Medical Ethicist Charles Camosy Debunks Media Lies About Abortion and Kamala’s Love for Infanticide

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Okay, so let me ask you, the Trump campaign has, and Donald Trump himself at the presidential debate, has accused Kamala Harris and Tim Walls of supporting infanticide, which is to say laws that allow doctors to kill children post-viability and allow them to stand by as babies born in botched abortions die and the media in the democratic party same thing have pushed back ferociously on this fact checked it um you know you're a medical ethicist this is right at the center of what you study for a living. Is that true? It's absolutely true.
And until this whole political thing got in the way, everyone knew it was true. I was doing my dissertation at Notre Dame on neonatal bioethics, and I rounded with neonatal teams in hospitals in the United States and Europe.
And everyone knew that not only in the abortion context you're discussing, but in many other kinds of contexts, we would just simply choose not to treat certain children, especially if they were too disabled. And we would call it comfort care.
We call it something else, but everyone knew exactly what was happening. So, it's not just the abortion case.
Far from it. It's just a matter of routine and nicky is across the country and around the world okay and this is long-standing yeah i mean for instance you could do it in a way where you bypass the parents it's called slow coding or show coding where the medical team basically says you know i'm not sure this baby is uh or i think this baby is too disabled

right or has will have too hard a life it's not in this baby's interest in living the couple wants

to do everything the family wants to do everything we don't agree with it and so it's a well-known

practice actually to show code or slow code your way into getting the outcome you want that's

without the families wait i'm complete wait so hospitals kill people's kids without telling them

Thank you. slow code your way into getting the outcome you want that's without the families wait i'm wait so hospitals kill people's kids without telling them i mean it's a little more complex than that the it's not what trump unfortunately uses the phrase when he talks about it in a particular trumpian way execution right it's not as if there is like a pillow put over their head or a sharp object is used or even like a poison is administered.

It's not as if there's like a pillow put over their head or a sharp object is used or even like a poison is administered. It's more like throwing someone away or discarding them in a way that keeps them comfortable.
So, it's called comfort care. The debate over the law in Minnesota that has prompted so much debate over this, insists that the babies be given comfort care,

but that's actually hiding what's actually going on in these particular circumstances.

They're given comfort care

because they're not given the typical care that others get.

What is comfort care?

It's mostly a kind of palliative care

or a sense of trying to keep someone

from not feeling pain or something like this.

Like giving them opioids?

Yeah, or keeping the temperature appropriate and that sort of thing. Um, in fact, the former governor of Virginia, right.
Was caught on tape essentially, or not caught on tape. He gave a radio interview saying this, this happens all the time.
The baby would be kept comfortable. And then, uh, he said, I'll tell you what would happen.
The baby kept comfortable. And then we'd make a decision together with the parents about what exactly to do.
And he said this in his interview, right? Very matter-of-factly. And he was right to do so because until recently, this was not a controversial thing or it's a controversial thing, but it's not controversial that this goes on at all.
and you're saying it goes on i mean there's so many questions sure one i think

i wasn't where this happened with children i mean of course with the elderly at the request of the

patient I mean, there's so many questions. Sure.
One, I think, I wasn't aware this happened with children. I mean, of course, with the elderly, at the request of the patient very often, physicians stop treatment.
Right. Which strikes me as fine.
I don't, you know, something that I would want. I don't, you know, most people don't want extraordinary treatment, you know, at 90 or something.
But you're saying it's very common with children. And then you're further saying that it happens without the parent's knowledge or consent.
That strikes me, how is that not a crime? Well, it should be a crime. But it's, and to be clear, it doesn't happen very often, right? That is not routine, the slow coding or show coding.
Most slow coding. Coding means death, right? Well, coding is specifically coding somebody as a particular kind of patient.
So if it's full code, you do everything to save the child's life, right? But if it's a different kind of code, like say a DNR, right? Or a different kind of code would be put in to say, no, we're not going to do anything to save the person, which is totally legitimate in many other contexts, right? At the end of life, we might make a choice about how to live right and say i i want to live the rest of my life in this very particular way so i'm i'm gonna have a yeah i don't want chemo yeah something like that um slower show coding and i'm sorry to interrupt you but just to be clear as an ethicist you're okay with that yeah yeah as long as what we're saying is it's a choice about how to live not a choice about dying right so if i say i want to live the rest of my life without um chemotherapy or without other aggressive treatments and to use the language of um moral philosophy and moral theology and bioethics i foresee but don't intend that death is going to be the likely result of this or death will be sped up as a result of this. Totally fine, totally legitimate.
Centuries we've been doing this. It's quite different, of course, to say either as a person yourself or as a medical team or as a surrogate for another person to say, let's not treat you so that you die.
We are aiming at your death. We were trying to kill you.
And the context of abortion reveals exactly what's going on here. So, Tim Walton Company in Minnesota specifically rewrote laws in that state to say, yeah, I know we have this Infant Born Alive Protection Act here, but we need to make it available to medical teams and others when there's a botched abortion to give the baby only comfort care and let them die.
But we know that it's not foreseen but not intending death because there was an abortion attempt, right? That was an attempt to kill. And so the attempt to kill is transferred over into the newborn context.
And so we're just doing it by omission, right? We call it comfort care again. But let me give you another example of how this works sometimes uh and very often uh parents uh are encouraged to have abortions in these cases where where um they choose not to right they um push back on the medical team like if there's a down syndrome diagnosis for instance prenatally the medical teams this is well documented will push them time and time again to have abort.
Even very pro-life, very prenatal justice focused parents get bombarded by medical teams. Oh, I've lived that.
You've lived it. Yes.
And yes, with a false diagnosis without even getting it's not about me or my family. But I know for a fact that what you're saying is true because I've seen it with my own eyes.
It's extraordinary. And what sometimes happens, and this again reveals what's actually happening in the post-birth context, these teams will get so frustrated that they'll say, okay, we can't convince you to have an abortion.
There's still things we can do after birth, right? So if you say there was this case I just saw recently of a child who was diagnosed prenatally with spina bifida and the medical team tried to get the mom to abort and was unable to do so. And the OBGYN said, okay, we can still choose not to treat the child after birth.
We'll give the child comfort care after birth. Now you might be able to say in the abstract, well, what exactly is going on here? Is it more like foreseen but not intending death? But you know exactly what's going on here because the whole point- They're trying to kill the kid.
They're trying to kill the kid. The child is too disabled.
We've decided that. I mean, I have thought this for almost 30 years since I first saw it, but how can someone like that be allowed to be a doctor in our country if you're pushing a mother to, to kill her child? Like this is not the opposite of your job.
You would think so. We, we have a lot of good doctors who don't participate in these kinds of things.
Do we have a lot of them? I don't believe you. We have a large number who either feel neutral about this or who feel positive about it who are who are active in it and the re and let me just give you an example of how the thought process goes i wrote an article about this for the public discourse um called the right to a dead baby question mark and the way that they sort of try to justify it and i i cite all the literature in this article justifying this claim, the way they justify it is they say, well, you know, after a certain time, we would never neglect a baby to death and call it comfort care because we've decided that there is a new person here that we're saving, actually, who's disabled, right? But before that it's for for every uh medical team or every doctor it'll vary um they think of it more as um stopping an individual who's disabled from coming into existence right now we're talking about newborn children here or neonatal children here and this is well documented again uh the article is in the public discourse the right to a dead baby baby question mark.
And I cite all the research that shows that this is how this is thought of.

