Hi, I am Heather.
And I'm Lisa.
Heather: And this is Another Bloody Podcast, where we talk about women's healthcare from a different angle, one that leverages our decades of experience as journalists and our personal health journeys,
Lisa: From brain fog to vagina drama, and every taboo subject in between. Think of us as the friends who say out loud all the things your doctor should have mentioned, but somehow didn't.
Heather: Join us now for a public conversation about our private parts.
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Hey, Lisa.
Hi, Heather. How are you? How are you?
Heather: Good.
Lisa: You're good?
Heather: I am doing well. It's Monday, and I guess you can tell 'cause we're already interrupting each other.
Lisa: Yeah.
Heather: So today we have a little bit of a different kind of show.
Lisa: Yeah. We put this together kind of fast for us. It would've been faster, but I've been super sick. So we kind of put this together based on some news, and, things we wanted to react to, and things that we thought were related to this show and our mission on this show, and some of the topics that we like to look at.
So Dr. Oz, said something about women being underbabied, and it went super viral. It started last week when Trump had a press conference to announce some initiatives around fertility and maternal health, and highlights from that press conference quickly became fodder for social media and comedy shows like The Daily Show. If you somehow missed it, we'll include a link to The Daily Show recap in the show notes, because it's hilarious. And to the entire, I think it was one hour 16 plus minute conference, from C-SPAN, just in case anybody has that kind of time.
Heather: I don't, nor do I have that kind of interest. What I saw was quite enough.
Lisa: Yeah
Heather: So that press conference included the president, you know, ever modestly referring to himself as the father of fertility, which I find incredibly creepy. But it was somehow topped by Dr. Oz, the Medicaid and Medicare administrator, declaring that one in three Americans are underbabied and promising that we would soon be seeing a bumper crop of what he called Trump babies, thanks to policies that these guys are trying to put in place. By these guys, RFK Jr. was also on the stage, and, he let us all know how concerned he is that the sperm counts of teenage boys are falling. This is I mean-
Lisa: It's a lot.
Heather: It's a lot. When I was a teenager, I was concerned about the power of teenage boy sperm. And to have this concern conveyed by an adult male on television, was quite creepy, and it might have been a little less creepy old uncle if he had thought to simply say that sperm counts are down, and not, point out teenage boys specifically.
Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. Where are you going there, RFK Jr.? So the memes and the jokes, they were all a lot of fun. But between the made-up statistics, the pro-natalist rhetoric, and the troubling policy initiatives, the press conference was actually extremely troubling if you care about women's healthcare, which of course we do.
Heather: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: Today, we're gonna talk about our reactions to Trump's one day after Mother's Day presser, and to his overall record on maternity healthcare.
Heather: Yeah, so I know that we've both prepared some notes and thoughts that we wanna talk about. We haven't talked this through ahead of time, so this conversation will be just as much of a surprise to us as it was for us to see these old bozos up on stage talking about these topics. So you wanna get started?
Lisa: Sure. So I'll go first. So Heather, I had, just some general questions. The first being, what was your reaction? Maybe your emotional reaction. I think I get the idea, though. What was your reaction to the press conference?
Heather: Well, I had a few. First and foremost, I'm wondering whether, who should be more concerned, RFK Jr. about teenage boys' sperm, or teenage boys about RFK's concern about their sperm? I mean, that was sincerely one of the stranger things I have ever seen in a political arena.
I also found quite a lot of it frankly insulting. There's something that I ... It's a little hard for me to identify, but there's something very insulting as a woman who desperately wanted children and tried very, very hard to have them, as being labeled under-babied. Also my friends and family members who have one child, typically they made that choice very thoughtfully, because of financial reasons, because of, you know, professional demands that wouldn't have allowed them to give a child, more children the attention that they needed and deserve.
And so to say that women's choices about family planning are entirely by accident and simply due to the fact that we don't have, like, mega sperm in this country. It's so diminishing and insulting, and I have struggled to figure out, like, what to do with those comments.
Lisa: Yeah. The off-the-cuff comments in particular were troubling. I was also troubled by the more planned, kind of subtle stuff. The stuff that was coming out from the women during which point Trump decided he would take a nap, that was also very troubling. But we'll get into that in a little bit.
I think you hit on something where I, and I often have this feeling, especially when it comes to RFK Jr.'s kind of role in this administration, which is, there might be a valid point in there somewhere, but it got so convoluted on the way that it becomes something sort of uglier and kind of ridiculous.
So I guess, my next question for you was, you know, do you think somewhere in all that mess there was a point or a problem or a set of problems that could and should be addressed?
Heather: I do. And I actually had that same question for you. Because there is a kernel of truth there. It's just not... It was poorly presented. There was a 2022 meta-analysis of 223 different studies that found that found a 50% decline in both sperm concentration and total sperm count between 1973 and 2018, and that was across North America, Europe, and Australia. So there is a kernel of truth there that there is a sperm crisis happening. It's not unique to the United States. And I have some theories of my own about what this administration could be doing to remedy that, that lean more towards diet and environmental issues than you know, rewarding women for being, you know, super producers of babies.
Lisa: I feel like old-school RFK Jr. back when he was cleaning up, like, the Hudson River Valley and worried about microplastics might have had an answer to that, and it might have even driven some of his concern this time around. But of course, he's not gonna suggest to his bosses that they do more regulation of industry. So yeah, there's... I felt the same way. I'm like, there's a there there, but this ain't it.
Heather: And also, I couldn't find any reliable data, it all seemed to be anecdotal, about sperm counts in teenage boys.
Lisa: Yeah, why the teenagers? I don't know.
Heather: Well, also, I don't know if it would even be legal to study that, unless you're, like, a billionaire, one of these tech bros who wants to live forever. I'm blanking on his name, but, there's a documentary-
Lisa: It's all of them. Right.
Heather: There's, like, a very creepy documentary about this guy, and he and his son, kind of do this project together, and he has tested his son's sperm against his own and claims now that he has, like, reversed aging.
Lisa: Oh, that's horrifying.
Heather: Well, what he says is that he's been able to reverse his own aging so that now he's as virile as his teenage son.
Lisa: Oh. Oh my God, dude.
Heather: So I'll put the name of the documentary in the show notes.
Lisa: Sure.
Heather: It's quite interesting. However, even in that very, very narrow context, those results are only verified by his paid experts. So anyway, I digress. So contrary to what Kennedy said, sperm count actually declines with age. So typically, unless there's an issue, young men have much higher counts than older men. So I'm just not even sure where he's getting any of this information.
Lisa: I think he was trying to say, like, not only are overall counts down, and we did talk about that a little bit in our endometriosis episode, that the number of heterosexual couples, the percentage who are having fertility issues is actually higher, even from the early 2000s, when you and I were kind of going through the fertility journey. The rates are higher, and part of that is male fertility rates are down. And maybe he was trying to say even teenagers' sperm counts are down. But of course, he didn't provide any of that context or say what study it was from or anything, so.
Heather: Right. I mean, anecdotally, maybe, because we're all eating microplastics and shitty food. But he didn't seem to have any science to back it up, which, I mean, welcome to the Trump administration.
