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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees SO4-O months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to behind the ******** the podcast that is only ever introduced properly once. And it's this time. So you got your one. Yeah. Thank you. This is the only time, Sophie. Next time, I'm gonna 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 celebrate our very special guest for today's episode, Samantha McVeigh of Stuff Mom never told you. Oh, I feel so special. Thank you. Thank you, Samantha. Uh not related to friend of the pod, Tim McVeigh. Do it. I knew it was coming. I was really, really scared. Spelled differently. I'm adopted. Let's just go put those two caveats in there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's, you know, we always bring up, we always bring up old cousin Timmy when we can. Who doesn't? Yeah. Cousin Timmy and Uncle Ted are our North Stars. No, you know, we're not talking about terrorists today, but in a way, we kind of are. We're we're talking about a bunch 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 fun story, you know, mostly, yeah, actually, absolutely. Yeah. The vast well, in 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. Yeah. So, Umm, have you ever heard Samantha of the Dalkon Shield? I have not. Please tell me this is a bad story. No. Like break our friendship. That's just beginning. Yeah. No, it's going to shatter everything. Ohh hell, here we go. None. None of this is going to be good. So obviously, Samantha, the the IUD or intrauterine device is a very popular form of birth control. At least from like a user satisfaction. Yeah, yeah, most people. You'll get them. Tend to be happy with them. Gynecologists emphasize that the devices are extremely safe and effective. And in fact, by some counts, the basic idea behind an IUD, which is the device you insert into the uterus in order to, like, you know, stop pregnancy from happening, goes back. That could go back as far as 1000 years. People have been doing versions of this for a long time. I'm so excited that you have me on for this episode. Yeah, I don't know. It could be more fitting. Sophie. Good job, Robert. Great job, Sophie nailed it on this one. All I did was read about a horrible. Horrible tragedy for three days. Yay. So obviously, modern IUD's tend to be hormone based, which works better with the caveat that it can cause some health issues. The Marina would be the best modern example of that. There's currently a big class action lawsuit brewing against Bayer Pharmaceuticals. The device has kind of a nasty tendency to perforate the uterus of its wearer, which keep that in mind. We'll be talking more about that in a minute. Yeah, there's also issues with the synthetic hormone. The Marina releases progestin. There's another set of lawsuits. It argues this can cause idiopathic intracranial hypertension and basically things that mimic tumors, 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. But also still kind of being litigated, we don't know exactly that it's the ID that caused it, but obviously like, you know, any kind of medical device, there's issues. And I, I don't think, you know, it's possible Bayers 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 you start to realize there's side effects. That's a pretty normal part of medicine. There's always like at least 5% or less chance that you hear that extra warning. Yeah, exactly. So I, I 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 were going to hurt people. The story of the Dalkon Shield is a very different tale. This might be one of the darkest stories in the history of contraception. By name for a bad weapon. It sounds like it sounds kind of like a spaceship, actually. Like. Yeah. Yeah, I expect that to be on Star Trek. Someone tell me. Yeah, I think it'd be a Romulan vessel, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. OK. That went way farther than maybe Kardashian. But yeah, Samantha and I went. What? There was a moment of pause. Yeah, what have I got myself into? OK, keep going. So the first modern IUD was invented in 1909 by a German guy. It was made out of Silkworm gut, and it was not very popular. Probably not hard to see why. I don't know that it was a bad IUD, but silkworm gut doesn't seem like something you would want to put in your body. I don't know. Uh, yeah. Ernst Grafenberg, who was another German, invented the ring IUD not long after. He's also grafenberg is the namesake for the * ****. Yeah. And as a result, he was very unpopular in Nazi Germany. Yeah. Both because he was. Yeah. Focused on, like, the fact that women could feel pleasure and on stopping you. Yeah. Yeah. The Nazis also weren't big on the concept of contraception because that meant less German babies, which was not. Not. Not their. Not their. Yeah. Yeah. They're they're they're only relations, of course. Yeah. Exactly. Specific genocides. And anti genocide for one group of people, I guess. So not. That probably didn't even go down that road. So OK, relatively decent IUD started being invented in the early 60s and the device has gained rapid popularity among people with uteruses and a desire to avoid getting babies and said uteruses. Uteri. I don't know the state of affair. Utari. Hmm. I don't know, allow it, but I don't think, yeah, I think it's uteruses. I've never had to say the plural, so this state of affairs continued until 1971, when a pharmaceutical giant named AH Robins debuted the Dalkon Shield. The Dalkon Shield featured a revolutionary design and like it. Like, what's a bad revolution? They're all pretty great. Imagine a bad revolution. It was not. It's not a good revolution. It looks like I'm trying to picture one. Keep going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to get this word picture in my head so I can follow along. I'm going to actually suggest Sophie finds a picture and sends it to you. While I describe it, some people, most people will describe it as looking like a crab. I actually think it looks more like a trilobite. It's a tiny piece of plastic with like 5 spiky legs, and the legs are meant to stop it from coming free once it's once it's inside of you. But it kind of looks like the trilobite, the the the silhouette of a trilobite, like you look at it and it immediately looks like something that shouldn't be inside a person. OK, so I'm thinking of the matrix, that thing that comes out. Yes, it does look like the thing that comes out of NEO stomach in the matrix. You're gonna be so definitely. When I said yes in a second, like, no, like I don't have a uterus. But as soon as I saw it, I was like, that should not be in a person. Oh no, it crawled and it is going to eat up your body. It looks like a monster. OK, fantastic. Everybody loves that story. Honestly, looks for all yeah, as much like a space invader as it does like a crap. Yeah. So yeah, but legs were kind of meant to hook in place inside of your uterus. And it also had a string, which was how it would could be removed later. And we'll talk more about the string later. Like, obviously a lot of IUD'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 shoe horn with cockles, like an old school shoehorn with tentacles. 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 that is a misplaced keychain. Yeah, it's what you put in key chain. You don't put that in yourself unless you're really bored. I mean, if that's your thing, you do you. