Also 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 giving that training my full attention throughout the duration of the video. Every single time I've watched It's good various employees for the last half decade or so, there was no there was no section on anti British discrimination. Yet again, another example that victimized.
Last time I took that training, there was a 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 was fine.
Like some shit in those videos, which is wild.
Okay, there you go.
I think that's a lady who's literally called Karen and they do her wrong in the in the in the video.
See I am.
I am definitely pro British discrimination. But you do get a point for having Peter O'Toole, so at least it's it's it's not all the way because the o'tool factor keeps you from the full might of my wrath.
Frankly, go, yeah, I'm sure that's the case.
I'm Garson Davis and joined by Mia Wong, James Stubven, and Robert Evans. This episode, we are talking about babies. Should there be more?
Yeah?
M hmm.
We're on a pro natalist kick. We're going to have that off putting couple who look like vampires but like not any of the good kinds 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 US policy might be, or that the people proposing US policy, and then we will discuss how those policies went historically.
Yeah, so like to start with Trumps.
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 pronataists certainly think that the new administration is at the very least ideologically sympathetic, if not in
cahoots with their agenda. The main inns on the pronatalist front have come from the Peter Thiel tech right wing of the White House Right. This is like JD. Vance and previously Elon Musk. 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, 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 parenthesies anytime anytime someone says baby, there's a little parentheses there that says white.
This is this is real Nazi shit.
Like yeah, A lot of this, a lot of the stuff that's certainly like based on like like great replacement rhetoric that the alt right, like Trojan Horst and like pushed forward in like twenty eighteen, 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 calls into 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 chant like that, that is that is what he inherits. He comes by it honestly, I guess you could say.
Well, and oftentimes printles rhetoric is also tied in with like the tradwife 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 tax 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.
I think he's.
Reactions action, I don't know, they very negatively.
Robot.
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, and some of this rheteric has rubbed off on Trump right and Trump at seapack in twenty twenty three, 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 five thousand dollars 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 pre schools. It's very preschools and 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 to have kids in their early twenties anymore, so instead they're waiting until their thirties.
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 five thousand dollars baby bonist doesn't actually solve the key issues that would cause people to be worried about, you know, trying to like get buried 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 of sorting out this problem. The new Big, Beautiful bud 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 are guardians open a new Mega savings account for their kids, the federal government will contribute one thousand dollars for babies born between January first, twenty twenty four and December thirty first, twenty twenty eight.
That that'll help, great, great.
I believe California also does it. Yeah, California have something called the California Child Saving Accounts Program, which already gives children like up to one thousand dollars. And I think it's like a college savings account from what I understand.
Yeah, that's that's pretty much what this is. Although specifically in the for the Mega accounts, it also lists home ownership. Oh cool, because this is like a big This is a big part of this pronatalst thing is you need to like own a home. We get in a straight marriage, start having kids in your early twenties.
Yeah, sure, make Instagram videos of yourself chopping would badly like we understand.
Yeah yeah.
The big beautiful budget bill also prohibits Medicare funds. We're going to planned parent hut great.
Yeah, let me tell you, one thousand 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 Devasit 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.
This is a little bit.
Similar to a policy proposed in twenty twenty three 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 Christy, Yeah, okay, sure, yeah, no, this sign is are we taking issue with this?
That is some Yeah, this is part of my British arity trade. We developed our own religion so that dudes could get divorced. It is, it is. Yeah, it is a bill of rights for British guys.
Obviously a lot of a lot of caveats in there so that you can have your little like tread Christian family. But four kids would equal a forty percent cut. Ten kids would equal no property taxes at all.
Well, I mean, shit, that's hard to argue with. Yeah, this is property taxes. You also have to own the property to begin with to be paying property tax.
Yeah, all of these yea, all these people want you to be like homeowners with a stay at homework.
This is like, this is what they want, but they don't want to actually do things to meaningfully make home ownership accessible.
No, this is just like self selecting for like well off white Christians, right like yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. Yeah, Slaton 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 Fox's sake.
It's a disaster.