Lisa: Right, exactly. Exactly. My next question was, I really had a hard time figuring out what they were trying to say. But I think from what Dr. Oz was trying to say is that maybe people would be having more babies if they could get some additional help or additional support. And I'm just wondering is do you think there are people who maybe you've known or just from doing, you know, you've been writing on healthcare topics and fertility for a while, are there people out there who maybe would have wanted to have larger families if there were no obstacles at all?
Heather: I think we have to separate out the infertile from the fertile because of course you and I would have had babies had we been able to. But I do know families who stuck to one child or two when they wanted three or four-
Lisa: Yeah
Heather: Because childcare is so expensive.
Lisa: Yeah.
Heather: Even pre-K if, you know, if you don't live in a place where you can send your children to like a pre-kindergarten program and in a public school, I was floored when I found out how much daycare and pre-K cost. I mean more than my rent every month, hands down. And that doesn't account for food and diapers and college and, you know, it's an expensive endeavor to raise a human. So I have to imagine that finances play heavily into this, and currently, practically everybody I know is losing their jobs or is either unemployed or underemployed thanks to AI.
And from everything I've read, that is predicted to get worse. And so if I were of childbearing age right now, I don't think that I would be willing to roll the dice that this is all financially gonna work out great for me.
Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. Again, it seems, it's like there's a kernel of a maybe sort of policy problem there. But then nothing that they went on to say during the rest of this press conference, and certainly nothing that they've proposed so far would address any of that. And it is interesting to me as well that they seem, there seems to be a really strong pro-natalist wing within MAGA, that has power within this administration.
But also wielding a lot of power within this administration are these tech bros who are implementing AI, who seem to want to put vast, vast numbers of us out of work, and I'm just curious why they think they need such a large population if they don't need workers. I'm, I'm very, I'm very baffled by the entire endeavor.
Heather: Maybe to fulfill the requirements of the draft that this administration is endeavoring.
Lisa: I don't know.
Heather: I mean, one of my questions to you, it's less of a question than a statement, but I want your thoughts on it, is that, you know, as usual, Trump seems to be really talking out of both sides of his mouth here. We need more Trump babies thanks to, what did he call himself? The fertility-
Lisa: Oh, the father of fertility, which is also ick.
Heeather: Oh, my God. Like- I know. Um-
Lisa: Oh, yeah
Heather: But so Trump wants us to see him as, you know, the father of fertility who's creating all of these babies, but at the same time, as usual, Trump seems to be talking out of both sides of his mouth here. Not that that comes as any surprise. But my question to you, or what I'd like your thoughts on, is like if the goal here is genuinely to improve the U.S. birth rate, then why cut Title X, which is a federal family planning program that's been around since the '70s, and it, contrary to popular belief, does not fund abortion.
It does give low-income, mostly low-income women access to birth control, STI screenings, pregnancy testing, and prenatal referrals once they are pregnant. And these are women who likely wouldn't be able to afford care otherwise. So it just seems contradictory to me to take away the care that would allow more women to have healthy pregnancies while saying that we need more pregnancies. How do you justify that?
Lisa: Yeah, it makes no sense. They're cutting, as you say, Title X, which was started by Nixon. It wasn't even initially a Democratic initiative. They're cutting, they're, and actually, not just cutting, they're, they are proposing eliminating it and eliminating Healthy Start and eliminating the Healthy Mother Infant programs through the CDC. They're also proposing big cuts, deep, deep cuts in Medicaid, no other insurance pays for more births in America than Medicaid does. It pays for 40% of all births, 50% in rural areas.
They're going to cut it so deeply that 10 million people are gonna find themselves without it. So it, it really creates an environment where it's much more dangerous to get pregnant, it's much more dangerous to give birth, and more babies are gonna die too, not just the mothers, I guess, 'cause I have to assume they don't really care that much about the mothers.
Babies and mothers are gonna die as a result of these cuts, and none of the initiatives that they mentioned during this press conference amount to anything really. If anything, they're damaging, and we can talk about what those initiatives really were in a little bit. But yeah, Title 10 is the big one, and then there's a bunch of other initiatives that they're putting forward that are... They are going to not just hurt women, they are gonna kill women.
Heather: Well, and there are some other insulting proposals here. One is a $5,000 baby bonus I assume that's a tax break.
Lisa: I think, yeah.
Heather: And you get it for giving birth. And then the other is the National Medal of Motherhood, which would be awarded to any woman who has six or more children. Please discuss.
Lisa: The Medal of Motherhood. I just picture a bunch of, like, future Stepford-like looking women with red hats on, with, you know, their MAHA T-shirts, running around with their big medals pushing us out of the way at Starbucks.
Heather: Six, seven, eight little blonde-haired babies clutching at their long trad wife skirts.
Lisa: Right. Yeah.
Heather: Not to make all of this about me, but, like, what do I get? I can't have a baby. I tried. So I don't get the $5,000. I don't get the National Medal of Motherhood. But I mean, for God's sake, my uterus tried.
Doesn't it get like a participation medal at least? I mean, It's in the trash somewhere, so she doesn't care. But, like, it just leaves out huge swaths of the population.
Lisa: I want an accessory. Oh, God. Yeah. It's... I mean, the natalism and like the pronatalism has just this kind of creepy tinge to it that feels very, of course everybody's saying it's very Handmaid's Tale, right? But it, it, it is really, it's really hard not to sort of see that in that press conference. Um, yeah.
Let me see if there was anything else I wanted to ask you. Well, if you did have a magic wand and you could support women in any way you wanted to, and even the $5,000, like, isn't that far off from, there are bonuses given in some Scandinavian countries, in Japan, and in a lot of countries they do give these very generous kind of bonuses to people in the recognition that, you know, especially during the first couple years after a baby is born, you're gonna spend enormous amounts of money on diapers, enormous amounts of money on, you know, help with lactation, or formula, or getting your house ready to be safe for a baby. So it's not that outrageous, right? If it's a really thought-through policy.
So what sort of things would you do, let's say for friends of yours who were like, "Boy, we really wanted to have, like, three kids, but we're gonna have one because that's, that's the number we can afford to send to college. That's the number we can afford to really focus on and give them the resources that we think they deserve."
Heather: Well, I think I would start by having these guys focus on the economy, and focus on how people are going to get jobs that can support the family that they already have, which would allow them to then consider expanding it.
I am a highly employable person, and I have been out of full-time work for a year and a half, and if I were in my 30s, this stretch of unemployment would have severely changed the way I thought about family planning or building a family.
This is a little bit off-topic, but another thing I've been thinking about as I prepared for this conversation is it doesn't solve this population crisis that these men are talking about, but there are thousands of children in this country in the foster care system who need homes. And why don't we start talking about the taking care of the people who already exist instead of these people who don't yet?
