Part Two: The Population Control Movement examines Margaret Sanger's complex legacy, noting her eugenicist focus on the "unfit" rather than genocide, before tracing the post-WWII shift to Global South overpopulation under Eisenhower and USAID director Ray Ravenholt. The narrative details the deadly Dalkon Shield scandal, where unsterilized IUDs caused infections and deaths in nations like Ethiopia and Guatemala while officials dismissed fatalities as promiscuity to prioritize birth prevention. Ultimately, the episode reveals a persistent ideology where individual lives are expendable for population targets, linking historical atrocities to modern figures like Bill Gates despite recent repudiations of racist overpopulation theories by groups like the Sierra Club. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:03:45
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I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shall we stay with me each night, each morning?
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode of my next guest.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's the podcast that it is.
This is the podcast that it is not the one it's not.
I'm Robert Evans, Behind the Bastards, part two of our population.
Thank you.
I'll never do that again.
I'm so sorry.
I liked it.
No, I feel like I'm getting all of the treats right now between the appropriate intro and then the singing intro, which you say you're going to do neither one of these again.
Uh-uh.
I feel like that's a good idea.
No, next episode I'm going to introduce by just shouting out the name of a famous ethnic cleansing.
And then, yeah, it's going to be very bad.
But this time, you got a song.
Of course, our guest today in part two of our population control episode, as in part one, is Samantha McVeigh of Stuff Your Mom Never Told You.
Stuff Mom Never Told You.
Stuff Mom Never Told You.
Yeah.
No, you're.
Oh, and my mom specifically.
Yeah, yeah.
Too.
How are you doing, Samantha?
Has life changed radically for you since part one?
Well, I did go visit my dog who I do put her away during recordings because she is a very loud barker.
But yeah, so, you know, that always makes me a little happier.
That's good.
Yeah, it's always good to see dogs.
I don't remove Anderson because I have separation anxiety.
Yeah.
But I feel like Anderson's so much better behaved than Peaches.
Peaches is just kind of a loud.
Just wait for somebody to get a package delivered.
She hates the package delivery, Pete.
Sanger and Eugenics00:15:32
She's like, is it for me?
No, fuck you.
Right.
Anderson has that in common with Jeff Bezos.
There you go.
Wait, is Anderson making just as much money for every package being delivered too?
Anderson makes $32,000 a second.
Son of a bitch.
Yeah, and she does not share a dime of it.
It's very frustrating.
No, very greedy dog I have.
Yeah, no.
She has so many jet skis that she can't even use.
You gotta make that bank.
Do you?
You do you, Anderson.
Speaking of making that bank.
Not at all, speaking of making that bank.
Speaking of population control, when we left off our long winding story about the Dow Con Shield and the population control movement, we had gotten to Margaret Sanger.
Have you heard of, does that name ring a bell to you, Samantha?
Yeah, of course we have kind of mentioned her previous episodes with previous.
Yeah, a little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah, she's, you know, again, kind of seen as the founder of Planned Parenthood, at least the organizations that became it and popularizer of the term birth control.
And in many ways, Margaret was a bridge between the eugenics movement, which was fundamentally racist, and the population control movement, which was usually racist, but not necessarily racist.
It's actually a much more complicated kind of terrible.
Margaret was not a eugenicist in the Nazi way.
She supported birth control access for everybody, including the kind of white people that you kind of assume she felt were a superior race.
She was comfortable talking to fascists.
In her 1938 autobiography, she wrote, always to me, any aroused group was a good group, and therefore I accepted an invitation to talk to the women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan at Silver Lake, New Jersey.
One of the weirdest experiences I had in lecturing.
So she did talk to the KKK.
There are pictures that will claim to be her with the KKK.
They're not her.
There's no picture of that meeting, but she did give a speech to a women's KKK group.
And you can find a lot online about Sanger's racism.
It's a very frustrating subject to research because she definitely was problematic, but also her status as founding mother of the safe contraception movement in the U.S. has made her the target of a bunch of disingenuous right-wingers who want to paint Planned Parenthood and birth control as part of a racist plot to wipe out black people.
And that is not true.
It wasn't true of Margaret Sanger, to be honest.
She did embark on something called the Negro Project, and that is not a great thing to call anything right.
Yeah.
But it was not what you might assume it was.
It was an effort to spread education and access to birth control in black communities, particularly throughout the South.
The reality of the project is complex.
Senger and her colleagues did deliberately appeal to white racists in their attempts to get funding for the project.
I'm going to quote from a write-up by New York University here.
Sanger, Reinhardt, and Senger's secretary Florence Rose drafted a report on birth control and the Negro, skillfully using language that appealed to both eugenicists fearful of unchecked black fertility and progressives committed to shepherding African Americans into middle-class culture.
The report stated that Negroes present the great problem of the South as they are the group with the greatest economic health and social problems and outlined a practical birth control program geared toward a population characterized as largely illiterate and that still breed carelessly and disastrously.
A line borrowed from a June 1932 birth control review article by W.E.B. Du Bois.
So, again, very problematic.
Also, quoting W.E.B. Dubois.
Yeah.
And it's, it was not, again, this is framed in modern times by usually like right-wing anti-birth control people as like evidence of her racism.
The Negro Project was very popular with black community leaders at the time, and it would be unfair to frame it as an act of genocide.
Senger wrote repeatedly of the importance of bringing in black doctors, stating at one point, I do not believe that this project should be directed or run by white medical men, which is good if you're going to do a healthcare project like focused on the black community.
Like that, that shows like she was not, like she was capable of understanding like what was necessary in order to actually reach people.
In 1939, some now, so that's kudos, I guess.
Yeah, yeah.
In 1939, she argued in a letter that black ministers needed to be heavily involved in the project in order to gain the trust of their communities.
We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.
Again, some problematic language there, but also like there's no evidence she was actually going in for genocide because she was, again, doing the same thing with white people.
She was a birth control across the board advocate, right?
She wanted everyone to have more access to contraceptives.
There are people on the right, like Danish D'Souza, who will spread wildly untrue claims about Sanger, like that she called black people human weeds and a menace to civilization.
And there is no evidence of this.
Sanger's own legacy contains enough problematic facts without making up lies.
She was a eugenicist, and she wrote in 1923 that birth control does not mean contraception indiscriminately practiced.
It means the release and cultivation of the better elements in our society and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extinction of defective stocks, those human weeds who threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.
So she did call people human weeds, but she wasn't referring to black people.
She was referring more to mentally challenged people, more to people with like, who are prone to diseases.
And that's bad.
Like, that's really bad.
But she was not like a for exterminating everything but white people.
She was for exterminating people she considered unhealthy, or at least exterminating them from the gene pool, which is again bad, but let's be accurate about the kind of bad it is, you know?
Right.
Yeah, we don't need to make it any more criminal.
I don't know how I'd say that because it's not flowery.
No, it's bad.
It's already bad.
She didn't want to make humanity better by wiping out black people.
She wanted to make black people and white people better by wiping out folks who had what she considered to be like bad qualities through selective breeding.
And that's really terrible.
Also, to classify for herself what those bad qualities are.
Yes.
She just picked that up.
Perfect.
Yeah, that is bad, but like it's not the kind of bad.
Like again, because they try to frame that, like, no, the progressives have always been trying to wipe out black people.
Like, that's not what she was doing.
We don't need that.