And yeah, I mean and like a lot of this stuff is too is it's this is the sort of flailing reaction to like one of the things that actually drives like declining birthrates, 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 birthrates
is 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 birthrates are gonna 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, because life, they quickly realize there's things in life, like you know, drugs and stuff. Yeah, they'll go back to the club.
In March, Trump called himself the quote unquote fertiliz.
They president, 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 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 pronatalst voices who are lobbying Trump. This sort of breaks down into 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 mental cycles using charting courses to
both help get pregnant and avoid using birth control. They propose that food, nutrition, and lifestyle chain could improve quote unquote natural conception. Instead of using assisted reproductive technologies, Heritage proposed to something that they call restorative reproductive medicine as a holistic approach to treating infertility through quote unquote hoonon balancing and dieting and nutritional adjustments, environmental changes, and surgery unquote.
Yeah, you just need some fucking uh some of those some of those baby teething pills Highlands made that kill babies. That's that's what you get to take. It's a holistic approach to you. Some 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 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.
Now, on the other side of the you know, pro natalist right, you have people like the vampire couple that Robert mentioned. Simone Collins, a pronatalist 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 super shit. Like, put these people on a boat and send it across the Atlantic, Like, 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 they deprive them of lime juice and save the world from a fucking.
Put them on the next starship and see how far up it gets.
No, they won't get that.
Let them try. I support the human spirit.
Collins is also the former managing director of an exclusive Peter teal In social club called a 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 churchescu 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. Yes, so they use IVF to to specifically select the embryos that they think are like naturally predisposed to have more desirable traits, including high IQ's. They have not discussed the exact method. That's why it's called special technology.
They're looking for one with the big head or something, So you don't know. I guess I'm not even that far along that they win the IVF.
So that's abways 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 ten 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 ef fact, 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 of my I that's kind that's what I'm That's what I'm that's what I'm wondering for. Yeah, Samuel Huntington thinks they have higher birth rates, right, Like that's his whole stick.
If you look at the full memo, I think this is this is just like a dog whistle for like white Christians, Like that is that is really what he's saying, sick, that is what I have for the.
Current the current peroneals policies.
We should go on and ad break and then return to learn the historical implications of pro natalist policies.
M h. All right, we are back and we are spinning our globe, our big ball of pro natalism, and it is slowing down and is landed on Japan, where mir is going to explain pronatalist policy.
Yeah, and I guess I want to open on a kind of global thing, which is a 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 eighteen seventies, every single person is complaining about like, oh my god, the birth rate of the right, well, the white race keeps declining and we're gonna get like overwhelmed by the Asiatic chords.
And then you go to like the Asiatic words 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 nineteen eighty seven. 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 a lie.
I can remember from 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 Paul Wall, it's if they have they have political contradictions in their pro natalist polics 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 a World War two Nazi, but that means that they run all of politics, so like every political factor effectively runs through them. They're early attempts in like the nineties are focused on
the deregulation of daycare jobs. So basically their plan is like in the ninety two thousands, they're like, Okay, we're going to like 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 intra class conflict between the peer 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 exploit these women's labor to like make money. And so the fight that starts to break out is this fight between like paying
for childcare leave versus like paying for daycare. So originally that 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, Like that's going to be a through line here, Yeah, yeah, Like no, none of this stuff works.
And so like like Shinzo Abe, I think is the most famous person who spends much of time trying to deal with this and like again, so they have started worrying about this in nineteen eighty seven. It is now twenty thirteen. The birth rate keeps declining recipitously. Shinzo wabey rest and piss you fascist bastard is still trying to like cook something, right, I'm 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 twenty thirteen, 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
pro natalist policy, right. A lot of it is focused on this sort of social push stuff to 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 thirty five thousand different 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 one hundred hours a month of overtime. Now, this doesn't do shit, right, Like one hundred 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 this is again this problem that he's having, which is that like, okay, so yes, you probably could maybe like people maybe would have more children if you weren't working literally all the time and you weren't just
like being worked to death. But that's really bad for Japanese business. And and like quote unquote Abba nomics, which is like abe 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 gonna 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 twenty twenty two, he what he was.
Bye.
By the time his political coalition was finally detonated, Bye by one by one guy 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 want to hear the happiest I've ever been during an episode, including the day after Kissinger died, go find the episode I did right after shits a while it was assassinated.