And what's so interesting about this, Tucker, is this is what's, I think if we think about history, if we think about the pagan Greek and Roman culture that existed before Christianity came on the scene, these are the kinds judgments that were made before a christian ethic came to dominate in our culture in the west because as you probably know it was thought of as not a big deal at all in ancient greece and rome to simply discard children that were too disabled or were female females were too expensive for many uh families and so they were just discarded. And it's no surprise that as we have re-paganized, as the Christian culture has retreated, especially in medicine, right? Secularized medicine is deeply, deeply problematic and dominant at the moment, even in some contexts where you might not expect it to be.
It's no accident we're moving towards this practice. It's a little weird of sex-selective abortion is defended by feminists, which I just find, I mean, I don't take feminists very seriously, but even by their low standards, that seems hard to explain.
If your job is to defend women and fight against anyone who thinks of women as less valuable than men how can you not say anything when sex selective abortion changes the demographic mix and say the biggest country in the world china i don't understand that yeah i mean it's no accident that that abortion is used as a tool of oppression for uh for this in in in China and other places. It's no accident that it was used this way in ancient Greece and Rome.
The disabled were also very much part of the group that would have been discarded. And just to give you a sense of how ubiquitous it was before Christians came on the scene, there were systems in place where you would sometimes abandon your baby in specific areas and with the hope that maybe somehow they would not die from exposure or be eaten by animals or something, but maybe they'd be picked up by slavers or sold into prostitution or something like this.
Even the early church fathers said, one reason you shouldn't visit a prostitute among the many is it could be a kind of incest, perhaps, because so many people in this area would be exposed and then prostitutes, right? You might have a family member there. I got to tell you one other case that just shows it's terrible, but it shows how ubiquitous it was.
We have an ancient papyrus letter from, I think it's the year 1 AD, of a migrant worker named Hilarion, who is writing his pregnant wife, Alice. And he's in Alexandria doing migrant work.
And he's worried that because his buddies are going to go home, we don't know quite where home is, but they're going to go home. And he's worried that she might think that he's abandoned her because he's not going to go with them.
So he's writing her saying, dude, I'm don't worry. I'm going to send you the money as soon as I get it.
I'm going to stay in Alexandria and try to make some more money. By the way, if you're pregnant, oh, and then he says, take care of our loved ones.
So they already have kids. Take care of our little one.
And by the way, if you're pregnant, if it's a boy, keep it. If it's a girl, throw it out.
Okay girl throw it out okay bye essentially that's it's it's an amazing letter it reveals so much about the culture including again when you don't have a christian ethic that says all human beings are equal right when it doesn't matter how old you are it doesn't matter how young you are how disabled you are how expensive you are how quote-unquote burdensome you are that vision of the good is not present in pre-Christian,

pagan Greece and Rome. And increasingly, it's not present in our own repaganizing culture.

And it wasn't present in supposedly Christian Europe in the 30s and 40s. And I just find it

so interesting that we spend a lot of time 80 years later talking about the Nazis, and obviously the Nazis are bad. Everyone agrees with that very much, including me.
But the one thing that we almost never mention is that before they started rounding up other populations the nazis

you Obviously, the Nazis are bad. Everyone agrees with that very much, including me.
But the one thing that we almost never mention is that before they started rounding up other populations, the Nazis killed hundreds of thousands, about 300,000 Germans in hospitals. The disabled children, a lot of them had comfort care, but it was murder.
And we never talk about that for some reason. And it's sort of weird to see the American medical establishment, which I think thinks of itself as anti-Nazi.

It's weird to see them embrace Nazi eugenics policy because that's exactly what they're doing,

it sounds like. At the early stages of life, yes.
I think it's no accident this is defended as kind

of an extension of abortion, which is a sacred cow that apparently we find it very difficult

to ask questions about, even just very basic critical questions about saving lives after birth. There is a little more hope, I think, at the end of life.
The American Medical Association still says that physician-assisted suicide can't be consistent with any rational understanding of what healthcare is. That's still explicitly said by them, though it's under fire every year.
And the beginning of medical ethics was actually the Nuremberg trials. The secular medical ethics was the Nuremberg trials, which called out a lot of these practices.
Then I'm aware of that, and I'm grateful for the codification of the lessons of the Second World War in our medical ethics, and this is what you do for a living. But it's just kind of weird to see that same medical establishment embrace Nazi medical ethics, which they have.
So does anyone say that? Yeah, I mean, as you know, the critique, you're a Nazi, is so overused that it sort of loses its bite sometimes. Well, if being a Nazi means anything, it means euthanizing children who aren't fit.
That's right. That's exactly right.
And that sort of mentality was only possible with the retreat of a Christian ethic in Nazi Germany. and increasingly as the retreat of the Christian ethic today takes place we're finding it more and more difficult to

to Christian ethic in Nazi Germany. And increasingly, as the retreat of the Christian ethic today takes place, we're finding it more and more difficult to marshal the resources to say why we shouldn't have very similar kinds of practices.
Canada is already almost a totally lost cause in this regard. We've had it in the Netherlands and Belgium and Switzerland for some time.
Many US states have adopted this, unfortunately. I do think it's interesting that some deep blue states out here on the east coast have have resisted in part because the disability rights community you're talking about euthanasia right right right um so yeah we're talking about uh euthanasia physician-assisted suicide in fact i think both um or maryland new New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut.

All these states have resisted well-funded attempts to try to legalize physician-assisted suicide.

So who's funding the attempts to kill?

Who's paying for that?

Yeah, I don't have all the information about that. But the main activist group is a group called compassion and choices um formerly known as you may know as the hemlock society the charmingly named hemlock society you might imagine why the board got together and changed their name to compassion and choices um uh but uh and they've been successful they've been successful in california they've been successful in my home state of New Jersey, unfortunately.
Who are the donors to Compassion and Choices, to the pro-killing lobby? That's a good question. I'll tell you I don't know the answer to it.
It's weird that they're not famous because if you're pushing the medical establishment and the state, inevitably the state, because the state really does control health care, to murder people or convince them to, quote, kill themselves because they're like poor or unhappy, then you're a monster and you should be well known, I would think. I can imagine donors not wanting to be publicly known.
So maybe this is just pure speculation. I don't know.
Maybe there's a place we can look this up it'd be good to know about these questions yeah but you know what's what's interesting about this is that um they are well-funded and they have um narratives that they like uh that they can use their well-funded resources to promote and one of those narratives is very sympathetic a narrative right like how could anyone we were just talking at breakfast right how can anyone see somebody at the at the end

stage of their life where they're in racking pain losing control of their bodily functions

you know like that's almost where everyone goes right is the first example um well because that's

where really almost everyone goes in life i mean that is what having seen we've all at a certain

age seen people die who we love yeah and that is what it looks like it's unbearably painful and

I'm going to go ahead and get a little bit It's the worst thing. So that is a compelling argument.
It is. What is not widely known though, is that it's a misleading argument because Oregon, for instance instance has had legalized physician-assisted killing since the 90s and um never has physical pain ever made the top five reasons people in oregon request physician-assisted killing the number one reason is fear of a loss of autonomy um also in the top five is fear of being a burden on others of course um You can understand why disability rights communities are some of the most effective and energetic resistors of these practices.
Because when they say things like loss of autonomy, fear of enjoyable activities, which is another loss of enjoyable activities, fear of being a burden on others, disability rights communities say, that sounds a lot like us.

Are you telling us that we're sort of making this judgment that people like us maybe have the kind of lives that should be killed or not worth living anymore? And I think that's actually interesting to think about why these blue states out here have been successful. I think it's pretty clear, actually, that the arguments made by disability rights groups saying we matter just as much as anybody else have been so far persuasive.

It shows that the Christian ethic

of fundamental human equality

has not totally died

because again,

these are populations

without that Christian ethic

that would otherwise just simply be discarded.

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That's 1-800-780-8888. Yeah, I'm so mad at the Down Syndrome people that it's hard to accept what you're saying, but I know that it's true.
I don't understand why the Down Syndrome groups haven't said something about the genocide of people with Down Syndrome. And I think they should be ashamed of their cowardice.
But that doesn't mean that there aren't great disability rights groups. Well, it's interesting to think about how can we do a better job on our end as pro-lifers to welcome.
We need them at the fight at the beginning of life for prenatal justice and neonatal justice now. Because, again, it's not just abortion.
These babies who are neglected to death very often have disabilities and were targeted for abortion in the first place precisely because they had disabilities. And so I think there seems to be some movement now post-Dobbs.
I was heartened by some of the language that J.D. Vance used in a recent debate with Governor Walz, thinking about ways to expand the pro-life message in ways that would be focused on social support and broadening the message out in ways that are really helpful.
And I think if we continue on that track, we might be able to bring in some of the disability rights groups into the fight for prenatal justice. Because you're just totally right that, that it's, I mean,

it's a,

it's a mass slaughter.

