in February, Trump's Transportation secretary Sean Duffy,
Speaker 5: who is a father of nine and has ten siblings,
Speaker 5: sent out a memo directing his staff to prioritize transportation
Speaker 5: funds to quote give preference to communities with marriage and
Speaker 5: birth rates higher than the national average unquote, which would,
Speaker 5: in ef fact, mean less money for urban public transit
Speaker 5: and instead send it towards like wealthier, rural, white conservative areas.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd imagine Latino communities have higher marriage rates at
Speaker 2: least than like the national average.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm not sure if Sean Duffy really wants his
Speaker 4: employees to select for that, though.
Speaker 2: No, neither of my I that's kind that's what I'm
Speaker 2: That's what I'm that's what I'm wondering for. Yeah, Samuel
Speaker 2: Huntington thinks they have higher birth rates, right, Like that's
Speaker 2: his whole stick.
Speaker 5: If you look at the full memo, I think this
Speaker 5: is this is just like a dog whistle for like
Speaker 5: white Christians, Like that is that is really what he's saying, sick,
Speaker 5: that is what I have for the.
Speaker 4: Current the current peroneals policies.
Speaker 5: We should go on and ad break and then return
Speaker 5: to learn the historical implications of pro natalist policies.
Speaker 2: M h. All right, we are back and we are
Speaker 2: spinning our globe, our big ball of pro natalism, and
Speaker 2: it is slowing down and is landed on Japan, where
Speaker 2: mir is going to explain pronatalist policy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I guess I want to open on a
Speaker 3: kind of global thing, which is a concern over like
Speaker 3: birth rates for like fascists is a really old thing.
Speaker 3: I mean it predates fascism. Like this is like like
Speaker 3: if you go to like the eighteen seventies, every single
Speaker 3: person is complaining about like, oh my god, the birth
Speaker 3: rate of the right, well, the white race keeps declining
Speaker 3: and we're gonna get like overwhelmed by the Asiatic chords.
Speaker 3: And then you go to like the Asiatic words and
Speaker 3: it's like Japan has been having the same fucking panic
Speaker 3: for literally so long. Like I cannot emphasize enough. You
Speaker 3: can just go back through newspaper archives and you just
Speaker 3: it's you're literally reading the same article over and over
Speaker 3: and over again, going back just decades and decades and decades.
Speaker 3: So like the first big modern freak out about birth
Speaker 3: rates is in like nineteen eighty seven. Yeah, they have
Speaker 3: the first big like japan birth rate declining freak out.
Speaker 4: This has been happening longer than like most of the
Speaker 4: people here have been a lie.
Speaker 2: I can remember from my child. It's just been like, oh,
Speaker 2: they're panicking about their birth rates again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so like the running thing with Japanese politics. So
Speaker 3: we're roughly doing these in order of like most to
Speaker 3: least hinged in terms of like in terms of these
Speaker 3: like natalist policies, Japan I think has an interesting series
Speaker 3: of sort of political contradictions in their like kind of
Speaker 3: pro natalist Paul Wall, it's if they have they have
Speaker 3: political contradictions in their pro natalist polics and political contradictions
Speaker 3: in their conservative faction. Because Japan is basically like a
Speaker 3: one party liberal democratic state. Liberal Democratic Party is the
Speaker 3: one party. This is a party established by a World
Speaker 3: War two Nazi, but that means that they run all
Speaker 3: of politics, so like every political factor effectively runs through them.
Speaker 3: They're early attempts in like the nineties are focused on
Speaker 3: the deregulation of daycare jobs. So basically their plan is
Speaker 3: like in the ninety two thousands, they're like, Okay, we're
Speaker 3: going to like deregulate the childcare industry so that we
Speaker 3: can have more affordable child There'll be more childcare jobs,
Speaker 3: so people can pay for childcare. This is how we're
Speaker 3: going to promote this. And this is sort of one
Speaker 3: of the first places you see this huge intra intra
Speaker 3: class conflict between the peer social conservatives who want to
Speaker 3: just like send every woman back to the household to
Speaker 3: raise children, and the business people who are like, no,
Speaker 3: you can't do that. We need to exploit these women's
Speaker 3: labor to like make money. And so the fight that
Speaker 3: starts to break out is this fight between like paying
Speaker 3: for childcare leave versus like paying for daycare. So originally
Speaker 3: that their plan is like, okay, so we're going to
Speaker 3: do the daycare stuff. That doesn't work.
Speaker 4: Like, none of these things they're going to do does.
Speaker 1: Jack shit, right, Like that's going to be a through
Speaker 1: line here, Yeah, yeah, Like no, none of this stuff works.
Speaker 3: And so like like Shinzo Abe, I think is the
Speaker 3: most famous person who spends much of time trying to
Speaker 3: deal with this and like again, so they have started
Speaker 3: worrying about this in nineteen eighty seven. It is now
Speaker 3: twenty thirteen. The birth rate keeps declining recipitously. Shinzo wabey
Speaker 3: rest and piss you fascist bastard is still trying to
Speaker 3: like cook something, right, I'm I'm going to read this
Speaker 3: quote from the Archives of Clinical Pediatrics. Shortly after the
Speaker 3: formation of Abe's second cabinet, the quote Task Force for
Speaker 3: Overcoming Population Decline was established in twenty thirteen, introducing three
Speaker 3: key strategies, supporting child rearing, reforming work styles, and promoting marriage,
Speaker 3: pregnancy and childbirth. So you can do these are going
Speaker 3: to become sort of like the three pillars of Japanese
Speaker 3: pro natalist policy, right. A lot of it is focused
Speaker 3: on this sort of social push stuff to promote the
Speaker 3: traditional family and promote marriage, and this hasn't ever really
Speaker 3: worked for this. Supporting child rearing is one that is
Speaker 3: going to get a lot of attention in subsequent administrations.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of attempts to reduce, like to reduce
Speaker 3: the cost of child rearing, where we're going to see
Speaker 3: them try like thirty five thousand different proposals to do this.