The Holy trinity of great days on the internet. Is that big stuck boat and the submarine that killed all those Oh it was amazing, people said, Biden gave us nothing. Bang is on the timeline.
There you go.
So all right, shinzuwape a successor is a guy named Fumio Kishita who lasts for a little bit, and Kishida every single Japanese government announces that they're going to spend like somewhere between twenty and like like fifteen and twenty billion dollars on pro natalist policies and mostly doesn't happen, but Kishita promises that he is going to spend twenty four and a half billion dollars. A lot of this money is going to be just straight up like child allowance.
So 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 okay, here you had a baby, We're going to give you
this amount per month. I think it's like ten to fifteen thousand yen which hold on, yeah, so it's like like seventy dollars a month, which is like not. Yeah, they are trying to expense it research on. 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 child care equipment stuff and make sure you're getting medical care. And that's supposed to come out
to about like seven hundred dollars ish roughly. You know, this is like the big sort of plan that they're doing. And then in twenty twenty four, Kishita 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 to 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 an extremely urban city, you're working a just hideous number of hours.
Right.
Yeah, there's also this there's supposed to be these massive like investments in providing childcare and nursing, and you can see these kind of like this this this point where they've reached this desperation point where they're trying both the sort of pro business like okay, fuck it will pay for your childcare 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 they're 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 just just absolutely jack shit, right, and if and if you want to look at like, okay, so, 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 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 structure contradictions in their political collision, and 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, Okay, why is not of this shit working?
Right?
They're 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 going to get worse?
Probably the products and services. It's simple of this show.
Yeah yeah, 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 contraceptual bands. Abortion had been legal, Spain was one of the first countries to do that. Right when Feliko Monceni, anarchist minister, made that legal minister of I guess public health that was made illegal.
I think it didn't become legally again until about twenty ten. In Spain, abortion and a lessa was like a serious health issue, elective abortion.
I guess.
Franco's military in the Civil War consistently used sexual violence as or weapon, and we can see this as a kind of prelude to his nationalization of birthing bodies. Right. Kibayao, who is a Francoist general, right, makes his speech in July nineteen thirty six, quote, our valiant legionnaires and regulas have shown the red cowards what true men are, and their women as well. This is totally justified because these
communists and anarchists anocate free love. At least now they will know what real men are, not the militia gaze. This is a translation that I'm reading to so people can go to the original document. But gays is not the word he used. A better translation would be a word that begins with f Yeah.
Okay, 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 Cecion Feminina, a women's section. My PhD supervisor Pamela Ragliff is written extensively about this. The group very much served as kind of the Propaganderama state natalist policy. It taught women from a young age they were inferior and subjugate to men. They
had to go through the organization's programs. To do anything any engagement with the state, they 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 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 child bearing a child rearing Francoist I'm going to use intellectuals here in like quotation scare quotes, right, frequently turned to phrenology
to justify women's domestic role. They fucking loved a phrenology.
Right.
It's great to go to antique markets in Spain because you could always buy like a phrenology head you can acquire like an og one, you know, like I bet if you know the red place, so that you could find some find the calibers.
That's the dream.
There is actually a lot of those secondhand stores in Portland.
Yeah, shocking.
Hands, spasping me with francoism, and I.
Found a lot of uses for those calipers.
Let me tell you, no, I mean the phrenologies goals. Oh okay, yeah, yeah, I've seen them all over down.
Yeah. But I bet you, I bet you was a re because I bet they're not like og phrenology skulls.
There's a market in France enter to that just had a bunch of monks skulls, like real, it 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 of pretty cool.
It was like three grand and you make a curtsy for the Quran.
But like this was a while ago, but seemed like a good price.
Just skull Talk, your favorite podcast discussing cranium.
Using the discount code, it could happen here. You can get ten percent off your skull Bible holder. Yeah that's right, Okay, so one of the things they did was to increasingly marginalize midwives and instead like have male 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 to work outside the home. Right, A big part of Franco's pro natalism was the repudiation of an Arco
feminism that had been relatively important to the Spanish Revolution. Right, the the anarchists believed in revolutionary marriage and free love. Their follow through on those beliefs varied wildly, right, So 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, right, So like they wanted, in for instance, to 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. Right, this is something that the Franco estate hated. It also had its own kind of unique take on eugenics that manifested in its pro natalism. Spain couldn't really do the straight racial eugenics right like that, 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.
