Part Two: The Population Control Movement

Robert is joined again by Samantha McVey to discuss how the Dalkon Shield influenced population control.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
It's the podcast that it is. This is the podcast
that it is, not the one it's not. I'm Robert
Evans Behind the Bastards Part two an intro, But are
you I'll never do that again? Um, I'm so sorry.
I like it. No, I feel like I'm getting all
of the treats right now between the appropriate intro and

(00:23):
then to see an intro. Would you say you're going
to do neither one of these again? No? Never. Next
episode I'm going to introduce by just shouting out the
name of a famous ethnic cleansing and then uh, yeah,
it's gonna be very bad. But this time you've got
a song. Of course. Our guest today in part two
of our Population Control episode, as in part one, is

(00:46):
Samantha McVeigh of stuff your mom never told you, Samantha,
mom never told you stuff mom never told you yet?
Know you and my mom specifically, Yeah to how are
you doing, Samantha? Has has life changed dratically for you
since part one? Well? I did go visit my dog,
who I do put her away during recordings because she

(01:06):
is a very loud barker. But h yeah, so you
know that always makes me a little happier. That's good. Yeah,
it's always good to see dogs. I don't remove Anderson
because I have separation anxiety. Yeah, but I feel like
Anderson so much better behaved than Peaches. Peaches is just
kind of allowed just wait for somebody to get a
package delivered. She hates the package delivery pieces, like she's like,

(01:30):
is it for me? No? Fuck you? Right? Anderson has
that in common with Jeff Bezos. There you go. Wait,
is Anderson making just as much money for every package
being delivered to two thousand dollars a second son of
a bit? Yeah, and she does not share a dime
of it. It's very frustrating, very rudy dog I have. Yeah,

(01:55):
she has so many jet skis that she can't even use.
Got to make that bank? You you do? You? Anderson
speaking of making that bank, not at all, speaking of
making that bank, speaking of population control. When we left
off our long winding story about the Dalkon Shield and
the population control movement, we had gotten to Margaret Sanger.

(02:17):
Have you heard Does that name ring a bell to you? Samantha? Yeah,
of course we have kind of mentioned her previous previous
episodes with previous Yeah, yeah, she's you know again kind
of seen as the founder of planned parenthood, at least
the organizations that became it, and popularizer of the term
birth control. And in many ways, Margaret was a bridge
between the eugenics movement, which was fundamentally racist, and the

(02:38):
population control movement, which was usually racist but not necessarily racist.
It's actually a much more complicated kind of terrible. Um.
Margaret was not a eugenicist in the Nazi way. She
supported birth control access for everybody, including the kind of
white people that you kind of assumed she felt were
a superior race. She was comfortable talking to fascists. In

(02:59):
her nineteen thirty autobiography, she wrote, always, to me, any
aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted
an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the
ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey, one of
the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing. So she did
talk to the KKK. There are pictures that will claim
to be her with the KKK. They're not her. Um.
There's no picture of that meeting. But she did give

(03:19):
a speech to a women's KKK group. UM. And you
can find a lot online about Singer's racism. It's a
very frustrating subject to research because she definitely was problematic,
but also her her status as founding mother of the
safe contraception movement in the US has made her the
target of a bunch of disingenuous right wingers who want
to paint planned parenthood and birth control as part of

(03:41):
a racist plot to wipe out black people. And that
is not true. It wasn't true of Margaret Sanger, to
be honest. Um, she did embark on something called the
Negro Project, and that is a not a great thing
to call anything. Yeah, but it was not what you
might assume it was. It was an effort to spread
education and access to birth control in black communities, particularly

(04:02):
throughout the South. The reality of the project is complex.
Singer and her colleagues did deliberately appeal to white racists
in their attempts to get funding for the project. I'm
gonna quote from a right up by New York University here, Sanger,
Ryan Art, and Sanger secretary Florence Rose drafted a report
on birth control and the Negro skillfully using language that
appealed to both eugenicists fearful of unchecked black fertility and

(04:23):
progressives committed to shepherding African Americans into middle class culture.
The reports stated that Negroes present the great problem of
the South, as they are the group with the greatest economic,
health and social problems, and outlined a practical birth control
program geared toward a population characterized as largely illiterate and
that still breed carelessly and disastrously, a line borrowed from

(04:44):
a June nineteen thirty two Birth Control Review article by W. E. B. Dubois.
So again very problematic, also quoting W. B. D b
Uh yeah, and it's it was not. Again this is
framed modern and modern times by usually like right wing
anti birth control people as like evidence of her racism.

(05:07):
The Negro Project was very popular with black community leaders
at the time, and it would be unfair to frame
it as an act of genocide. Sanger wrote repeatedly of
the importance of bringing in black doctors, stating at one point,
I do not believe that this project should be directed
or run by white medical men, which is good if
you're going to do a healthcare project like focused on

(05:27):
the black community like that, that that shows like she
she was not, like she was capable of understanding like
what was necessary in order to actually reach people. Yeah yeah, nine.
She argued in a letter that black ministers needed to
be heavily involved in the project in order to gain
the trust of their communities. We do not want word

(05:48):
to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population,
and the minister is the man who can straighten out
that idea if it ever occurs to any of their
more rebellious members. Again, it's a problematic language there. But
also like, there's no evidence she was actually going in
for genocide because she was again doing the same thing
with white people. She was a birth control across the
board advocate, right, she wanted everyone to have more access

(06:10):
to contraceptives. Um, there are people on the right like
Denisia Suza who will spread wildly untrue claims about Singer,
like that she called black people human weeds and a
minis to civilization, and there is no evidence of this.
Singer's own legacy contains enough problematic facts without making up lies.
She was a eugenicist, and she wrote in nineteen twenty
three that birth control does not mean contraception indiscriminately practiced.

(06:33):
It means the release and cultivation of the better elements
in our society and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual
extinction of defective stocks, those human weeds who threatened the
blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization. So she
did call people human weeds, but she wasn't referring to
black people. She was referring more to mentally challenged people,

(06:53):
more to people with like who are prone to diseases.
And that's bad, Like, that's really bad. But she was
not like a for exterminating everything but white people. She
was for exterminating people she considered unhealthy, or at least
exterminating them from the gene pool, which is again bad.
But let's be accurate about the kind of bad it is,
you know. Yeah, we don't need to make it anymore. Yeah, criminal.

