In this episode, Dr. Kelly talks about the controversial issue of fetal homicide in neonatal ICU units across the country and around the world, and why it's not just about abortion. It's about the treatment of disabled babies in the neonatal unit, and the practice of withholding information from their parents about their child's care and treatment. And it's a practice that has been around for a very long time, and has been covered up by the media, the media and the Democratic Party for decades. In this episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, host Tucker Carlson sits down with pediatric neuroscientist and neonatal bioethicist Dr. Kelsey Miller to discuss the practice, and how it's been used in the past, and what it means for the lives of disabled children in the care of families with disabled children, and their families who are unable to speak up for their child. Art of the Surge is a multi-part documentary series that premieres Wednesday, Nov. 8, on the eve of the presidential election, hosted by Tucker Carlson on his new show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight." Episodes 1 and 2 are available to watch on TuckerCarlson. Showcase, available on Amazon Prime and Vimeo worldwide. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! Thank you so much for all your support, and stay tuned for more episodes, coming soon. -Tucker and Tucker and the rest of the team at All I Can't Sleep podcast. . -Your support is so appreciated, we'll be working hard to make sure you get the most out of this election cycle. Thank you for all the support we can be heard everywhere. We're not just on the airwaves, we're listening to you're getting the most of it! -The Tucker Carlson, the most important thing you can get, too! -- Thank you, Thank you. -- the best of your support is appreciated, and we're not censored, too much of it's the most appreciated, so please share it on social media, so we can spread the word out there, everywhere else, everywhere you listen to it's possible, everywhere they can do it. Love you're listening, not just because it's important, not only that's not enough, it's more than just the best, right? Thanks, Tucker, enough, thank you, much more than you can do that, and good night.
00:29:54.720I've heard more and more people talking about IQ recently in ways that I find sort of disturbing, especially given what you said about Nazi Germany.
00:30:02.640And so once you move away from fundamental human equality, you're left with these trait Xs, I call them.
00:30:08.300And it's very clear that human beings don't have those in equal capacity, right?
00:30:11.960Or some human beings don't appear to have them at all.
00:30:13.920Right, I mean, it doesn't, I think it's really obvious that IQ determines more than any other factor your material success in life.
00:30:22.320I don't think there's any question about that.
00:30:23.760And I also think it has a huge effect on your interactions with the criminal justice system.
00:30:28.560I think it's a very important predictor of your life.
00:30:33.140I don't think it has anything to do with your value.
00:30:59.780And if it's all right with you, I'd just like to name some of the categories of human beings that are on their way.
00:31:08.480If we think about the trajectory before of trying to live out this more consistently,
00:31:13.160we're now moving in a very different direction where people are falling out of the circle of protection for fundamental human equality.
00:31:18.940And so we've already talked about prenatal human beings and neonatal human beings as classic examples of that.
00:31:23.700In fact, it's so interesting to think about the early church's response to ancient Greece and Rome's infanticide was found in the Didache,
00:31:32.520which is a first century, essentially a catechism, which gives us a really important insight into how they lived.
00:31:38.300And they contrast the way of life with the way of death and say Christians need to lead the way of life.
00:31:44.220And the way of life is explicitly focused on a couple of things.
00:31:48.260One, don't do abortion and infanticide, and they were talked about together explicitly because that's how the ancient pagan Greeks and Romans thought about them.
00:32:07.960It's one of the oldest Christian documents.
00:32:09.360It also, interestingly, contrasts the way of life with the way of death in a way that those who are the rich and unjust judges of the poor are part of the way of death.
00:32:21.540And the way of life is explicitly focused on one of the central messages of Christ, which is to see my face, he says, in the poor, right?
00:32:33.220But, okay, so this goes all the way back to the very earliest parts of the church, right?
00:32:38.480And now we're not just seeing this with regard to the populations that so perfectly mirror that, newborn children and prenatal human beings.
00:32:47.920But now we're seeing it with people with catastrophic brain injuries.
00:32:52.260So if I can just speak briefly about brain death, maybe not so briefly because we have a two-hour podcast here and it's somewhat complicated, but I need to set it up a little bit.
00:33:03.220So I do a lot of work on secular utilitarian philosophy and I'm actually friends with Peter Singer, who's a very well-known secular utilitarian philosopher.
00:33:14.920We don't agree on many, many things, but I think he's wrong in really interesting ways.
00:33:19.080And he's seen, and since the 70s, he's seen what it has meant to reject a Christian ethic of human life.
00:33:26.800And he said very explicitly, if you're pro-choice for abortion, you also need to be pro-choice for infanticide.
00:33:31.920He's right about that, just to work the other way.
00:33:34.260If we're protecting babies, we should protect prenatal babies as well.
00:33:37.600But interestingly, he says it really wasn't abortion that was the first moment where we decided to say being human doesn't matter.
00:33:47.520So around the time of the 60s and 70s, when a lot of stuff went down that involved cultural shifts, there was a confluence of two inventions.
00:34:01.940The first was the ventilator, so a machine that helps people breathe.
00:34:06.660And the second was the transplantation of vital organs from one individual to another.
00:34:13.940And once we got the capacity to transplant organs, as you might imagine, as we have today, huge waiting lists developed, right, for this resource.
00:34:26.540And then the ventilator was invented, and suddenly we had people with catastrophic brain injuries on ventilators.
00:34:33.380And something called the Harvard, ad hoc Harvard Committee to Determine Death or Brain Death, came up with a proposal.
00:34:42.180They said, let's decide that all these individuals with catastrophic brain injuries on ventilators have something called brain death and are dead.
00:34:52.240And therefore, we can take their organs and give them to others who need them.
00:34:57.120And by the way, I'm not hating an organ donation.
00:35:00.800I'm just trying to tell the story that both Peter Singer and I agree on actually was a major turning point in all of this.
00:35:06.400So, what the dean of Harvard Medical School said at the time was, it sounds like you just are redefining death in order to get more organs.
00:35:14.400We don't want to release a document that says that's what we're doing.
00:35:20.420But it's still, even with the edited document, it's very clear.
00:35:23.240And this is historically well known that this is what happened.
00:35:25.420And so, what Peter Singer and I and others who are aware of this history say is, this is when we first said a living member of the species Homo sapiens, a fellow human being, did not count, was dead, essentially.
00:35:39.140Did not have the same moral status as others.
00:35:52.680If you cut into their body, they release adrenaline and their heart rate speeds up.
00:35:59.700There was even this case of, oh, and by the way, the gestating children case often happens, unfortunately, in very tragic cases where a pregnant woman gets into a car accident or something, has a catastrophic brain injury.
00:36:11.980And her body is, herself, she's able to gestate a child despite being declared brain dead.
00:36:17.760One of my favorite all-time headlines about this, it shows the confusion we have about this in the culture, it's from the AP.
00:36:22.660It said, brain dead woman gives birth then dies.
00:36:26.420So, it's just like the full confusion on display in one very short headline.
00:36:31.600But maybe you remember this case from a few years ago, Jahai McMath in California.
00:36:36.620She was this African-American girl who had a surgery go really terrible for sleep apnea, had a catastrophic brain injury.
00:36:43.840And the state of California declared her dead.
00:36:47.140And her very Christian, also African-American parents said, she's not dead.
00:36:53.400And the state of California said, and her medical team said, yes, she is.
00:36:58.100And by the way, according to her family's lawyer, Jahai's family's lawyer, the chief of pediatrics at, I think it was UC San Francisco Hospital, pounded his fists on the table and said, she's dead.
00:37:14.080And then a few days later, she got her first period.
