It Could Happen Here - Pronatalism

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

The gang talks about the pronatalist right in Trump's orbit, and historical examples of pronatalism from Japan, Spain, and Romania. Sources: https://www.vscw.ca/en/node/119 https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203059913-9/pronatalism-motherhood-franco-spain-mary-nash https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781438402062/html?lang=en https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15335899 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237296749_Marriage_squeeze_and_changes_in_family_formation_historical_comparative_evidence_in_Spain_France_and_the_United_States_in_the_twentieth_century   https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ypdy05jl9ohttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/us/politics/trump-birthrate-proposals.htmlhttps://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/report/treating-infertility-the-new-frontier-reproductive-medicine https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/2/2155893/-Texas-Republican-channels-Stalin-and-Putin-to-glorify-motherhood https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dot-memo-funds-communities-marriage-birth-rates_n_679bf8d8e4b0e1faebeef9c8See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Callzone Media. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the only podcast where anti-British discrimination is a way of life. James, are we allowed to say that? Do you remember the training I haven't done yet? I was given that training with full attention throughout the duration of the video. Every single time I've watched it. That's good. At various employers for the last half decade or so. There was no section on anti-British discrimination. Yet again, another example of that.

Can't see that. We've been victimized. Last time I took that training, there was just straight up anti-Asian racism in it that they didn't address at all. So I'm assuming if that's okay, then anti-British racism is fine. There's some shit in those videos, which is wild. Okay. There you go.

I think there's a lady who's literally called Karen and they do her wrong in the end of video. See, I am definitely pro-British discrimination, but you do get a point for having Peter O'Toole. So at least, it's not all the way because the O'Toole factor keeps you from the full might of my wrath, frankly. Fair is day, the greatest person. There we go. Yeah, I'm sure that's the case.

I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stone, and Robert Evans. This episode, we are talking about babies. Should there be more? Yeah. Mm-hmm. We're on a pronatalist kick. We're going to have that off-putting couple who look like vampires, but like not any of

the good kinds of vampires on the show. Very excited to have those people on. They seem nice. But before we do that, we all decided maybe we should talk about other pro-Natalist policies in world history and how well they've worked generally. We're going to start by talking about what the U.S. policy might be or the people proposing U.S. policy. And then we will discuss how those policies went historically. Yeah. So like to start with Trump's, besides one executive order in February

supporting IVF, the new administration has yet to tackle pro-natalist concerns on the policy front. But a collection of lobbyists, activists and influencers are vying for the president's ear while proposing a multitude of plans to grow the number of heterosexual marriages and incentivize childbirth. The pro-natalists certainly think that the new administration is at the very least ideologically sympathetic, if not in cahoots, with their agenda. The main ins on the pro-natalist front have come from the Peter Thiel tech-right wing of the White House. Right, this is like JD Vance and previously Elon Musk.

Yep. Musk has been doom-posting for years about how a drop in fertility rates could be leading to a large-scale population collapse. And at an anti-abortion rally this past January, Vance addressed the crowd saying quote I want more babies in the United States of America I want more happy children in our country And I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them Uh-huh. Yeah, and you got to like whatever you're listening to one of these things You got to like have a little parentheses anytime anytime someone says baby. There's a little parentheses there that says white this is real Nazi shit. Like a lot of this stuff is certainly like based on like great replacement rhetoric that

the alt-right like Trojan horse and like pushed forward in like 2018, which is now so widely normalized thanks to I mean, really Musk has done a lot of work in normalizing great replacement stuff. Yeah, Tucker Carlson too. And Carlson, of course. Well, and Musk's family goes into this, right? Like this is the kind of thing like his grandparents were involved in.

Like it was a little bit less of like the standard great replacement shit and a little more like focused on like we need to be breeding high IQ white people together Yeah, you check like that. That is that is what he inherits. He comes by it. Honestly, I guess you could say Oftentimes printed less rhetoric is also tied in with like the trad wife and like loss of traditional family Structure type stuff, right? Vance has laid blame at childless cat ladies and referred to our quote-unquote broken culture That attacks masculinity and turns our nation's youth into androgynous idiots. Hey shout out

Yeah, I've also started referring to women with kids as catless child ladies as a result of this People reacted very negatively. Wait. Don't let that stuff you rub it. A declining birth rate has also been attributed to women in the workplace who are not getting married and raising kids at home from an early enough age. Yeah. And some of this rhetoric has rubbed off on Trump, right? In Trumpet CPAC in 2023, he said, quote, we will support baby booms and we will support

baby bonuses for a new baby boom. I want a baby boom. Cool. Trump has floated a $5,000 cash quote unquote baby bonus to American mothers after delivering a baby, calling this proposal a good idea. Well Garrison, that's almost three months at a preschool. Oh, yeah, I'm sure that's enough. Not quite three months at a lot of preschools. Like not even great preschools. It's very, preschools are unbelievably expensive. The actual cause of like, of a declining birth rate is due to skyrocketing cost of living

so people aren't financially stable enough to have kids in their early 20s anymore. So instead they're waiting until their 30s. That's part of it at least, yes. If you want people to have kids more, you should make the world more affordable. And a $5,000 baby bonus does not actually solve the key issues that would cause people to be worried about, you know, trying to like get married and have kids at a young age in a world where that seems kind of like unfathomably expensive. Now luckily, Trump does have a few other ways of sorting out this problem. The new big, beautiful budget bill

that recently passed the House will create quote-unquote, mega savings accounts for new kids. And here, mega stands for money accounts for growth and in- for growth and advancement. Just fucking stop. Stop it. So when parents or guardians open a new mega savings account for their kids, the federal government will contribute $1,000 for babies born between January 1st, 2024 and December 31st, 2028. That'll help.