Speaker 3: The one that's actually interesting is reforming work style. So, like,
Speaker 3: part of the problem here is that, you know, everyone
Speaker 3: in Japan is working a just genuinely unhinged amount unbelievably
Speaker 3: staggering overwork, right, I mean, it's one of these things
Speaker 3: that's like a persistent social crisis. There's a persistent sort
Speaker 3: of suicide crisis because of how long everyone is working
Speaker 3: all the time. So shinto Abe's plan for this was
Speaker 3: to put into place a soft cap of you can
Speaker 3: only work one hundred hours a month of overtime. Now,
Speaker 3: this doesn't do shit, right, Like one hundred hours a
Speaker 3: month of overtime is enough to kill you, right, like,
Speaker 3: you know, especially when like your regular hours are this long.
Speaker 3: But this is this is again this problem that he's having,
Speaker 3: which is that like, okay, so yes, you probably could
Speaker 3: maybe like people maybe would have more children if you
Speaker 3: weren't working literally all the time and you weren't just
Speaker 3: like being worked to death. But that's really bad for
Speaker 3: Japanese business. And and like quote unquote Abba nomics, which
Speaker 3: is like abe sort of you know economic plan like
Speaker 3: relies on maintaining this extremely high level of labor hours
Speaker 3: from everyone in the entire population. And it's also based
Speaker 3: on putting more women into the workforce to expand the
Speaker 3: size of the workforce to you know, extract more hours
Speaker 3: so they can all these people can make more money.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: They were also supposed to do free preschool for all children,
Speaker 3: and this just like didn't happen, which over and over
Speaker 3: again they're like, we're gonna do these kind of like
Speaker 3: these these kind of like okay, we'll give we'll give
Speaker 3: you some kind of welfare state bullshit, but only in
Speaker 3: order to like have kids, And it just doesn't happen.
Speaker 3: And so you know, this is one of Abe's big initiatives.
Speaker 3: But by the time he's like assassinated in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 3: he what he was.
Speaker 4: Bye.
Speaker 3: By the time his political coalition was finally detonated, Bye
Speaker 3: by one by one guy with an electric blunderbuss.
Speaker 1: My favorite politics.
Speaker 4: Oh god, it's so good. It's so good. We have
Speaker 4: covered this extensively on the show.
Speaker 3: If you want to hear the happiest I've ever been
Speaker 3: during an episode, including the day after Kissinger died, go
Speaker 3: find the episode I did right after shits a while
Speaker 3: it was assassinated.
Speaker 1: The Holy trinity of great days on the internet. Is
Speaker 1: that big stuck boat and the submarine that killed all
Speaker 1: those Oh it was amazing, people said, Biden gave us nothing.
Speaker 1: Bang is on the timeline.
Speaker 6: There you go.
Speaker 3: So all right, shinzuwape a successor is a guy named
Speaker 3: Fumio Kishita who lasts for a little bit, and Kishida
Speaker 3: every single Japanese government announces that they're going to spend
Speaker 3: like somewhere between twenty and like like fifteen and twenty
Speaker 3: billion dollars on pro natalist policies and mostly doesn't happen,
Speaker 3: but Kishita promises that he is going to spend twenty
Speaker 3: four and a half billion dollars. A lot of this
Speaker 3: money is going to be just straight up like child allowance.
Speaker 3: So Japan has the system that they've been you know,
Speaker 3: they've been sort of implementing over the course of like
Speaker 3: all of these fucking reforms, which is just like all right,
Speaker 3: we're just gonna like hand you cash. It's still not
Speaker 3: enough money to like substantively change stuff. But there's a
Speaker 3: lot of different kinds of cash policies they have. They
Speaker 3: have cash transfer policies that are just straight up like okay,
Speaker 3: here you had a baby, We're going to give you
Speaker 3: this amount per month. I think it's like ten to
Speaker 3: fifteen thousand yen which hold on, yeah, so it's like
Speaker 3: like seventy dollars a month, which is like not. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they are trying to expense it research on. They're supposed
Speaker 3: to have these like counselors that like come check in
Speaker 3: on you and like give you education and stuff. They're
Speaker 3: also supposed to just like give you a whole bunch
Speaker 3: of basically like child care equipment stuff and make sure
Speaker 3: you're getting medical care. And that's supposed to come out
Speaker 3: to about like seven hundred dollars ish roughly. You know,
Speaker 3: this is like the big sort of plan that they're doing.
Speaker 3: And then in twenty twenty four, Kishita is replaced by
Speaker 3: like some other dipshit who you know, if he lasts
Speaker 3: more than like two years, I guess I'll tell you
Speaker 3: his name. But he's you know, attempting to go back
Speaker 3: to the sort of childcare side of it, right, which
Speaker 3: is his plan involves a bunch of things like childcare
Speaker 3: subsidies and very importantly like tuition free high school. So
Speaker 3: one of the continuous plans if you like, if you
Speaker 3: go back to like what I was talking about with
Speaker 3: they were supposed to do free preschool for all children, right,
Speaker 3: that never got implemented except in like the last two years,
Speaker 3: like Tokyo has started doing it, just like as a city,
Speaker 3: because Tokyo is one of the places where, like you know,
Speaker 3: the birth rate has been like dropping the fastest or whatever.