I think that's the way we need to talk about it.

Well,

how can you get up there and be like,

I'm advocating for people with down syndrome and I'm so grateful someone is,

of course.

And then ignore the fact that they're basically,

they've been eliminated by prenatal testing and then abortion.

They've been targeted for killing and it succeeded.

And if you run again, I'm just grinding an ax here, but i wrote about them 30 years ago i've never forgotten it the arc uh like have you ever asked them that we get into i've been in part of the pro-life movement for a very long time now my first real job was actually communications director for pro-life wisconsin back in the day um so i've been around the movement a long time and i've i've been aware of attempts to reach out especially at the beginning of life our relationships are really solid at the end of life really solid beginning of life we have this political stuff going on it makes it very difficult but again i think we're at this moment perhaps where um it's clear something is clearly shifting in the pro-life movement i think um along with our politics that would make it easier to welcome those folks in. If I can tell you just one story to highlight why this has moved me so much too, it sounds like you have a lot of stories in your background.
I was giving a talk, a kind of post-mortem, after the 2016 election in Connecticut, I think. I was on a panel discussion with that and i was talking about um this very topic uh you know abortion and the and and the slaughter of disabled people uh via abortion and uh after the talk this gentleman in his 70s um with a a guy i later learned was his son in his 30s, clearly had Down syndrome, came up to me and he just thanked me, the older gentleman, and said, nobody ever talks about this.
As you pointed out, nobody ever talks about, thank you for bringing it up. I lost my wife two years ago and all I have in my life now is my son.
He's the joy of my existence. It's so hard to hear the kinds of things we hear about abortion and and how it's used against people like him in the middle of us talking this guy who's probably in his 30s just grabbed me and hugged me as hard as ever been hugged in my entire life it makes me emotional it's yes because he it feels it too he can't really articulate it as well but he he feels the surrounding culture well i mean i don't you know anytime you're around, anytime you're around someone with Down syndrome, or at least I'll speak for myself, anytime I've been around someone with Down syndrome, the spirit coming off that person is really unlike any other person you meet.
I mean, that's just hard to imagine, you know, thinking that it's good to get rid of people like that. I mean, there's just a kindness that it's impossible not to notice.
And there's data now to support this. People with Down syndrome actually rate their lives happier than those of us who don't have Down syndrome.
Of course. I'm not surprised at all, having spent time around people.
I couldn't be less shocked by that. And yet we have a regime of prenatal violence, which targets them in a way that's just reprehensible.
But I'm also, you know, in addition to feeling sorry for anyone who's targeted for genocide, I also worry about the attitudes that make that possible and that make it mostly unnoticed. And the core underlying attitude seems to be some people aren't worth anything they're just objects that can be discarded and i don't think that's a good attitude at all to have for our fellow human beings where did that come from well uh throughout human history um we've seen this be the norm rather than uh the exception right it was not great for disabled people at all before a Judeo-Christian ethic came on the scene in the West.
And with this idea that every single human being, in virtue of their being a member of the species Homo sapiens, a fellow human animal, in a way of speaking, has exactly the same value because that human being bears the image and likeness of god in precisely the same way regardless of age regardless of disability regardless of burden regardless of any accidental trait in their very nature and the very nature of who they are the the face of um the image of god is is present they have souls we we used to say. People have souls.
They have souls. Before that, it was just a matter of course to consider human beings in this way.
After that, though we didn't always live out, as Martin Luther King said, the true meaning of our creed, but we were on this trajectory, trajectory right we were trying to better live out this principle of fundamental human equality as the declaration uh you know says we hold these truths to be self-evident that all of us are created equal by god right try to live that out more consistently i think it's fair to say and it's especially true in medicine but it's i think it's true more broadly throughout the culture.

As we've become post-Christian, as we've repaganized, at least again within our spheres of power,

not necessarily with the broader people, we've lost the ability to say that all human beings are equal. We've lost the basis for saying that.
We do affirm the view, like equality is maybe

one of the most overused buzzwords

around, right?

But I think of it

almost like

kind of

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like like like like like like like saying now we do affirm the view like equality is maybe one of the most uh overused buzzwords around right um but i think of it almost like cut flowers um as an analogy you can cut the flower off of its roots and put it in water and it'll stay beautiful for a little while right but everybody knows that once you cut the flower from its foundation from its roots it's it's dying it's going to die. These ideas, these foundational ideas like fundamental human equality have their roots in Judeo-Christian ethics.
There's just absolutely no doubt about it. And we have cut these ideas away from their roots and we still talk about them, right? We still even use them as important ideas.
But the issue is the idea is dying. The idea of fundamental human equality is dying.
We're no longer on the trajectory of trying to live this idea out more consistently. We are now in a very different trajectory.
People are losing their fundamental equality. We are thinking less about how to do this and more about, well, is it really being human that matters at the end of the day? Maybe it's about autonomy.
Maybe it's about rationality. Maybe it's about self-awareness.
Maybe it's about IQ. I'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.
And so once you move away from fundamental human equality, you're left with these trait Xs,'s i call them and it's very clear that human beings don't have those in equal capacity right or some human beings don't appear to have them at all right i mean it doesn't i think it's really obvious that iq determines more than any other factor your material success in life there's any question about that and i also think it has a huge effect on your interactions with the criminal justice system. I think it's a very important predictor of your life.
I don't think it has anything to do with your value. So this is my opinion.
In other words, I think IQ is super important. We should talk about it.
Okay. But God doesn't care what your IQ is.
It has nothing to do with whether or not you have a soul. You have a soul because you're a human being.
Your soul is identical in value to mine. You may have an IQ twice mine.
You may be three times as rich as me. It doesn't matter.
No, that matters. So just to be clear about my view on this.
Yeah, yeah. And 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.
If we think about the trajectory before of trying to live out this more consistently, we're now moving in a very different direction where people are falling out of the circle of protection for fundamental human equality. And so we've already talked about prenatal human beings and neonatal human beings as classic examples of that.
In 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, which is a first century, essentially a catechism, which gives us a really important insight into how they lived. And they contrast the way of life with the way of death and say Christians need to lead the way of life.
And the way of life is explicitly focused on a couple of things one don't do abortion and infanticide and they were talked about together explicitly because that's how the ancient um pagan greeks and romans thought about them when was this written first century i don't know exactly when in the first century but first century so it's very very old it's very very well it's called the didache you can find it online you can find it's got to be one of the oldest christian documents yeah it's one of very old. It's very, very old.
It's called the Didache. You can find it online.
You can find- It's gotta be one of the oldest Christian documents. Yeah, it's one of the oldest Christian documents.
It 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. And the way of life is explicitly focused on one of the central messages of Christ, which is uh to see my face he says in the poor right see the image my image in the poor um but okay so this goes all the way back to the very earliest parts of the church right and and now we're not just seeing this with regard to the populations that so perfectly mirror that newborn children and prenatal human beings but now we're seeing it with people with catastrophic brain injuries so if i can just speak briefly about um brain death um maybe not so briefly because we have a two-hour podcast here and it's it's somewhat complicated but i need to set it up a little bit so so i am I am, uh, I do a lot of work, um, on secular utilitarian philosophy and I'm actually friends with Peter Singer, who's a very well-known secular utilitarian philosopher.
We don't agree on many, many things, but I think he's wrong in really interesting ways. And he sees, he's seen any sense, the seventies, he's seen what it has meant to reject a Christian, um, ethic of human life.
And he said very explicitly, if you're pro-choice for abortion, you also need to be pro-choice for infanticide. He's right about that.
Just to work the other way. If we're protecting babies, we should protect prenatal babies as well.
But interestingly, he says it really wasn't abortion that was the first moment where we decided to say being human doesn't matter. It was brain death.
So 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. The first was the ventilator, so a machine that helps people breathe.
And the second was the transplantation of vital organs from one individual to another. And once we got the capacity to transplant organs, as you might imagine, as we have today, huge waiting lists developed for this resource.

