Part One: The Worst Birth Control Device Ever Invented

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that is only
ever introduced properly once, and it's this time. So you've
got your one. Yeah, thank you. This is the only time, Sovie.
Next time I'm going to be back to just shouting
the name of a dead dictator or screaming incoherently. I
wouldn't have it any other way, Robert. This is our one.
This is our one. And that good introduction was to

(00:22):
celebrate our very special guest for today's episode, Samantha McVeigh
of stuff Mom never told you. Oh, I feel so
special thing. Thank you. Thank you, Samantha uh not related
to friend of the pod to McVeigh had to do it.
I knew it was coming. I was really really scared.
Spelled differently, I'm adopted. Let's just go and put those

(00:42):
two caveats in there. Yeah, I mean, you know, we
always bring up we always bring up old cousin Timmy
when we can't. Who doesn't Cousin Timmy and Uncle Ted
um are our north stars. No, Um, you know we're
not talking of out terrorists today, Um, But in a
way we kind of are. We're talking about a bunch

(01:07):
of people who thought that they were doing good things
and wound up having a larger negative impact than any
single terrorist I've ever heard of. And that's always a story. Yeah,
mostly yeah, actually absolutely yeah. Well and white women and
white women. There's a white woman who's factors pretty centrally
into this story as well. But yes, mostly white men.

(01:28):
Um yeah, so um have you ever heard Samantha of
the Dalkon Shield? I have not to me. Oh this
is a bad story. Oh no, break our friendship. That's
just beginning. Yeah, no, it's gonna shatter everything. Hell, here
we go. None of this is going to be good,

(01:50):
so obviously, Samantha. The The I U D or intrauterine
device is a very popular form of birth control, at
least from like a user satisfaction. Yeah yeah, most people
who get them tend to be happy with them. Um.
Gynecologists emphasize that the devices are extremely safe and effective,
and in fact, by some counts, the basic idea behind
an i U D, which is a device you insert

(02:10):
into the uterus in order to like, you know, stop
pregnancy from happening, goes back. It could go back as
far as a thousand years. People have been doing versions
of this for a long time. Can I just say
I'm so excited that you have me on for this episode. Yeah,
I don't know if it could be more fitting. Sophie
could job Robert, great job. Sophie nailed it on this one.
All I did was read about a horrible, horrible tragedy

(02:30):
for three days. So obviously, modern i U d s
tend to be hormone based, which works better with the
caveat that it can cause some health issues. Um. The
Marina would be the best modern example of that. There's
currently a big class action lawsuit brewing against Bear Pharmaceuticals. Um.
The device has kind of a nasty tendency to perforate
the uterus of its wearer, which keep that in mind.

(02:51):
We'll be talking more about that in a minute. Um. Yeah,
there's also issues with the synthetic hormone the Marina releases, progestin.
There's another set of lawsuits that argues this can cause
idiopathic intercranial hypertension UM and basically things that mimic tumors UM,
which you know has happened to someone pretty close to me.
And yeah, it's it's it's it's it's messed up, um,

(03:13):
but also still kind of being litigated. We don't know
exactly that it's the I D that caused it, but obviously,
like you know, any kind of medical device, there's issues,
and I don't think, um, you know, it's possible bears
culpable to some extent in you know, hiding aspects of it.
But it's also possible that they did nothing wrong, and
that just just you know, when you have a device
out like this that's hormonal, over the course of years

(03:34):
you start to realize their side effects. That's a pretty
normal part of medicine. There's always like at least five
percent or less chance that you hear that extra warning. Yeah, exactly,
So I don't like, I certainly you know what whatever
is actually happening with the Marina. We don't really know
the full extent or the full case of it yet,
and it doesn't seem like a case where people were
just going off whole hog and doing something they knew

(03:56):
we're going to hurt people. The story of the Dalkon
Shield is a very different tail. This might be one
of the darkest stories in the history of contraception. A
sci fi name for a bad weapon. Yeah, it sounds
like it sounds kind of like a spaceship actually like, yeah, yeah,
I expected to be on star trucks. Someone tell me, yeah,
I think it'd be a Romulan vessel maybe yeah, maybe Cardassian. Um,

(04:21):
but yeah, Samath and I went. There was a moment
of boss, Yeah, what have I got myself into? Okay,
keep going. So the first modern i u D was
invented in nineteen o nine by a German guy. It
was made out of silkworm gut, and it was not
very popular. Um probably not hard to see why. Um,
I don't know that it was a bad i U D.
But silkworm gut doesn't seem like something you would want

(04:42):
to put in your body. Um, I don't know. Uh. Yeah.
Ernst Graffenberg, who was another German, invented the ring i
U D not long after. He's also Graffenberg is the
namesake for the g spot um. Yeah. And as a result,
he was very unpopular in Nazi Germany, both because he
was yeah, focused on like the fact that women could

(05:03):
feel pleasure and on stopping you yeah. Yeah. The Nazis
also weren't a big on the concept of contraception um,
because that meant less German babies, which was not not
not there not there. Yeah, yeah, there there were, of
course exactly specific genocides. Um an anti genocide for one

(05:25):
group of people. I guess so not that probably shouldn't
even go down that so relatively decent. I U D
started being invented in the early sixties, and the device
has gained rapid popularity among people with uterus is in
a desire to avoid getting babies and said, uterus is um?
You do? I don't know this state of affair, you do?

(05:47):
I m hmm, I don't know. I'll allow it, but
I don't think. I think it's uterus is um. I've
never had to say the plural. So this state of
affairs continued until nineteen seventy one, when of parmaceutical Giant
named A. H. Robbin's debut, the Dalkon Shield. The Dalkon
Shield featured a revolutionary design and like it, like, hmm,

(06:10):
what's a bad revolution? Um, they're all pretty great. Imagine
a bad revolution. It was not. It's not a good revolution.
It looks like Yeah, I'm trying to picture one. Keep going. Yeah,
I'm trying to get this word picture in my head
so I can follow along. I'm gonna actually suggest Sophie
finds a picture and sends it to you. While I

(06:32):
describe it, some people, most people will describe it as
looking like a crab, I actually think it looks more
like a trilobyte. Um. It's a tiny piece of plastic
with like five spiky legs, and the legs are meant
to stop it from coming free um once it's once
it's inside of you. Um. But it kind of looks
like the trilobite, the silhouette of a trilobite. Like you
look at it and it immediately looks like something that

(06:54):
shouldn't be inside a person. Okay, so I'm thinking of
the Matrix, that thing that comes out like absolutely, yes,
it does look like the thing that comes out of
Neo's stomach in the Matrix. You're going like, I don't
have a uterus. But as soon as I saw it,
I was like, that should not be in a person.

(07:14):
Oh no, it crawled and it's going to it looks
like a monster. Okay. I love that story honestly, which
is yeah, as much like a space invader as it
does like a crap um. So yeah, the legs were
kind of meant a hooking place inside of your uterus,
and it also had a string, which was how it

(07:35):
could be removed later, and we'll talk more about the
string later. Like obviously a lot of I U d
s have strings, they tend to do them differently than
the Dalkon shield did for a very good reason. Did
you just did you just open the image because you
just made a face? Oh yeah, what do you think
of that? That looks like like a shoehorn with like

(07:59):
an old school what is happening? We can debate on
what it looks like, but it definitely looks like something
that should not go in a person. I think, Yeah,
it's you don't put that in yourself. You're really bored.
I mean, if that's the thing, you do you but yeah,
I mean yeah, I not no, no shame, but like

(08:20):
if that is your thing, you're probably going to the doctor.
Yeah yeah, so um yeah. As I stated, the legs
were kind of meant a hooking in place inside of
your uterus and had a string um and most importantly
for what's going to come next, the shield was invented
by two male doctors, Hugh Davis and Erwin Learner. Uh
Davis was the gynecologist, and he was a major opponent

(08:42):
of the pill which was new at the time and
at the time had a lot of problems. They've just
been like a big like congressional trial over it because
it had been the company's selling it had misrepresented the
side effects UM and I think they make like that
it's better now, but obviously there's still side effects to
the pill. UM. So there was a big back lash
against the pill because the companies that has been like
this thing, it's just consequence free birth control, and it

(09:05):
absolutely is not. And so people were there was a
big backlash against the pill. And Davis, this guy in
ecologist who makes the Dalkon Shield, is both like doesn't
like the pill and also sees an opportunity in the
backlash against it. UM and so he and this guy
Learner form a company called the Dalkon Company, and they
start marketing their shield as an alternative to the pill

(09:28):
without any side effects UM, unlike the pill, which had
side effects. Let me guess that that's factually incorrect. Yeah,
it didn't wind up being true. So I just really
hung on the back that's called the shield itself, like
the name of the naming of it altogether, the whole thing.
I mean, to be fair, it kind of looks like
a shield. It does kind of look like a shield.