Speaker 2: Sure, I imagine cost to living is also really high.
Speaker 3: Yeah, cost of living is really high. And it's also
Speaker 3: just like you know, if you're working in an urban
Speaker 3: like an extremely urban city, you're working a just hideous
Speaker 3: number of hours.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's also this there's supposed to be these massive
Speaker 3: like investments in providing childcare and nursing, and you can
Speaker 3: see these kind of like this this this point where
Speaker 3: they've reached this desperation point where they're trying both the
Speaker 3: sort of pro business like okay, fuck it will pay
Speaker 3: for your childcare and also we will raise taxes to
Speaker 3: like hand you money and also nursing stuff. And also
Speaker 3: they're trying to there's like giant carve outs for this,
Speaker 3: but they're they're they're trying to set up a system
Speaker 3: where you can get full pay for couples who both
Speaker 3: take parental leave at the same time. So they're trying everything, right,
Speaker 3: They're trying like paid childcare. They're trying, fuck it, we'll
Speaker 3: just pay people to leave the workforce to have children.
Speaker 3: They're trying just straight up cash transfers. They're trying paying
Speaker 3: for medical care, especially medical care for disabled kids. And
Speaker 3: none of this shit has done anything at all, Right,
Speaker 3: like just just absolutely jack shit, right, and if and
Speaker 3: if you want to look at like, okay, so, like
Speaker 3: what what's sort of actually happening here?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 3: A lot some of it is just like overwork. Some
Speaker 3: of it is just if people who can have children
Speaker 3: have any kind of freedom and autonomy, they just decide
Speaker 3: not to. And so part of this is also just
Speaker 3: like and then this has been one of the social
Speaker 3: pushes that the conservatives have been dealing with, is they've
Speaker 3: been trying to get people to marry younger because people
Speaker 3: are marrying later, and thus they are like, you know,
Speaker 3: they're having kids later because they're marrying later. So and
Speaker 3: this is not working at all, Right, But you can
Speaker 3: look at the series of structure contradictions in their political collision,
Speaker 3: and then you can look at the fact that like, again,
Speaker 3: one of the important ideological things here is that these
Speaker 3: people hate immigrants, right, and they don't. They don't want immigrants.
Speaker 3: They want they want like Japanese babies, and so this
Speaker 3: is kind of like if you look at like, Okay,
Speaker 3: why is not of this shit working?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: They're trying all these things to just avoid having more
Speaker 3: immigrants in the country, and none of it is fucking
Speaker 3: working at all. But you know, like, insofar as it's failing,
Speaker 3: it's mostly they're trying some limited welfare stuff and they're
Speaker 3: doing a bunch of weird ideological stuff, and it is
Speaker 3: going to get so much worse when every other country
Speaker 3: tries this.
Speaker 1: Yeah cool, Well, you know what else is going to
Speaker 1: get worse?
Speaker 2: Probably the products and services. It's simple of this show.
Speaker 6: Yeah yeah, all right, we're back.
Speaker 2: It's me And predictably, I suppose I am talking about
Speaker 2: Franco as Spain. So Francisco Franco attempted to rebuild Spain
Speaker 2: after Civil War, both through explicit eugenics and through the
Speaker 2: nationalization of women's bodies, abortion and contraceptual bands. Abortion had
Speaker 2: been legal, Spain was one of the first countries to
Speaker 2: do that. Right when Feliko Monceni, anarchist minister, made that
Speaker 2: legal minister of I guess public health that was made illegal.
Speaker 2: I think it didn't become legally again until about twenty ten.
Speaker 2: In Spain, abortion and a lessa was like a serious
Speaker 2: health issue, elective abortion.
Speaker 6: I guess.
Speaker 2: Franco's military in the Civil War consistently used sexual violence
Speaker 2: as or weapon, and we can see this as a
Speaker 2: kind of prelude to his nationalization of birthing bodies. Right. Kibayao,
Speaker 2: who is a Francoist general, right, makes his speech in
Speaker 2: July nineteen thirty six, quote, our valiant legionnaires and regulas
Speaker 2: have shown the red cowards what true men are, and
Speaker 2: their women as well. This is totally justified because these
Speaker 2: communists and anarchists anocate free love. At least now they
Speaker 2: will know what real men are, not the militia gaze.
Speaker 2: This is a translation that I'm reading to so people
Speaker 2: can go to the original document. But gays is not
Speaker 2: the word he used. A better translation would be a
Speaker 2: word that begins with f Yeah.
Speaker 6: Okay, yeah.
Speaker 2: They will not escape, however much they kick their legs
Speaker 2: and scream like this is a general in their army
Speaker 2: making explicit rape threats.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 2: They weren't subtle about this. Yes, the Spanish Falange, which
Speaker 2: is Spain's fascist party, also had a Cecion Feminina, a
Speaker 2: women's section. My PhD supervisor Pamela Ragliff is written extensively
Speaker 2: about this. The group very much served as kind of
Speaker 2: the Propaganderama state natalist policy. It taught women from a
Speaker 2: young age they were inferior and subjugate to men. They
Speaker 2: had to go through the organization's programs. To do anything
Speaker 2: any engagement with the state, they had to first go
Speaker 2: through the women's section.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: If they wanted to get a passport, they wanted to
Speaker 2: get a driving license, if they wanted to engage with
Speaker 2: the world outside of their homes in any way way,
Speaker 2: they had to go through this program, which indoctrinated them
Speaker 2: that their highest calling and only value was to have children.
