She thought it was a prenatal vitamin. She didn’t know it was radioactive. | The Truth of the Matter

Pregnant women were handed a “vitamin drink” at a prestigious university clinic. No one told them it was radioactive.

In this episode of “The Truth of the Matter,” Natasha Zouves sits down with attorney Donald Arbitblit, who helped expose how Vanderbilt University doctors secretly fed radioactive iron “cocktails” to hundreds of pregnant women in the 1940s — including Emma Craft and Helen Hutchinson — to see how much radiation would cross the placenta to their unborn babies. The women were told it was good for them. Some of their children later developed cancer.

Arbitblit takes us inside the case he brought against Vanderbilt:

• How Emma discovered, decades later, that she’d been experimented on without her consent

• What happened to Helen after she was urged to “drink it all… drink it on down”

• The haunting medical records, depositions and letters that still keep Arbitblit up at night

• How a respected Southern medical school became a site for radiation testing on pregnant women

• The moment when Arbitblit realized they might actually win

• The $10M+ settlement — and a rare apology

Far beyond a story about just one lawsuit, this conversation is a window into a much larger, disturbing pattern of human radiation experiments on some of the most vulnerable people in America — orphans, hospital patients and pregnant women who thought they were getting care, not being used as test subjects.

If you care about medical ethics, informed consent, and what’s still hidden in archives, this conversation will stay with you.

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The Truth of the Matter with Natasha Zouves isn’t just another podcast — it’s a fight to uncover what powerful institutions want hidden. From secret human experiments the government carried out on unsuspecting citizens to toxic cover-ups poisoning communities, Emmy and Murrow Award-winning journalist Natasha Zouves brings you the stories people in power don’t want told.