Culture Friday: Motherhood on trial

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Friday, August 21st. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. 

It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now, John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. 

John, good morning!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Well, John, National Review is reporting that violent crime in 2025 in the U.S. has fallen 9.7 percent, year on year. That would be the largest annual drop since the FBI began tracking these numbers all the way back in 1936.

No single cause has been established for the good number. Some theories point to cameras and changes in drug markets, but there is a darker possibility is that young men are simply more isolated indoors, they're absorbed by gaming, gambling, and porn.

Now, obviously a lower crime rate is good news. But if part of the decline reflects isolation and digital vice, it may not mean people and communities are any healthier. 

Now, as Prison Fellowship marks 50 years this year, what would you say, John, is the difference between less crime and genuine restoration?

STONESTREET: Well, I don’t think anyone’s had the track record in terms of actual restoration—what happens when someone actually commits a crime. And you know, the original theory that you can just put semi-violent criminals in a small, confined space with other semi-violent criminals and that everyone will be better at the end of whatever sentence—never made sense to begin with.

And understanding the kind of fallen creatures that humans are after Eden—I mean, these are essential categories that Chuck Colson tried to work into the work that Prison Fellowship was doing in the prisons, and also breaking the cycle of crime, including understanding the essential role of moms and dads in the lives of their children and that they’re irreplaceable. So even how the way the ministry of Angel Tree was conceived and carried out was a way to restore and reconcile, and it’s a way of seeing people in that relational aspect of really who they really are.

But you know, this stat here, this big drop, and what it’s credited to, it reminds me of other good news/bad news that we have received lately: the incredible decline of the teen pregnancy rate. And I don’t think anyone assumes that fewer teenagers are getting pregnant in America because of a spike in sexual purity or sexual wholeness.

In fact, they’re not having sex. They’re also not dating. They don’t even know how to talk to each other, and we have an absolutely collapsing birth rate in the long run. We have our own problems. And it reminds me of something G. K. Chesterton said: “There are a lot of ways to fall down. There’s only one way to stand up straight.”

So look, if this drop in the violent crime rate was accompanied by, I think, an increase in an understanding of moral formation, an increase in the home—and we know there is nothing more effective in breaking the cycle of crime and cutting back antisocial behavior than to be enculturated as a citizen by moms and dads who love and care for you—then maybe that’s the sort of thing we are seeing from certain angles.

I think often about how the young people entering the NBA and professional sports, their parents seem to be way more engaged than a generation ago, when both the NFL and the NBA were plagued by what many people consider to be more thuggish behavior.

So I think it’s a mix of all kinds of things. But I don’t think across the board, if we gave everyone a worldview test, America would suddenly score a lot higher in things like moral absolutes. I think there’s a lot more to this stat that needs to be evaluated.

MAST: Well John, I know you’ve been following the Lindsay Clancy trial. Her lawyers do not dispute that she killed her three young children. They argue that bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis left her unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of her actions. Prosecutors say she planned the killings and understood what she was doing.

Now I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of postpartum psychosis, but it is a rare psychiatric emergency, and most women who experience it do not harm their children.

What I am concerned about here is the conversation around it, and that it may add to the idea I often hear: that children will ruin, rather than add to, a mother’s life and happiness.

So what do you make of the way this exceptional tragedy is being drawn into the broader cultural story that children diminish women’s lives?

STONESTREET: Well, I think that’s really important. That’s a myth that certainly predates this story: that children are bad for us, especially that children are bad for women. I mean it’s hard to quantify. I’m grateful for so many of the female Catholic theologians who are trying to recapture this idea in Holy Scripture, where God created men and women in His image, and looked at what He had made, and said it’s actually very good.

The contraceptive mindset has built into society the idea that women should, at some level, oppose who they are. They should oppose particularly their procreative potential and capacity. There is, I think, something to be corrected in the idea of reducing women just to their ability to bear children, that certainly is dehumanizing. But it’s also dehumanizing to say that a woman’s fertility is a problem to be overcome and avoided, as opposed to the good aspect of how God created her to be.

We’re very, very confused on anthropology, you know, top to bottom, and that has fed into, created, and led to this anti-natalist society, where we’d rather have pets than have children.

But I tell you, one thing we can do is point to the flurry of resources and research coming out of places like the Institute for Family Studies. Also, as awkward a relationship as I have with happiness studies in America, it just keeps coming back that the happiest people are religious, middle-aged, married mothers. They just are the happiest. And study after study just gives a whole new spin on what it means to be a church lady these days, and I think we should respect that and celebrate that. And being a mom is a big part of that, too.

