Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Worst Birth Control Device Ever Invented

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

Robert is joined by Samantha McVey to discuss the Dalkon Shield.FOOTNOTES:1.    https://www.silentmother.com/2016/05/04/the-dalkon-shield-a-story-of-corporate-greed-a-lack-of-medical-testing-and-an-ongoing-fear-of-the-iud/2.    http://advocatesaz.org/2016/03/28/instrument-of-torture-the-dalkon-shield-disaster/3.    https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/06/magazine/the-sad-legacy-of-the-dalkon-shield.html4.    https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/2002/03/checkered-history-and-bright-future-intrauterine-contraception-united-states5.    https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1979/11/charge-gynocide/ 6.    http://imjournal.com/depo/IMCJ_12_1_p27_34Spevack.pdf7.    https://climateandcapitalism.com/2009/11/23/the-dark-past-of-population-confrom/ 8.    https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4125211 9.    https://www.sierraclub.org/washington/blog/2020/01/overpopulation-myth-and-its-dangerous-connotations10. https://www.pop.org/population-control-and-the-new-global-racism/11. https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/blog/2019/mar/9/how-racist-myths-built-population-growth-bogey-man  12. https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/overpopulation-alarmism-only-marginalizes-the-worlds-most-vulnerable-people/13. https://www.drugwatch.com/news/2013/06/28/mirena-litigation-dalkon-shield-injuries/14. https://www.litigationandtrial.com/mirena-lawsuit-brain-injury/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that is only ever introduced properly with the Russian astronauts. This is only ever introduced properly once, and it's this time, so you got your one. Yeah, thank you. This is the only time, Sovi. I'm proud of you. Next time I'm going to be back to just shouting the name of a dead dictator or screaming incoherently. I wouldn't have it any other way, Robert. This is our one. This is our one.

And that good introduction was to celebrate our very special guest for today's episode, Samantha McVeigh of Stuff Mom Never Told You. Oh, I feel so special. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Samantha. That related to Friend of the Pod, Tim McVeigh. Oh, it had to do with 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. I mean, you know, we always bring up, we always bring up old cousin Timmy when we can't. Who doesn't? Cousin Timmy and Uncle Ted are our North Stars. No. You know, we're not talking about terrorists today, but in a way we kind of are. 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. Mostly, yeah, absolutely. Well, and white women. And white women. There's a white woman who factors pretty centrally into this story as well. But yes, mostly white men. Yeah. So have you ever heard, Samantha, of the Dalcon shield?

I have not. Oh, this is a bad story. Oh, no. Is this going to break our friendship that it's just beginning? Yeah, no, it's going to shatter everything. Oh, hell, here we go. None of this is going to be good. So obviously, Samantha, the IUD or intrauterine device is a very popular form of birth control.

At least from a user satisfaction. Yeah, yeah. Most people who 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 a device you insert into the uterus in order to stop pregnancy from happening, goes back, it could go back as far as a thousand years. People have been doing versions of this for a long time. Can I just say, I'm so excited that you have me on for this episode.

Oh, yeah. I don't know if 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 IUDs 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 that argues this can cause idiopathic intercranial hypertension, and basically things that mimic tumors, which has happened to someone pretty close to me. And yeah, it's messed up, but also still kind of being litigated.

We don't know exactly that. It's the IUD that caused it, but obviously, like any kind of medical device, there's issues. And I don't think it's possible Bayer's copable to some extent in hiding aspects of it, but it's also possible that they did nothing wrong, and that just 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 at least 5% or less chance that you hear that extra warning. Yeah, exactly. So I certainly, 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 Dalcon shield is a very different tale. This might be one of the darkest stories in the history of contraception. Also, it sounds like a sci-fi name for a bad weapon. Yeah, it sounds like a spaceship, actually. Something. I expect it to be on Star Trek. Someone tell me.

Yeah, I think it'd be a Romulan vessel, maybe. Okay, that went way farther than I thought. Samantha and I went, what? There was a moment of pause. What have I got myself into? Okay, 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. Jesus Christ.

Probably not hard to see why. I don't know that it was a bad IUD, but your gut doesn't seem like something you would want to put in your body. I don't know. Yeah, Ernst Grafenberg, who was another German, invented the ring IUD not long after. He's also, Grafenberg is the namesake for the G-spot. Yeah, and as a result, he was very unpopular in Nazi Germany,

both because he was focused on the fact that women could feel pleasure, and on stopping... How dare you? Yeah. The Nazis also weren't a big on the concept of contraception, because that meant less German babies, which was not their... Just genocide. Yeah.

