Culture Friday: Word games of life and death

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 15th day of December, 2023.

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

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

Well, it's culture Friday. Joining us now is John Stonestreet, the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. Good morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Alright, really big case, John, coming to the Supreme Court having to do with the abortion pill, you will remember the lawsuit brought in Texas, that made the case that the federal drug regulator, the FDA in Washington, should not have approved the drug in the first place. And certainly, the FDA had no business more recently making access to the abortion pill too easy, essentially creating a mail order abortion process, instead of requiring a doctor's care. Now, this is complicated, and the pro-lifers did not get everything they wanted. But they did succeed at the appeals court level in rolling back some of the provisions easing access. Well, now comes news this week that the Supreme Court is getting involved in this case, because the Biden administration sued. And this is absolutely not what the pro-life side wanted. As a story I read in the New York Times put it, the lawyers wanted to continue working on the case down at the trial court level, quoting from the legal brief here, "to allow the parties to develop a full record." John, obviously, I don't want to get into the legal finer points. But there are a lot of legal finer points here, and what we're not really able to do with this case, moving so quickly to the Supreme Court, is to have the discussion of the abuses of easy access to the abortion pill, talking about what some women go through with Do-It-Yourself abortions, the fact that the FDA approved non-doctors prescribing the abortion pill, those kinds of conversations. So it seems as though this might short circuit that conversation. And so going back to the Supreme Court seems to have the potential to backfire, don't you think?

STONESTREET: Well, it does. And the frustrating part about this, of course, is that we will, you know, here, in fact, CNN's headline and others on this story was basically, uh, you know, here we have another opportunity for the Supreme Court to roll back abortion rights, this time, you know, with chemical abortions. But the truth of the story is it's been two decades not of access to this, but two decades of a process in which the FDA has refused to take accountability for pushing this thing through as quickly as it did, and without the sort of regulation and oversight and kind of the back end evaluation that it did. It should not have handled this the way that it did. And then it just went along and ignored requests for Comments, questions, complaints that were leveled at the FDA, trying to get them to explain what it was that they did. And of course, at the same time, we have official government health care spokespersons saying things like, well, the abortion pill reversal was dangerous, the abortion pill reversal was unproven. In other words, taking something that's been used also for decades, to help women who have an at-risk pregnancy, to overcome that with a shot of progesterone, suddenly, that is what's controversial when that's been in practice now for so long. So it's obviously true that the FDA has decided, you know, which side they want to come down on this, and they're not considering both sides on the same merits. Now, whether the lawyers here for ADF and others are going to have time to really work through that and be able to make that case. And, and certainly, it's even been made worse, as you said, because of, you know, kind of COVID era, additional removal of more regulation, that, you know, it's just really this isn't getting a fair hearing. And at the same time, making the abortion pill reversal process play by completely different rules than the abortion pill. So look, it's almost impossible right now for mainstream media to get an accurate description of what is actually happening in these cases or with these questions. You know, you can look also with this incredible story happening out of Texas with a woman who wanted to have an abortion because her child was diagnosed in utero as being disabled, you know, just wild claims that were just made out loud about the condition about what the condition always means, which wasn't true about, you know, what's really happening in Texas and things like that. And it's just almost impossible to get the right information right now.

EICHER: Well, you know, John, I'm glad you brought this Texas case up, because I did want to hear what you had to say about this. The Texas case, of course was touted as a hard case and from our personal experience with it, it is a hard case. But that doesn't change the fact that we're talking about a human life. God created the Trisomy 18 baby the precise way he intended to create the Trisomy 18 baby. And we have had this discussion many times John about another type of trisomy, trisomy 21, known as Down Syndrome, where the nation of Iceland, for example, was patting itself on the back for "eradicating" Down syndrome. And it turns out it does so by killing everyone who has it before they have a chance to be born. Clearly these populations of Trisomy kids are being targeted for extermination. And the media narrative is how sad how cruel this poor woman couldn't have an abortion. And that's the framing. So it's kind of difficult to even have an honest conversation these days.