So you’re right. I mean, when a story like this reinforces the exception, and you’ve already accepted a narrative that children are bad and that women have to fight their fertility to be truly human, then the temptation is to hold this kind of a story up and undermine what is actually true. 

And so I think we have a responsibility to celebrate the good that is children.

MAST: Well, speaking of fertility, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—she’s 36—she says she is freezing her eggs to feel more in control of her life and to normalize the conversation for working women. Now with another major political run potentially ahead, she presents the procedure as a way to preserve her options.

But WORLD Opinions writer Ericka Andersen warns that this can sound as though marriage and motherhood may safely be postponed. But planned egg freezing preserves a possibility and not a promise; future use requires IVF, and success depends heavily on age and the number of mature eggs frozen.

So what does AOC’s decision reveal about our culture’s belief that technology can put motherhood on our timetable?

STONESTREET: Well, you know, it’s interesting. I think she’s reflecting culture more than changing it. Certainly, there’ll be a plausibility narrative that’s reinforced here. But this is nothing new, this is nothing unusual for a culture, again, in which fertility is understood as a barrier to true womanhood. Fertility is actually seen as a problem to be solved, as a barrier to be overcome, as something to be subverted so someone can actually reach their true selves, which, in so many cases, looks like a woman being a man or behaving like a man. And it just is really upside down, and we’ve failed to understand the good of it.

Ericka Andersen’s exactly right. The promise of this—“It’ll all be fine”—is very much reflected in the attitude that is behind these artificial reproductive technologies and all of their forms: That we can have kids on our own terms. We can have kids when we want them, how we want them, where we want them. My desires come first, and the kids come second.

If we really believe that kids’ lives begin at conception, these are very difficult pregnancies, very often, and hormones and everything else that's involved in extracting eggs is painful. The viability factor on the backside tends not to be as high. It just doesn’t work out the way this technology has been sold to women, as if it makes this promise. It’s a sad thing.

I was interested in hearing so many conservative women whom I either know or am friends with just say, “This is sad.” It’s sad to see this, even if they disagree with AOC in so many different ways, and to realize, “No, this is actually a real woman, and this is a really sad development.”

EICHER: Well John, this week the Meta trial got underway, and it's expected to run about six weeks. And I should use this occasion to say that I misspoke the other day. I said that “oral arguments” had begun; I meant “opening statements.” I’ve had my nose in so many Supreme Court stories that my mouth apparently went on autopilot.

Four states allege in federal court that Meta designed Facebook and Instagram to drive compulsive use by children, that Meta collected data from children under 13 without parental consent, that Meta misled families about the risks. Meta is denying the allegations, but the states want large financial penalties, they're also seeking court-ordered changes to the products themselves. So this could be both a money case and an accountability case.

But John, if Meta and parents have both failed to govern this technology, is it just inevitable that the courts and the government are going to get involved?

STONESTREET: Well, I don’t think actually those two possibilities are mutually exclusive. I think very much the opportunity will not be wasted on the government when it can actually seize that kind of money. But, at the same time, there’s a bit of this that can be understood in light of the framework that Chuck Colson offered: “the conscience or the constable.” And I think he was quoting someone else, I just don’t know who he was quoting. 

The idea is that if you can’t govern yourself, you have to be governed from the outside. We’ve talked about this a number of times when it comes to gun violence. I’m a Second Amendment guy, I don’t want the state telling me what I can and can’t do when it comes to owning firearms. But if we’re not a society that can wield firearms responsibly—if there is an excuse for the state to step in—it will.

And look, social media companies have proven that they are willing to deceive customers, including children. Parents have proven that they are unwilling to violate their children’s so-called autonomy in order to put common-sense rules around not having social media platforms that are observably, testably, and research-based bad for kids, especially young girls.

If they don’t act, then that door is open, and the person or the group—the entity that steps through that open door of no conscience—is always the constable. It’s the state. 

I think at some level there’s an inevitability here: that if we can’t rein in our behavior when it comes to some of these things, then the regulations come.

MAST: This is why we can’t have nice things!

EICHER: Apparently not! That is John Stonestreet. John is president of the Colson Center. He’s also host of the Breakpoint Podcast. 

It's great to talk with you, John. I hope you have a great week.

STONESTRET: Thank you both!

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