Great. Great. I believe California also does it. Yeah, California had something called the California Child Saving Accounts Program, which already gives children up to $1,000. And I think it's like a college savings account from what I understand. Yeah, that's pretty much what this is. Although specifically for the MAGA accounts, it also lists homeownership. Oh, cool.

Because this is a big part of this pro-natalist thing is you need to like own a home, get in a straight marriage, start having kids in your early 20s. Yeah, sure. Make Instagram videos of yourself chopping wood badly. Like we understand. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The big beautiful budget bill also prohibits Medicare funds from going to Planned Parenthood.

Great, yeah. Let me tell you, $1,000 American dollars, even with compounding interest, isn't going to do shit to buy you a home anywhere in the United States. Now, the Heritage Foundation's DeVos Center for Life, Religion and Family have pushed for a policy that exponentially increases the child tax credit for each additional child a married couple has. child a married couple has. This is a little bit similar to a policy proposed in 2023 by Republican Representative Brian Slaton of Texas, who proposed increasing property tax cuts for married heterosexual couples who have never been divorced and have four or more children starting after marriage. So there's a lot of caveats there. Jesus Christ, yeah.

Okay. Sure. Yeah. No, this't, are we taking issue with this? That is some, yeah, look, this is part of my British heritage, right? We developed our own religion so that dudes could get divorced. It is, it is, it is the Bill of Rights for British guys. Obviously a lot of, a lot of caveats in there so that you can have your little like trad Christian family. But four kids would equal a 40% cut. Ten kids would equal no property taxes at all. Well, I mean, shit, that's hard to argue with.

This is property taxes. You also have to own the property to begin with to be paying property taxes. All of these people want you to be like homeowners with a stay at home wife. This is what they want. But they don't want to actually do things to meaningfully make home ownership accessible to you. No, this is just like self-selecting for well-off white Christians, right? Yes, yeah, yeah, 100%.

Slayton said in a statement, quote, with this bill, Texas will start saying to couples, get married, stay married, and be fruitful and multiply, unquote. For fuck's sake. It's a disaster. And, I mean, like, a lot of this stuff is too, is there's sort of flailing reaction to, like, one of the things that actually drives, like, declining birth rates, which is not having teen pregnancies,

like, significantly decreases birth rates, because it turns out they're like, oh, yeah, right, it turns out a huge part of, like, why birth rates are so high is just direct social coercion. And if you stop having that or like, you know, the amount of the coercion decreases, then yeah, like fucking birth rates are going to decline because women aren't being forced to have babies.

Like, and, you know, and so they're trying to do all this like, you know, unhinged tinkering bullshit to sort of like, deal with the fact that if you don't force people to have Children as teenagers they won't yeah cuz life they quickly realized there's things in life like you know drugs and stuff Yeah, they'll go back to the club in March March, Trump called himself the quote-unquote, fertilization president. Oh my God. Jesus fucking Christ.

Ugh. Oh no. And the White House is expected to soon release a report on how to expand access and affordability of IVF. Now, this is where things get sticky. Uh, insert pun. There is hot debate amongst advisors and think tanks on the religious ethics of IVF, right? There's no real consensus among the pro-natalist voices who are lobbying Trump. This sort of breaks down into like the new tech right versus the more religious Christian

family sector of conservatism. And Vance is kind of caught in the middle of this. But these groups may end up compromising to form an alliance. Now, Heritage, the Heritage Foundation, recommends a program to use government funds for education that promotes quote-unquote natural fertility, teaching women how to track their menstrual cycles, using charting courses to both help get pregnant and avoid using birth control. They propose that food, nutrition, and lifestyle changes could improve quote unquote natural conception

instead of using assisted reproductive technologies. Heritage proposes something that they call restorative reproductive medicine as a holistic approach to treating infertility through quote unquote hormone balancing, dieting, and nutritional adjustments, environmental changes, and surgery." Unquote. Yeah, you just need some fucking, some of those baby teething pills Hyland's made that kill babies. That's what you gotta take. It's a holistic approach to your health.

Get some raw milk in there. Put a bunch of random chemicals and lead in your body from an unregulated supplement company. Heritage itself critiques IVF as failing to address the underlying causes of infertility, as well as, you know, out of concern for embryo personhood rights. For fuck's sake. So they advocate for embryo adoption and have proposed legislation to make the production of embryo spares illegal. Embryo adoption?

Because they believe that these are like full like people. Yeah. Now, on the other side of the pro-natalist right, you have people like the vampire couple that Robert mentioned, Simone Collins, a pro-natalist activist and failed Pennsylvania congressional candidate. She could still pull it off. Stay in line if your vote hasn't been counted, people. Her and her husband are self-described quote unquote techno puritans.

And she is the fucking stupidest shit. Like fucking damn it. Can we put these people on a boat and send it across the Atlantic? Can they get scurvy? Have they already got, they look a little bit like they may already have scurvy to be fair. They do look like they have scurvy constantly. Can we deprive them of lime juice and save the world from a fucking crisis?

