Culture Friday: Unsafe and untrue

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Friday the 2nd of May.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is author and speaker Katie McCoy. Good morning.

KATIE MCCOY: Good morning.

EICHER: Katie, this story is really making waves: a new study raising serious questions about the safety of chemical abortion—and the federal government’s oversight of it.

Researchers at the Ethics and Public Policy Center tracked more than 865,000 abortion-pill prescriptions over six years and found that one in nine women suffered a serious complication. I’d like to note how conservatively and carefully that term is defined in the study: The authors asked a panel of OBGYNs to map every diagnosis and procedure code that meets the FDA’s own definition of a serious event. They excluded mild or moderate complaints, and included only the top two grades on the NIH severity scale. We’re talking conditions requiring hospitalization, invasive intervention, or posing an immediate threat to life.

What the study found was that the rate of serious complications is in reality more than twenty times the rate listed on the drug’s FDA label.

And this is especially important, as it comes at a time when mifepristone now accounts for two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S.

So let’s start with the top-line finding: One in nine women who took the abortion pill experienced a serious complication. Did that surprise you?

MCCOY: I wish it did, Nick. It’s staggering and completely unsurprising, in part because we see the rhetoric surrounding mifepristone, the abortion pill highlighted not only as safe, but one of the lines you’ll hear associated with it is it’s safer than Tylenol.

What’s also staggering is to realize that women are getting this medication via telehealth. They don’t even have to see a doctor. So they’re getting effectively, abortion by mail. This is as easy to come by as an antibiotic.

I certainly hope this continues to make waves, but here’s where I’m afraid it might not: We are living in an age where data comes up against dogma, and dogma always wins. What I mean by that is what you believe is true depends upon the degree to which it aligns with a political purpose or an ideological narrative. So you already know what you believe, no matter what the facts are. But our own FDA is using old studies.

That was something else that this report found—old studies that are done with maybe 10 clinical trials, they said, with about maybe 31,000 women. But here they’re coming with not just their own study, but verifiable insurance claims. They have documentation of what was required after taking mifepristone, and it should be the biggest story in the news right now.

I remember, maybe you do too, just a few years ago, when this over-the-counter antacid, Zantac. Do you remember Zantac? It was pulled from the shelves, recalled nationwide. Get it out, throw it away, and that was because of studies that showed it might eventually increase the risk of someday getting cancer. With an antacid, we had a nationwide movement to get rid of it.

This should be something that is immediately halted, but it won’t be—and it won’t be because it doesn’t fit a narrative. As long as we’re defining truth according to its political effect, not according to that which corresponds with reality, I’m afraid this report will continue to fall on deaf ears.

REICHARD: OK, from one alarming thing to another.

I saw a report from an organization called the Network Contagion Research Institute. It points to a cultural shift taking root online. Researchers call it “assassination culture.” Now, this thing treats violence as not only acceptable, but desirable. And it’s fueled by memes and highly stylized forms of political extremism.

We know that political violence has been a concern for a long time. But what’s new is young people who are big-time engaged with left-leaning digital spaces like Reddit and BlueSky are doing this.

Here’s just one finding in that report: Nearly 4 in 10 Americans surveyed said assassinating President Trump would be at least somewhat justified. That number jumps to more than half among left-of-center respondents.

We’re not just talking about politicians, either. Many point to Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthCare, as a meme or rallying cry.

Katie, how on earth did we get here?

MCCOY: It is upsetting indeed. I’m not familiar with this Network Contagion Research Institute. But when I saw the name, I thought, uh-huh, contagion. We’ve had quite a few social contagions in our culture in the last 15 to 20 years, and certainly now this contagion of politically motivated or ideologically motivated violence is becoming more frighteningly common.

We also hear it in some of our elected officials. They’ll try to walk it back, but they’ll say things that certainly sound like they could be inciting people to violence. Again, Mary, what I go back to it’s that data versus dogma, because when people are using this language, they’re justifying it in the name of some type of politically held ideology.

It’s ironic, though—isn’t it?—that you have among some of the same pockets of our society both justifying violence but then also saying that certain types of words are a form of violence. So for instance, saying something that goes against your own political or ideologically held beliefs is considered violent or doing violence.

It is nonsensical. But the reason it’s nonsensical is because, again, data versus dogma. When you have a view of truth, a prevailing view of truth in our culture, that doesn’t have to correspond to reality and is just determined by its political effect, this is what you get.