Yeah, there were only... Other populations, of course. Yeah, exactly. Specific genocides. And anti-genocide for one group of people, I guess. So not that... Probably shouldn't even go down that road. Wrong show. Okay. Relatively decent IUDs started being invented in the early 60s,

and the devices gained rapid popularity among people with uteruses and a desire to avoid getting babies instead of uteruses. Uteri? I don't know. This state of affair... Uteri? I don't know. I'll allow it, but I don't think that's... 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 A.H. Robbins debuted the Dalcon Shield. The Dalcon Shield featured a revolutionary design, and like... What's a bad revolution? Ah, they're all pretty great.

Imagine a bad revolution. It's not a good revolution. It looks like... I'm trying to picture one. Keep going. 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.

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 five spiky legs, and the legs are meant to stop it from coming free once it's inside of you. But it kind of looks like the trilobite, the silhouette of a trilobite. You look at it and it immediately looks like something

that shouldn't be inside a person. Okay, so I'm thinking of the matrix, that thing that comes out of his stomach. Yeah, absolutely. It does look like the thing that comes out of Neo's stomach in the matrix. You're going to be so sad when I saw this in a second. Oh, 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 through your uterus. Yeah, it looks like a monster. Okay, okay. Fantastic. Everybody loves that story. Honestly, it looks as much like a space invader

as it does like a crab. So, yeah, the legs were kind of meant to hook and place inside of your uterus, and it also had a string, which was how it could be removed later. And we'll talk more about the string later. Like, obviously, a lot of IUDs have strings. They tend to do them differently than the Dalcon shield did for a very good reason.

Did you just open the image because you just made a face? Oh. Yeah. What do you think of that? That looks like a shoehorn with tentacles. Like an old school shoehorn with tentacles. And what is happening? We can debate on what it looks like,

but it definitely looks like something that should not go in a person. That is a misplaced keychain. That is not what you put inside yourself. It does look like a keychain. You don't put that in yourself unless you're really bored. I mean, if that's your thing, you do you. Yeah, I mean, yeah, no shame.

But if that is your thing, you're probably going to the doctor. You need to see a doctor immediately. Yeah, so, as I stated, the legs were kind of meant to hook it with a 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'd just been like a big congressional trial over it because the company's selling it had misrepresented the side effects. And I think 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 been selling it 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 Dalcon Shield 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 Dalcon 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 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 in itself. Like the naming of it altogether,

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. With legs. With shoehorn, keychain, weird cooking utensil. Crab shield. Keychain shield. Yeah.

Horrible. Yeah, definitely horrible. So yeah, the pharmaceutical giant A.H. Robbins, though, buys into Dalcon's 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 A.H. Robbins to sell the Dalcon Shield. And I'm going to quote from the Embryo project now to talk about that. In 1971, the A.H. Robbins Company,

producers of the Coff Medicine Robitussin, bought the device from Davis and put it on the market. The A.H. Robbins Company began selling the shields in the U.S. 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 Dalcon Shield capitalized on that, claiming that the device was safer than existing methods of birth control. So that's, you know, kind of... Including the pullout method?

Yeah. 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. Right, right. Behind the Bastards is sponsored by the pullout method. Robert, I'm glad to be a part of this. You know what? Not so happy.

Well, the pullout method is, like, heavily sponsored by Raytheon. Raytheon, the more kids you have accidentally, the more targets we have for missiles. Hey. Yeah, sorry. It's so good. You're so good at this. Robert, I wonder if people love you. I wonder if people love you.

Slowly. Yeah, the adries alone, fake or real, enough said. I buy it. I don't know what it was. I just can't stop advertising. Yeah. The big adlets comes out. And the Shield's inventors,

like the guys who actually made the Delcon Shield, had conducted an internal study before they sold it to A.H. Robbins. And their studies showed that the device had a failure rate of about 1.1%. And other IUDs on the market had a failure rate of 2% to 3%. So they advertised of, like, 99% effective, better than all the other IUDs. That was another big part 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 A.H. 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. I'm just wondering how there's, do they give the ChapSticks to help you to lube that up with ChapSticks and try to stick it in yourself? Yeah, with ChapSticks, you get a discount if they let you use a ChapStick to lube. It's a package deal.

Yeah. That would be better than what was done. Every time you say it, I keep thinking of the radish. The daikon radish. Oh, the daikon radish, yes. Yeah, and like, it kind of has sprouts like that. Yeah, it would be a safer method of birth control than the Dalcon 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, A.H. Robbins, lied to everybody about a number of, you know, minor, minor things. For example, they lied about the rate at which the device worked, because the first study into the shield's efficacy was flawed. It had been done by two scientists

over a period of eight months with just a handful of people being tested. 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 A.H. Robbins 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. A.H. Robbins? Or Davis? Yeah, Robbins. Like, I don't know why. It's like H.H. Holmes. It's like, oh, there it is.