Welcome mine virus.
Yeah yeah, yeah, god no, it's it's boring from the same type of fascist right.
It also practiced something called anti Semitism without Jews at this time, so there was a very very small Jewish population space. But nonetheless, Franco was constantly freaking out about Judeo Bolshevism. He saw liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, feminism, Judaism, et cetera as completely antithetical to Spanish nests, and of course they blame us for their national declient right, something little
fascists like to talk about. This anti leftist eugenics and pro natalism extended to something called ninos robalos nenzfostats in Catalan. These children were abducted from their parents. Sometimes this is when their parents were in jail. Sometimes it was when the parents have been killed. Some it was when the mother had been forced into incarceration. By something called the
Women's Protection Board. This, theoretically run by Franca'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. These children who were taken from their mothers were often trafficked and some cases sold to approve families by nuns and priests. I'm going to quote one example from a
BBC article in nineteen seventy one. Manoli, who was twenty three at the time and not long married, gave birth to what she was told with 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 called in for 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 grave for babies, but many of those grave 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.
Right.
I remember, like 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 right because the people who were stolen from their families and in many cases are still alive, right and in most cases their birth certificately exists with say mother unknown. And that was a process that existed to protect women who have had children outside of marriage, but was also used to
steal babies and leave no paper trail. At least in twenty eleven, the BBC confronted one of the doctors who was doing this. It's kind of a wild BBC. I've linked it 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 was able to make a make an appointment with the obg y N who was stealing these babies, and when she confronted him, he grasped a crucifix and started brandishing
it at her and Jesus first incredible country. The reason that they did this right was because their their fascism was a bit of a unique kind that was you know, Paul Preston said that Franco wasn't fascist, you was something worse. They had what's called national Catholicism right, which prevented them from doing sterilization or abortion. So instead they felt that they could steal these children and 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 just but like we're gonna put some spins on it, like how the Portuguese were like, we're going to do fashion. 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 the sex assaults were not racist, guys, It's fine.
We were communing godh Iberia Baby Spain is different, as the slogan used to go m terms of Francoist tourism slogan back in the day. Yeah, so the discourse of quote true Catholic womanhood was essential to Francoist nationalization of women, and they were raised to serve the patteria right 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 predictively opposite. It returned for its inspiration to succeed 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 raise
that they did have. You have a post or baby boom, right, you have that everywhere that is affected by a large war, Like you know, there are pretty obvious reasons for this, and then birth rates do go up until like the nineteen seventies nineteen eighties, and then they start declining rapidly and Spain is once again in like 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 nineteen eighties, but nonetheless Spanish birth rates never more particularly high compared to those in the rest of Europe because Franco was an absolutely wrapped up to the economy, right, 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 Ninio Slovados, 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 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 worse to doing pro natalism, there's a lot of contenders, but I feel like we got the usane bolt of natalism right here, and it's such a Jesco 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 forty seven, early nineteen forty eight, 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, 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 of the poorest people in these societies experienced
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, 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.
Right.
One reason why birth rates are high is people are like, yeah, well like but three of them might live, right, you know, I gotta I gotta really pump these numbers up. I'm and have enough kids to keep this fucking farm going, right, And when that stops happening happening, women are like, well, maybe I don't need to have eleven kids, yeah, right, Like if they're all going to live to adults, I don't need eleven children to be adults, right, So birth
rates start to fall. This freaks out though a lot of these 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 at 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 nikolaichi Chescu takes over as party leader on June twenty third, nineteen sixty six, the problem is serious enough in his eyes that it had become a crisis and the birth rate had declined pretty precipitously. In nineteen fifty five, there were about twenty five point six life births per thousand people in Romania, and by the time to Chesscu takes over, there's about
fourteen live birth per thousand people. Right now, for reference, both of those are still higher than the US birth rate. Right now, we're at about eleven a little less than eleven 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. Cichscu stated that women needed to use their influence to rebuild the family, and per that article in the Journal of Family History, Cichescu 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 then 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 it 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 shitloading kids, right, And he announces a new initiative to increase the population of Romania by thirty percent by nineteen ninety so, which I don't know if the idea that would ever be possible is a long shot. Right, So that's that's a massive change in society. But Chichscu 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 leashes a famous raft of new legislation aimed towards 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've had if you already have five children under eighteen in the house concurrently, which is nice, and 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 forty five years are required to undergo monthly gynicle logic examinations at their workplaces, and any
pregnancies detected are monitored to term. Unmarried persons over twenty five years of age and childless married couples without a valid medical reason for infertility are assessed to thirty percent tax on income.
