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 History.

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 History, 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.

Things that all seem to have their eyes on the skies of a future American utopia, which

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