(09:52):
Weird cooking crab shield, key chain shield. Yeah, horrible, horrible,
definitely horrible. So yeah, the pharmaceutical giant Age Robbins, though,
buys into dal cons like marketing scheme and purchases the
shields because they want the rights to sell it and
manufacture and stuff. Um. And they launched like an unprecedented

(10:14):
ad blitz, the biggest ad campaign that had ever preceded
a contraceptives release onto the market in the United States
is launched by a Age Robbins to sell the Dalkon shield.
And I'm gonna quote from the Embryo Project now to
talk about that. In nineteen seventy one, the Age Robbins company,
producers of the cough medicine robotus and bought the device
from Davis and put it on the market. The Age
Robbin's company began selling the shields in the US and

(10:36):
Puerto Rico and launched a large marketing campaign for the device.
The campaign emphasized the safety of the i U D
compared to traditional contraceptive pills. According to reporter Robert Thomas,
prior to government regulation of birth control, many Americans were
concerned with the safety of birth control pills and sought
safer alternatives. The manufacturers of the Dalkon Shield capitalized on that,
claiming that the device was safer than existing methods of

(10:59):
birth control. So that's you know, kind of including method. Yeah,
I'm just that's the safest method obviously. The only method
with no consequences is the pullout method of the time,
as long as you pull out fast enough, right behind
the bastards is sponsored by the pullout method. I'm glad

(11:19):
to be a part of this. You know, fake sponsor
we've had. Well, the pullout method is like heavily sponsored
by raytheon, raytheon. The more kids you have, accidentally, the
more targets we have for missiles. Um, yeah, sorry, good,
you're so good at this. The ad reads alone, fake

(11:43):
or real said, I don't know what it can't stop advertising,
So yeah, the big ablets comes out and the shield's inventus. Like.
The guys who actually made the Dalkon Shield had conducted
an internal study before they sold it to Age Robbins,
and their studies showed that the device had a failure
rate about one point one percent, and other i U
D s on the market had a failure rate of
two to three percent, so they were they advertised of

(12:05):
like effective better than all the other I U D
s um That was another big part of their of
their claim to fame. It was billed as completely safe, reliable,
in consequence free, and since it was mostly plastic, it
was made in the same factory as Chapstick, another Age
Robin's product. It retailed for four dollars and thirty five cents,
which made it one of the most affordable methods of

(12:26):
long term birth control on the market. So that all
sounds fine. One point one percent failure rate, cheap, affordable,
made with the chapstick people. How do they give the
chapsticks that help you to load that up with chapstick
it yourself? Yeah, chapsticks. You get a discount if you
use if if they let you, if you use a chapstick. Still, yeah,

(12:47):
that would be better than every time you say, I
keep thinking of the Radish, the dikeon Radish, Oh, the
dikeon Radish, Yes, and like it kind of has sprouts
like that. Yeah, it would be a say for a
method of birth control than the Dalcan shield for sure.
So in nineteen seventy one, the f d A was
not the all powerful entity that it is today. Drug

(13:10):
laws were looser, and since the shield was not a
method of hormonal birth control, it wasn't regulated as a drug,
so we got to skip the testing process normally required
for medical devices that go inside a human body. Uh.
And it kind of turns out, unfortunately, that giant pharmaceutical
company Age Robbin's lied to everybody about a number of
you know, my minor minor things. For example, they lied

(13:33):
about the rate at which the device worked because the
first study into the Shield's efficacy was flawed. It had
been done by two scientists over a period of eight months,
with just a handful of it with two people, and
be like, oh, you didn't get fined in three months?
Were good? Yeah, it was a tiny number of people
and it was a short period of time. Um, and
further study wasn't required by the f d A, so

(13:54):
Age Robbin's just didn't do any further study. Every time
you say his name, I do think of like a
bondvill Like every time you say his name, H. Robbins
or yeah, the Probins, like the H. Holmes, Like it's
it's like you there it is, Yeah, Age Robbins winds
up racking up a body count similar to HH Holmes.

(14:14):
Actually the story yeah so, um so H Robbins like
these two scientists who invent this thing, you know, study
a couple of dozen people over a few months and
are like, this is the failure rate, and age Robbins
sells it to millions of people without doing any further
research on it because they don't have to, and companies
don't do anything they don't have to. Um. And this

(14:37):
is a problem because the first year's sales suggests the
failure rate was actually something like five and a half
percent UM, which makes it twice what other products on
the market wore, and it would wind up actually being
much higher than that. UM. So they pretty immediately know
that it fails a lot more often than they're advertising,
but they don't change their advertisements because that helps them
make money now, H Robbins. Yeah, of course H. Robin

(15:00):
also chose to keep on the d l the fact
that the shield contained copper salts. Uh, those were an
active ingredient in the Dalkon shield. Um, no big, no big,
because if they told people about that, then it would
have to be regulated as a drug and they would
have had to go through FDA testing. So they just lied,
you know, just you know, just slightly, just the book

(15:20):
a little bit, just a little bit. Mhm. Why would
you you know? This is a very dangerous grift. Yeah,
it's getting it's getting dangerous. Here. To obscure the fact
that it included medical like it did include drugs without
technically lying, sales people were instructed to tell clients that
the Dalkon shield contained a confidential blending of ingredients, because

(15:42):
if you say it's a secret O medient, it's the
family recipe and please tell me. These people came around
these sells people with like briefcases to show off their
dynamic key chain. Oh yeah, no, I've actually seen some
of the packaging for that. You just got a Dalkon
shield at home? We would love a novel um. Yeah.

(16:04):
In three years, more than two point two million Dalkon
shields were sold in the United States, making it the
top selling I U D in the nation. Throughout the
early nineteen seventies, A. H. Robbins and the devices inventors
pocketed massive amounts of money, and all was well, except
all was not well. That was a lie because the
pharmaceutical giant knew from the beginning that things were horribly
wrong with the Dalkon Shield. And I'm gonna quote here

(16:26):
from a contemporary rite up in mother Jones. Only a
few months after the Dalkon Shield went on sale in
nineteen seventy one, reports of adverse reactions began pouring into
the headquarters of the manufacturer H. Robbins. There were cases
of pelvic inflammatory disease and infection of the uterus that
can require weeks of bed rest and antibiotic treatment, sept semia,
blood poisoning, pregnancies resulting from spontaneous abortions at topic, tubal pregnancies,

(16:49):
and perforations of the uterus. In a number of cases
the damage was so severe as to require hysterectomy. There
were even medical reports of Dalkon shields ripping their way
through the walls of the uterus and being found voting
free in the abdominal cavity far from the uterus. So
that's not ideal. Yeah, So this went on for how long?

(17:10):
How many and of associated this I mean, we'll get
to the end numbers. But you know, they they sell
millions of these before anything really blows up in the
media about it. And when I say sell millions of these.
I mean millions of these were put into people's bodies. Um. Yeah, yeah,

(17:33):
didn't have a clue that this was going to be problematic. Well, no,
some of them did. Actually, there were doctors who noticed
the shields flaws almost immediately and planned parenthood. Advocates of
Arizona made this note in a write up quote, not
everyone who laid eyes on the Dalkon shield got a
warm and fuzzy feeling from it. Those feet gave many
people The HEB. Gbs Dorothy Lansing and O. B. G.