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, I know. No shame, but, like, if that is your thing. You're probably going to the doctor. You need to see a doctor and me. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, as I stated, the legs were kind of meant to hook it in place inside of your uterus and had a string. And most importantly for what's going to come next, the shield was invented by two male doctors, Hugh Davis and Irwin Lerner. Davis was the gynecologist, and he was a major opponent of the pill, which was new at the time and at the time had a lot of problems. There just been like a big, like, congressional trial over it because it had been the company selling it. Misrepresented the side effects and I think they make like they it's better now, but obviously there's still side effects to the pill. So there was a big backlash against the pill because the companies that had something had been like this thing, it's just consequence free birth control and it absolutely is not. And so people were there was a big backlash against the pill. And Davis, this gynecologist who makes the dalkon shield is is both like doesn't like the pill and also sees an opportunity in the backlash against it. And so he and this guy Lerner form a company. Called the Dalkon company and they start marketing their shield as an alternative to the pill without any side effects, unlike the pill which had side effects. Let me guess, that's factually incorrect. Yeah, it didn't wind up being true. So I just really got hung on the fact that it's called the shield itself. Like the name of the naming of it all together, the whole thing. I mean, to be fair, it kind of looks like a shield. I guess it does kind of look like a shield. Yeah. Shoe short legs, Shane. Weird cooking chilli, crab shield, key chain shield. Yeah, horrible. Horrible. Definitely horrible. So yeah, the pharmaceutical giant H Robbins, though, buys into Daltons like marketing scheme and purchases the Shields because they want the rights to sell it and manufacture it and stuff, and they launched like an unprecedented ad blitz. The biggest ad campaign that had ever preceded a contraceptives release onto the market in the United States is launched by AH Robins to sell the Dalkon Shield, and I'm going to quote from the Embryo project now to talk about that. In 1971, the AH Robins Company, producers of the Cough Medicine Robitussin, bought the device. Davis and put it on the market. The AH Robbins Company began selling the Shields in the US and Puerto Rico and launched a large marketing campaign for the device. The campaign emphasized the safety of the IUD 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 birth control. So that's, you know, kind of the. The pull out method, yeah, I'm just that's the safest method. Obviously the only method with no consequences is the pullout method. Works 100% of the time, as long as you pull out fast enough. Rep right behind the ******** is sponsored by the pullout method. Robert. I'm glad to be a part of this. You know what? Not the worst fake sponsor. We've had some. Well, the pull out method is is like heavily sponsored by Raytheon. Raytheon, the more kids you have accidentally, the more targets we have for missiles. Yeah. Sorry. Good. You're so good at this, Robert. Slowly, yeah, the ad reads alone, fake or real. Enough said. I buy it. I don't know what it can't stop advertising. So yeah, there's big a blitz comes out and the Shields adventures like the guys who actually made the dalkon shield had conducted an internal study before they sold it to H Robbins. And their studies showed that the device had a failure rate of about 1.1% and other IUD's on the market had a failure rate of two to 3%. So they were, they advertise of like 99% effective, better than all the other IUD's. That was on another big part. Of their of their claim to fame. It was billed as completely safe, reliable and consequence free. And since it was mostly plastic, it was made in the same factory as Chapstick, another age Robbins product, it retailed for $4.35, which made it one of the most affordable methods of long term birth control on the market. So that all sounds fine. 1.1% failure rate. Cheap, affordable, made with the Chapstick people, that's all. Wondering how do they give the chapsticks that help you to Lube that up with Chapstick to try to stick it in yourself? Yeah, we chapstick. You get a discount if you use get if they if they let you, if you use a chapstick for loop. Still yeah, that would be better than what was done every time you say. I keep thinking of the radish. The dicon radish. Radish. Yeah. And like, it kind of has sprouts like that. Yeah. It would be a safer method of birth control than the dalkon shield for sure. So in 1971, the FDA was not the all powerful entity that it is today. Drug laws were looser. And since the shield was not a method of hormonal birth control, it wasn't regulated as a drug. So it got to skip the testing process normally required for medical devices that go inside a human body. And it kind of turns out, unfortunately, that. Giant pharmaceutical company age. Robbins lied to everybody about a number of, you know, my minor, minor things. For example, they lied about the rate at which the device worked because the first study into the Shields efficacy was flawed. It had been done by two scientists over a period of eight months with just a handful of people with two people and be like, oh, you didn't get pregnant in three months. We're good. Yeah, it was a tiny number of people, and it was a short period of time. And further study wasn't required by the FDA. So H. Things just didn't do any further study. Every time you say his name. I do think of like a bond villain. Like every time you say his name. Age. Robbins or David. Yeah. No, Robbins. Like the. I don't know why. Like HH Holmes. Like, it's like you up there. It is. Yeah. H Robbins winds up racking up a body count similar to HH Holmes, actually. Yeah, throughout the course of the story. Yeah. So, so H Robbins, like these two scientists who invent this thing, you know, study a couple of dozen people over a few months. And they're 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. And this is a problem because the first year sales suggest the failure rate was actually something like 5 1/2%, which makes it twice what other products on the market were, and it would wind up actually being much higher than that. So they pretty immediately know that it fails a lot more often than their advertising, but they don't change their advertisements because that helps them make money. Now, H Robbins, yeah, of course, H Robbins also chose to keep on the DL the fact that the shield contained copper salts, those were an active ingredient in the dalkon shield. 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, yeah, you know, just slightly, just the buck a little bit. Just a little bit. 