Yeah, A.H. Robbins winds up racking up a body count similar to H.H. Holmes, actually. Oh, no. Yeah, throughout the course of the story. Oh, no. Yeah, so A.H. Robbins, like, these two scientists who invent this thing, you know, study a couple of dozen people over a few months and are like,

this is the failure rate. And A.H. 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 that suggest the failure rate was actually something like five and a half percent, 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 they're advertising, but they don't change their advertisements because that helps them make money. Now, A.H. Robbins, yeah, of course. A.H. Robbins also chose to keep on the DL,

the fact that the shield contained copper salts. Those were an active ingredient in the Dalcon 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 slightly. Just the buck a little bit, just a little bit. Yeah. Why would you, you know? This is a very dangerous grift. Yeah, it's getting danger-risser. To obscure the fact that it included medical, like it did include drugs without technically lying,

salespeople were instructed to tell clients that the Dalcon shield contained a confidential blending of ingredients. Because if you say it's confidential. The magic ingredients, yes. It's a secret ingredient. It's a family recipe. And please tell me these people came around,

these salespeople, with like briefcases to show off their dynamic keychain monsters. Oh, yeah. No, I've actually seen some of the packaging for that. I think he's got a Dalcon shield at home. We would love a couple. Yeah. In three years, more than 2.2 million Dalcon shields

were sold in the United States, making it the top-selling IUD in the nation throughout the early 1970s. A.H. Robbins and the devices inventors pocketed massive amounts of money, and all was well. Except all was not well. That was a lie.

Because the pharmaceutical giant knew from the beginning that things were horribly wrong with the Dalcon shield. And I'm going to quote here from a contemporary write-up in Mother Jones. Only a few months after the Dalcon shield went on sale in 1971, reports of adverse reactions began pouring into the headquarters of the manufacturer, A.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 Dalcon 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 they sell millions of these before anything really blows up in the media about it. Oh no.

And when I say sell millions of these, I mean millions of these were put into people's bodies. Right. So disturbing. The doctors didn't have a clue that this was going to be problematic? Well, no. Some of them did, actually. There were doctors who noticed the shields flaws

almost immediately. And Planned Parenthood advocates of Arizona made this note in a write-up. Not everyone who laid eyes on the Dalcon shield got a warm and fuzzy feeling from it. Those feet gave many people the heebie-jeebies. Dorothy Lansing, an OBGYN from Pennsylvania, derided the shield in 1974,

a veritable instrument of torture, a gruesome-looking little device with vicious spikes that made removal very difficult for the doctor and painful for the user. She refused to offer shields to her patients. Of course, a female doctor. A female doctor. There's a good male doctor in here,

but yeah, you suspect most of the first people to recognize it were the lady OBGYNs. Those vicious spikes were not the worst part of the shield's design, unfortunately. That would be the string. Like I said, most IEDs have a string attached to them. It makes it easier to remove. Normally, those strings are made out of

a very particular kind of material that cannot transfer bacteria, right? Because the uterus is sterile, right, and you want to keep it that way. Let me guess, they didn't use that material. No. Did they use dental floss?

They used nylon. Which is like... They used nylon wrapped in a sheath that deteriorated inside the body. And the string was not at each end, and so not sealed. Irwin Lerner, who was the Daokan Company's president,

thought that the knot would be enough to keep bacteria from getting into the string. And it was not. Do they know how a body works? Yeah, a lot of people did. A lot of people warned them that this knot, bacteria will get inside it and will travel up the string into the uterus.

And they said, yeah, that's never going to happen. It's fine, it's fine. 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. 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. It's just the right tool for the job. Get the stains out. Nature's bleach.

Just saying. So the nylon in 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 dalcon 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 dalcon 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. They really upgraded themselves. They're like, watch this, hold my beer. Germs, viruses, hold my beer. We made you guys your own little road. And it's just for women.

We love you so much. So one of the first publicized failures of the dalcon shield came in 1973 when the device had already been inserted into nearly 2 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 that point. And at this point, data was suggesting

that the dalcon shield's failure rate was closer to 10% than to 5%. Again, the company had not updated any of their marketing material. Now, unfortunately, this patient who got pregnant on the shield, the bacteria highway thing in 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. The head of obstetrics at the Medical Center

where that woman died was an OBGYN named Dr. Donald Christian. He began screaming as loud as he could to anyone who would listen about the dangers of the dalcon shield. So we do have one good male doctor who was like, what the fuck? This is like clearly a problem. Yeah. And 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 dalcon 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.