(17:53):
Y In from Pennsylvania to right at the shield in
nineteen seventy four, calling it a veritable instrument of torture.
Grouse looking little device with vicious spikes that made removal
very difficult for the doctor and painful for the user.
She refused to offer shields to her patients, of course,
a female doctor. Female doctor. Yeah, there's a fe male
doctor in here. But yeah, you suspect most of the

(18:14):
first people to recognize it were the the lady O. B.
G ns. Um. Now, those vicious spikes were not the
worst part of the shield's design. Unfortunately, that would be
the string. So, like I said, most I e d
s have a string attached to them makes it easier
to remove. Uh. The normally those strings are made out
of a very particular kind of material that cannot transfer bacteria, right,

(18:37):
because the uterus is is sterile, right, and you want
to keep use that material. No. Um, they use nylon um,
which is like they use Yeah, they use nylon wrapped
in a sheath that deteriorated inside the body. Uh. And
the string was not at each end and so not sealed. Um.

(19:00):
Irwin Learner, who was the Dalcon Company's president, thought that
the knot would be enough to keep bacteria from getting
into the string. Uh. And it was not. Uh. And
you know there were Yeah, there were a lot of
people did a lot of people warned them that like
this not like bacteria will get inside, it will travel
up the string into the uterus. And they said, that's

(19:22):
never gonna happen. It's fine, it's fine. They'll never know.
It's fine. We have to figure we'd have to change
the product, and that will cost money. By the time
they figured out, I'll have their money. It's all good,
all good now. One of the reasons Learner thought that
the shield he'd helped design was safe was the fact
that the uterus is again a sterile environment, which is
why so many people use uterus as to clean their kitchens. Unfortunately. Yeah,

(19:42):
of course, yeah, it's just the right tool for the job. Um. Yeah,
it gets nature's bleach to say it. So, the nylon
in the string was not sterile, as I said, and
bacteria were able to enter through that unsealed knot and
apple up from the vagina into the uterus, crawling up

(20:02):
the dalkon shield strings like Rapunzel's hair ladder, and the
fact that there was actually a sheath around the string
protected the traveling bacteria from cervical mucus, which is normally
a barrier to bacteria. So that Planned Parenthood write up
I found described the string on the dalkon shield as
a bacterial expressway. In other words, they couldn't have designed
a better device to transfer dangerous bacteria into the womb

(20:25):
if they had tried, Like it's made for that. It
really upgraded themselves, Like watch this hole, my beer, virus,
this hole my beer. Yeah. No, we made you guys,
your own little road and it's just for women. We
love you so much. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the
first publicized failures of the Dalkon shield came in nineteen

(20:46):
seventy three, when the device had already been inserted into
nearly two million women. Doctors with the University of Arizona
Medical Center inserted a shield into a patient who wound
up getting pregnant. Anyway, at this point in medical history, UM,
it was standard procedure to leave the I U D
in the uterus during a pregnancy. I think that's different now, um,
but that's the way things were at that point. Um.

(21:10):
And at this point, data was suggesting that that the
Dalkon shields failure rate was closer to ten than to
five percent. Again, the company had not updated any of
their their marketing material. Now, unfortunately, this patient who got
pregnant on the shield, UM the bacteria highway thing in her.
The string introduced a bunch of deadly bacteria into her womb,
and she started presenting with flu like symptoms, and three

(21:32):
days later she miscarried her nineteen week old fetus and
died from a massive bacterial infection. Uh. Yeah, So the
head of obstetrics at the medical center where that woman
died was a an O B G y N named
doctor Donald Christian Um. He began screaming as loud as
he could to anyone who would listen about the dangers
of the Dalkon shields. So we do have one good

(21:52):
male doctor and he was like, what the fuck this
is like clearly a problem. Um, yeah, and he he
took this on as a crusade. He started talking to
guynetrologists and obstetricians around the country and gathering hundreds and
hundreds of stories of Dalkon shield users who had been
injured or killed by massive bacterial infections that started in
their uteruses. By the spring of nineteen seventy three, he
felt he had enough data to bring to the f D. A.

(22:15):
Christian's goal was to get them to suspend sales and
use of the Dalkon Shield until further research could be done.
But being history's greatest monsters and also a bunch of
cowards without the stones to assault my mountaintop compound, the
FDA waffled, enraged in dismay, Dr Christian wrote a book
length study into the shield titled Maternal Deaths associated with
an intra uter and Device. Um. He wasn't great at titling,

(22:36):
but he didn't he did. He did the work. Yeah,
His study focused on four deaths and six life threatening
infections suffered by shield users. Now. While he was working
on his manuscript, other doctors and women's health advocates grew
more and more aware of the Shields flaws. By nineteen
seventy four, seventeen deaths had been traced directly to the device,
and the actual number was probably significantly highly. I think

(22:58):
at least twenty four we know now, say how many
people like we're told this is not the reason, it's
because of your fault. You're never you did this wrong,
You did this your dirty and you got sick, which
is essentially what happens to women or of those who
have have uterus is in general gets sold. Is your fault,
you did this wrong. Sorry, yep, yep. So you have

(23:19):
to assume, like seventeen is the minimum that had died
at this point, and that's just hundreds and hundreds, potentially
even tens of thousands um with some level of serious
serious adverse effects like in a lot of cases like
if you're getting um pelvic inflammatory syndrome, like your bedridden
for weeks. Like this is the amount of human misery
that has been caused by nineteen seventy four is pretty astonishing. Um,

(23:42):
The estimate that I found is that for every million
dollars A H. Robbins, the pharmaceutical company, profited from selling
the Dalkon shield, their customers spent an estimated twenty million
dollars on medical care due to the illness as it cost,
which is pretty pretty bad. It's just it's just kind
of like one more thing of like how little they

(24:04):
care about women's health, people with you to help, like
people in that general like gnecology. How little is actually
worried about and even to this day obviously, yeah, like
I think it's better, but not good now, I mean,
you know, yeah, and I'm certainly not saying it's absolutely

(24:25):
better now. I won't know, but I haven't heard of
one quite this bad. Although maybe the Marina will wind
up being that bad, Like we don't really know at
this point. Tell me that although, yeah, Probert, why I
think people should look into that. There's something absolutely interesting
lawsuits happening now. I know a lot of people who
have them and have great, great experiences with them, but

(24:46):
it does concern me a bit. Um. Those numbers are
still astonishing, and things that are being figured out the best,
and this is just so blatantly horrible. Um, Like you're
talking by nineteen seventy four, when it's mostly still on
the market, tens of thousands of women have been hospitalized
because of their Dalkon shields. Like we're not talking about

(25:09):
oh yeah, you know one percent of people or whatever
are going to have a negative response, and that's a problem.
But it's like within like this is a a sizeable
chunk of the people who get the dal shield inserted
have health consequences as a result of it, right, because
we're not just talking about death, We're talking about all
of the problematic issues that coscarriages and topic pregnancies which
are nypermayors and for those who ye are wanting children

(25:31):
and lots of children, all of these things. It's just
such a heartbreaking thing. Well especially you have a lot
of women who wanted children, who got pregnant and then
or who wanted children at some point but didn't want
them now got the Dalkon shield and because of complications,
had their uteruses removed. Um yeah, it's just a real bummer.