And then the ventilator was invented, and suddenly we had people with catastrophic brain injuries on ventilators. And something called the Harvard, ad hoc Harvard Committee to Determine Death or Brain Death came up with a proposal.
They said, let's decide that all these individuals with catastrophic brain injuries on ventilators have something called brain death and are dead. And therefore, we can take their organs and give them to others who need them.
And by the way, I'm not hating an organ donation. I'm an organ donor myself.
I'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. So 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.
We don't want to release a document that says that's what we're doing. And so they changed the document.
But it's still, even with the edited document, it's very clear. And this is historically well known that this is what happened.
And 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. Did not have the same moral status as others.
Because guess what, Tucker? People in these so-called brain-dead states can gestate children. They can fight off infections.
If you cut into their body, they release adrenaline, and their heart rate speeds up. There 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, and her body is herself.

She's able to gestate a child despite being declared brain dead.

One of my favorite all-time headlines about this that shows the confusion we have about this in the culture is from the AP. It said, brain dead woman gives birth birth then dies so it's just like the full confusion on display in one very short headline um but maybe you remember this case from a few years ago jahai mcmath um in california she was this african american girl who had a surgery go really terrible for sleep apnea had a catastrophic brain injury in, and the state of California declared her dead.

And her very Christian, also African-American parents said, she's not dead. And the state of California said, and her medical team said, yes, she is.
And 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. She's dead.
What is it you don't understand? She's dead. And then a few days later, she got her first period.
And 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. And the other states don't allow that? They don't allow it.
They don't allow it. What does that mean, they don't allow it? It would be as if from their, in my view, deeply misguided view, they would say, well, you can't just say a corpse is alive, right? Like this is a dead individual.
This is a corpse. In fact, some of the medical ethics, the deans of medical ethics around the United States reacted to this case, the Jehi McMath case, saying, this is a corpse.

They're animating a corpse. Who are these people? She's going to decompose, they said.
Why did it make them so mad? Why are they so, so many physicians, most physicians seem like they just love death. What is that? Yeah, I don't know exactly.
I think, because I want to talk about that i know i know and i want you i no no no 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 and each time i had the same question which is i would hope that the default desire for doctors would be to see people live.

And yet I have seen it in my own life.

Most doctors I know get off on death.

They love death.

That is just my observation.

Maybe you've got a different one.

But what is that?

I do think there is 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.

Well, pro-death, I think would be the opposite.

Is anathema, right?

But why?

Because 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. But 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.
Why would you pound your fist on the table and demand that other people think she's dead or why would you push parents to abort a child with down syndrome or spinal bifida both of which are so survivable and thrive you know you can thrive with both of those things so but why are they so vested and we must kill like they're not neutral on it that's right like what is that well i think there would be at least two sets of reasons in the case of uh brain death the first one would be unique to brain death the other one would connect with what's called vegetative state i think maybe offensively vegetative state which is different i'm going to say more about that in a minute if that's all right but with brain death i think what's always in the background here is what the harvard brain death committee was concerned with organs, right? So if, 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, then the number of, uh, of, um, then the waiting list for organs just goes way through the roof right now. And this is actually brought up.
There have been champions, secular champions of attempts to really call brain death or what it is a kind of fiction. Well, originally it was a fiction that was just designed to put us in a position to get better organs and more organs.
When he gives talks, he routinely gets questions like, you shouldn't be talking about this. You know what's going to be the result of what you're talking about here? People are going to die because they're not going to get organs that they need.
They're going to die on organ waiting lists. And so don't talk about this because people will die.
Don't talk about vax injuries because vaccines are too important. It's a classic utilitarian perspective on these things.
But if you find yourself lying or ignoring harm to individuals on behalf of some imagined greater good, then you're just evil. I mean, I don't really see another plausible description of that.
If 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. I think in many cases it is, but this just follows logically.
Why would we get bent out of shape aboutahai mcmath is a person or not or has human dignity or not what really matters at the end of the day is that we maximize good outcomes from this situation because that's a nazi attitude that's literally that's literally the attitude that they were not ashamed of they bragged about they wrote about it extensively we seem to have forgotten all of this we 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 it's like super simple right sorry no that that's well said um i think i think another angle into it though is this ideological a different kind of 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, right? And this is explicitly said. So let's talk, if you don't mind, about a so-called vegetative state.
Yeah, okay. So if I could, sorry.
Yeah, no, go ahead. I'm getting so spun up.
I keep interrupting you. I beg your pardon.
No. You've said three times that brain death is a category that was kind of devised.

It's really almost like a marketing tool in order to increase the supply of organs. But what is brain death exactly? When it's explained to laymen like me, it's they're flatlining.
We're measuring brain activity and there's none. Is that real? Yeah, so part of the problem here is there really isn't a good way to test for what's called whole brain death um in part because and this was actually after the harvard um uh 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 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. And 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.
And that's fine. You could say that as a thing, but then we have to find ways to determine that.
And there's- To measure to see if it's true? See if it's true. And 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.
There'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 brainstem. There's all sorts of debates now about how precisely to test for whether the

hypothalamus is still alive. And some people will say, well, who cares whether the hypothalamus is

still alive? Other people will say, well, no, we got to determine whether the whole brain is that

or not. And meanwhile, we got this individual, regardless of what's happening here, who's

fighting off infections, maybe gestating a child, right? Maybe reaching their first period.

and so I I don't

so anyway

to answer your question

none of which should be possible

if the

Thank you. here who's fighting off infections, maybe just dating a child, right? Maybe reaching their first period.
And so, I don't, so anyway, to answer your question. None of which would be possible if the brain was dead.
Well, this is an interesting question. These, 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.
I think we just sort of said, well, that sounds right. Especially, 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.
I wonder if we don't too quickly just assume that these things are controlled by our brain. One of the interesting things I like to point out, or I think it's interesting, I hope you your viewers think it's interesting um when the ancient egyptians would mummify somebody you know what they did with the brain no they threw it out they thought it cooled the blood now what what would what would a culture have to be thinking about themselves right to think that the brain is something you're really not going to need in the afterlife it just cools the blood blood.
It's sort of this thing that you won't really need as opposed to us. You really sort of imagine ourselves like, I'm raised in this culture.
I kind of imagine myself inside my head here. All these thought experiments in my world, imagine like, what if you had your brain in a vat on Mars, right? Would that be you, right, in that vat? Like if we could put it in a tub of nutrients and give it electric shocks.
We 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? These are questions that transhumanists are really asking right now. Very serious people are asking these questions, but 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.
I want to push back on that. I want to say we are in sold bodies, right? We are our bodies and that we were who we were before we had our brains, right? Prenatally, we were who we were before we had brains.
And 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. I think some people have speculated.
Wait, what? So it's no accident that a lot of these cases these so-called brain death cases are um children right so there's been some speculation some informed speculation that says well you know what these children have um the ability to have other parts of their bodies take over for their brains when their brains are destroyed perhaps their spinal cord perhaps some other way of thinking about this the body as you know is an incredibly mysterious thing and um and by the way we still have not found the place where consciousness exists in our brain maybe you've heard about this for for now for decades we've been exploring the brain where is the consciousness where is the consciousness is it here is in this part of the brain is it here it's nowhere nobody 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 maybe consciousness is an illusion because it must be in the brain the consciousness must be part of the brain and and that i that that is such a revealing claim because It's an absurd claim right it's an absurd claim right and that's also a non-scientific claim i mean the basis of science is inquiry yeah and taking your preconceptions and setting them aside and trying to see things if i if i know for a fact my car keys are in the kitchen i'm never going to find them in my bedroom that's right so why why would you start with that assumption well i mean i agree with your critique i think it's because we are so in especially in the developed west focusing on rationality i again i'm a the kantian sort of i think therefore i am cogito ergo sum i'm a thinking thing that's not a christian vision of the human person which we are not thinking things we are in sold bodies? And we can have in sold living bodies with a very seriously damaged brain, perhaps a fully dead brain. And what's so interesting again about children is it looks like the spinal cord can maybe take over for some of what the brain did.
And we know that we're conscious beings, right? That's just a brute fact about us. And we also know that at least so far after many decades of trying we can't find uh consciousness in the brain anywhere and so that's just a brute fact about us.
And we also know that at least so far, after many decades of trying, we can't find consciousness in the brain anywhere. And so that suggests to me anyway, that consciousness is a product of something else, right? It's not a product of the brain, most likely.
It'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 body's holistically considered in relationship with each other and our environment i don't fully understand some of those arguments but at the very least i think we need to expand this idea that we're more than just our brains well and also at the very least i think we need to approach medicine and science with renewed humility yes if 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. And 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.
Like, why don't we admit that? believe in god why not force doctors to admit that at gunpoint actually like why how can you get a medical license if you won't admit that doctors shots fired no no i'm sorry i don't mean literally why don't we force that i i think it helps to have a context in which um there is a, right, who is all-knowing and in whom ultimate truth resides. And it's not from you, right? It's not up to us.
It's not in us. I agree, but I mean, I don't know.
Most of my life, I haven't spent thinking about God. I do now.
But I mean, most of my life, I didn't. Yeah.
But I don't know. I'm 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.
And if you don't know that, then you're dangerous. Yeah, this is just pure speculation.
I guess I'm just trying to, especially now that I teach at a medical school and I've been in academia for now almost two decades, those kind of humble