Put them on the next starship and see how far up it gets. Yeah, let them colonize Mars. No, they won't get that far. Let them try. I support the human spirit. Collins is also the former managing director of an exclusive Peter Thiel founded social club called Dialogue.

Now she has called the new administration quote unquote inherently pronatalist and has sent several draft pronatalist executive orders to the White House. One of which would award a quote unquote national medal of motherhood to mothers with six or more children. This is some Trichescu shit. Like, I know we're going to talk about that, but Jesus Christ. She herself wants at least seven kids. And she claims to use special technology to select embryos with high IQs, which relates back to what Robert was saying earlier. Yeah. relates back to what Robert was saying earlier. Yes. So they use IVF to specifically select embryos that they think are naturally predisposed

to have more desirable traits, including high IQs. They have not discussed the exact method. That's why it's called special technology. Are they looking for one with the big head or something? So you don't know. I guess they're not even that far along, are they, when they're IVF? So that's always pretty fucked up. And then I guess, finally, one of the few things that actually has happened in advancement

of this ideology was way back, like in February, Trump's transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, who is a father of nine and has 10 siblings, sent out a memo directing his staff to prioritize transportation funds to, quote, give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average, unquote. Which would in effect mean less money for urban public transit and instead send it towards like wealthier, rural white conservative areas. Yeah, I'd imagine Latino communities have higher marriage rates, at least, than like the national average. Yeah, I'm not sure if Sean Duffy really wants his employees to select for that though.

No, neither am I. That's what I'm wondering for. Samuel Huntington thinks they have higher birth rates, right? Like that's his whole shtick. If you look at the full memo, I think this is just like a dog whistle for like white Christians. That is really what he's saying. Sick. Anyway, that is what I have for the current pro-natalist policies. We should go on an ad break and then return to learn the historical implications of pro-natalist policies. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left.

In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie.

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and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be.

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Yeah. And I guess I want to open on a kind of global thing, which is that concern over like birth rates for like fascists is a really old thing. I mean, it predates fascism. Like this is like, like if you go to like the 1870s, every single person is complaining about like, oh my God, the birth rate of the right with the white race keeps declining and we're going to get like overwhelmed by the Asiatic hordes. And then you go to like the Asiatic hordes, and it's like Japan has been having the same fucking panic

for literally so long. Like I cannot emphasize enough. You can just go back through newspaper archives and you just, it's, you're literally reading the same article over and over and over again, going back just decades and decades and decades. So like the first big modern freak out about birth rates is in like 1987.

Yeah. They have the first big like Japan birth rate declining freak out. This has been happening longer than like most of the people here have been alive. I can remember this from like my child. It's just been like, Oh, they're panicking about their birth rates again. Yeah. So like the running thing with Japanese politics, so we're roughly doing these in order of like most to least hinged in terms of like in terms of these like natalist policies.

Japan, I think has an interesting series of sort of political contradictions in their like kind of pro-natalist. Well, if they have political contradictions in their pro-natalist politics and political contradictions in their conservative faction, because Japan is basically like a one-party liberal democratic state. Liberal Democratic Party is the one party. This is a party established by World War II Nazi, but that means that they run all of politics. So like every political faction effectively runs through them.

Their early attempts in like the 90s are focused on the deregulation of daycare jobs. So basically their plan is like in the 90s and 2000s they're like, okay, we're going to deregulate the childcare industry so that we can have more affordable child, there'll be more childcare jobs so people can pay for childcare. This is how we're going to promote this. And this is sort of one of the first places you see this huge intra-class conflict between the pure social conservatives who want to just like send every woman back to the household to raise children and the business people who are like, no, you can't do that. We need to explain these women's labor to like make

money. And so the fight that starts to break out is this fight between like paying for child care leave versus like paying for childcare leave versus like paying for daycare. So originally their plan is like, okay, so we're going to do the daycare stuff. That doesn't work. Like none of these things they're going to do does jack shit, right? That's going to be a through line here. Yeah, yeah, like none of this stuff works.

And so like Shinzo Abe, I think is the most famous person who spends much time trying to deal with this. And like, again, so they have started worrying about this in 1987. It is now 2013. The birth rate keeps declining precipitously. Shinzo Abe, rest in piss you fascist bastard, is still trying to like cook something. Right, I'm going to read this quote from the archives of clinical pediatrics. Shortly after the formation of Abe's second cabinet,

the quote, task force for overcoming population decline was established in 2013, introducing three key strategies, supporting child rearing, reforming work styles and promoting marriage, pregnancy and childbirth. So you can do these are going to become sort of like the three pillars of Japanese pronatalist policy, right? A lot of it is focused on this sort of social push stuff to like promote the traditional family and promote marriage. And this hasn't ever really worked for this. Supporting child rearing is one that is going to get a lot of attention in subsequent administrations. There's a lot of attempts to reduce, like to reduce the cost of child rearing, where we're going to see them try like 35,000 different

like proposals to do this. The one that's actually interesting is reforming work style. So like part of the problem here is that, you know, everyone in Japan is working a just genuinely unhinged amount, unbelievably staggering overwork, right? I mean, it's one of these things that's like a persistent social crisis. There's a persistent sort of suicide crisis because of how long everyone is working all the time. So Shinto Abe's plan for this was to put into place a soft cap of,

you can only work a hundred hours a month of overtime. Now, this doesn't do shit, right? Like, 100 hours a month of overtime is enough to kill you. Right. Like, you know, especially when like your regular hours are this long. But this is again, this problem that he's having, which is that like, OK, so yes, you probably could maybe like people maybe would have more children if you weren't working literally all the time, you weren't just like being worked to death.

