It Could Happen Here - Governing Fertility: How Pronatalist Policies Kill

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

The gang talks about the pronatalist right in Trump's orbit, and historical examples of pronatalism from Japan, Spain, and Romania. Sources: https://www.vscw.ca/en/node/119 https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203059913-9/pronatalism-motherhood-franco-spain-mary-nash https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781438402062/html?lang=en https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15335899 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237296749_Marriage_squeeze_and_changes_in_family_formation_historical_comparative_evidence_in_Spain_France_and_the_United_States_in_the_twentieth_century   https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5ypdy05jl9ohttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/21/us/politics/trump-birthrate-proposals.htmlhttps://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/report/treating-infertility-the-new-frontier-reproductive-medicine https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/2/2155893/-Texas-Republican-channels-Stalin-and-Putin-to-glorify-motherhood https://www.huffpost.com/entry/dot-memo-funds-communities-marriage-birth-rates_n_679bf8d8e4b0e1faebeef9c8See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself

outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. No. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6000. I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society

all across the world. Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, Brazilian favela life and much more. All real, completely uncensored. Listen to the Away Days podcast, reporting from the underbelly, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, the only podcast where anti-British discrimination is a way of life. James, are we allowed to say that? Do you remember the training I haven't done yet?

Are we allowed to say that? Do you remember the training I haven't done yet? I was given that training with full attention throughout the duration of the video every single time I've watched it at various employers for the last half decade or so. There was no section on anti-British discrimination. Yet again, another example of that. Can't see that. Imagine. We've been victimized. Last time I took that training, there was just straight up anti-Asian racism in it that they didn't address at all.

So I'm assuming if that's okay, then anti-British racism is fine. There's some shit in those videos, which is wild. Okay. There you go. I think there's a lady who's literally called Karen and they do her wrong in the end of video. See, I am definitely pro-British discrimination, but you do get a point for having Peter O'Toole. So, at least, it's not all the way, because the O'Toole factor keeps you from the full

might of my wrath, frankly. Famously the greatest person. Yeah, I'm sure that's the case. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stone, and Robert Evans. This episode, we are talking about babies. Should there be more? Yeah.

Mm-hmm. We're on a pro-natalist kick. We're going to have that off-putting couple who look like vampires, but like not any of the good kinds of vampires on the show. Very excited to have those people on. They seem nice. But before we do that, we all decided maybe we should talk about other pro-Natalist policies in world history and how well they've worked generally.

We're going to start by talking about what the U.S. policy might be, or the people proposing U.S. policy. And then we will discuss how those policies went historically. Yeah. So, like, to start with Trump's, besides one executive order in February supporting IVF, the new administration has yet to tackle pro-natalist concerns on the policy front, but a collection of lobbyists, activists, and influencers are vying for the president's ear while proposing a multitude of plans to grow the number of heterosexual marriages and incentivize childbirth.

The pro-natalists certainly think that the new administration is at the very least ideologically sympathetic if not in cahoots with their agenda. The main ins on the pro-natalist front have come from the Peter Thiel, tech-right wing of the White House. Right, this is like JD Vance and previously Elon Musk. Yep. Musk has been doom-posting for years about how a drop in fertility rates could be leading to a large-scale population collapse. And at an anti-abortion rally this past January, Vance addressed the crowd saying, quote, I want more babies in the United States of America. I want more happy children in our country. And I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to

raise them. Yeah. And you got to like, whatever you're listening to one of these things, you got to like have a little parentheses anytime. Anytime someone says baby, there's a little parenthesis there that says white. Because this is this is real Nazi shit. Like a lot of this, a lot of this stuff is certainly like based on like, like great replacement rhetoric that the alt-right, like Trojan horse and like pushed forward in like 2018, which is now so widely normalized. Thanks to I mean, really Musk has done a lot of work in normalizing great replacement stuff. Yeah, Tucker Carlson too. And Carlson, of course.

Well, and Musk's family goes into this, right? Like this is the kind of thing like his grandparents were involved in. Like it was a little bit less of like the standard great replacement shit and a little more like focused on like we need to be breeding high IQ white people together. Yeah, you Jen. Like that is what he inherits. He comes by it honestly, I guess you could say.

Well, and oftentimes Pernadine Lestrade-Rick is also tied in with like the trad wife and like loss of traditional family structure type stuff, right? Vance has laid blame at childless cat ladies and referred to our quote unquote broken culture that attacks masculinity and turns our nation's youth into androgynous idiots. Hey, shout out. Yeah, I've also started referring to women with kids as catless child ladies as a result of this. I don't think you should say that.

Which has not gotten me some good reactions actually. Yeah, I don't know. People reacted very negatively. No, no. Don't let that stuff you rubbed in. A declining birth rate has also been attributed to women in the workplace who are not getting married and raising kids at home from an early enough age.

Yeah. And some of this rhetoric has rubbed off on Trump, right? In Trump at CPAC in 2023, he said, we will support baby booms and we will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom. I want a baby boom. Cool. Trump has floated a $5,000 cash, quote, unquote, baby bonus to American mothers after delivering a baby, calling this proposal a good idea. Well, Garrison, that's almost three months at a preschool. Oh, yeah, I'm sure that's enough.

Not quite three months at a lot of preschools. Like, not even great preschools. It's very... preschools are unbelievably expensive. The actual cause of like, of a declining birthrate is due to skyrocketing cost of living. So people aren't financially stable enough to have kids in their early 20s anymore. So instead, they're waiting until their 30s. That's part of it, at least. Yes. If you want people to have kids more, you should make the world more affordable.