Speaker 2: Women's role in the Francoist project then was child bearing
Speaker 2: a child rearing Francoist I'm going to use intellectuals here
Speaker 2: in like quotation scare quotes, right, frequently turned to phrenology
Speaker 2: to justify women's domestic role. They fucking loved a phrenology.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: It's great to go to antique markets in Spain because
Speaker 2: you could always buy like a phrenology head you can
Speaker 2: acquire like an og one, you know, like I bet
Speaker 2: if you know the red place, so that you could
Speaker 2: find some find the calibers.
Speaker 1: That's the dream.
Speaker 4: There is actually a lot of those secondhand stores in Portland.
Speaker 1: Yeah, shocking.
Speaker 2: Hands, spasping me with francoism, and I.
Speaker 1: Found a lot of uses for those calipers.
Speaker 4: Let me tell you, no, I mean the phrenologies goals.
Speaker 4: Oh okay, yeah, yeah, I've seen them all over down.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But I bet you, I bet you was a
Speaker 2: re because I bet they're not like og phrenology skulls.
Speaker 1: There's a market in France enter to that just had
Speaker 1: a bunch of monks skulls, like real, it seems fine.
Speaker 1: There was one that had been turned into a holder
Speaker 1: for a Bible, like they'd cut like an L shaped
Speaker 1: cut in the skull of pretty cool.
Speaker 2: It was like three grand and you make a curtsy
Speaker 2: for the Quran.
Speaker 1: But like this was a while ago, but seemed like
Speaker 1: a good price.
Speaker 5: Just skull Talk, your favorite podcast discussing cranium.
Speaker 2: Using the discount code, it could happen here. You can
Speaker 2: get ten percent off your skull Bible holder. Yeah that's right, Okay,
Speaker 2: so one of the things they did was to increasingly
Speaker 2: marginalize midwives and instead like have male doctors taking control
Speaker 2: of the child birthing process, because midwives would advocate for
Speaker 2: their patients too much, and they didn't feel that women
Speaker 2: belonged to work outside the home. Right, A big part
Speaker 2: of Franco's pro natalism was the repudiation of an Arco
Speaker 2: feminism that had been relatively important to the Spanish Revolution. Right,
Speaker 2: the the anarchists believed in revolutionary marriage and free love.
Speaker 2: Their follow through on those beliefs varied wildly, right, So
Speaker 2: we can see that in some collectivized industries, for instance,
Speaker 2: the unions took on the role they would assign women
Speaker 2: I guess I was going to say mentors, but apprenticeships, right,
Speaker 2: So like they wanted, in for instance, to CNT Transport Union.
Speaker 2: Once the revolution had happened and the CNT Transport Union
Speaker 2: had been collectivized, women who wished to be tram drivers
Speaker 2: or bus drivers could apprentice to men in that position,
Speaker 2: so that in order to achieve more gender equality within
Speaker 2: that sphere. Right, this is something that the Franco estate hated.
Speaker 2: It also had its own kind of unique take on
Speaker 2: eugenics that manifested in its pro natalism. Spain couldn't really
Speaker 2: do the straight racial eugenics right like that, that doesn't
Speaker 2: really work with Spanish history. But instead they saw leftism
Speaker 2: as being some kind of genetic defect and something of
Speaker 2: a pathogen that spread within society.
Speaker 4: Welcome mine virus.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, yeah, god no, it's it's boring from the
Speaker 5: same type of fascist right.
Speaker 2: It also practiced something called anti Semitism without Jews at
Speaker 2: this time, so there was a very very small Jewish
Speaker 2: population space. But nonetheless, Franco was constantly freaking out about
Speaker 2: Judeo Bolshevism. He saw liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, feminism, Judaism, et
Speaker 2: cetera as completely antithetical to Spanish nests, and of course
Speaker 2: they blame us for their national declient right, something little
Speaker 2: fascists like to talk about. This anti leftist eugenics and
Speaker 2: pro natalism extended to something called ninos robalos nenzfostats in Catalan.
Speaker 2: These children were abducted from their parents. Sometimes this is
Speaker 2: when their parents were in jail. Sometimes it was when
Speaker 2: the parents have been killed. Some it was when the
Speaker 2: mother had been forced into incarceration. By something called the
Speaker 2: Women's Protection Board. This, theoretically run by Franca's wife, was
Speaker 2: a way of institutionalizing quote unquote fallen women or women
Speaker 2: who were quote at risk of falling. It provides a
Speaker 2: way to force any woman you want to into an institution.
Speaker 2: These children who were taken from their mothers were often
Speaker 2: trafficked and some cases sold to approve families by nuns
Speaker 2: and priests. I'm going to quote one example from a
Speaker 2: BBC article in nineteen seventy one. Manoli, who was twenty
Speaker 2: three at the time and not long married, gave birth
Speaker 2: to what she was told with a healthy baby boy,
Speaker 2: but he was immediately taken away for what were called
Speaker 2: routine tests. Nine interminable hours passed. Then a nun who
Speaker 2: was a nurse called in for me that my baby
Speaker 2: had died. She said they would not let her have
Speaker 2: her son's body, nor would they tell her when the
Speaker 2: funeral would be. Some of these clinics went as far
Speaker 2: as to keep the body of a dead baby in
Speaker 2: a freezer and they would bring it out to show mothers.