Christian's goal was to get them to suspend sales and use of the dalcon 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, Dr. 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 the work. It's to the point. His study focused on four deaths and six life-threatening infections suffered by shield users. Now, while he was working on his

manuscript, other doctors and women's health advocates grew more and more aware of the shield's flaws. By 1974, 17 deaths had been traced directly to the device, and the actual number was probably significantly higher. I think at least 24, we know now. I was going to say how many people were told

this is not the reason. It's because of your fault, your negligence. You did this wrong. You did this to your body. You're dirty and you got sick. Which is essentially what happens to women or those who have uteruses in general. It's your fault you did this wrong. Sorry. Yep.

You have to assume 17 is the minimum that had died at this point. Hundreds and hundreds, potentially even tens of thousands, with some level of serious adverse effects. In a lot of cases, if you're getting pelvic inflammatory syndrome,

you're bedridden for weeks. 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, A.H. Robbins, the pharmaceutical company, profited from selling the Daukan shield,

their customers spent an estimated $20 million on medical care due to the illness as it caused. Which is pretty bad. It's just one more thing of how little they care about women's health, people with uterus health,

people in that general gynecology. How little is actually worried about. Even to this day, obviously. I think it's better but not good now. I'm certainly not saying it's absolutely better now.

I haven't heard of one quite this bad. Although maybe the marina will wind up being that bad. We don't really know at this point. Don't tell me that. Robert, why? I don't know. I think people should look into that. There's some interesting lawsuits happening now.

I know a lot of people who have them and have great experiences with them but it does concern me a bit. Those numbers are still astonishing and things that are being figured out. Not the best. This is just so blatantly horrible.

You're talking by 1974 when it's mostly still on the market tens of thousands of women have been hospitalized because of their Daukan shields. We're not talking about 1% of people are going to have a negative response and that's a problem but this is

a sizable chunk of the people who get the Daukan shield inserted have health consequences as a result of it. We're not just talking about death. We're talking about all of the problematic issues that come with it. Miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, which are nightmares. And for those who are wanting children

and loss of children and all of these things it's just such a heartbreaking thing. Well, especially you have a lot of women who wanted children who got pregnant or who wanted children at some point but didn't want them now, got the Daukan shield and because of complications had their uteruses removed.

Right. It's just a real bummer. Father Jones, again, the Daukan 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 was difficult. Patients found it almost unbearable. As early as February 1971 a physician wrote to A.H. Robbins in reference to the insertion of the Daukan shield. I have found the procedure to be the most traumatic manipulation ever perpetrated on womanhood

and I have inserted thousands of other varieties. Why would they keep doing this? Because they're making money. Because they're causing them not to stop. Because they're making money. 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. I think the doctors who are complaining do it a few times and have a horror realize that it's bad on everyone and then say, well, I'm not going to do this anymore. I wonder how many doctors just kept pushing them to suck it up.

Which, by the way, women do here today about some procedures and being told you're not really in pain, you're making the shit up. So I can't imagine them where they're like, eh, suck it up. I think it's most doctors do that. Because you do have good doctors like Christian,

like this person who wrote that letter in 1971, like the woman we heard from, the lady O.B. Uchua and we heard from earlier, who try to blow the whistle, who complain, who say this is unacceptable. They're just like, yeah, it hurts. What do you want? Stop complaining.

You all have sex, you have to have pain to have sex. And then die, obviously. And then die on the operating table. I wonder also for Dr. Christensen, it took someone to die before realizing how bad this was. I don't know what his direct experience because he was 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. I don't know his actual history. I just know that when that happened, he went on the war path, but I don't know, maybe he was putting it in for years before he someone died.

I really just, I couldn't tell you. So many questions, so many questions. So in May of 1974, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America banned the Dalcon 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 Dalcon Shield side tear through soft tissue when yanked out. As deaths and nightmare stories of injuries mounted, the FDA begged A.H. Robbins to stop selling their vaginal death crap, which is a pretty good name for a band. I was going to say, whose band name is this? Yeah, vaginal death crap?

Solid metal band. Oh my god. The songs. Or maybe it's just an emo band. Yeah, Dalcon Shield's not a bad band name either, you know? I'm still holding to that as a Star Trek weapon. Yeah, I do think it's more of a 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 tens of thousands of women were suing them for injuries, it would be expensive to admit guilt. So because so many

people are suing us, we can't stop selling this because then they'll win their cases against us for the injuries we did to them. Right. So I assumed there would be a lot of lawsuits and so many so many lawsuits. This company gets sued

like you would not believe. Well, like you would absolutely believe because of their contempt for human life. Yeah. So age Robbins lawyers took the tact that 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 capital something to say. We got our own experts. You say this, but let me bring my people. You have no degree in this, but they're going to be really loud

about it. Yeah, it's that oil industry shit 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 Dalcon shield was effectively

off the market. They kind of just quietly stopped selling it after a while. More than two and a half million and well, they stopped selling it in the U.S. 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 Dalcon shield and filed claims against age Robbins. Some set counts a 400,000. Like a huge amount of the people who get this wind up with like, you know, legal complaints against 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. Tens of thousands of pages of internal documents were destroyed in direct violation with court orders.