And a $5,000 baby bonus does not actually solve the key issues that would cause people to be worried about, you know, trying to like get married and have kids at a young age in a world where that seems kind of like unfathomably expensive. Now, luckily, Trump does have a few other ways of sorting out this problem. The new big, beautiful budget bill that recently passed the House will create quote-unquote mega savings accounts for new kids. And here, mega stands for money accounts for growth and advancement. Just fucking stop.

Stop it. Just fucking stop. Stop it. So when parents or guardians open a new mega savings account for their kids, the federal government will contribute $1,000 for babies born between January 1st, 2024 and December 31st, 2028. That'll help. Great. Great. I believe California also does it. Yeah, California has something called

the California Child Saving Accounts program, which already gives children like up to a thousand dollars. And I think it's like a college savings account from what I understand. Yeah, that's that's pretty much what this is. Although specifically in the for the mega accounts, it also lists homeownership. Oh, cool. Because this is like a big this is a big part of this pro-natalist thing, is you need to like own a home, get in a straight marriage, start having kids in your early 20s. Yeah, sure.

Make Instagram videos of yourself chopping wood badly, like we understand. Yeah, yeah. The big, beautiful budget bill also prohibits Medicare funds from going to Planned Parenthood. Great, yeah. Let me tell you, $1,000 American dollars, even with compounding interest, isn't going to do shit to buy you a home anywhere in the United States. Now, the Heritage Foundation's DeVos Center for Life, Religion and Family have pushed for a policy that exponentially increases the child tax credit for each additional child

a married couple has. This is a little bit similar to a policy proposed in 2023 by Republican Representative Brian Slaton of Texas, who proposed increasing property tax cuts for married heterosexual couples who have never been divorced and have four or more children starting after marriage. So there's a lot of caveats there. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Okay. Sure. Yeah., yeah. Okay, sure. Yeah, no, this is, are we taking issue with this? That is some, yeah, look, this is part of my British heritage, right?

We developed our own religion so that dudes could get divorced. It is, it is, it is the Bill of Rights for British guys. Obviously a lot of, a lot of caveats in there so that you can have your little like trad Christian family. But four kids would equal a 40% cut. Ten kids would equal no property taxes at all. Well, I mean, shit, that's hard to argue with. This is property taxes. You also have to own the property to begin with to be paying property taxes.

Yeah, all of these people want you to be like homeowners with a stay at home wife. This is like, this is what they want. But they don't want to actually do things to meaningfully make home ownership accessible to you. No, this is just like self-selecting for well-off white Christians, right? Yes, yeah, yeah, 100%. Slayton said in a statement, quote,

with this bill, Texas will start saying to couples, get married, stay married, and be fruitful and multiply, unquote. For fuck's sake. It's a disaster. And, I mean, like, a lot of this stuff is too, is it's, it's, this is the sort of flailing reaction to, like, one of the things that actually drives, like, declining birth rates, which is not having teen pregnancies, like, significantly decreases birth rates, because

it turns out they're like, oh yeah, right, it turns out a huge part of, like, why birth rates are so high is just direct social coercion. And if you stop having that or like, you know, the amount of the coercion decreases, then yeah, like fucking birth rates are going to decline because women aren't being forced to have babies. Like, and, and, you know, and so they're trying to do all this, like, you know, unhinged tinkering bullshit to sort of like deal with the fact that if you don't force people to have children as teenagers, they won't?

Yeah, because life, they quickly realized there's things in life like, you know, drugs and stuff. Go back to the club. Yeah, they'll go back to the club. In March, Trump called himself the quote-unquote, fertilization president. Oh my god. Jesus fucking Christ.

Oh no. And the White House is expected to soon release a report on how to expand access and affordability of IVF. Now, this is where things get sticky. Uh, insert pun. There is hot debate amongst advisors and think tanks on the religious ethics of IVF, right? There's no real consensus among the pro-natalist voices who are lobbying Trump. This sort of breaks down into like the new tech right versus the more religious

Christian family sector of conservatism. And Vance is kind of caught in the middle of this. But these groups may end up compromising to form an alliance. Now, Heritage, the Heritage Foundation, recommends a program to use government funds for education that promotes quote-unquote natural fertility, teaching women how to track their menstrual cycles, using charting courses to both help get pregnant and avoid using birth control. They propose that food, nutrition, and lifestyle changes could improve quote-unquote natural conception instead of using assisted reproductive technologies. Heritage proposes something that they call restorative reproductive medicine as a holistic

approach to treating infertility through quote-unquote hormone balancing, dieting, and nutritional adjustments, environmental changes, and surgery." Unquote. Yeah, you just need some fucking, uh, uh, some of those, some of those baby teething pills Hyland's made that kill babies. That's what you gotta take. It's a holistic approach to your health. Get some raw milk in there. Put a bunch of random chemicals and lead in your body from an unregulated supplement company.

Heritage itself critiques IVF as failing to address the underlying causes of infertility, as well as, you know, out of concern for embryo personhood rights. For fuck's sake. So they advocate for embryo adoption and have proposed legislation to make the production of embryo spares illegal. Embryo adoption? Geez. Because they believe that these are full people.

God fucking damn it. Now, on the other side of the pronatalist right, you have people like the vampire couple that Robert mentioned, Simone Collins, a pronatalist activist and failed Pennsylvania congressional candidate. She could still pull it off. Stay in line if your vote hasn't been counted, people. Her and her husband are self-described, quote-unquote,

technopuritans. And she is the... It's fucking stupid as shit. Like, fucking damn it. Oh, my God. It's the Shaggy. Oh, my God. Can we put these people on a boat

and send it across the Atlantic? Like, can they get scurvy? Have they already got... They look a little bit like they may already have scurvy, to be fair. They do look like they have scurvy constantly. Can we deprive them of lime juice and save the world from a fucking crisis? Put them on the next starship and see how far up it gets. Yeah, let them colonize Mars.