sort of um yeah humble approaches are not rewarded in in these structures right in these systems what is rewarded is saying i've got the answer right or i'm on my way finding the answer. I've got this new piece of information about this.

That'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. because 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 we do precisely because we need to start with the virtue of humility first. Well, right.
And 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.

That's right.

Much more listening, much less writing that's right much more listening much less talking and it seems the opposite that's absolutely true there's a there's a tremendous amount of um pressure put on academics and including those in academic medicine to just publish your ass off right and just get paper after paper out there and we have as you know a replication crisis now in part because of this um can you explain for people who don't follow what that is so um in part but not only because of the the intense pressure on academics and especially in academic medicine to advance one's career through publications uh there's been a real um lack of humility in sort of sitting with data and books and studies uh and an attempt to sort of just push things out and get your name out there and get your publications out there um 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 there's some glory in finding that they were wrong about it. But not a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to confirm or replicate studies.
But when they do, we now have found a replication crisis that a lot of these- But replication is just like a virtue it's prerequisite for science that's right it's a basic scientific precept if you're going to make a claim in order for us to declare it true it has to be replicated that's right and it's a deep and foundational problem that especially in areas which are ideologically charged let's's say, the replication crisis is particularly profound.

So it's not just about publish or perish,

get a ton of articles out there to advance your career.

It's also to get the right kind of articles out there,

the 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?

These are politically charged things. And in order to get it published in the best journals, you probably need to have the quote-unquote right answer as well.
That seems like total corruption. There's corruption.
I mean, there's absolutely no doubt about it. I mean, I experienced this even in my own world of bioethics where you just sort of know what journals you need to submit to if you have a particular sort of argument and a sort of conclusion.
You say, well, I could submit it there, but it's never going to be published there. It doesn't matter how good the argument is.
It doesn't really matter whether I've done good research or have adequately investigated this and I'm making very tight arguments. I have the wrong conclusion for that journal.
And so you submit it to a different journal, right? Or you don't submit it at all or you submit it to an online journal or something that might actually get read by people. Just submit it to Twitter.
Yeah. I mean, that's increasingly where a lot of this is headed.
Twitter has actually been one of the places where we've been able to most clearly see the replication crisis, right? I was half joking, but what do you mean? Well, I mean, so many of these things before Twitter and before social media happened on the down low, right? They would just be, only the specialists would sort of know, like, oh, so-and-so, their article got retracted. ored or like so and so followed behind them it wasn't able to replicate their work or you know whatever now 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 this 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 so 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 so i'm sorry back to the topic that you were explaining before i once again so rudely sidetracked the conversation, which was brain death and a persistent vegetative state.

Right. So 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.
I think that's right. We're trying to get ways, for instance, to do a better job testing for hypothalamic function, for instance, and brainstem function.
But actually one of the difficulties that is pushing us 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 actually pretty arbitrary how we test. Who cares whether we can test for the function of the hypothalamus? Who cares actually actually how much of the brain is dead they're they're good they're not the person they ever will be again or something like this so there is um there is something in most people that kind of agrees with that though they don't want themselves or their loved ones living on a ventilator and i think that's fair to say i'm that's right uh 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 as long as it's a choice about how to live if somebody says to me and and uh you know my parents a friend spouse listen charlie i i would not want to be on a ventilator so can you make sure I'm not living on a ventilator? It's not that I want to die in any particular moment.
I just don't want to live my life that way. 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.
And we do that all the time, right? Even the food we eat, as your show has hopefully pointed out, is maybe a choice how to live. We can foresee if we eat or behave or exercise a certain way.
We have certain outcomes, right? It's a choice about how to live, not a choice about how to die. So that's different from saying, quite different from saying, because you're on a ventilator and you don't have the requisite brain activity, you're dead, right? You're dead.
That's quite different. And 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 people alive indefinitely.
In fact, this is not at all a Christian ethic. I mean, just look up at Christ on the cross.
It's pretty obvious. You don't need to do everything to save your life, right? If we're imitating Christ, the early, the church's martyrs also give a great example of this.
It can be a very clear example of idolatry, in fact, to just pursue life, extended life. I agree.
So, I hope I'm making it clear that that's not what I'm saying, that we have to do everything. We should not do everything.
We don't make an idol out of life. At the same time, we don't tell ourselves silly bedtime stories about individuals who gestate children or get their first period as being dead.
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Yeah, and I think we should, I agree with everything you've said. I would never want to be in a ventilator.
I mean, I'm 55. My kids are grown.
I'm, you know, whatever. I have no reason to want to prolong life to that extent at all.
And I think it's degrading and I would hate it. So I'm definitely in the do not resuscitate side of this argument and that we are the ethicist, tell me if that's immoral no you're perfectly

legitimate but i do think we should really care about whether a person is alive or dead like i do think we should fret about these questions because every life has intrinsic value and again if you treat people like objects you're going to wind up murdering millions of them because we've seen that again and again. So to the question of organ donation and quote harvesting organs, repulsive

phrase. millions of them because we've seen that again and again.
So to the question of organ donation and quote, harvesting organs, repulsive phrase, but I think it's still used, right? Harvesting. Yeah.
And it's repulsive because it treats people like farmland. Just like a medium in which this thing grows, this heart, liver, kidney.
I don't like that at all. But it raises the question, are people from whom organs are, quote, harvested still alive? I think these are deep questions we need to ask, Tucker.
And 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? Again, I'm an organ donor.

I have people in my life who are walking around right now because of organ donation.

It's an incredibly important thing.

But again, we should not be telling ourselves false stories about who is alive and who is dead just because we want more organs.

That was the foundational mistake of—

So it sounds like we're harvesting organs, taking organs from living people.

If brain death is not death, then that's definitely what we're doing. Do you think we're doing that? Yeah.
Okay, so that's kind of heavy. It's really heavy.
It's really heavy. I'm sure you're going to be yelled at for saying that because like how dare you get in the way of progress, but.
And let me say it for a third time. I'm an organ donor.
I support organ donation. Yes.
I also support telling the truth about whether people are alive or dead. And 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.
That was the foundational shift where we moved away from fundamental human equality and we moved it to something else and then we slid into persistent vegetative state you probably remember the terry schivo case very well very well um terry schivo for your listeners who aren't aware was a woman who also undergo underwent a catastrophic brain injury due to an eating disorder as i recall and her husband and her family disagreed about what should be done to be clear a persistent so-called vegetative state no person no human beings a vegetable but that's just sort of the language we use um or have used it's changing now but uh she did not have brain death she was she had other parts a large part of her brain had been fundamentally compromised but she had sleep and wake cycles and she responded there's a amazing video online you can watch of her responding to music somebody plays music she just like sort of leans over and sort of makes a noise that sort of almost smiles um people who were there like her parents said they responded to her there's a huge fight you remember it sort of engulfed the nation in the early part of the this millennium early aughts anyway um it's interesting her her i think nefarious husband won that battle and they uh they uh starved her and dehydrated her to death after declaring essentially that she was no longer there in fact if you're if you if anybody would challenge me on this i challenged them to look at the gravestone that um her husband created for her it says that um 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 in the i think it was 2003 when they dehydrated her to death.

