Culture Friday: Unsafe at any dose

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: Culture Friday!

HAWLEY: Um, Sec. Kennedy, different subject, you and I have talked before when you’ve been before this committee and you and I have talked in person a number of times about mifepristone. I just want to follow up with you, because the last time you and I spoke…

This is from back in May, Senator Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican, raising concerns about the abortion drug Mifepristone. Appearing before the Senate committee was Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Hawley’s bringing up a study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center pointing to safety issues for women using the abortion pill.

HAWLEY: You will remember that this data shows the biggest study on mifepristone done, I think, ever, and it showed that nearly 11 percent of women experience very serious adverse health effects ... by the way, that’s 22 times higher — that rate is 22 times higher — than the FDA’s current label, which says it’s just point-five, the incidence of serious adverse health events. So my question to you is this: You previously testified at the committee that you would do a top-to-bottom review of mifepristone. Do you continue to stand by that? And don’t you think that this new data shows that the need to do a review is, in fact, very pressing?

RFK JR: I’ve asked Marty Makary, who’s the director of FDA, to do a complete review and report back.

HAWLEY: It will be a top priority, though, for you —

RFK JR: Yeah

HAWLEY: —is that safe to say?

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Again, that was more than four months ago. But by the end of September, the Food and Drug Administration, which is an agency under Kennedy’s HHS, gave approval to a generic version of mifepristone.

Last Friday at the White House, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the approval process of the drug, if not, she insisted, the drug itself. Here’s how she put it.

LEAVITT: HHS’s decision, it’s not an endorsement of this drug by any means. They are just simply following the law, and as they put out in their statement, by law, the Secretary of Health and Human Services must approve a generic drug application if the application demonstrates the generic drug is the quote ‘same as the brand-name drug.’

Making this point repeatedly: that green-lighting a cheaper generic medication for the most common abortion method in the country, says nothing about the merits of the current safety program. And that HHS is still reviewing adverse effects.

EICHER: Nevertheless, Senator Hawley was stunned by the approval and said so on social media, going so far as to say he’s lost confidence in the leadership of FDA…S namely Dr. Marty Makary.

WORLD Washington reporter Carolina Lumetta caught up with Senator Hawley on Capitol Hill and asked him about it.

HAWLEY: This application has been pending since, I think it's October 3, 2021 so it's been pending for four solid years, and now they say, Oh, we have a statutory deadline of 100 days. They blew through that years ago, I mean, and you're supposed to be doing a safety study to determine … whether the drug needs to be in some way modified from the market, and yet you're going to approve a new one, and under the old rules, the old safety protocols .

EICHER: Joining us is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast, good morning John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Great reporting by Carolina, and she tells me further that yesterday, 51 Republican senators wrote Dr. Makary, and made a forceful appeal urging HHS and the FDA to halt distribution and approval of abortion pills until a full safety review is complete.

We’ll see, but this is a serious breach on the pro-life side, John. I know that Dr. Makary is highly respected on the right because of his courage on COVID, but now he finds himself in the hot seat.

All this as abortion by mail and telehealth continues to grow, with some states going so far as to shield providers who ship pills where abortion is banned.

So it’s a big moment—what are pro-lifers to do?

STONESTREET: Well, listen, it is a big moment, and it is a big breach. In one level, it should not surprise us. I mean, listen, in the run-up to the election, there were real questions about President Trump’s commitment to the pro-life cause. He certainly made the case himself as a candidate that he had done all he intended to do in terms of overturning Roe v. Wade, and that was about it.

Now there became a little bit more pressure when he was pushing through RFK to head HHS, mainly because the overturning of Roe v. Wade and pushing this back to the states to define was powerless against mail-order abortion. The case had long been made that mifepristone was not properly evaluated by the FDA.

Obviously, RFK had real things he wanted to get accomplished—having to do with processed foods and having to do with vaccines—and those were common causes for a lot of people on the right, including a lot of pro-lifers. But there was never really any real indication—in fact, there were a lot of indications otherwise—where RFK stood on the issue of abortion.