No, they won't get that far. Let them try. I support the human spirit. Collins is also the former managing director of an exclusive Peter Thiel founded social club called Dialogue. Now she has called the new administration quote unquote inherently pronatalist and has sent several draft pronatalist executive orders to the White House. One of which would award a quote unquote national medal of motherhood to mothers with six or more children.

This is some Trichescu shit. Like, I know we're gonna talk about that, but Jesus Christ. She herself wants at least seven kids, and she claims to use special technology to select embryos with high IQs, which relates back to what Robert was saying earlier. Yeah.

So they use IVF to specifically select embryos that they think are naturally predisposed to have more desirable traits, including high IQs. They have not discussed the exact method. That's why it's called special technology. They're looking for the one with the big head or something. So you don't know. I guess they're not even that far along, are they, with the IVF? So that's always pretty fucked up.

And then I guess, finally, one of the few things that actually has happened in advancement of this ideology was way back, like in February, Trump's transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, who is a father of nine and has 10 siblings, sent out a memo directing his staff to prioritize transportation funds to, quote, give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average unquote. Which would in effect mean less money for urban public transit and instead send it towards like wealthier rural white conservative areas. Yeah, I'd imagine Latino communities have higher marriage rates at least than like the

national average. Yeah, I'm not sure if Sean Duffy really wants his employees to select for that though. No, neither am I. That's what I'm wondering for. Samuel Huntington thinks they have higher birth rates, right? Like that's his whole shtick. If you look at the full memo, I think this is just like a dog whistle for like white Christians. That is really what he's saying. Sick. Anyway, that is what I have for the current pro-natalist policies. We should go on an

ad break and then return to learn the historical implications of pro-natalist policies. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family

that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fat phobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart

True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal.

It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts

of that relationship that are being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. tests. All real, completely uncensored. This is unique access with straightforward underground reporting. We're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media. A way that showcases what the mainstream cannot access. Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses. For the past decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be meeting people I shouldn't know. Now you can come along too. Listen to the your way days

podcast reporting from the underbelly on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true Crime podcast Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders.

I was calling about the murder of my husband. It's a cold case. I've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking.

Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. get your podcasts. All right. We are back and we are spinning our globe, our big ball of pronatalism and it is slowing down and has landed on Japan where Mir is going to explain pronatalist policy. Yeah. And I guess I want to open on a kind of global thing, which is that concern over like birth rates for like fascists is a really old thing. I mean, it predates fascism. Like this is like, like if you go to like the 1870s, every single person is complaining

about like, oh my God, the birth rate of the right with the white race keeps declining and we're going to get like overwhelmed by the Asiatic hordes. And then you go to like the Asiatic Hordes and it's like, Japan has been having the same fucking panic for literally so long. Like I cannot emphasize enough. You can just go back through newspaper archives and you just, it's, you're literally reading the same article over and over and over again, going back just decades and decades and decades.

It's like the first big modern freak out about birth rates is in like 1987. Yeah. They have the first big like Japan birth rate declining freak out. This has been happening longer than like most of the people here have been alive. I can remember this from like my child pictures being like,

oh, they're panicking about their birth rates again. Yeah. So like the running thing with Japanese politics, so we're roughly doing these in order of like most to least hinged in terms of like in terms of these like natalist policies. Japan, I think has an interesting series of sort of political contradictions in their like kind of pro-natalist. Well, if they have political contradictions in their pro-natalist politics and political contradictions in their conservative faction. Because Japan is basically like a one-party liberal democratic state.

Liberal democratic party is the one party. This is a party established by a World War II Nazi. But that means that they run all of politics. So like every political faction effectively runs through them. Their early attempts in like the 90s are focused on the deregulation of daycare jobs. So basically their plan is like in the 90s and 2000s they're like, okay, we're going to deregulate the childcare industry so that we can have more affordable child, there'll be more childcare jobs

so people can pay for childcare. This is how we're going to promote this. And this is sort of one of the first places you see this huge intra-class conflict between the pure social conservatives who want to just like send every woman back to the household to raise children and the business people who are like, no, you can't do that. We need to explain these women's labor to like make money. And so the fight that starts to break out is this fight between like paying for childcare leave versus like paying for childcare leave versus like paying for daycare.

So they've originally that their plan is like, okay, so we're going to do the daycare stuff. That doesn't work. Like none of these things they're going to do does jack shit, right? That's going to be a through line here. Yeah, yeah, like none of this stuff works. And so like Shinzo Abe, I think is the most famous person who spends much time trying to deal with this. And like, again, so they have started worrying about this in 1987.