(07:17):
I don't know what I would say, because it's not
flower either. It's bad. It's already bad. She didn't want
to make that humanity better by wiping out black people.
She wanted to make black people and white people better
by wiping out folks who had what she considered to
be like bad qualities through selective breeding. And that's really terrible.
Also to classify for herself what those bad qualities are

(07:40):
like Yeah, that is bad, but like it's not the
kind of bad like again, because they tried a friend
that Like, no, the progressives always been trying to wipe
out black people. Like, that's not what she was doing. Um, information,
she was just a bad person. She was she was
There's plenty that's bad about her. Yeah, let's be actually

(08:00):
honest when we condemn someone. She also stated during another speech,
I believe now immediately there should be national sterilization for
certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged
to breed and would die out where the government not
feeding them. Um, you know that's bad, But again it's
the kind of like. Part of why they like to

(08:21):
try to frame her badness as something different is because
if you're accurate about it, you can find a funk
load of Republicans who say that the poor should starve, right,
like the people who can't work on their own in
find Jordan Peterson talking about like how terrifying it is
that some people aren't intelligent enough to be in the military,
and like say, like, because so what do we do
with those people? Like that's a really like what Margaret

(08:43):
Sanger was saying back then is still common today. Um,
people dress it up a little bit more. I mean
it kind of relates to the COVID things like that's fine,
they're already they're already problems if they die, so's they're unproductive. Yeah,
they're unproductive, they're on the government. Actually, Um, yeah, she
just she was bad. She just was not the kind

(09:04):
of bad people liked SUSA like to paint her as.
And in fact, a lot of progressive black leaders at
the time liked Margaret Sanger and what she was trying
to do. Uh. In one nine letter to Dr C. J.
Gamble of Procter and Gamble fame, she urged him to
get over his resistance to hiring a full time negro physician,
as quote, the colored negroes can get closer to their
own members and more or less lay their cards on

(09:25):
the table, which means they're ignorant, superstitions and doubt. Um.
And again she's also she's number one saying that black
people are ignorant and superstitious, which is bad, but also
saying that like, no, you get educated black people to
talk to them about birth control. So again, she's a
problematic person, but not what do SUSA likes to paint
her as. She was very paternalistic in her dealings with
black people. Obviously that is extremely clear for reading anything

(09:48):
about her um, But her own letters and correspondence don't
show she wanted to eliminate groups of people, um other
than like she wanted to eliminate groups of people, I guess,
but not that the way that is portrayed um. In
she wrote that quote, the Negro race has reached a
place in history when every possible effort should be made
to have every Negro child count as a valuable contribution
to the future of America. Negro parents, like all parents,

(10:10):
must create the next generation from strength, not from weakness,
from health, not from despair. See it's complicated here, especially
since one of the things historians who are honest will
point out is that if you're judging people by the
standards of the time, Margaret Sanger was woke for her
period of time. Like she she had enlightened views on

(10:31):
race relations for the time, right, Yeah, and she got
some kind of equality and understanding that the the way
to talk to people is not by telling them what
to do, but to actually include the I guess, yeah,
exactly exactly, to include them and to include their community,
and to like yeah, again, everything is bad back there.

(10:53):
It's still bad now. It was even worse than I
guess in that standard and that time standards, she was
seen as progressive, that leer as again like the eighties
when they stopped saying yeah things as well. Yeah, she
was better on race relations than most white people of
her social class in that time. Um, because her actual

(11:15):
thing wasn't race as much as it was eliminating people
she thought weren't intelligent enough, people who were poor and
thus unintelligent, Like that was the kind of people that
Margaret Sanger wanted to wipe out. Um, yeah, he just wanted,
you know, because to kill all of a certain other groups.
It's fine, fine, Yeah, it's it's fine. Yeah. Yeah, so
it's yeah. I'm gonna quote now from a write up

(11:36):
in the Journal of Past and Present that kind of
points out the the actual kind of eugenicist Margaret Singer was.
She argued that contraception was not merely a personal choice,
but a public good, indeed a pantasa for social problems
for the unfit. It was a duty, and Sanger became
convinced that states had to intervene when necessary to prevent
their propagation. Her movement would thus court government repression to
gain visibility and sympathy for the cause of liberating individuals

(11:59):
from unwanted birth, while striving to win state support for
top down programs to shape populations. Sanger herself felt that
she never had a country and instead devoted her life
to the movement. For her, birth control was a secular
faith that would advance peace between people's by reducing Malthusian
pressures and depriving militant nationalists of cannon fodder. So that

(12:20):
is interesting to me, um, because that's why she's kind
of the founder of the population control movement. And that's
where it splits from eugenics, because she's not talking about like,
I want the white race to succeed. She's talking about,
I want to engineer humanity, and birth control is the
way to do that. And I'm you know, she above
all else frightened of overpopulation, and particularly overpopulation of poor people, Right,

(12:41):
that's kind of her thing. So yeah, in the nineteen
thirties and forties, obviously, eugenics was still very big. Various
fascist states adopted hardcore racist eugenicist policies. Hitler's policies were
based heavily on a different state, and federal policies in
the United States that had been named it breeding and
immigration restrictions of certain groups of people. Uh Hitler described
the invasion of Eastern Europe and its subsequent genocides as

(13:03):
the planned control of population movements to restore the numbers
and qualities of the Aryan race. Japan's imperial government, on
the other hand, set itself to the task of purifying
what they called the Yamato race. Now, when all of
the dust had settled from World War Two, the horrors
of the death camps proved to be the nail in
the coffin for eugenics as a worldwide movement. Obviously, remnants
of eugenics policies remain in the US for a frightening

(13:25):
long time, and one can argue even into today in
some ways. But no longer was eugenic thinking something you
could advocate openly without drawing nasty comparisons to Nazis. So
the Nazis kind of kill eugenics as a respectable movement
because of you know, the death caffs. Like people see
where that leads. But population control, like this is part

(13:46):
of why what's kind of like brilliant about what Sanger
and other population control advocates do when they split from
the eugenics movement. Population control only gets more popular after
World War Two. Margaret Sanger herself even pointed to Nazi
extermi nation centers as evidence of the quote widespread devaluation
of human lives that was caused when people didn't have
birth control. Um like, because basically there were so many

(14:10):
useless people that it made everyone's life worth lesson that's
what made these these massacres possible. And instead, if we
had just sterilized people with quote dysgenic qualities of body
and mind, these death camps would never have become a thing.
That's the whole reach. Like that's yeahs like you had
to play in order to justify why your cause could

(14:34):
be better than this bad cause. But because it wasn't happening,
it happened. M Yeah, yeah, it's and it's like that's
a bad way to explain. It's it's all bad. It's
very bad. Um. Yeah. So Sanger and her fellow travelers
believed that intelligence was the most important qualities to select
forth idiots they felt should be discouraged from breeding. Obviously,

(14:57):
there's a lot of problems with this, but the chief
one is that dumb and poor were synonyms for people
like Margaret Singer, and they always have been. For the
population control mo When they talk about wanting to like,
you know, stop unintelligent people from breeding, they're talking about
poor people, right. What they really mean is uneducated or
not educated to my standards. Aldous Huxley cited research that

(15:18):
suggested an inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility. Basically, Huxley
was pointing out that like intelligent people have less children
and he called for a world population policy. And in
this Huxley was making the same argument that Mike Judge
did in the movie Idiocracy, which is why I find
that movie problematic because the whole the fundamental idea like
idiocracy is everything Margaret Singer was talking about, if we

(15:40):
let dumb people breed, the world will become stupid, which
isn't how genetics works. But yeah, it's it's bad. Um,
it's frustrated to me, Like the degree to which people
like right now is just like idiocracy, and it's like, no,
it's not like these people are anyway. Very first, the
whole concept of who is an idiot who isn't as
a um problematic in itself. Like, yeah, and it's part

(16:04):
of you know, honestly, like the fact that there's so
many folks who were like you know, quote unquote coastal
elites who like to clare folks in the Deep South
to be dumb because of like the way they talk
or the differences in their education is part of what
like has makes those people easier to recruit by folks
who are trying to take advantage of them. Um, it's
very it's all very frustrating. It's it's very frustrating. But

(16:28):
you know what's not frustrating. This is frustrating. It's not
time for an ad pivot. I'm just going to keep
popping about racism. Yeah, sorry in the late night that
that was a little bit of a fake out there
and you see that that was good. Okay, what are
we doing here? You're like, is there a second part
of the segment that I didn't know? Right back into