(25:51):
Um yeah, I'm gonna quote from Mother Jones again. The
Dalkon shield was turning out to be far more dangerous
than any other i u D already on the market.
Later research in Canada and Jerry Many show that microscopic
defects helped account for the shield's ability to slice into
the uterine wall. Physicians found insertion was difficult, patients sounded
almost unbearable. As early as February nineteen seventy one, a
physician wrote to Age Robbins in reference to the insertion

(26:13):
of the Dalkon shield. I have found the procedure to
be the most traumatic manipulation ever perpetrated on womanhood. And
I have inserted thousands of other varieties that would they
keep doing this? Like what because? Because not to stop?
It's like, quite well, we just kept pushing. It's fine,
They're fine. They screamed a little bit, Everything's fine. I

(26:35):
think these doctors are stopping. Like I think the doctors
who are complaining like do it a few times and
have a horror, realize that it's bad on everyone, and
then say like, well, I'm not going to do this anymore. Um.
But I'm wondering how many doctors just kept pushing and
be like suck it up, which, by the way, women
do here today about some procedures and being told you're
not really in pain. You're making the ship up. So

(26:56):
I can't imagine them when they're like, suck it up.
I think it's most doctors do that because you you
do have you do have good doctors like Christian, like
this person who wrote that letter in nineteen seventy one,
like the woman we heard from the lady ob Jua,
and we heard from earlier. Um, who try to blow
the whistle, who complain, who say this is unacceptable. But
I think the bulk of people inserting them are just like, yeah,

(27:18):
it hurts, Like what do you what do you want?
Like stop complaining? You know you all have sex. You
have to have pain to have sex, and then obvious
and then and then die in the operating table. Yeah,
but I wonder also for Dr Christensen, it took someone
to die before realizing how bad this was, right, Yeah.
I mean I don't know what his direct experience because
he was the he was like the head of the

(27:38):
unit at the hospital, so I don't know if he
was actually putting them in, if this was the first
time he maybe thought about it, Like I I don't
know enough about the guy's actual history. Um, I just
know that when when that happened, he went on the
war path. But I don't know, like maybe he was
putting it in for years before someone died. I really
just I couldn't tell you many questions. So in of

(28:00):
nineteen seventy four, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America banned
the Dalkon Shield from use in their clinics. They recommended
it be removed from patients who had had it inserted.
Even this came with harms to patients because the vicious
spikes in the Dalkon shields side had a tendency to
tear through soft tissue when yanked out. As deaths and
nightmare stories of injuries mounted, the FDA begged Age Robbins
to stop selling their Vaginal Death Crap, which is a

(28:22):
pretty good name for a band. I was going to say,
who's a boy vaginal? Yeah, solid metal band, Oh my god,
the songs, or maybe it's just an emo band. Yeah,
Dalkon Shield is not a bad band name either. You know,
I'm still holding it. That's a Star Trek weapon, Yeah, yeah,
I do think it's more of a Star Trek a
Star Trek ship. So the company refused to stop selling.

(28:44):
You know, they're horrible, horrible, poisoned i u D executives
worried that doing so would be seen as an admission
of guilt um and since tens of thousands of women
were suing them for injuries, it would be expensive to
admit guilt. So, because so many people are suing us,
we can't stop selling this because then they'll win their
cases against us for the injuries and we did to them, right,

(29:06):
So I assumed there would be a lot of lawsuits
and it would go so many, so many lawsuits. This
company gets sued like you would not believe, well, like
you would absolutely believe they're contempt for human life. Yeah.
So ah, Proven's lawyers took the text the shield was
no more dangerous than any other i U D. They

(29:28):
argued that all the pelvic inflammatory disease cases tied to
the shield had actually nothing to do with it. The
company spokesman Thomas Poe told press, they have their experts,
we have ours, which is a very capital something to say,
well we got experts. Bring my people who have no
degree in this, but they're gonna be really loud about it. Yeah.

(29:48):
It's that oil industry ship where it's like, yeah, well
we got scientists too, and we pay them to say
what the opposite of what you're saying, but louder. Despite
all of the US by the end of nineteen seventy four,
the Dalkon Shield was effectively off the market. They kind
of just quietly stopped selling it after a while. More
than two and a half million and well stopped selling

(30:10):
it in the US after a while. More on that later,
more than two and a half million American women had
the shields installed in their bodies. As many as two
hundred thousand people testified that they had been injured by
the Dalkon Shield and filed claims against Age Robbins. Some
set counts say four hundred thousand, like a huge amount
of the people who get this wind up with, like,

(30:31):
you know, legal complaints against Age H. Robbins. So the
pharmaceutical giant would spend a full decade fighting these cases
tooth and nail, doing everything and its power to avoid
any kind of legal consequences for its actions. Numerous company
executives perjured themselves in court. Tens of thousands of pages
of internal documents were destroyed and direct violation with court orders.
FDA offices and Capitol Hill were flooded with AH Robbin's

(30:55):
lawyers just doing everything that they could to slow down
the process at which like they were mitigated because they
knew eventually litigation was going to mean the end of
the company and they wanted to suck as much value
out of it as they possibly couldn't put it in
the hands of their shareholders. Part of why they're delaying
this so much is because they're selling it to other
people outside the United States after they stopped the US. Yeah,

(31:20):
you gotta keep that ship going before your companies destroyed
by a river of lawsuits. That was no one was
dark and griffty. Oh it's about Sopha. You have no
idea how bad this is gonna get. It's gonna get
so much worse. Well before we get to so much worse, right,
you know what it is, right? Yeah, you know what

(31:42):
won't so vaginal death crabs. God, I hope not um
audible Lobster. Yeah, either way, we're back. And I'm thinking

(32:03):
about Red Lobster because of what you just said, because
they have a new Mountain dew Margarita, I really wanted
to go. I went to the nearest Red Lobster to me,
and it was across the river in Washington, and everyone
in the line outside didn't have a mask and it
was inside seating only. And I was like, no, that
seems I don't want to get COVID for this margarita.
Are you sure? Yeah? But really, I what about cheddar biscuits.

(32:27):
I've gotten a lot of diseases for cheddar biscuits in
the past, enough that I think I don't need that anymore.
I'm starting to question what you're worth, Like what what
we've all We've all gotten a little bit of a
little bit of what you think, like hepatitis whatever. It's fine, Like, yeah,
you're not gonna go to red lobster and not get

(32:48):
a disease. It's so bacon wrapt gallops that are kind
of cooked. They are kind of cooked, and they only
about a third of them have the haunt of virus.
So that's a pretty good ratio. I mean, have you
gone for shrimp thus come on, Oh yeah, no, you're
definitely getting the hunt of virus. Is shrimp fust absolutely anyway?

(33:12):
But man, them shrimps is cheap. That's so good. So
in the end, the law did come for H. Robbins.
In nine four, Judge Miles W. Lord ruled against the
company and in favor of its hundreds of thousands of victims. Again,
they're being sued in court by more than like a
quarter of a million people at this point, which is,

(33:32):
if that many people are suing you, you're in the wrong.
Like I don't even need to hear about the case.
So two fifty people are suing you, okay, but that's
all like five of the population. You should you shouldn't
be allowed in society anymore. Maybe it's fine. So um.
Some of those victims were in the courtroom while Judge

(33:54):
Lord read his his his judgment, and many of them
wept openly as he read this. To the companies top executives,
it is not enough to say I did not know.
It was not me, look elsewhere. Time and time again,
each of you has used this kind of argument in
refusing to acknowledge your responsibility and in pretending to the
world that the chief officers and the directors of your

(34:15):
gigantic multinational corporation have no responsibility for the company's acts
and omissions. Under your direction, your company has in fact
continued to allow women, tends of thousands of them, to
wear this device, a deadly depth charge in their wounds,
ready to explode at any time. This is corporate irresponsibility
at its meanest. Pretty good, many good band names in there.

(34:38):
Yeah they're Veginale. Uh Se. Conviction is today because I
feel like we do not hold obviously and I don't know,
you know, of all people, enough heads of corporations irresponsible
for these things, and they didn't then, like the company

(34:58):
was destroyed, which is good, better or than like what's
happening to Perdue, um, you know, for starting the opiate crisis?
But they didn't. None of these guys went to prison,
and they should have. Yeah, yeah, you put you put
twenty of these guys in prison. Maybe we didn't have
had an opiate crisis because maybe Perdue would have been like,
oh ship, there's still Age Robin guys doing time for

(35:18):
the vaginal depth charges. Like I don't know, I feel
like those are narcissists who really believe they're the ones
who get away with this, So it really doesn't matter.
Maybe I say we still give it a shot and
throw it. I'm not opposed to the don't get me wrong.
So um, now, the company was set up to start
a multimillion dollars and eventually think it was a multibillion

(35:38):
dollar program to remove the shields from women and pay
for them for their pain and injuries. Of the more
than four hundred thousand lawsuits filed against the company were
litigated or settled, and a lot of those were aggregating
like thousands of cases together obviously, because you get that
many people suing and you start like lumping them into
class actions and stuff. The company was forced to declare
bankruptcy in nineteen eighty five, and it collapsed under the

(35:59):
way of so many judgments. By six and estimated hundred
thousand American women still had Dalkon shields in their bodies.
Think that long. Yeah. Yeah. The catastrophic and extremely public
failure of the Dalkon shield nearly killed the i u
D itself. By nineteen eight six, only one brand of
iu D was still on the market in the United States.