And misinformation.
She was just a bad person.
There's plenty that's bad about her.
Yeah.
Like, let's be intellectually honest when we condemn someone.
She also stated during another speech, I believe now, immediately, there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.
You know, that's bad.
But again, it's the kind of like part of why they like to try to frame her badness as something different is because if you're accurate about it, you can find a fuckload of Republicans who say the poor should starve, right?
Like the people who can't work on their own.
You can find Jordan Peterson talking about like how terrifying it is that some people aren't intelligent enough to be in the military and like say like, because so what do we do with those people?
Like that's a really like what Margaret Sanger was saying back then is still common today.
People dress it up a little bit more.
I mean, it kind of relates to the COVID thing.
It's like, eh, that's fine.
There are already problems if they die.
So it's a problem.
They're unproductive.
Yeah, they're unproductive.
They're on the government poll.
Exactly.
Yeah, she just, she was bad.
She just was not the kind of bad people like D'Souza like to paint her as.
And in fact, a lot of progressive black leaders at the time liked Margaret Sanger and what she was trying to do.
In one 1939 letter to Dr. C.J. Gamble of Procter ⁇ Gamble fame, she urged him to get over his resistance to hiring a full-time Negro physician as, quote, the colored Negroes can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table, which means they're ignorant, superstitions, and doubt.
And again, she's number one saying that black people are ignorant and superstitious, which is bad, but also saying that, like, no, you get educated black people to talk to them about birth control.
So again, she's a problematic person, but not what D'Souza likes to paint her as.
She was very paternalistic in her dealings with black people.
Obviously, that is extremely clear from reading anything about her.
But her own letters and correspondence don't show she wanted to eliminate groups of people.
Other than like, she wanted to eliminate groups of people, I guess, but not the way that is portrayed.
In 1946, she wrote that, quote, the Negro race has reached a place in history when every possible effort should be made to have every Negro child count as a valuable contribution to the future of America.
Negro parents, like all parents, must create the next generation from strength, not from weakness, from health, not from despair.
See?
It's complicated here.
Especially since one of the things historians who are honest will point out is that if you're judging people by the standards of the time, Margaret Senger was woke for her period of time.
Like she had enlightened views on race relations for the time, right?
Yeah.
She brought some kind of equality and understanding that the way to talk to people is not by telling them what to do, but to actually include them, I guess.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
To include them and to include their community and to like, yeah.
Again, everything is bad back then.
And it's still bad now.
Everything was even worse then.
I guess in that standard, in that time standard, she was seen as progressive.
And that layer, as again, like the 80s when they stopped saying things as well.
Wow.
Yeah, she was better on race relations than most white people of her social class in that time.
Because her actual thing wasn't race as much as it was eliminating people she thought weren't intelligent enough, people who were poor and thus unintelligent.
Like that was the kind of people that Margaret Sanger wanted to wipe out.
Yeah.
She just wanted, you know, to kill off a certain other group.
It's fine.
Everything's fine.
Yeah, it's fine.
So it's, yeah, I'm going to quote now from a write-up in the Journal of Past and Present that kind of points out the actual kind of eugenicist Margaret Senger was.
She argued that contraception was not merely a personal choice, but a public good, indeed, a panacea for social problems.
For the unfit, it was a duty.
And Senger became convinced that states had to intervene when necessary to prevent their propagation.
Her movement would thus court government repression to gain visibility and sympathy for the cause of liberating individuals from unwanted births while striving to win state support for top-down programs to shape populations.
Senger herself felt that she never had a country and instead devoted her life to the movement.
For her, birth control was a secular faith that would advance peace between peoples by reducing Malthusian pressures and depriving militant nationalists of cannon fodder.
So that is interesting to me because that's why she's kind of the founder of the population control movement.
And that's where it splits from eugenics because she's not talking about like, I want the white race to succeed.
She's talking about I want to engineer humanity and birth control is the way to do that.
And I'm, you know, she, above all else, frightened of overpopulation and particularly overpopulation of poor people, right?
That's kind of her thing.
So yeah, in the 1930s and 40s, obviously, eugenics was still very big.
Various fascist states adopted hardcore racist eugenicist policies.
Hitler's policies were based heavily on a different state and federal policies in the United States that had been aimed at breeding and immigration restrictions of certain groups of people.
Hitler described the invasion of Eastern Europe and its subsequent genocides as the planned control of population movements to restore the numbers and qualities of the Aryan race.
Japan's imperial government, on the other hand, set itself to the task of purifying what they called the Yamato race.
Now, when all of the dust had settled from World War II, the horrors of the death camps proved to be the nail in the coffin for eugenics as a worldwide movement.
Obviously, remnants of eugenics policies remain in the U.S. for a frightening long time, and one can argue even into today in some ways.
But no longer was eugenic thinking something you could advocate openly without drawing nasty comparisons to Nazis.
The Nazis kind of kill eugenics as a respectable movement because of, you know, the death camps.
Like, people see where that leads.
But population control.
Like, this is part of why what's kind of like brilliant about what Senger and other population control advocates do when they split from the eugenics movement.
Population control only gets more popular after World War II.
Margaret Senger herself even pointed to Nazi extermination centers as evidence of the quote widespread devaluation of human lives that was caused when people didn't have birth control.
Like because basically there were so many useless people that it made everyone's life worth less.
And that's what made these massacres possible.
And instead, if we had just sterilized people with quote dysgenic qualities of body and mind, these death camps would never have become a thing.
That's a whole reach.
Like that's taking the wrong lesson, Margaret.
Games like you had to play in order to justify why your cause could be better than this bad cause, but because it wasn't happening, it happened.
Yeah.
Yeah, it did.
It's and it's like, that's a bad way to explain.
It's all bad.
It's very bad.
It's horrible.
Yeah.
So Senger and her fellow travelers believed that intelligence was the most important quality to select for.
Idiots, they felt, should be discouraged from breeding.
Obviously, there's a lot of problems with this, but the chief one is that dumb and poor were synonyms for people like Margaret Sanger.
And they always have been for the population control movement.
When they talk about wanting to like, you know, stop unintelligent people from breeding, they're talking about poor people, right?
What they really mean is uneducated or not educated to my standards.
Alduis Huxley in 1948 cited research that suggested an inverse correlation between intelligence and fertility.
Basically, Huxley was pointing out that like intelligent people have less children and he called for a world population policy.
And in this, Huxley was making the same argument that Mike Judge did in the movie Idiocracy, which is why I find that movie problematic.
Because the whole, the fundamental idea, like idiocracy is everything Margaret Sanger was talking about.
If we let dumb people breed, the world will become stupid, which isn't how genetics works.
But yeah, it's bad.
It's frustrating to me, like the degree to which people are like, right now it's just like idiocracy.
And it's like, no, it's not.
Like these people are, yeah, anyway, very frustrating.
I feel like the whole concept of who is an idiot and who isn't is problematic in itself.
Yeah.
And it's part of, you know, honestly, like the fact that there's so many folks who are like, you know, quote-unquote coastal elites who like declare folks in the deep south to be dumb because of like the way they talk or the differences in their education is part of what like has makes those people easier to recruit by folks who are trying to take advantage of them.
It's very, it's all very frustrating.
It's it's very frustrating.
But you know what's not frustrating?
This is frustrating.
It's not time for an ad pivot.
I'm just going to keep talking about racism.