STONESTREET: Oh, it's completely difficult, almost nearly impossible. When you, you know, you have these kind of euphemisms, too, that are just commonly used, like, you know, "incompatible with life" a condition incompatible with life, it's just not true. I mean, there are babies with trisomy 18 that are born alive. There, you know, there are some that die shortly after but you know, as you said, it's still alive. And no one would say, Okay, well, you know, I missed that diagnosis. So, once this baby is born, 4, 6, 8, 10 hours later, we have the right then to actually end that baby's life after it's born. So then you have to actually ask the fundamental question, it's the fundamental question, what is it that we're talking about? What is the unborn? It matters what it is, and you know, basically saying, look, okay, so a baby diagnosed with trisomy 18. And that diagnosis is missed in utero, but then we know as soon as it's born, or you know, does the length of one's life change the value of one's life, is there any difference between you know, the person we are in utero and the person we are outside of the utero that would justify killing one and not the other? I mean, the differences are and you know, is a wonderful analogy to remember called SLED: size, level of development, environment and degree of dependency. You know, that we don't say that Shaq is more valuable than the rest of us, because he's enormous. We don't say that the level of development, you know, means that a teenage boy is less valuable than a grown man. You know, environment, how does where I am determined who I am. And dependency I mean, every husband is dependent upon his wife for survival, and every child is, is completely dependent on mom, you know, throughout all of life, and even into the 20s. So, you know, none of this changes the inherent value of kind of who we are the identity of who we are. And that's what's betrayed in this story. So you have to have these kinds of word games that are played on this issue that just kind of sell the conclusion upfront, you know, oh, this is a condition incompatible with life. I mean, that is as evil a phrase as, you know, unworthy eaters, or, you know, whatever was used.

EICHER: Useless eaters.

STONESTREET: That's right. Yeah. If that's a qualification, you know, I'm, I have a short future.

BROWN: Well, as we're talking about making it easier not to have kids or to do away with them with a pill. And I'm noticing a very online trend concerning so called DINK couples. DINK is an acronym for dual income, no kids. So these DINKs go viral with frivolous videos, showcasing the perks of not having children bragging about being childless and carefree. The owner of the social media site formerly known as Twitter weighed in saying he didn't care for it. Elon Musk called the trend, "awful morality to those who deliberately have no kids." So John, what do you, do you think Elon Musk is right?

STONESTREET: Yeah, absolutely. And this is an example of the cultural status of the you know, the issue is that we've already been talking about - abortion and why is it the case that we haven't gotten further than we have now that Roe v. Wade is gone and even when you put the vote to the people, that so many pro-life votes have failed. And it has to do with the same sort of cultural ethos that is behind this DINK movement. You know, Dual Income No Kids where basically they get on and say, you know, we never, we can sleep in if we want. We don't have to clean anybody else's throw up. We don't have to take anyone on a plane with us who's a whiny kid, we basically telegraphing, we can have whatever we want, whenever we want. And I think about all those family movies, you know, that star Jim Carrey there for a while or Robin Williams, that you know, where you have basically an introduction to a character who's a parent, but then who immediately says how selfish they are, and I'm going to get whatever I want you immediately find out just kind of how self-centered they are. The self-centered selfish character is always the bad guy in the movie. It's always the one that's going to be visited by three ghosts before you know the next morning. And yet here you have people kind of celebrating a sort of vision of thorough going narcissism kind of a rabid individualistic narcissism, as if that makes them the good guys. And so it really I think does betray the fact that A: morality is upside down. B: there's a complete fabrication, a fantasy that having more stuff and more leisure is actually going to fill the God-shaped hole in my heart that we're actually made to satisfy ourselves and not made to satisfy anyone else. And that's a fundamental, I think, misunderstanding of what it means to be human. And, you know, frankly, look, I don't think if one of these DINKs made a video when they're 80, it's going to be nearly this optimistic. It's going to be I didn't have any kids. And now there's no one to come and visit me. And the whole thing reminded me of a story that came out, I don't know, four or five years ago out of Japan, where you kind of fast forward the, the numbers reality of birthright, that's not anywhere near replacement, far worse even than the United States, and decades already into the process. And so you can kind of there get a picture of what this sort of lifestyle looks like, especially if it's on a societal level, down the road. And the story was elderly, Japanese women who were shoplifting hoping to get caught so that they could be in prison so that they would have a friend. And look, it's as a friend says, It's not magic, it's math. There's just, you live for yourself, and you think life is all about you. Eventually, you get what you want, and it's not going to be all that it's cracked up to be. And between now and then, is a mindset that makes abortion more and more and more and more thinkable. And so it's very much related, these stories.

BROWN: They’re all connected. John Stonestreet is president of the Coulson center and host of the breakpoint podcasts. Thank you, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both

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