FDA offices and Capitol Hill were flooded with age Robbins 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 it in the US. They're trying to find a little nest egg. They gotta keep their savings in. Yeah, gotta keep that shit going before

your company is destroyed by a river of lawsuits. No one was dark and grifty. Oh, it's about... Oh, 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, you know what time it is, right?

Yeah, you know what? Won't sell vaginal death crabs? God, I hope not. Um... Audubon? Yeah, either way.

During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series,

Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI

spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good, badass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev,

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story

of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you

that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted is only a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial

to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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?

But really, what about the cheddar biscuits? I've gotten a lot of diseases for cheddar biscuits in the past. Enough that I think I don't need that anymore. I'm starting to question what you're worth. What? We've all gotten a little bit of...

A little bit of... Hepatitis, whatever. Yeah! You're not going to go to Red Lobster and not get a disease. They sell bacon wraps and gallops that are kind of cooked. They are kind of cooked

and only about a third of them have the hantavirus. So that's a pretty good ratio. Have you gone for a shrimp fest? Come on. You're definitely getting the hantavirus at shrimp fest. Absolutely. Anyway... Shrimps is cheap.

That's so good. All you can eat. So in the end, the law did come for age, Robbins. In 1984, Judge Miles W. Lord ruled against the company in favor of its hundreds of thousands of victims. Again, they're being sued in court by more than a quarter of a million people

at this point, which is... If that many people are suing you, you're in the wrong. I don't even need to hear about the case. 250,000 people are suing you. Come on. That's only like 5% of the population. Come on.

You shouldn't be allowed in society anymore, maybe. That's fine. Everything's fine. So some of those victims were in the courtroom while Judge Lord read 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 a kind of argument in refusing to acknowledge your responsibility and in 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, tens 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. Many good band names in there. They're a vaginal depth charge. I want to know where that conviction is today because I feel like we do not hold obviously, and I know you know of all people enough heads of corporations

irresponsible for these things. And they didn't then. The company was destroyed which is good, better than 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. You put 20 of these guys in prison, maybe they had an opiate crisis because maybe Purdue would have been like, oh shit, there's still age robbing guys doing time for the vaginal depth charges. I don't know. I feel like those are narcissists who really believe they're the ones who can get away with it.

So it really doesn't matter. Maybe. I say we still give it a shot and throw them in prison. I mean, yeah, I'm not opposed to that. Don't get me wrong. So now the company was set up to start a multi-million dollars and eventually I think it was a multi-billion 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, 9,500 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 100,000 American women still had Dalcon shields in their bodies. Sounds like it took that long. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. The catastrophic and extremely

public failure of the Dalcon 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 U.S. women who used contraception used 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 and popularity of the IUD was the Dalcon shield. That it cratered people because obviously, like you hear that story like you're not going to get one of those. You already get the horror story of the floating IUD.

Which does happen. Yeah. In European nations, most of which never imported the shield, IUDs remained popular and the U.S. still has the lowest rate of IUD use of any Western nation. According to the Guttmacher Institute. 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 chants, the number of unintended pregnancies should also decline. An industry sponsored survey of 7,000 U.S. 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. God knows how many millions at this point of unintended pregnancies have occurred as a result of this thing. It's just the amount

of human shrapnel caused by A.H. 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 A.H. Robbins and the Dalcon company make a pretty solid bastard. But we're actually just scraping

the start of this story, Samantha. I don't like your use of scraping. Barely gotten started. Between the words slicing and scraping and This is a slicey scraping kind of thing. What was that horrifying 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. Oh yeah, I saw Bacterial Expressway open for uterine depth charge back in 98. So good. So good, man.

So, the United States Agency for International Development or USAID exists to do exactly what the name would suggest. Help other nations to develop. This is one of the reasons in which 1970s thinkers in the government felt poor nations needed help developing. Was it giving their

populations access to contraceptives? And obviously this isn't necessarily nefarious. It's great. A lot of people are poor. They don't 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 Dalcon Shields that first started going public in a big way. And it was immediately obvious. They didn't stop selling it for two more years, but the people at A.H. 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 U.S. because of that. God know. 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 Dalcon Shield. Because they're good people.