But that's really bad for Japanese business. And unlike quote unquote, Abe Namix, which is like a sort of, you know, economic plan like relies on maintaining this extremely high level of labor hours from everyone in the entire population. And it's also based on putting more women into the workforce to expand the size of the workforce to, you know, extract more hours so they can all these people can make more money. Right. They were also supposed to do free preschool for all children.

And this just like didn't happen, which over and over again, they're like, we're going to do these kind of like these, these kind of like, okay, we'll give, we'll give you some kind of welfare state bullshit, but only in order to like have kids and it just doesn't happen. And so, you know, this is one of Abe's big initiatives, but by the time he's like assassinated in 2022, he what he was, by by time his political coalition was finally detonated by by one by one guy with with an electric blunderbuss. My favorite politics. Oh God, it's so good, it's so good.

We have covered this extensively on the show. If you wanna hear the happiest I've ever been during an episode, including the day after Kissinger died, go find the episode I did right after Shinzo Abe was assassinated. The holy trinity of great days on the internet is that big stuck boat in the submarine that killed all those billionaires. Yeah. Oh, it was amazing. People say Biden gave us nothing.

There was some bangers on the timeline. There you go. So, alright, Shinzo Abe's successor is a guy named Fumio Kishida who lasts for a little bit and Kishida, every single Japanese government announces that they're going to spend like somewhere between 20 and like 15 and 20 billion dollars on pronatalist policies and mostly doesn't happen. But Kishida promises that he is going to spend 24 and a half billion dollars A lot of this money is going to be just straight up like child allowance

Japan has the system that they've been you know They've been sort of implementing over the course of like all of these fucking reforms, which is just like all right We're just gonna like hand you cash It's still not enough money to like substantively change stuff. But there's a lot of different kinds of cash policies. They have they have cash transfer policies that are just straight up like, OK, here you had a baby. We're going to give you this amount per month.

I think it's like 10 to 15000 yen, which hold on. Yeah. So it's like like 70 dollars a month, which is like not. Yeah, they are trying to expense state research on this. They're supposed to have these like counselors that like come check in on you and like give you education and stuff. They're also supposed to just like give you a whole bunch of basically like childcare equipment stuff and make sure you're getting medical care. And that's supposed to come out to about like $700 ish, roughly. You know, this is like the big sort of plan that they're doing. And then in 2024, Kishida is replaced by like some other dipshit who, you know, if he lasts

more than like two years, I guess I'll tell you his name. But he's, you know, attempting to go back to the sort of childcare side of it, right, which is his plan involves a bunch of things like childcare subsidies, and very importantly, like tuition free high school. So one of the continuous plans if you like if you go back to like, what I was talking about with they were supposed to do free preschool for all children, right? That never got implemented. Except in like the last two years, like Tokyo has started doing it just like as a city. Because Tokyo is one of the places where like, you know, the birth rate has been like dropping the fastest or whatever.

Sure. I imagine cost of living is also really high. Yeah, cost of living is really high. And it's also just like, you know, if you're working in an urban, like in an extremely urban city, you're working a just hideous number of hours, right? Yeah. There's also these supposed to be these massive, like, investments in providing child care and nursing, and you can see these kind of like, this point where they've reached this desperation point where they're trying both the sort of pro-business, like, fuck it. We'll pay for your child care and also we will raise taxes to like hand you money and also nursing stuff and also They're trying to there's like giant carve outs for this

But they're trying to set up a system where you can get full pay for couples who both take parental leave at the same time So they're trying everything right? They're trying like paid childcare. They're trying fuck it We'll just pay people to leave the workforce to have children They're trying just straight-up cash transfers. They're trying paying for medical care, especially medical care for disabled kids and None of this shit has done anything at all Right, like it just just absolutely jack shit, right? And if you want to look at like, okay It's like what what's sort of actually happening here

Right a lot some of it is just like overwork some of it is just if people who can have children have any kind of freedom and autonomy they just decide not to and so part of this is also just like and then this has Been one of the social pushes that that the conservatives have been dealing with is they've been trying to get people to marry younger because people are marrying later and thus they are like, you know, they're having kids later because they're marrying later. So and this is not working at all. Right.

But you can look at the series of structural contradictions in their political coalition and then then you can look at the fact that, like, again, one of the important ideological things here is that these people hate immigrants, right. And they don't they don't want immigrants. They want they want like Japanese babies. And so this is kind of like if you look at like, OK, why is none of this shit working right there, trying all these things to just avoid having more immigrants in the country and none of it is fucking working at all but you know like insofar as it's failing it's mostly they're trying some limited welfare stuff and they're doing a bunch of weird ideological stuff and it is going to get so much worse when every other country tries this yeah cool well you know what

else is gonna get worse probably the products and services that support this show. Yeah. Yep. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were

being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait.

Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal,

and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that are being naked together. How we love our family.

I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world. Live from the underground you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, Brazilian favela life and much more.

