On this podcast, we explore fantastical thinking, moral panics, conspiracy theories, and urban legends,

examine the forces that shape our culture, and tell the stories that create the realities we share and sometimes the realities

we don't.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber Smith, and this is American hysteria.

That used to be considered the central task of leadership, perpetuating the population.

This beautiful race of people is going to survive on the earth.

The one sin for which the penalty is national death, race suicide.

When you decide to have a baby, do all you can to have a healthy baby.

Previously on American hysteria.

We started all the way back with the Puritans and the ways that abortion really wasn't a focus for the churches, political leaders, or the citizenry at large. It was left in the hands of women, not necessarily accepted, but not illegal.

But we also looked at how enslaved women were forced to give birth to increase the slave population,

to produce more labor for the Anglo-Saxon Protestant upper class.

We saw how resistance looked, the hushed community information networks, and the midwives who provided medicines to induce miscarriage.

We saw the panic around immigration that came just as the first abortion laws acted both as a means for the American Medical Association to take over the birth industry and as a way to protect Anglo-Saxon

stock from being outbred by Irish immigrants. For part two, we'll see similar obsessions

over population rates and race throughout the 20th century from different sides

of a deeply complicated tangle of forces, forces that all seem to have their eyes on the skies

of a future American utopia, which included, perhaps most importantly, who should and should

not give birth. So now let's start with a story. Just like our former star and flamboyant abortionist Madame Restelle, there was one charismatic woman who reigned supreme in the business of choice.

Inez Burns was born in 1886 to an impoverished family in Philadelphia, working as a pickle

packer at a local plant in her early teens.

But Ines was a dreamer, certainly not content to let her star quality be pickled into complacency.

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