This 'Horrifying' New Podcast Is Being Compared To 'The Handmaid's Tale', And It's A Must-Listen

Elle

a day ago

The sixth — and final — season of The Handmaid's Tale might be over, but the show, which has become a cultural shorthand for conversations about reproductive rights, has sparked a string of dystopian pronatalist podcasts that nod to the themes of the hit Hulu series, the most recent of which is an episode of The Guardian's Today in Focus podcast.
The episode, named Make America Pregnant Again, is presented by Helen Pidd with Moira Donegan, and it probes the question of why there is a growing contingency of pronatalists in America, and what exactly it means, questions that are eerily mirrored throughout the Hulu series in which women are stripped of their autonomy and reduced to their reproductive function. In The Handmaid's Tale, Handmaids are forced to bear children for elite families with no say in the process.
Make America Pregnant Again touches on an annual pronatalist conference named NatalCon, the second outing of which took place in April in Austin, Texas. The gathering brought together the various groups who want there to be more babies in the US – and they were an unusual collective.
Doneghan says: 'So you have folks who we might think of as sort of the traditional old-school pronatalists, right? Like traditionalist Catholics who are very invested in a cultural model in which marriage is the sole legitimate expression of sexuality and in which that sexuality is sort of unmediated by any use of birth control or non-reproductive practices.'
The episode name checks the Hulu adaptation of Atwood's seminal 1985 novel, too. 'In the pronatalist movement, there are fewer women. There is a married couple named Malcolm and Simone Collins,' Doneghan notes. 'Simone has started wearing these bonnets that look kind of like what Elisabeth Moss wears in The Handmaid's Tale. She's doing that on purpose.' In fact, the warped interpretation of the Bible in The Handmaid's Tale — which Gilead uses to justify the Handmaids' roles of forced procreation — mirrors many of the most prominent pronatalist voices in America who are often driven by religious ideology.
Make America Pregnant Again posits the idea that the pronatalist movement isn't just trying to encourage a higher birth rate to remedy the west's ageing population, but rather to condition the types of children that are born into the world — something that wouldn't feel out of place in Gilead. 'There's a lot of these techno-futurists, who are advancing the use of artificial reproductive technology, including things that are very frowned on by the Catholic church, such as IVF,' Doneghan explains. 'These are also people who tend to be very into gene editing. Something I think is really important to hammer down about the pro-natalist movement is that they're not just looking for more babies, they're looking for more of what they consider higher-quality babies … which is a judgment that they're making that might have, I think frequently does have, racial connotations.'
In 2023, the total fertility rate in England and Wales was 1.44 children per woman, the lowest ever on record, which has resulted in an ageing population. It's a similar picture across the pond in America too, where the fertility rate has fallen to 1.6 births per woman, below the 2.1 needed to sustain the population.
LISTEN TO 'MAKE AMERICA PREGNANT AGAIN' HERE
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Naomi May is a seasoned culture journalist and editor with over ten years' worth of experience in shaping stories and building digital communities. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard, where she worked across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Digital Editor at ELLE Magazine and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others. Naomi is also the host of the ELLE Collective book club.