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. Salespeople were instructed to tell clients that the Dalkon shield contained a confidential blending of ingredients, because if you say, it's magic ingredients. So secret ingredient is the family recipe. And please tell me these people came around, these sales people with, like, briefcases to show off their dynamic keychain. Oh yeah, no, I've actually seen some of the packaging for that. I think he's got a dalkon shield at home. We would love a couple. Yeah. In three years, more than 2.2 million dalkon Shields were sold in the United States, making it the top selling IUD in the nation. Throughout the early 1970s, 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 going to quote here from a contemporary write up in Mother Jones only a few months after the Dalkon Shield went on sale in 1971, reports of adverse reactions. Began pouring into the headquarters of the manufacturer, H Robbins. There were cases of pelvic inflammatory disease, an infection of the uterus that can require weeks of bed rest and antibiotic treatment, septicemia, blood poisoning, pregnancies resulting from spontaneous abortions, ectopic tubal pregnancies, and perforations of the uterus. In a number of cases, the damage was so severe as to require a hysterectomy. There were even medical reports of Dalkon Shields ripping their way through the walls of the uterus and being found floating free in the abdominal cavity far from the uterus. So that's not ideal. Yeah. So this went on for how long? Years. How many cases? And no one really kind of associated this. I mean, we'll get to the end numbers, but, you know, they 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, right? Yeah. So disturbing. Yeah. Doctors didn't have a clue. This is 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 heebie jeebies Dorothy Lansing, an OBGYN from Pennsylvania to right at the Shield in 1974, calling it a veritable instrument of torture. A gruesome looking little device with vicious spikes that made removal very difficult for the doctor and painful. To the user. She refused to offer Shields. To her patients, of course. The female doctor. Yeah. Female doctor. Yeah, there's a good male doctor in here, but yeah, you you suspect most of the first people to recognize that we're the the lady OBGYN's. Now, those vicious spikes were not the worst part of the Shields design. Unfortunately. That would be the string. So, like I said, most IED's have a string attached to them. It makes it easier to remove the normally those strings are made out of a very particular kind of material that cannot. Transfer bacteria, right? Because the uterus is is sterile, right? And you want to keep it that way, use that material. They, they used dental floss. They use nylon, which is like they use. Yeah, not. They use nylon wrapped in a sheath that deteriorated inside the body. And the string was not at at each end and so not sealed. Irwin Lerner, who was the Dalkon company's president, thought that the knot would be enough to keep bacteria from getting into the string. And it was not. And, you know, there were warnings, body works. 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, hey, that's 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'll cost money. By the time they figure it out, I'll have their money. It's all good. All good. Now, one of the reasons Lerner 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 uteruses to clean their kitchens. Unfortunately, yeah, of course. Yeah. It's just the right tool for the job. You know, yeah, gets out. Yeah, it gets. Natures bleach. Just saying. So the nylon and the string was not sterile, as I said, and bacteria were able to enter through that unsealed knot and travel up from the vagina into the uterus, crawling up 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 right 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 if they had tried. Like, it's made for that. Yeah. Really upgraded themselves. Be like, watch this. Hold my beer germs, viruses. Hold my beer. Yeah. No, we made you guys your own little Rd, 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 1973, 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, it was standard procedure to leave the IUD in the uterus during a pregnancy. I think that's different now, but that's the way things were at at that point. And at this point, data was suggesting that that the down Shields. Failure rate was closer to 10% than to 5%. Again, the company had not updated any of their their marketing material. Now unfortunately this patient who got pregnant on the shield, 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 days later she miscarried her 19 week old fetus and died from a massive bacterial infection. Yeah. So the head of obstetrics at the Medical Center where that woman died was a an OBGYN named Doctor, Donald Christian. He began screaming as loud as he could to anyone who would listen about the dangers of the Dalkon shield. So we do have one good male Doctor Who was like, what the ****? This is like, clearly a problem, right? Yeah. And he he took this on as a crusade. He started talking to gynecologists 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 1973, he felt he had enough data to bring to the FDA. Christians 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 and dismayed, Doctor Christian wrote a book length study into the shield titled maternal deaths, associated with an intrauterine device. He wasn't great at titling, but he did. He did. He did the work to the point. His study focused on 4 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 197417 deaths had been traced directly to the device and the actual number was probably significantly highly. I think at least 24 we know now would say how many people like we're told this is not the reason, it's because of your fault, your negligence. You did this wrong, you did this, your dirty and you got sick. Yeah, which is? Essentially, what happens to women or those who have uteruses in general, get told is your fault? You did this wrong. Sorry. Yep. Yep. So you have to assume, like, 17 is the minimum that had died at this point. And that's just, you know, hundreds and hundreds, potentially even 10s of thousands, with some level of serious, serious adverse effects. Like in a lot of cases, like if you're getting pelvic inflammatory syndrome, like you're bedridden for weeks, like this is, the amount of human misery that has been caused by 1974 is pretty astonishing. The estimate that I found is that for every million dollars, AH Robbins, the pharmaceutical company, profited from selling the dalkon shield, their customers spent an estimated $20 million on medical care due to the illness as it cost, which is pretty, pretty bad. It's just kind of like one more thing of like how little they care about Women's Health, people with uteruses, health, like people in that general, like gynecology, 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 I'm certainly not saying it's absolutely better now. I wouldn't know, but I haven't heard of 1 quite this bad. Although maybe the Marina will wind up being that bad. Like, we don't really know at this point. Don't tell me that, although. Yeah. Yeah, Robert. Why? I thought, I don't know. Friends. I think people should look into that. There's some absolutely interesting lawsuits happening now. I know a lot of people who have them and have great, great experiences with them, but it does. Concerned me that those numbers are still not fishing and and things that are being figured out. Not that. Yeah. Yeah. And this is just so blatantly horrible. Right. Like, you're you're talking by 1974 when it's mostly still on the market, 10s of thousands of women have been hospitalized because of their dalkon Shields. Like, we're not talking about. Oh yeah. You know, 1% 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 sizable chunk of the people who. The Dalkon seal 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 come miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, which are nightmares. And for those who, yeah, are wanting children and loss of children and all of these things, it's just such a heartbreaking thing. Really? 