(16:49):
bigot Aldous Huxley. So, in the late nineteen forties and
early fifties, thinkers like Huxley began to panic over the
thought of a population explosion, which they considered to be
an existential threat on the level of a nuclear war
because the poorest nations on Earth, the global South, had
the highest populations and most rapid rates of population growth.
This is where population control advocates focus their efforts. So again,

(17:11):
we're not racist. We're not trying to call certain races.
But the poor are having the most babies and we
want to stop that. And also all of the poor
live in these specific countries, and they're not white, right right,
It's not about race. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In nineteen fifty eight,
Dwight D. Eisenhower called a meeting of his National Security

(17:33):
Council to discuss foreign aid. He told them they neglected
what he viewed as the biggest threat to their future,
even more dire than the Cold War. And I'm gonna
quote from historian Matthew Connolly here, who's quoting someone who
is in that NSC meeting with Eisenhower. In all our
discussions of the problem of underdeveloped countries and the kind
of assistance which we could effectively provide them, we had
not yet faced up to what was really the most

(17:53):
serious problem, namely that of exploding population growths. As far
as he could see, continued the President, the only solution
to this problem throughout the world was finding an effective
two cent contraceptive. Eisenhower thought that something drastic had to
be done to solve this problem, though he certainly did
not know how to get started on this solution, and
he furthermore could not himself get it started. So Eisenhower

(18:16):
did form a Presidential Commission on US fourign aid and
test them with the goal of finding ways for the
US to help poorer nations reduced fertility rates. In an
NSC meeting, he confided to his men that overpopulation was
quote a constant worry to him and from time to
time reduced him to despair. So he is the basics
I've been trying to put him in basis for Thanos. Yeah,

(18:41):
for this character. Okay, yeah, I'm waving get in now.
I will say though, Eisenhower also doesn't think that the
president can do anything about this. He thinks that that's
like not the job of the federal government to provide contraceptives. Um.
So he thinks it's critical and import but he also
thinks that like, I can't do this or have the

(19:03):
government do this because that would be wrong, which I
don't know, it seems weird to me. Um. Yeah. Around
the same time, population control advocates had started pushing the
u in, which was new at the time, and US
government to distribute contraceptives in poor countries as a way
to curb birthrates, but Ike refused to consider this, stating
I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is

(19:23):
not a proper political or government activity or function or responsibility.
Once he left office, Eisenhower became the honorary co chair
of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, right alongside Harry Truman. Yeah,
I meant she didn't know that Harry Truman and Eisenhower
were like chairman of the Plan Parnet. I'm having so
many questions right now, like that Republicans used to be

(19:46):
very different. I mean again, we talked about this in
episode we just recorded. But like Barry Goldwater, who was
like seen as the first Trump like was a pro
abortion access advocate at the end of his life. So
Republicans have really gone off the deep ense recently. But
it is worth pointing out how recent they're like antipathy
to birth control and stuff is right, I mean, to

(20:07):
be fair, the difference today seems to be that they're
more worried about, you know, people being born as to
whether or not they die later, They're okay, they're dying later.
Part now they have always been because Dwight Eisenhower was
a big murdering people advocate. Yeah, I mean, and in
fairness to most of the people he murdered were Nazis,

(20:30):
so like you got to give him some credit, but
he killed a lot of people who weren't Nazis. We
can talk about the Congo and ship. Yeah, yeah, I
think that was under him, And like, you know Korea,
well that was Truman, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah, a
lot of the Cold Wars started. Yeah, I mean Eisenhower's
complex Korean was under Truman. Um. Yeah, Eisenhower was complicated

(20:51):
because he is one of the only presidents, maybe the
only whoever like directly did ounce the military industrial complex,
and he did it right when it was like starting off.
He was like, this is happening, and it's bad and
it's going to destroy our entire country if we let it.
But also he's who it got started under Um and
he let it happen and then kind of on his way,
I was like, oh, by the way, I left you

(21:12):
all with a big old problem. So I don't know,
complicated figure Eisenhower still is one of the best presidents
we ever had. But all of our presidents are criminals,
so you know, yeah, quotation marks around best. So um yeah.
Once he left office, Ike winds up as the honorary

(21:33):
co chair of Planned Parenthood, and in this position he
turned his focus to lambasting welfare programs, including federally funded
birth control, which it just started to be a thing.
His issue was that the United States was spending money
with one hand to slow up population growth among responsible families,
and with the other providing financial incentives for increasing production
by the ignorant, feeble minded or lazy. Oh now that's fun,

(21:55):
not racial talk at all. No, No, what's fun about
that is like, obviously White was not a Nazi because
he helped the story of the Nazis, but also feeble
minded is almost directly the translation of one of the
terms that the Germans used to justify the eugenics programs
that turned into the Holocaust, right, you know, uh, useless

(22:16):
eaters was a less polite term the Germans had for Yeah,
that was so the Holocaust started not with the extermination
of the Jews or of other races, but with the
extermination of Again, what we're called useless eaters. And this
a lot has its roots a lot in so like
a million Germans start to death during World War One
because the British blockade them in Germany cannot feed itself um,

(22:36):
which is like one of the things that it's why
Hitler invaded Eastern Europe, why he wanted to get Ukraine
in particular, UM. And so one of the things Hitler
wanted to do when the Nazi thinkers wanted to do,
was get rid of all these quote unquote useless eaters
because they were afraid that when Germany was blockaded again
in the inevitable next war, these people would use up
like precious food stores that working people could be And

(22:58):
so the Holocaust star did with the gassing of um
physically handicapped people who were seen as again useless eaters.
Like that's where it got started. Before they gass people
at a racial level, they were gassing the disabled. So wow,
cool stuff. And again Eisenhower's rhetoric directly mirrors what the

(23:18):
Nazis were saying in the early period of their time
and power, which is cool, very cool and good. Yeah,
a delight is a delight, you know what doesn't advocate
for the extermination of large segments of the population. Uh,
perhaps the products and services that sponsor this very podcast.

(23:41):
That's true. They do not, they absolutely don't. Every time
we get a new sponsor, we send them an email
that says genocide with a question mark, and they always
respond to no, and then we're good to go. I
felt like, it's like, shrug no, no, we only accept
a hard no. We are that's one of our lines. Yeah,

(24:01):
that's yeah, that's that's why we are not sponsored by
Procter and Gamble, because they gave us the shrug emoji
and we were like, that's not enough, that's not enough.
I G. Farben had the same response, which you know,
shocking from the makers of zion B. Anyway, here's the ads.

