Welcome back to Kaylee’s Conspiracy Corner. This week, I want to discuss something that goes beyond internet rumors and straight into one of the most personal aspects of our lives: fertility. Have you noticed a rise in infertility and menstruation issues? Are the government and corporations shaping not only the economy and politics, but also reproduction itself? From the variety of chemicals in our food and water to medical solutions sold as progress, the question lingers. And when you look back at examples in history, you begin to wonder whether this is just paranoia or a pattern repeating itself.
For decades, there have been rumors circulating that the government, large pharmaceutical companies, and numerous global organizations have been working to reduce the world’s population, not through war or famine, but through fertility.
Everyday products and medical treatments are said to be part of a hidden agenda to sterilize or weaken human reproductive health. Theorized methods include vaccines, birth control, hormone-laced food, and even the plastics and pesticides in our environment.
Throughout history, there has been an abundance of correlation used to support these claims. In the early 20th century, the U.S. Eugenics Movement saw more than 60,000 people forcibly sterilized under state laws, targeting people with disabilities, people of color, and others deemed “unfit to reproduce.” Their goal was to improve the genetic quality of the human population. Eugenicists promoted selective breeding for individuals with desirable traits. It was not until the 1970s that these programs were shut down.
Between the 1930s and 1970s in Puerto Rico, nearly one-third of women of childbearing age underwent sterilization without consent. Some were pressured by employers, while others were tricked into thinking the procedure was reversible. The U.S. government’s involvement is a major reason this case is central to population-control theories.
During Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule in India in the late 1970s, millions of men and women were sterilized in government-run initiatives. Some were promised compensation like money and food; others were intimidated or coerced into submission. Historians estimate over 8 million sterilizations were performed in just two years. India even received a loan from the World Bank for $66 million between 1972 and 1980 for sterilization programs.
In the 1970s, it was revealed that thousands of Native American women, specifically Navajo women, were sterilized without consent by the Indian Health Service. The law subsidized sterilizations for patients who received their health care through the Indian Health Service and for Medicaid patients. This was just one of the many injustices Native Americans have faced with the federal government. Also, Black and Latina women in the U.S. were also targets of coercive sterilization in these years.
One of the most famous modern examples of enforced population control is China’s One-Child Policy. Families faced fines and job loss, and it got even worse if a family had more than one child. Forced abortions and sterilizations were documented, especially in rural areas. This went on for almost 40 years.
When you gather these cases together, it becomes understandable why medicine and health programs are questioned and placed under harsh scrutiny. This may be framed as just some wild, imaginative thought, but it is based on a real history of abuse, coercion, and broken trust. Fast forward to today, and the theories have only evolved.
In the 1990s and 2010s, church groups in Africa and Asia believed the tetanus vaccine contained a hormone that induced miscarriages. According to the National Library of Medicine, tetanus is deadly to pregnant women, and getting the vaccine during pregnancy is strongly encouraged because it gives your baby immunity and protection for the first two months of their life.
I am not a doctor or scientist, so I cannot tell you exactly if this is safe or not; but to me, taking any sort of medication while pregnant is scary, let alone a vaccine. What I can say, though, is that this would be a very clever and sneaky way of controlling the population, by telling women they risk losing a baby if they do not get vaccinated.
Another clever way for the government to control the population, theorists say, is by creating pills or IUDs that claim to help with menstruation cycles and decrease pregnancy risk. The idea is that certain contraceptives do not stop fertilization but instead prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus, what some may call “silent abortion.” Medically, pregnancy begins with implantation, not fertilization. But views on this subject vary based on a multitude of beliefs. The claim rests on a belief that life begins with fertilization, not implantation.
Theorists also say governments and corporations are loading our environment with endocrine disrupters, chemicals that block hormones, ultimately reducing fertility, lowering testosterone, and making populations easier to control. The suspects include plastics, pesticides, food packaging, and industrial pollution.
The common herbicide atrazine was shown in a 2002 Berkeley study to cause male frogs to develop female characteristics. It interfered with the frogs’ reproductive systems and caused male frogs to develop into fully functional females. It also depleted the frogs’ androgens, male hormones, which reduced testosterone levels and decreased sperm counts. Theorists often imagine what it could do to humans, however, in that study and subsequent studies in rats and mice, the findings persist that, “these effects are not expected to occur in humans because of specific biological differences between humans and these types of animals.”
When you take all the information gathered, the forced sterilizations, the global health campaigns, the rise in endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and the cultural differences in how pregnancy and abortion are defined, it can be easy to see why people may be skeptical. History has shown that governments have interfered with reproduction in the name of public health. Are these vaccinations, chemicals, and birth-control measures an intentional population-control plan, or simply the byproduct of negligence? One thing is for certain: when trust is broken, conspiracy theories are not only inevitable, they’re practically invited.