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, right? Yeah, it's just a real bummer. Yeah, I'm going to quote from Mother Jones again. The Dalkon Shield was turning out to be far more dangerous than any other IUD already on the market. Later, research in Canada and Germany showed that microscopic defects helped account for the Shield's ability to slice into the uterine wall. Physicians found insertion. Is difficult. Patients sounded almost unbearable as early as February 1971, a physician wrote to H Robbins in reference to the insertion of the Dalkon Shield. I have found the procedure to be the most traumatic manipulation ever perpetrated on womanhood, and I've inserted thousands of other varieties, which is what they keep doing this like what? Stop is like, I try to make it work quite well. We just kept pushing. It's fine, they're fine. They screamed a little bit. Everything's fine. I think these doctors are stopping. Like, I think the doctors who are complaining, like, do it a few times and have a horrible realize that it's bad on everyone and then say like, well, I'm not going to do this anymore, but I wonder 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 this **** up. So I can't. Imagine them where they, 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 1971, like the woman we heard from the Lady OB Chua and we heard from earlier, who tried to blow the whistle, who complain, who say this is unacceptable. But I think the bulk of people inserting them are just like, yeah, 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 yeah, obviously. And then and then die on the operating table. Yeah. I wonder also, for Doctor Christianson, it took someone to die before realizing how bad this was, right? Yeah, I mean, I I don't know what his direct experience, because he was the he was like the head of the 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. I just know that one. When that happened, he he went on the warpath. But I don't know, like, maybe he was putting it in for years before he someone died. I really just. I couldn't tell you any questions. So many questions. So in May of 1974, 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 arms to patients, because the vicious spikes in the dalkon shield side had a tendency to tear through soft tissue when yanked out as deaths and nightmare stories of injuries mounted. The FDA begged AH Robins to stop selling their vaginal death crap, which is a pretty good name for a band. I was going to say, who's band name is this? Yeah. Vaginal defrag. Yeah. Solid metal band. Oh my God, the songs. Or maybe it's just an emo band. Yeah, Delcon Shield's not a bad name. Bad name either. You know, I'm still holding to. That's a Star Trek weapon. Yeah. Yeah, I do think it's more of a Star Trek, Star Trek ship. So the company refused to stop selling, you know, their horrible, horrible poison IUD. Executives worried that doing so would be seen as an admission of guilt. And since 10s 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 injury. So we did to them, right. So I assume 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. I would have hoped contempt for human life, yeah. So age Robin's lawyers took the tech. The shield was no more dangerous than any other IUD. They 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 capitalism thing to say. Well, we got our own experts. My people, you have no degree in this, but they're going to be really loud about it. Yeah, it's that oil industry **** 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, you know? On better media. Despite all of this, by the end of 1974 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? Well, it stopped selling 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 200,000 people testified that they had been injured by the Dalkon Shield and filed claims against AH Robins. Some set count, say, 400,000 like he. A huge amount of the. People who get this wind up with, like, you know, legal complaints against age. Age. Robbins. So the pharmaceutical giant would spend a full decade fighting these cases tooth and nail, doing everything in its power to avoid any kind of legal consequences for its actions. Numerous company executives perjured themselves in court. 10s of thousands of pages of internal documents were destroyed and direct violation with court orders. FDA offices and Capitol Hill were flooded with AH Robins lawyers just doing everything that they could to slow down the process at which, like, they were litigated. 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 could and put it in the hands of their shareholders. Part of why they delaying this so much is because they're selling it to other people outside the United States after they stop selling in the US. That's there. They gotta, they gotta keep their savings in. Yeah, they gotta keep that **** going before, you know your company's destroyed by a white a river of lawsuits. That was no one was dark and drifty. Oh, it's about Sophie. You have no idea how bad this is going to get. It's going to get so much worse. Well, before we get to so much worse, right? You know what time it is, right? Yeah, you know what? Won't. So, vaginal death crabs. God, I hope not. Umm. Audible lobster, yeah, either way. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying. Or for a family. And it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. 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It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time when you want to be a better problem solver therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind. Better helcom behind this fall on revisionist history. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or or I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. We're back and I'm thinking 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. I mean, but really, what about the cheddar biscuits? I've gotten a lot of diseases for cheddar biscuits. The pain just enough that I 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 got in the league a little bit of, little bit of, a little bit of. Titus, whatever. It's fine. Like, yeah, you're not gonna go to Red Lobster and not get a disease like it's so bacon wrapped scallops that are kind of cooked. They are kind of cooked. And they only about a third of them have the hantavirus. So that's a pretty good ratio. I mean, have you gone for Shrimp fest? Come on. Oh yeah. No. You're definitely getting the hantavirus at Shrimp Fest. Absolutely. Anyway, but man them shrimps is cheap so good all you can eat. So in the end, the law did come for H Robbins. In 1984, 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, 1/4 of a million people at this point, which is if that many people are suing you, you're in the wrong. Like, I don't even need to hear about the case. Oh, 250,000 people are suing you, OK? But that's only like 5% of the population. You should come on. You shouldn't be allowed in society anymore. Maybe mine is fine. So some of those victims were in the courtroom while Judge Lord read his, his, his judgment, and many of them wept openly as he read this to the company's 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 pretending to the world that the chief officers and the directors of your 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, 10s of thousands of them, to wear this device, a deadly depth charge in their wombs, ready to explode at any time. This is corporate irresponsibility at its meanest. Pretty good. Many good bad names in there. Yeah, yeah, there are there. Vaginal depth. Depth charge. Come on. Yeah. I want to know where the conviction is today because I feel like we do not hold, obviously. And I know, you know, of all people, enough heads of corporations in responsible things and they didn't then, like, the company was destroyed, which is good, better than like what's happening to Purdue, 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 wouldn't have had an opiate crisis. Is maybe Purdue would have been like, oh **** there's still age Robin guys doing time for the irresponsible no things and they didn't then. Like the company was destroyed. Which is good. Better than like what's happening to Purdue. 