It says she was at peace. And 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.
What 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. Now, 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.
Joe Fins, who's a secular bioethicist, wrote a great book called Rights Come to Mind, if listeners want to explore it.

We now know that a significant percentage of people in a so-called vegetative state are actually conscious.

They've done scans of their brains, fMRI scans, and they ask them yes or no questions, yes being imagine you're playing tennis and and no being uh read a book in your room and they answer by what parts of their brain light up correctly they answer these yes or no yes or no questions correctly we've further learned that with the right kind of therapies uh joe finn points out in this book you can actually prove that more 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. In 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 uh just an extraordinary story um but yet so many people have this idea that uh that uh 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 i 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? So it's the concern that I'm concerned about or the lack of concern.
I 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. You think, I don't want this for myself.
I mean, I understand all of that. I'm not judging anybody.
But the core idea is so important that all of us have identical moral value. Because without it, society becomes really dark and evil.
That's right. Not just in the way we treat the weak in hospice or in neonatal care, but in the way that we treat everybody, the way our economy is structured.
So when I was a kid, I grew up in a rich world. Rich people had a sense of noblesse oblige.
We're fortunate. That 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. We're not gods because we're rich.
Like that was a, I mean, I know I was there. That was a prevalent feeling that is totally absent.
You think Larry Fink thinks that like poor people are as good as him? No, he's like a disgusting money worshiper who thinks he's better than poor people. And they all think that.
It's not just Larry Fink he's obviously genuinely repulsive but they're all that way that's right and that's a big change is it not am i imagining this well this gets back for me anyway back to the didache right because 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 fantasize they were interested in the what you just described right the rest of life from birth till death like there's a lot of years in there the rich and unjust uh judges of the poor were named explicitly in the case part of the way of death part of the way of death and that all the early church fathers tucker thought about abandoning the poor as akin to indirect homicide right and you owe the poor um from your substance actually And you put your salvation in peril if you don't give from your substance to the poor because they deserve it. It's owed them as a matter of natural right.
If you have too much, you owe it to them. And this isn't something that's made up.
It comes right out of sacred scripture. Jesus couldn't be more clear about this.
That culture was still alive when I was a kid. Like, I remember that very well.
I remember people saying that and I remember them acting like it was true. And these are not even faithful Christians that I grew up around at all.
But 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. That's all gone.
It's gone. I mean, just get there back in the day and in I think it was a medieval practice rich people would routinely ask invite the the poor beggars outside the Cathedral to pray for their loved ones at their funeral because they would think these people bear bear the face of Christ in a special way and I better get— Well, that's taken directly, of course, from a story of the New Testament.
Yeah. Yeah.
And that's what I've loved so much about this kind of shift that we've seen. I don't know if it's on the right or that's even the way to describe it today.
You've been an important leader, I think, in this shift for conservatives, for people who are more traditional to say, we 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. In fact, not only do we not have to choose between them, it's part of the same ethic.
It's part of the same vision. It'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.
And again, to go back to the debate that the vice presidential candidates had recently recently it was so heartening for me to hear jd vance talk about both to say like yeah we got some challenges right now with prenatal justice and we have to we have to re-earn trust but we don't need to choose between trying to protect babies in utero and neonatally now and 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. And so to have someone like him be so public about saying, we're going to do both of these things together, We're going to pursue prenatal justice and we're going to pursue economic justice

for women and families

who are in these difficult circumstances.

What a beautiful thing.

If that takes fire,

if that takes hold,

I am just so excited about what that could mean.

Because this is something I haven't really emphasized.

I want to make sure I emphasize this, Tucker.

In 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. So again, with brain death, what pushed it? Organs, right? So many people thought, Terry Schiavo, why would we put resources into caring for her?

Why 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. And he's had crickets from his colleagues.
Because we've got wars to fund. We've got lots of things that people don't want.
Well, we 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.
It'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. You should never be happy or cavalier about the deaths, particularly if like huge civilian populations, a million people in Iraq.
And no one has, obviously no one has gone to prison. Lots of people should go to prison for it and no one ever will, but we should at least say that's really bad.
That's like a million human beings or, you know, what's going on in the Middle East now? I mean, half the right, the whole Daily Wire every day, they're so excited about all these people getting killed. And it's like there's not one person who stands up and says, look, I'm not for this or that group.
These people are terrorists. That's all fine.
I get all that. I'm not even contesting it.
But if civilians get killed, noncombatants get killed, we should feel bad about that. I don't understand.
And if we don't feel bad about that, that suggests a darkness that's really scary. And 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 people who shouldn't be here or whatever, victims of crime.
They don't care because they don't care about other people, actually. That's the theme that connects those two.
It connects all of this. Oh, 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.

And I just, I think to myself, I can't believe I'm in the same category with these people.

I have nothing in common with them.

I'm never going to celebrate someone's death ever.

Why would you?

And it's wrong.

Sorry.

I was talking.

And what a beautiful.

Do you see this?

Oh, yeah.

And by the way, this is, again, I hate to keep coming back to to this but maybe i'll pull my moral theologian card one more time this is just jesus and the gospels and the early church again right this is this anti-war uh swords into plowshares turn the other cheek love your enemies augustine thought it was so important to love your enemies that he he was not a pacist, but he said, if you're going to kill your enemies, you got to do it out of love for your enemies. Well, I agree with that, or at least it should be accompanied by guilt and shame.
Yes. I've done all kinds of bad things in my life.
I'm sure I'll do more, unfortunately, but my only defense would be, I think I felt guilt and shame, probably not enough. Like, you should feel bad.
And I even, I 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. He killed a friend of mine, actually.
I'm not for Osama bin Laden. But I thought, you know, we should just have reverence.
When someone dies, we should have reverence for death itself. I mean, we can be happy that someone who is attacking us is gone and the threat is gone.
I think that's worth celebrating. But we should never feel glee watching a human soul be extinguished.
I just don't, I think that's a really ugly habit to get into and it diminishes us and turns us into monsters. It turns us into Osama bin Ladenen type people and 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 i don't care if it's osama bin laden the guy i like least but that's precisely okay i probably shouldn't even have said that but i felt that at the time like it sounds like you're talking about trying to find a way to love your enemy i don't think a country can i mean could there really be a truly christian country that loved its enemies maybe would get invaded the first day i don't know i'm not a statesman or theologian so i don't have to make these but 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.
I just think it's important not to worship death. I just, I don't know.
I mean, all of us have it in ourselves. How many videos have I seen on the internet of someone, you know, a robber getting shot to death at a 7-Eleven, and I'm like, you go shoot that robber.
Like, I get it. I understand that impulse.
It's very human, but it's ugly and we should fight against it. That's right.
That's right. And 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.

But of course you would be for anti-war.

Of course you would be for justice,

for impoverished and middle-class populations

who are under siege.

Of course you would be for disability rights.

Of course you would be anti-abortion.

Of course you would be anti-infanticide.

And of course you would be anti-euthanasia,

physician-assisted killing,

because it's all part of the same vision.