Lisa: As you're kind of mentioning, they're doing absolutely nothing to make employers adhere to previous legislation on employment discrimination, and women in particular are really getting hit. They've done nothing to make it easier for women to step back from the employment arena, kind of stay home with their kids if they want to, or cut back on their employment hours and then re-enter the workforce, which according to some economists who study this, who study family size, they have said that is a big factor when women think about whether they wanna have children. You know, is that they kinda look at, well, if I could easily step in and out of my career trajectory without losing ground, or even being shut out from it entirely, a lot of women would be more likely to have children who end up not having children, and would have more children who have one or two.
So, we could be doing things to make it easier for women. That doesn't seem to be the agenda here.
Heather: No. And the focus here seems largely on women. I mean, why don't they start, like, a sperm Olympics so that we can all figure out w- which guys to stay away from? I mean, that would be family planning on its own. They can call it, like, the Nick Cannon Award. The guy with the highest sperm count. I mean.
Lisa: Yeah, exactly
Heather: It just always lands so squarely on the shoulders of women to solve these types of problems, and, I don't know. This whole thing seems like a bunch of bullshit. And from what I can tell, Dr. Oz just wants to coin a phrase. I was reading about this, and apparently he dropped this little under-babied nugget a, I don't know, six months ago and it didn't take off, so he's just, like, trying again.
Lisa: Right. Didn't anybody hear me say underbabied?
Heather: Yeah. It's like when you're at a party and someone says something that they think is really funny and nobody laughs, so they just say it again.
Lisa: Right. Stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen. Yeah. I mean, I did kind of, I ended up in this crazy tailspin of looking at both our maternity mortality rates, but also fertility rates. And I got it in my head, it was one of the reasons I asked you the question, was, you know, I got it in my head like, what if we did what they do in Japan or France, where they, you know, Scandinavia, where they just give women so much to, if they're gonna have babies, right?
Wonderful, free childcare. And it's not just free, but they put a lot of incentive into training people who are interested in early childhood development to go into direct childcare. So you could have someone with a master's degree taking care of your baby at the local childcare, so that you can work. They have really generous workplace incentives. I mean, they just have all this stuff in place, and we have nothing, right?
So, those were things I thought if I had a magic wand, you know, I'd do that, and I think that it would really move fertility rates.
Heather: If women were guaranteed a significant maternity leave even where they could spend three to six months with their babies without penalty.
Lisa: Six months is standard in Europe, by the way.
Heather: And if there was a livable minimum wage that would help. And if we cleaned up our water and our food so that we aren't all eating microplastics, that would probably help.
Lisa: Yeah. So I was trying to figure out, like, where does he come up with this number, like, one in three? As far as I could tell, even in the pro-natalist community, this is not a statistic anybody really has come up with.
Heather: Well, he asked three women, and one of them said, "I don't have enough babies."
Lisa: That's probably it. All I could, I, I looked at how many women currently kind of finish their fertility lifespan and have one baby or no babies, and it's somewhere in the 35 to 40% range. That is all I could come up with. I have no idea. Nobody else seems to have any idea. Even people who are on his side are not kind of jumping forward and going, "Oh, yes, he took it from our, our weird study that was skewed to begin with." It's like, there's nothing.
But the U.S. fertility rate is 1.6, and that, in theory, if you wanted, quote, "replacement rate," you'd have to have 2.1. And it steadily was in decline for at least two decades, and then it took a real sharp decline after 2007, and it really hasn't recovered. And that's, of course, when the economy went south quickly. Birthrates have declined globally. It's not just in the U.S.
So I took a look, I ended up looking at the work of this woman. She is a Nobel Award-winning economist, Claudia Goldin of Harvard, and she breaks down the world's economies into a couple different categories, and one is steadily developing economies like the U.S., U.K., Scandinavia, France, and Germany, where the rates right now are 1.6, and a lot of these economies would like it to be a little bit higher, so they're trying to figure out ways to deal with this.
Then there are rapidly growing economies. So economies that were either very hard hit after World War II and really had to rebuild from nothing, or they were always sort of lagging and have had, like, a rapid entry into developed economy status. And those are Japan, South Korea, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain, and they have significantly lower, birthrates of 1.3, to the point where it's quite concerning. So you see, like, an economy like Japan where they are just throwing anything at folks hoping they will have babies, and the women are saying, "No, thank you."
And then there are sort of these regressive states, so places that are really harsh on women or have women have very little autonomy. So Saudi Arabia, although it got a little bit better after 2018, but there's still just a lot of curtailing of female autonomy. United Arab Emirates is another one, and they are down from women typically having six to seven children just a generation ago to 2.2, and they are throwing everything at these women to keep them home and get them to be pregnant. And women the world over are saying, "No, thanks."
Heather: Well, that's also assuming that this is exclusively the decision of the woman. Men raise families, too, and, if you are going to tout the family values that this administration has touted, then you have to assume that this is a decision that's been made between, a man and a woman. So why are all of the incentives aimed at women?
Lisa: No, they're not. They're family, so the family would get..
Heather: Oh, I see.
Lisa: Yeah. What they're giving to women, and they're giving to men, too, though. They give, they give a lot more pater- like, paternity and maternity, time off, lots of stuff. But what Goldin's research is saying is it really is women who are the ultimate arbiters here, even in regressive societies because they're the ones who, when you dig down, they are saying they don't wanna have that many children. And when you talk to the men, they're saying, "I wish it was like it used to be, and I want my, you know, my woman to have more babies. These women, they won't have the number of babies I want." Or, "I want to get married." So, in a country like Japan, many, many more young men wanna get married and have families, say that they do, and young women, when they poll them, they say, "Nope, I don't."
Heather: I'm good.
Lisa: I'm good. And Goldin's research, it's kind of interesting where she says, you know, you can't just throw kind of a one-off policy, In hope that women are gonna snap it up, like the $5,000, right? Where it's not part of a greater context that is reassuring for women, primarily women, but men as well, when they're making these family planning decisions and they're saying, "I feel confident that we can have three kids, and I'm gonna be supported by my government, and I'm gonna be supported by my workplace, and I am gonna be able to raise these children with the care and resources that I think they deserve."
If you just do, like, one-off here or one-off there, they don't really move the needle. But if you look at, like, France and Scandinavia, they have slowly have moved the needle, and nobody else is moving the needle globally. Which I thought was really interesting.
And she also argues if you wanna go the other way, which seems to be what the United States seems to be wanting to do, which is go full regressive, it doesn't really work.
Heather: So how do we wrap this up?
Lisa: I mean, I think that supporting women and families would be a much better way to go here.
Heather: Yeah, not a one-time prize for giving birth.
Lisa: Exactly. Hopefully they would stop cutting resources toward the kinds of healthcare crises that women face that affect fertility. They've cut funding for healthcare initiatives to do further research into things like PCOS and endometriosis, things that actually affect fertility.
Heather: Yeah, I mean, if they could give us a solution to endometriosis, that would reach... What was the number? 190 million women worldwide. Not that all of those women would have babies, but I would've.
Lisa: We came up with the, I think the current number is something around the 13% of couples who are trying to conceive are having trouble, and half of them, it's due to endometriosis. So that's a pretty large percentage that you could increase.