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 wouldn't have had an opiate crisis because maybe Purdue would have been like, oh **** there's still age Robin guys doing time for 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 it. So it really doesn't matter. Maybe. I say we still give it a shot and throw them in prison. Yeah, I'm not opposed to that. Yeah, don't get me wrong. So now the company was set up to start a multi $1,000,000 and eventually it was a multibillion dollar program to remove the Shields from women and pay them for their pain and injuries. Of the more than 400,000 lawsuits filed against the company, 9500 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 1985 and it collapsed under the weight of so many judgments by 1986, an estimated 100. 1000 American Women still had dalkon Shields in their bodies, so they took that long. Wow, yeah, yeah. The catastrophic and extremely public failure of the Dalkon shield nearly killed the IUD itself by 1986. Only one brand of IUD was still on the market in the United States. In the 1970s, nearly 10% of US women who used contraception use an IUD. Today, that number is less than 1%. It's around 1%, and it's generally agreed that the main reason for the collapse in popularity. Of the IUD was the Dalkon shield that it cratered people? Because obviously, like, you hear that story, like, you're not gonna get one of those. You already get the Horror Story of of the, you know, floating ID. Yeah, which does happen, yeah, yeah. In European nations, most of which never imported the shield. IUD's remained popular in the US, still has the lowest rate of IUD use of any western nation. According to the Guttmacher Institute quote, the public health need for more widespread use of the IUD is revealed in one simple statistic, 53% of unintended. Pregnancies in the United States are the result of contraceptive failure or misuse because the IUD is almost impossible to misuse and is far less likely to fail than the pill, the condom, or the injectable. A national increase in IUD use that comes at the expense of such methods would reduce the number of unintended pregnancies. If some women choose the IUD instead of relying on natural birth control methods or chance, the number of unintended pregnancies should also decline. An industry sponsored survey of 7000 US women conducted in 1999 revealed that many current IUD 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. You know which it's 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 were injured and rendered infertile. And yeah, H Robbins and the Dalkon company make a pretty solid *******. But we're actually just scraping the start of this story, Samantha. Barely gotten started. Yeah, yeah, it's scraping between the word slicing and scraping. And this is a slicy scrapy kind of day thing. You said bacteria Expressway? Bacterial Expressway? Yeah, which is another good band name. This is a great episode for that. That is a punk band. Ohh yeah, I saw bacterial Expressway open for uterine depth charge back in 98. Good. So good. So the United States Agency for International Development, or US aid, exists to do exactly what the name would suggest help other nations to develop. Now, one of the ways in which 1970s thinkers in the government felt poor nations needed help developing wasn't giving their populations access to contraceptives. And obviously this isn't necessarily nefarious. It's great to you. A lot of people are poor. They have money for contraceptives. Give them free contraceptives. Always a good thing I am supportive of people having access to. Good birth control. Not a problem, except it becomes a problem because of the way that they do it. So back in 1972, 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 the people at age Robbins 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 are. Oh, OK, yeah. So yeah, yeah. Obviously they still kept pumping out as many of these devices into the US market as possible. But being forward thinking capitalist, they started looking further afield for new markets for 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 of Population within AID had a budget of $125 million to spend on the purchase and overseas distribution of contraceptives. Director RT Ravenholt was known to be a population control enthusiast who had asked few questions about a good deal on Dalkon Shields. It was only natural for Robins to turn to the government. Robert W Nichols Robbins is director of international marketing. Vote to the Population Office of Aid 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 AID the shield in bulk packages unsterilized at 48% off. Ohh, so that's that's not a good sign. So the word population control says a lot. That's not a good sign either, isn't? You know, that's never, never a good sentence or a phrase to hear, ABI. Just love like vaginal death crabs for everyone. Yeah. Discounted price unsterilized. You're welcome. No problems. There's no problem. Let the poor have vaginal death crabs. Everyone celebrate. Also, this is gonna remain in your vagina for a long while. Hanging in there, hanging in there. If you try to move it out, it's going to rip you up like a ******* shrapnel from a mortar. But it's OK because it's population control, because we 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 terrifying thing to call someone. Now that that actually refers to a specific intellectual movement within the Western civilization that goes back almost 100 years. See? So I had this written a little bit differently, but I'm just going to go ahead and say, surprise, this is not an episode about the Dalkon shield. That was just the introduction. 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. No, it does not. It tears jamming. Yeah. And wedging. I I wedged myself in there. And now we're going to learn about the popular. You're not gonna be friends, Robert. You're not gonna be friends after that. Sorry. Like I said, trade Samantha. Yeah, exactly. If I could flip this desk over. Yeah, in a dramatic way. Well, you know, we talked about the bacterial superhighway and now we're going to take a hard right turn onto the eugenics superhighway 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. Good news. Make it ********. So the first concerted project to control world population started in the late 1800s 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. And California Asian immigration had actually been stoked by a U.S. government policy from the 1860s. Washington DC had heavily pressured China's imperial government to make it easier for Chinese citizens to leave the country because we wanted workers and stuff. the US actually argued that Beijing was. Treading on their people's quote, inherent and inalienable right to change their home and allegiance by stopping them from leaving the country. So keep that in mind. 