It is now 2013. The birth rate keeps declining precipitously. Shinzo Abe, rest in piss you fascist bastard, is still trying to like cook something. Right, I'm going to read this quote from the archives of clinical pediatrics. Shortly after the formation of Abe's second cabinet, the quote, task force for overcoming population decline was established in 2013, introducing three key strategies,

supporting child rearing, reforming work styles and promoting marriage, pregnancy and childbirth. So you can, these are going to become sort of like the three pillars of Japanese pronatalist policy, right? A lot of it is focused on this sort of social push stuff to like promote the traditional family and promote marriage. And this hasn't ever really worked for this. Supporting child rearing is one that is going to get

a lot of attention in subsequent administrations. There's a lot of attempts to reduce, like to reduce the cost of child rearing, but we're going to see them try like 35,000 different like proposals to do this. The one that's actually interesting is reforming work style. So like part of the problem here is that, you know, everyone in Japan is working a just genuinely unhinged amount, unbelievably staggering overwork, right? I mean, it's one of these things that's like a persistent social

crisis. There's a persistent sort of suicide crisis because of how long everyone is working all the time. So Shinzo Abe's plan for this was to put into place a soft cap of you can only work 100 hours a month of overtime. Now, this doesn't do shit, right? Like, a hundred hours a month of overtime is enough to kill you. Like, you know, especially when, like, your regular hours are this long. But this is, again, this problem that he's having, which is that, like, okay, so, yes, you probably could maybe, like, people maybe would have more children if you weren't working literally all the time, you weren't just like being worked to death.

But that's really bad for Japanese business and like quote unquote, Abe Namix, which is like a sort of, you know, economic plan like relies on maintaining this extremely high level of labor hours from everyone in the entire population. of labor hours from everyone in the entire population. And it's also based on putting more women into the workforce to expand the size of the workforce to, you know, extract more hours so they can, all these people can make more money, right? They were also supposed to do free preschool for all children. And this just like didn't happen,

which over and over again, they're like, we're gonna do these kind of like, these kind of like, okay, we'll give you some kind of welfare state bullshit, but only in order to like have kids and it just doesn't happen. And so, you know, this is one of Abe's big initiatives. But by the time he's like assassinated in 2022, he what? He was by by time his political coalition was finally detonated by by one by one guy

with with an electric blunderbuss. My favorite politics. Oh god, it's so good. We have covered this extensively on the show. If you want to hear the happiest I've ever been during an episode, including the day after Kissinger died, go find the episode I did right after Shinzo Abe was assassinated. The holy trinity of great days on the internet is that big stuck boat in the submarine that killed all those So all right Shinzo Abe's successor is a guy named Fumio Kishida who lasts for a little

bit and Kishida, every single Japanese government announces that they're going to spend like somewhere between 20 and like 15 and 20 billion dollars on pronatalist policies and mostly doesn't happen. But Kishida promises that he is going to spend 24 and a half billion dollars a lot of this money is going to be just straight up like child allowance so Japan has the system that they've been you know they've been sort of implementing over the course of like all of these fucking reforms which is just like all right we're just gonna like

hand you cash it's still not enough money to like substantively change stuff, but there's a lot of different kinds of cash policies. They have they have cash transfer policies that are just straight up like, okay, here you had a baby, we're going to give you this amount per month. I think it's like 10 to 15,000 yen, which hold on. Yeah, so it's like like $70 a month, which is like not. Yeah, they are trying to expense that research on this. They're supposed to have these like counselors that like come

check in on you and like give you education and stuff. They're also supposed to just like give you a whole bunch of basically like child care equipment stuff and make sure you're getting medical care. And that's supposed to come out

to about like $700 ish roughly. You know, this is like the big sort of plan that they're doing. And then in 2024, Kishida is replaced by like some other dipshit who, you know, if he lasts more than like two years, I guess I'll tell you his name, but he's, you know, attempting to go back to the sort of childcare side of it, right, which is his plan involves a bunch of things like childcare subsidies, and very importantly, like tuition free high school. So one of the continuous plans if you like if you go back to like, what I was talking about with they were supposed to do free preschool for all children, right? That

never got implemented. Except in like the last two years, like Tokyo has started doing it just like as a city. Because Tokyo is one of the places where like, you know, the birth rate has been like dropping the fastest or whatever. Sure. I imagine cost of living is also really high. So like, yeah, cost of living is really high. And it's also just like, you know, if you're working in an urban, like in a extremely urban city, you're working a just hideous number of hours, right? Yeah. There's also this these supposed to be these massive, like investments in providing childcare

and nursing and you can see these kind of like this this this point where they've reached this desperation point where they're trying both the sort of pro-business, like, okay, fuck it, we'll pay for your childcare, and also we will raise taxes to like hand you money, and also nursing stuff, and also they're trying to... there's like giant carve-outs for this, but they're trying to set up a system where you can get full pay for couples who both take parental leave at the same time. So, they're trying everything, right? They're trying like paid childcare, they They're trying fuck it. We'll just pay people to leave the workforce to have children. They're trying just straight up cash transfers. They're trying paying for medical care, especially medical care for disabled kids. And none of this shit has done anything at all. Right? Like it just just absolutely jack shit. Right. And if you want to look at like, okay, so like what's sort of actually happening here, right?

A lot, some of it is just like overwork. Some of it is just, if people who can have children have any kind of freedom and autonomy, they just decide not to. And so part of this is also just like, and then this has been one of the social pushes that the conservatives have been dealing with is they've been trying to get people to marry younger because people are marrying later and thus they are like, you know, they're having kids later because they're marrying later. So and this is not working at all. Right.

But you can look at the series of structural contradictions in their political coalition and then you can look at the fact that like, again, one of the important ideological things here is that these people hate immigrants, right? And they don't they don't want immigrants, they want they want like Japanese babies. And so this is kind of like if you look at like, okay, why is none of this shit working? Right? They're trying all these things to just avoid having more immigrants in the country and none of it is fucking working at all. But you know, like in so far as it's failing it's mostly they're trying some limited welfare stuff and they're doing a bunch of weird ideological stuff and it is going to get so much worse when every other country tries this. Yeah. Cool. Well, you know what else is going to get worse? Probably the products and services that support this show. Yeah. Yeah. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary

results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane

turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame

one week early and totally ad free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. To most people, I'm the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. Voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal,

it's political, it's societal, and at times it's far from what I originally intended it to be. These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover, to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships. I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that are being naked together. How we love our family.