The only sunlight that we got in this whole issue as pro-lifers was when he made this commitment to evaluate mifepristone based on how it had been rushed through the FDA and how it had not been properly evaluated, and how the kind of mail-order rules that seemed to apply to everything but abortion had been skirted—basically leaving state attorneys general, like in Texas, to try to come up with some sort of way to criminally prosecute those who were shipping abortion pills into the state.

It’s going to be a notoriously hard thing to do. The fact that they’re claiming to do it, though, is a step forward, so I don’t want to dismiss it. I think we’ve got to demand that he follow his word. Gosh, the answer to mifepristone being pushed through the FDA is not to have a cheaper form of mifepristone pushed through the FDA. This is exactly the opposite.

But it does reflect maybe what we should have known all along in terms of how deeply our shared commitment was on this with the Trump administration—particularly RFK—and it wasn’t as committed as many people then turned around and thought.

The other thing that I’ll say is, look, when there were very few legal strategies in play for the pro-life movement back in the days of the stronghold of Roe v. Wade, there were a lot of cultural moves. There were the person-to-person apologetic efforts. In other words, there were extra-political strategies that the pro-life movement thought up and implemented. Some were successful, some were more successful than others.

We’re going to have to do the same thing when it comes to chemical abortion. I’m not claiming to know what that is, but this is something that we’re not winning on, on chemical abortions. Even in states that are prohibiting it, we haven’t figured out how to keep it out of the states through the mail. So we’re going to have to come up with some of these alternative mitigating strategies, and that’s probably a calling for pro-lifers to tackle right now.

BROWN: Bari Weiss—the founder of The Free Press and a leading voice for what she calls “honest journalism”—is now the new Editor in Chief of CBS News.

Paramount, which owns CBS, made the move after acquiring Weiss's startup The Free Press. In a memo to staff, Weiss called for what she described as “a return to fearless reporting and clear moral courage,” saying CBS must “earn back public trust by telling the truth even when it offends.” The tone of the memo has already stirred strong reactions inside the network, where some see it as a rebuke of legacy-news culture. Do you think she can succeed?

STONESTREET: Oh, I think Bari Weiss is a force of nature in so many ways. So I think the quick answer to that is yes, she can succeed!

This could be just a purely financial decision of a major news network unable to compete with the new media and looking at the state of the ocean, so to speak—wanting to get out of the red ocean into the blue ocean.

When you have every major network saying the same thing—with one exception, if you put Fox News in that mix—you have all kinds of space for another voice like this. You have all kinds of space between where these networks land, which is on the far left on almost every story every time, to basically people who want to be able to trust it again.

I think there is a brand opportunity here. Bari Weiss is clearly the right one to do that. But let me also add that the Bari Weiss story hit the same time as another story—Louise Perry, who is a feminist writer critical of the sexual revolution—announced that she had fully come to Christ.

There are stories like this, right, where people have come to the truth about something. In Louise Perry’s case, the truth about the sexual revolution being harmful particularly to women. If you think about Chloe Cole, she came to the truth about who she really was in her body as a female, and it’s that truth that then became the stepping-stone for her to come to full faith in Jesus Christ.

Can we hope that for Bari Weiss? Going from left to center, in this case, is the right direction. Being committed to journalism as truth-telling is a good start. We’ve seen examples of this.

By the way, it also puts to lie this notion we’ve heard from so many—even Christian voices—that you can’t talk about these controversial issues, you can’t make a big deal about these public truths because that’ll get in the way of people coming to faith. It seems the exact opposite is happening right now.

It’s a little dangerous to put the Bari Weiss story into that whole category, but that is a growing category, and it’s big enough to include Bari Weiss if she wants to explore who Jesus Christ is, as so many others seem to be doing right now.

EICHER: I don’t want to rain on the parade here, I love this story too. I’m glad to hear you talk about that. But! But, it is one thing to set a standard. It’s another thing, story by story, to hold the standard. And I really hope that she has the ability to see it through all the way. CBS is a massive organization. It’ll be very interesting to see how she does.