EICHER: Alright, Katie: The New York Times says the Trump administration is considering proposals to encourage Americans to marry and have more children. Among the ideas: a $5,000 “baby bonus” for new mothers and reserving top government fellowships for applicants who are married or have kids. Laudable goal, for sure: to try to reverse America’s declining birthrate and restore the family to the center of American life. But what's your take on these kinds of things? Do you think financial incentives like baby bonuses and tax credits have a meaningful role to play—or do they risk reducing family to a policy lever?

MCCOY: Yeah, that’s a great question. So first, I’m really glad to hear people talking about this in the mainstream. It’s been at least 10-15, years ago that we started hearing about the demographic winter.

I recently heard an interview with Darrell Bricker, who wrote a book, Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline. This something that is generally speaking, true worldwide, certainly in Western countries.

This writer, Darrell Bricker, said that some people are not having children because they can’t afford them, but mostly they’re not having kids because they just don’t want them. So some of the policy issues, the economic issues that we’re talking about—necessary, though they are—they’re colliding with cultural issues as well.

We have, generally speaking, the decline in the family. We can go back to the sexual revolution, as we’ve talked about on this show many times, and see how 60 years later, we’re still living in the effects of that. Researchers like Mary Eberstadt would be a wonderful place to start if you’re wanting to look into that.

There’s a fantastic new book coming out by one of our WORLD Opinions writers, Nathanael Blake, wrote a book called Victims of the Revolution. It is phenomenal, so well-researched. But one of the ways that we are still seeing the effects of it now is among unmarried women. This is affecting everything from the disproportionate gender ratio in higher education to women remaining unmarried, 30s, 40s, then not having children—deciding maybe they don’t want to have kids at all, or if they do maybe one or two, and then maybe they don’t even need a partner, they can just do IVF if they would like to have a child that way as well.

The many cultural maladies that have caused our low birth rate will remain even after the financial incentive. But here’s the thing, Nick, and some of our writers, like our own, Katy Faust and Emma Waters, have talked about this. It isn’t just births that we need. We need families, because adding more single mothers raising children is not going to fix our social ills. In fact, you can predict a whole other host of compounded social ills if we just have an increase in fatherlessness. Fatherlessness being linked to nearly every negative metric, from mental and behavioral health, to increased risk of poverty and academic difficulties. So what we need is a revival of families, not just babies.

REICHARD: I’m sure you’ve heard about the proposed development in Texas that Governor Greg Abbott is calling a “Sharia city.” He’s trying to block a thousand-home, master-planned community outside Dallas—anchored by a mosque and backed by members of the East Plano Islamic Center. The group behind the project, EPIC City, says it’s open to all, fully legal under Texas law, and born not of separatism, but of serving a growing faith community. So is this just religious liberty at work—or something else? What’s the right way to think about it?

MCCOY: Well, Mary, I’ll leave it to you to figure out what this means legally, but when I see this story, I can’t help but see what this means culturally.

For that, I compare communities in the United Kingdom, in France, and other Western European nations. You know, one of the things that we see, and I don’t want to unfairly besmirch practicing Muslims. I do, however, want to talk about the religion of Islam.

My colleague did a lot of missions overseas. I’ll never forget this conversation. He was describing to me what it’s like to live in a Muslim context, and describing that, you know, when they say they are a “religion of peace,” what “peace” is to this religion is global domination. Peace is the caliphate. So when they’re saying it’s a “religion of peace,” they say “peace,” but it’s not what in our pluralistic society we typically would understand to mean peace.

I asked him, I said, “Well, so how does that co exist with any other government?” He said, “It doesn’t.” True Islam is more like what we saw in ISIS about 15 years ago. 

I will hasten to say that the rise of ISIS led to the exponential and unprecedented conversion of Arabs to Christianity because they had inherited their Muslim identity. It was part of their culture. It was a kind of nominal aspect of their lives, and they saw true Islam being practiced, and they didn’t want anything to do with it.

So this is culturally alarming. I realize it can sound like Henny Penny, The Sky is Falling. But the truth is, we saw this happening in the United Kingdom about 20 years ago. A British Parliamentary member named Baroness Cox talked about “Sharia councils.” They were sort of like family courts. They had about 80 of them in the UK, and she sounded the alarm on behalf of British female citizens and the inequality that they were living in.

I would really caution all of your listeners to see it through the lens of where has this gone in Western Europe, and could that happen in America as well, in the name of civil liberties in the name of the things that we take for granted. But the reason we take for granted is because we have lived historically in a predominantly Christianized society.

EICHER: Speaker and author Katie McCoy is ….Thanks, Katie. See you next time.

MCCOY: See y’all next time.

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