00:37:16.120And they managed to convince both the state of California and her medical team to essentially allow them to transfer to New Jersey, where I live, which happens to be the only state in the union that allows religious freedom for people like Jahai's family to say, I don't think this individual who just got her first period is dead and I want to take care of my daughter.
00:37:40.080And the other states don't allow that?
00:37:45.260It would be as if from their, in my view, deeply misguided view, they would say, well, you know, you can't just say a corpse is alive, right?
00:38:01.040In fact, some of the medical ethics, the deans of medical ethics around the United States reacted to this case, the Jahai McMath case saying, this is a corpse.
00:38:26.120I think, because I want to talk about vegetation.
00:38:29.100I know, I know, I know, and I want you, but I just keep, five different times in the last half an hour, you've made reference to the views of doctors on these things.
00:38:38.280And each time I had the same question, which is, I would hope that the default desire for doctors would be to see people live.
00:38:46.940And yet, I have seen it in my own life.
00:38:57.780I do think there's a strain within contemporary secularized medicine that is so ideological that if there's something that pushes back against their very secularized, whatever, I don't know what to call it, whatever the opposite of pro-life is perspective.
00:39:17.520Well, pro-death, I think we'd be the opposite.
00:39:27.140Because they're, and this is, I mean, I want to speak with too broad a brush, but in many cases, the ideology is far more important than their oath they took to protect and care for life.
00:39:37.080But you would just think like, okay, so this girl, they think she's dead, but then she has her period, she's clearly not dead.
00:39:42.360Like, why would you pound your fist on the table and demand that other people think she's dead?
00:39:47.420Or why would you push parents to abort a child with Down syndrome or spinal bifida, both of which are survivable and thrive?
00:39:54.960You know, you can thrive with both of those things.
00:39:56.460So why are they so vested in a we must kill?
00:40:26.360So if we suddenly say that individuals with catastrophic brain injuries are not dead, and we still have the dead donor rule that says you need to be dead in order to donate a non-paired vital organ, like a heart, say.
00:40:38.520Then the number of, then the waiting list for organs just goes way through the roof right now.
00:40:49.200There have been champions, secular champions, of attempts to really call brain death or what it is, a kind of fiction.
00:40:58.020Well, originally it was a fiction that was just designed to put us in a position to get better organs and more organs.
00:41:06.000Who, when he gives talks, he routinely gets questions like, you shouldn't be talking about this.
00:41:14.540You know what's going to be the result of what you're talking about here?
00:41:17.060People are going to die because they're not going to get organs, right, that they need.
00:41:20.400They're going to die on organ waiting lists.
00:41:21.840And so don't talk about this because people will die.
00:41:26.300Don't talk about vax injuries because vaccines are too important.
00:41:29.880It's a classic utilitarian perspective on these things.
00:41:33.680But if you find yourself lying or ignoring harm to individuals on behalf of some imagined greater good, then you're just evil.
00:41:43.700I mean, I don't really see another plausible description of that.
00:41:48.680If one has a view that what's at bottom true about ethics and morality is maximizing the greatest good for the greatest number, we can call it evil.
00:42:00.740I think in many cases it is, but this just follows logically.
00:42:04.120Why would we get bent out of shape about whether Jehi McMath is a person or not or has human dignity or not?
00:42:09.600What really matters at the end of the day is that we maximize good outcomes from this situation.
00:42:23.320We seem to have forgotten all of this.
00:42:24.800We remember all the lessons about Poland and Czechoslovakia, but we missed the basic lesson, which is you cannot treat people like objects or else you end up committing genocide.
00:42:38.620I think another angle into it, though, is a different kind of ideological angle, which is if we say that individuals who have catastrophic brain injuries but are clearly still functioning members of the species Homo sapiens, just like you and I are, though very seriously disabled, that has implications for human dignity that if applied consistently would undermine very foundational views, including with regard to abortion.
00:43:07.160And this is explicitly said, so let's talk, if you don't mind, about so-called vegetative state.
00:43:20.700You've said three times that brain death is a category that was kind of devised as really almost like a marketing tool in order to increase the supply of organs.
00:43:44.740So part of the problem here is there really isn't a good way to test for what's called whole brain death, in part because, and this was actually after the Harvard report came out, something called the Uniform Commission, which is a nonprofit group that has surprisingly a lot of power to propose uniform language for states across the country without federal law.
00:44:13.980How to sort of make sure they're basically on the same page with regard to legislation so there wouldn't be like one kind of brain death laws in California and a different kind in New York.
00:44:22.880And so I think it was 1981, certainly the early 80s, they proposed language that basically mirrored the recommendations of the Harvard Brain Death Commission, which said brain death, which means death of the whole brain, including the brain stem, is death.
00:44:46.060And most of the ways, especially to determine whether there's brain stem activity, like in the very center of the brain, it's just super, super difficult.
00:44:56.180There's a big debate right now in my world about whether the hypothalamus, which controls a lot of different things, but is this sort of tiny organ or part of the inner part of the brain stem, there's all sorts of debates now about how precisely to test for whether the hypothalamus is still alive.
00:45:11.820And some people will say, well, who cares whether the hypothalamus is still alive?
00:45:15.540Other people will say, well, no, we've got to determine whether the whole brain is dead or not.
00:45:18.380And meanwhile, we've got this individual, regardless of what's happening here, who's fighting off infections, maybe gestating a child, right?
00:45:29.100None of what should be possible if the brain was dead.
00:45:32.260Well, this is an interesting question.
00:45:33.440These, I think the push for organs, the connection to organs really pushed us through to determine that people were dead who had dead brains too quickly.
00:45:45.220I think we just sort of said, well, that sounds right.
00:45:47.160Especially, you know, in the developed West, I think in a, I think, therefore I am sort of inspired world that's focused on the head.
00:45:54.840I wonder if we don't too quickly just assume that these things are controlled by our brain.
00:46:01.040One of the interesting things I like to point out, or I think it's interesting, I hope you and your viewers think it's interesting.
00:46:07.780When the ancient Egyptians would mummify somebody, do you know what they did with the brain?
00:46:25.880It's sort of this thing that you won't really need.
00:46:28.360As opposed to us, you really sort of imagine ourselves like, I'm raised in this culture.
00:46:32.720I kind of imagine myself inside my head here.
00:46:35.600All these thought experiments in my world.
00:46:37.340Imagine, like, what if you had your brain in a vat on Mars, right?
00:46:40.740Would that be you, right, in that vat?
00:46:43.940Like, if we could put it in a tub of nutrients and give it electric shocks.
00:46:48.060We talk about, in this current transhumanism moment, what if we could, like, do this modeling of your brain's information and upload it to the cloud and then, like, download it into a robot or something?
00:47:00.680These are questions that transhumanists are really asking right now.
00:47:03.140Very serious people are asking these questions.
00:47:06.880But I think it's because we sort of just imagine ourselves as this kind of creature that thinks of ourselves, well, maybe we just are our brains.
00:47:17.160I want to say we are in sold bodies, right?
00:47:20.260We are our bodies and that we were who we were before we had our brains, right?
00:47:24.960Prenatally, we were who we were before we had brains.
00:47:27.320And there is some evidence, though it still needs to be explored, that especially young people, Tucker, can have other parts of their body take over for the functions of the brains in a kind of a really interesting plasticity of the body.
00:48:29.100Nobody can find any seat of consciousness in the brain to the point where some philosophers of mine, like Daniel Dennett, have said, you know what?
00:48:37.260Maybe consciousness is an illusion because it must be in the brain.
00:48:41.260The consciousness must be part of the brain.
00:48:43.280And that is such a revealing claim because it's an absurd claim, right?
00:49:43.480And we also know that at least so far, after many decades of trying, we can't find consciousness in the brain anywhere.