I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world.

Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting Japanese street racing Brazilian favela life and much more all real completely uncensored This is unique access with straightforward on the ground reporting We're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media Way that showcases what the mainstream cannot access. Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses. For the past decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be meeting people I shouldn't know.

Now you can come along too. Listen to the Away Days podcast, reporting from the underbelly on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone. I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend.

I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist

and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for.

If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. It's me. And predictably, I suppose I am talking about Franco as Spain. Francisco Franco attempted to rebuild Spain after civil war, both through explicit eugenics and through the nationalization of women's bodies, right? Abortion and contraception were banned. So abortion had been legal.

Spain was one of the first countries to do that, right? When the Federico Monsigny, anarchist minister made that legal, minister of, I guess, public health, that was made illegal. I think it didn't become legal again until about 2010 in Spain, abortion and unless there was like a serious health issue, elective abortion, I guess. Franco's military in the civil war consistently use sexual violence as a weapon. And we can see this as a kind of prelude to his nationalization of birthing bodies. Teboda Yano, who is a Francoist general, makes a speech in July 1936, quote, Our valiant legionnaires and regulares have shown the red cowards what true men are, and

their women as well. This is totally justified because these communists and anarchists, anarchate free love. At least now they will know what real men are, not the militia gays." This is a translation that I'm reading just so people can go to the original document. But, yeah, gays is not the word he used. A better translation would be a word that begins with F. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. They will not escape. However much they kick their legs and scream. Like this is a general in their army making explicit rape threats right? They weren't subtle about this. Yes. The Spanish Falange, which is Spain's fascist party, also had a Césion Feminina, a women's section. My PhD supervisor, Pamela

Radcliffe, has written extensively about this. The group very much served as kind of the propaganda arm of state natalist policy. It taught women from a young age they were inferior and subjugate to men. They had to go through the organization's programs to do anything, any engagement with the state. They had to first go through the women's section, right? If they wanted to get a passport, they wanted to get a driving license. If they wanted to engage with the world outside of their homes in any way, they had to go through this program which indoctrinated them that their highest calling and only value was to have children. Women's role in the Francoist project then was childbearing and childrearing. Francoists, I'm going to use intellectuals here in like

quotation scare quotes, right? Frequently turned to phrenology to justify women's domestic role. And they fucking loved a phrenology, right? It's great to go to like antiques markets in Spain because you can always buy like a phrenology head. Jesus Christ. You can acquire like an OG one, you know, like, I bet if you know the right place to look, you could find some, find the calipers. That's the dream.

There's actually a lot of those secondhand stores in Portland. Yeah, shocking. Yeah, hands clasping me with Francoism. I found a lot of uses for those calipers, let me tell you. No, I mean the phrenology skulls. Oh, okay. I've seen them all over town. Yeah, but I bet yours are replicas. I bet they're not like OG phrenology skulls.

There's a market in France I went to that just had a bunch of monk skulls. Like real ones. Real monk skulls, yeah. Seems fine. There was one that had been turned into a holder for a Bible, like they'd cut like an L-shaped cut in the skull.

It was pretty cool. It was like three grand. Like you make a cursi for the Quran, but like. This was a while ago, but seemed like a good price. Welcome to Skull Talk, your favorite podcast discussing craniums. Using the discount code, it could happen here. You can get 10% off your Skull Bible holder.

Yeah, that's right. Okay. So, one of the things they did was to increasingly marginalize midwives and instead have male doctors taking control of the child birthing process because midwives would advocate for their patients too much and they didn't feel that women belonged in work outside the home. A big part of Franco's pronatalism was the repudiation of anarcho-feminism that had been relatively important to the Spanish Revolution. The anarchists believed in revolutionary marriage and free love. Their follow through

on those beliefs varied wildly, right? So we can see that in some collectivized industries, for instance, the unions took on the role. They would assign women, I guess, I was going to say mentors, but apprenticeships, right? So like they wanted, for instance, the CNT Transport Union. Once the revolution had happened and the CNT transport union, once the revolution had happened and the CNT transport union had been collectivized, women who wished to be tram drivers or bus drivers could apprentice to men in that position so that in order to achieve more gender equality within that sphere. This is something that the Franco estate hated. It also had its own kind of unique take on eugenics that manifested in its pronatalism. Spain couldn't really do the straight racial eugenics, right?

Like that doesn't really work with Spanish history, but instead they saw leftism as being some kind of genetic defect and something of a pathogen that spread within society. Woke mind virus. Yeah, yeah, good God. No, it's pulling from the same type of fascist thought. Yes, yes. You're 100% right.

Yep, yep. It also practiced something called antisemitism without Jews at this time. So there was a very, very small Jewish population. A real step forward. But nonetheless, Franco was constantly freaking out about Judeo-Bolshevism. He saw liberalism, Marxism, anarchism, feminism, Judaism, et cetera, as completely antithetical to Spanishness. And of course, they blamed us for their national decline, something that all fascists like to talk about. This anti-leftist eugenics and pronatalism extended to something called níños robalos, nens for stats in Catalan. These children were

abducted from their parents. Sometimes this is when their parents were in jail, sometimes it was when the parents had been killed, sometimes it was when the mother had been forced into incarceration by something called the Women's Protection Board. This theoretically run by Franka's wife was a way of institutionalizing quote unquote fallen women or women who were quote at risk of falling. It provides a way to force any any woman you want to into an institution at a rate. These children who were taken from their mothers were often trafficked and in some cases sold to approve families by nuns and priests. I'm going to quote one example from a BBC article.