Yeah, sorry.
In the late 90s, that was a little bit of a fake out there.
You see that?
That was good.
I was ready.
I was like, wait, what are we doing here?
You're like, no, we're going to.
Is there a second part of this segment that I didn't know about?
We're going to dive right back into bigot Alduis Huxley.
So in the late 1940s and early 50s, thinkers like Huxley began to panic over the thought of a population explosion, which they considered to be an existential threat on the level of a nuclear war.
Presidents and Birth Control00:06:11
Because the poorest nations on earth, the global south, had the highest populations and most rapid rates of population growth, this is where population control advocates focus their efforts.
So again, we're not racist.
We're not trying to cult certain races, but the poor are having the most babies, and we want to stop that.
And also, all of the poor live in these specific countries and they're not white.
Right, right, right.
It's not about you.
It's not about race.
Yeah.
In 1958.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In 1958, Dwight D. Eisenhower called a meeting of his National Security Council to discuss foreign aid.
He told them they neglected what he viewed as the biggest threat to their future, even more dire than the Cold War.
And I'm going to quote from historian Matthew Connolly here, who's quoting someone who was in that NSC meeting with Eisenhower.
In all our discussions of the problem of underdeveloped countries and the kind of assistance which we could effectively provide them, we had not yet faced up to what was really the most serious problem, namely that of exploding population growths.
As far as he could see, continued the president, the only solution to this problem throughout the world was finding an effective two-cent contraceptive.
Eisenhower thought that something drastic had to be done to solve this problem, though he certainly did not know how to get started on this solution, and he furthermore could not himself get it started.
So Eisenhower did form a presidential commission on U.S. foreign aid and tasked them with the goal of finding ways for the U.S. to help poorer nations reduce fertility rates.
In an NSC meeting, he confided to his men that overpopulation was, quote, a constant worry to him and from time to time reduced him to despair.
So Ike's is the basics.
I've been trying to throw him in.
Basis for Thanos.
That's what I'm going to go with.
Yeah, he's the basis for this marble.
We're the Thanos character.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm weaving it in now.
I will say, though, Eisenhower also doesn't think that the president can do anything about this.
He thinks that that's like not the job of the federal government to provide contraceptives.
So he thinks it's critical and important, but he also thinks that I can't do this or have the government do this because that would be wrong, which I don't know, seems weird to me.
Yeah.
Around the same time, population control advocates had started pushing the UN, which was new at the time, and U.S. government to distribute contraceptives in poor countries as a way to curb birth rates.
But Ike refused to consider this, stating, I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or government activity or function or responsibility.
Once he left office, Eisenhower became the honorary co-chair of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, right alongside Harry Truman.
Yeah, I bet you didn't know that.
Harry Truman and Eisenhower were like chairmen of the Planned Parenthood.
I'm having so many questions right now.
Republicans used to be very different.
Hmm.
I mean, again, we talked about this in an episode we just recorded, but like Barry Goldwater, who was like seen as the first Trump, like was a pro-abortion access advocate at the end of his life.
So Republicans have really gone off the deep end recently.
But it is worth pointing out how recent their like antipathy to birth control and stuff is.
Right.
I mean, to be fair, the difference today seems to be that they're more worried about, you know, people being born as to whether or not they die later.
They're okay with the dying later part now.
They have always been because Dwight Eisenhower was a big murdering people advocate.
What a title.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, and in fairness to Ike, most of the people he murdered were Nazis.
So like, you got to give him some credit.
But he killed a lot of people who weren't Nazis.
We could talk about the Congo and shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think that was under him.
And like, you know, Korea.
Well, no, that was Truman, I guess.
Yeah.
A lot of the Cold War started.
Yeah.
I mean, Eisenhower's complete.
Korean was under Truman.
Yeah.
Eisenhower is complicated because he is one of the only presidents, maybe the only, whoever like directly denounced the military-industrial complex.
And he did it right when it was like starting off.
He was like, this is happening and it's bad and it's going to destroy our entire country if we let it.
But also, he's who it got started under.
And he let it happen.
And then kind of on his way out was like, oh, by the way, I left y'all with a big old problem.
So I don't know.
Complicated figure, Eisenhower.
Still is one of the best presidents we ever had, but all of our presidents are criminals.
So, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
Quotation marks around best.
So, yeah, once he left office, Ike winds up as the honorary co-chair of Planned Parenthood, and in this position, he turned his focus to lambasting welfare programs, including federally funded birth control, which had just started to be a thing.
His issue was that the United States was spending money with one hand to slow up population growth among responsible families, and with the other, providing financial incentives for increasing production by the ignorant, feeble-minded, or lazy.
Oh, now that's fun to me.
Not racial talk at all.
No, no.
What's fun about that is like, obviously, Dwight was not a Nazi because he helped destroy the Nazis, but also feeble-minded is almost directly the translation of one of the terms that the Germans used to justify the eugenics programs that turned into the Holocaust, right?
You know, useless eaters was a less polite term the Germans had for years.
Useless eaters?
I don't know.
Yeah, so the Holocaust started not with the extermination of the Jews or of other races, but with the extermination of, again, what were called useless eaters.
And this a lot has its roots a lot in, so like a million Germans starved to death during World War I because the British blockade them and Germany cannot feed itself, which is like one of the things that is why Hitler invaded Eastern Europe, why he wanted to get Ukraine in particular.
And so one of the things Hitler wanted to do when the Nazi thinkers wanted to do was get rid of all these quote-unquote useless eaters because they were afraid that when Germany was blockaded again in the inevitable next war, these people would use up like precious food stores that working people could be.
And so the Holocaust started with the gassing of physically handicapped people who were seen as, again, useless eaters.
Like that's where it got started.
Before they gassed people on a racial level, they were gassing the disabled.
Nazi Rhetoric Roots00:15:57
So.
Wow.
Cool stuff.
And again, Eisenhower's rhetoric directly mirrors what the Nazis were saying in the early period of their time in power, which is cool.
Very cool.
Such a delight.
And good.
Yeah, a delight.
Such a delight.
Robert, you know what else is a delight?
You know what doesn't advocate for the extermination of large segments of the population?
Perhaps the products and services that sponsor this very podcast?
That's true.
They do not.
They absolutely don't.
Every time we get a new sponsor, we send them an email that says genocide with a question mark.
And they always respond, no.
And then we're good to go.
I felt like it's like, shrug.
Is it the shrug emoji?
No, no, we only accept a hard no.
Okay, that's one of our lines.
Yeah.
Oh, that's good.
Yeah, that's why we are not sponsored by Procter Gamble because they gave us the shrug emoji and we were like, that's not enough.
That's not enough.
IG Farben had the same response, which, you know, shocking from the makers of Zykwan B. Anyway, here's the ads.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
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Listen to the girlfriends.
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Next guest, you know, from Stepbrothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
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I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
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He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
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If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey, who did it?
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
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I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
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Oh, we're back.
So Dwight D. Eisenhower, again, was not a Nazi, but his rhetoric echoed Nazi rhetoric, which is a recurring problem for what we call population control advocates like Ravenhold, the guy who.
Just say, just because you're not a Nazi doesn't mean you're not a racist asshole.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Nazis were mostly, the Nazis were mostly destroyed by other racists, just less racist.
Yeah.
It was a bunch of shot in there.
The men who landed at Normandy were like, well, I don't like the Jews either, but what you're doing isn't okay.