Oh, okay. So, yeah. Yeah. Obviously, they still kept pumping out as many of these devices into the U.S. market as possible, but being forward-thinking capitalists, 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 Dalcon Shields. It was only natural for Robbins to turn to the government. Robert W. Nichols, Robbins' director of international marketing, wrote 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 sweetened the deal with a special discount, which dramatically illustrates the double standard drug companies applied to third world consumers. The company offered AID the shield in bulk packages

unsterilized at 48% off. So that's not a good sign. The word population control says a lot. That's not a good sign either, is it? That's never a good sentence or a phrase to hear.

I just love like a fashionable death crabs for everyone. At a discounted price, unsterilized. You're welcome. No problems. Let the poor have vaginal death crabs. Everyone. Celebrate. Also, this is going to remain in your vagina

for a long while. Hang in there. Hang in there. If you try to move it out, it's going to rip you up like a fucking shrapnel from a mortar. But it's okay because it's population control. Because we got to control that population of you kinds of people. Yeah.

Yeah. You did kind of hit on the fact that population control enthusiast is a terrifying thing to call someone. Now 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 Dalcon Shield. That was just the introduction. This is an episode about the population control movement, and I just kind of wanted to

like a Dalcon Shield, slide in secretly and then surprise you. More jamming and wedging. I wedged myself in there, and now we're going to learn about the population control movement. You and I are not going to be friends, Robert.

I'm sorry. I feel like I can portray Samantha at the exact moment. If I could flip this desk over in a dramatic way. 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. Can we also say that's an expressway? Keep going. Maybe a tollway. Let's make it shittier. 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. In California, Asian immigration had actually

been stoked by a U.S. government policy from the 1860s. Washington, D.C. had heavily pressured China's imperial government to make it easier for Chinese citizens to leave the country, because we wanted workers and stuff. The U.S. 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 U.S. government argued that restricting people from leaving China for the U.S. 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 ever. I was going to say, this is such a 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 and allegiance. What? How dare you?

They don't stick with that for long. From 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, MJD sought to justify anti-Chinese attacks. Migration was not just another form of international trade, he insisted, and the international 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 to the chances of natural selection. So 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 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, there started to come out because you know how the way that like all culture really flows. This is one of the things I say this a couple of times that Andrew Breitbart got, right? Politics is downhill of culture, right? So what 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 are, I guess their modern equivalent would be the guys writing for the Atlantic, you know, like Connor Friedersdorf and the, then, you know, people like Steve Bannon, like writing like racist fiction about how Chinese people are going to it's white genocide shit, right?

Like it's always been the same fear. I was like, are you talking about today, right? Yeah, yeah, it's changed a lot. Right, okay, okay, keep going. 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 Retzel, perhaps the first European to draw attention to the Chinese question in California, would go on to popularize the notion of Lieben's realm. You know what that, you guys you guys know Lieben's realm, right? Everybody remembers

that from high school. Yeah. I did not realize that's where that concept had started. Oh, this is getting so bad, Robert. Pretty good. It gets really bad. I'm waiting for the big, yeah, I want the big finale. Let's keep going. Yeah, yeah, that's coming.

We got to build up a bit. So, obviously the term Lieben's realm was one of Hitler's chief talking points. The literal meaning of the term is living space. Hitler pointed to the U.S. which had genocide in its way in the possession of a vast continent and argued that Germany deserves that kind of space too. But the actual term Lieben's realm 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 Lieben's realm suggested

that biological processes of growth and movement underlay politics and were more fundamental than mere political borders. So, Lieben's realm wasn't just a matter of physical space. In fact, it wasn't mostly a matter of physical space because California is still empty today. Most of California nobody fucking lives in. Like, as big as Los

Angeles is, like, it's a huge land mass. So, it's like the whole continent. Like, these people who started using this term weren't actually short on space. Living space meant more directly physical and not physical, but

philosophical space for white people and white culture and white genes to spread. That's really what... Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah. On a ground level, anti-Asian sentiment in this period was driven by working class white people who were angry that Chinese

immigrants were undercutting their wages and taking jobs. But on the loftier philosophical level that politics kind of flows downstream from, it was a question of the survival of the white race. Now, then as 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 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 cosmopolitan 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? Yeah, we sure are. It's like, hmm, 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 some of them made it and no longer exist as if that could possibly happen, especially in the next generation or so.

Interesting. Well, and it's this matter of the fuel for the movement comes from poor white workers who are getting edged out of jobs by people being paid less than them. But the problem isn't the people being paid less than them.

The problem is, for example, the fact that there's all sorts of holes in our labor market whereby certain types of people who are affected citizens can be treated subhumanly by companies without any consequence and it's just cheaper for them to not treat people or pay them properly. Right.