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 and allegiance. The only time you'll hear that from the United States government. Hard left from what we know. Well, yeah, because that's one where it's like, I'm totally on board with the United States. There, people do have an inherent right to change their home in allegiance. How dare you? Yeah, they don't stick with that for long. From a journal, an article in the Journal of Past and present by the Oxford University Press. Quote, disgruntled workers in California attacked Asian immigrants and in 1877 began political mobilization, much to the alarm of East Coast elites writing for the North American Review. The following year, MGD sought to justify anti Chinese attacks. Immigration 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 would fail to reproduce. Dire consequences would therefore ensue should they withdraw the intelligence of artificial selection from the environment and leave the battle. Are the chances of natural selection. O that's pretty racist. Wow. I mean, it's fitting with the current administration. So go ahead, I guess. Yeah. I mean, we're really, really a blast to 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 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 late 1800s. So that same year, 1877, they started to come out. As you know, the way that like all culture really flows, this is one of the things I say this a couple of times that Andrew Breitbart got right. Politics is downhill of culture, right. So what hat starts happening in the culture in the late 1800s that leads to all of these like Chinese exclusion acts and stuff is this flood of novels and short stories that are like trying to warn white people of an invasion of Europe in the United States. 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 they're modern equivalent be the guys writing for the Atlantic, you know? Like Conor Friedersdorf and the then you know people like Steve Bannon like writing like racist fiction about how Chinese people are going to it's it's white genocide **** 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 a lot, right? OK OK yeah. Quote Chinese were depicted not as nationals of a particular country but as a hoarder flood, a force of nature. This image also featured in European journalistic and fictional accounts of migration, the German geographer. Friedrich Ratzel, perhaps the first European to draw attention to the Chinese question in California, would go on to popularize the notion of leavins realm. Ohhh, you know what you you get you guys. You guys know leavins around, right? Everybody remembers that from high school. Yeah. I did not realize that's where that concept had started. Ohh pretty good. So bad Robert. It's really, I'm waiting for the big yeah, I'm, I'm one of the big finale. Let's keep going. Yeah, yeah, that's coming. We gotta build up of it. So ohh yeah. Obviously, the term lebens 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 genocide its way into possession of a vast continent, and argued that Germany deserves that kind of space too. But the actual term Lebensraum had originated in California from these Europeans. And, like, American white people who were seeing Chinese people immigrate and being like they're crowding us out. Like that's actually where it started. Historian Matthew Connolly notes it suggested the word Lebensraum suggested that biological processes of growth and movement underlay politics and were more fundamental than mere political borders. So Lebensraum wasn't just a matter of physical space. In fact, it wasn't mostly a matter of physical space, because California still empty today. Most of California, nobody ******* lives in like, as big as Los Angeles is. Like, it's it's it's a huge landmass. So it's like the whole continent, like these, these people who started using this term weren't actually short. On space, living space meant more directly physical and or it's not. Not physical but philosophical space for white people and white culture and white jeans to spread. That's really what? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So yeah, on a ground level, anti Asian sentiment in this. 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 turn this into a boiling race hatred. In 1885, 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. White supremacist writers defended the killers, describing their actions as an example of workers expressing their citizenship. The expulsions and the violence were positively compared to anti Jewish pogroms 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 going to lie, it's just kind of like, are we doing this again today? Except yeah, we sure are like Chinese immigrants. It's like this is too familiar. Yeah, in a way we never stopped. Yeah. I mean, I think the focus is, yeah, threat of white hierarchy, whether or not they're going to be decimated and no longer exist, as if that could possibly happen, especially in the next generation or so. But yeah, interesting there were actually. Well, and it's it's this matter of like the 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. Problem is, for example, the fact that there's all sorts of holes in our labor market whereby certain types of people who are not documented citizens can be treated sub humanly by companies without any consequence and it's just cheaper for them to not treat people or pay them properly. And companies like State Farm who love to advocate for special cards for Immigrations who don't have citizenship rights but can be underpaid, pay taxes, and no longer be recognized as individuals. Hey, it's great. It's good. It's fine. Yeah, we're better now. It's fine. Everything's fine. Yeah, something's on fire. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I wish everything were on fire sometimes. Do you? Do you? Do you know what? What? What is most likely not on fire. This is 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 I could transition like that. All you gotta do is believe in yourself how it goes. Don't feel like. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. 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And if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time when you want to be a better problem solver therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com/behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better. Elp.com behind betterhelp, com behind this fall on revisionist history. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or or? Would ask you, you'd like to add that seems relevant. You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. We're back, so we're talking about. Racism. So, uh, new legal bear. Yeah. It's always good to talk about individuals and, you know, different racial peoples. Let's go. Population I love is a melting pot, as in, yeah, no, I won't make it. Cannibalism. New legal barriers were added to Chinese immigration by the same government that had literally, like a decade earlier, lobbied the Chinese government about the inherent freedom of human beings to change their face place of residence. That **** 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, 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. With population control. So all of this human monitoring **** that we deal with today really does start in order to stop Chinese people from immigrating to the United States. The whole infrastructure that like ice is the is the current manifestation of begins here, which is great. Just start somewhere. Yeah, yeah. So by 1908, 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. Wow. Say that about Teddy enough. Yeah, we just talked about the parks he made, but no. Yeah, he tried to play ban every Asian person from English speaking nations. Smart. Pretty cool. 