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All right, we're back. It's me. And predictably, I suppose I am talking about Franco as Spain. So, Francisco Franco attempted to rebuild Spain after civil war, both through explicit eugenics and through the nationalization of women's bodies. Abortion and contraception were banned, so abortion had been legal. Spain was one of the first countries to do that, right? When Federico Montseny, anarchist minister, made that legal, minister of, I guess, public health, that was made illegal. I think it didn't become legal again until about 2010 in Spain, abortion and unless it

was like a serious health issue, elective abortion I guess. Franco's military in the civil war consistently use sexual violence as a weapon and we can see this as a kind of prelude to his nationalization of birthing bodies, right? Kebode-Yangu, who is a Francoist general, makes a speech in July 1936, quote, Our valiant legionnaires and regulaires have shown the red cowards what true men are, and their women as well. This is totally justified, because these communists and anarchists, anarchate free love. At least now, they will know what real men are, not the militia gaze." This is a translation that I'm reading just so people can go to the original document. But gaze is not the word he used. A better translation would be a word that begins with

F. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. They will not escape, however much they kick their legs and scream. Like this is a general in their army making explicit rape threats, right? They weren't subtle about this. Yes. The Spanish Falange, which is Spain's fascist party also had a Césion Feminina, a women's section. My PhD supervisor, Pamela Radcliffe, has written extensively about this. The group very much served as kind of the propaganda arm of state natalist policy. It taught women from a young age, they were inferior and subject to men. They had to go through the organization's programs to do

anything, any engagement with the state. It had to first go through the women's section, right? If they wanted to get a passport, they wanted to get a driving license. If they wanted to engage with the world outside of their homes in any way, they had to go through this program, which indoctrinated them that their highest calling and only value was to have children. Women's role in the Francoist project then was childbearing and childrearing. Francoists, I'm going to use intellectuals here in quotation, scare quotes, frequently turn to phrenology to justify women's domestic role. They fucking loved a phrenology to justify women's domestic role. And they fucking loved a phrenology, right? It's great to go to like antiques markets in Spain because you can always

buy like a phrenology head. She's Christ. You can acquire like an OG one, you know, like, I bet if you know the right place to look, you could find some, uh, find the calipers. That's the dream. There was actually a lot of those, uh, secondhand stores in Portland. Yeah. Uh, shocking. Yeah, hands clasping me with Francoism. I found a lot of uses for those calipers,

let me tell you. No, I mean the phrenology skulls. Oh, okay. I've seen them all over town. Yeah, but I bet yours are replicas. I bet they're not like OG phrenology skulls. There's a market in France I went to that just had a bunch of monk skulls,

like real ones. Real monk skulls, yeah, seems fine. There was one that had been turned into a holder for a Bible, like they'd cut like an L-shaped cut in the skull. It was pretty cool, it was like three grand. Like you make a cursi for the Quran, but like. This was a while ago, but seemed like a good price.

Welcome to Skull Talk, your favorite podcast discussing craniums. Using the discount code, it could happen here. You can get 10% off your Skull Bible holder. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Okay. So one of the things they did was to increasingly marginalized midwives and

instead like have males doctors taking control of the child birthing process because midwives would advocate for their patients too much and they didn't feel that women belonged in work outside the home. A big part of Franco's pronatalism was the repudiation of anarcho-feminism that had been relatively important to the Spanish Revolution. The anarchists believed in revolutionary marriage and free love. Their follow through on those beliefs varied wildly. We can see that in some collectivized industries, for instance, the unions took on the role. They would assign women, I guess, I was going to say mentors, but apprenticeships. They wanted, for instance, the CNT Transport Union.

Once the revolution had happened and the CNT transport union once the revolution had happened and the CNT transport union had been collectivized, women who wished to be tram drivers or bus drivers could apprentice to men in that position so that in order to achieve more gender equality within that sphere. This is something that the Francoist state hated. It also had its own kind of unique take on eugenics that manifested in its pronatalism. Spain couldn't really do the straight racial eugenics, right? Like that doesn't really work with Spanish history, but instead they saw leftism as being some kind of genetic defect and something of a

pathogen that spread within society. Woke mind virus. Yeah, yeah. Good God. No, it's pulling from the same type of fascist thought. Yes, yes. You're 100% right. Yes, yes.

It also practiced something called antisemitism without Jews at this time. So there was a very, very small Jewish population. A real step forward. But nonetheless, Franco was constantly freaking out about Judeo-Bolshevism. He saw liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, feminism, Judaism, et cetera, as completely antithetical to Spanishness. And of course, they blamed us for their national decline, something that all fascists like to talk about. This anti-leftist eugenics and pronatalism extended to something called níños robalos, nens for stats in Catalan. These children were abducted from their parents. Sometimes this is when their parents were in jail. Sometimes it was when the parents had been killed. Sometimes it was when the

mother had been forced into incarceration by something called the Women's Protection Board. This theoretically run by Franka's wife was a way of institutionalizing quote unquote fallen women or women who were quote at risk of falling. It provides a way to force any woman you want to into an institution at rate. These children who were taken from their mothers were often trafficked and in some cases sold to approve families by nuns and priests. I'm going to quote one example from a BBC article. In 1971 Manoli, who was 23 at the time and not long married, gave birth to what she was told was a healthy baby boy, but he was immediately taken away for what were called routine tests. Nine interminable hours passed. Then a nun, who was a nurse, coldly informed me that my baby had died, she said. They would not let her have her son's body, nor would they tell her when the funeral would be. Some of these clinics went as far as to keep the