(24:25):
Oh we're back. So Dwight D. Eisenhower Again, it was
not a Nazi, but his rhetoric echoed Nazi rhetoric, which
is a recurring problem for what we call population control
advocates like Raven Holt, the guy who just say, just
because you're not a Nazi doesn't mean you're not a racist, asshole. Yeah,
the Nazis were mostly the Nazis were mostly destroyed by

(24:45):
other racists, just less racists. Yeah, it was a bunch
of the men who landed at Normandy were like, well,
I don't like the Jews either, but what you're doing
isn't okay like that, Like, let's let's be honest about it, right,
Really you read some of the ship George Patton wrote
about Jewish people while he was beating the Nazis, and
it's like, yeah, he was pretty fucking racist. Um yeah,

(25:09):
so uh yeah, Matthew. Anyway, the point I'm getting to
here is that population control advocates, while not Nazis, often
said ship that sounded like Nazi rhetoric. Matthew Connelly, great historian, writes, quote,
all population control movements tended to diagnose social and political
problems as pathologies with a biological basis. All shared the
idea that society should reproduce themselves by design, even if

(25:33):
that meant controlling how people disposed of their own bodies.
And all looked at human beings not as individuals, but
as populations which could be shaped through a combined force
of politics and science. Not great thing to look at
human beings as yeah, we're all these things just coming

(25:54):
into a combination of pretty much people are not people
humanity does not exist, and people are just people aren't
people except for me and the people that I and
sixty years ago the people like me were white. But
now people who aren't white can be people like me
as long as they're the kind of smart that I
recognize as smart. And also they can acknowledge and all

(26:17):
acknowledged that I am the supreme superior form of that
human being. If you can acknowledge that, then yes, then
we can all be white together. Perfect been waiting for
someone to tell me that. Oh my god. Yeah. In
the nineteen sixties, population control advocates began to lobby the
World Bank of the US Agency for International Development us AID,

(26:39):
asking them for birth control programs in the global South.
They held out against this at first, largely out of
fear of the political consequences, mainly because they were scared
they would anger the Catholic Church, which was then is
now very against contraception. UM. Now this started a change
under LBJ, who complained that he was quote not going
to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refus

(27:00):
used to deal with their own population problems. One of
the nice things about l b J is he never
really pulled us punches. I was gonna say, that's fairly direct. Okay, okay,
all right now, near the end of the nineteen sixties,
U s A, which made up more than half of
all foreign aid from the United States, began providing large
scale assistance for birth control around the world in Bolivia, Bangladesh,

(27:22):
South Korea, Pakistan, Thailand, and Tunisia. More than two thirds
of national family planning budget came from foreign aid, maybe
mainly U s A. And again at this point, because
you know, South Korea is today one of the wealthier
nations on the planet. At this point, it's a war
racked country that's like barely getting out of a devastating
conflict like they are. It is considered, in the words

(27:42):
of the white popol time, third world at that point
in time, um, which is why it's it's getting aid
in that way. In nineteen sixty five, Reimert Ravenholt took
over us AIDS Office of Population. Under his auspices, it
would grow from basically nothing to a multibillion dollar international
crusade against overpopulation. Raven Holt was a true believer as
well as profoundly charming and well connected. Thanks to thanks

(28:05):
to this, his office had no oversight whatsoever. He could
spend the money allotted to him by Congress. However he
saw fit. Yeah, that's not a recipe for disaster at all. No,
it's gonna go great. It's gonna be a good story
for Matthew Connelly quote. His preferred strategy was national inundation,
based on the idea that making contraceptives freely available, ideally

(28:26):
at the very doorstep of consumers, could increase usage. Massive
purchasing contracts of as many as a hundred million monthly
pill cycles also ensured that pharmaceutical companies would join in
defending his growing budget and encourage corporate support for his organization.
When some of these US back contraceptives were siphoned off
and resold, raven Holt was unconcerned. This black market constituted

(28:46):
a free distribution network. He also used NGOs to provide
training and sterilization and distribute low cost abortion kits even
where abortion was illegal. Raven holt strategy, according to a
Population Council officer, was to make abortion so easy to
perform and so widely used that it would be meaningless.
When raven holt superiors tried to remove him, they found
it was all but impossible his supporters were too numerous.

(29:09):
M hm sucks. M hmm. So he said easy accessible,
but not necessarily safe. Would that be exactly? So there's
a lot of what he's doing that's mine obviously, Like
I think everyone should have access to safe and cheap
contraception everywhere in the world. Safe is key and one
of the things that raven Holt is able to do

(29:31):
in order to get as much Because for raven Holt,
it's safe is not as important as numerous. What he
wants is to stop as many babies being born as possible. Yeah,
I'm just imagining he's just sending out packages of hangars.
Yeah he would, Yeah, he would have if he if
he thought that that would have done it. But like
he would have preferred something that's easier to get people
on but may have some of the same consequences as

(29:53):
using a hangar um because people are going to use
the hangar, but people might take a pill that has
also a horrible effect of it. Because again, so yeah,
we're gonna get to that. This all brings us back
around to the Dalkon Shield because Reynard Ravenholt, ray to
his buddies, was the man who approved H Robbins that
pharmaceutical company's request for the U. S Government to buy
up all of the unsold millions of Dalkon shields and

(30:16):
sell them in bulk to the global South. Now, I
want you to remember, to save money. Robbins was selling
these shields in massive bulk packages of a thousand each,
and they were unsterilized, sterilized. My favorite part of the
whole thing is, yeah, just basically, yeah, this was very uncommon.
Yeah yeah, yeah, crap. And the wire hangar isn't an

(30:39):
or isn't a bacterious super highway, so that's good. Yeah.
So obviously selling unsterilized i U d s was very odd.
I U d s were always sold sterile in the
United States. U s A demanded an explanation as to
why Robbins was shipping them unsterilized, and an employee for
AH Robbins wrote back that the shields were being sold

(30:59):
that way for the purpose of reducing price and thereby
attaining wider use uh and is intended for restricted sale
to family planning support organizations who will limit their distribution
to those countries commonly referred to as less developed. So USA,
it was like it worries us that these are unsterilized.
H Robins says, don't worry. That makes them cheaper and
we're only selling them to poor people. And the response, Okay, cool,

(31:21):
thanks man. Yeah, that's exactly what they said. Yeah, because again, right,
Raven Holts all about national inundation. He just wants as
much contraception out there as possible and like consequences be damned.
So he's fine with this. He's a good guy. Three five,
that's fine. I think it's rid of someone I don't

(31:42):
think is smart because they don't read the same books
that I read. Then it's all good, great ship right here.
So Robbins explained that medical practitioners in those countries were
expected to sterilize shields by soaking them and disinfectant. Now,
this was again very uncommon. Normally, you just get them

(32:02):
sterilized and you wear sterile gloves and you insert them.
Having people sterilize them introduces a potential for someone to
funk up and not sterilize them properly, which is why
it's not the way you do something like an I U. D.
In a contemporary write up of this, Mother Jones noted
quote in the United States, according to private gynecologists we interviewed.
The insertion of an I U D that had merely

(32:23):
been soaked into disinfectant before use would possibly be grounds
for a malpractice suit. Robbins insists that the sterilization procedure
it recommended was effective, but it is highly likely that
few people ever read the instructions. The company attached only
one set of instructions for each pack of a thousand shields,
and those were printed, and only three languages English, French,

(32:43):
and Spanish. Although the devices were destined for forty two
countries from Ethiopia to Malaysia, we're still only ten inserts
were provided per hundred shields, adding a measurably to the
problem of infection. Oh well, so, in my mind it
really was like an Ikea level of instructions to it,
where you get brief stick figures and they're like, good luck.