Speaker 2: They even dug grave for babies, but many of those
Speaker 2: grave just contained stones or the remains of adults. These
Speaker 2: babies were then given or sold to other families and raised,
Speaker 2: and in some cases they lived their whole lives and
Speaker 2: died without ever knowing who their parents were.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: I remember, like I was doing my PhD when the
Speaker 2: initial research into this was being done, And it is
Speaker 2: fucking horrible for people to find this out right because
Speaker 2: the people who were stolen from their families and in
Speaker 2: many cases are still alive, right and in most cases
Speaker 2: their birth certificately exists with say mother unknown. And that
Speaker 2: was a process that existed to protect women who have
Speaker 2: had children outside of marriage, but was also used to
Speaker 2: steal babies and leave no paper trail. At least in
Speaker 2: twenty eleven, the BBC confronted one of the doctors who
Speaker 2: was doing this. It's kind of a wild BBC. I've
Speaker 2: linked it an article. There was also like a I
Speaker 2: guess it's like a podcast, a radio documentary where one
Speaker 2: of their reporters had recently had a baby so it
Speaker 2: was able to make a make an appointment with the
Speaker 2: obg y N who was stealing these babies, and when
Speaker 2: she confronted him, he grasped a crucifix and started brandishing
Speaker 2: it at her and Jesus first incredible country. The reason
Speaker 2: that they did this right was because their their fascism
Speaker 2: was a bit of a unique kind that was you know,
Speaker 2: Paul Preston said that Franco wasn't fascist, you was something worse.
Speaker 2: They had what's called national Catholicism right, which prevented them
Speaker 2: from doing sterilization or abortion. So instead they felt that
Speaker 2: they could steal these children and and sort of raise
Speaker 2: them outside of this leftist kind of pathogen I.
Speaker 1: Do love just I'm working on the Salazar episodes right now.
Speaker 1: I love how often Iberians are like, we're going to
Speaker 1: do fascism just but like we're gonna put some spins
Speaker 1: on it, like how the Portuguese were like, we're going
Speaker 1: to do fashion. But with us having sex with absolutely everyone,
Speaker 1: we're colonizing and trying to make an argument to the
Speaker 1: fact that that makes us the good colonizers because of
Speaker 1: all the sex assaults were not racist, guys, It's fine.
Speaker 2: We were communing godh Iberia Baby Spain is different, as
Speaker 2: the slogan used to go m terms of Francoist tourism
Speaker 2: slogan back in the day. Yeah, so the discourse of
Speaker 2: quote true Catholic womanhood was essential to Francoist nationalization of women,
Speaker 2: and they were raised to serve the patteria right the fatherland,
Speaker 2: with their bodies not their minds. In the Republic, Spain
Speaker 2: had used secular education to fight its perceived and real
Speaker 2: backwardness compared to the rest of Europe. The Francoist predictively opposite.
Speaker 2: It returned for its inspiration to succeed century Catholic texts,
Speaker 2: and they saw intellectual development as a risk to femininity
Speaker 2: and a risk to the ultimate goal of women's lives,
Speaker 2: which was motherhood. In terms of I guess birth raise
Speaker 2: that they did have. You have a post or baby boom, right,
Speaker 2: you have that everywhere that is affected by a large war,
Speaker 2: Like you know, there are pretty obvious reasons for this,
Speaker 2: and then birth rates do go up until like the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies nineteen eighties, and then they start declining rapidly
Speaker 2: and Spain is once again in like a sort of
Speaker 2: not so much a birth rate panic. I didn't think,
Speaker 2: but it is noted that Spanish birth rates have gone
Speaker 2: down since the nineteen eighties, but nonetheless Spanish birth rates
Speaker 2: never more particularly high compared to those in the rest
Speaker 2: of Europe because Franco was an absolutely wrapped up to
Speaker 2: the economy, right, which made it harder for people to
Speaker 2: have more children. But yeah, that's what I've got. If
Speaker 2: you want to read more on Ninio Slovados, I think
Speaker 2: there's a TV series about it now, Stolen Children. I'm
Speaker 2: sure you can find it with subtitles. But someone made
Speaker 2: a documentary on this that was presented in academic conference
Speaker 2: I did, and if I find the link, I will
Speaker 2: put it in the show notes.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, well, I think it's time to talk about
Speaker 1: Romania now. When it comes to who is the worse
Speaker 1: to doing pro natalism, there's a lot of contenders, but
Speaker 1: I feel like we got the usane bolt of natalism
Speaker 1: right here, and it's such a Jesco regime, so we
Speaker 1: got to peel back a little bit here and talk
Speaker 1: about you know, when communism first came to Romania, which
Speaker 1: was like kind of the end of forty seven, early
Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight, and in the first years of the
Speaker 1: communist regime, it brought the same changes that communist governments
Speaker 1: in Europe all tended to bring in the post war period,
Speaker 1: obviously earlier for the USSR. And a lot of these
Speaker 1: are good, actually right, not to deny all the horrible
Speaker 1: things that were happening, but life changes pretty dramatically in
Speaker 1: a positive way for a lot of women. This is
Speaker 1: true in Russia as well. Literacy for women rises, the
Speaker 1: employment rate for women rises, and this happens across society, right.