body of a dead baby in a freezer, and they would bring it out to show mothers. They even dug graves for babies, but many of those graves just contained stones or the remains of adults. These babies were then given or sold to other families and raised and in some cases, they lived their whole lives and died without ever knowing who their parents were. I remember I was doing my PhD when the initial research into this was being done and it is fucking horrible for people to find this out. Because the people who were stolen from their families in many cases are still alive and in most cases their birth certificate exists will say mother unknown. That was a process that existed to protect women who had children outside of marriage, but it was also used

to steal babies and leave no paper trail. At least in 2011, the BBC confronted one of the doctors who was doing this. It's kind of a wild BBC. I've linked it as an article. There was also like a, I guess it's like a podcast, a radio documentary where one of their reporters had recently had a baby. So it's able to make a, uh, make an appointment with the OBGYN who was stealing these babies. And, uh, when she confronted him, he, he grasped the crucifix and started brandishing at her in his incredible country. The reason that they did this right was because was because their fascism was of a unique kind

that was, you know, Paul Preston said that Frank wasn't fascist, he was something worse. They had what's called national Catholicism, right, which prevented them from doing sterilization or abortion. And so instead they felt that they could steal these children and sort of raise them outside of this leftist kind of pathogen. Instead they felt that they could steal these children and sort of raise them outside of this leftist kind of pathogen. I do love just, I'm working on the Salazar episodes right now. I love how often Iberians are like, we're going to do fascism, but we're going to put

some spins on it. Like how the Portuguese were like, we're going to do fascism, but with us having sex with absolutely everyone we're colonizing, and trying to make an argument to the fact that that makes us the good colonizers because of all of the sex assaults. We're not racist guys, it's fine. We're communing. God. Oh, Iberia, baby.

Spain is different as the slogan used to go. That was a Francoist tourism slogan back in the day. So the discourse of quote true Catholic womanhood was essential to Francoist nationalization of women. They were raised to serve the patria, right at the fatherland with their bodies, not their minds. In the Republic, Spain had used secular education to fight its perceived and real backwardness compared to the rest of Europe. The Francoist project did the opposite. It returned for its inspiration to 16th century Catholic texts

and they saw intellectual development as a risk to femininity and a risk to the ultimate goal of women's lives, which was motherhood. In terms of I guess birth rates, like they did have, you have a post-war baby boom, right? You have that everywhere that is affected by a large war. Like we, you war. There are pretty obvious reasons for this. And then birth rates do go up until the 1970s, 1980s, and then they start declining rapidly. And Spain is once again in a sort of, not so much a birth rate panic, I didn't think, but it is noted that Spanish birth rates have gone down since the 1980s. But nonetheless, Spanish birth rates never were particularly high compared to those in the rest of Europe, because

Francoism absolutely rat-fucked the economy, which made it harder for people to have more children. But yeah, that's what I've got. If you want to read more on Niños Robados, I think there's a TV series about it now, Stolen Children. I'm sure you can find it with subtitles, but someone made a documentary on this that was presented in an academic conference I did, and if I find the link, I will put it in the show notes. Hell yeah. Well, I think it's time to talk about Romania. Now, when it comes to who is the worst at doing pro-natalism. There's a lot of contenders, but I feel like

we got the Usain Bolt of natalism right here and it's a Ceausescu regime. So we got to peel back a little bit here and talk about, you know, when communism first came to Romania, which was like kind of the end of 47, early 1948. And in the first years of the communist regime, it brought the same changes that communist governments in Europe all tended to bring in the post-war period, and obviously earlier for the USSR. And a lot of these are good actually, right? Not to deny all the horrible things that were happening,

but life changes pretty dramatically in a positive way for a lot of women. This is true in Russia as well. Literacy for women rises, the employment rate for women rises, and this happens across society, right? A lot, the employment rate for women rises, and this happens across society, right? A lot of the poorest people in these societies experience substantial initial lifts, right?

And along with that, lifespan increases pretty dramatically, rates of accidental death fall pretty dramatically, and literacy increases. And again, it increases across the board, but it is particularly significant for women, right? And this is all lovely is particularly significant for women, right? And this is all lovely. These are good things, right? However, it comes with a problem for a lot of the leaders, and this is not just true in Romania, but we're talking about Romania here.

It comes with a problem for a lot of the leadership of Romania's Communist Party, which is that one of the things we see in every society when people have more and are doing better and live longer is that they start having less kids because among other things all their kids aren't dying. One reason why birth rates are high is people are like, yeah, well, like, but three of them might live, right? You know, I got to really pump these numbers up and have enough kids to keep this fucking farm going, right? And when that stops happening, women are like, well, maybe I don't need to have 11 kids.

Yeah. Right? Like if they're all gonna live to adulthood, I don't need 11 children to be adults, right? So birth rates start to fall. This freaks out though, a lot of these communists, because the kind of communists who are like leading Romania are very traditional Marxists, right? And Marx was what you call a physiocrat, right?