Like that.
Like, let's be honest about it.
All right.
Really?
Yeah, you read some of the shit George Patton wrote about Jewish people while he was beating the Nazis, and it's like, yeah, he was pretty fucking racist.
Perfect.
Yeah.
So, yeah, Matthew, anyway, the point I'm getting to here is that population control advocates, while not Nazis, often said shit that sounded like Nazi rhetoric.
Matthew Connolly, great historian, writes, quote, all population control movements tended to diagnose social and political problems as pathologies with a biological basis.
All shared the idea that society should reproduce themselves by design, even if that meant controlling how people disposed of their own bodies.
And all looked at human beings not as individuals, but as populations which could be shaped through a combined force of politics and science.
Not great thing to look at human beings as.
Yeah.
We're just shaking our heads of all of these things just coming into a culmination of pretty much people are not people.
Humanity does not exist.
Yeah, people aren't people.
People aren't people except for me.
And the people that I choose.
60 years ago, the people like me were white, but now people who aren't white can be people like me as long as they're the kind of smart that I recognize as smart.
And also they can acknowledge that I am the supreme superior form of that human being.
If you can acknowledge that, then yes.
Then we can all be white together.
Perfect.
I've been waiting for someone to tell me that.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
In the 1960s, population control advocates began to lobby the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S.AID, asking them for birth control programs in the global south.
They held out against this at first, largely out of fear of the political consequences, mainly because they were scared they would anger the Catholic Church, which was then is now very against contraception.
Now, this started to change under LBJ, who complained that he was, quote, not going to piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems.
One of the nice things about LBJ is he never really pulled his punches.
I was going to say, that's fairly direct.
Okay.
Yeah, okay.
All right.
Yeah.
Now, near the end of the 1960s, USAID, which made up more than half of all foreign aid from the United States, began providing large-scale assistance for birth control around the world.
In Bolivia, Bangladesh, South Korea, Pakistan, Thailand, and Tunisia, more than two-thirds of national family planning budget came from foreign aid, maybe mainly USAID.
And again, at this point, because South Korea is today one of the wealthier nations on the planet, at this point, it's a war-wracked country that's like barely getting out of a devastating conflict.
Like they are, it is considered, in the words of the white people that I'm third world at that point in time, which is why it's getting aid in that way.
In 1965, Reimert Ravenholt took over U.S. AIDS Office of Population.
Under his auspices, it would grow from basically nothing to a multi-billion dollar international crusade against overpopulation.
Ravenholt was a true believer, as well as profoundly charming and well-connected.
Thanks to this, his office had no oversight whatsoever.
He could spend the money allotted to him by Congress however he saw fit.
Yeah, that's not a recipe for disaster at all.
No, it's going to go great.
This is going to be a good story.
I love this.
For Matthew Connolly, quote, his preferred strategy was national inundation based on the idea that making contraceptives freely available, ideally at the very doorstep of consumers, could increase usage.
Massive purchasing contracts of as many as 100 million monthly pill cycles also ensured that pharmaceutical companies would join in defending his growing budget and encourage corporate support for his organization.
When some of these U.S.-backed contraceptives were siphoned off and resold, Ravenholt was unconcerned.
This black market constituted a free distribution network.
He also used NGOs to provide training and sterilization and distribute low-cost abortion kits, even where abortion was illegal.
Ravenholt's strategy, according to a population council officer, was to make abortion so easy to perform and so widely used that it would be meaningless.
When Ravenholt's superiors tried to remove him, they found it was all but impossible.
His supporters were too numerous.
That sucks.
So he said easy and accessible, but not necessarily safe.
Would that be exactly?
Yeah.
So there's a lot of what he's doing that's fine.
Obviously, like, I think everyone should have access to safe and cheap contraception everywhere in the world.
Yeah.
Safe is key.
And one of the things that Ravenholt is able to do in order to get as much contra because for Ravenholt, it's safe is not as important as numerous.
What he wants is to stop as many babies being born as possible.
Yeah.
I'm just imagining he's just sending out packages of hangers.
Yeah, no, no, he wouldn't.
Yeah, he would have if he thought that that would have done it, but like he would have preferred something that's easier to get people on, but may have some of the same consequences as using a hanger.
Because people aren't going to use the hanger, but people might take a pill that has also a horrible effect on it.
Because again, so yeah, we're going to get to that.
This all brings us back around to the Dalcon shield because Reinhard Ravenholt, Ray to his buddies, was the man who approved A.H. Robbins, that pharmaceutical company's request for the U.S. government to buy up all of the unsold millions of Dalcon shields and sell them in bulk to the global south.
Now, I want you to remember, to save money, Robbins was selling these shields in massive bulk packages of a thousand each and they were unsterilized.
Unsterilized.
My favorite part of the whole thing.
This is the wire hanger.
Yeah, just basically, yeah.
This was very uncommon.
Crab.
Yeah.
Crap.
And the wire hanger isn't an abort or isn't a bacteria super highway.
So that's good.
You know.
Yeah.
So obviously selling unsterilized IUDs was very odd.
IUDs were always sold sterile in the United States.
USAID demanded an explanation as to why Robbins was shipping them unsterilized.
And an employee for A.H. Robbins wrote back that the shields were being sold that way for the purpose of reducing price and thereby attaining wider use and is intended for restricted sale to family planning support organizations who will limit their distribution to those countries commonly referred to as less developed.
So USAID was like, it worries us that these are unsterilized.
And A. Robbins says, don't worry, that makes them cheaper and we're only selling them to poor people.
And was the response?
Okay, cool.
Thanks, man.
Yeah, that's exactly what they said.
Yeah.
Because again, Ravenholt's all about national inundation.
He just wants as much contraception out there as possible and like consequences be damned.
So he's fine with this.
He's a good guy.
If that gets rid of one, three, five, it's fine.
It worked.
If it gets rid of someone I don't think is smart because they don't read the same books that I read, then it's all good.
Great shit right here.
So Robbins explained that medical practitioners in those countries were expected to sterilize shields by soaking them in disinfectant.
Now, this was again very uncommon.
Normally, you just get them sterilized and you wear sterile gloves and you insert them.
Having people sterilize them introduces a potential for someone to fuck up and not sterilize them properly, which is why it's not the way you do something like an IUD.
In a contemporary write-up of this, Mother Jones noted, quote, In the United States, according to private gynecologists we interviewed, the insertion of an IUD that had merely been soaked in a disinfectant before use would possibly be grounds for a malpractice suit.
Robbins insists that the sterilization procedure it recommended was effective, but it is highly likely that few people ever read the instructions.
The company attached only one set of instructions for each pack of a thousand shields, and those were printed in only three languages: English, French, and Spanish.
Although the devices were destined for 42 countries from Ethiopia to Malaysia, we're still only 10 inserters were provided per 100 shields, adding immeasurably to the problem of infection.
Oh, wow.
So in my mind, it really was like an IKEA level of instructions to it, where you get three stick figures and they're like, good luck.
You know, I'll give IKEA credit.
They generally, wherever they sell IKEA products, print them in the language most common in that country.
Sometimes.
Yeah, sure, I'm sure.
Yeah.
It looks like it's a foreign language to me when I'm trying to put these.
That's mostly nonsense still.
But also, very few people put IKEA furniture inside their bodies.
I mean, I feel like that could be an IKEA furniture.