In 1971 Manoli, who was 23 at the time and not long married, gave birth to what she was told was a healthy baby boy, but he was immediately taken away for what were called routine tests. Nine interminable hours passed. Then a nun, who was a nurse, coldly informed me that my baby had died, she said. They would not let her have her son's body, nor would they tell her when the funeral would be. Some of these clinics went as far as to keep the body of a dead baby in a freezer, and they would bring it out to show mothers. They even dug graves for babies, but many of those graves just contained stones or the remains of adults. These babies were then given or sold to other families and raised

and in some cases they lived their whole lives and died without ever knowing who their parents were. I remember I was doing my PhD when the initial research into this was being done and it is fucking horrible for people to find this out. Because the people who were stolen from their families in many cases are still alive. In most cases, their birth certificate exists, we'll say mother unknown. That was a process that existed to protect women who had had children outside of marriage, but was also used to

steal babies and leave no paper trail. Yes. At least in 2011, the BBC confronted one of the doctors who was doing this. It's kind of a wild BBC. I've linked it as an article. There was also like a, I guess it's like a podcast, a radio documentary where one of their reporters had recently had a baby. So was able to make a, uh, make an appointment with the OBGYN who was stealing these babies. And, uh, when she confronted him, he, he grasped the crucifix and started brandishing at her

in his incredible country. The reason that they did this right was because was because their fascism was of a unique kind that was, you know, Paul Preston said that Frank, it wasn't fascist, you were something worse. They had what's called national Catholicism, right, which prevented them from doing sterilization or abortion. And so instead they felt that they could steal these children and sort of raise them outside of this leftist kind of pathogen. Instead they felt that they could steal these children and sort of raise them outside of

this leftist kind of pathogen. I do love just, I'm working on the Salazar episodes right now. I love how often Iberians are like, we're going to do fascism, but we're going to put some spins on it. Like how the Portuguese were like, we're going to do fascism, but with us having sex with absolutely everyone we're colonizing and trying to make an argument to the fact that like that makes us the good colonizers

because of all of the sex assaults. We're not racist guys, it's fine. We're communing. God. Oh, Iberia baby. Spain is different as the slogan used to go. That was a Francoist tourism slogan back in the day. So the discourse of quote, true Catholic womanhood was essential to Francoist nationalization

of women. They were raised to serve the patria, right? The fatherland with their bodies, not their minds. In the Republic, Spain had used secular education to fight its perceived and real backwardness compared to the rest of Europe. The Francoist project did the opposite. It returned for its inspiration to 16th century Catholic texts, and they saw intellectual development as a risk to femininity and a risk to the ultimate goal of women's lives, which was motherhood. In terms of I guess birth rates, like they did have, you have

a post-war baby boom, right? You have that everywhere that is affected by a large war. So you have a post-war baby boom, right? You have that everywhere that is affected by a large war. There are pretty obvious reasons for this. And then birth rates do go up until the 1970s, 1980s, and then they start declining rapidly. And Spain is once again in a sort of, not so much a birth rate panic, I don't think, but it is noted that Spanish birth rates have gone down since the 1980s. But nonetheless, Spanish birth rates never were particularly high compared to those in the rest of Europe because Francoism absolutely rat-fucked the economy, which made it harder

for people to have more children. But yeah, that's what I've got. If you want to read more on Niños Robados, I think there's a TV series about it now, Stolen Children. I'm sure you can find it with subtitles, but someone made a documentary on this that was presented in an academic conference I did, and if I find the link, I will put it in the show notes. Hell yeah.

Well, I think it's time to talk about Romania. Now, when it comes to who is the worst at doing pro-natalism, there's a lot of contenders, but I feel like we got the Usain Bolt of natalism right here and it's the Ceausescu regime. So we got to peel back a little bit here and talk about when communism first came to Romania, which was like kind of the end of 47, early 1948. And in the first years of the communist regime,

it brought the same changes that communist governments in Europe all tended to bring in the post-war period, obviously earlier for the USSR. And a lot of these are good, actually, right? Not to deny all the horrible things that were happening, but life changes pretty dramatically in a positive way for a lot of women. This is true in Russia as well. Literacy for women rises, the employment rate for women rises. And this happens across society, right? A lot of the poorest people in these societies experience substantial initial lifts, right? And along with that, lifespan increases pretty dramatically, rates of accidental death fall pretty dramatically, and literacy increases.

And again, it increases across the board, but it is particularly significant for women, right? And this is all lovely is particularly significant for women, right? And this is all lovely. These are good things, right? However, it comes with a problem for a lot of the leaders, and this is not just true in Romania, but we're talking about Romania here. It comes with a problem for a lot of the leadership of Romania's Communist Party, which is that one of the things we see in every society when people have more and are doing better and live longer is that they start having less kids

Because among other things all their kids aren't dying. Yeah, one reason why birth rates are high is people are like Yeah, well like but three of them might live right, you know I got it. I got a really pump these numbers up and have enough kids to keep this fucking farm going, right? And when that stops happening happening women are like, well, maybe I don't need to have 11 kids. Yeah. Like if they're all gonna live to adulthood, I don't need 11 children to be adults, right? So birth rates start to fall.

This freaks out though, a lot of these communists, because the kind of communists who are like leading Romania are very traditional Marxists, right? And Marx was what you call a physiocrat, right? Which is a term that I found for the first time in a Journal of Family History article, but it's a term you can find other places. And the basic idea is that, and this is an idea that,

then it goes back to the original Marx, more people equals better economy, right? Equals more productivity. So falling fertility is seen as a potential calamity for the state, you know? Obviously this isn't how it works. Like the US has had fertility rates falling and economic prosperity rise in the same period of time.