Speaker 1: A lot of the poorest people in these societies experienced
Speaker 1: substantial initial lifts, right. And along with that, lifespan increases
Speaker 1: pretty dramatically, rates of accidental death fall pretty dramatically, and
Speaker 1: literacy increases. And again, it increases across the board, but
Speaker 1: it is particularly significant for women.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And this is all lovely, These are good things, right. However,
Speaker 1: it comes with a problem for a lot of the
Speaker 1: leaders And this is not just true in Romania, but
Speaker 1: we're talking about Romania here. It comes with a problem
Speaker 1: for a lot of the leadership of Romania's Communist Party,
Speaker 1: which is that one of the things we see in
Speaker 1: every society when people have more and are doing better
Speaker 1: and live longer, is that they start having less kids, because,
Speaker 1: among other things, all their kids aren't dying.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: One reason why birth rates are high is people are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: well like but three of them might live, right, you know,
Speaker 1: I gotta I gotta really pump these numbers up. I'm
Speaker 1: and have enough kids to keep this fucking farm going, right,
Speaker 1: And when that stops happening happening, women are like, well,
Speaker 1: maybe I don't need to have eleven kids, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: Like if they're all going to live to adults, I
Speaker 1: don't need eleven children to be adults, right, So birth
Speaker 1: rates start to fall. This freaks out though a lot
Speaker 1: of these these communists, because the kind of communists who
Speaker 1: are like leading Romania are very traditional Marxists, right, And
Speaker 1: Marx was what you call a physiocrat, right, which is
Speaker 1: a term that I found for the first time in
Speaker 1: a Journal of Family History article, But it's a term
Speaker 1: you can find other places. And the basic idea is
Speaker 1: that and this is an idea that then it goes
Speaker 1: back to the original Marx. More people equals better economy, right,
Speaker 1: equals more productivity. So falling fertility is seen as at
Speaker 1: potential calamity for the state. You know, obviously this isn't
Speaker 1: how it works, Like the US has had fertility rates
Speaker 1: falling and like economic prosperity rise in the same period
Speaker 1: of time. But this is like a thing that they think,
Speaker 1: right then that like if we don't bump up these
Speaker 1: birth rates. We're going to deal with like an actual
Speaker 1: economic disaster. So by the time nikolaichi Chescu takes over
Speaker 1: as party leader on June twenty third, nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: the problem is serious enough in his eyes that it
Speaker 1: had become a crisis and the birth rate had declined
Speaker 1: pretty precipitously. In nineteen fifty five, there were about twenty
Speaker 1: five point six life births per thousand people in Romania,
Speaker 1: and by the time to Chesscu takes over, there's about
Speaker 1: fourteen live birth per thousand people. Right now, for reference,
Speaker 1: both of those are still higher than the US birth rate.
Speaker 1: Right now, we're at about eleven a little less than
Speaker 1: eleven live births per thousand people in the country. The
Speaker 1: only reason why the US population continues to grow is immigration,
Speaker 1: but that's a topic for another day. Cichscu stated that
Speaker 1: women needed to use their influence to rebuild the family,
Speaker 1: and per that article in the Journal of Family History,
Speaker 1: Cichescu declared that backward attitudes and expressions of levity toward
Speaker 1: the family must be combated with determination because they result
Speaker 1: in an increase in the number of divorces and the
Speaker 1: disintegration of the family and then the neglect of the
Speaker 1: children's education and training for life. And this is something
Speaker 1: that had come alongside the revolution, right that there's a
Speaker 1: lot of more critical ideas about these traditional concepts like
Speaker 1: the family in the society that it existed before. And
Speaker 1: a lot of people are like, well, but you know,
Speaker 1: we're we're becoming more scientific, you know, we have like
Speaker 1: women have jobs. Now, maybe a lot of these attitudes
Speaker 1: about what the family should be are kind of outdated.
Speaker 1: And he's saying, no, no, no, no, they're not they're
Speaker 1: not you need to go back to having a shitloading kids, right,
Speaker 1: And he announces a new initiative to increase the population
Speaker 1: of Romania by thirty percent by nineteen ninety so, which
Speaker 1: I don't know if the idea that would ever be
Speaker 1: possible is a long shot. Right, So that's that's a
Speaker 1: massive change in society. But Chichscu isn't a logic thinker guy, right,
Speaker 1: He's not like running the numbers hardcore here. He's just
Speaker 1: sort of throwing out some shit that sounds good. And
Speaker 1: so to encourage the shift, he leashes a famous raft
Speaker 1: of new legislation aimed towards pro natalism towards massively increasing
Speaker 1: the birth rate. The first step is that abortion is
Speaker 1: banned for nearly all women in the country. There are
Speaker 1: some exceptions. For example, you can qualify for an abortion
Speaker 1: if you've had if you already have five children under
Speaker 1: eighteen in the house concurrently, which is nice, and there's
Speaker 1: one or two other exceptions based on your age, but
Speaker 1: there aren't many exceptions per an article in PubMed. In addition,
Speaker 1: employed women under age forty five years are required to
Speaker 1: undergo monthly gynicle logic examinations at their workplaces, and any
Speaker 1: pregnancies detected are monitored to term. Unmarried persons over twenty
Speaker 1: five years of age and childless married couples without a
Speaker 1: valid medical reason for infertility are assessed to thirty percent
Speaker 1: tax on income.
Speaker 4: Jesus women who refuse.
Speaker 1: To have children have been termed deserters. Despite official pro
Speaker 1: natalist policies, it has been estimated that forty percent of
Speaker 1: the seven hundred thousand Romanian women pregnant in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: five had illegal abortions. A special unit has been established
Speaker 1: within the State Security Police to combat this practice.
Speaker 4: So we're so close to this, we are we are not?
Speaker 4: They really want to do all of this. We're like
Speaker 4: knocking on the door.
Speaker 1: They are like, that is the thing that I really
Speaker 1: want to drive home. Is that the closest that I
Speaker 1: have found in all of my rings, the closest direct
Speaker 1: graph to what guys like Vance and Musk are suggesting
Speaker 1: for US policy is Romanian.
Speaker 4: And it's also the worst this has ever worked.