(33:04):
You know, I'll give you. I'll give a keya credit.
They generally, wherever they sell i Kea products, print them
in the language most common in that country. I'm sure. Yeah,
it looks like the foreign language to me, trying to
put mostly nonsense, but also very few people put Ikea
in Ikea furniture inside their bodies. I mean, I feel

(33:25):
like that could be an Ikea furniture like that. Yeah,
at least just say yeah, there'd be a bunch of
extra eyes and d's and g s to the name.
But yeah. So H. Robbins also assured USA that actual
medical professionals weren't needed to insert the dalkon s field
into patients. A lot of these devices were headed to

(33:45):
rural family planning clinics, and the drug company insisted that
staff without medical degrees were more than capable of handling
the job. USA pushed back in this case, too, noting
that in the United States, there's been numerous reports of
adverse reactions from patients who had taken that who had
had the dalt Un shield inserted by doctors who weren't gynecologists.
If m d s had trouble following the instructions, surely

(34:06):
random aid workers who weren't even doctors in like the
Ethiopian countryside world also make mistakes. So H. Robbins did
with pharmaceutical giants do best. They commissioned a study that
would show exactly what they needed it to show a
study or did they just lie they paid for a
study that showed what they needed. Yeah, and the study
they paid for showed that paramedics could learn to reliably

(34:29):
insert the dalkon shield in a half hour. Oh wait,
of course they said they could just insert it, or
that they could do it correctly and safely learned they
could correctly learn how to do it safely in a
half hour, paramedics. Number one, they paid for this study.
Number two. Most of these aid workers, and again fucking
rural like Ethiopia, are like like aid workers, Like a

(34:54):
lot of them aren't paramedics or any other kind of
medical professional, but some of them are still putting these
things in people as what we would like to talk
about the fact that the white girl from America who
claimed to be a nurse who killed millions, like many orphans, yea,
many orphans. Yeah, but that just happened recently. I'm sure
that didn't happen back then. No, no, no, well actually yeah,

(35:16):
I mean different things happened back then. It was usually
more of a government thing. I don't know that it
was anyway, we'll get it. I'm just thinking, like, in general,
if you want white people to try to send help,
this was one of those send help moments. Oh yeah,
a ton of babies get killed by this. It's it's
fucking god, I get left with that hurts, keep going yeah,
well you know, um so yeah, h Robbins like pays

(35:39):
for this study and are like, see, you can teach
people to do it in a half hour. We're not
actually going to teach the people we sell these two
to do it. We're just going to give them instructions
they probably can't read. But potentially, if they were paramedics
and had a proper instructions, they could learn how to
do it. And that's enough for USA to give it
and be like hell, yeah, cool, yeah, here's millions of dollars.
So Ray Ravenholt gave the Dalkon shield his rubber stamp,

(36:03):
and suddenly hundreds of thousands of Dalkon shields, all paid
for by the U. S. Treasury, were out on their
way to forty two different nations. This happened at the
same time that a planned parenthood study revealed pregnancy rates
in excess of six percent from Dalkon shield insertion in
places like Costa Rica and Yugoslavia, in nearly fifteen percent
in one Latin American country. So because they're not being

(36:25):
put in right so again, sometimes the amount of unintended
pregnancies with dalkon shields in some places like fift because
the people putting them in don't know how to do it.
And you have to remember that we're not just talking
about unintended pregnancies here. Remember the dalkon shield is a
bacterial super highway in the best of conditions, and that's
in when it's sterile, right, Yeah. And patients in these

(36:48):
poorer nations who were receiving unsterile shields and having them
inserted with unsterile applicators suffered from infections, miscarriages, and death
at vastly higher rates than what was seen in the
United States. We do not know and will never know
the full toll from this because nobody bothered to take
any sort of notes on it, like nobody gave a
ship about how many people actually got hurt by this
thing in these countries. We do, however, have some specific

(37:11):
stories of individual victims to highlight the horror. For Mother
Jones quote, when Maria Aguirez woke up on the morning
of June ninety seven, she was at first two drenched
with sweat to feel the blood. They had warned her
at the clinic that there might be some bleeding, but
this was more than a period. Her skirt, the worn sheet,
the matt were soaked through more than her. After her
oldest daughter's birth, when the midwife had at one point

(37:33):
simply prayed dimly, Maria must have realized that the baby
was already awakened fussing. He was still fussing an hour
later when Maria's sister, someone by the older children, came
running in. Maria was no longer sweating because she died
as a result of, in fact, an infection that her
Dalkon shield gave her. Yeah, and I'm wondering if, like
some of these numbers that they say, it's effectives because
they died, Yeah, they were pregnant. That works for Ray Ravenholtz. Yeah, exactly. Yeah,

(37:57):
he stops the pregnantcy. That's all that matters to Ray.
Population control advocates like Ray Ravenholt had been willing to
look the other way at unsterile medical devices implanted by
qualified people. They were not particularly concerned by victims like
Maria Aguires as events by the fact that neither us
AID or any other international organization even tried to track

(38:18):
down all the fatalities and injuries caused by the overseas
importation of the Dalkon shield. The only thing that actually
disturbed them was the evidence that the shield was ineffective
as a birth control method, because it was okay to
endanger the lives of poor children, but it was not
okay to risk them having more kids. We can't have
more kids. You didn't do what we wanted. Damn. Now again,
we don't have any sort of authoritative numbers on the

(38:39):
number of deaths and injuries as a result of the
millions of Dalkon shields imported to the global South. Author
Morton Mints estimates that quote shield related p I D
pelvic inflammatory infection killed hundreds, possibly thousands of women outside
the United States. If the shield were in a third
world country where there are no doctors, no antibiotics, becomes infected,
she's going to die. And again, this is the seventies.

(39:03):
Antibiotics are not as common as they are now, especially
in places like Ethiopia. You know, still under Raven Holtz guidance.
The name of the game for us AID was national
inundation and I U D s That worked eight to
nine percent of the time. We're better than bringing more
poor people into the world. As lawsuits against Age Robin
spun up in the United States, the company sent one

(39:23):
of their employees on a tour of Asia to sell
more shields. In every place he stopped, the employee would
be met by the local USA population officer, who would
assemble a group of local physicians for the Robin's employee
to lecture and sell to. When Robbins was finally forced
to discontinue the product in nineteen seventy four, US aid
was left, in the words of a Mother Jones reporter,
holding the bag, or rather the bulk pack, they had

(39:45):
no choice but to issue an international recall. We don't
know how many women and isolated mountain villages across India
and Guatemala and wherever else actually learned that the thing
in their uterus had been recalled for being dangerously unsafe,
because again, no one at Age Robbin's for U s
A cared to find out. It just was not important
to them. The lack of communication, Yeah, already, and then

(40:05):
that's how they did the recall. So I can't did
we talk about whether or not the lifespan how long
that's supposed a shield is supposed to last five years?
Which means yeah. And and removal again, because it's spiked
removal as a nightmare for people to actual surgical procedure.
I'm saying yeah, and people die from that as well.
And again the number but probably thousands, probably a death

(40:27):
toll of thousands worldwide. The Dalkon Shield was a major
national story in the US, where it killed maybe a
couple of dozen people, but it's spread overseas, funded by
US tax dollars, was not well known. Mother Jones is
the only outlet I have found who actually covered that
part of the story during that time in any kind
of detail, and they deserve a lot of credit for that.
It is an excellent article. A nineteen eight five article

(40:50):
I found in the Washington Post, for example, didn't even
mention that the Dalkon Shield had been sold overseas. Mother Yeah, yeah,
why why would you care? Therefore? Come? Yeah, they're poor,
they're poor in they're not Ethiopia. Yeah. Mother Jones actually
interviewed Ray Ravenholt in nineteen seventy nine to ask why

(41:12):
he had given the seal of American goodwill to this
whole bloody endeavor, and the picture they paint of him
is bizarre and not very positive. And I'm going to
read the description that journalist wrote about meeting ray oh
No in person. He is a tall, affable Midwesterner with
an engaging smile and a marked inability to sit still
once he warms up to the subject at hand. No,
sooner had we gotten through the introductions than he bounded

(41:34):
off to one corner of his spacious office and returned
with his latest contraceptive enthusiasm, a plastic guns style laparoscopic
device which, when aimed through the vagina, shoots little plastic
bands around the fallopian tubes, resulting in permanent sterilization. He
demonstrated by placing one foot up on his chair and
shooting the bands at his shoelace, only after he completed

(41:54):
the simulated sterilization of his left foot, where we able
to bring the subject round to the Talcott shield. So
he had this in his office as like a toy.
Just keeps us little like fucking gun thing for wrapping
up collopian tubes sheets it at his foot to impressive
journalist for real, he's got to be a serial killer.