Yeah.
Or at least that's a good idea.
Just say.
Yeah.
There'd be a bunch of extra I's and D's and G's to the name, but yeah.
So A.H. Robbins also assured USAID that actual medical professionals weren't needed to insert the Dalcon shield into patients.
A lot of these devices were headed to rural family planning clinics, and the drug company insisted that staff without medical degrees were more than capable of handling the job.
USAID pushed back in this case too, noting that in the United States, there'd been numerous reports of adverse reactions from patients who had had the Dalcon shield inserted by doctors who weren't gynecologists.
If MDs had trouble following the instructions, surely random aid workers who weren't even doctors in like the Ethiopian countryside would also make mistakes.
So A.H. Robbins did what pharmaceutical giants do best.
They commissioned a study that would show exactly what they needed it to show.
They actually did a study or did they just lie?
They paid for a study.
Oh, okay.
That showed what they needed.
Yeah.
And the study they paid for showed that paramedics could learn to reliably insert the Dalkon shield in a half hour.
Oh, wait, wait.
Of course.
They said they could just insert it or that they could do it correctly and safely.
They could correctly learn how to do it safely in a half hour.
Paramedics could.
Cool, cool, cool.
Number one, they paid for this study.
Unsterile Dalkon Shield00:15:04
Number two, most of these aid workers, and again, fucking rural like Ethiopia, are like aid workers.
Like a lot of them aren't paramedics or any other kind of medical professional, but some of them are still putting these things in people.
Right.
As we would like to talk about the fact that the white girl from America who claimed to be a nurse who killed millions, like mini orphans.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like does it.
It's something to be a doctor.
Yeah, mini orphans.
Yeah.
But that just happened recently.
I'm sure that didn't happen back then.
No, no, no.
Well, actually, yeah, I mean, different things happened back then.
It was usually more of a government thing.
I don't know that it was this.
Anyway, we'll get into it.
I'm just thinking, like, in general, if you want white people to try to send help, this was one of those send help moments.
Oh, yeah.
A ton of babies get killed by this.
It's fucking cases.
I can't laugh at that.
That hurts.
Keep going.
Yeah, well, you know.
So, yeah, A.H. Robbins, like, pays for this study and are like, see, you could teach people to do it in a half hour.
We're not actually going to teach the people we sell these to to do it.
We're just going to give them instructions they probably can't read.
But potentially, if they were paramedics and had proper instructions, they could learn how to do it.
And that's enough for USAID to be like, hell yeah, cool.
Yeah.
Here's millions of dollars.
So Ray Ravenholt gave the Dowcon shield his rubber stamp, and suddenly hundreds of thousands of Dowcon shields, all paid for by the U.S. Treasury, were out on their way to 42 different nations.
This happened at the same time that a Planned Parenthood study revealed pregnancy rates in excess of 6% from Dowcon shield insertion in places like Costa Rica and Yugoslavia and nearly 15% in one Latin American country.
So because they're not being put in right.
So again, sometimes the amount of unintended pregnancies with Dowcon shields in some places like 15% because the people putting them in don't know how to do it.
And you have to remember that we're not just talking about unintended pregnancies here.
Remember, the Dowcon shield is a bacterial superhighway in the best of conditions.
Yeah.
And that's in when it's sterile.
Right?
Yeah.
And patients in these poorer nations who were receiving unsterile shields and having them inserted with unsterile applicators suffered from infections, miscarriages, and death at vastly higher rates than what was seen in the United States.
We do not know and will never know the full toll from this because nobody bothered to take any sort of notes on it.
Like nobody gave a shit about how many people actually got hurt by this thing in these countries.
We do, however, have some specific stories of individual victims to highlight the horror.
For Mother Jones, quote, When Maria Aguirrez woke up on the morning of June 5th, 1977, she was at first too drenched with sweat to feel the blood.
They had warned her at the clinic that there might be some bleeding, but this was more than a period.
Her skirt, the worn sheet, the mat were soaked through more than a hurric after her oldest daughter's birth, when the midwife had, at one point, simply prayed.
Dimly, Maria must have realized that the baby was already awake and fussing.
He was still fussing an hour later when Maria's sister, summoned by the older children, came running in.
Maria was no longer sweating because she died as a result of an infection that her Dalcon shield gave her.
Yeah.
And I'm wondering if like some of these numbers that they say is effective is because they died.
Yeah.
They weren't able to get pregnant.
That works for Ray Ravenholtz.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
That's Jesus.
Jesus Christ.
Stops a pregnancy.
That's all that matters to Ray.
I'm not pregnant.
Right?
Population control advocates like Ray Ravenhold had been willing to look the other way at unsterile medical devices implanted by qualified people.
They were not particularly concerned by victims like Maria Aguirez, as evinced by the fact that neither USAID or any other international organization even tried to track down all the fatalities and injuries caused by the overseas importation of the Dalkon shield.
The only thing that actually disturbed them was the evidence that the shield was ineffective as a birth control method because it was okay to endanger the lives of poor children, but it was not okay to risk them having more kids.
We can't have more kids.
Yeah.
We didn't do what we wanted.
Oh, damn.
Now, again, we don't have any sort of authoritative numbers on the number of deaths and injuries as a result of the millions of Dalcon shields imported to the global south.
Author Morton Mintz estimates that, quote, shield-related PID, pelvic inflammatory infection, killed hundreds, possibly thousands of women outside the United States.
If the shield wearer in a third world country where there are no doctors, no antibiotics becomes infected, she's going to die.
And again, this is the 70s.
Antibiotics are not as common as they are now, especially in places like Ethiopia, you know.
Still, under Ravenholt's guidance, the name of the game for USAID was National Inundation, and IUDs that worked 85 to 90% of the time were better than bringing more poor people into the world.
As lawsuits against A.H. Robbins spun up in the United States, the company sent one of their employees on a tour of Asia to sell more shields.
In every place he stopped, the employee would be met by the local USAID population officer who would assemble a group of local physicians for the Robbins employee to lecture and sell to.
When Robbins was finally forced to discontinue the product in 1974, USAID was left, in the words of a Mother Jones reporter, holding the bag, or rather, the bulk pack.
They had no choice but to issue an international recall.
We don't know how many women in isolated mountain villages across India and Guatemala and wherever else actually learned that the thing in their uterus had been recalled for being dangerously unsafe.
Because again, no one at A.H. Robbins or USAID cared to find out.
It just was not important to them.
The lack of communication.
Yeah.
Already.
And then that's how they did the recall.
So I can't.
Did we talk about whether or not the lifespan of how long that's supposed to last?
Yeah.
Five years, which means that a lot of these.
Yeah.
And removal, again, because it's spiked.
Removal is a nightmare for people, too.
That's actual surgical precision.
I'm saying, I'm thinking.
Yeah.
And people die from that as well.
And again, we'll never know the number, but probably thousands.
Probably a death toll of thousands.
Christ.
Worldwide.
The Dalcon Shield was a major national story in the U.S. where it killed maybe a couple of dozen people, but its spread overseas, funded by U.S. tax dollars, was not well known.
Mother Jones is the only outlet I have found who actually covered that part of the story during that time in any kind of detail, and they deserve a lot of credit for that.
It is an excellent article.
A 1985 article I found in the Washington Post, for example, didn't even mention that the Dalkon shield had been sold overseas.