Speaker 2: When I was a lot younger, when I sixteen, I've
Speaker 2: volunteered in an orphanage venere diverting kids in Romania.
Speaker 1: Jesus fucking Christ.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean they created a culture of child abandonment, right, Like, yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: we'll be talking about that. That shit fucked me up,
Speaker 2: and like, yeah, you shouldn't send your sixteen year old
Speaker 2: children to do that, to be clear, but like.
Speaker 1: No, and you're you're encountering it after the worst of
Speaker 1: it too, which we'll talk about here, not to minimize
Speaker 1: the experience, but we'll be discussing where it was at
Speaker 1: its worst.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's worth noting that while women did start working
Speaker 1: at a higher rate after Communist takeover, that started to
Speaker 1: plateau by the time that Chicheski, because obviously, like there
Speaker 1: was still a lot of communism, doesn't get rid of
Speaker 1: men being shitty to women. Right, it does do things
Speaker 1: do get a lot better.
Speaker 2: Right, sometimes it empowers shitty man.
Speaker 1: And at the start, like kind of right around when
Speaker 1: he announces these this set of fertility laws, he does
Speaker 1: try to institute a policy with the goal of increasing
Speaker 1: the number of women working at high positions in different
Speaker 1: state departments. Right, there is an initial like we're going
Speaker 1: to break the grant glass ceiling kind of thing, but
Speaker 1: that doesn't last long. He may basically cancels any sort
Speaker 1: of messaging or work on the policy. After his wife,
Speaker 1: Elena is made a member of the party executive committee.
Speaker 4: He's like, women have gone fired.
Speaker 1: Up, look at my wife. Classic chicescu. Yes, classic guy
Speaker 1: who's going to die with his wife in a basement. So,
Speaker 1: as is always the case with shit like this, women
Speaker 1: were not equally impacted by the abortion ban. Largely. The
Speaker 1: impacts were pretty widely divergent based on your level of
Speaker 1: wealth and social class. And I'm going to quote from
Speaker 1: an investigation by the NGO Helsinki Watch, who conducted a
Speaker 1: deep investigation and do all of this immediately after the
Speaker 1: regime fell. Women were not equally affected by the pro
Speaker 1: natalist policies, members of the urban middle class managed somehow
Speaker 1: or another to get contraceptives on the black market. Oh
Speaker 1: I should also know contraceptives were basically made illegal, with
Speaker 1: the exception of like condoms. They could also obtain medical abortions.
Speaker 1: A Bucharest student candidly informed Helsinki Watch that several years ago,
Speaker 1: when his girlfriend became pregnant, the abortion had cost him
Speaker 1: five thousand lay or about fifty dollars on the black market,
Speaker 1: and several women with professional degrees reported matter of factly
Speaker 1: that they had simply refused to cooperate with government gynecological
Speaker 1: inspectors who came to their institutes without suffering any reprisals.
Speaker 1: Nor were the most rural segments of the population deeply affected.
Speaker 1: The Orthodox Christians had long shunned birth control and abortion,
Speaker 1: and others like the ROMA had not practiced it. The
Speaker 1: brunt of the policy fell on the lower middle class,
Speaker 1: particularly factory workers, single women, urban ROMA, and those from
Speaker 1: disorganized or troubled families, none of whom had the money
Speaker 1: or connections to circumvent the regulations. Their options were as
Speaker 1: limited as they were life threatening. Some used a variety
Speaker 1: of would be aborti fascians, others availed themselves of the
Speaker 1: services of a back alley abortionist. Still others carried to
Speaker 1: term and the number of deaths, the mortality rate for
Speaker 1: women as a result of this did like there's a
Speaker 1: lot of hideous stuff. There were kind of doing the
Speaker 1: shortest version of this, But I don't mean to paper
Speaker 1: over that a lot of women died and suffered lasting
Speaker 1: injury in fertility and a number of other things because
Speaker 1: of different back alley abortions and weird drugs that they
Speaker 1: were given. But it's important to note that women who
Speaker 1: had money and opposition in the social class could still
Speaker 1: gain access to this shit. And that's how it will
Speaker 1: work here too, right, Like these Republican congressmen will not
Speaker 1: be restricting their family members from having access to this stuff.
Speaker 1: They'll be restricting poor people. Right Yeah, Now, the first
Speaker 1: thing I should know about this whole raft of policies
Speaker 1: Toichesscu introduced is that they did not work. That Journal
Speaker 1: of Family History article that I've quoted from a couple
Speaker 1: of times. Here ran the numbers to try to analyze
Speaker 1: how well did this, like, how did these policies correspond
Speaker 1: to birth rates in Romania and It is true that
Speaker 1: after the first major laws were pushed in sixty seven
Speaker 1: and sixty eight, there was a brief surge in birth rates,
Speaker 1: but that fell very quickly and had completely disappeared. By
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, things were back to baseline. So in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four to Chesscu launches another push to increase
Speaker 1: birth rates, and again they briefly increase and then fall
Speaker 1: a year or two later. This process plays out a
Speaker 1: couple times throughout the administry, and one of the things
Speaker 1: that's important to note is that the increase that happens
Speaker 1: after every new sort of like focus on birth rates
Speaker 1: is less each time, Right, it gets less effective every time. Now,
Speaker 1: the analysis in that paper concluded the birth rate would
Speaker 1: only rise when the state applied direct pressures on the population.