00:49:50.360And so that suggests to me anyway that consciousness is a product of something else, right?
00:49:55.420It's not a product of the brain, most likely.
00:49:56.940It's probably a product of some, there are actually some philosophers of mind, secular ones, who say it's probably the product of like our whole bodies holistically considered in relationship with each other in our environment.
00:50:07.360I don't fully understand some of those arguments.
00:50:09.360But at the very least, I think we need to expand this idea that we're more than just our brains.
00:50:13.440Well, and also at the very least, I think we need to approach medicine and science with renewed humility.
00:50:19.740If we don't even know where consciousness resides, self-awareness as people, which is the whole, you know, that's the main, that's what makes the brain different from the spinal cord, I would argue, actually, or we thought made it different, then we don't know squat.
00:50:35.920And why don't, I feel like you're wiser when you concede that rather than bounding forward with the false pretense that you're all knowing.
00:51:22.620But I don't know, just trying to be honest with myself, it was always pretty clear to me that I didn't really know anything and that nobody does.
00:51:29.540And if you're, if you don't know that, then you're dangerous.
00:51:58.840What is rewarded is saying, I've got the answer, right?
00:52:02.360Or I'm on my way to finding the answer.
00:52:03.680I've got this new piece of information about this.
00:52:05.720That's one of the reasons I think that so many theologians, at least in my world, have reacted negatively to this sort of publish or perish, come up with new ideas constantly, sort of a model of higher education.
00:52:20.060Because, boy, oh boy, if we're truly exhibiting the virtue of humility in the way you suggest, we need to make far fewer claims about the kinds of things that are, that we do precisely because we need to be, start with the virtue of humility first.
00:52:38.460And in a, you know, in a system that actually wanted to expand knowledge and perpetuate it, pass it on, there would be much more reading and much less writing.
00:52:56.600There's a, there's a tremendous amount of pressure put on academics and including those in academic medicine to just publish your ass off, right?
00:53:05.880And just get paper after paper out there.
00:53:08.500And we have, as you know, a replication crisis now in part because of this.
00:53:12.940Can you explain for people who don't follow what that is?
00:53:15.800So, in part, but not only because of the, the, the intense pressure on academics and especially in academic medicine to advance one's career through publications.
00:53:27.360Uh, there's been a real, um, lack of humility in sort of sitting with data and books and studies, uh, and, and attempt to sort of just push things out and get your name out there and get your publications out there.
00:53:42.920Um, and then when people come behind them and it's actually more and more difficult for people to come behind them because there's not a lot of glory in either confirming what somebody has already published or, um, there's some glory in finding that they were, they were wrong about it.
00:53:57.160But, um, not a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to confirm, um, or replicate studies, but when they do, we now have found a replication crisis that a lot of these.
00:54:06.120The replication is not just like a virtue, it's prerequisite for science.
00:54:17.640And it's a deep and foundational problem that especially, um, in areas which are ideologically charged, let's say, um, the, the replication crisis is particularly profound.
00:54:28.360So it's not just, it's not just about, um, publish or perish, get a ton of articles out there for your, to advance your career.
00:54:37.200It's also to get the right kind of articles out there.
00:54:39.680The ones that say the right things that have the right conclusions about some of the issues we've been discussing so far on the show, right?
00:55:01.300I mean, there's no, there's absolutely no doubt about it.
00:55:03.440I mean, I experienced this even in my own world of bioethics where you just sort of know what journals, um, you need to submit to if you have a particular sort of argument and a sort of conclusion.
00:55:15.020You say, well, you know, I could submit it there, but it's never going to be published there.
00:55:20.000It doesn't matter how good the argument is.
00:55:21.200It doesn't really matter, um, whether I've done good research or, or, or have adequately investigated this and I'm making very tight arguments.
00:55:28.340I have the wrong conclusion for that journal.
00:55:30.180And so you submit it to a different journal, right?
00:55:31.960And, or you don't submit it at all, or you submit it to an online, um, uh, journal or something that, that might actually get read by people.
00:55:42.100Or, yeah, I mean, that's, that's increasingly where a lot of this is headed.
00:55:46.080That's, uh, Twitter has actually been one of the places where we've been able to most clearly see the replication crisis, right?
00:55:53.560I was half joking, but what do you mean?
00:55:56.760Well, I mean, so many of these things before Twitter and before social media happened on the down low, right?
00:56:01.420They would just be only the specialists would sort of know like, oh, so-and-so their article got retracted or like so-and-so followed behind them.
00:56:09.140It wasn't able to replicate their work or, you know, whatever.
00:56:11.540Now, as soon as that happens, happily, there's a place where you can go and see people saying, hey, look, this, this data was problematic.
00:56:18.320This problem, this data was faulty and there's public pressure, in fact, to then have the journal address that and say, well, maybe this, you know, we need to have a note here or something like that and address the problem.
00:56:28.360So, that kind of transparency, which is only just a few years old now, um, I think we've yet to see the end result of that.
00:56:37.760So, I'm sorry, back to the topic that you were explaining before I once again so rudely sidetracked the conversation, um, which was brain death and a persistent vegetative state.
00:56:50.780So, when we left, you were explaining, I think, that there is no way or universally agreed upon way to measure whether or not a brain is dead.
00:57:03.580We're trying to get ways, for instance, to do a better job testing for hypothalamic function, for instance, and brainstem function.
00:57:08.860But, but actually one of the difficulties that is pushing us, um, in ways that I find pretty disturbing about declaring somebody brain dead is a lot of people are sort of throwing up their hands and say, it's, it's actually pretty arbitrary how we test.
00:57:22.080Like, who cares whether we can test for the function of the hypothalamus?
00:57:25.840Who cares, actually, how much of the brain is dead?
00:57:47.460Uh, and getting back to one of our earlier discussions, um, it's perfectly legitimate to take somebody off a ventilator as long as one is not aiming at their own death, right?
00:57:56.600As long as it's a choice about how to live.
00:57:58.040If somebody says to me and, and, uh, you know, my parents, a friend, spouse, listen, Charlie, I, I, I would not want to be on a ventilator.
00:58:06.920So, can you make sure I'm not living on a ventilator?
00:58:08.560It's not that I want to die in any particular moment.
00:58:10.120I just don't want to live my life that way.
00:58:12.700Um, that's, again, to use the more fancy language, that's foreseeing, but not intending one's death, but making a choice about how to live rather than a choice to die.
00:58:31.500It's a choice about how to live, not a choice about, um, how to die.
00:58:35.380So, that's different from saying, quite different from saying, um, because you're on a ventilator and you don't have the requisite brain activity, you're dead, right?
00:58:46.580And so, we can perfectly say, and we should say, and let me make this clear if I haven't already, we don't need to keep, uh, people alive indefinitely.
00:58:54.420In fact, this is not at all a Christian ethic.
00:58:56.940I mean, you just look, look up at Christ on the cross.
00:59:23.280At the same time, we don't tell ourself silly bedtime stories about individuals who gestate children or get their first period as being dead.
00:59:31.620Do you remember when Democrats used to refer to abortion as something that should be safe, legal, and rare?
00:59:36.960Well, they've changed their view on that.
00:59:39.280It went from a right to a sacrament, and Kamala Harris is celebrating it at full volume.
00:59:45.120She was the first vice president to visit an abortion mill, and then the Democratic National Convention offered abortions on demand, basically right outside the convention hall.
00:59:55.040As the publication First Things reported, Tim Walz, who's running with Harris, supports the right to kill babies after birth, to infanticide.
01:00:03.080And that's true, despite what the fact-checkers may tell you.
01:00:21.480And that's why we have joined forces with Preborn, they're a sponsor of the show and of our speaking tour, to do something about it.
