It's Wednesday, April 23rd. I'm Erin Ryan in for Jane Koston, and this is What a Day,

the show that says, way to go, meanies, you're not going to have Elon Musk to kick around anymore.

Musk announced Tuesday that he'll be stepping back from Doge after Tesla reported a 71% drop in earnings

during the first quarter of 2025.

We're mournfully waving our chainsaws around in solidarity.

On today's show, Sun-poisoned Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that America's children will now be protected from the menace of

artificial food dies, thanks to the Trump administration. And in immigration courtrooms,

unaccompanied migrant children were not given attorneys, leaving more and more kids to represent

themselves in their own deportation hearings. Also, thanks to the Trump administration.

But first, MAGA is in full on panic mode about

the declining birth rate in the U.S. And so the doors of the West Wing are wide open to figuring

out how to get more babies born around here. That's right. Trump administration officials want

you to get pregnant and stay pregnant. Nothing creepy about that. That's according to a New York Times article

that ran this week detailing some of the solutions that have been presented to the Trump

administration by concerned pronatalists. That is, people who believe that it is important to increase

the birth rate in order to assure that all of America doesn't turn into a giant episode of the

Golden Girls in a generation.

Some of their concerns are reasonable. Some of them are racist, and many of the solutions they've come up with are straight up weird. But will any of them work? To get more into the right-wing

panic around the coming baby apocalypse, we called up Carter Sherman, a reproductive health

and justice reporter for The Guardian,

an author of the forthcoming book, The Second Coming, Sex and the Next Generations Fight

Over Its Future.

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