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, get on them. Solidarity, buddy. So cute. 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. Yeah. And it was dispatched, for the most part as an international goodwill exercise. 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 stop in like 20 or 30 countries and, you know, do diplomatic visits and just be like, hey, the US is here. We're going to 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. And most of those trips were very pleasant. You know, the US expressing its goodwill and desire to trade with everybody. We were not. A A world military power. At this point we weren't an invade people, all that. I mean we 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 because Roosevelt had sent it to Japan to threaten the Japanese government to stop them from sending Japanese or letting Japanese people come over to the United States. Yeah, it's it's pretty bad. Roosevelt White fleet have a special white cloak. They they are? Yeah. I mean, why not? It's a part of the theme, right? Yeah, it is a little 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. Cool. Yeah, it's cool stuff. And a big reason for this was that the empire of the Rising Sun had just beaten Russia in a war in like 1905, which is the first time that an Asian power beat a European power in a modern conflict. Like the the, the, the Russian like N fleet sailed into the area around like the coast of China where the Japanese were. And they had this huge, like, they just got massacred by the Japanese Navy, which hit like, absolutely shocked the hell out of everybody in Europe at the time. Because, like, this is like, colonialism is at its height at this point. They're not used to having to, like, 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, which the Japanese Empire was, too at this point. Like, it's like we're not talking about good. They all kind of are terrible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk to the Okinawans about that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it was too Imperial powers going to war with each other and then another imperial power threatening that imperial power to not let yet everybody's bad. It's 19, you know, I'm like, wait. Definitely not heroes. Yeah. So yeah, the fleet was met with protests in Japan, most of which were inspired by the fact that California had just 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 did not 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, which is not surprising. Nope. Yeah. No, 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 try to kick all the Chinese people out of California. So yeah, yeah, it's it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad all the way down. So yeah, history. Yeah, it's fun. You get to learn new ways about how people suck. Ohh Yep, that's about. Yeah. What I feel 2020 like new ways that people suck. Yeah, this is good. It's they they never stopped finding ways to suck. It's remarkable. So by this point, 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 going to quote. From the Journal of past. Had the audacity to say native yeah, yeah, I know. It's pretty wild, right? Like my dudes, my dudes. Tell me that God keep going. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Quote in the United States, the Immigration Bureau won congressional approval for collecting statistics according to a list of races and peoples 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. What is happening? I love this just 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 what? Like a little bit like funny? But yeah, that at the time they were like, yeah, they were the Chinese of Europe. So, hey, 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, right. Wow. So the category of peoples requiring containment thus grew beyond Asians, defined not by nationality so much as by biology. That is, they're supposed capacity to propagate on wages that would lower other people's living standards. 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 1912, the sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross, from whom Roosevelt had borrowed the idea of race suicide, which is 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. It was race suicide. That was the thing that all of these guys, like Ross, were warning people of. That's what Roosevelt believed. The white race is committing suicide. Letting Chinese people in Italian people into our country. Hey, yeah, talk about dramatic. Yeah, like these guys are all ******* drama Queens. Absolutely. Yeah. 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 need you to read everything in that accent from now on, please. Yeah. If any of this is sounding a bit Nazi adjacent, that's because it was. I was going to say. Wasn't that the very beginning we were talking? Yeah. All of this **** had a huge impact of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi thinkers. It was an American, like we just talked about how it was. It was a European living in California who came up with the term Lebensraum to talk about white people being overwhelmed by Chinese people. 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 new with interesting. What we're talking about, of course, was definitely a fourth. Like, I don't think you can be a Prescott, not a racist like it. It's just it's a law that just has to be. Yeah, the world would break if that weren't the case. So barely 20 years after Prescott defined Chinese immigrants as bacterial infections, Hitler would refer to Jews as plague bacillus in a clear imitation of this, right? Week the terminology that that people like Prescott are using for 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 19th century or 20th century, really no good options. They really had no real good options. You're kind of ****** no matter what. 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. So, uh, yeah, uh, Hall argued for world eugenics, in which fit and unfit in terms of individual people and races, would be primary categories the government would use to determine who could immigrate. Hall, and many others like him, who very much dominated immigration policy in this. 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, that's what the people running the United States government in the early part of the 20th century, and particularly immigration, but all through the government, see the US government as a mechanism for controlling biological processes, promoting the propagation of the fit, and excluding or sterilizing the unfit. That's what the government does. Talk about. Stephen Miller. Yeah, yeah, we are talking about Stephen Miller because he's he's he's he very much sees things that exact same way. I'm just wondering, even though he pretends his little Asian wife, but. Well, yeah, yeah. Certain racists have admitted actions into the pantheon of white people. Now it's congratulations. Racist. Yeah. As long as, like, you're the right kind of Asian, you know, quiet otherwise. Background. Yeah, that's, I think Stephen Miller. I'm gonna get myself in trouble. Keep going. So 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 today is how the eugenics movement splintered off into the population control movement. Remember, we heard that term a bit earlier when we were talking about that guy Ravenholt from USA who was a population control enthusiast. 