01:00:28.640It's the largest pro-life organization in the United States, and they are doing what they should do, which is speaking up against this atrocity.
01:00:36.920No one seems to have the bravery to call that wrong, which it is, but Preborn is calling it out.
01:00:46.240Their networks of clinics are positioned in the highest abortion areas in the country, and they've rescued 300,000 babies.
01:00:52.380When a woman considering an abortion searches to end her baby's life, Preborn is there.
01:00:57.380The power of ultrasound, combined with the love of God, doubles the baby's chance of being born.
01:02:46.200But it raises the question, are people from whom organs are, quote, harvested still alive?
01:02:51.700I think these are deep questions we need to ask, Tucker.
01:02:55.760And I'm giving a talk at the seminary where I teach next week, which is essentially, should Catholics be organ donors, precisely in light of these questions.
01:03:45.260I also support telling the truth about whether people are alive or dead.
01:03:49.100And to get back to the original reason for bringing this up, Peter Singer and I both agree that it was this foundational place where we said an obviously living human being no longer counts as a legal person, and therefore we can take their organs.
01:04:01.440That was the foundational shift where we moved away from fundamental human equality and we moved it to something else.
01:04:07.000And then we slid into persistent vegetative state.
01:04:10.460You probably remember the Terri Schiavo case very well.
01:04:14.540Terri Schiavo, for your listeners who aren't aware, was a woman who also underwent a catastrophic brain injury due to an eating disorder, as I recall.
01:04:24.560And her husband and her family disagreed about what should be done.
01:04:29.540To be clear, persistent so-called vegetative state, no person, no human being is a vegetable, but that's just sort of the language we use.
01:05:13.140Her, I think, nefarious husband won that battle, and they starved her and dehydrated her to death after declaring, essentially, that she was no longer there.
01:05:24.160In fact, if anybody would challenge me on this, I challenge them to look at the gravestone that her husband created for her.
01:05:32.320It says that on the date of her catastrophic brain injury that she departed this earth, I think it was 1990, he uses the phrase departed this earth, and then I think it was 2003 when they dehydrated her to death, it says she was at peace.
01:05:49.720And so when I give talks on this topic, I often start with that gravestone as a really indicative, important insight into what we are doing here.
01:06:02.340What we are saying is this individual has departed this earth as a person and yet can leave behind somehow a body that is responding to music, has sleep-wake cycles, all the things.
01:06:17.000Now, even since that time, Tucker, maybe you are or you aren't aware of this, there's been research into people who've been lumped into this category of vegetative state.
01:06:25.500Joe Fins, who's a secular bioethicist, wrote a great book called Rights Come to Mind if listeners want to explore it.
01:06:32.840We now know that a significant percentage of people in a so-called vegetative state are actually conscious.
01:06:38.080They've done scans of their brains, fMRI scans, and they ask them yes or no questions with yes being imagine you're playing tennis and no being read a book in your room.
01:06:52.300And they answer by what parts of their brain light up correctly.
01:06:55.380They answer these yes or no questions correctly.
01:06:57.860We've further learned that with the right kind of therapies, Joe Fins points out in this book, you can actually prove that more and more, either they weren't conscious before and then they become conscious because of the therapy or they were conscious the whole time and the therapies end up showing that they give them opportunity.
01:07:17.540In fact, he tells this amazing story of this neurologist who was working on a patient and suddenly he realized she was blinking and trying to communicate with her through her blinking.
01:07:28.740But yet, so many people have this idea that Terry Schiavo's husband had, which is like people who are in a vegetative state have departed this earth despite this human body that is very clearly here.
01:07:39.920I see that as the sort of next step from brain death to say, well, you know, and that's why some people aren't too concerned about whether the hypothalamus is really functioning or not because who cares at the end of the day?
01:07:48.000So it's the concern that I'm concerned about or the lack of concern.
01:07:51.740I mean, I, you know, these are all emotional subjects for people, particularly the end of life stuff because everyone by middle age has seen it with a loved one and it's so sad and you imagine yourself in that position and you think, I don't want this for myself.
01:08:22.100Not just in the way we treat the weak in hospice or in, you know, neonatal care, but in the way that we treat like everybody, the way our economy is structured.
01:08:34.200So when I was a kid, I grew up in a rich world, rich people had a sense of noblesse oblige, like we're fortunate.
01:08:40.580That was the word people used, but there are good people who are not fortunate and we should feel at the very least bad about that.
01:09:13.940Well, this gets back to, for me anyway, back to the Didache, right?
01:09:16.580Because when they contrasted the way of life with the way of death, they weren't just interested in what you might call today classical bioethics issues of abortion and infanticide.
01:09:23.820They were interested in the, what you just described, right?
01:09:26.640Yeah, the rest of life from birth till death.
01:10:07.460And I remember them acting like it was true.
01:10:09.320And these are not even faithful Christians that I grew up around at all.
01:10:11.980But there was this feeling you had a moral obligation to help people beneath you, not to scoff at them, not to try and put their presidential candidate in prison, but to listen to them and help them.
01:10:23.680I mean, back in the day in, I think it was medieval practice, rich people would routinely ask, invite the poor beggars outside the cathedral to pray for their loved ones at their funeral.
01:10:40.740Because they would think these people bear the face of Christ in a special way.
01:10:50.800And that's what I've loved so much about this kind of shift that we've seen.
01:10:59.560I don't know if it's on the right or that's even the way to describe it today.
01:11:03.300You've been an important leader, I think, in this shift for conservatives, for people who are more traditional to say,
01:11:09.660we don't need to choose, actually, between more traditional pro-life ideas and human dignity and focusing on giving the poor what they are owed, giving the most vulnerable social classes what they are owed.
01:11:25.480In fact, not only do we not have to choose between them, it's part of the same ethic.
01:11:30.260It's part of the same seeing individuals as not mere things to be discarded, but as fellow image bearers, exactly the same as I am in value totally.
01:11:39.140And again, to go back to the debate that the vice presidential candidates had recently, it was so heartening for me to hear J.D. Vance talk about both, to say, like, yeah, we got some challenges right now with prenatal justice and we have to re-earn trust.
01:11:57.080But we don't need to choose between trying to protect babies in utero and neonatally now and supporting very poor women and families who feel pushed often into contexts where they have a desperate situation in front of them and they don't know what else to do.
01:12:17.980And so to have someone like him be so public about saying, we're going to do both of these things together.
01:12:24.140We're going to pursue prenatal justice and we're going to pursue economic justice for women and families who are in these difficult circumstances.
01:12:32.560If that takes fire, if that takes hold, I am just so excited about what that could mean.
01:12:40.180Because this is something I haven't really emphasized.
01:12:42.820I want to make sure I emphasize this, Tucker.
01:12:44.140In so many of these contexts that we've been discussing this, the push away from fundamental human equality has been, in part, a question of resources, a question of consumerism, a question of allocation of resources.
01:13:01.000So, again, with brain death, what pushed it?
01:13:04.660So many people thought, Terry Schiavo, why would we put resources into caring for her?
01:13:08.380Why would anybody put – Joe Finn says, hey, I'm trying to tell people you can help people in these states and we can actually bring them back and let's get on the horn here and let's figure out how to do this.
01:13:18.740And he's had crickets from his colleagues.
01:13:22.600We've got lots of things that people –
01:13:24.120We have a lot of wars and I have to say that's the last – and I will get off my soapbox – but that is the last big effect of this attitude change is the callousness that you see displayed everywhere on the right a lot and universally on the left now about the killing of other people.
01:13:41.700It's like, I don't know, if you're in a war with somebody and it's a just war, maybe you have to kill people, but you should never gloat over it.