Speaker 1: Otherwise it dropped, right, because this just doesn't work, Like,
Speaker 1: you're not fundamentally changing anything, and none of these incentives
Speaker 1: because they're expensive, and in Romania's case, the country literally
Speaker 1: didn't have money to provide much of the way of incentives, right,
Speaker 1: but they never are going to work. Like, as we
Speaker 1: went over earlier, the ones being proposed here are wildly
Speaker 1: insufficient to deal with the cost of having kids, let
Speaker 1: alone a bunch of fucking kids, and none of the
Speaker 1: people in charge of the Republican Party have any interest
Speaker 1: in making life affordable for people who are not rich.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 1: The situation that this led to by the time that
Speaker 1: Chicheskei regime fell in eighty nine was also pretty catastrophic
Speaker 1: because there had been surges in births, right, in births
Speaker 1: of kids to parents who, because the people can't get
Speaker 1: away from this, tend to be the poor, could not
Speaker 1: take care of these kids, right. And there was also
Speaker 1: a surge in kids as a result of the general
Speaker 1: surge in birth rate, but also as a result of
Speaker 1: different sort of issues with nutrition and whatnot. In Romania,
Speaker 1: a lot of kids who had different physical and mental
Speaker 1: disabilities right who were just abandoned straight away because their
Speaker 1: parents could not take care of them. By nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: there were an estimated one hundred and thirty thousand children
Speaker 1: in orphanages and homes for the handicapped, these institutions that
Speaker 1: had been set up in Romania. And there were like
Speaker 1: posters that were going around that were part of the
Speaker 1: pro natalist campaign that basically said, hey, if you have
Speaker 1: a kid, you can't take care of or that's not
Speaker 1: like working out for you. The Romanian government can handle
Speaker 1: it better than you, So like who cares have another
Speaker 1: kid and we'll just drop it off with us if
Speaker 1: you can't take care of them, right, Like that was
Speaker 1: literally a part of the propaganda campaign that led you
Speaker 1: again like one hundred and thirty thousand kids in orphanages.
Speaker 4: Oh fucking Christ.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that hell sinky article I found quoted from a
Speaker 1: different piece of western news media, like a team of
Speaker 1: journalists that went to a town called the dell Lefter
Speaker 1: Chichesco Fell And this is how that article opens. On
Speaker 1: the second floor of the state run institution. Here, dazed
Speaker 1: toddlers liars sit in iron cribs and close stuffy rooms.
Speaker 1: Their foreheads are speckled with flies and with scabs and
Speaker 1: bruises that come from banging their heads and mouths on
Speaker 1: crib rails. Some cry, but most are silent and appear
Speaker 1: bewildered behind their bars, with the doomed air of laboratory
Speaker 1: animals down the hall. Other cribs hold smaller children, pale skeletons,
Speaker 1: suffering from malnutrition and disease. Despite the heat of the day,
Speaker 1: several of the children are wrapped in dirty blankets. From
Speaker 1: one still bundle, only a bluish patch of scalp is visible.
Speaker 1: Ask if the child inside is alive and orderly, says,
Speaker 1: of course and pulls back the covers. The tiny skeleton
Speaker 1: stirves turned onto its side and groans.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's worse.
Speaker 1: This is not the worst like Helsinki article goes into
Speaker 1: like how in the homes for the handicapped, the children
Speaker 1: are just ignored. They can go months without any real
Speaker 1: human contact of the the bare minim of being fed.
Speaker 1: There's no one watching these kids like this is some
Speaker 1: of the most cruelest and most hideous systematic abuse of
Speaker 1: children I've ever heard of. A lot of children die.
Speaker 1: AIDS spreads through some of these facilities like wildfire. I
Speaker 1: really cannot exaggerate like the horror of these institutions. If
Speaker 1: you do want to read more, there's two articles I'll
Speaker 1: recommend for you that I'm not going to quote up
Speaker 1: from now because we're already going long enough. But there's
Speaker 1: the Romanian Orphans are Adults Now, an article in the Atlantic,
Speaker 1: that's the title. You should check that out. And then
Speaker 1: Chichescu's Children and The Guardian, both of those articles do
Speaker 1: a good job of providing additional context and horror on this,
Speaker 1: but I think it's important to note that what happened
Speaker 1: in Romania is what sounds most familiar to the programs
Speaker 1: being pushed today and also easily the worst this has
Speaker 1: ever got.
Speaker 5: I mean, yeah, especially combined with like RFK Junior's policies. Yeah,
Speaker 5: that is like, yeah, yeah, it takes a lot for
Speaker 5: me to be like kind of shocked and horrified these days.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but that stuff is grim. It's some of the
Speaker 4: worst shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Oh boy, I remember that the time, there
Speaker 2: was like concern if the kids were really nonverbal, yeah,
Speaker 2: like or they just had never been talked to. Oh
Speaker 2: my god, because right, they've been institutionalized from such a
Speaker 2: young like I was there probably about twelve years after
Speaker 2: the end of the regimes, so that these kids were
Speaker 2: in their teens, I guess, Oh my god. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: remember teaching little kids to ride bikes who like had
Speaker 2: never really been able to play outside very much, and
Speaker 2: it was fucking yeah, that shit will fuck you up.
Speaker 2: That's a good museum. I'll see if I can find radios,
Speaker 2: because if they've maintained one of the old orphanages as
Speaker 2: it was like with the iron cribs and shit, and
Speaker 2: they have like projections on the walls the kids rocking
Speaker 2: and banging their heads someone had filmed. Yeah, that shit
Speaker 2: is disturbing. Like I I wouldn't read any of those
Speaker 2: articles before going to bed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, anyway, this has been It could happen here all
Speaker 1: right bye?
Speaker 7: It could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 7: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 7: Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 7: Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 4: You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 7: You can now find sources for it could Happen Here
Speaker 7: listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.