And companies like State Farm who love to advocate for special cards for immigrations who don't have citizenship rights but can be underpaid, paid taxes and no longer be recognized as individuals. Hey! It's wonderful. It's all good now.

Everything's fine. Yeah. I mean, I wish everything were on fire sometimes. Do you know what is most likely not on fire? This is my worst way. You know what I wouldn't say on fire, Samantha?

There we go. The products and services that support this podcast. That would be biting the dog that feeds me. I really wish we could transition like that. All you got to do is believe in yourself. Is that how it goes? I don't feel like.

During the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series,

Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys we're revealing how the FBI

spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good bad ass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little

band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Kreklev is floating in orbit when he gets

a message that down on earth his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left standing the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match

and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart

Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! We're talking about racism. It's always good to talk about extermination of cultures and individuals and, you know, different racial

people. So let's go. Populations. What I love is a melting pot. As in yeah, no, I won't make a cannibalization. I'm waiting. 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 shit 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 of population control. So all of this human monitoring shit 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 cool. Everybody can 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. You don't say that about Teddy enough. Yeah. We just talking about the parks he made, but no, yeah, he tried to

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. White people unite.

Yeah. Good on them. Solidarity, buddies. So cute. That's my favorite romcom. Let's go. Yeah. White people everywhere cheered when Roosevelt dispatched the white fleet to the Pacific. Now, the white fleet was a US Navy squadron named for the color of the holes on its ships, not for the

white race, but kind of for the white race. 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 world military power at this point. We weren't an invade people all the, I mean, the Spanish-American war accepted had not done a huge amount of that as 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 pretty bad. Does the white fleet have a special white cloak

that they are? Yeah. 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.

Oh. 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 was the first time that an Asian power beat a European power in a modern conflict. Like the Russian

North 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 it like absolutely shocked the hell out of everybody in Europe at the time, because like this is like colonialism's at its height at this point.

They are 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. We're not talking about good. They all kind of are terrible.

Yeah, talk to the Okinawans about that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it was two Imperial powers going to war with each other. And then another Imperial power threatening that Imperial power to not let everybody's bad. It's 1908. As a person of Korean ethnicity, I'm like

wait, wait, come on. Definitely not heroes. Yeah. So, yeah, the fleet was met with protest in Japan, most of which were inspired by the fact that California had 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 and 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 California

had no segregation. It's not surprising. Nope. Yeah, absolutely not. I mean 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 pretty bad. It's pretty bad all the way down. I'm like, yay, history. Yeah, it's fun.

You get to learn new ways about how people sucked. Well, yep, that's about what I feel in 2020. New ways how people suck. Yeah, this is good. They never stop finding ways to suck. It's remarkable. True. By this point, American intellectuals largely

agreed that regulation of the quote, composition of immigration was necessary to safeguard the fertility and thus the supremacy of native stocks, meaning white people. I'm going to quote now from the Journal of Pasadena. Had the audacity to say native? Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's pretty wild, right?

Yeah. My dudes. Okay. That got me. That got me. Keep going. 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. This is happening.

I love this 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 like, mwah, like a little bit like funny.

But yeah, at the time, they were like, yeah, they were the Chinese of Europe. Okay. 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. Wow. So the category of peoples requiring containment thus grew beyond Asians, defined not by nationality so much as by biology. That is, their supposed capacity to propagate on wages that would lower other peoples' living standards and fertility.

Though Roosevelt failed to coordinate exclusionary measures, researchers and activists saw them as the beginning of a de facto policy of global population control. In 1912, the sociologist Edward Ellsworth 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 by letting Chinese people and Italian people

into our country. Hey. Talk about dramatic. These guys are all fucking 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 equalized population pressure around the globe. I'm going to 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 at the beginning when we were talking? Yeah. All of this shit had a huge impact of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi

thinkers. It was an American. We just talked about how it was a European living in California who came up with the term it was round 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 U.S. as bacterial infections, which is interesting. It has to be a Prescott. Of course. Was he a junior? Definitely a Prescott. I don't think you can be a Prescott not a racist. It's a law. It 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 basilis in a clear imitation of this, right? Like the terminology 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 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 fuck no matter what happens. Get to the UK if you can, but you still might wind up in a concentration camp, which happened

to thousands of Jewish people in the UK. We don't talk about that that much either. So yeah, 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 period, saw the state as, in Connolly's words, merely a mechanism for controlling biological processes, whether through promoting the propagation of the fit or excluding

and sterilizing the unfit. Remember, that's what the people running the United States government in the early part of the 20th century, in particularly immigration, but all throughout 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. Are we talking about Stephen Miller? Yeah, we are talking about Stephen Miller. He very much sees things that exact same way. I'm just wondering, even though he pretends his little Asian wife, but

hmm, yeah, certain racists have admitted Asians into the pantheon of white people now. Congratulations. As long as you're the right kind of Asian. Quiet in the background? Yeah, that's, I think, Stephen Miller. I'm going to get myself in trouble. Keep going!