Heather: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: Um, so I think there's things you could do that are good for women generally that would actually also help your fertility rates. You could support maternal women's health, especially in maternal healthcare deserts, which are largely rural, and they're red states. So it makes no sense. We didn't really talk about the fact that instead what they're doing is they're going to cycle this money toward the network of pro-natalist, pregnancy centers. Did you read about this?
Heather: No
Lisa: Yeah, so they started this moms.gov site, and that site, it's very, like, pro-life coded, in terms of its language and its graphics. And it it has this, a picture on the home page of, it kinda cuts the woman's head off, and her, you don't really see much of her legs. You just see her very, very pregnant belly. Of course, she's white, blonde. And she's in a field of hay or ragweed or something.
Heather: I don't even need to see it. Wearing a, like, gauzy white dress probably.
Lisa: I think it's a gauzy yellow dress. Yup. And it says, uh, "Resources, information, and help for new and expecting mothers," but then it directs women to these pregnancy centers. So it's a network of pregnancy centers that are organized by what's called the Option Line, which is run by Heartbeat International. And there's thousands of these centers.
And so if you think that these pregnancy centers, have a single medically certified professional on site, you would be wrong. If you thought that they were testing for hypertension, anemia, or gestational diabetes, which can affect birth weight, stillbirth, infant or maternal mortality, nope. If you think you're gonna meet with somebody and even put together a birth plan, no.
These are those centers that are designed to trick young women into thinking they're going somewhere where they might get to talk through with somebody, "Well, what would happen if I want to have an abortion?" That's what these centers are. So they will do pregnancy tests. They do ultrasounds, which I don't understand how they're allowed to do without medical personnel. And then there've been all kinds of studies done, where there's pretty good evidence that they often lie to women and tell them they're further along than they are
Heather: Yeah
Lisa: So that they don't think they can have an abortion.
Heather: I know somebody that this happened to.
Lisa: Oh my God
Heather: When we were in college. I didn't know her well. So to be honest, I don't even remember how I heard this story. I think she told me, but I don't really know why. But she discovered she was pregnant, I think we were, like, either freshmen or sophomores in college, and she went to a center that sounded like a place where you could get like, a blood pregnancy test, which is usually the definitive indicator that you're pregnant, and talk through options.
And when she got there, it was a complete bait and switch. They sat her down, they showed her pictures of fetuses. It was a very disturbing experience for somebody who was really just looking for support because she was young and scared. And, you know, a quote unquote "service" that calls itself, what did you say? Option Line?
Lisa: Option Line, and they're pregnancy centers.
Heather: Yeah. So options indicates that they are going to actually present you with your options, and ugh, that makes my blood boil.
Lisa: Over the last few years, these centers have received $1.3 billion in federal... or not necessarily federal funds, but government funds. So we the people are paying for these centers. A lot of times, they purposely set up shop very close by an abortion clinic or a Planned Parenthood. They try and give themselves a name that's sounds kinda sorta like it might be the same thing. And literally hoping to sort of trap young women.
Heather: Yeah
Lisa: They'll tell them that they'll give them free stuff, like diapers or cribs, but then even if those young women choose to keep their pregnancies, and then they come back and they go, "So diapers and crib, and help-
Heather: I'm here for my diapers.
Lisa: They'll say, "Well, that's contingent on you taking some religion classes and maybe converting to our brand of Christianity."
Heather: Oh, for fuck's sake.
Lisa: Yeah. Sometimes if they decide, Well, okay, you've convinced me or it's too late for me to have an abortion, I'd like to have an adoption. Then they steer them not toward the kinds of adoption options that I used or your sister used, where the birth mother has a lot of power and autonomy in the relationship, but they'll steer them to some highly, famously problematic Christian adoption agencies. One of these is very famously in my hometown. There's one that was kind of revealed to be pretty creepy. Pretty, pretty upsetting. There's this fantastic podcast called Liberty Lost that talks about what happened inside this old, you know, it's a 1950s style, still going, home for quote "unwed mothers." And it is, if you've got the stomach for it, it's fantastic, but it's kinda like listening to, like, The Handmaid's Tale meets Rosemary's Baby. It's terrifying.
Heather: And it called Liberty?
Lisa: Liberty Lost.
Heather: Liberty Lost.
Lisa: It's great. It's a very well done podcast. And these are the centers. These pregnancy centers, sometimes they're called crisis pregnancy centers.These are the places that our government's website is sending these young women to, or, sending people who are worried about a problematic pregnancy to, and these are the centers that I imagine they're gonna try really hard to give our federal dollars to. So.
Heather: Ay, ay, ay.
Lisa: I know. So I felt like, you know, it's funny, and I'm happy that The Daily Show did sort of a three-minute spoof of it, but it's, it's a lot. It's much more than just creepy. What they were alluding to during that press conference were initiatives that are dangerous to women.
Heather: Do you have any uplifting final words for us, Lisa? Because personally, I'm feeling a little beaten down at the moment.
Lisa: You know, there are a number of organizations that are on top of this stuff. They know exactly what the signaling is about. They're keeping tabs on where this funding is going, and they're fighting the good fight. And so I think, I think maybe that's another. This is going to have a lot of show notes and a lot of URLs, places for everyone to go for additional information. And so we are definitely gonna include some of that in the show notes if you wanna get involved.
And I think the other positive that was mentioned in the research that I mentioned from Claudia Goldin, the economist from Harvard, she talked about something that we talked about really early on, which is in Episode 3 we talked about sort of domestic equity. And she said one of the best ways to increase, sizes of families or for somebody who's deciding, "I don't think I am gonna have kids. In an ideal world, I would've wanted a child," the best way to do that, she said, is not just to increase employment for women, but to start to really look at cultural equity for women, and especially making that domestic labor sphere more equitable.
So that when you become mom, you're not also still taking on the bulk of the housework, and you have an outside job, and you're taking on the bulk of childcare. And I do think men, especially younger men, they are stepping up to the plate. I think there's evidence that they are getting better at this, and that marriages and domestic partnerships between parents are slowly getting a little more equitable.
And I think if there's even a crisis to begin with, I mean, maybe our civilizations can adjust to slightly smaller, numbers of children. Obviously, there's a balancing act. You don't wanna have one young person taking care of, you know, eight great-grandparents and four grandparents, and that's where it gets a little dicey. But if we want to increase birth rates closer to that kinda 2.0, 2.1 level, I mean, it does seem like younger people, as they're building more equitable partnerships and relationships together, that's probably gonna be a much more effective driver than anything else.
Heather: I agree. And if you haven't heard it already, go back and listen to the episode titled The Marriage Imbalance, and you'll hear, a pretty lively conversation that Lisa and I had about marriage that I think was pretty interesting.
Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, so I think there's hope. There's hope.
Heather: All right, friend. Well, good talk. And we will see you next week for another episode of Another Bloody Podcast. Thanks for listening.
Lisa: All right, bye. Bye.
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more information about the sources we used for this episode can be found in the show notes and at our website, anotherbloodypodcast.com. If you have comments about this episode, stories you wanna share or future topics to suggest, please DM us on Instagram at anotherbloody_pod or send us a note on our website.