But this is a thing that they think right then, that if we don't bump up these birth rates we're going to deal with an actual economic disaster. So by the time Nicolae Ceausescu takes over as party leader on June 23rd, 1966, the problem is serious enough in his eyes that it had become a crisis. When Nicolae Ceausescu takes over as party leader on June 23rd, 1966, the problem is serious enough in his eyes that it had become a crisis. The birth rate had declined pretty precipitously. In 1955, there were about 25.6 live births per thousand people in Romania. By the time Ceausescu takes over, there's about 14 live births per thousand people.

For reference, both of those are still higher than the US birth rate right now. We're at about 11, a little less than 11 live births per thousand people in the country. The only reason why the US population continues to grow is immigration. But that's a topic for another day. Ceausescu stated that women needed to use their influence to rebuild the family. And per that article in the Journal of Family History, Ceausescu declared that backward attitudes and expressions of levity toward the family must be combated with determination because they result in an increase in the number of divorces and the disintegration

of the family and in the neglect of the children's education and training for life. And this is something that had come alongside the revolution, right? That there's a lot of more critical ideas about these traditional concepts like the family in the society that it existed before. And a lot of people are like, well, but you know, we're, we're becoming more scientific. You know, we have like women have jobs now. Maybe a lot of these attitudes about what the family should be are kind of outdated.

And he's saying, no, no, no, no, they're not. They're not. You need to go back to having a shitload of kids. Right. And he announces a new initiative to increase the population of Romania by 30% by 1990. So, which I don't know if the idea that would ever be possible is a long shot, right? So unhinged.

That's a massive change in society. But Ceausescu isn't a logic thinker guy, right? He's not like running the numbers hardcore here. He's just sort of throwing out some shit that sounds good. And so to encourage the shift, he unleashes a famous raft of new legislation aimed towards like pro-natalism, towards massively increasing the birth rate.

The first step is that abortion is banned for nearly all women in the country. There are some exceptions. For example, you can qualify for an abortion if you already have five children under 18 in the house concurrently, which is nuts. There's one or two other exceptions based on your age, but there aren't many exceptions. Per an article in PubMed, in addition, employed women under age 45 years are required to undergo monthly gynecologic examinations at their workplaces

and any pregnancies detected are monitored to term. Unmarried persons over 25 years of age and childless married couples without a valid medical reason for infertility are assessed a 30% tax on income. Jesus. Yep. Women who refuse to have children have been termed deserters. Despite official pronatalist policies, it has been estimated that 40% of the 700,000

Romanian women pregnant in 1985 had illegal abortions. A special unit has been established within the state security police to combat this practice. So- We're so close to this. We are not, they really want to do all of this. We're like knocking on the door. They are, like that is the thing

that I really want to drive home, is that the closest that I have found in all of my readings, the closest direct graph to what guys like Vance and Musk are suggesting for US policy is Romania. Yeah, like it's also the worst this has ever worked. When I was a lot younger, like when I was 16, I volunteered in a an orphanage for new divergent kids in Romania. Jesus fucking Christ.

Well, I mean, they created a culture of child abandonment, right? Yes, yeah, we'll be talking about that. That shit fucked me up. And you shouldn't send your 16-year-old children to do that, to be clear. No, and you're encountering it after the worst of it, too, which we'll talk about here, not to minimize the experience, but we'll be discussing where it was at its worst. So it's worth noting that while women did start working at a higher rate after communist takeover,

that started to plateau by the time that Ceausescu, because obviously like there was still a lot of, communism doesn't get rid of men being shitty to women, right? It does tend to, things do get a lot better, right? Sometimes it empowers shitty men. And at the start, like kind of right around when he announces this set of fertility laws,

he does try to institute a policy with the goal of increasing the number of women working at high positions in different state departments. Right? There is an initial, like, we're going to break the glass ceiling kind of thing, but that doesn't last long. He basically cancels any sort of messaging or work on the policy after his wife, Elena, is made a member of the party executive committee.

He's like, women have gone fired up, look at my wife. Classic Chichescu. Yeah, sample size of one. Classic guy who's gonna die with his wife in a basement. So as is always the case with shit like this, women were not equally impacted by the abortion ban. Largely, the impacts were pretty wildly divergent based on your level of wealth and social class. And I'm going to quote from an investigation by the NGO Helsinki Watch, who conducted a

deep investigation into all of this immediately after the regime fell. Women were not equally affected by the pronatalist policies. Members of the urban middle class managed somehow or another to get contraceptives on the black market. Oh, I should also note contraceptives were basically made illegal with the exception of light condoms. They could also obtain medical abortions. A Bucharest student candidly informed Helsinki Watch that several years ago when his girlfriend

became pregnant, the abortion had cost him 5, lay, or about $50 on the black market. And several women with professional degrees reported matter-of-factly that they had simply refused to cooperate with government gynecological inspectors who came to their institutes without suffering any reprisals. Nor were the most rural segments of the population deeply affected. The Orthodox Christians had long shunned birth control and abortion, and others like the Roma had not practiced it. The brunt of the policy fell on the lower middle class, particularly factory workers,

single women, urban Roma, and those from disorganized or troubled families, none of whom had the money or connections to circumvent the regulations. Their options were as limited as they were life-threatening. Some used a variety of would-be abortifacients, others availed themselves of the services of a back-alley abortionist. Still others carried the term. And the number of deaths, the mortality rate for women as a result of this did rise. There's a lot of hideous stuff there.