Jesus women who refuse.
To have children have been termed deserters. Despite official pro natalist policies, it has been estimated that forty percent of the seven hundred thousand Romanian women pregnant in nineteen eighty five 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 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 want to drive home. Is that the closest that I have found in all of my rings, the closest direct graph to what guys like Vance and Musk are suggesting for US policy is Romanian.
And it's also the worst this has ever worked.
When I was a lot younger, when I sixteen, I've volunteered in an orphanage venere diverting kids in Romania.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Well, I mean they created a culture of child abandonment, right, Like, yes, yeah, we'll be talking about that. That shit fucked me up, and like, yeah, you shouldn't send your sixteen year old children to do that, to be clear, but like.
No, and you're 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.
Yeah.
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 Chicheski, because obviously, like there was still a lot of communism, doesn't get rid of men being shitty to women. Right, it does do 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 grant glass ceiling kind of thing, but that doesn't last long. He may 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 chicescu. Yes, 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 widely 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 and do all of this immediately after the
regime fell. Women were not equally affected by the pro natalist policies, members of the urban middle class managed somehow or another to get contraceptives on the black market. Oh I should also know contraceptives were basically made illegal, with the exception of like 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 five thousand lay or about fifty dollars 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 aborti fascians, others availed themselves of the
services of a back alley abortionist. Still others carried to term and the number of deaths, the mortality rate for women as a result of this did like there's a lot of hideous stuff. There were 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 in fertility 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 opposition in the social class could still gain access to this shit. And that's how it will work here too, right, Like these Republican congressmen will not be restricting their family members from having access to this stuff. They'll be restricting poor people. Right Yeah, Now, the first thing I should know about this whole raft of policies
Toichesscu 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 sixty seven and sixty eight, there was a brief surge in birth rates, but that fell very quickly and had completely disappeared. By
the nineteen seventies, things were back to baseline. So in nineteen seventy four to Chesscu 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 times throughout the administry, 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 the 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 none of these incentives because they're expensive, and in Romania's case, the country literally didn't have money to provide much of the way of incentives, right,
but they never are going to work. Like, 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 of 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 that Chicheskei regime fell in eighty nine was also pretty catastrophic because there had been surges in births, right, in births of kids to parents who, because the people 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 nineteen ninety there were an estimated one hundred and thirty thousand 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 a part of the propaganda campaign that led you again like one hundred and thirty thousand kids in orphanages.
Oh fucking Christ.
Yeah, that hell sinky 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 Lefter Chichesco Fell And this is how that article opens. On the second floor of the state run institution. Here, dazed toddlers liars sit in iron cribs and 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. Ask if the child inside is alive and orderly, says,
of course and pulls back the covers. The tiny skeleton stirves turned onto its side and groans.
Yeah, there's worse.
This is not the worst 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 of the the bare minim of being fed. 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 like 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 Chichescu'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 got.
I mean, yeah, especially combined with like RFK Junior'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 the 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 twelve years after the end of the regimes, so that these kids were
in their teens, I guess, Oh my god. Yeah, I remember teaching little kids to ride bikes who like had never really been able to play outside very much, and it was fucking yeah, that shit will fuck you up. That's a good museum. I'll see if I can find radios, because if they've maintained one of the old orphanages as it was like with the iron cribs and shit, and they have like projections on the walls the kids rocking and banging their heads someone had filmed. Yeah, that shit
is disturbing. Like I I wouldn't read any of those articles before going to bed.
Yeah, anyway, this has been It could happen here all right bye?
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