Our logo was designed by Illustrator Stefanie Augustine. You can find more of her work@stefanieaugustine.com. Finally, please keep in mind that the content presented on this podcast is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only, and should not be regarded as a substitute for medical advice and please take care of yourselves.
And I'm Lisa.
Heather: And this is Another Bloody Podcast, where we talk about women's healthcare from a different angle, one that leverages our decades of experience as journalists and our personal health journeys,
Lisa: From brain fog to vagina drama, and every taboo subject in between. Think of us as the friends who say out loud all the things your doctor should have mentioned, but somehow didn't.
Heather: Join us now for a public conversation about our private parts.
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Hey, Lisa.
Hi, Heather. How are you? How are you?
Heather: Good.
Lisa: You're good?
Heather: I am doing well. It's Monday, and I guess you can tell 'cause we're already interrupting each other.
Lisa: Yeah.
Heather: So today we have a little bit of a different kind of show.
Lisa: Yeah. We put this together kind of fast for us. It would've been faster, but I've been super sick. So we kind of put this together based on some news, and, things we wanted to react to, and things that we thought were related to this show and our mission on this show, and some of the topics that we like to look at.
So Dr. Oz, said something about women being underbabied, and it went super viral. It started last week when Trump had a press conference to announce some initiatives around fertility and maternal health, and highlights from that press conference quickly became fodder for social media and comedy shows like The Daily Show. If you somehow missed it, we'll include a link to The Daily Show recap in the show notes, because it's hilarious. And to the entire, I think it was one hour 16 plus minute conference, from C-SPAN, just in case anybody has that kind of time.
Heather: I don't, nor do I have that kind of interest. What I saw was quite enough.
Lisa: Yeah
Heather: So that press conference included the president, you know, ever modestly referring to himself as the father of fertility, which I find incredibly creepy. But it was somehow topped by Dr. Oz, the Medicaid and Medicare administrator, declaring that one in three Americans are underbabied and promising that we would soon be seeing a bumper crop of what he called Trump babies, thanks to policies that these guys are trying to put in place. By these guys, RFK Jr. was also on the stage, and, he let us all know how concerned he is that the sperm counts of teenage boys are falling. This is I mean-
Lisa: It's a lot.
Heather: It's a lot. When I was a teenager, I was concerned about the power of teenage boy sperm. And to have this concern conveyed by an adult male on television, was quite creepy, and it might have been a little less creepy old uncle if he had thought to simply say that sperm counts are down, and not, point out teenage boys specifically.
Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. Where are you going there, RFK Jr.? So the memes and the jokes, they were all a lot of fun. But between the made-up statistics, the pro-natalist rhetoric, and the troubling policy initiatives, the press conference was actually extremely troubling if you care about women's healthcare, which of course we do.
Heather: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: Today, we're gonna talk about our reactions to Trump's one day after Mother's Day presser, and to his overall record on maternity healthcare.
Heather: Yeah, so I know that we've both prepared some notes and thoughts that we wanna talk about. We haven't talked this through ahead of time, so this conversation will be just as much of a surprise to us as it was for us to see these old bozos up on stage talking about these topics. So you wanna get started?
Lisa: Sure. So I'll go first. So Heather, I had, just some general questions. The first being, what was your reaction? Maybe your emotional reaction. I think I get the idea, though. What was your reaction to the press conference?
Heather: Well, I had a few. First and foremost, I'm wondering whether, who should be more concerned, RFK Jr. about teenage boys' sperm, or teenage boys about RFK's concern about their sperm? I mean, that was sincerely one of the stranger things I have ever seen in a political arena.
I also found quite a lot of it frankly insulting. There's something that I ... It's a little hard for me to identify, but there's something very insulting as a woman who desperately wanted children and tried very, very hard to have them, as being labeled under-babied. Also my friends and family members who have one child, typically they made that choice very thoughtfully, because of financial reasons, because of, you know, professional demands that wouldn't have allowed them to give a child, more children the attention that they needed and deserve.
And so to say that women's choices about family planning are entirely by accident and simply due to the fact that we don't have, like, mega sperm in this country. It's so diminishing and insulting, and I have struggled to figure out, like, what to do with those comments.
Lisa: Yeah. The off-the-cuff comments in particular were troubling. I was also troubled by the more planned, kind of subtle stuff. The stuff that was coming out from the women during which point Trump decided he would take a nap, that was also very troubling. But we'll get into that in a little bit.
I think you hit on something where I, and I often have this feeling, especially when it comes to RFK Jr.'s kind of role in this administration, which is, there might be a valid point in there somewhere, but it got so convoluted on the way that it becomes something sort of uglier and kind of ridiculous.
So I guess, my next question for you was, you know, do you think somewhere in all that mess there was a point or a problem or a set of problems that could and should be addressed?
Heather: I do. And I actually had that same question for you. Because there is a kernel of truth there. It's just not... It was poorly presented. There was a 2022 meta-analysis of 223 different studies that found that found a 50% decline in both sperm concentration and total sperm count between 1973 and 2018, and that was across North America, Europe, and Australia. So there is a kernel of truth there that there is a sperm crisis happening. It's not unique to the United States. And I have some theories of my own about what this administration could be doing to remedy that, that lean more towards diet and environmental issues than you know, rewarding women for being, you know, super producers of babies.
Lisa: I feel like old-school RFK Jr. back when he was cleaning up, like, the Hudson River Valley and worried about microplastics might have had an answer to that, and it might have even driven some of his concern this time around. But of course, he's not gonna suggest to his bosses that they do more regulation of industry. So yeah, there's... I felt the same way. I'm like, there's a there there, but this ain't it.
Heather: And also, I couldn't find any reliable data, it all seemed to be anecdotal, about sperm counts in teenage boys.
Lisa: Yeah, why the teenagers? I don't know.
Heather: Well, also, I don't know if it would even be legal to study that, unless you're, like, a billionaire, one of these tech bros who wants to live forever. I'm blanking on his name, but, there's a documentary-
Lisa: It's all of them. Right.
Heather: There's, like, a very creepy documentary about this guy, and he and his son, kind of do this project together, and he has tested his son's sperm against his own and claims now that he has, like, reversed aging.
Lisa: Oh, that's horrifying.
Heather: Well, what he says is that he's been able to reverse his own aging so that now he's as virile as his teenage son.
Lisa: Oh. Oh my God, dude.
Heather: So I'll put the name of the documentary in the show notes.
Lisa: Sure.
Heather: It's quite interesting. However, even in that very, very narrow context, those results are only verified by his paid experts. So anyway, I digress. So contrary to what Kennedy said, sperm count actually declines with age. So typically, unless there's an issue, young men have much higher counts than older men. So I'm just not even sure where he's getting any of this information.
Lisa: I think he was trying to say, like, not only are overall counts down, and we did talk about that a little bit in our endometriosis episode, that the number of heterosexual couples, the percentage who are having fertility issues is actually higher, even from the early 2000s, when you and I were kind of going through the fertility journey. The rates are higher, and part of that is male fertility rates are down. And maybe he was trying to say even teenagers' sperm counts are down. But of course, he didn't provide any of that context or say what study it was from or anything, so.