(36:21):
In the nineteen seventies, nearly ten percent of US women
who used contraception used an i U D. Today that
number is less than one percent. It's around one percent.
And it's generally agreed that the main reason for the
collapse and popularity of the i U D was the
Dalkon shield that it created, Because obviously, like you hear
that story, like, you're not gonna get one of those,
you already get the horror story of the you know,

(36:42):
floating i u D, which does happen. Yeah. In European nations,
most of which never imported the shield i u D
s remained popular. In the U S still has the
lowest rate of i u D use of any Western nation,
according to the Gutmacher Institute quote. The public health need
for more whitespread use of the i u D is
revealed in one simple statistic. Fifty of unintended pregnancies in

(37:04):
the United States are the result of contraceptive failure or misuse.
Because the i u D is almost impossible to misuse
and is far less likely to fail from the pill,
the condom, or the injectable. A national increase in iu
D use that comes at the expense of such methods
would reduce the number of unintended pregnancies. If some women
choose the i u D instead of relying on natural
birth control methods or chance, the number of unintended pregnancies
should also decline. An industry sponsored survey of seven thousand

(37:27):
U S women conducted in n revealed that many current
i u D users had switched from the condom, the
pill or withdrawal. So again, pretty significant consequences to this.
Outside of the suffering of the people who have it
implanted in them, there's just there's god knows how many
millions at this point of unintended pregnancies have occurred as
a result of this thing. Um, you know which it's

(37:48):
it's It's just the amount of human shrapnel caused by
Age Robbins is pretty astonishing. And you add that to
the couple of dozen people we know died, the hundreds
of thousands of people who are injured and rendered fertile,
And yeah, Age Robbins in the Dalkon Company make a
pretty solid bastard. But we're actually just scraping the start
of this story, Samantha, don't barely gotten started. Yeah, between

(38:13):
the word slicing and scraping in this is a slicy
scraping thing. You said, Bacteria Expressway. Bacterial Expressway, which is
another good band name. This is a great episode for
that is a punk band. Oh yeah, Bacterial Expressway open
for uterine depth charge back. So um. The United States

(38:40):
Agency for International Development, or us AID exists to do
exactly what the name would suggests. Help other nations to develop. Now,
one of the ways in which nineteen seventies thinkers in
the government felt poor nations needed help developing was it
giving their populations access to contraceptives. And obviously this isn't
necessarily nefarious. It's great to get a lot of people
are poor the money for contraceptives given free contraceptives always

(39:02):
a good thing. I am supportive of people having access
to good birth control. Um not a problem, except it
becomes a problem because of the way that they do it.
So back in two horrifying stories of the Dalkon Shields,
Deadly Flaws had first started going public in a big way,
and it was immediately obvious. They didn't stop selling it
for two more years. But the people at H. Robbins

(39:23):
knew pretty much as soon as this thing got on
the market that it was going to get taken off
the market because it was hurting too many people. And
they didn't stop selling it in the US because of that,
God no, But they did immediately start looking at places
they could sell it overseas in order to make sure
that they had a long term way of making money
off of the Dalkon shield because they're good people. Yeah,

(39:45):
So yeah. Yeah. Obviously, they still kept pumping out as
many of these devices into the US market as possible,
but being forward thinking capitalists, they started looking further afield
for new markets from Mother Jones. With any other kind
of hazardous product, the manufacturer might at this point have
had to search out some sleazy broker to arrange a
secret dump. Not so with a contraceptive device. The Office

(40:07):
of Population within a I D had a budget of
a hundred and twenty five million dollars to spend on
the purchase and overseas distribution of contraceptives. Director RT. Ravenholt
was known to be a population control enthusiast who would
ask few questions about a good deal on Dalkon shields.
It was only natural for Robbins to turn to the government.
Robert W. Nichols, Robbins director of International Marketing, wrote to

(40:29):
the Population Office of a I D to interest them
in placing this fine product with the population control programs
and family planning clinics throughout the Third World. Nicholas sweeten
the deal with a special discount, which dramatically illustrates the
double standard drug companies apply to Third World consumers. The
company offered a I d the shield in bulk packages
unsterilized at forty eight percent off. So that's that's not

(40:53):
a good side. So the word population controls as a lot,
that's not a good side either. That's never never a
good sentence or a phrase to hear A b I
just love. It's like vaginal death crabs for everyone. How
to discommit price unsterilized. You're welcome, no problems, There's no problem, Paul,
have vaginal death crabs. Everyone. Also, this is going to

(41:17):
remain in your vagina for a long while, hanging in there,
hanging in If you try to root move it out,
it's going to rip you up like a fucking shrapnel
from a mortar. But it's okay because it's population control,
because we've got to control that population of you kinds
of people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So you did kind of
hit on the fact that population control enthusiast is a

(41:40):
terrifying thing to call someone. Um now that that actually
refers to a specific intellectual movement within the Western civilization
that goes back almost a hundred years. Um. See, so
I had this written a little bit differently, but I'm
just gonna go ahead and say, surprise, this is not
an episode about the Dalkon Shield. That was just the introduction.

(42:02):
This is an episode about the population control movement, and
I just kind of wanted to, like a Dalkon shield
like slide in secretly and then surprise you, m yeah,
and I wedged myself in there, and now we're going
to learn about there not going to be friends, Robert
friends after that. Sorry, I feel like I trade Samantha. Yes,

(42:28):
if I could flip this desk over in a dramatic way.
You know, we talked about the bacterial super Highway, and
now we're going to take a hard right turn onto
the eugenics super Highway, because that's what this episode is
secretly about. I just we also say that's an expressway.
Keep going, Oh yeah, maybe a tollway. Get shittier. So

(42:49):
the first concerted project to control world population started in
the late eighteen hundreds and four colonizer dominated nations the
United States, mostly California, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. Now,
in California, Canada and Australia, white people were increasingly terrified
about the fact that Asian people were immigrating there and
having babies in California. Asian immigration had actually been stoked

(43:11):
by a US government policy. From the eighteen sixties, Washington
d c. Had heavily pressured China's imperial government to make
it easier for Chinese citizens to leave the country because
we wanted workers and stuff. Um. The US actually argued
that Beijing was treading on their people's quote inherent and
an alienable right to change their home and allegiance by
stopping them from leaving the country. So keep that in mind.

(43:33):
The US government argued that restricting people from leaving China
for the US was a violation of their inherent and
inalienable right to change their home in allegiance. The only
time you'll hear that from the United States government had
left from well we know, well, yeah, because that's one
where it's like, I'm totally on board with the United States. There.

(43:54):
People do have an inherent right to change their home
in allegiance. Um, they don't stick with that for long.
From a Journey an article in the Journal of Past
and Present by the Oxford University Press quote, disgruntled workers
in California attacked Asian immigrants and in eighteen seventy seven
began political mobilization, much to the alarm of East coast elites.