Mother Jones.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Why would you care?
They're poor.
Come on.
Yeah, they're poor.
They're poor and they're not white.
Who gives a shit?
Yeah, it's fine.
Fucking Ethiopia.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah.
Mother Jones actually interviewed Ray Ravenholt in 1979 to ask why he had given the seal of American goodwill to this whole bloody endeavor.
And the picture they paint of him is bizarre and not very positive.
And I'm going to read the description that that journalist wrote about meeting Ray.
Oh, no.
In person, he is a tall, affable Midwesterner with an engaging smile and a marked inability to sit still once he warms up to the subject at hand.
No sooner had we gotten through the introductions than he bounded off to one corner of his spacious office and returned with his latest contraceptive enthusiasm, a plastic gun-style laparoscopic device, which, when aimed through the vagina, shoots little plastic bands around the fallopian tubes, resulting in permanent sterilization.
He demonstrated by placing one foot up on his chair and shooting the bands at his shoelace.
Only after he completed the simulated sterilization of his left foot were we able to bring the subject around to the Downt shield.
Unbelievable.
So he had this in his office as like a toy?
He just keeps his little like fucking gun thing for wrapping up fallopian tubes, shoots it at his foot to impress a journalist.
For real, he's got to be a serial killer.
He's a 10-buncher.
He's a fucking maniac.
There's no fucking way he didn't use this on a woman.
Hey, hey, I got something for you.
Yeah, tie your hands behind your back.
Let me show you something.
You're going to love this.
What the fuck?
Fucking Ray Ravenholt.
So Mother Jones continues.
And this is Ray Ravenholt speaking and quoting him.
Robbins, the company, didn't know there was any problem with it in 1972, he insisted, which is not true.
When we countered that A.H. Robbins had been deluged with reports of adverse reactions by that time, Ravenholt smiled patiently and explained, you don't really know anything until you have a very, very large number of people who have used it.
You might have one kind of impression from 10,000 people, another from 100,000.
You might need a million, 10 million, before you really know.
So it's not until everybody's dead, then you actually you have to have a hundred percent rating of whatever you've got wrong.
If you've given it to 10,000 women and 2,000 of them have horrible horrible, life-altering reactions to it, you got to give it to another 10 million before you can really tell if it's dangerous.
I mean again, it's kind of like what we're going through with the pandemic.
It's not really that bad.
Come on yeah, come on.
99 survival rate.
It's fine, it's fine.
It's only 250,000 people.
That's not a big deal.
When pressed, Ravenholt did eventually agree that USAID had heard some of the tens of thousands of stories of septic pregnancies, infections and miscarriages that had flooded the U.S. Media by 1973.
But he pivoted immediately from that to leaning forward with enthusiasm to tell the Mother Jones reporter his own pet theory about Iud induced pelvic infections.
This is ray.
Women who frequently change sexual partners have these intercurrent low-grade infections.
The iud can't cause an infection.
The body tolerates anything that's sterile.
Wait, isn't that the same kind of argument about the rape?
You know, your body rejects that.
Oh my god, what is happening?
Well, and he's also wrong because he knows the Dowkhan shields are being sent unsterilized and that obviously not everybody is going to properly sterilize them.
Um, and also because the data existed at this point, he knows that the Dowkhan shield is a magnet for infections by design.
It's awesome stuff.
And when Mother Jones, this is my favorite part.
When Mother Jones pointed out to him that the infections that he was blaming on promiscuity might be caused by the non-sterile devices being exported by USAID, Ravenholt defended his agency shipping out unsterile Dalkon shields by pointing out that all the other IUDs they shipped out to poor people were supplied unsterile too.
Oh, great.
That's awesome.
Good job, bro.
Okay.
I love the, again, the gymnastics that someone has to go through and be like, no, This is cool.
And let me tell you.
No, it's fine.
It's fine.
Nothing's wrong.
It's fine.
Nothing's wrong.
Because we're always this irresponsible.
Right.
And you know, before that, many people called us out.
No one really talked about it.
Like they were here.
Why are they talking about it?
Why are we talking about it?
Yeah.
What's the problem?
Let me show you my little toy.
Yeah.
Let me show you my.
You want me to sterilize my foot again?
One more time.
You know who won't sterilize your foot, Samantha.
Oh, God.
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two: never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
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The cops didn't seem to care.
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I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
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My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
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I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
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Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey.
What did I love now?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
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Imperialism via Pills00:15:56
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I'm crossing my legs inexplicably.
So, as sleazy as the justifications Ray Ravenholt gave to Mother Jones were, he had to issue them.
By 1979, Dalcon shields were still in use around the world, and they were in the bodies of more than 440,000 people.
Five years after A.H. Robbins suspended sales of the device, medical practitioners in Pakistan, India, and South Africa were still inserting Dalcon shields into new patients.
It's pretty good stuff.
Mother Jones wrote at the time, 1979, it is impossible to know how frequently this is still taking place, but our own sources have told us of at least two cases.
In Nairobi, Kenya, on the wall of the Family Planning Association Clinic, there is a poster advertising the Dalcon Shield.
In early May 1979, a young woman patient at this clinic was offered, among other birth control options, a Dalcon shield.
In Ottawa, Canada, Pierre Blaise, senior consultant to the Bureau of Medical Devices, told us the shield was being inserted as late as 1977, two years after it had been withdrawn to the U.S. market.
Finally, neither AID nor even the FDA would have any way of stopping A.H. Robbins from privately dumping its own unsold stock of Dalcon Shields if the company was of a mind to do so.
And it was.
In a recent interview, Robbins attorney Franklin Tatum admitted to us that his client was still selling the devices through the first quarter of 1975, even as they were being recalled through AID and allegedly destroyed.
So he was personal, he was still doing it, even though the company was still selling it even after they like, they were not only selling it through AID, they were selling it directly to other poorer nations while they were fighting court cases in the U.S. and pulling it off of that market.
And of course, nothing really happened to him.
No, I wouldn't.
I mean, the company got destroyed, but the people responsible for those decisions are millionaires, and their kids are still millionaires and probably funding Ben Shapiro or someone today.
It's all great.
It's all very good.
Just cool shit.
So good.
So Ray Ravenholt had the power and influence to put a stop to most, if not all of this, but he chose not to.
And the question, why, is easy to answer.
Ray was a pretty open dude.
In 1977, Ravenhold gave an interview to the St. Louis Post Dispatch where he insisted that population explosions, unless stopped, would lead to revolutions.
Population control, Ray explained, was necessary in order to maintain the normal operation of U.S. commercial interests around the world.
Without our trying to help these countries with their economic and social development, the world would rebel against the strong U.S. commercial presence.
The self-interest thing is the compelling element.
Self-interest.
That's really fascinating.
It's honest.
I mean, like, ridiculously honest.
I just love that it all results in women dying.
We got to kill off the women.
They're giving, they're making babies.
Well, and specifically, what he's saying here is we have to sterilize large chunks of the developing world, as they call it.
The third world, the global south, we have to sterilize these poor people because otherwise they're going to destroy capitalism.
Like, yeah, the world will rebel against U.S. commercial presence if we don't reduce their populations.
They're going to realize that we're fucking them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That we are really screwing them over.
So this is the best way.
Kill them.
Kill them all.
Yeah.
Again, the bad guys, generally capitalism in the end.
So most population control advocates supported a variety of methods to achieve their aims.