Heather: Right. I mean, anecdotally, maybe, because we're all eating microplastics and shitty food. But he didn't seem to have any science to back it up, which, I mean, welcome to the Trump administration.
Lisa: Right, exactly. Exactly. My next question was, I really had a hard time figuring out what they were trying to say. But I think from what Dr. Oz was trying to say is that maybe people would be having more babies if they could get some additional help or additional support. And I'm just wondering is do you think there are people who maybe you've known or just from doing, you know, you've been writing on healthcare topics and fertility for a while, are there people out there who maybe would have wanted to have larger families if there were no obstacles at all?
Heather: I think we have to separate out the infertile from the fertile because of course you and I would have had babies had we been able to. But I do know families who stuck to one child or two when they wanted three or four-
Lisa: Yeah
Heather: Because childcare is so expensive.
Lisa: Yeah.
Heather: Even pre-K if, you know, if you don't live in a place where you can send your children to like a pre-kindergarten program and in a public school, I was floored when I found out how much daycare and pre-K cost. I mean more than my rent every month, hands down. And that doesn't account for food and diapers and college and, you know, it's an expensive endeavor to raise a human. So I have to imagine that finances play heavily into this, and currently, practically everybody I know is losing their jobs or is either unemployed or underemployed thanks to AI.
And from everything I've read, that is predicted to get worse. And so if I were of childbearing age right now, I don't think that I would be willing to roll the dice that this is all financially gonna work out great for me.
Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. Again, it seems, it's like there's a kernel of a maybe sort of policy problem there. But then nothing that they went on to say during the rest of this press conference, and certainly nothing that they've proposed so far would address any of that. And it is interesting to me as well that they seem, there seems to be a really strong pro-natalist wing within MAGA, that has power within this administration.
But also wielding a lot of power within this administration are these tech bros who are implementing AI, who seem to want to put vast, vast numbers of us out of work, and I'm just curious why they think they need such a large population if they don't need workers. I'm, I'm very, I'm very baffled by the entire endeavor.
Heather: Maybe to fulfill the requirements of the draft that this administration is endeavoring.
Lisa: I don't know.
Heather: I mean, one of my questions to you, it's less of a question than a statement, but I want your thoughts on it, is that, you know, as usual, Trump seems to be really talking out of both sides of his mouth here. We need more Trump babies thanks to, what did he call himself? The fertility-
Lisa: Oh, the father of fertility, which is also ick.
Heeather: Oh, my God. Like- I know. Um-
Lisa: Oh, yeah
Heather: But so Trump wants us to see him as, you know, the father of fertility who's creating all of these babies, but at the same time, as usual, Trump seems to be talking out of both sides of his mouth here. Not that that comes as any surprise. But my question to you, or what I'd like your thoughts on, is like if the goal here is genuinely to improve the U.S. birth rate, then why cut Title X, which is a federal family planning program that's been around since the '70s, and it, contrary to popular belief, does not fund abortion.
It does give low-income, mostly low-income women access to birth control, STI screenings, pregnancy testing, and prenatal referrals once they are pregnant. And these are women who likely wouldn't be able to afford care otherwise. So it just seems contradictory to me to take away the care that would allow more women to have healthy pregnancies while saying that we need more pregnancies. How do you justify that?
Lisa: Yeah, it makes no sense. They're cutting, as you say, Title X, which was started by Nixon. It wasn't even initially a Democratic initiative. They're cutting, they're, and actually, not just cutting, they're, they are proposing eliminating it and eliminating Healthy Start and eliminating the Healthy Mother Infant programs through the CDC. They're also proposing big cuts, deep, deep cuts in Medicaid, no other insurance pays for more births in America than Medicaid does. It pays for 40% of all births, 50% in rural areas.
They're going to cut it so deeply that 10 million people are gonna find themselves without it. So it, it really creates an environment where it's much more dangerous to get pregnant, it's much more dangerous to give birth, and more babies are gonna die too, not just the mothers, I guess, 'cause I have to assume they don't really care that much about the mothers.
Babies and mothers are gonna die as a result of these cuts, and none of the initiatives that they mentioned during this press conference amount to anything really. If anything, they're damaging, and we can talk about what those initiatives really were in a little bit. But yeah, Title 10 is the big one, and then there's a bunch of other initiatives that they're putting forward that are... They are going to not just hurt women, they are gonna kill women.
Heather: Well, and there are some other insulting proposals here. One is a $5,000 baby bonus I assume that's a tax break.
Lisa: I think, yeah.
Heather: And you get it for giving birth. And then the other is the National Medal of Motherhood, which would be awarded to any woman who has six or more children. Please discuss.
Lisa: The Medal of Motherhood. I just picture a bunch of, like, future Stepford-like looking women with red hats on, with, you know, their MAHA T-shirts, running around with their big medals pushing us out of the way at Starbucks.
Heather: Six, seven, eight little blonde-haired babies clutching at their long trad wife skirts.
Lisa: Right. Yeah.
Heather: Not to make all of this about me, but, like, what do I get? I can't have a baby. I tried. So I don't get the $5,000. I don't get the National Medal of Motherhood. But I mean, for God's sake, my uterus tried.
Doesn't it get like a participation medal at least? I mean, It's in the trash somewhere, so she doesn't care. But, like, it just leaves out huge swaths of the population.
Lisa: I want an accessory. Oh, God. Yeah. It's... I mean, the natalism and like the pronatalism has just this kind of creepy tinge to it that feels very, of course everybody's saying it's very Handmaid's Tale, right? But it, it, it is really, it's really hard not to sort of see that in that press conference. Um, yeah.
Let me see if there was anything else I wanted to ask you. Well, if you did have a magic wand and you could support women in any way you wanted to, and even the $5,000, like, isn't that far off from, there are bonuses given in some Scandinavian countries, in Japan, and in a lot of countries they do give these very generous kind of bonuses to people in the recognition that, you know, especially during the first couple years after a baby is born, you're gonna spend enormous amounts of money on diapers, enormous amounts of money on, you know, help with lactation, or formula, or getting your house ready to be safe for a baby. So it's not that outrageous, right? If it's a really thought-through policy.
So what sort of things would you do, let's say for friends of yours who were like, "Boy, we really wanted to have, like, three kids, but we're gonna have one because that's, that's the number we can afford to send to college. That's the number we can afford to really focus on and give them the resources that we think they deserve."
Heather: Well, I think I would start by having these guys focus on the economy, and focus on how people are going to get jobs that can support the family that they already have, which would allow them to then consider expanding it.
I am a highly employable person, and I have been out of full-time work for a year and a half, and if I were in my 30s, this stretch of unemployment would have severely changed the way I thought about family planning or building a family.
This is a little bit off-topic, but another thing I've been thinking about as I prepared for this conversation is it doesn't solve this population crisis that these men are talking about, but there are thousands of children in this country in the foster care system who need homes. And why don't we start talking about the taking care of the people who already exist instead of these people who don't yet?