(44:15):
Writing for The North American Review the following year, MJ
D sought to justify anti Chinese attacks. Migration was not
just another form of international trade, he insisted, and the
frugal Chinese worker was not just another labor saving machine.
Migration was a biological process. Centuries of overpopulation in places
like India and China had produced people able to subsist
on wages that would starve Europeans. Facing such competition, Whites

(44:38):
would fail to reproduce. Dire consequences would therefore ensue should
they withdraw the intelligence of artificial selection from the environment
and leave the battle to the chances of natural selection.
So that's pretty racist, wow, I mean it's fitting with
the current administration, So go ahead. Yeah, I mean we're

(44:59):
really really a blast the past there. But yeah, that's
the argument there. That's why. So initially the government's like
forcing the Chinese government to let more people come here
because we need the workers. But then like white people,
I feel like they're getting undercut, and so pressure the
government to stop Chinese people from coming into the country.
Like that's the basic way that things go in the

(45:19):
late eighteen hundreds, So that same year eighteen seventy seven
there started to come out because you know how the
way that like all culture really flows. This is one
of the things I say that a couple of times
that Andrew Breitbart got right, politics is downhill of culture. Right. Um,
So what hat starts happening in the culture in the
late eighteen hundreds that leads to all of these like
Chinese exclusion acts and stuff. Is this flood of novels

(45:41):
and short stories that are like trying to warn white
people of an invasion of Europe in the United States. Um, Like,
that's this big thing that starts happening in the media
right now. So you've got like this mix of like,
you know, people who were I guess their modern equivalent
be the guys writing for The Atlantic, you know, um
like Connor Friedersdorff and the Then you know people like
Steve Bannon like writing like racist fiction about how Chinese

(46:04):
people are going to Uh it's it's white genocide ship right,
Like it's it's always been the same fear are you
talking about today? Right? Yeah? Yeah, it's it's it's changed, right, Okay, okay, yeah. Quote,
Chinese were depicted not as nationals of a particular country,
but as a hoard or flood, a force of nature.
This image also featured in European journalistic and fictional accounts

(46:24):
of migration. The German geographer Friedrich Retzel, perhaps the first
European to draw attention to the Chinese question in California,
would go on to popularize the notion of Levin's realm.
Do you know what that? You get? You guys? You
guys know Levian's realm? Right? Everybody remembers that from high school? Yeah,
I did not realize that's where that concept had started.

(46:48):
Pretty good, waiting for the big Yeah, I'm one of
the big finale. Let's keep going. Yeah, yeah, that's coming.
We gotta build up a bit. So obviously, the term
lead in round was one of Hitler's chief talking points.
The literal meaning of the term is living space. Hitler
pointed to the US, which had genocided its way into
possession of a vas continent and argued that Germany deserves

(47:09):
that kind of space too. But the actual term Leban's
round had originated in California from these Europeans and like
American white people who were seeing Chinese people immigrant and
being like they're crowding us out. Like that's actually where
it started. Um Historian Matthew Connolly notes it suggested the
word Leban's round suggested that biological processes of growth and

(47:30):
movement underlay politics and were more fundamental than mere political borders.
So Leban's round wasn't just a matter of physical space.
In fact, it wasn't mostly a matter of physical space,
because California is still empty today. Most of California, nobody
fucking lives in, like as big as Los Angeles is,
like it's it's it's a huge land mass, so it's
like the whole continent. Like these these people who started

(47:51):
using this term weren't actually short on space. Um, living
space meant more directly physical and course not not physical,
but philosophical space for white people and white culture and
white jeans to spread. That's really what Yeah, exactly, exactly
exactly yeah. So yeah. On a ground level, anti Asian

(48:12):
sentiment in this period was driven by working class white
people who were angry that Chinese immigrants were undercutting their
wages and taking jobs. But on the loftier philosophical level,
that politics kind of flows downstream from it was a
question of the survival of the white race. Now then
is now white supremacist ideologues were happy to take advantage
of poor white resentment over economic trouble and turned this

(48:33):
into a boiling race hatred. In eighty five, all this
race baiting boiled over into a series of mass expulsions
of Chinese immigrants all across the West Coast. Further inland,
there were even murders and straight up massacres. There were
ethnic cleansings in California of of of Chinese communities. Um
White supremacist writers defended the killers, describing their actions as

(48:53):
an example of workers expressing their citizenship. The expulsions and
the violence were positively compared to anti Jewish programs in Europe,
as both Jews and Chinese immigrants were depicted by racists
as quote disease carrying cosmopolitans who excelled in economic competition.
It was the same basic thing you know that you
saw happening with anti Semitism. I'm not gonna lie, it's

(49:14):
just kind of like, are we doing this again today?
Except yeah, like Chinese immigrants is like this is too
familiar in a way we never stopped. Uh yeah, I
mean I think the focus is, yeah, the threat of
white hierarchy, whether or not they're going to be decimated.
No longer exists as if that could possibly happen, especially

(49:34):
in the next generation or so. But interesting, there were
actually well, and it's it's this matter of like the
fuel for the movement comes from poor white workers who
are getting edged out of jobs by people being paid
less than them. But the problem isn't the people being
paid less than them. The problem is, for example, the
fact that there's all sorts of holes in our labor

(49:55):
market whereby certain types of people who are not documented
citizens can be treat did subhumanly by companies without any consequence,
and it's just cheaper for them to not treat people
or pay them properly, right yep. And companies like State
Farm who love to advocate for special cards for immigrations
who don't have citizenship rights but can be underpaid, paid

(50:16):
taxes and no longer be recognized as individuals. Hey, it's great,
it's good, it's a fine. Yeah, it's fine, everything's fine. Yeah,
it's on fire. Yeah, I mean I wish everything we're
on fire. Sometimes do do you do? You know what?
What what is most likely not on fire? This is

(50:38):
my worst, my worst way, you know what? I wouldn't
set on fire. Samantha. There we go the products and
services that support this podcast. That would be biting the
dog that feeds me. I really wish we could transition
like that. All you gotta do is believe in yourself,

(50:59):
like we're bad. So we're talking about racism, so new
legal it's always and individuals and you know, different racial people.
Let's go population. I love is a melting pot, as in, yeah, no,

(51:25):
I won't make a cannibals. Yeah. New legal barriers were
added to Chinese immigration by the same government that had literally,
like a decade earlier, lobby the Chinese government about the
inherent freedom of human beings to change their face place
of residence. That ship switches around real damn fast. Chinese
migrants had to develop new ways of faking their identity
paperwork in order to gain entrance into the United States. Meanwhile,

(51:48):
immigration officials developed an ever more sophisticated and invasive system
of tracking people, which Matthew Connolly, who's a great historian,
describes as a prerequisite for modern systems of population control.
So all of this human monitoring ship that we deal
with today really does start in order to stop Chinese
people from immigrating to the United States. The whole infrastructure that,

(52:09):
like ice is the is the current manifestation of begins here,
which is great just somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. So, by nineteen
o eight, America's top racist president, Theodore Roosevelt, was calling
openly for Asian immigrants to be banned from entering not
just the United States, but all English speaking nations. To

(52:32):
say that about Teddy enough, Yeah, we're just talking about
the parks he made. But no, yeah, he tried to
ban every Asian person from English speaking nations. Pretty cool. Uh,
And you know this is not just a US is
bad thing because elected leaders in Canada and Australia expressed
significant solidarity with Roosevelt's idea. White folks everywhere, Yeah, good

(52:55):
on the solidarity bodies. Yeah, that's my favorite rom com.
Let's go Yeah. White people everywhere cheered when Roosevelt dispatched
the White Fleet to the Pacific. Now, the White Fleet
was a U. S. Navy squadron named for the color
of the holes on its ships, not for the white race,
but kind of for the white race, um, and it
was dispatched for the most part as an international goodwill exercise.

(53:17):
Like the United States was starting to become a world
power at this point. We built this big, modern fleet.
Roosevelt wanted to sail it around the world and have
it stopped in like twenty or thirty countries and you know,
do diplomatic visits and just be like, hey, the US
is here. We're gonna be in the Pacific more like
we're a real country. Like check out how cool we are,
which is you know, I guess fine broadly speaking, Um,
and most of those trips were very pleasant, you know,

(53:39):
the US expressing gets good will and desire to trade
with everybody. We were not a world military power at
this point. We weren't an invade people all that. I mean,
the Spanish American war accepted had not done a huge
amount of that is not nearly as much as we
would do at this point. So it was mostly about trading,
except for when it got to Japan. Um, because Roosevelt
had sent it to Japan too, threatened the Japanese government

(54:01):
to stop them from sending Japanese or letting Japanese people
come over to the United States. Um, yeah, it's it's
pretty bad. Um have a special white cloak they are, Yeah,
I mean why not? Yeah, Yeah, it is a little

(54:23):
on the nose that name, especially since when Roosevelt ordered
them to intimidate the Japanese government, he specifically said that
they were there to protect white civilization. Um. Yeah, it's
a big reason for this was that the Empire of
the Rising Sun had just beaten Russia in a war
in like nineteen o five, which is the first time
that an Asian power beat a European power in a