(42:14):
He's a ten bundy. There's no way we didn't use
this on a woman like hey, hey, I got something
for you. Yeah, tie your hands behind your back. Let
me show you. So you're gonna love this. What's the
fucking Ray raven Holt? Uh so uh? Mother Jones continues,
and this is Ray raven Holt speaking, and they're quoting him. Robbins.
The company didn't know there was any problem with it

(42:36):
in nineteen seventy two, he insisted, which is not true.
When we countered that Ah Robbins had been deluged with
reports of adverse reactions by that time, raven Holt smiled
patiently and explained, you don't really know anything until you
have a very very large number of people who have
used it. You might have one kind of impression from
ten thousand people, another from a hundred thousand. You might

(42:56):
need a million ten million before you really know. So
it's not tell everybody's dead. Then you actually you have
to have a dent rating of because you've got wrong.
If you've given it to ten thousand women and two
thousand of them have horrible, horrible, life altering reactions to it,
you gotta give it to another ten million before you
can really tell if it's dangerous. I mean again, it's

(43:19):
kind of like what we're going through with a pandemic.
Yeah that bad. Come on, yeah, come in, Yeah, it's fine.
It's only people. That's not a big deal. When pressed,
Ravenholt did eventually agree that us AID had heard some
of the tens of thousands of stories of septic pregnancies, infections,
and miscarriages that had flooded the US media by nineteen

(43:41):
seventy three, but he pivoted immediately from that to leaning
forward with enthusiasm to tell the Mother Jones reporter his
own pet theory about i U D induced pelvic infections.
This is ray women who frequently change sexual partners have
these intercurrent, low grade infections. The i U D can't
cause an infection. The body tolerates anything at sterile. Wait,

(44:01):
isn't that the same kind of argument about the rape?
You know your body rejects, Oh my god, what is happening? Well,
because he knows the Dalkon shields are being sent unsterilized
and that obviously not everybody is going to properly sterilize them. Um,
and also because the data existed at this point, he

(44:22):
knows that the Dalkon shield is a magnet for infections
by design. It's awesome stuff, and when Mother Jones This
is my favorite part, when Mother Jones pointed out to
him that the infections uh that he was blaming on
promiscuity might be caused by the non sterile devices being
exported by us AID. Raven Holt defended his agency shipping
out unsterile Dalcon shields by pointing out that all the

(44:45):
other i U d s they shipped out to poor
people were supplied unsterile too. Oh great, that's awesome, good job, bro.
Uh okay, I love the again, the gymnastics that someone
has to go through and be like no, no, no,
no, no no, this is cool. And let me tell you

(45:06):
it's fine. It's fine, it's fine, it's fine. It's because
we're always this year responsible, right, And you know before
gotten many people called us out. No one really really
talked about like here, why are they talking about it?
Why are we talking about it? Yeah? Was the problem?
Let me show you my little toy. Yeah, let me
show you my you want you wanted to sterilize my
foot again one more time? You know who won't sterilize

(45:30):
your foot? Samantha? Oh god, products and services that support
this podcast. Okay, um, this has gone. Yeah, I don't
know what I am anymore. Ah, we are back and

(45:53):
just having a good old time. I'm crossing my legs
and explictly so as sleazy as the justifications Ray raven
Holt gave to Mother Jones were he had to issue them.
By nineteen seventy nine, Dalkon shields were still in use
around the world, and they were in the bodies of
more than four hundred and forty thousand people. Five years

(46:15):
after age Robins suspended sales of the device, medical practitioners
in Pakistan, India, and South Africa were still inserting Dalkon
shields into new patients. It's pretty good stuff, Mother Jones
wrote at the time in nineteen seventy nine. It is
impossible to know how frequently this is still taking place,
but our own sources have told us of at least
two cases. In Nairobi, Kenya. On the wall of the

(46:36):
Family Planning Association clinic, there is a poster advertising the
Dalkon shield. In early May nineteen seventy nine, a young
woman patient at this clinic was offered, among other birth
control options, at Dalkon shield. In Ottawa, Canada, Pierre Blaize,
senior consultant to the Bureau of Medical Devices told us
the shield was being inserted as late as nineteen seventy seven,
two years after he had been withdrawn to the US market. Finally, Yep, yep, yep. Finally,

(47:00):
neither a I D nor even the FDA would have
any way of stopping H. Robbins from privately dumping its
own unsold stock of dalco on shields if the company
was of a mind to do so, and it was.
In a recent interview, Robin's attorney, Franklin Tatum, admitted to
us that his client was still selling the devices through
the first quarter of nineteen seventy five, even as they
were being recalled through a I D and allegedly destroyed.

(47:20):
So he was personally he was still doing it even
though the company was still selling it, even after they
like they were not only selling it through a I D.
They were selling it directly to other poorer nations while
they were fighting court cases in the US and pulling
it off of that market. And um, of course nothing
really happened to him. No, why wouldn't. I mean, the
company got destroyed, But the people responsible to THESEUS are

(47:42):
millionaires and their kids are still millionaires and probably funding
Ben Shapiro were someone today, um it self great self,
very good, um just cool shit. So Ray Ravenholt had
the power and influence to put a stop to most,
if not all, of this, but he chose not to,
And the question why is easy to answer. Ray was

(48:04):
a pretty open dude. In nineteen seventy seven, Ravenhold give
an interview to the St. Louis Post Dispatch where he
insisted that population explosions, unless stopped, would lead to revolutions.
Population control, Ray explained, was necessary in order to maintain
the normal operation of US commercial interests around the world.
Without our trying to help these countries with their economic
and social development, the world would rebel against the strong

(48:27):
US commercial presence. The self interest thing is the compelling
element self interest. That's really fascinating, honest. I mean, like, yeah,
ridiculously honest. Um, I just love that it all results
in women dying, and we gotta golve the women they're
giving they're they're making babies well, and specifically, what he's
saying here is we have to sterilize large chunks of

(48:51):
the developing world as they call it, the Third World,
the Global South. We have to sterilize these poor people
because otherwise they're going to destroy capitalism like they are going. Yeah,
the world will rebel against us commercial presence if we
don't reduce their populations. They're gonna realize that we're sucking
the yah. Yeah, that we are really screwing them over.

(49:14):
So this is the best way to kill them, kill
them all. Yeah. Again, the bad guys generally capitalism in
the end. So most population control advocates supported a variety
of methods to achieve their raims. Economic development, healthcare, expanded
women's rights. All of these can reduce family size. Ray
Ravenholt preferred instead to focus on contraceptives, and only contraceptives.

