NPR Sponsor Message

speaker

72 appearances 17 recordings 3 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 12 Dec

NPR Sponsor Message’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Consider This from NPR · They want America to have more babies. Is this their moment? · 7 Apr 2025 podcast

That's Charles Haywood at the First Natal Con a couple years ago. This year, he's behind the scenes as a sponsor. He made his money as a shampoo magnate. Haywood blames birth rate declines on feminism and the overturning of what he sees as natural hierarchies of gender and race.

So it may seem like a challenge to square a Charles Haywood with a Simone Collins — she's an entrepreneurial woman with a master's degree from Cambridge — but they share a commitment to spaces like Natalcon because they both believe Modern culture has stopped prioritizing nuclear families and having kids, which is not really how most demographers describe what's happening.

Catherine Benjamin Guzzo is a University of North Carolina sociologist who runs the Carolina Population Center.

The United States has low fertility right now. Up until the Great Recession, we were sort of humming along right around two kids per person.

Then birth rates began to fall, partly because the U.S. succeeded in reducing teen and unintended births. America was actually a couple decades late to the declining fertility trend. It's something that's been happening at different rates all over the world.

And this is true in Italy and it's true in Japan and it's true in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa. India has a below replacement fertility rate in some parts.

The theories about why this is happening are pretty complicated. But there's also another trend emerging. We're used to thinking of richer, more educated people having fewer children than the poor and working class. Recent research shows that tendency has actually started to reverse in many countries, including the U.S. Guzzo says surveys show most people want kids.

But nowadays, in this very competitive world, they have a vision of what being a good parent means. A stable home, income, a partner, hope about the future.

People are not being irrational and selfish when they're deciding not to have children. People are making a series of decisions to not have a child now, maybe in the future. And then that keeps happening because we aren't giving people the societal supports to meet their visions of having a good parent.

For her, that should include things like more government funding for health care, affordable housing, schools, child care, addressing climate change. But many pro-natalists, including NatalCon's organizer Kevin Dolan, see their biggest allies as the folks in the White House right now. Here's Dolan speaking at the conference over lunch.

Dolan left his data science job in 2021 after his anonymous Twitter account was exposed. Among other things, he'd used it to promote the racist notion that white men are superior to other races and women. After getting doxed, Dolan continued sharing his thoughts about how society should be ordered on his podcast.

Matthew McManus is a lecturer at the University of Michigan and an expert on the modern hard right writers Dolan takes inspiration from.

For these thinkers, restoring this masculine culture means feminism and multicultural democracy need to be rooted out.

It's not explicit on the natal con stage, but part of Dolan's vision for the conference is to help build this world where men like him can't be doxed because they'll be in power. Dolan says his conference is nonpartisan, and he invites speakers who say stuff like this.

That's a speech from the first natal con. It's a writer who goes by the pseudonym Peachy Keenan. Her work is published by a company that sells books arguing Black people are inherently more criminal and less intelligent than white people. That publisher, Passage Press, sponsored NatalCon this year, and its founder was a featured speaker.

These are some of the elements united under the banner of pronatalism. They don't all agree on how to boost birth rates, but two years after the first NatalCon, this is a movement that's much closer to power than it used to be.

Since Donald Trump took office in January, a lot has happened. The White House Budget Office ordered a pause on all federal grants and loans. The impact of the Trump administration's tariffs is already being felt in President Trump's efforts to radically remake the federal government.

It's Been a Minute · Crunchy conservatives want to 'Make America Healthy Again' · 7 Apr 2025 podcast

Support for NPR comes from the Cy Sims Foundation, since 1985, supporting advances in science, education, and the arts towards a fairer, more just, and civil society. More information is available at cysimsfoundation.org.

Showing 21–40 of 72 · page 2 of 4