Was there a spate of pregnancies in the 1980's which may have led to the ban on children? If you and Nancy quit, maybe others did as well and they decided to stop that.
Not particularly, but there was a big influx of staff in the late 70s/early 80s and at that time there were no rules on how many children new recruits would bring, or any rules against pregnancies.
The bigger situation was that the children kept losing their nannies. The orgs did not want to give their better SO staff, and there were at least two perverts found on staff at the CEO around '82 or '83.
Temporary bans against pregnancies had taken place in the SO in the past.
So the number of children per nanny was more then 3X beyond the legal limit at PAC. AOLA started paying for outside babysitters and even some of the ASHO execs had outside babysitters.
I wrote about this at length in the past. It is an upsetting subject, but I was there and know firsthand how it all went down. I was one of the last to bear a child in the SO before the ban.
The CMO began conducting surveys on all SO crew about whether or not children were important to the SO, production and the future. The results went up to mgmt.
In order to try to curtail what was going to happen and help the children (who were terribly neglected in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions where they rarely left their cribs), I started a pilot as Exec Esto AOLA where I requested staff not become pregnant for one year so we could catch up and get more nannies. It was voluntary - there were no warnings, fines, penalties. It was stressed as a personal choice that was never to be an order and emphasized that it would only be a YEAR. One staff member got pregnant in that time and she was not penalised in any way, but she was asked to recruit a nanny and she did.
It was my hope and last-ditch effort that by giving us a one-year break without adding more children to the already severely overcrowded CEO, we could straighten out the CEO and help the kids. We also put a limit on the number of young children a recruit could join the SO with (I think it was two, but later the C/O AOLA changed it to none.)
It went well. The CEO started getting on top of things within months. The kids were doing better. Less than three months later, ASHO instituted a similar pilot. All was smooth. SO women were respected as this was their right and an individual choice. There was never even a thought of abortion - for God's sake! Abortion was completely contra-Dianetics!
Then before six months was up (the pilot was supposed to be for a year), ED Int (Guillaume LeSevre), under orders from DM, made it mandatory that SO staff could not get pregnant or they would be sent as Class IV org staff. There was no time limit. The CMO results plus whatever Flag data had gone uplines. So my idea to make it just a temporary thing failed.
We tried. We did everything we could for the kids, but Scientology's policies were abusive to children and there was no way to take care of the children well within the Sea Org while those abusive policies were always going to be followed, while Scientology was always more important than family, and while children were considered a burden and not essential to production. The Sea Org and Scientology were, and are, unchangeable.
Others who were at Flag at the time also have the story from Flag's POV. Apparently the same idea as mine had been brought up before and scrapped repeatedly - only to have it become a permanent order.... the one thing all of us in middle management tried so hard to prevent.