On Halloween night in 1926, an unconventional millionaire in Toronto with a wicked sense of humour died, leaving behind an unusual clause in his will that haunted Canada for a decade:
Charles Vance Millar offered to give the bulk of his estate to the woman who had the most babies in the decade after his death, close to $10 million in today's money.
The bequest prompted a mad rush by desperate women to make babies and a media frenzy. Newspapers covered the contest as a melodrama, with heroines and villains, legal battles, and unexpected twists and turns.  
Contests say as much about the public and its prejudices as they do about the contestants. For a competition that was ostensibly about motherhood, it raised troubling questions about race, class, eugenics, birth control, and women’s rights. The court, full of all-male judges and lawyers, poked fun at women and demeaned them, grilling them on their childbirths or sexual history. But sthe women in the Great Stork Derby stood proud and laid the foundations for the rights and recognitions we have today.

The Great Stork Derby is relevant ​to us because it's not history --  it is happening again, with a disturbing new political twist. Fearful of seeing their populations replaced by a wave of immigrant, non-white or non-Christian births, authoritarian governments and right-wing politicians are now clamoring for women to do their patriotic duty and have more babies. In the United States, President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement have adopted a kind of Make America Pregnant Again campaign with open disdain for women and their bodies. The world's richest man, Elon Musk, has warned that “feminism and lack of children has killed happiness.” It was a particular kind of population that Musk was concerned about: “Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” he wrote, having boasted of fathering at least 14 children of his own. 

The dates have changed. The names have changed. But widespread attitudes and beliefs have not: Rich and powerful men still shape our world in a way that leaves too many women as dehumanized and disempowered as they were a century ago.