(49:35):
Before the Dalkon Shield rose to popularity, he'd done this
by trying to flood the global South with hormonal birth
control pills. These were sold over the counter in places
like Bangladesh, with no doctor consultation required and precious little
information about what the health consequences might be. In Bangladesh,
this caused what one reporter called a biological disaster. Quote,
the average Bangladeshi woman weighs ninety two pounds and suffers

(49:57):
from chronic malnutrition. Even in a hundred and already five
pound American woman, The pill is known to deplete the
body's supply of vitamins A, basics D, and folic acid,
hence the special vitamins sold in the US as supplements
to the pill. Furthermore, no less than nine of the
Bangladeshi women who accepted the pill were breastfeeding. According to
a study by the International Planned Parenthood Federation, babies nursed

(50:18):
by pill users grew at an average rate that was
only two thirds of that of babies nursed by non
pill users. Ending world hunger is the most common rationalization
for the top down approach to population control, but in Bangladesh,
A I D was creating its own kind of chemically
induced famine. Motherfucker Jesus Christ, it's pretty bad kidding me.

(50:40):
So a big part of what's happening here is that
these birth control pills that USA had been handing out
in Bangladesh had been judged safe for American women, and
American women have were much better fed, had much better nutrition,
did not have the same kind of vitamin deficiencies that
Bangladeshi women did. They were larger like, so obviously the
same pill that works on them is going to be

(51:02):
toxic to people who are smaller and who have Yeah,
it's just it's horrible. Essentially, they had to have supplements
like that because, of course all that mattered was that
they weren't having as many babies. That doesn't however, maybe death, sure,
let's do this whatever. Yeah, And obviously, data in the
US at this time already showed that high estrogen pills

(51:22):
had more health consequences than low estrogen pills. Um and
so in the US, birth control pills had switched over
to low estrogen birth control pills, but that meant there
were still millions of high estrogen birth control pills that
like nobody in the U s would buy. So obviously
Ray Ravenho bought them all and shipped them off to
poor people. Of course, we're gonna go. We're gon hand
about somewhere. We gotta make fun money somehow. We can't
waste this. Come on, come on. Yeah. And one of

(51:45):
the most breathtakingly unethical moments in the history of birth control,
marketers for us AID even found a way to turn
one of the common consequences of high estrogen pills, which
was painfully swollen breasts, into a positive. They started promoting
the pills in rural Bangladesh with the tagline it makes
your breasts more beautiful. It is good for you, including
the tailors who have to make bigger brasiers. You want

(52:08):
big boobies, try those, baby, I got you. Your boobs
are gonna be amazing. You know when you're laying down
and people come to see you dead, don't be legit.
J christ Uh. Now, we focused rightfully on age Robbins

(52:31):
in the horrifying Dalcan Shield, but the terrible reality of
Western doctors forcing unsafe i u D s on impoverished
women actually goes back even further than that. In the
early nineteen sixties, western population control programs in rural India
and Pakistan started using experimental spiral and ring shaped i
u d s. These specific i u d s had
been widely discredited by doctors at the time as causing

(52:53):
extremely high rates of infection, pain, and bleeding. I'm gonna
quote now from the website Climate and Capitalism. Just at this. J.
Robert Wilson, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Temple University,
told the nineteen sixty two Population Council conference i u
D should be ruled out regardless. We have to stop
functioning like doctors he said, In fact, it may well
be that the incidence of infection is going to be

(53:15):
pretty high in the patients who need the device most. Again,
if we look at this from an overall long range view,
these are the things I have never said out loud
because I don't know how it's going to sound. Perhaps
the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things,
particularly if the infection she acquires is sterilization but not lethal. Expendable, expendable,

(53:38):
So yeah, no mask on there, Like, yeah, she's expendable.
And honestly, if she gets a horrible infection that renders
her sterile, that's a win that if we did what
we said that we're going to do right, we can
hold that population just right out in the open with it.
It's amazing. Yeah, I mean I give that guy on

(54:00):
honestly more credit than I give Raven Holt, because he's
not Raven Holtz is saying the same thing but dressing that.
This guy's just like, yeah, fuck him, like it's about
stopping him from giving birth. I don't care how we
do it. Don't worry about the doctor's oath. Just go
ahead and do your thing. Yeah, we can't act like doctors.
These are poor people and they're not white. So it's fine.
It's fine about this control, this good ship. Yeah, uh yeah.

(54:24):
Wilson's fellow obstetrician, Alan Goodmocker, an influential figure in the
Population Council and i PPF extolled the benefits of I
U d S in a similar vein, no contraceptive could
be cheaper. And also once the damn thing is in,
the patient cannot change her mind. In fact, we will
hope she will forget it's there, and perhaps in several
months wonder why she has not conceived. Oh wait what? Yeah,

(54:46):
it's pretty bad, right, It's like roofy. Yeah, hopefully the
dumbastards will forget they even have it. You'll never remember
and then oh god, yeah it's pretty bad right, I
don't like now. A lot of the evidence for this

(55:07):
episode comes from a couple of different sources, but most
of them written by one man, Matthew Connolly, who has
done more to unravel and expose the whole horrific story
of the population control movement than probably any other Westerner.
His book, Fatal Misconception lays out the whole sordid tale.
In it, he concludes the great tragedy of population control.

(55:28):
The fatal misconception was to think that one could know
other people's interests better than they know it themselves. But
if the idea of planning other people's families is now discredited,
this very human tendency is still with us. The essence
of population control, whether it targeted migrants, the unfit, or
families that seemed either too big or too small, was

(55:48):
to make rules for other people without having to answer
to them. It appealed to the rich and powerful, because
with the spread of emancipatory movements and the integration of markets,
it began to appear easier and more profitable that to
control populations than to control territory. That's why opponents were
correct in viewing it as another chapter in the unfinished
history of imperialism more profitable Holy Fund. Yeah Yeah, And

(56:19):
that chapter, Samantha, is in fact not finished. Today. You
can still find many of these same attitudes present and
well meaning powerful people today. In May two thousand nine,
a group of billionaires including Bill Gates, Ted Turner, David Rockefeller,
George Soros, and Warren Buffett all met in semi secrecy
to discuss what they termed a nightmarish scenario over population.

(56:39):
The London Sunday Time said they considered this a potentially
disastrous environmental, social, and industrial threat since at present more
than projected population growth was expected to occur in the
global South. We can assume they were worried about precisely
the same nations and sorts of people as Ray Ravenholt.
And it's interesting that David Rockefeller attended because in the
nineteen sixties his father is one of the major founders

(57:01):
of the Population Council, which helped fund and drive through
lobbying everything we've talked about today. In nineteen seventy, journalists
Steve Weissman termed people like Rockefeller members of the American
population elite. In an immortal line for Ramparts magazine. He noted,
in the hands of the self, seeking humanitarianism is the
most terrifying ism of all. Wow, all right, so caring

(57:29):
about people and uh and I'm wanting to help enough?
How help people survive? Well, No, it's it's it's when
you're it's when you try to cloak your desire to
control other people's behavior as wanting to help them, right,
It's not wanting to help someone to force a contraceptive

(57:49):
on them that they don't know the consequences of and
that will harm them, and that you're not going to
give them follow up care and provide them with the
essential vitamins and stuff. It is. It is helping someone
to be like, hey, here's a bunch of free condoms,
here's how you use them. Or here's much birth control pills,
here's how you use them. Here's what you need to
know about how it will affect your body. Here's what
you need to take in order for this to be safe.
You know. That is helping people. It's helping people to say,