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, school, school of intellectual thought. 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 1980s and beyond. 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. Blacks for Trump seems to be bothering a lot of people right now. I'm just saying Trump. Yeah, you're right. You're correct. Yeah. Yeah, we can say I have a friend of. Yeah. There's a reason Enrique Tarrio was the head of the proud boys, you know. Right, right. Yeah. So instead of just nakedly appealing to racism, eugenics advocates realized they had more success when they appealed 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 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, come on, bro. I'm pro-life. We can't say that. So instead you say no, we just we overpopulation is bad, we got to stop over population and then you start pushing. Yeah, 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 AM Carr Saunders thought that war would inevitably result from differential growth rates among nations and 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 its two great fecundity, is threatening the peace of the world, the psychologist and future. Leader of the International 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's 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. Like it's just the block. Yeah, and of course Russians aren't white in this. Either. Right, not wide enough, you know. Umm. Yeah, specific. When you start to study white racism in this. You realize that, like from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, there were about 11 actual white people on the planet. It's just a really fancy club. You have to be. Really? Really? Really. Yeah. Perfectly pitched, 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 possibly being hurt first. Yeah. Well, yeah. They're not going to be expendable, expendable people. Of course you do. Why not? Yeah. You have to go invade Stalingrad. Yeah. So in 1921, 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 perceive that the important question will then be what kind of people are they to be? Who will then inherit the earth? Here enters 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 whitest? Which is people in Europe can determine what the entire population of the world will look like in the future by controlling eugenics. That's the goal, right? Obviously, pretty cool stuff. Pearl said that it was pointless for eugenicists 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 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 Sanger. 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 advocacy would, years after her death, help spread millions upon millions of unsterilized dalkon Shields to uteruses all over the global S and we will talk more about that in Part 2. Gonna be fun. How you doing? How you doing, Samantha? I'm digging all of this in. I'm just, first of all, all of the different names, and there's a lot that I have. I get to. I get that. No, I mean, like I get to use as my band names and or screen name somewhere. There's definitely going to be happening soon. I'm enjoying every bit of this level of building up, of what hierarchy and supremacy is, is it's quite delightful. This little chain, this little adventure maze that you've put me on. I am glad to hear that we seek to please people here in our horrible stories of genocide and forced hysterectomies. As one of the brown yellow people who maybe investing the nations, I will tell you I have been one that has been inundated and not breeding. So you're welcome, I guess, past white people, white supremacists. 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. Oh God, yeah, it's weird. 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 ******** Catholic and Christian Advocates who just think that like it, like who want to demonize Planned Parenthood. And they're wrong, actually, about what's bad. Like Margaret Sanger, there's a lot that's ****** ** about her. They always lie about her, like and say stuff that she didn't actually say in order to condemn her. When there's stuff she said. It's just a different kind of bad. And the reason they don't say the bad stuff. They 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 where there's the suffragette movement and how racist and ****** ** the whole like community was to from get go. But they did do some good work and you have to sit back critical work take yeah. Taking back through like, OK, 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 if the word justified, but trying to look back at how awful people were in history, historical context and who they were and what 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 with the, you know, with with the abolitionist movement, you have to point out like, these people are on the right side of history. It was an important critical fight in a heroic fight, and it's good that they did it. Also, a huge chunk of them were abolitionists. Because they didn't want black people anywhere near them. Like, 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 the same with the suffragettes. A lot of the absolutely were fighting on the side of history and like doing the right thing. And it's good that they were there. Ton of them were racist as hell. You know, just see Harriet Tubman's and I a woman speech, right. Like it's yeah, it's absurd. And that's the same thing with the abolitionist. It's it's not that they. Didn't do a good thing. It's literally, they just didn't like black people. But that, yeah, they're just racist. Everyone was just to happen. Yeah, well, it's like you, you go back to the civil rights movement and a number of, like, the, the, the black men who were like, prominent the civil rights movement were very misogynist. And, like, that's almost people. 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, yeah, anyway, definitely need to make sure you know the truth of it all before we idealize, idealize people in any such case. But as a rule, don't make statues of people. I'm not going to sit in the fetal position and making sure no one comes near my vagina with a what? Was it a vagina? What? Was it, a vaginal death crap. Yeah, vaginal or uterine depth. Charge both. Again, great band names just fine. Whatever. Samantha, you got any plug cables to plug before we roll out a part one? Well, if you guys want to find me on social media, I am under McVay, Samantha on Twitter, or 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 you can check me out on stuff from never told you, which is an intersectional feminist podcast. So if you're afraid of that, you probably won't like it. But yeah, with iheart, yeah, yeah. Check out stuff Mom never told you on iheart? Check out Samantha on the the interwebnet.com. Send her your favorite band names. Send me your favorite band names. Start a band 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 Dalkon shield. All that and more coming up. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break our handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. So four whole months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts, sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator Kapal Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and as a Dominicana myself, I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books to read. Your has blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts.