The Puerto Rico Birth Control Pill Trials

0:11 Hi everyone. This is Carmen and Christina. This is Unknown, a podcast where we talk about Latin American history. Sometimes it's horrible and deals with Tybee topics like racism, corruption, and genocide. But more than that, it's also about community power and resistance. Yeah, that's it. It's just a lot of order than how we usually say it. But it doesn't matter. Okay, Well it sounded wrong as I was saying it. Yeah. Also while I was out of breath as I was talking, I don't know what's going on. Also warning I might be low energy today. I'm dying. I have an illness that my child gave me. My throw is sore. Who know, I'm tired. So yeah, okay, that's okay. I'm glad it's to you episode. Yeah, you're welcome. Well, Christina, Today we're talking about Puerto Rican women being harmed in the creation of birth control pills. Wow, tell me what.

1:01 This has been on my topic list for a long time and I know haven't had it was because I got it from our topic list. Oh I added it, like yeah a year ago. You even added some sources that I was able to use. Only one of them was like a dead article. It didn't go anywhere, okay, but yeah, I used a few of your sources. You did some of the work for me. Yeah, not so good. I did still do some more researching here. I'm not only using Christina's labor, right, right, But it was a good starting point for sure. Yeah. Well, I'm excited because I know this is going to be depressing. Oh yeah it is. But you know, it just got me thinking because last week, is it the Spanish version of an episode we had already done about the four sterilizations in California. Yeah, so I kind of want to stay on that theme of reproductive and medical injustice, if you will. But also it's part of, like, I don't know, a larger theme that we've talked about. I don't know, like using people of color as guinea pigs. I guess, yes, I mean we've talked about what the Guatemalan syphilis studies, the mustard gas experiments again, the foresvitilizations, to name a few Cornelius roads. Yes, yeah, something we haven't talked about, but we learned about probably in school, well not in high school, but Tuskegee. Yes, right, we mentioned it briefly in the Guatemalan Ziphilis studies. So, I mean, you know, there's a long, long, long story

2:35 of this, sadly, yes, but yeah, before we get into the trials itself, the trial, let's get to know our villains. Some say that these doctors meant well because they really believed the pills were safe and that it would give women choices. And as a defending point, some have pointed out that when the doctors even handed out first control pills to their family members, even in their experimental stage. So who knows, Okay, but I don't think you can dismiss that women were also viewed less than even more back then, so more than today. Yeah, although we are reverting to that again, we're going back. Even though they said we weren't going back, we are. That laugh was actually a cry for help, no, I mean yeah, yeah.

3:30 So the pioneers of the birth control pill were John Rock and Gregory Pinkis. Both of them got their start at one of the most evil places in the world, Harvard What a surprise, shocker. So. Gregory Pinkus was born in nineteen o three to Russian Jewish immigrants in New Jersey. He attended Cornell, another evil place, after winning a scholarship. I'm sorry, I'm laughing because I remember we said that in the Cornelis Rhodes episode, but I don't remember where he went, but it was one of these IVY leagues. What are these evil schools, these evil IVY leagues? And yeah, he won a scholarship to Cornell, where he excelled in biology.

4:15 Eventually he became an assistant professor at Harvard and gained notoriety for his creative and innovative research in mammalian sexual physiology. In nineteen thirty four, Gregory achieved IVF and rabbits Okay, yeah, and this was the scientific feat, but it was not received positively by the general public, and they began to see why they began referring to Gregory as doctor Frankenstein. Wow, a bit much, I think, yeah, yeah, but for the times it makes sense. Yeah, it was like freaky for the time, but also around this time freaky. No, it was like a like a freak of nature. It was viewed as a freak of nature. That's why I said free, like the weirdest thing. Yeah, yeah, it's like a natural yeah, which some people still say about IVF that those people being Christians who want to run this country to the ground to the you know why, because they want the apocalypse to come because oh well yeah, it's in their book The Little Fiction, the oldest fantasy series in the world. Yeah, okay, Anyway, this attitude had a lot to do with the release of the science fiction book Brave New World by Alduiss.

5:32 I don't know how to say his name, Eldis or Aldouis. We all know the book. Yeah, actually yeah, I had seen it, but I never knew what it was about. I'l just Huxley since I didn't finished seing his name. But yeah, I guess it's about fatherless test tube babies born with no human born. Sorry, sorry that sounds like today I'm saying, yeah, born with no humanity or spirit and you know this this I shouldn't need to say this, but obviously babies, children people born from IVF are not test two babies, and they are regular people fatherless. But no, still a belief like why do you think, oh, yeah, don't want gay people to be able to have access to And there's obviously a lot to be said about is surrogacy exploitative blah blah blah, which you know, it's not what we're going to talk about. But people should have families if they want them. Yeah, of course. So Gregory ended up being denied tenure and he was let go by Harvard because they cared about their reputation. Yes, yeah, I could remember that word. I was like, I was gonna say, like how people view them, but there's like a shorter way of saying that. Yeah. So Gregory ended up bringing a small private lab with another friend, and in the early nineteen fifties he was a proud Bye did she devil herself? Margaret Singer? Oh and someone else

7:05 who I'm assuming is also she doubled. But I did not have time to look into Catherine McCormick about developing a birth control pill. Gregory was interested in this more for the science than the social implications or benefits of a birth control pill. He wasn't to help but to learn yeah, yeah, yeah, the science behind exactly. Yeah. He once said I am against women having sexual freedom, but I hasten to add that I'm also opposed to sexual freedom among men. Okay, well, at least that's like a balanced view. Yeah, that's truly funny. And before we get to John Rock, the other pioneer of the birth control pill.

7:48 Let's let's take a quick journey on market singer. Okay, I feel like some people most people maybe I don't know. I don't know if most people. I feel like my view is very skewed because of this whole podcast, right right, But I feel like people know about her, right the name sounds familiar, but it can't like place. Oh okay, right now, she was like the founder of planned parenthood. Have you heard about how planned parenthood is racist and blah blah? Yeah, And like I hesitate to talk about this because this is also a viewpoint that the right manipulates. Yeah, but they have like, like anything they say, you can't even take parts of it because they are also racist, right, true.

8:31 So it's like, okay, this is like shit calling shit shit like yeah, yeah, yeah, because they say birth control was created like as a racist blah blah. I mean, at the end of the day, everything ties back to racism and eugenics, you know what I'm saying, at the expense everything we have people indigenous people, including this country, you know what I'm saying. Yes, yeah, so it's not it doesn't matter, right So anyway, Yeah, Margaret's singer is known for her work as a feminist to help bring a birth control to the United States and around the world. What is less known is Margaret's dark motivations behind wanting women to have access to birth control. These motivations being racism and eugenics. Not shocking, rain, was she like trying to limit the populations of black women and like people of color? Yeah? Yeah, okay, So Margaret's early life and career as a nurse also led her to fight for women to have access to birth control. So it wasn't only the racism and eugenics, okay. It was also because she was one of eleven children ooh, and often saw her mother's stressed and overworked. And then later as a nurse, she saw the struggles women faced without access to birth control.

9:41 And also during this point in time, the Comstock Act of eighteen seventy three was in place, and this made it illegal to publish, distribute, and possess obscene information, including information about medications or other methods of abortion and contraception. Interesting, you bring that specific thing up because it today it's something that's still being used by right writing. Another reason I want her to talk about this, Yeah, it's ever So, what's the word. M hmm. Ever green prevalent, Yeah, prevalent. What did you say, ever green? Yeah, like something that never goes away off the topic. That's like a yeah, yeah, relevant, sadly really yes, truly unfortunately. I'm sorry. I was gonna say it's shorter, but I was like, I guess people don't you like that? I said it so true. And of course, wanting women to have control over their lives and reproduction is a good thing. But Margaret Margaret was a staunch eugenist, as she wrote about in many of her writings, and she saw birth control as a safe way to limit the growth of certain populations. Those certain populations being black, condigenous people of color, of course, and for people well there it is, including poor white people.

11:03 So yeah, well that's what the thing that poorably people don't realize that they're limped in with everyone else. Yes, and they always have been since the dawn of time. So Margaret believed the United States was suffering because of uncontrolled reproduction, especially from feeble minded people quote feeble minded, something we talked about also in the Forester Relations episode. We have feeble minded people living in city slums. Margaret subscribed to the eugenus belief that quote feeble mindedness was associated with abnormally high rates of fertility, which was also described as a biological menace. Wow, which is something also we talked about in the relations episode. I mean, because this is a Eugenus believe, you know, which we talked about a lot. Well, you can hear my child in the background, but I was gonna say this ties into the whole Latinas are extra ferdile. They love making babies.

11:59 They love babies, yep, And so yeah, she believed that feeble minded people shouldn't have the personal liberty to reproduce as much as normal people. There it is, so Margaret saw birth control as a solution and was quoted saying birth control is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science. So she was just putting it all out there. That's like very upfront. That's just hiding anything. She was saying. The quiet part. Yeah, it wasn't for later years. She tried to hide this and like these letters came to be I think discovered later. But I didn't really look much into that. Well, during these years, they were very proud of their beliefs. And now it's coming back, right, and Margaret's mind feeble minded people not only included I already mentioned this, but yeah, poor people, black people, people of color. In a writing called The Pivot of Civilization, mar Margaret wrote several pages about a sixteen year old, the black girl she knew from one of the planned parenthood clinics, who was supposedly feeble minded, and who supposed uncontrolled reproduction resulted in sixteen children who either died at a young age or supposedly became criminals. Honestly, I don't trust March, no, of course not. But that's another thing that it's another very eugenusic genuism belief, like, yeah, that the genus believe. I think, yeah, whatever, it doesn't matter,

13:31 it doesn't Mexicans are thieves. Black people are more likely to commit crimes because they're black, not you know, all the other economic and socioeconomic things happening there. But it's because of the race. Yeah. So yeah, and this also I don't think we've mentioned it as much, but it also was for people with disabilities, right, yes, And of course, there's a lot more to be said. So one of the articles I used is about Margaret and her eugenist believes So I'll definitely be good if you want to learn more about that to read that article, because yeah, I mean there's a lot, there's a lot out there's too much. So now a bit about the other co creator of the birth control pill, John Rock John was born in eighteen ninety in Massachusetts. He went to the High School of Commerce in Boston and had never actually planned to become a doctor, instead pursuing a career in business, but he later discovered business was not for him and he turned to medicine, obtaining an undergrad and medical degrees from Harvard Harvard, John worked at different women's hospitals in Boston before establishing his own medical practice, where he mostly worked with the women having fertility problems. Although John was a devout Catholic and socially conservative, throughout his practice, he came to support access to contraceptives within marriage because he often saw women's suffer from collapse wombs, premature aging, and

15:03 poverty from unwanted pregnancies. And John was also a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Harvard, and he taught about birth control, which was basically unheard of back then and also actually illegal because of that law. Right and like Margaret, John believed the birth control wasn't necessary to control the world population. In an interview, John once said, people like to have babies, and this is particularly so among primitive people's. Primitive people's right who. Gregory and John used to correspond in the nineteen thirties, and they later reconnected at a scientific conference in nineteen fifty two where they chat it about their work and found that they were both using the same drugs in their respective work, the same like hormonal drugs. Gregory ended up asking John to collaborate with him in the clinical trials for birth control, first in Boston on women who were interned at an asylum Okay yep, and later in Puerto Rico. Concerns with Gregory's ethics and methodology arose during the Boston experiments. In nineteen fifty four, with the goal of learning about the pills possible tranquilizing effect, Gregory launched a new trial with sixteen patients at the Worcester State Hospital again an asylum, gave them birth control prototypes, and then slice into their uteruses to understand the pills effect on ovulation. Oh okay, yeah wow. After he published

16:36 his findings, his peers were critical of his methodology, with one doctor saying, this use of guinea pigs of chronic psychotic patients who are not able to give or withhold valid permission in physiological research of this type must be as repugnant to many readers as it is to me. A progressive view. Yeah, because for the time also this was commonplace. There was no standard on metal consent, and these type of people were unlimited test subjects. They were in people. They were Yeah, but Gregory didn't care. He kept experimenting on asylent patients, even overseeing an experiment in which scientists under his direction performed testicular biopsies on men with schizophrenia without anesthesia, and the point was to learn about men's castration anxiety, which what is the point? Obviously, anyone is scared to have their body parts cut off, Like, come on, do we really need to learn about this? No? No, no, So Gregory decided that Puerto Rico was a perfect place to continue the human trials because because there were no anti birth control laws in place, and because there was already an established network of birth control clinics. There were sixty seven clinics providing family planning services to Perdrican women, which also have things wrong with them? Right, gets that they were also in the w Yeah, yeah, the clinics, yeah, not the woman. Yeah yeah, just to be clear, yes,

18:07 And eugenics, like Margaret, targeted Puerto Rico because of their fear of poor Hispanic overpopulation of course, and you, like I had mentioned, eugenics also had a lot to do with the more liberal birth control laws in Puerto Rico, with forced sterilization having been codified into law. Oh yeah. In nineteen thirty three, the governor of Puerto Rico wrote to Margaret Sane, the tragedy of the situation is that the more intelligent classes voluntarily restrict their birth rate, while the most vicious, most ignorant, and most helpless and hopeless part of the population multiplies with tremendous rapidity. What the fuck?

18:50 And that's the rudest buck, that's so fucking rude. First of all, how dare you no? Like seriously, that's like I can't believe from that surprise, but I don't like it. Yeah, Like, it doesn't surprise me, but like it so pisces me off. Yeah yeah, And of course Puerto Rico is a long colonial relationship the United States was also a factor, right, of course. A professor of the history of science at Harvard said, and her name was Gabriela Soto la Viaga. She said, because of its semi colonial status with the United States, the ability to test on these women's bodies seemed like these territories are an extension of US. So like, I don't know, Puerto Rico was always viewed still is viewed as a playground, an extension of the Uri States, not as its own place. People and it's women are not exception unlimited test subjects. Yeah yeah. So prior to both birth control pills, Puerto Rican women used lao parasion as it came to be known, or sterilization to prevent pregnancy, and some of it was forced. Later. Research from the nineteen eighties showed that about sixteen percent of Puerto Rican women who underwent sterilization did not consent to it. Of course, but many Puerto Rican women were eager to have control over their family planning. Women were also coersed and manipulated to undergo sterilization. And law Pasiona was also free. It

20:26 was made free by the government because of Eugenus policies. Women were pressured into sterilizations by employers who strongly favored sterilized employees. That is so like they shouldn't even know so fucked. Yeah, like they shouldn't know the status of anyone's reproduction. Yeah, yeah, that's insane, Oh my god. And health workers also went door to door begging mothers who already had two children to undergo hysterectomies or tubul lications. Wow. Not unlike what we talked about in the sterilizations in California episode of even I mean, I don't know how recent, but as recent as when we were born. And it wasn't only us, it was we saw a lot of or heard of a lot of people saying their mothers were pressured into being startlized or giving up their kids for adoption in the nineties. So I don't think did you look into see if it was like a common thing now or no, I haven't heard of it. I couldn't find new information of like things like this, like other than you know, what's it called anecdotal? Yes, thank you?

21:41 I was like, what is that word. Yeah, other than anecdotal, it couldn't find like, uh, someone like a journalist date from the nineties was also anecdotal, right, because you saw a TikTok video with somebody saying it and then like a bunch of comments were like, oh my god, my mom told me the same thing. Yeah, so but there's some truth to it, right, because our mother was a document and then the documentary no mas bbis right they mentioned that to twenty years before that, So so this was going on then also, and women were also like to about the permanency of La Paracion and they were told there was reversible, which of course is not true, but they didn't know that. Regardless of this ongoing coersion and pressure, Puerto Rican women were eager to be able to have control over the reproduction, to the point where John and Gregory had more participants sign up, like way more participants sign up for the trial than they were expecting. Yeah, than they were expecting. And that's the thing. It's like the risks were not revealed, were not They were not It wasn't informed. It was like they were this is a right, you know in bodily autonomy, but what should have been and I guess maybe they didn't know, although I'll get into it. Okay, thanks, I'll just shut up. Yeah.

22:58 And then also the scientists felt that if they could show that quote dumb poor woman from Puerto Rico and they use the word uneducated, but essentially they're saying dumb, right. Yeah, So they felt that if uneducated poor women from Puerto Rico could follow the birth control po regiment, then women anywhere could, Oh my god. Yeah. So the trial started out small with Selzo Ramon Garcia, a colleague of Gregory and John's at the Worcester Foundation. I'm pretture I'm pronouncing that wrong if it's anything like that sauce like the Worcester right, Yeah, don't ask me. Yeah, this Selto person recruited twenty medical students from the University of Puerto Rico, with over half eventually dropping out of the trial, which pissed off Gregory and John. But most of them jumped out because the pills grueling side effects. Okay I was about to ask why. Yeah, they dropped out, and because of the amount of time required from them as participants.

24:06 The participants experienced blood clots, bleeding, and nausea, and they had to take their temperature and a vaginal smear daily. Then each month their cervices were dilated and tissue from their uteruses was collected, and in more extreme cases, some of the women underwent, oh I should have looked the potter pronounces of proscopiescarotomies. Oh oh, that's worse. Yeah. And this is where a large incision was made into the abdominal cavity so that their ovaries could be observed in real time. Wow, that's that's said. That's real life for I want to drop out too. As soon as they said, hey, you're gonna have to do liparotomy, that word no, thank you. Wow.

24:55 So then in April nineteen fifty six, Gregory John and their team moved on on to conduct their research at Rio Predas, which back then was a new housing project outside of San Juan, an impoverished area. Okay, that's exactly I was gonna say. Yeah. One of the researchers described the participants and a residence of Rio Padas by saying, as a family selected were landless, they were to some extent social problems rude as buck, I know. A memo from Gregory to John indicated that the two hundred and sixty five women they recruited were quote sufficiently intelligent women for whom pregnancy would be acceptable or ours inconvenient. So they're like, well, they're not completely dumb bitches or smart enough. Yeah, the fun. They would be allowed to have kids, Yeah, allowed, mm hmm. And although women were eager for non permanent family planning options, Gregory and John ran into some similar problems they the problems they had at Worship War Sister.

26:03 Over twenty percent of the women dropped out of the trial because of the pills side effects and because of how time consuming their participation was, And there was also a general mistrust in the medicine in the Burson Trol pills, with the newspaper olympiad Imparcia calling the tests the trial a campaign to sterilize women, which given the forestilizations that are popular still at that time, it makes sense that they would be mistrustful of this. The women complained of nausea, dizziness, headaches, stomach pain, and vomiting, and side effects are still common, very common when taking birth control, but imagine taking three times the hormones of the modern day pill and saying and I get They needed to figure out you know, how to get to what we have today. But it's like again, at the expense of in this case predicate women.

26:55 But you know, more often than not everything we've been talking about. Yeah, and the side effects were so serious that doctor Eddie's Rice Rain that's probably the name in English. No, in Spanish, but I already said it in Spanish. Anyway, This doctor a faculty member of the Puerto Rico Medical School and a medical doctor of the Perto Rican Family Planning Association who was overseeing the trials. The doctor reported to Gregory that the ten milligram does it caused too many problems to be acceptable basically, But Gregory and John dismissed doctor Rice Rai's concerns and believed the complaints were psychosomatic.

27:39 Oh so not believing Yeah, the women receiving this medication, like, oh, they're just exaggerating. Oh my god, another way it gets worse. Oh and well. And in addition to that, they also thought whatever physical symptoms the women were actually having were nothing compared to the benefit of the pill. Right, But they also attributed the psychosomatic symptoms to Puerto Rican women being hyperactive emotionally. Oh my god, and this is why we have always discussed how much we hate the spicy latina yeah stereotype because look at this, Look at this. Yep, it's not a fun stereotype. It's like historically used against Yeah, I'm so mad right now. See how I'm calmely mad though?

28:28 Do you see that? You see that? I'm just kidding at you beating the allegations. Also, three women who participated in the trial died and my god, yeah, it is unknown the cause of death because no investigations were ever conducted to see if the pill had anything to do with these deaths. Probably, but it's something that should have been looked into. Oh yeah. And years later it was discovered that the scientists lied to the woman by failing to disclose the pill was in its experimental stages. They never told the women that they were participants in a clinical trial. Wow, they were like, this is medicine. It works, it's already been because you know, if they don't say this is part of a study, the implication is that the studies have already been done. Application is that it's gonna proved medication that's safe to take. Yeah. Yeah, So they lied to these women. They took their consent away insane, and of course it did. But also, like one hundred percent, I believe that their deaths were caused by the pill because like even today, when you look at the label of some pills, like, yeahs uh, if you smoke and you take it, your increase of what is it not stroke some medical thing that can kill you is much much higher if you're smoking and taking the pill. If they didn't tell them this, I thought it was stroke.

29:53 Is it is a stroke? Okay, I couldn't be like blood cloths or something, you know what? Maybe both, and that was a symptom that women experienceerienced, Yeah, and so, but they didn't know. They didn't fully know all of the side effects. They knew a little bit, right, because they did that smaller trial in Boston with the women in the asylum, who also didn't consent, because they were never informed that this was a trial either. They knew some of the side effects, but they didn't know what was going to happen to these women, and they didn't care because they saw them as dispensable. Yeah. The Puerto Rican women participated in the trial until nineteen sixty four, even while the pill became available to women in the United States, and I saw the year when it was It was only like a year or two after the trials in puert Rico started. But even when it was made available to the women in the United States, they the women in the United States experienced severe side effects as well, and lawsuits were launched against the manufacturers. Oh wow.

30:53 Of course, the difference here is that the women in the United States were not tricked into taking experimental medicine, right, they gave their consent. Yeah, and maybe they didn't also didn't know because of the side effects, because the creators did minimize the side effects. So I mean, there's a factor. But at least it was an approved medication at that point, you know, right. Delia Maestre, one of the participants in the trial, told the newspaper The Orlando Sentinel, the experiments were both good and bad. Why is it in tears by the way I should ask? She was crying, She was saying this, okay, the experience experiments were both good and bad. Why didn't they let us make some decisions for ourselves. I have difficulty explaining that time to my own grown children. I have very mixed feelings about the entire thing. And after I read that quote. I tried to find articles from the woman's point of view, and one of the articles I use a link to this one in the Orlando Sentinel, but it said the it was no longer available. So I was like, I looked, and I looked, and I couldn't find any I don't know.

32:03 So maybe if someone has heard of like the women being interviewed, they could tell us about it, because I would like to learn more about what the woman thought. Yeah, although Puerto Rican women were essential and the pill becoming FDA approved and widely available in the United States, they couldn't afford to use it. Oh my god. It was priced at fifty cents a pill or eleven dollars a month, which was out of you know, out of budget. I don't know what the word is. Price range, price range, Yeah, as a price range for them back then. Even in two thousand and two, forty six percent of women ages eighteen two forty four reported being sterilined, and only nineteen percent of Puerto Rican women used oral cont contraceptives, and as of two thousand and eight, over sixty five percent of pregnancies were still accidental. And I didn't look for more updated numbers, so hopefully it's better. But I know that there's been an ongoing battle for reproductive rights even recently in Puerto Rico and here now too, and here not too. Yeah. So yeah. The deceit, coupled with the genus beliefs behind the creation of the birth control pill, as well as the dismissiveness of women's experiences with the side effects, paints a bad picture of colonialism and exploitation. Right, not a good look. No, not at all. Usually when you go back to like whatever highly like amazing medical

33:34 thing that we have, it's yeah, if you go back front of the beginning is ugly. Yeah, yeah, obg y n yep. That entire field created from horrible experiments on black women. Yeah, birth con cancer treatment, treatment, yeap. Who knows what else. We'll find out soon enough, and then there will be an episode. Yeah. I did see that there's a documentary from nineteen eighty one called l'a paracion which I want to watch. Didn't get to watch before this though, And I saw that it's available on YouTube. Oh wow, all right, well I'll be watching. It's about forty five minutes from what I saw. Oh cool, okay.

34:15 And then there's a book by eighties, Ophelia Lopez called matters of choice Puerto Rican women struggle for reproductive freedom that I also want to look into, all right, adding to my to be arned. Yeap, what an important topic in today's landscape. Unfortune in these unprecedented times which are actually also very which are actually very pre precedented, depending on who you're asking, who you're talking to. Yeah, yep, not new, not new. No, we've been here before. Yeah, and we'll get through it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah together. Yep.

35:00 See Sid bother raise his fist. Yes, yes, both in unison. You're right, it was at the same time from our magical Twin Powers. Stop. Is that the end of the episode? Yeah, it is. Okay, Well, I we didn't notice, but we have more than one Patreon. Oh that's right. I was gonna say, I feel like you were going to add like we were going to like mention something last time, or that you told me about after we last recorded, and that we were going to mention this episode. So I'm glad you remembered because I did not. Right, let's shout out our Patreon members. Yeah, let's give a shout out to Chata, Michelle, Mariah and then our free members JG and Desiree. Wow. Yeah, five hole people. So I'm exciting now it is exciting. Yeah, and that's the anything else I had to send some stickers out. Yeah, exciting, very very I'm so tired. Okay, I guess that brings us now officially to the end of the episode. We gave our shout outs. Anything else to add, I don't think so, other than thanking Mariah for naming our Patreon episode where we just talked about stuff in the episode that was hilarious and I'm I'm gonna pretend that I came up with that. Yes, yeah, that's like honest, Booky tells.

36:25 Someone suggested and I forgot they did it. They suggested that we, you know, put our spooky recommendation somewhere, and then I took credit for it after you had suggested to do. But really it came from her. So yeah, we were gonna say, really it came from me, but really, in the end, it was my idea. So so yeah, those are Patreon episodes or episodes, that's what they are now. Yeah, yeah, and they're fun. We only have one, but who knows what yap out yup about next? Yeah, well I have ideas, Oh, anyway than so I can eat my soup, okay, because I'm sick. Yeah. Well, I hope you feel better. I will enjoy your suiting. I will thank you everyone for listening, and we hope this was one lasting study unknown for you.

37:13 Bye bye