(58:12):
you know, here's access to vaccine. You know that will
deal with a problem that you have in this region. Um,
it's not helping people to, for example, do with the
CIA did in Pakistan and secretly give people a fake
vaccine in order to get blood samples to track down
Osama bin laden, which is the thing that happened. It's
not like historic maze and ice at all. Yeah, And

(58:33):
the biggest problem here is that, in no way is
over population actually a problem. Over Population is not driving
climate change. Over Population is not the issue we're dealing
with here. It's what all these billionaires are focusing on
because in part, if you can get other people to
think that overpopulation is the problem, that people won't look
at billionaires is maybe part of the problem. Um. But yeah,

(58:55):
this is this brings me to the conclusion of this story, um,
the because yeah, there are some people who have learned
from the past of the population control movement, from this
chapter in the history of imperialism, and one of those
groups is the Sierra Club. Like most environmental organizations, the
Sierra Club bought whole hog into population control throughout the
twentieth century. They thought that the best way to protect

(59:16):
wild nature was to reduce the human population, and they
bought into a lot of the stuff that we've talked
about today and helped to fund it and all that
horrible shit. But in they published a blog post repudiating
that history, titled the Overpopulation Myth and its Dangerous Connotations. Yeah,
it took him a while, right. The article is brutal

(59:38):
and unsparing. It points out that the Population Bomb in
nineteen sixty eight book by Paul Erlick that was probably
the single most influential inspiration behind modern fears of overpopulation,
was also profoundly racist. It quote opens its fearmongering. With
a sensationalized account of traveling through Delhi, India during a
taxi ride, author Paul Airlick notes people visiting, arguing and screaming,

(59:58):
thrusting their hands through the a taxi window begging. Since
that night, I've known the feel of overpopulation. What Erlich
fails to mention, however, is that while Delhi's population was
just say of three million, both New York and Paris
housed about eight million at the time. Air Lick's emphasis
on an Indian city as the exemplification of overpopulation was
part of a large and continuing pattern of focusing blame

(01:00:19):
on the Global South and mostly the non white people
who lived there, as affluent Western Europeans and Americans. And
in this article, which is quite good, the Seria Club
makes the accurate point that our actual population with overpopulation
has nothing to do with the raw number of humans
on Earth, and certainly not in the number of people
who live in the Global South. It has everything to
do with the wildly outsized amount of resources consumed by

(01:00:41):
a privileged few, namely you and me and everybody listening
to this podcast. The world's wealthiest half billion people are
responsible for fifty percent of the planet's carbon dioxide emissions
despite making up six percent of the population. Yep, like it. Yep,
there's so many things. I just can't understand the whole
overpopulation movement in itself, not seeing that as a travesty

(01:01:05):
to humanity in general. Yeah, and it's it is fundamentally
racist while also being a thing that people who would
call themselves anti racist buy into because they see, look
at all these giants, these all these families that are
nine and ten kids, and you know, Mexico and Guatemala,
in in in Paraguay or whatever. Uh, Like, that's we
gotta that's a problem part of has to be part

(01:01:26):
of the climate change problems. Like, no, dude, it's the
fact that your family has three cars for two people, right,
Like that is a bigger driver every lion on using
all kinds of emissions. Yet But okay, it's absolutely the
poor people who's living on and more to the point,
it's not even really honestly, if we want to actually
get at the core of the problem with climate change,
it's not even like the fact that your family has

(01:01:47):
three cars. It's that there is this giant system of
mega corporations that profit based off of releasing emissions into
the air that also effectively control the levers of government
and very effectively market to all of us, and also
very effectively stop reforms and things like public transportation that
would reduce our need, like our dependence on emissions generating vehicles.

(01:02:08):
Like it's all bad, but it's sure as hell not
the pop It's not the fault of somebody in Ethiopia
who has eight kids, you know, if that I mean
to be fair in general, Like the poverty situation is
not because that they are wasting ship. That's not That's
not that poor people are the best at not wasting ship.

(01:02:29):
But I remember one time in Mosle in Iraq, we
were like hanging out with this this group of like
civil defense people, like basically e m t s, like
going into collapsed buildings in the day and pulling people
out of the rubble. And like they wanted to watch
a movie. So they took apart an old refrigerator and
an old like giant like not one of the flat screens,
one of the big boxy TVs, and they wired the

(01:02:49):
TV through the refrigerator into a generator so that we
could watch I think it was Patriot Games on like
some fucking local channels. Okay, yeah, yeah, they didn't waste ship.
There wasn't things wasted. That's that's the problem. Is the
conversation is who's wasting one? And who was actually the
problematic issue in this conversation? And what are you really

(01:03:10):
getting at? You just want to be in the hierarchy
and make sure you come out on top. Yeah, exactly,
Like there's sucking people listening to this, probably including me,
who have bought new TVs when old ones were not
permanently broken but just became a problem. It just you
wanted something nicer. It's it's a bigger screen. I want
the big screen with a better Yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry.

(01:03:36):
Yeah anyway, Well, thank you for the horror nightmare that
you just put me through. Robbery once again and then
and Sophie, uh, there are a lot of things that
I will be horrified of now. I feel like my
I U D maybe trying to crawl out of me. Um,
thank you for that. I did not use a vaginal

(01:03:58):
death crab yea for mine. And I want to be clear,
like I've tried to make a point of this. I'm
not saying I d are bad. I hope that's not
what anyone takes out of this, like the obviously shield was,
and you know, the Marina might wind up being something
like that. We don't really know what the whole story
is going to be on that, although I know a
lot of people who haven't and have had no problem
with it. Like the bad guy in this is again imperialism,

(01:04:22):
and also talking about the healthcare in general, who has
provided what type of care and what is being who
has the privilege of getting the better not whatever whatnot.
So that's also the conversation. But yeah, the vaginal death
crabs something that I will always remember. Thank you. I
love that this was our first meeting. That that's what

(01:04:42):
our conversation talking about vaginal death crabs. And we can
hear us play as vaginal death crabs when you know
in two were able to finally go on tour. Yeah,
I'm so excited for this. I've got my uku lately
ready will actually be opening for the Eagles. Oddly enough,
it was strange cook, Ye, my dream is coming true. Amazing.

(01:05:06):
Uh Okay, well, you got anything you want to plug
before we roll out of here. Samantha again, you can
find me on stuff. Mom never told you a podcast
with I heart wherever you get your podcast, and you
can find me as a McVay Samantha m c v
e y. That is the spelling, not the other one.
I just want to put that out there on both
Instagram or Twitter. Yeah, and I am not available anywhere

(01:05:32):
you cannot find me. Don't try. I will destroy you.
Challenge accepted. Yep, You're so weird sometimes, Robert, I don't know.
I don't know how do There's so many episodes of
this fucking podcast. I can't end all of them like
a competent professional. I feel like I got surprised into
a two partter. I was like, what more death traps? Yeah, okay, yeah.

(01:05:54):
We said at some point early in the series that
we mostly we would only rarely do two parters, and
then we seated to pivot to only doing two parters
almost in the I don't know how I let that.
What if we do in the occasional twice per week?
And then it was like I order or just twice
per Welcome to the Welcome in my world. Never enough

(01:06:16):
good bad information out there, pieces old