(54:45):
modern conflict. Like the Russian like north fleet sailed into
the area around like the coast of China where the
Japanese were, and they this huge like they just got
massacred by the Japanese navy, um, which like absolutely shocked
the hell out of every anybody in Europe at the time,
because like this is like colonialisms at its height at
this point. They are not used to having to like

(55:06):
have any sort of conflict that's a real fight with
anyone who's not a white person, and it really scares
the hell out of racists, um, which the Japanese Empire
was too at this point. Like it's like we're talking
about good are terrible? Yeah, talked to the Okinawans about that, Yeah, Yeah,
I mean it was two imperial powers going to war

(55:27):
with each other, and then another imperial power threatening that
imperial power to not let everybody's bad. It's nineteen you know,
I'm like, yeah, definitely not heroes. Yeah, so um yeah.
The fleet was met with protests in Japan, most of
which were inspired by the fact that California had just

(55:48):
passed a law segregating Japanese children out of white schools,
Which is interesting because if you look at like that,
you can find maps online that will show like which
states had segregation which didn't, and California is always listed
as a state that didn't have segregation. But Japanese and
I think a number of other Asian people were segregated
out of white schools in California. So it's not true
that that California had no segregation. It's not surprising. Yeah, no,

(56:12):
absolutely not. I mean, the the the guy who was
the first Supreme Court justice in Oregon who passed the
Lash law saying that like black people had to be
whipped if they didn't leave Oregon became the first governor
of California, and one of the first things he did
as governor of California was trying to kick all the
Chinese people out of California. Um, so, yeah, it's pretty bad.

(56:34):
It's pretty bad all the way down. Yeah. Yeah. History.
Yeah it's fun. You get to learn new ways about
how people sucked. Well yeah, that's about yeah what I
feel like, the way people suck. Yeah, it's they never
stopped finding ways to suck. It's remarkable. By this point,

(56:54):
American intellectuals largely agreed that regulation of the quote composition
of of immigration was necessary to safeguard the fertility and
thus the supremacy of native stocks meaning white people. I'm
gonna quote now from the Journal of Pasty Native Yeah. Yeah,
I know, it's pretty wild, right, like my dudes, my dudes.

(57:17):
That got me, That got yeah. Quote. In the United States,
the Immigration Bureau one congressional approval for collecting statistics according
to a list of races and people's rather than country
of origin. This became a tool to prove the inferiority
of racial groups and a model for like minded French
officials in Canada, Australia, and several European states as well.
Italians came to be known as the Chinese of Europe.

(57:43):
Is happening? I love juxtaposition of this whole conversation. Keep
going as an Italian descended person, I always love getting
those like little glimpses of racism against Italians because at
this point it's just it's just like like a little
bit like funny. But yeah that at the time they

(58:03):
were like, yeah, they were the Chinese of Europe. Um.
So yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's how you know, by
the way, you're really racist when you start making gradients
of white people, when you're like, oh, Hungarians. Right. So
the category of people's requiring containment thus grew beyond Asians,

(58:24):
defind not by nationality so much as by biology, that is,
their supposed capacity to propagate on wages that would lower
other people's living standards and fertility. Though Roosevelt failed to
coordinate exclusionary measures, researchers and activists saw them as the
beginning of a de facto policy of global population control.
In nineteen twelve, the sociologist Edward All'sworth Ross, from whom
Roosevelt had borrowed the idea of race suicide, which is

(58:47):
again the genesis of white of the white genocide myth.
That was the first term before white genocide, because genocide
didn't really exist as a term at this point. Um
it was race suicide. That was the thing that all
of these guys like Ross were warning people of. That's
what Zvelt believe, the white races committing suicide by letting
Chinese people, in Italian people into our country. Yeah, talk
about dramatic. Yeah, Like these guys are all fucking traumas. Absolutely. Yeah.

(59:14):
Ross argued that Northern European nations had to hold fast
to every settlement colony and fill them with their offspring
or else see them filled with the children of the
brown and the Yellow races. He predicted that the world
will be cut up with immigration barriers, which will never
be leveled until the intelligent accommodation of numbers and resources
has greatly equalized population pressure around the globe. I'm gonna

(59:37):
need you to read everything in that accident from now on. Yeah.
If any of this is sounding a bit Nazi adjacent,
that's because it was the beginning. Yeah. Yeah, all of
this ship had a huge impact of Adolf Hitler and
other Nazi fingers. It was an American, like we just
talked about how it was, it was a European living

(59:58):
in California who came up with the term Leban's round
to talk about white people being overwhelmed by Chinese people. Um.
It was an American named Prescott Hall of the Immigration
Restriction League who first started describing Asian immigrants to the
US as bacterial infections, which is both interesting what we're
talking about definitely, like I don't think you can be

(01:00:20):
a Prescott not a racist, Like if it's just it's
a law, it has to be. Yeah, the world would
break if that weren't the case. So barely twenty years
after Prescott defined Chinese immigrants bacterial infections, Hitler would refer
to Jews as plague bacillus in a clear imitation of this. Right, Like,
the terminology that that people like Prescott are using for

(01:00:42):
Asian immigrants is almost identical to the terminology Hitler is
using for Jewish people. And a lot of those Jewish
people are immigrants. A lot of the people who he
was like ranting about were immigrants from Russia, like Jewish
communities in Russia who had fled from the Civil War
into Germany, which was proved not to be a great idea.
Although if you were a Jewish person in Eastern Europe
in the early half of the nineteenth century or twentieth century,

(01:01:02):
really no good options, you're kind of no matter what happens,
get to the UK if you can, but you still
might wind up in a concentration camp, which happened to
thousands of Jewish people in the US. We don't talk
about that that much either, um so, uh yeah. Hall
argued for world eugenics in which fit and unfit in

(01:01:26):
terms of individual people in races, would be primary categories
the government would use to determine who could immigrate. Hall,
in many others like him, who very much dominated immigration
policy in this period, saw the state as in Connolly's words,
merely a mechanism for controlling biological processes, whether through promoting
the propagation of the fit or excluding and sterilizing the unfit. Remember,

(01:01:50):
that's what the people running the United States government in
the early part of the twentieth century, and particularly immigration,
but all throughout the government see the US government as
a mechanism for cot rolling biological processes, promoting the propagation
of the fit and excluding or sterilizing the unfit. That's
what the government does. Are talking about Miller, Yeah, yeah,
we are talking about Stephen Miller, because he's he very

(01:02:12):
much sees things that exact same way I'm just ding,
even though he pretends his little Asian wife. But yeah,
certain racists have admitted Asians into the pantheon of white people.
Now it's yeah, as long as like you're the right
kind of Asian, you know. Yeah, that's I think Stephen

(01:02:32):
Miller's I'm gonna get myself in trouble keep doing so.
Um Now, I'm going to guess most people are broadly
familiar with eugenics movement in the United States. We'll do
a deep dive on that at some point. What's important
to talk about the day is how the eugenics movement
splintered off into the population control movement. Remember we heard
that term a bit earlier when we're talking about that
guy Ravenholt from USA. It was a population control enthusiast.

(01:02:56):
All of this is trying to explain where population control
comes from, because it's actually like a distinct like like
like school of intellectual thought, very racist school of intellectual
Thought's school school of intellectual thought. Um, So, what we're
going to talk about today is how the eugenics movement, yes,
splintered off into the population control movement, which wound up
directing US AID policy until the nineteen eighties and beyond.