Ray Ravenholt preferred instead to focus on contraceptives and only contraceptives.
Before the Dow Con Shield rose to popularity, he'd done this by trying to flood the global south with hormonal birth control pills.
These were sold over-the-counter in places like Bangladesh with no doctor consultation required and precious little information about what the health consequences might be.
In Bangladesh, this caused what one reporter called a biological disaster.
Quote: The average Bangladeshi woman weighs 92 pounds and suffers from chronic malnutrition.
Even in a 135-pound American woman, the pill is known to deplete the body's supply of vitamins A, B6D, and folic acid, hence the special vitamins sold in the U.S. as supplements to the pill.
Furthermore, no less than 90% of the Bangladeshi women who accepted the pill were breastfeeding.
According to a study by the International Planned Parenthood Federation, babies nursed by pill users grew at an average rate that was only two-thirds of that of babies nursed by non-pill users.
Ending world hunger is the most common rationalization for the top-down approach to population control.
But in Bangladesh, AID was creating its own kind of chemically induced famine.
Oh, motherfucking Jesus Christ.
That's pretty bad.
Kidding me.
So a big part of what's happening here is that these birth control pills that USAID had been handing out in Bangladesh had been judged safe for American women.
And American women were much better fed, had much better nutrition, did not have the same kind of vitamin deficiencies that Bangladeshi women did.
They were larger.
So obviously, the same pill that works on them is going to be toxic to people who are smaller and who have, yeah, it's just, it's horrible.
A supplement.
Essentially, they had to have supplements like that.
Yeah, nobody handed that shit out.
Because, of course, all that mattered was that they weren't having as many babies.
That doesn't, however, maybe death?
Sure.
Let's do it this way.
Whatever.
Yeah.
And obviously, data in the U.S. at this time already showed that high estrogen pills had more health consequences than low estrogen pills.
And so in the U.S., birth control pills had switched over to low estrogen birth control pills.
But that meant there were still millions of high estrogen birth control pills that like nobody in the U.S. would buy.
So obviously Ray Ravenholt bought them all and shipped them off to poor people.
Of course.
We're going to hand them out somewhere.
We got to make fucking money somehow.
We can't waste this.
Come on.
Come on.
Yeah.
In one of the most breathtakingly unethical moments in the history of birth control, marketers for USAID even found a way to turn one of the common consequences of high estrogen pills, which was painfully swollen breasts, into a positive.
They started promoting the pills in rural Bangladesh with the tagline, it makes your breasts more beautiful and it's good for you, including the tailors who have to make bigger brassiers.
You want big boobies?
Try this, baby.
I got you.
It's the only consequence.
Your tits get human.
Yeah, you might die.
Your boobs are going to be amazing.
You know, when you're laying down and people coming to see you dead, you're going to boobies.
It's going to be legit.
Jesus Christ.
Now, we focused rightfully on A.H. Robbins and the horrifying Dalkon Shield, but the terrible reality of Western doctors forcing unsafe IUDs on impoverished women actually goes back even further than that.
In the early 1960s, Western population control programs in rural India and Pakistan started using experimental spiral and ring-shaped IUDs.
These specific IUDs had been widely discredited by doctors at the time as causing extremely high rates of infection, pain, and bleeding.
I'm going to quote now from the website, Climate and Capitalism.
Despite this, J. Robert Wilson, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Temple University, told the 1962 Population Council conference IUDs should be rolled out regardless.
We have to stop functioning like doctors, he said.
In fact, it may well be that the incidence of infection is going to be pretty high in the patients who need the device most.
Again, if we look at this from an overall long-range view, these are the things I have never said out loud because I don't know how it's going to sound.
Perhaps the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things, particularly if the infection she acquires is sterilization but not lethal.
Expendable.
Expendable.
That's so lovely.
No mask on there.
Like, yeah, she's expendable.
And honestly, if she gets a horrible infection that renders her sterile, that's a win.
If we did what we said we were going to do, right?
We control that population.
Just right out in the open with it.
It's amazing.
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, I give that guy, honestly, more credit than I give Ravenholt because he's not.
Ravenholt is saying the same thing, but dressing it up.
This guy's just like, yeah, fuck him.
Like, it's about stopping them from giving birth.
I don't care how we do it.
Don't worry about the doctor's oath.
Just go ahead and do your thing.
Yeah, we can't act like doctors.
These are poor people and they're not white.
So it's fine.
It's fine.
We've got it.
We've got this control.
Let's do this.
Let's do this good shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wilson's fellow obstetrician Alan Guttmacher, an influential figure in the Population Council and IPPF, extolled the benefits of IUDs in a similar vein.
No contraceptive could be cheaper.
And also, once the damn thing is in, the patient cannot change her mind.
In fact, we will hope she will forget it's there and perhaps in several months wonder why she has not conceived.
Oh, wait, what?
Yeah, it's pretty bad, right?
It's like roofing your uterus.
What the fuck just happened?
Yeah, hopefully the dumb bastards will forget they even have it.
Hey, you'll never remember.
Oh, God.
Yeah, it's pretty bad, right?
I don't like this episode, Robert.
Now, a lot of the evidence for this episode comes from a couple of different sources, but most of them written by one man, Matthew Connolly, who has done more to unravel and expose the whole horrific story of the population control movement than probably any other Westerner.
His book, Fatal Misconception, lays out the whole sordid tale.
In it, he concludes, The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think that one could know other people's interests better than they know it themselves.
But if the idea of planning other people's families is now discredited, this very human tendency is still with us.
The essence of population control, whether it targeted migrants, the unfit, or families that seemed either too big or too small, was to make rules for other people without having to answer to them.
It appealed to the rich and powerful because with the spread of emancipatory movements and the integration of markets, it began to appear easier and more profitable to control populations than to control territory.
That's why opponents were correct in viewing it as another chapter in the unfinished history of imperialism.
More profitable.
Holy fuck.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that chapter, Samantha, is in fact not finished today.
You can still find many of these same attitudes present in well-meaning, powerful people today.
In May 2009, a group of billionaires, including Bill Gates, Ted Turner, David Rockefeller, George Soros, and Warren Buffett all met in semi-secrecy to discuss what they termed a nightmarish scenario, overpopulation.
The London Sunday Times said they considered this a potentially disastrous environmental, social, and industrial threat.
Since at present, more than 90% of projected population growth was expected to occur in the global south, we can assume they were worried about precisely the same nations and sorts of people as Ray Ravenhold.
And it's interesting that David Rockefeller attended because in the 1960s, his father was one of the major founders of the Population Council, which helped fund and drive through lobbying everything we've talked about today.
In 1970, journalist Steve Weissman termed people like Rockefeller members of the American population elite.
In an Immortal Lion for Ramparts magazine, he noted, In the hands of the self-seeking, humanitarianism is the most terrifying ism of all.
Wow.
It's done.
Yeah.
All right.
So caring about people and wanting to help and help people survive.
Bad.
Well, no, it's when you try to cloak your desire to control other people's behavior as wanting to help them.
Right.
It's not wanting to help someone to force a contraceptive on them that they don't know the consequences of and that will harm them and that you're not going to give them follow-up care and provide them with the essential vitamins and stuff.
It is helping someone to be like, hey, here's a bunch of free condoms.
Here's how you use them.
Or here's a bunch of birth control pills.
Here's how you use them.