01:13:47.800You should never be happy or cavalier about the deaths, particularly of like huge civilian populations, a million people in Iraq.
01:13:56.080And no one has – obviously, no one has gone to prison.
01:13:58.360Lots of people should go to prison for it and no one ever will.
01:14:00.740But we should at least say that's really bad.
01:14:27.780And if we don't feel bad about that, that suggests a darkness that's really scary.
01:14:33.680And it's no surprise that the same people who are thrilled when giant bombs drop on apartment blocks, those people have, I think, really dark attitudes about Americans who, say, die of fentanyl ODs or find their towns invaded by, you know, people who shouldn't be here or whatever, victims of crime.
01:14:53.100They don't care because they don't care about other people, actually.
01:14:55.840That's the theme that connects those two.
01:15:00.340Oh, I couldn't, and I'm thinking of a couple leaders on the so-called right, they're not conservative in any sense that I recognize at all, who were like this.
01:15:09.340And I just, I think to myself, I can't believe I'm in the same category with these people.
01:16:05.700And I even, I'm probably make myself super unpopular for saying this, but I remember when Osama bin Laden got shot to death and I hated Osama bin Laden.
01:16:14.720Um, I'm not for someone bin Laden, but I thought, you know, we should just have, when someone dies, we should have reverence for death itself.
01:16:24.580I mean, we can be happy that someone who was attacking us is gone and the threat is gone.
01:16:30.140But we should never feel glee watching a human soul be extinguished.
01:16:37.420I just don't, I think that's a really ugly habit to get into and it diminishes us and turns us into monsters.
01:16:44.340It turns us into Osama bin Laden type people.
01:16:47.600And I didn't have the balls to say this at the time, but I remember thinking, I'm not into celebrating some guy, an unarmed man getting shot in the face.
01:16:54.680I don't care if it's Osama bin Laden, the guy I like least.
01:17:15.300I'm not a statesman or a theologian, so I don't have to make these.
01:17:17.960But I just think at the level of the individual, the human being, we should be on guard for the natural impulse to treat other people as objects and to worship death.
01:17:31.100I just think it's important not to worship death.
01:17:55.040And again, what a beautiful image of human dignity, an image of resisting a throwaway culture that would combine all these things together to see them and not as dichotomous or even strange.
01:18:09.060But of course, you would be for anti-war.
01:18:12.580Of course, you would be for justice for impoverished and middle-class populations who are under siege.
01:18:19.140Of course, you would be for disability rights.
01:18:22.120Of course, you would be anti-abortion.
01:18:23.780Of course, you would be anti-infanticide.
01:18:26.520And of course, you would be anti-euthanasia physician-assisted killing because it's all part of the same vision.
01:18:30.560And not throwing away old people and putting them in some super depressing facility.
01:19:51.900People are given antipsychotic drugs, not because they have any psychosis, but it's essentially a way of keeping them more docile.
01:19:59.300In part, because we don't put enough resources into caring for them.
01:20:02.040And I don't know about you, Tucker, but when I talk to immigrants about how we treat our elderly and those who have dementia, they are shocked.
01:20:09.040They are shocked that we put them away in the way that we do.
01:20:11.840We literally throw them away into a room until they die.
01:20:18.420In the next 20 years, unless the mean siblings get what they want in terms of treating type 3 diabetes, the number of people with later stage dementia is going to double.
01:20:46.120And so that's the next – in a book I wrote called Losing Our Dignity, How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality,
01:20:56.120I finished the last three chapters by saying this is the next shoe to drop in our loss of fundamental equality.
01:21:02.920We're going to end up saying that individuals who have lost their rationality and self-awareness at the end of life no longer count as persons.
01:21:08.720And just as we said it about – just as we say it about prenatal and neonatal children, just as we say it about those in a so-called vegetative state, just as we say it about those in a so-called brain-dead state.
01:21:18.680And Canada's already saying it about individuals at the end of life with later stage dementia.
01:21:25.800And unless we can have a recovery of the concept of fundamental human equality – and I hope you don't mind me asking you this question – the only hope I really have that we don't have a dementia crisis along the lines we suggest is if there's a kind of revival,
01:21:40.760a kind of recovery of the kinds of – the vision of human dignity, fundamental equality that we've been talking about here.
01:21:52.820You've spent the last month or so traveling around the country.
01:21:58.160I've heard you say you've been – I don't know if I'm putting words in your mouth here – but rejuvenated or you have some sort of really positive experience as a result of this.
01:22:06.480Do you think – do you think – you know, I'm isolated in academia in a lot of ways.
01:22:12.100Do you think we can have a kind of revival in this country that could recapture a vision of human dignity that would cause us to say,
01:22:22.360yes, grandpa, dad, my neighbor, he doesn't know his name, he doesn't know his wife's name, but he matters just the same as anyone else.
01:22:33.060And we are going to rearrange our lives to care for him in his final journey on this earth.
01:22:39.220Or do you think – the ship has sailed, like, we've just jettisoned – the cut flowers are dying.
01:22:46.480There's no way to reattach them to the roots.
01:22:48.660And we just have to find a way to work through it somehow.
01:22:51.000I mean, the – you know, one of the reasons that immigrants can't believe how we treat our elderly is because they have intact families and we don't.
01:23:12.280Right. So it's pretty hard when you have a lot of – you know, you have a lot of elderly without any family, actually, way more than any other time in our history.
01:23:21.440This is just one among countless issues that every person deals with every single day that turn on how we see each other.
01:23:34.260Do we see other human beings as fellow human beings, as people with souls whose lives inherently matter, whether we like them or the life they're living or not?
01:23:46.380It's kind of not up to us. How do we see ourselves? Do we understand ourselves as, you know, as subjects to a greater authority?
01:23:54.600Not a government authority, but authority above that? Or do we see ourselves as gods?
01:23:59.080I mean, these are all, like, basic questions.
01:24:03.900And I think the way that we understand all of these things depends on our core understanding of who we are and, you know, how much power we have.
01:24:11.760Like, do you think – do you really believe you have the right to kill somebody except in self-defense?
01:24:16.440I don't – where do we get that idea? Only God has that power.
01:24:19.480I will just say this. Here's what I believe is happening.
01:24:21.980I think the last 80 years, really, since we dropped that second bomb on Nagasaki, have been an anomaly in human history.
01:24:31.420And I think because of these profound technological, very rapid technological advances, people have lost context and lost perspective on themselves.
01:24:40.680And I think they think they're God, and the result has been a pretty hollow culture, just based on buying crap and sensual pleasure.
01:24:53.680And I don't think that – you know, I'm not against buying crap or sensual pleasure.
01:24:57.200I've engaged them both quite ardently, but I don't think, in the end, they satisfy.
01:25:03.980It is like eating Snickers bars, which I've also done a lot of, and they just don't fill you up.
01:25:08.460And I do think that there's a recognition of that among almost every single person I know, and the result is, you know, a spiritual yearning that's becoming explicit.
01:25:20.220And what that becomes, I have no idea.
01:25:22.640I'm terrible at predictions, but it is a kind of revival underway.
01:25:25.340There's no question about it right now.
01:25:27.800And that will change people's attitudes.
01:25:29.380You're not going to change – you know, one of the things I've learned from covering politics for, you know, more than 30 years is that we're coming at the story at the very end.
01:25:37.400Like, if there's a real debate over a law, then that means that, or even if you get a law, attitudes have changed on the ground, like, fundamentally.
01:25:47.880And, you know, I think people's attitudes are changing back, I do think.
01:25:57.320And with the rise of AI and transhumanism and phenomenon that are really designed to degrade and eliminate people and make them redundant and irrelevant, that is the point of AI and transhumanism is to kind of eliminate people.