And I'll see you next time. uh for disability rights of course you would be anti-abortion of course you would be anti-infanticide and of course you would be anti-euthanasia physician assisted killing because it's all part of the same vision and not throwing away old people and putting them in some super depressing facility i don't know the whole thing i don't think there's any surprise when i look at how little our leaders care about americans they just don't care.
They step over the bodies of drug addicts on the way to go vote to fund the Ukraine war. Those two facts are connected.
I think if you don't care about people, you will mistreat them. And the last category you should have ruling over you is people who don't care about other people.
Like that, oh man, like keep them away from power, right? Can I say one thing about older people here in light of this? Especially those who are, I mean, we're in the midst, we're in the very early stages of a dementia crisis, as you know. What is that? Can you be more sure? Sure.
So we already don't care properly for reasons you just suggested for people with moderate and later stage dementia. Essentially, we shuffle them off into so-called care homes.
And really, the New York Times did this very interesting expose about how many of them are treated. and essentially many of them, a high percentage, because they're sort of difficult to take care of in some contexts, are given antipsychotic drugs, not because they have any psychosis, but as essentially a way of keeping them more docile, in part because we don't put enough resources into caring for them.
And 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 they are shocked that we put them away in the way that we do we literally throw them away into a into a room until they die and we're this is what we're doing now in the next 20 years unless the mean siblings get what they want in terms of treating type 3 diabetes with the the number of with later stage dementia is going to double. In 30 years, it's going to triple.
In 30 years, Tucker, what are we going to do with three times the number of people with dementia? Are we going to adequately care for them? Are we going to find new ways to help them? Or are we going to slouch towards physician-assisted killing as we do? Well, we're going to kill them. We're going to do what canada is doing that's right and so that that's that's the next um in a book i wrote um called losing our dignity how secularized medicine is undermining fundamental human equality i finished the last three chapters by saying um this is the next shoe to drop in our loss of fundamental equality we're going to end up saying that individuals who've lost their rationality and self-awareness at the end of life no longer count as persons, 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.
Canada's already saying it about individuals at the end of life with later stage dementia. and 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, a kind of recovery of the kinds of, the vision of human dignity,

fundamental equality that we've been talking about here.

You've spent the last month or so

traveling around the country.

I've heard you say you've been,

I don't know if the pretty words in your mouth here,

but rejuvenated or you have some sort of

really positive experience as a result of this. Do you think, you know, I'm putting words in your mouth here, but rejuvenated or you have some sort of really positive experience as a result of this.
Do you think, you know, I'm isolated in academia in a lot of ways. Do 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, yes, grandpa, dad, my neighbor, he doesn't know his his name he doesn't know his wife's name but he matters just the same as anyone else and we are going to rearrange our lives to care for him in his final journey on this earth or do you think the ship has sailed like um we've just jettisoned the cut flowers are dying um there's no way to reattach them to the roots.
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Workday, moving business forever forward. I mean, one of the reasons that immigrants can't believe how we treat our elderly is because they have intact families and we don't.
Yeah. Right.
So it's pretty hard when you have a lot of elderly without any family, actually, way more than any other time in our history. This is just one among countless issues that every person deals with every single day that turn on how we see each other.
Do we see other human beings as fellow human beings, as people with souls whose lives inherently inherently matter whether we like them or the life they're living or not it'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 not a government authority but authority above that or do we see ourselves as gods i, these are all like basic questions. And I think the way that we understand all of these things depends on our core understanding of who we are and how much power we have.
Do you really believe you have the right to kill somebody except in self-defense? Where do we get that idea? Only God has that power. I will just say this.
Here's what I believe is happening. I think the last 80 years, really, since we dropped that second bomb on Nagasaki have been an anomaly in human history.
And I think because of these profound technological, very rapid technological advances, people have lost context and lost perspective on themselves and i think um they think they're god and the result has been a pretty hollow culture it was just based on buying crap and sensual pleasure and i don't think that you know i'm not against buying crap or sensual pleasure i've engaged them both quite quite ardently but I don't think in the end they satisfy. Right, they don't.
It is like eating Snickers bars, which I've also done a lot of, and they just don't fill you up. And I do think that there's a recognition of that among almost every single person I know, and the result is a spiritual yearning that's becoming explicit.
And what that becomes, I have no idea. I'm terrible at predictions, but it is a kind of revival underway.
There's no question about it right now. And that will change people's attitudes.
One of the things I've learned from covering politics for more than 30 years is that we're coming at the story at the very end. 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 and um you know i i think people's attitudes are changing back i do think and with the rise of ai and transhumanism and phenomenon that are really designed to degrade and eliminate people and make them redundant irrelevant that is the point of ai and transhumanism is to kind of eliminate people um the body yeah the body and the mind yeah actually both yeah um i think people can feel that it scares the crap out of them and they're reacting reacting against that.
Thank heaven. And I know, of course, it's not too late.
I mean, AI and transhumanism will, you know, a thousand or 10,000 years ago from now will seem like the absurd jokes they are. I mean, AI is not going to extinguish people forever.
It may extinguish 99% of them, but people will live on. And they'll mock AI, you know, in future generations.
And transhumanism will just be like phrenology or some other stupid cult that we make fun of, slavery. You know, something we look back on and think, do people really do that? Do you know what I mean? It's absurd.
It's like it's only for creepy billionaires in the tech world think that's a good idea.

And of course, they're being controlled by spiritual forces, by demons.

That's so obvious to me.

But they're not going to win.

Are you joking?

They're not going to win.

They may win short term, but they're not going to win long term.