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 USAID. He 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 school of intellectual thought. Very racist school of intellectual thought. 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 USAID 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,

Blackster Trump and stuff. I don't know, this seems to be bothering a lot of people right now. I'm just saying... But yes, you're correct. As long as we can say I have a friend of... Yeah, there's a reason Enrique Tario was the head of the Proud Boys, you know? Right.

So instead of just nakedly appealing to racism, eugenics advocates realized that 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 I, increasing numbers of white supremacist academics began ringing alarm bells about overpopulation. And this starts to become after World War I. 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. I'm pro-life. We can't say that. So instead you say, no, we just...

overpopulation is bad. We gotta stop overpopulation. 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, A.M. 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 too great fecundity is threatening the peace of the world. The psychologist in future leader of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, C.P. Blacker, worried that Asia and Russia might become a solid

block determined to shake off the yoke of the Western powers end of America. Birth control offered the only way to avoid a Second World War, this time between East and West, but this required that every culture accepted. I like the whole block. It's just the block of people.

Yeah, and of course, Russians aren't white in this period either. You're right. Not white enough, you know. Hmm. Yeah. When you start to study white racism in this period, 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 perfectly fit, right? Yeah, because you lose your whiteness

if you're poor until they need your help to hurt other people. Then you get to be white again. You just have to be at the front of possibly being hurt first. Yeah. Well, yeah, they're not going to get out. They're expendable. You have to have the expendable people. Of course you do.

Why not? Yeah, you have to go invade Stalingrad, yeah. Obviously. So in 1921, biologist Raymond Perl 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, is 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, richest 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. Perl 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 en masse from increasing their numbers. One of Perl'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 her advocacy would, years after her death, help spread millions upon millions of unsterilized Daukan shields to uteruses all over the global south. And we will talk more about that in part two. It'll 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 phrases that I have. I get to use as my band names and or screen name somewhere. That's definitely going to be happening soon.

I'm enjoying every bit of this level of building up of what hierarchy and supremacy 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 may be 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. I'll tell Raymond Pearl that when he stops having been dead for half a century. I want to give somebody some satisfaction and enjoy in their life. That's how I did it. You're welcome.

God. This is a tough one because a lot of the history we're talking about is misinterpreted by anti-birth control advocates, by hardcore Catholic and Christian advocates who just think they want to demonize plant parenthood

and they're wrong, actually, about what's bad. Margaret Sanger, there's a lot that's fucked up about her. They always lie about her 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 she actually did is that it's

very similar to the bad stuff they say. Right. That's kind of the whole beginning of everything, whether it's the Suffragette movement and how racist and fucked up the whole community was from get-go, but they did do some good work and you have to sit back and take,

yeah, taking back through okay, how awful is this and how do we need to correct it? 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 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. With the abolitionist movement, you have to point out, these people are on the right

side of history. It was a critical fight and a heroic fight and it's good that they did it. Also, a huge chunk of them were abolitionists because they didn't want black people anywhere near them. That doesn't mean that it wasn't good that they were abolitionists. It just means that, let's be honest

about what they were and it's the same with the Suffragettes. Absolutely we're fighting on the side of history and doing the right thing and it's good that they were there. A ton of them were racist as hell. Just see Harriet Tubman's A&I, a woman's speech. That's the same thing with abolitionists.

It's not that they didn't do a good thing. It's literally they just didn't like white people but that same time. Yeah, they're just racist. Everyone was. It's like you go back to the civil rights movement and a number of the black men who were prominent in the civil rights movement were fairy misogynists.

People are never perfect or even all that great usually, but it doesn't like what matters is 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 in like anyway. We definitely need to make sure you know the truth of it all before we idealize people in any such place. But as a rule don't make statues of people. I am not going to sit in a 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. Or a uterine depth charge. Both, again, great band names. I'm just saying best band names ever. Samantha

you got any plugables to plug before we roll out a part one? Well, if you guys want to find me on social media, I am under McVeigh Samantha on Twitter, or Sam McVeigh at Instagram. You can see other 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 Mom Never Told You, which is an intersectional feminist podcast, so if you're afraid of that, you probably won't like it. Also with iHeart. Yeah.

Check out Stuff Mom Never Told You on iHeart. Check out Samantha on the interweb net.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 Dalcon Shield. All that and more coming up. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first

season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver purse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date,

the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science

and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple

Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.