Lisa: As you're kind of mentioning, they're doing absolutely nothing to make employers adhere to previous legislation on employment discrimination, and women in particular are really getting hit. They've done nothing to make it easier for women to step back from the employment arena, kind of stay home with their kids if they want to, or cut back on their employment hours and then re-enter the workforce, which according to some economists who study this, who study family size, they have said that is a big factor when women think about whether they wanna have children. You know, is that they kinda look at, well, if I could easily step in and out of my career trajectory without losing ground, or even being shut out from it entirely, a lot of women would be more likely to have children who end up not having children, and would have more children who have one or two.
So, we could be doing things to make it easier for women. That doesn't seem to be the agenda here.
Heather: No. And the focus here seems largely on women. I mean, why don't they start, like, a sperm Olympics so that we can all figure out w- which guys to stay away from? I mean, that would be family planning on its own. They can call it, like, the Nick Cannon Award. The guy with the highest sperm count. I mean.
Lisa: Yeah, exactly
Heather: It just always lands so squarely on the shoulders of women to solve these types of problems, and, I don't know. This whole thing seems like a bunch of bullshit. And from what I can tell, Dr. Oz just wants to coin a phrase. I was reading about this, and apparently he dropped this little under-babied nugget a, I don't know, six months ago and it didn't take off, so he's just, like, trying again.
Lisa: Right. Didn't anybody hear me say underbabied?
Heather: Yeah. It's like when you're at a party and someone says something that they think is really funny and nobody laughs, so they just say it again.
Lisa: Right. Stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen. Yeah. I mean, I did kind of, I ended up in this crazy tailspin of looking at both our maternity mortality rates, but also fertility rates. And I got it in my head, it was one of the reasons I asked you the question, was, you know, I got it in my head like, what if we did what they do in Japan or France, where they, you know, Scandinavia, where they just give women so much to, if they're gonna have babies, right?
Wonderful, free childcare. And it's not just free, but they put a lot of incentive into training people who are interested in early childhood development to go into direct childcare. So you could have someone with a master's degree taking care of your baby at the local childcare, so that you can work. They have really generous workplace incentives. I mean, they just have all this stuff in place, and we have nothing, right?
So, those were things I thought if I had a magic wand, you know, I'd do that, and I think that it would really move fertility rates.
Heather: If women were guaranteed a significant maternity leave even where they could spend three to six months with their babies without penalty.
Lisa: Six months is standard in Europe, by the way.
Heather: And if there was a livable minimum wage that would help. And if we cleaned up our water and our food so that we aren't all eating microplastics, that would probably help.
Lisa: Yeah. So I was trying to figure out, like, where does he come up with this number, like, one in three? As far as I could tell, even in the pro-natalist community, this is not a statistic anybody really has come up with.
Heather: Well, he asked three women, and one of them said, "I don't have enough babies."
Lisa: That's probably it. All I could, I, I looked at how many women currently kind of finish their fertility lifespan and have one baby or no babies, and it's somewhere in the 35 to 40% range. That is all I could come up with. I have no idea. Nobody else seems to have any idea. Even people who are on his side are not kind of jumping forward and going, "Oh, yes, he took it from our, our weird study that was skewed to begin with." It's like, there's nothing.
But the U.S. fertility rate is 1.6, and that, in theory, if you wanted, quote, "replacement rate," you'd have to have 2.1. And it steadily was in decline for at least two decades, and then it took a real sharp decline after 2007, and it really hasn't recovered. And that's, of course, when the economy went south quickly. Birthrates have declined globally. It's not just in the U.S.
So I took a look, I ended up looking at the work of this woman. She is a Nobel Award-winning economist, Claudia Goldin of Harvard, and she breaks down the world's economies into a couple different categories, and one is steadily developing economies like the U.S., U.K., Scandinavia, France, and Germany, where the rates right now are 1.6, and a lot of these economies would like it to be a little bit higher, so they're trying to figure out ways to deal with this.
Then there are rapidly growing economies. So economies that were either very hard hit after World War II and really had to rebuild from nothing, or they were always sort of lagging and have had, like, a rapid entry into developed economy status. And those are Japan, South Korea, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain, and they have significantly lower, birthrates of 1.3, to the point where it's quite concerning. So you see, like, an economy like Japan where they are just throwing anything at folks hoping they will have babies, and the women are saying, "No, thank you."
And then there are sort of these regressive states, so places that are really harsh on women or have women have very little autonomy. So Saudi Arabia, although it got a little bit better after 2018, but there's still just a lot of curtailing of female autonomy. United Arab Emirates is another one, and they are down from women typically having six to seven children just a generation ago to 2.2, and they are throwing everything at these women to keep them home and get them to be pregnant. And women the world over are saying, "No, thanks."
Heather: Well, that's also assuming that this is exclusively the decision of the woman. Men raise families, too, and, if you are going to tout the family values that this administration has touted, then you have to assume that this is a decision that's been made between, a man and a woman. So why are all of the incentives aimed at women?
Lisa: No, they're not. They're family, so the family would get..
Heather: Oh, I see.
Lisa: Yeah. What they're giving to women, and they're giving to men, too, though. They give, they give a lot more pater- like, paternity and maternity, time off, lots of stuff. But what Goldin's research is saying is it really is women who are the ultimate arbiters here, even in regressive societies because they're the ones who, when you dig down, they are saying they don't wanna have that many children. And when you talk to the men, they're saying, "I wish it was like it used to be, and I want my, you know, my woman to have more babies. These women, they won't have the number of babies I want." Or, "I want to get married." So, in a country like Japan, many, many more young men wanna get married and have families, say that they do, and young women, when they poll them, they say, "Nope, I don't."
Heather: I'm good.
Lisa: I'm good. And Goldin's research, it's kind of interesting where she says, you know, you can't just throw kind of a one-off policy, In hope that women are gonna snap it up, like the $5,000, right? Where it's not part of a greater context that is reassuring for women, primarily women, but men as well, when they're making these family planning decisions and they're saying, "I feel confident that we can have three kids, and I'm gonna be supported by my government, and I'm gonna be supported by my workplace, and I am gonna be able to raise these children with the care and resources that I think they deserve."
If you just do, like, one-off here or one-off there, they don't really move the needle. But if you look at, like, France and Scandinavia, they have slowly have moved the needle, and nobody else is moving the needle globally. Which I thought was really interesting.
And she also argues if you wanna go the other way, which seems to be what the United States seems to be wanting to do, which is go full regressive, it doesn't really work.
Heather: So how do we wrap this up?
Lisa: I mean, I think that supporting women and families would be a much better way to go here.
Heather: Yeah, not a one-time prize for giving birth.
Lisa: Exactly. Hopefully they would stop cutting resources toward the kinds of healthcare crises that women face that affect fertility. They've cut funding for healthcare initiatives to do further research into things like PCOS and endometriosis, things that actually affect fertility.
Heather: Yeah, I mean, if they could give us a solution to endometriosis, that would reach... What was the number? 190 million women worldwide. Not that all of those women would have babies, but I would've.