(01:03:19):
The process started when eugenicists realized that they had the
most success in pushing their policies when they could find
ways to make them appeal to the masses. Naked racism
did not appeal to the masses, because while most Americans
were racist, they didn't like to think of themselves as racists. Right.
That's always been the key of racism in America is
saying you're not a racist. That's why you know a

(01:03:41):
lot of people right now, I just Trump, yeahs, I
have a friend of Yeah. There's a reason Enrique Tario
was the head of the Proud Boys, you know, right. Yeah.
So instead of just nakedly appealing to racism, um eugenics
advocates realized that they had more success when they appealed

(01:04:03):
to improving maternal and child health and restricting immigration in
order to protect jobs. Eugenicists could still push racist eugenic policies,
but they wrapped them in a veil of concern for
human welfare. In the wake of World War One, increasing
numbers of white supremacist academics began ringing alarm bells about overpopulation,
and this starts to become after World War One this

(01:04:23):
is like really what the population control movement focuses on, Like, uh,
we can't talk about sterilizing whole races. Americans don't like that.
That's a little bit too naked. When you talk about genocide,
Americans are like, well, I don't really like I don't
I'm racist, but I don't really like to think of
myself as pro genocide, right, I mean, I'm come on,
pro I'm pro live. We can't say that, so instead
you say, no, we just we overpopulation is bad. We've

(01:04:45):
got to stop over population, and then you start pushing
exactly from Connolly quote. The Cambridge economist Harold Wright called
for a world policy in regard to population problems, but
worried that national rivalries were leading in precisely the opposite direction.
The influential demographer A. M. Car Saunders thought that war
would inevitably result from differential growth rates among nations and

(01:05:06):
races unless declining populations were provided with some form of
international guarantee. Similarly, the former MP and editor of the
Edinburgh Review Harold Cox thought that low fertility nations needed
to band together to defend themselves against any race that
by it's too great fecundity is threatening the peace of
the world. The psychologist and future leader of the International

(01:05:27):
Planned Parenthood Federation CP Blacker worried that Asia and Russia
might become a solid block determined to shake off the
yoke of the Western powers end of America. Birth control
offered the only way to avoid a second World War,
this time between East and West. But this required that
every culture accepted like the whole block, just the block. Yeah,

(01:05:48):
And of course Russians aren't white in this period either,
not white enough, you know. Um. Yeah, when you start
to study white racism in this period, you realize that,
like from the late eighteen hundreds of the early nineteen hundreds,
there were about eleven actual white people on the planet.

(01:06:11):
It's just a really fancy club. You have to be really,
really really perfectly fit, right, Yeah, yeah, because you lose
your whiteness if you're poor and until they need your
help to like hurt other people, then you get to
be white again. Yeah, as long as you have to
be at the front of yea, possibly being hurt first. Yeah. Well, yeah,

(01:06:31):
they're not gonna be expendable. Its expendable people, of course
you do. Why not? Yeah, you have to go invade
Stalin grad Yeah, nicely so. Biologist Raymond Pearl addressed the
International Eugenics Congress, projecting our thought ahead for a moment
to that time, at most a few centuries ahead. We
perceived that the important question will then be what kind

(01:06:52):
of people are they to be? Who will then inherit
the earth? Here into is the eugenic phase of the problem.
Man in theory at least has it now completely in
his power to determine what kind of people will make
up the Earth's population of saturation. This is the way
these guys are thinking, is that, like we, this tiny
group of the very widest, richest people in Europe can
determine what the entire population of the world will look

(01:07:15):
like in the future by controlling eugenics. That's the goal, right,
Obviously pretty cool stuff. Pearl said that it was pointless
for eugenesis to go about their old tactics of urging
the fitter classes of people to have more children as
some sort of transcendental social duty. He also told them
that simply targeting the obviously unfit would mean that meaning

(01:07:35):
the disabled for sterilization was not a good tactic. Instead,
the poor and unfit had to be stopped in mass
from increasing their numbers. One of Pearl's strongest allies in
this would be a woman named Margaret Singer. Margaret is
the woman who popularized the term birth control. She went
on to found the organizations that would eventually become the
Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and as it happened, her

(01:07:56):
advocacy would, years after her death, help spread millions of
on millions of unsterilized alcon shields to uterus is all
over the global South. And we will talk more about
that in part two. It will be fun. How are
you doing? How you doing, Samantha. I'm I'm digging all
of this in. I'm just first of all, all of

(01:08:17):
the different names and there is that I have I
get to I get that note. I mean like I
get to use as my band names and or screen
names somewhere. That's definitely gonna be happening soon. Uh. I'm
I'm enjoying every bit of this level of building up
of what hierarchy and supremacy is. It's quite delightful this

(01:08:37):
little chain as a little uh adventure maze that you
put me on. I am glad to hear that we
seek to please heat people here in our horrible stories
of genocide and forced hysterectomys as one of the brown
yellow people who may be infesting the nation's Uh, I
will tell you I have been one that have been

(01:08:58):
inundated and not breeding. You're welcome. I guess I'll tell
Raymond Pearl that when he stops having been dead for
half a century. I mean, you know, I want to
give somebody some satisfaction and enjoy in their life. That's
how I did it. You're welcome. Uh. God, Yeah, it's weird.

(01:09:21):
There's like this is this is a tough one because
like a lot of the history we're talking about is
misinterpreted by anti birth control advocates, by like like hardcore
Catholic and Christian advocates. You just think that like like
who want to demonize plant parenthood, and they're wrong actually
about what's bad Like Margaret Sayinger, there's a lot that's
sucked up about her. They always lie about her, like
and say stuff that she didn't actually say in order

(01:09:43):
to condemn her with their stuff. She said. It's just
a different kind of bad um. And the reason they
don't say the bad stuff she actually did is that
it's very similar to the bad stuff they say, right, yeah,
I mean that's kind of the whole like beginning of everything,
whether there's the suffragette movement and how racist and fucked
up the whole community was from get go. But they

(01:10:03):
did do some good work, and you have to sit back, yeah,
taking back through like, Okay, how awful is this and
how do we need to correct it? It's kind of
like it's a it's a constant change in trying to
justify I guess I don't even know the word justified,
but trying to look back at how awful people were
in history, historical contacts on who they were and what

(01:10:24):
it was, but trying to also say, yeah, I guess
they did do some good things too. You have to
be fair without whitewashing. So like the you know, with
with the abolitionist movement, you have to point out like
these people were on the right side of history. It
was a critical fight and a heroic fight, and it's
good that they did it. Also, a huge chunk of

(01:10:44):
them were abolitionists because they didn't want black people anywhere
near them, right, Like, that's that, and that doesn't mean
that it wasn't good that they were abolitionists. It just
means that, like, let's be honest about what they were
and like, it's same thing with the suffragettes. A lot
of the absolutely we're fighting on the side of his
story and like doing the right thing, and it's good
that they were there. A ton of them were racist
as hell, you know, just see Harriet Tubman's Ain't I

(01:11:06):
a woman's speech? Right, Like it's yeah, And that's the
same thing with the abolition is it's not that they
didn't do a good thing. Is literally they just didn't
like people. But then yea, well, it's like you you
go back to the civil rights movement and a number
of like the black men who were like prominent the
civil rights movement, we're very misogynists and like that. People

(01:11:29):
people are not never perfect or even all that great usually,
but it doesn't like what matters is, you know, the
broad sweep of what they attempted to accomplish. You can't
expect people to be perfect as long as they're fighting
to make the world better. No one's going to make
the world perfect, and nobody is perfect and like, and
we definitely need to make sure you know the truth
of it all before we ideal idealized people in any list.

(01:11:52):
But as a rule, don't make statues of people. I
am never going to sit in a fetal position and
making sure no one comes near my vaginant with a
what was it a vagina? Is it a vaginal death crap? Yeah?
Or a uterine depth charge? Both? Again? Great band names,

(01:12:13):
best bed named ever, Samantha, You got any plugg doubles
to plug before we roll out apart one? Well, if
you guys want to find me on social media, I
am under McVeigh Samantha on Twitter. Are Sam McVeigh at Instagram.
You can see the pictures of my dogs because that's
pretty much the only thing that hangs out with me
now since we're in quarantine and never will leave. Or

(01:12:35):
you can check me out on Stuff I've Never Told You,
which is an intersectional feminist podcast, So if you're afraid
of that, you probably will like it. But with heart.
Yeah yeah, check out Stuff Mom Never Told You on iHeart.
Check out Samantha on the interweb net dot com. Send

(01:12:56):
her your favorite band names, um, send me your favorite
band names. Start a band, uh and come back on
Thursday to hear more about the population control movement Margaret
Sanger And finally, the conclusion of our horrible story about
the Dalcock shield um. All that and more coming up

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: The Worst Birth Control Device Ever Invented