STONESTREET: Well, we have seen attempts like this in the past. I think you would know more about the ins and outs of that than certainly I would, Nick, and I think that it’s a good warning. If there’s anybody on the planet right now that I would think, this person has the kind of moral fortitude and the orneriness maybe to pull this off, she would be high on the list of people that could do it.

But you’re exactly right. Turning big institutions around in any sort of way is notoriously difficult. It happens really slow, which explains the effectiveness of new media in so many ways. So we will see what happens.

BROWN: Can I just ask real, real quick? Do you all remember when she resigned from The New York Times just five years ago and and she said that she basically was resigning, well part of the reason, she wrote it in her resignation letter that she was the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagreed with her, so she just walking right back into the hostile environment. What's different this time?

EICHER: I think what’s different—I’m not the analyst here—but I think what’s different is that that Bari Weiss now has the support of the ownership, where at The New York Times, she was kind of a dissident, in a tiny minority, and I think that's the difference.

STONESTREET: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I think it’s the right question that you’re asking, Myrna, and I think she’s older now, she’s grown, and I think that there’s something else going on behind the scenes in the ownership. But obviously that’s me just guessing based on how this whole story came down.

EICHER: John, with the Supreme Court back in session, we’ve talked this week about Chiles v. Salazar—a challenge to a Colorado law that prohibits licensed counselors from helping minors who struggle with unwanted feelings of gender dysphoria.

Our legal team is reporting this out for Monday’s program, but it sure sounded like Colorado had a rough day in court. Without the legal team, I’m not going to wade into this, so what I’d rather discuss is the broader issue of so-called “conversion therapy.” Some of the older methods are obviously discredited, but the state lumps together any counseling that has the aim of helping a person get comfortable with the body God made for them ... that is lumped together with discredited practices. Isn’t that a kind of misdirection—using the worst examples to outlaw even compassionate, talk-based help?

STONESTREET: Well, you’re exactly right. Let me just say Colorado did have a bad day in court—and again, another bad day in court—and that’s because Colorado officials are largely incompetent on matters of the law.

They are pushing forward a particular way of life based on an ideology, and it violates the law. They should know better, but they repeatedly either don’t know better or pretend to not know better. What you’re describing here is exactly the case.

First of all, you have the craziness that many people are beginning to realize—the abuse of language. The side that wants to affirm a person with their biological body are the ones that are called guilty of “conversion therapy,” and those that actually want to fast-track particularly children into converting their male bodies into fake female bodies, or vice versa, are called “affirmers.”

It’s a whole language game, and you can only believe that language has validity if you are trapped within an ideological framework. The entire state of Colorado seems to be this way, which is why this is just one of, I think, seven lawsuits the ADF has filed right now against the state of Colorado.

It really comes down to something simple, and that’s what seemed to emerge during the oral arguments. For so-called “affirmation therapy” that Colorado is actually promoting—and restricting everything else—it involves medication, transitioning, powerful state forces to enforce this over and above the will of the parents. It involves even surgical intervention. It involves every level of what’s called “therapy.”

But someone who is trying to help a young person come to grips with the fact that they were born male or female—you’re not adding hormones, you’re not drugging that kid up. What you’re doing is sitting and talking to them. You know what that’s called? That’s called speech.

Basically, the state of Colorado has exposed that they don’t understand the difference between talk and therapy, and their inability to distinguish between talk and therapy reveals that they can’t tell the difference between conversion and affirmation.

The Constitution of the United States—the First Amendment—clearly protects speech. Legal precedent clearly protects even professional speech. It’s as cut and dry as that. For the justices, they don’t even have to make a decision about the rightness or wrongness of the therapy itself.

EICHER: This could be a nine-zip.

STONESTREET: It might be a nine-zip. I think, given Ketanji Brown Jackson’s question—seemed a little bit off base from everybody else—I don’t hold that same amount of hope, but we could get an 8-1.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thank you, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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