Which is a term that I found for the first time in a Journal of Family History article, but it's a term you can find other places. And the basic idea is that, and this is an idea that then it goes back to the original Marx, more people equals better economy, right? Equals more productivity. So falling fertility is seen as a potential calamity for the state, you know? Obviously, this isn't how it works. Like the US has had fertility rates falling and like economic prosperity rise in the same period of time

But this is like a thing that they think right then that like if we don't bump up these birth rates We're going to deal with like an actual economic disaster So by the time Nikolai Ceausescu takes over as party leader on June 23rd 1966 the problem is serious enough in his eyes that it had become a crisis. And the birth rate had declined pretty precipitously. In 1955, there were about 25.6 live births per thousand people in Romania. And by the time Ceausescu takes over, there's about 14 live births per thousand people, right?

Now, for reference, both of those are still higher than the US birth rate right now. We're at about 11, a little less than 11 live births per thousand people in the country. The only reason why the US population continues to grow is immigration, but that's a topic for another day. Ceausescu stated that women needed to use their influence to rebuild the family. And per that article in the Journal of Family History, Ceausescu declared that backward attitudes and expressions of levity toward the family must be combated with determination because they result in an increase in the number of divorces and the disintegration

of the family and in the neglect of the children's education and training for life. And this is something that had come alongside the revolution, right? That there's a lot of more critical ideas about these traditional concepts like the family in the society that had existed before. And a lot of people are like, well, but you know, we're, we're becoming more scientific. You know, we have like women have jobs now, maybe a lot of these attitudes about what the family should be are kind of outdated. And he's saying, no, no, no, no, they're not, they're not. You need to go back to having a shitload of kids, right? And he announces a new initiative to increase the population

of Romania by 30% by 1990. So, which I don't know if the idea that would ever be possible is a long shot, right? So unhinged. That's a massive change in society. But Ceausescu isn't a logic thinker guy, right? He's not like running the numbers hardcore here. He's just sort of throwing out some shit that sounds good.

And so to encourage the shift, he unleashes a famous raft of new legislation aimed towards like pro-natalism, towards massively increasing the birth rate. The first step is that abortion is banned for nearly all women in the country. There are some exceptions. For example, you can qualify for an abortion

if you already have five children under 18 in the house concurrently, which is nuts. There's one or two other exceptions based on your age, but there aren't many exceptions, per an article in PubMed. In addition, employed women under age 45 years are required to undergo monthly gynecologic examinations at their workplaces and any pregnancies detected are monitored to term. Unmarried persons over 25 years of age and childless married couples without a valid medical reason for infertility are assessed a 30% tax on income.

Women who refuse to have children have been termed deserters. Despite official pronatalist policies, it has been estimated that 40% of the 700,000 Romanian women pregnant in 1985 had illegal abortions. A special unit has been established within the state security police to combat this practice. So- We're so close to this. We are not, they really want to do all of this.

We're like knocking on the door. They are, like that is the thing that I really wanna drive home, is that the closest that I have found in all of my readings, the closest direct graph to what guys like Vance and Musk are suggesting for US policy is Romania. It's Romania, yeah. Like, and it's also the worst this has ever worked.

When I was a lot younger, like when I was 16, I volunteered in an orphanage for neo-divergent kids in Romania. Jesus fucking Christ. Well, I mean, they created a culture of child abandonment, right? Yes. Yeah, we'll be talking about that. That shit fucked me up. You shouldn't send your 16-year-old children to do that, to be clear. No. But like...

No, and you're encountering it after the worst of it too, which we'll talk about here. Not to minimize the experience, but we'll be discussing where it was at its worst. So it's worth noting that while women did start working at a higher rate after communist takeover, that started to plateau by the time that Ceausescu, because obviously like there was still a lot of, communism doesn't get rid of men being shitty to women, right?

It does tend to, things do get a lot better, right? Sometimes it empowers shitty man And at the start like kind of right around when he announces these this set of fertility laws He does try to institute a policy with the goal of increasing the number of women working at high positions in different state departments Right. There is an initial like we're going to break the glass ceiling kind of thing, but that doesn't last long He basically cancels any sort of messaging or work on the policy after his wife, Elena, is made a member of the party executive committee. He's like, women have gone fired up. Look at my wife. Classic Chichescu. Sample size of one.

Classic guy who's going to die with his wife in a basement. So as is always the case with shit like this, women were not equally impacted by the abortion ban. Largely, the impacts were pretty wildly divergent based on your level of wealth and social class. And I'm going to quote from an investigation by the NGO Helsinki Watch, who conducted a deep investigation into all of this immediately after the regime fell. Women were not equally affected by the pronatalist policies. Members of the urban middle class managed somehow or another to get contraceptives on the black market.

Oh, I should also note contraceptives were basically made illegal, with the exception of light condoms. They could also obtain medical abortions. A Bucharest student candidly informed Helsinki Watch that several years ago when his girlfriend became pregnant, the abortion had cost him 5,000 lay, or about $50 on the black market. And several women with professional degrees reported matter-of-factly that they had simply refused to cooperate with government gynecological inspectors who came to their institutes without suffering any reprisals, nor were the most rural segments of the population deeply affected.

The Orthodox Christians had long shunned birth control and abortion, and others, like the Roma, had not practiced it. The brunt of the policy fell on the lower middle class, particularly factory workers, single women, urban Roma, and those from disorganized or troubled families, none of whom had the money or connections to circumvent the regulations. Their options were as limited as they were life threatening. Some used a variety of would-be abortifacients, others availed themselves of the services of a back-alley abortionist.