01:28:02.360It's a deep—and they have a very strong sense, too, maybe even better than you and I have, about it being foisted on them.
01:28:08.620They just grew up in a culture that was—that had these structures already in place.
01:28:14.640And interestingly, when some of my colleagues do things like teach a class that would involve a technology fast, for instance, like, those classes are totally full.
01:28:25.240And, like, people want—people want to get out of it.
01:28:31.940It's—I just am amazed, you know, given how many addictions I've beaten in my life, you know, things I never thought I would stop doing, like smoking especially.
01:28:42.540Amazingly, I quit at the age of 45 or drinking, you know.
01:29:04.460Like, those are very addictive, both of those things.
01:29:08.020And we've got, as you've talked about on your show a few times now, we've got the best scientists, and including social scientists, and chemists, and others who are working very hard to make sure that's the case, right?
01:29:22.220Because it makes a lot of people a lot of money.
01:29:45.960I mean, we basically have a pornified culture.
01:29:48.380Or the kind of things that you and I grew up with is sort of odd.
01:29:51.180You say, well, that's how a porn star dresses.
01:29:53.000Or these are attitudes that come from porn, this thing that's out there that's separate from the rest of the culture.
01:30:00.100It's now pretty well accepted that the culture itself has been pornified.
01:30:03.480So the logic of porn is now the logic of the culture more broadly.
01:30:06.400In fact, this is how most young people today understand what sex is and what it's for.
01:30:12.880This is why, I don't know if you've seen in recent, I think it's been over the last couple years, this has been a phenomenon.
01:30:18.060More and more women report being choked during sex, right?
01:30:22.820This is a phenomenon that's just come up almost directly because young men and boys see this on their phones and on their TV screens, right?
01:32:23.820That's not what the numbers say at all.
01:32:25.640And so it's interesting to think about what that is.
01:32:27.400It doesn't seem to be a kind of, I mean, it's not clear.
01:32:29.920I mean, if there is a revival underway and if young men are returning to church in significant ways, maybe it has something to do with that.
01:32:36.560But it could also be just, again, the ubiquity of sitting around playing video games and watching porn all day long, too.
01:32:41.560Well, it does, my strong, overwhelming sense is that the distrust between the sexes, particularly when younger people, is kind of the defining fact.
01:32:56.020I don't want this to turn into like a long catalog of all of our social problems.
01:32:59.040But it, I guess all I'm saying is, in response to your original question, I think things are coming to a head where whatever we're doing is just not working.
01:33:08.680And that's become really obvious at every level.
01:33:12.860At the personal level, men and women are having a lot of trouble understanding each other, getting married, having children, buying a home, finding a job that sustains all of that.
01:33:23.100You know, just a basic middle class life that's like beyond people's reach.
01:33:25.860And then looming above us is the constant threat of annihilation by AI or war, things that were created by our lunatic leaders, like actual lunatics who run the country, who hate us and hate humanity.
01:33:40.660And, but, but everyone feels that anxiety of like, holy shit, any minute this could all end.
01:35:05.300But how many mornings have you sort of woken up and there's, you know, your bride next to you and maybe a dog or two and you're sort of happy and sunlight streaming in and you pick up your phone and you think, oh man, Western civilization is over.
01:35:18.860I mean, we just spent an hour and a half talking about infanticide.
01:35:24.160So like, you know, the kinds of things I think about almost all day long are horrific things, right?
01:35:39.360So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's something that I've thought about and many of us I'm sure have thought about for a long time now is how do we, how can I do my job?
01:35:50.680How can I be aware of the things I need to be aware of and yet have a much healthier, and people have written books and I've read the books that I've, I've talked with other people.
01:36:00.440My wife and I have talked about this at some length, how we can negotiate these things in our life because she's not as bad as I am, but it's, you know, she's involved in this, in this lifestyle as well.
01:36:10.840But, but again, the, the, the companies that make shit tons of money from this stuff have, have hired the best social scientists in the world to make sure that we, that we, that we're going to try to do the best job to make us fail in these, in these opportunities.
01:36:30.360It's apparently this box you can sort of put your phone into and like, you have to have a specific combination to open it.
01:36:37.340And it's sitting there in our kitchen sort of laughing at us because we haven't used it, but it's there as a reminder, like we probably should be using this thing.
01:37:15.520I've obsessed, frankly, over this question.
01:37:18.240And, um, and I think we need, I think one of the solutions is to have a community of people right around you that can hold you accountable for this.
01:37:26.260And so much of what happens here, it seems to me anyway, is, um, we lead isolated lives, unlike the lives we used to lead both as a species and sort of as a culture, not that long ago.
01:37:36.520Or there could be people that would hold you accountable to that sort of thing.
01:37:39.500Like I, I at least, uh, would of course make my kids leave their phones away from the dinner table, for instance.
01:39:02.840Well, we are living through an epic change right now in our culture, a change with regard to our technology, a change with regard to our politics, a change perhaps with regard to this religious revival that may be coming.
01:39:18.260We currently have a medical culture which is dominated by secularism, by a hostility to the vision of human dignity and equality that we've been articulating so far.
01:39:35.400It could also change in a very similar way to the way that younger people more generally are changing.
01:39:41.360So young doctors, young nurses, young whoever will be caring for us.
01:39:48.540I think there's an important case to be made actually that maybe healthcare needs like a different kind of category to care for people that doesn't exist just in a clinic with a bed somewhere, but is a broader sort of understanding of people more broadly outside of just caring for them in their sickness, but also in their health or in this in-between stage before they need to go to the hospital or get checked out by a clinician.
01:40:08.540And maybe that sort of thing is coming.
01:40:33.480They taught Nightingale everything that she knew.
01:40:35.360There's still a really strong proliferation of religious hospitals, religious health organizations, health systems, many of which are Catholic.
01:40:49.700One in seven beds in the United States is actually at a Catholic facility.
01:40:52.760There are ways to recover this image of human dignity and replace the one that's in there now, especially, again, if we have this broader religious revival underway that you're talking about.
01:41:05.920Can we recover this vision of human dignity that we've been articulating?
01:41:10.700But we're going to need to, and this is very much connected, again, to the show you did with the mean siblings about how, what is the God that is actually governing health care?
01:41:26.200Is it a center of ultimate concern, God, that is nonviolent, that is about fundamental equality, that is about the most vulnerable, it is about not using individuals as mere means to another end for profit and efficiency and consumerism?
01:41:40.780Um, there are enough people out there, there are enough people out there, good people, uh, to be a form of resistance to that.
01:41:55.820I think one place to start would be institutions of the Catholic church to say, we are going to rebuild these institutions in ways that resist the kinds of things that, um, the kinds of things that happen when we put mammon and consumerism and efficiency.
01:42:12.300Um, and, and we are well primed to do something like that.
01:42:16.200Again, one in seven beds, it's a massive, uh, opportunity and it doesn't need to be limited to Catholic institutions.
01:42:22.160There are plenty of non-Catholic institutions as well.
01:42:24.920Um, but at least that's where I put my hope.
01:42:27.220That's where I say we can have a revival.
01:42:28.840Could you start a Christian hospital center and just say, you know, that we're not in the business of killing or in the business of healing?
01:42:36.580We're not going to do any killing here.
01:43:07.140It's, it's a yes to a particular vision of human dignity that requires no's.
01:43:10.440But we have four decades now in the United States had a really powerful, um, uh, uh, attempt to carve out this space for ourselves through religious freedom to say, yeah, I know you guys you're for abortion.
01:43:26.460I know you guys are doing this other thing.
01:43:27.900We're not going to do that in these hospitals.
01:43:29.540And by the way, uh, we can no longer call this a Catholic hospital.