Lisa: We came up with the, I think the current number is something around the 13% of couples who are trying to conceive are having trouble, and half of them, it's due to endometriosis. So that's a pretty large percentage that you could increase.
Heather: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: Um, so I think there's things you could do that are good for women generally that would actually also help your fertility rates. You could support maternal women's health, especially in maternal healthcare deserts, which are largely rural, and they're red states. So it makes no sense. We didn't really talk about the fact that instead what they're doing is they're going to cycle this money toward the network of pro-natalist, pregnancy centers. Did you read about this?
Heather: No
Lisa: Yeah, so they started this moms.gov site, and that site, it's very, like, pro-life coded, in terms of its language and its graphics. And it it has this, a picture on the home page of, it kinda cuts the woman's head off, and her, you don't really see much of her legs. You just see her very, very pregnant belly. Of course, she's white, blonde. And she's in a field of hay or ragweed or something.
Heather: I don't even need to see it. Wearing a, like, gauzy white dress probably.
Lisa: I think it's a gauzy yellow dress. Yup. And it says, uh, "Resources, information, and help for new and expecting mothers," but then it directs women to these pregnancy centers. So it's a network of pregnancy centers that are organized by what's called the Option Line, which is run by Heartbeat International. And there's thousands of these centers.
And so if you think that these pregnancy centers, have a single medically certified professional on site, you would be wrong. If you thought that they were testing for hypertension, anemia, or gestational diabetes, which can affect birth weight, stillbirth, infant or maternal mortality, nope. If you think you're gonna meet with somebody and even put together a birth plan, no.
These are those centers that are designed to trick young women into thinking they're going somewhere where they might get to talk through with somebody, "Well, what would happen if I want to have an abortion?" That's what these centers are. So they will do pregnancy tests. They do ultrasounds, which I don't understand how they're allowed to do without medical personnel. And then there've been all kinds of studies done, where there's pretty good evidence that they often lie to women and tell them they're further along than they are
Heather: Yeah
Lisa: So that they don't think they can have an abortion.
Heather: I know somebody that this happened to.
Lisa: Oh my God
Heather: When we were in college. I didn't know her well. So to be honest, I don't even remember how I heard this story. I think she told me, but I don't really know why. But she discovered she was pregnant, I think we were, like, either freshmen or sophomores in college, and she went to a center that sounded like a place where you could get like, a blood pregnancy test, which is usually the definitive indicator that you're pregnant, and talk through options.
And when she got there, it was a complete bait and switch. They sat her down, they showed her pictures of fetuses. It was a very disturbing experience for somebody who was really just looking for support because she was young and scared. And, you know, a quote unquote "service" that calls itself, what did you say? Option Line?
Lisa: Option Line, and they're pregnancy centers.
Heather: Yeah. So options indicates that they are going to actually present you with your options, and ugh, that makes my blood boil.
Lisa: Over the last few years, these centers have received $1.3 billion in federal... or not necessarily federal funds, but government funds. So we the people are paying for these centers. A lot of times, they purposely set up shop very close by an abortion clinic or a Planned Parenthood. They try and give themselves a name that's sounds kinda sorta like it might be the same thing. And literally hoping to sort of trap young women.
Heather: Yeah
Lisa: They'll tell them that they'll give them free stuff, like diapers or cribs, but then even if those young women choose to keep their pregnancies, and then they come back and they go, "So diapers and crib, and help-
Heather: I'm here for my diapers.
Lisa: They'll say, "Well, that's contingent on you taking some religion classes and maybe converting to our brand of Christianity."
Heather: Oh, for fuck's sake.
Lisa: Yeah. Sometimes if they decide, Well, okay, you've convinced me or it's too late for me to have an abortion, I'd like to have an adoption. Then they steer them not toward the kinds of adoption options that I used or your sister used, where the birth mother has a lot of power and autonomy in the relationship, but they'll steer them to some highly, famously problematic Christian adoption agencies. One of these is very famously in my hometown. There's one that was kind of revealed to be pretty creepy. Pretty, pretty upsetting. There's this fantastic podcast called Liberty Lost that talks about what happened inside this old, you know, it's a 1950s style, still going, home for quote "unwed mothers." And it is, if you've got the stomach for it, it's fantastic, but it's kinda like listening to, like, The Handmaid's Tale meets Rosemary's Baby. It's terrifying.
Heather: And it called Liberty?
Lisa: Liberty Lost.
Heather: Liberty Lost.
Lisa: It's great. It's a very well done podcast. And these are the centers. These pregnancy centers, sometimes they're called crisis pregnancy centers.These are the places that our government's website is sending these young women to, or, sending people who are worried about a problematic pregnancy to, and these are the centers that I imagine they're gonna try really hard to give our federal dollars to. So.
Heather: Ay, ay, ay.
Lisa: I know. So I felt like, you know, it's funny, and I'm happy that The Daily Show did sort of a three-minute spoof of it, but it's, it's a lot. It's much more than just creepy. What they were alluding to during that press conference were initiatives that are dangerous to women.
Heather: Do you have any uplifting final words for us, Lisa? Because personally, I'm feeling a little beaten down at the moment.
Lisa: You know, there are a number of organizations that are on top of this stuff. They know exactly what the signaling is about. They're keeping tabs on where this funding is going, and they're fighting the good fight. And so I think, I think maybe that's another. This is going to have a lot of show notes and a lot of URLs, places for everyone to go for additional information. And so we are definitely gonna include some of that in the show notes if you wanna get involved.
And I think the other positive that was mentioned in the research that I mentioned from Claudia Goldin, the economist from Harvard, she talked about something that we talked about really early on, which is in Episode 3 we talked about sort of domestic equity. And she said one of the best ways to increase, sizes of families or for somebody who's deciding, "I don't think I am gonna have kids. In an ideal world, I would've wanted a child," the best way to do that, she said, is not just to increase employment for women, but to start to really look at cultural equity for women, and especially making that domestic labor sphere more equitable.
So that when you become mom, you're not also still taking on the bulk of the housework, and you have an outside job, and you're taking on the bulk of childcare. And I do think men, especially younger men, they are stepping up to the plate. I think there's evidence that they are getting better at this, and that marriages and domestic partnerships between parents are slowly getting a little more equitable.
And I think if there's even a crisis to begin with, I mean, maybe our civilizations can adjust to slightly smaller, numbers of children. Obviously, there's a balancing act. You don't wanna have one young person taking care of, you know, eight great-grandparents and four grandparents, and that's where it gets a little dicey. But if we want to increase birth rates closer to that kinda 2.0, 2.1 level, I mean, it does seem like younger people, as they're building more equitable partnerships and relationships together, that's probably gonna be a much more effective driver than anything else.
Heather: I agree. And if you haven't heard it already, go back and listen to the episode titled The Marriage Imbalance, and you'll hear, a pretty lively conversation that Lisa and I had about marriage that I think was pretty interesting.
Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, so I think there's hope. There's hope.
Heather: All right, friend. Well, good talk. And we will see you next week for another episode of Another Bloody Podcast. Thanks for listening.
Lisa: All right, bye. Bye.
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