Here's what you need to know about how it will affect your body.
Here's what you need to take in order for this to be safe.
You know, that is helping people.
It's helping people to say, you know, here's access to a vaccine, you know, that will deal with a problem that you have in this region.
It's not helping people to, for example, do what the CIA did in Pakistan and secretly give people a fake vaccine in order to get blood samples to track down Osama bin Laden, which is the thing that happened.
Oh, God.
It's not like force hysterectomies and eyes at all.
Yeah.
And the biggest problem here is that in no way is overpopulation actually a problem.
Overpopulation is not driving climate change.
Overpopulation is not the issue we're dealing with here.
It's what all these billionaires are focusing on.
Because in part, if you can get other people to think that overpopulation is the problem, then people won't look at billionaires as maybe part of the problem.
But yeah, this brings me to the conclusion of this story.
Because yeah, there are some people who have learned from the past of the population control movement from this chapter in the history of imperialism.
And one of those groups is the Sierra Club.
Like most environmental organizations, the Sierra Club bought whole hog into population control throughout the 20th century.
They thought that the best way to protect wild nature was to reduce the human population.
And they bought into a lot of the stuff that we've talked about today and helped to fund it and all that horrible shit.
But in 2020, they published a blog post repudiating that history titled The Overpopulation Myth and Its Dangerous Connotations.
The article is in 2020.
Yeah, it took them a while, right?
The article is brutal and unsparing.
It points out that the population bomb, a 1968 book by Paul Ehrlich, that was probably the single most influential inspiration behind modern fears of overpopulation, was also profoundly racist.
It, quote, opens its fear-mongering with a sensationalized account of traveling through Delhi, India.
During a taxi ride, author Paul Ehrlich notes, people visiting, arguing and screaming, thrusting their hands through the taxi window begging.
Since that night, I've known the feel of overpopulation.
What Ehrlich fails to mention, however, is that while Delhi's population was just sigh of 3 million, both New York and Paris housed about 8 million at the time.
Ehrlich's emphasis on an Indian city as the exemplification of overpopulation was part of a large and continuing pattern of focusing blame on the global south and mostly the non-white people who lived there as affluent Western Europeans and Americans.
And in this article, which is quite good, the Sierra Club makes the accurate point that our actual population with overpopulation has nothing to do with the raw number of humans on Earth and certainly not in the number of people who live in the global south.
It has everything to do with the wildly outsized amount of resources consumed by a privileged few, namely you and me and everybody listening to this podcast.
The world's wealthiest half billion people are responsible for 50% of the planet's carbon dioxide emissions, despite making up 6% of the population.
Yep.
Yep.
There's so many things.
I just can't understand the whole overpopulation movement in itself, not seeing that as a travesty to humanity in general.
Yeah.
And it is fundamentally racist while also being a thing that people who would call themselves anti-racist buy into because they see, look at all these giant, you know, these, all these families that are nine and ten kids in Mexico and Guatemala and in Paraguay or whatever.
Vaginal Death Debate00:07:18
Like that's, we gotta, that's a problem, part of, has to be part of the climate change problem.
It's like, no, dude, it's the fact that your family has three cars for two people.
Right.
Like that is a bigger driver.
Every light on using all kinds of emissions yet.
But okay.
Yeah.
It's absolutely the poor people who's living on.
And more to the point, it's not even really, honestly, if we want to actually get at the core of the problem with climate change, it's not even like the fact that your family has three cars.
It's that there is this giant system of mega corporations that profit based off of releasing emissions into the air that also effectively control the levers of government and very effectively market to all of us and also very effectively stop reforms and things like public transportation that would reduce our need, like our dependence on emissions generating vehicles.
Like it's all bad, but it sure is hell not the pop.
It's not the fault of somebody in Ethiopia who has eight kids.
You know?
If that, I mean, to be fair, in general, like the poverty situation is not because they are wasting shit.
That's not how that works.
Poor people are the best at not wasting shit.
But I remember one fucking time in Mosul in Iraq, we were like hanging out with this group of like civil defense people, like basically EMTs, like going into collapsed buildings in the day and pulling people out of the rubble.
And like they wanted to watch a movie.
So they took apart an old refrigerator and an old like giant, like not one of the flat screens, one of the big boxy TVs, and they wired the TV through the refrigerator into a generator so that we could watch, I think it was Patriot games on like some fucking local channels.
Jesus, all the movies.
Okay.
Yeah.
Poor, yeah.
They didn't waste shit.
There wasn't things wasted.
That's the problem: the conversation is who's wasting what and who's actually the problematic issue in this conversation.
And what are you really getting at?
You just want to be in the hierarchy and make sure you come out on top.
Yeah, exactly.
Like there's fucking people listening to this, probably including me, who have bought new TVs when old ones were not permanently broken, but just became a problem.
You wanted something nicer.
It's a bigger screen.
I want the bigger screen with a better resolution.
40 inches and big enough.
Yeah.
Come on.
Yeah, come on.
Come on.
I mean, yeah.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, we all.
It's fine.
Anyway.
Well, thank you for the horror nightmare that you just put me through.
Robert, once again.
And then Sophie, there are a lot of things that I will be horrified of.
Now I feel like my IUD may be trying to crawl out of me.
Thank you for that.
Yeah, I did not use a vaginal death crab for mine.
And I want to be clear, like I've tried to make a point of this.
I'm not saying IUDs are bad.
I hope that's not what anyone takes out of this.
Like, obviously, the Delcon Shield was.
And, you know, the marina might wind up being something like that.
We don't really know what the whole story is going to be on that, although I know a lot of people who have it and have had no problem with it.
Like, the bad guy in this is, again, imperialism.
And also just talking about the healthcare in general, who has provided what type of care and what is being, who has the privilege of getting the better notch, whatever, whatnot.
So that's also the conversation.
But yeah, the vaginal death crab is something that I will always remember.
Thank you.
I love that this was our first meeting, that that's what our conversation is.
We're talking about vaginal death crabs.
And you all can hear us play as vaginal death crabs when, you know, in 2022, we're able to finally go on tour.
Yeah, I'm so excited for those.
Yeah.
I've got my ukulele ready.
We'll actually be opening for the Eagles, oddly enough.
It was a strange book.
Yeah.
My dreams coming true.
Amazing.
Okay.
Well, you got anything you want to plug before we roll out of here, Samantha?
Again, you can find me on Stuff Mom Never Told You, a podcast with iHeart, wherever you get your podcast.
And you can find me as McVay Samantha, M-C-V-E-Y.
That is the spelling, not the other one.
Just want to put that out there on both Instagram or Twitter.
Yeah.
And I am not available anywhere.
You cannot find me.
Don't try.
I will destroy you.
Sophie.
Challenge accepted.
Yep.
You're so weird sometimes, Robert.
I don't know.
There's so many episodes of this fucking podcast.
I can't end all of them like a competent professional.
I feel like I got surprised into a two-parter.
I was like, what?
More death traps?
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, we said at some point early in the series that we mostly, we would only rarely do two-parters, and then we proceeded to pivot to only doing two-parters almost.
I don't know how I let that happen.
Like, what if we do an occasional twice per week?
And then it was like, all right, we're just going to do it twice per week.
Welcome to the world.
Yep.
Never enough good, bad information out there.
Yay.
Peace sizzle.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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You related to the Phantom at that point?
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
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If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
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Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
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