01:43:32.880If you're going to force us to do that, we will shut ourselves down.
01:43:35.140In fact, if you tell us we need to do this.
01:43:37.500And so far we've had pretty good success, frankly, in, um, in, in, in, especially from the Supreme court in telling us that, yes, you're free as Catholic hospitals and other institutions to not do abortions, to not do a physician assisted suicide, even contraception, even something like that.
01:43:53.320Uh, Catholic hospitals don't, don't prescribe contraception, at least in principle, shouldn't.
01:43:57.780Um, and so if we, there's no reason, again, it needs to be limited to Catholic hospitals.
01:44:02.240Again, it was the, oh, I didn't mention this, that, you know, who, uh, who carved out the religious freedom exemption for brain death in New Jersey, Orthodox Jews.
01:44:09.540So it was Orthodox Jews who said, um, yeah, our guys who have brain dead, not dead.
01:44:14.900Uh, and you're not going to force us, um, to call them dead.
01:44:17.900And we're going to carve out religious freedom exemption for ourselves here in New Jersey.
01:44:20.880Um, so again, it doesn't need to be limited to even Christianity at all.
01:44:25.220Plenty of, uh, religious folks and even non-religious folks can, can, can imagine how this might work apart from it.
01:44:32.580Um, I, you know, people who think there's an authority higher than themselves have the humility that is the foundation of wisdom and good decision-making.
01:44:42.400And people who think they're God, you know, always wind up going way off the rails, I think.
01:44:47.920I think that's right. And, and it's not an accident, right?
01:44:52.240Again, that historically, um, it was Jews, it was Christians and even Muslims to a certain extent who are very much connected in their early stages to, to both Christianity and Judaism who pushed back on abortion and infanticide in the ancient world for the reasons that we've already talked about.
01:45:06.920So is there anybody providing ethical guidance to the scientists funded by U.S. tax dollars who are tampering with the building blocks of life and doing Frankenstein-like experiments, one of which resulted in COVID, um, in order not to save lives but to feel like God?
01:45:25.940Because there's an awful lot of that genetic engineering and the rest of it. Is it, are there any ethical guidelines to that at all?
01:45:35.300There are medical ethicists who work in those spaces. Um, most of them, if I can just speak frankly, uh, have been compromised with regard to the kinds of stuff we've been talking about so far.
01:45:44.340So, most of them would either be, um, neutral or have no connection to the kinds of, uh, visions of, of human dignity and nonviolence.
01:46:03.000That's what I would say. I mean, I don't know. I'm sure the Nazis had ethicists too. I mean, like, it doesn't mean anything at a certain point.
01:46:08.200If you kill Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I'm sorry. Yeah. You don't have any working ethicists on staff.
01:46:14.080Yeah. The, uh, the largest, um, the largest conference in bioethics in the United States is something called the ASBH, the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities Conference.
01:46:24.200And, um, I stopped going a few years ago because I realized that, um, the only place that my voice was really welcome there was in the, uh, Christian ethics interest group that met in the evenings.
01:46:34.340The main, the main papers, the main panels, not at all interested in hearing from someone like me.
01:46:40.420Justifying evil was kind of their job. Like what, like what are their guidelines exactly?
01:46:45.640Well, um, it depends who you talk to, but, um, a secularized context in bioethics has been sort of taken over by what's called principalism, which is this idea that there are four main principles in bioethics.
01:46:57.360It turns out autonomy really high on the list. The first principle, actually, uh, non-maleficents do no harm, which is a classic bioethics principle.
01:47:04.840Beneficents do good and justice give everyone their due.
01:47:08.020But those things, those principles, uh, Tucker are just so generic and so unspecific that virtually anyone can manipulate those principles and sort of end up with what they want at the end of the day.
01:47:19.280But don't kill people's not on the list.
01:47:21.120Well, you might say that's non-maleficents.
01:47:23.180Yes. Well, clearly it's not. They've killed a lot of people.
01:47:26.240Or offended against justice, right? But that's what I'm talking about. So, you know, what is harm is parasitic on what is good, right?
01:47:32.960And if we have a disagreement about what is good, um, then we're going to disagree about what non-maleficents is.
01:47:38.520What, you know, I have to say first do no harm, right?
01:47:40.700Well, if I think, uh, you know, that there's no such thing as human dignity and that we really just need to be maximizing organs for transplant, what is doing no harm in any situation will look quite different, right?
01:47:49.820It might in fact be saying, I don't really need to test for hypothalamic function.
01:47:54.140Let's just declare this individual dead and decide that we can take their organs, right?
01:47:58.920So when we have these four sort of generic principles, which rule the day and by secular bioethics today, you can really get anywhere you want with them.
01:48:05.580Um, and so it turns out, frankly, that those of us who are doing theological bioethics end up in do having our own conferences, our own journals, our own sort of intra, um, insulated, uh, discussions and secularized medicine really does is with few exceptions.
01:49:38.100So how can you say you're right and I'm wrong?
01:49:39.580Because they're not appealing to anything above themselves.
01:49:42.920Therefore, it's just a circular argument.
01:49:45.680And, uh, and the thing that I find so frustrating about this is, um, my secular counterparts, um, in these fields sort of criticize religious people for being, um, you know, uh, believing in superstition, uh, irrational, you know, and trying to impose their point of view on others.
01:50:06.820But in reality, if you just walk, uh, these secular folks back to their first principles, their vision of the good and you say, okay, we've walked you back and you believe in the greatest good for the greatest number.
01:50:42.100And how is it different from what we have now?
01:50:44.120Oh, they would say that, um, the, the reason why the Nazi program was problematic is because it didn't respect patient autonomy, the first principle of bioethics.
01:50:56.020Well, given the conversation over the last hour and a half or whatever it's been, I think we, it's very clear we also, uh, do not respect patient autonomy.
01:51:03.820Well, anyone who forces a vaccine on somebody by definition is not respecting patient autonomy.
01:51:10.080If I'm telling you you're required by law to put some drug in your body that you don't want, how am I treating you as a human being?
01:51:17.940I'm treating you as my slave, as a subhuman, right?
01:51:20.620Well, that's the argument that we've heard, um, now for several years, which is, isn't it interesting that, um, many of you were all about bodily autonomy, are all about bodily autonomy, uh, when it comes to reproductive rights, so-called.
01:51:35.080Um, but then, uh, we're, we're very happy to jettison conscience rights and bodily autonomy rights when it came to those, uh, sorts of issues.
01:51:43.540It doesn't seem to be, um, again, a kind of coherent vision of the good.
01:51:48.380What did the ethicist community say to that?
01:51:51.720Well, I'm sure they went all in on the VAX mandates.
01:51:55.460I mean, as you know, there've been a lot of important questions asked across the board recently that weren't asked at the time, but I, at that point, I think there was just a ton of fear, right?
01:52:03.560A sense that like, um, you know, they, they, this is almost always how it works, right?
01:52:07.340These sort of things get, get eroded because of claims that are so fearful.
01:52:11.320Not to be mean or whatever, but that is my default.
01:52:15.100Um, don't we have ethicists precisely for the moments that are ruled by fear?
01:52:19.380Isn't that, that is what, when we lack a clear consensus on the right direction.
01:52:25.180And when our judgment is muddled by panic, that's exactly the moment we need clear thinking ethicists.
01:52:42.600Not all of them, but, but a lot of, but a lot of them, a lot of them.
01:52:46.200I was one of the ones arguing that, um, uh, you know, Catholicism actually has a very robust sense of conscience, right?
01:52:53.800Uh, to say like, oh, conscience is the place where you meet God in the most profound way.
01:52:59.480And, um, and where you, and where you, where God speaks to you in the most profound way.
