Care and Feeding | Slate's parenting show - Introducing CRAMPED: "Has Period Education Gotten Better For Teens?"
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 July 2026
⏱️ 37 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
Hosted by Kate Helen Downey, CRAMPED is an investigative deep dive, exploring what the research actually says about menstrual pain and reproductive health, and the gap between what science knows and what options are given to patients. New episodes cover everything from pelvic floor PT to period poops, AI diagnoses to the history of women's health care. In this episode, Kate thinks about her own "abysmal menstrual health education" and wonders if it has gotten any better. Are there more resources and support out there for a young cramper? She speaks with Kat Samedova, who recently graduated from Kingston High School and is the former vice president of the Period Power! Club there.
Period pain has been undertreated, understudied, and underfunded for decades. CRAMPED is here to ask why. If you—or your child–have ever been told your excruciating cramps were "normal", this podcast is for you.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey Karen feeding listeners. My name is Kate Helen Downey and I host Cramped, a podcast about severe period pain and why medicine so often ignores it. |
| 0:09.8 | Season one of Cramped follows my quest for answers to the debilitating period pain that I had had for 20 years. |
| 0:17.6 | I know many of you listening right now are parents of children who either already have |
| 0:22.1 | or will someday have a period, which means 90% of those children will experience some kind of |
| 0:29.1 | period pain, and 30% of them will experience debilitating period pain. Those are the stats. It's |
| 0:36.3 | crazy. So I thought you might be particularly interested in an episode that I did about period pain. Those are the stats. It's crazy. So I thought you might be particularly |
| 0:38.7 | interested in an episode that I did about period education in high school. I remember my |
| 0:44.4 | own public high school sex ed course having very little info about periods, aside from handing |
| 0:49.8 | out pad samples with deodorant samples and begging us to use both as soon as we needed to. |
| 0:55.5 | It was fascinating to hear the experience of one high schooler in upstate New York who was so |
| 1:00.4 | unsatisfied with the menstrual education and resources provided by their school that they co-founded |
| 1:05.8 | a period power club. The kids are all right, you guys. If you want more info about period pain and navigating |
| 1:12.5 | our health care system as a person with a uterus, check out cramped wherever you get your |
| 1:17.3 | podcast or follow the link in the show notes. Without further ado, here's an episode of cramped |
| 1:22.1 | for your listening pleasure. You've already heard some of my stories about having death cramps in middle and high school. |
| 1:29.1 | Throwing up in school bathrooms, the school nurse rolling her eyes when I told her it was cramps, |
| 1:34.5 | even as I was passing out. |
| 1:36.1 | Being so convinced that my body was the only one in the world that did this that I didn't talk to my friends about it at all. |
| 1:43.2 | So maybe it's not that surprising that I am desperately curious |
| 1:47.0 | about what current high school and middle school students are experiencing. |
| 1:51.6 | Does their sex ed now include anything about period pain and the conditions that cause it? |
| 1:57.0 | Has having the internet and social media changed how they talk to their friends about this at all? |
... |
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