We're kind of doing the shortest version of this, but I don't mean to paper over that. A lot of women died and suffered lasting injury, infertility, and a number of other things because of different back alley abortions and weird drugs that they were given. But it's important to note that women who had money and a position in the social class could still gain access to this shit. And that's how it will work here too. These Republican congressmen will not be restricting their family members from having access to this stuff.

They'll be restricting poor people. Now, the first thing I should know about this whole raft of policies Ceausescu introduced is that they did not work. That Journal of Family History article that I've quoted from a couple of times here ran the numbers to try to analyze how well did this, like how did these policies correspond to birth rates in Romania? And it is true that after the first major laws were pushed in 67 and 68, there was a brief surge in birth rates, but that fell

very quickly and had completely disappeared by the 1970s. Things were back to baseline. So in 1974, Cheskuh launches another push to increase birth rates. And again, they briefly increase and then fall a year or two later. This process plays out a couple of times throughout the administration. And one of the things that's important to note is that the increase that happens after every new sort of like focus on birth rates is less each time, right? It gets less effective every time.

Now, the analysis in that paper concluded that birth rate would only rise when the state applied direct pressures on the population. Otherwise it dropped, right? Because this just doesn't work. Like you're not fundamentally changing anything and and none of these incentives, because they're expensive, and in Romania's case, the country literally didn't have money to provide much of the way of incentives, right? But they never are going to work.

As we went over earlier, the ones being proposed here are wildly insufficient to deal with the cost of having kids, let alone a bunch of fucking kids. And none of the people in charge in the Republican Party have any interest in making life affordable for people who are not rich. Now, the situation that this led to by the time the Tuchescu regime fell in 89 was also pretty catastrophic because there had been surges in births, right? In births of kids to parents who, because the people who can't get away from this tend to be the poor, could not take care of these kids.

There was also a surge in kids as a result of the general surge in birth rate, but also as a result of different sort of issues with nutrition and whatnot in Romania. A lot of kids who had different physical and mental disabilities, who were just abandoned straight away because their parents could not take care of them. By 1990, there were an estimated 130,000 children in orphanages and homes for the handicapped, these institutions that had been set up in Romania. And there were like posters that were going around that were part of the pro-natalist campaign that basically said, hey, if you have a kid you can't take care of or that's

not like working out for you, the Romanian government can handle it better than you. So like, who cares? Have another kid and we'll just drop it off with us if you can't take care of them. Right? Like that was literally part of the propaganda campaign that led to again, like 130,000 kids in orphanages. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah.

That Helsinki article I found quoted from a different piece of Western news media, like a team of journalists that went to a town called The Dell after Ceausescu fell. And this is how that article opens. On the second floor of the state-run institution, here dazed toddlers lie or sit in iron cribs in close, stuffy rooms. Their foreheads are speckled with flies and with scabs and bruises that come from banging their heads and mouths on crib rails. Some cry, but most are silent and appear bewildered behind their bars with the doomed air of laboratory

animals. Down the hall other cribs hold smaller children, pale skeletons suffering from malnutrition and disease. Despite the heat of the day, several of the children are wrapped in dirty blankets. From one still bundle, only a bluish patch of scalp is visible. Asked if the child inside is alive, an orderly says, of course, and pulls back the covers. The tiny skeleton stirves, turned onto its side and groans.

Ugh. Gar. There's worse. This is not the worst. Like, this, like, Helsinki article goes into, like, how in the homes for the handicapped, the children are just ignored. They can go months without any real human contact, other than the bare minimum of being fed. There's no, there's no one watching these kids. Like, this is some of the most cruelest and most hideous systematic abuse of children I've ever heard of.

A lot of children die. AIDS spreads through some of these facilities like wildfire. I really cannot exaggerate the horror of these institutions. If you do want to read more, there's two articles I'll recommend for you that I'm not going to quote up from now because we're already going long enough. The Romanian Orphans Are Adults Now, an article in The Atlantic, that's the title. You should check that out. And then Ceausescu's Children and The Guardian, both of those articles do a good job of providing

additional context and horror on this. But I think it's important to note that what happened in Romania is what sounds most familiar to the programs being pushed today and also easily the worst this has ever gone. I mean, yeah, especially combined with like RFK Jr.'s policies. Yeah. That is like, yeah, yeah, it takes a lot for me to be like, kind of shocked and horrified these days. Yeah. But that stuff is grim. It shocked and horrified these days. Yeah.

But that stuff is grim. It's some of the worst shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, boy. I remember the time there was like concern if like kids were really non-verbal.

Yeah. Like, or they just had never been talked to. Oh my God. Because, right, they've been institutionalized from such a young. Like I was there probably about 12 years after the end of the regime. So these kids were in their teens, I guess. Oh my God. Yeah. I remember teaching little kids to ride bikes who like have never really been able to play outside very much. And it was fucking. Yeah. Yeah. That that shit will fuck you up.

Yeah. That's a good museum. I'll see if I can find where it is because they've maintained one of the old orphanages as it was like with the iron cribs and shit. And they have like projections on the walls of the kids rocking and banging their heads that someone had filmed. Yeah, that shit is disturbing. Like I wouldn't read any of those articles before going to bed. Yeah.

Anyway, this has been It Could Happen Here. All right. Bye. Anyway, this has been It Could Happen Here. All right, bye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here

listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait, head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today.

Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process.

Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. No. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder.

I'm Catherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week I investigate a new case. If there's a case we should hear about, in their community. I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world. Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing,

Brazilian favela life and much more. All real, completely uncensored. Listen to the Away Days podcast, reporting from the underbelly on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.