01:53:04.060And conscience, um, rights actually, um, have been coded left for a lot of, uh, the church's history in recent years.
01:53:13.140Um, but it's interesting again, when this sort of fear took over, um, the, the focus on conscience sort of went away, right?
01:53:20.900Like this, the sense of, I mean, I, I don't agree with some of the claims that people were making about, you know, the kinds of connections to aborted body parts and things like that.
01:53:30.640And reasonable people can disagree about that, but I would say, hey, this is enough of a serious argument.
01:53:35.220We ought to respect people's conscience rights to choose not to take the vaccine because, because, but, but it's so interesting that those arguments sort of evaporated in light of all that fear.
01:54:16.080It's like, I'm laughing as it's like, it's hard even to imagine having those attitudes now, but I once did.
01:54:20.740But anyway, I'm saying that by way of confession.
01:54:22.820But in the last few years, I have noticed, the reason I've had cause to rethink all this is because I've noticed that almost every major push from the public health community, and certainly from our politicians, is anti-fertility.
01:54:40.860It's the one right you possess is the right to have an abortion.
01:54:44.340You don't have the right to speak freely, to have control of your own money, to gather with like-minded people, to protest or petition your government.
01:55:04.580I'm not a genius, but I have noticed that the thread that connects all of their main concerns is the same, and is they don't want you to have kids.
01:55:16.680I mean, if you look at surveys, women are very consistently reporting that they would like to have more kids than the kids they actually have.
01:55:28.020And the reasons they give are very interesting.
01:55:33.860Both Vance and Waltz in the recent debate were asked about paid family leave as a possible option to pursue, and it was very interesting to hear them both offer sort of vaguely supportive ideas with regard to that.
01:55:47.940A number of women give lack of paid family leave as reasons for why they don't have the number of kids that they want to have.
01:55:55.520Others suggest that, you know, they would much rather have a not be in a two-income trap, right, where they feel like they must be away from their kids all the time and work.
01:56:07.520Elizabeth Warren, before she became a totalitarian robot, which she is today, wrote a wonderful book on this called The Two-Income Trap, which I quoted at length on Fox News once without identifying the author, and I could hear people applauding in the audience until they found it was Elizabeth Warren who wrote it, but she did write it, and she made that point.
01:56:25.760And if you ask women what they actually want, not all, of course, but the overwhelming majority would like to raise their own children, particularly when they're little, you know, no one wants to hang around a 15-year-old, I got it.
01:56:37.000But when they're five, most women would like to raise their own kids and not import people from another country to do it.
01:56:42.040And that seems like the most human of all desires, and it's the one desire that we thwart.
01:56:45.880And I found that conversation about paid family leave, like, nauseating, actually, because that was, no one ever mentioned the possibility that maybe women could raise their own kids.
01:57:11.040I think they don't, you know, this is pure speculation.
01:57:13.900I think one reason people don't mention it is precisely because of how deeply the systems and structures which have led to the two-income trap are foundational in our culture.
01:57:25.100We would have to undo so much of what our culture has become.
01:57:28.340Well, I hope we do it immediately because it's so rotten and anti-human.
01:57:31.960It's denying people the true source of joy.
01:57:51.540And actually, the exploit of lending money at interest used to be called usury, and it used to be considered an intrinsically evil act in the tradition, by the way.
01:57:59.440Well, it still is in my house, so that's how I feel about it strongly.
01:58:03.020Unfortunately, but that's considered wildly controversial.
01:58:06.320I mean, like, you know, having six trans kids is considered great, but criticizing usury is considered like, whoa, off the charts.
01:59:08.800But then there's also the drug companies here as well.
01:59:11.720And this is, again, I keep on bringing up this amazing show you did with the mean siblings that brought up big pharma and exploitive practices of contraception as part of big pharma.
01:59:23.660We talk about getting kids on a regimen, which makes pharma shit tons of money for almost their whole lives.
01:59:30.620Well, how about getting a young girl on birth control from the time she's 12 until the time she has menopause, right?
02:00:09.380For the first time in my lifetime, I mean, it was always considered really subversive and not acceptable, really, to point out that the pill increased stroke risk, for example, just as abortion increases breast cancer risk.
02:00:20.600You're not allowed to mention that either.
02:00:22.020But I never put it all together in my mind, which is the one thing that all of these attitudes have in common, is the desire to stifle fertility.
02:00:35.100And it's hard to escape the conclusion that there's a spiritual force behind that.
02:00:40.500Yeah, and it's a spiritual force that may, again, run throughout the different topics we've engaged.
02:00:47.900You know, it's, again, treating women not as fully autonomous individuals.
02:00:52.240Ironically, though, that's the language which is used to suggest that they need to do this, right?
02:00:56.300Except for women who do want to prescind from this, who want to lead a different kind of lifestyle, who are often actually not religious at all, but sort of crunchy, progressive lefties who say, I don't want to put this carcinogen in my body.
02:01:07.460I want to put this poison in my body, right?
02:01:09.140That's, again, one of the things that's pushing back from this.
02:01:13.500We use the language, which actually inverts what is actually happening.
02:01:17.220We use the language of autonomy and empowering women, when in reality, it's doing precisely the opposite.
02:01:23.120It's interesting, though, the connection.
02:02:34.240And so the rest of the country goes to sleep with the TV on.
02:02:37.840And only the granola chicks and the religious people don't have it on.
02:02:43.520And maybe they're hearing something that the rest of us should be hearing.
02:02:47.120And that's, yeah, that's a wonderful thing to, I don't know if this is what we're going to finish on, but that's a wonderful thing.
02:02:52.180Can we make space for that silence, right?
02:02:55.680That place, again, where God meets us in our most foundational way.
02:03:00.700Like that is, I think that maybe, I don't want to speak for you, maybe one reason you moved up here to Maine, because at least in my short time here, this seems like a wonderful place to encounter that silence.
02:03:09.740It's to put the phone away, to put the pounding feed that just pushes you to doom scroll and feel terrible.
02:03:20.240But instead, think critically, but also think creatively.
02:03:23.780I can't tell you how many times my creative thoughts, even whole book ideas have come just when I was holding my infant son in my lap and just had nothing else to do but let that happen.
02:03:53.300And I was like, you know, if I get 15 minutes to sit butt naked in a hot room in silence, like that's a massive improvement over not doing it.
02:04:04.280I used to write my whole script just sitting there, you know, like you just in silence, only in silence can you receive, you know, actual clarity and wisdom.
02:04:19.960And that's historically, again, to take it back to the tradition that I'm bound by, there was so much emphasis on finding these times for silence, right?
02:04:31.240To imitate Christ going into the wilderness, to hang out with the monks, to get out of the situation you're in and allow this voice to speak to you in a way that allows you to be both critical and creative.
02:04:42.480It seems like a pretty scary religion you've signed up with, Charlie.
02:05:10.160If people are interested in, and I interrupted you so many times.
02:05:14.440I'm afraid we didn't get to a lot of things, but for people who want to understand more about how you think and the way you've connected a lot of seemingly disconnected trends in our society, which are of a piece, I think.
02:05:38.040But probably the book I've written, I'm starting book 10, or I'm trying to finish book 10 by Thanksgiving.
02:05:43.660But probably the book that makes, I'm actually writing a book right now, trying to finish a book on how understanding what a good death looks like can resist physician-assisted suicide.
02:05:52.740So, maybe we could talk about that some other time, too.
02:05:55.160But to answer the question you asked me, I wrote a book called Resisting Throwaway Culture, How a Consistent Life Ethic Can Unite a Fractured People.
02:06:03.920And that book really offers the kind of vision that I've been trying to articulate.
02:06:08.460I hope you'll come back when your death book comes out.