Still others carried the term. And the number of deaths, the mortality rate for women as a result of this did rise. There's a lot of hideous stuff there. We're kind of doing the shortest version of this, but I don't mean to paper over that. A lot of women died and suffered lasting injury, infertility, and a number of other things because of different back alley abortions and weird drugs that they were given. But it's important to note that women who had money and a position in the social class could still gain access to this shit.

And that's how it will work here too. These Republican congressmen will not be restricting their family members from having access to this stuff. They'll be restricting poor people. Now, the first thing I should know about this whole raft of policies Ceausescu introduced is that they did not work. That Journal of Family History article that I've quoted from a couple of times here ran the numbers to try to analyze how well did this, like how did these policies correspond

to birth rates in Romania? And it is true that after the first major laws were pushed in 67 and 68, there was a brief surge in birth rates, but that fell very quickly and had completely disappeared by the 1970s. Things were back to baseline. So in 1974, Cheskuh launches another push to increase birth rates. And again, they briefly increase and then fall a year or two later. This process plays out a couple of times throughout the administration.

And one of the things that's important to note is that the increase that happens after every new sort of like focus on birth rates is less each time, right? It gets less effective every time. Now, the analysis in that paper concluded that birth rate would only rise when the state applied direct pressures on the population. Otherwise it dropped, right? Because this just doesn't work. Like you're not fundamentally changing anything and and none of these incentives, because they're

expensive. And in Romania's case, the country literally didn't have money to provide much in the way of incentives, right? But they never are going to work. As we went over earlier, the ones being proposed here are wildly insufficient to deal with the cost of having kids, let alone a bunch of fucking kids. And none of the people in charge in the Republican Party have any interest in making life affordable for people who are not rich.

Now the situation that this led to by the time the Tuchescu regime fell in 89 was also pretty catastrophic because there had been surges in births, right? In births of kids to parents who, because the people who can't get away from this tend to be the poor, could not take care of these kids, right? And there was also a surge in kids as a result of the general surge in birth rate, but also as a result of different sort of issues with nutrition and whatnot in Romania. A lot of kids who had different physical and mental disabilities, right, who were just abandoned straight away because their parents could not take care of them.

By 1990, there were an estimated 130,000 children in orphanages and homes for the handicapped, these institutions that had been set up in Romania. And there were like posters that were going around that were part of the pro-natalist campaign that basically said, hey, if you have a kid you can't take care of, or that's not like working out for you, the Romanian government

can handle it better than you. So like, who cares? Have another kid and we'll just drop it off with us if you can't take care of them. Right? Like that was literally part of the propaganda campaign that led to again, like 130,000 kids in orphanages. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah.

That Helsinki article I found quoted from a different piece of Western news media, like a team of journalists that went to a town called The Dell after Ceausescu fell. And this is how that article opens. On the second floor of the state-run institution, here dazed toddlers lie or sit in iron cribs in close, stuffy rooms. Their foreheads are speckled with flies and with scabs and bruises that come from banging their heads and mouths on crib rails. Some cry, but most are silent and appear bewildered behind their bars with the doomed air of laboratory

animals. Down the hall other cribs hold smaller children, pale skeletons suffering from malnutrition and disease. Despite the heat of the day, several of the children are wrapped in dirty blankets. From one still bundle, only a bluish patch of scalp is visible. Asked if the child inside is alive, an orderly says, of course, and pulls back the covers. The tiny skeleton stirs, turned onto its side and groans.

Ugh. Yeah. There's worse. This is not the worst. Like, this, like, Helsinki article goes into, like, how in the homes for the handicapped, the children are just ignored. They can go months without any real human contact other than the bare minimum of being fed. There's no, there's no one watching these kids. Like, this is some of the most cruelest and most hideous systematic abuse of children I've ever heard of.

A lot of children die. AIDS spreads through some of these facilities like wildfire. I really cannot exaggerate the horror of these institutions. If you do want to read more, there's two articles I'll recommend for you that I'm not going to quote up from now because we're already going long enough. But there's the Romanian Orphans Are Adults Now, an article in the Atlantic, that's the title. You should check that out. And then Ceausescu's Children and The Guardian, both of those articles do a good job of providing additional context and horror on this. But I think it's important to note that what happened in Romania is what sounds

most familiar to the programs being pushed today and also easily the worst this has ever gone. I mean, yeah, especially combined with like R.F.K. Jr.'s policies. Yeah, that is like, yeah, yeah. It takes a lot for me to be like kind of shocked and horrified these days. Yeah. But that stuff is grim It's some of the worst shit. Yeah

Yeah, oh boy. I remember that the time there was like concern if like kids were really nonverbal Yeah, like or they just had never been talked to oh my god Because right they've been institutionalized from such a young like I was there probably About 12 years after the end of the regime so that these kids were in their teens. I guess. Oh my god Yeah, I remember teaching little kids to ride bikes who like I've never really been able to play outside very much and it was fucking Yeah, yeah that shit will fuck you up. Yeah, that's a good museum I'll see if I could find where it is because they've maintained one of the old orphanages as it was like with the iron cribs and shit

Mm-hmm, and they have like projections on the walls of the kids rocking and banging their heads someone had filmed Yep, that shit is disturbing like I Wouldn't read any of those articles for going to bed. Yeah Anyway, this has been it could happen here All right. Bye Anyway, this has been It Could Happen Here. All right, bye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us

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