Anyway, yeah, no, I think there's massive change in people's deepest feelings about the world right now. And I think it's fair to call it a revival.
It's my sense too. And in part, because I've listened to some of the people you've interviewed and talked with over the last few weeks.
And I've looked at some of the data which suggests that um there's actually young men uh are the ones leading a return to church 18 to 29 year olds are leading uh return to church in fact that more yeah like how much can you eat how many random people can you sleep with it's not that fun how much time can you spend on your phone how much porn can you watch uh uh it's it's a deep and and they have a very strong sense too maybe even better than you and i have about it being foisted on them they just grew up in a culture that was that had these structures already in place and if interestingly when um some of my colleagues do things like teach a class that would involve a technology fast for instance like those classes are totally full and like people want people want to get out of it they want an excuse to get out of it they want an excuse to get out of it it's i just am amazed you know given how many addictions i've beaten in my life you know things i never thought i stop doing, like smoking especially. Amazingly, I quit at the age of 45 or drinking.
No problem, I quit it. No problem.
I never would go back to either one of those things. Pretty hard to get off bad food and your phone.
I'll just say from my own experience, I think I'm pretty good at beating addiction hard to get off your phone hard to stop eating wheat thins like those are very addictive both of those things and we've got as you've talked about on your show a few times now we've got the best um scientists and including social scientists and chemists and others who are working very hard to make sure that's the case, right? Because it makes a lot of people a lot of money. Well, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
I sort of missed the porn thing and thank God I didn't grow up with that. And, you know, obviously my phone's totally monitored.
So I'm like, even if I was into porn, I would not like porn. I wish I'm not.
But my my sense is that the whole country is addicted to porn. I don't know too much about it.
Oh, it's an extraordinary thing. I mean, we basically have a pornified culture.
Or the kind of things that you and I grew up with is sort of odd. You say, well, that's how a porn star dresses.
Or these are attitudes that come from porn. This thing that's out there that's separate from the rest of the culture.
It's now pretty well accepted that the culture itself has been pornified. So the logic of porn is now the logic of the culture more broadly.
In fact, this is how most young people today understand what sex is and what it's for. This is why, I don't know if you've seen in recent, I think it's been over the last couple of years, this has been a phenomenon, more and more women report being choked during sex right this is a phenomenon that's just come up almost directly because uh young men and boys see this uh on their phones and on their tv screens right yeah i i don't know again i'm 55 thank heaven um but i'll be gone soon we'll have to deal with any of this stuff.
But since you brought up something that forbidden and naughty, I'll just say for whatever it's worth, probably nothing. But I've heard a lot about this from, you know, younger people I come into contact with.
And it sounds like that's driven 100% by women. Just being honest from every report.
I mean, I was so shocked the first time I heard that. since i don't really see a connection between violence and sex i never have it's just deeply unappealing to me um maybe i'm revealing too much here but but i mean it you know we all have preferences i've never really understood that violence really no violence is not not hot but anyway here's the point i've talked to like more than three young who were like, oh yeah, this is a constant request that I'm not that into from women.
Okay, I didn't know that. I've heard that so much that I think it's really interesting.
What is that? I don't know what that's about. I don't know what that's about, but it does show that the impact now is not just on men, right? So we used to think that porn was mostly consumed.
It still is, I think i think the numbers say mostly by men and boys but with that i think it really strongly indicates is that women and girls are also you know i really i don't know i'm really interested in how people live just because i'm a curious person so i've like i always ask questions about all sorts of stuff with people probably too many questions but um but do you know who has the most sex and the best sex of all yeah married people by far by far and i know that is a pretty very pro-sex protestant because i'm i don't know for reproduction you know yeah um it seems like people are not having sex no no they're not i would joke with my students and say you know you guys claim to be these wild people and you look at my generation older generation as fuddy duddies or whatever that's not what the numbers say no that's not at all at all um and so it's interesting to think about what that is it doesn't seem to be a kind of i mean it's not clear i mean if there's 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 but could also be just again the ubiquity of sitting around playing video games and watching porn all day long too. Well, it does, my strong overwhelming sense is that the distrust between the sexes, particularly when younger people, is kind of the defining fact.
Like they don't trust each other and they don't, they seem to have a lot of trouble getting along. I don't know.
I don't want this to turn into like a long catalog of all of our social problems. But 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 at all.
And that's become really obvious at every level. At 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, you know, just a basic middle-class life that's like beyond people's reach.
And 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. But everyone feels that anxiety of like, holy shit, any minute this could all end.
And that's a weird environment. Like I grew up during the Cold War and I was on my honeymoon when it ended.
So that's how old I am. And I never felt, I was sort of aware, you know? Yeah.
I never really felt like any second we could die in a nuclear conflagration now i definitely feel that way don't you and we have obviously something that didn't exist back then uh our addiction to our phones and our social media which is constantly calibrated to make us feel anxious and depressed and when it works and it totally works again we got the best social scientists in the world working for these companies. It would be strange if we weren't.
It'd be strange if we weren't. How long after you wake up do you check your phone? Oh, my gosh.
I don't want to admit it. It's okay.
I've admitted I love Wheat Thins. Yeah, yeah.
No, my phone is my alarm clock. Yeah.
So, like, for so many people. So, immediately.
So, my phone wakes me up and then my phone is in my hand and so i see the notifications on my phone and i want to see what's going on in the news that day or somebody's texted me right when you wake up oh yeah oh yeah so how bad for your spirit is that it's horrific like how many mornings have been wrecked you're speaking for everyone right now not just yourself i'm mostly speak i mean with you about my but i'm definitely speaking for lots of other people yeah you are yeah but 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 i mean we just spent an hour and a half talking about infanticide so like you know the kinds of things i think about almost all day long are horrific things right so i and my algorithm knows that so i get sent these things people also send these things because they know i'm interested right so oh did you see what so and so hospital is doing now and that this that and other? So, yeah, I mean, 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? How 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 talked with other people. My 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.
But, 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 we're gonna try to do the best job to make us fail in in these in these opportunities and i've tried multiple times we even have this uh thing that we we haven't used yet we bought it it's apparently this box you can sort of put your phone into and like you have to have a specific combination combination um to open it 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 um but yeah i used to feel that way about drinking you know sunday morning i'd think i've just i've got to stop this this is just too bad and you know ultimately i did but uh and i always knew i would like you can't be that hung over and like keep it. Yeah.
But I suspect I'll never get rid of this. So how do we live with it? Like, what is the good way that we live with those things? It's very, it's difficult for me to imagine because I've thought about this.
I've obsessed, frankly, over this question. And I think one of the solutions is to have a community of people around you that can hold you accountable for this.
And so much of what happens here, it seems to me anyway, is 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, where there could be people that would hold you accountable to that sort of thing.
Like I at least would, of course, make my kids leave their phones away from the dinner table, for instance. That's one small thing you can do.
But now I find myself at the dinner table pulling it out, right? And say, well, we're at dessert. I guess I can sort of check and see what's going on here.
Well, of course. Or in a restaurant, people leave it on the table.
Like they used to leave a pack of cigarettes. They leave the phone prefer the cigarettes um less less harmful uh much less i think there's a strong case for that oh my god marlboros compared to the iphone bring back the marlboros are you joking yes um so you live to 65 so you know what i mean uh okay so i want to.
Speaking of holding people accountable, so doctors have a unique power

in that they are present at the beginning and the end of life,

and they have the power to kill,

and it's not regulated at all, I've noticed.

And so really we're all dependent on the attitudes of physicians

to stay alive.

Like we need them to be pro-life, not simply against abortion, but in favor of life as a default position, or else we're screwed. And yet, so many of them, I have in my personal experience, are vehemently pro-death.
And I'm not saying all, but most doctors I have known are strongly pro-death. So, what do you do about that? Well, 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.
We 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.

Could that change?

I think the answer is yes.

It could also change in a very similar way

to the way that younger people more generally are changing. So young doctors, young nurses, young whoever will be caring for us.
I 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 as 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. And maybe that sort of thing is coming.
I hope it is. But if we can recover, and by the way, it was, you know, the first hospital was, it was of course a Christian hospital, right? Like this was invented in the Middle Ages.
Nurses, we were talking about at breakfast, all the original nurses were Catholic women religious. Nuns.
Nuns, nuns. They taught Nightingale everything that she knew.
There's still a really strong proliferation of religious hospitals, religious health organizations, health systems, many of which are Catholic. One in seven beds in the United States is actually at a Catholic facility.
There 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. Can we recover this vision of human dignity that we've been articulated? I think the answer is yes, but we're going to need to, and this is very much connected, again, to the show you did with the mean siblings about what is the God that is actually governing healthcare.
Is it the God of mammon? Is it the God of consumerism? Is it the God of efficiency? Or is it something else, right? Is 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. There are enough people out there, there are enough people out there, good people, to be a form of resistance to that.
I'm biased. I'm a Catholic moral theologian.
I teach at a Catholic medical school. Again, I teach at a seminary as well.
I 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 at the center of what we do. Um, and, and we are well primed to do something like that again, one in seven beds.
It's a massive, uh, opportunity and it doesn't need to be limited to Catholic institutions. There are plenty of non-Catholic institutions as well.
But at least that's where I put my hope. That's where I say we can have a revival.
Could you start a Christian hospital center and just say that we're not in the business of killing, we're in the business of healing? We're not going to do any killing here. That's right.
But could you do that? There's no hospital like that that I'm aware of. Oh yeah.
There's really no reason why you couldn't do it. I mean, in fact, this is what Catholic hospitals say.
We have ethical and religious directives, which we say we aren't going to do these things. There's no abortion in Catholic hospitals? No hospital.
There's no abortion. There's no euthanasia.
Now, I'm not going to say that there aren't hospitals and systems that try to find their way around these things. They do.
But it's at least in principle something that is forbidden. And it's not a no, it's a broader yes.
It's a yes to a particular vision of human dignity that requires no's.

but we have for decades now in the united states had a really powerful um uh attempt to carve out this space for ourselves through religious freedom to say, yeah, I know you guys you're for abortion. Yeah, I know you guys are doing this other thing.
We're not going to do that in these hospitals. And by the way, uh, we can no longer call this a Catholic hospital.
If you're going to force us to do that, we will shut ourselves down. In fact, if you tell us we need to do this.
And so far we've had pretty good success success, frankly, 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 physician-assisted suicide, even contraception, even something like that. Catholic hospitals don't prescribe contraception, at least in principle, shouldn't.
And so there's no reason, again, it needs to be limited to Catholic hospitals. Again, it was the, oh, I didn't mention this, that you know who carved out the religious freedom exemption for brain death in New Jersey? Orthodox Jews.
So it was Orthodox Jews who said, yeah, our guys who have brain dead, not dead, and you're not gonna force us to call them dead, and we're gonna carve out religious freedom exemption for ourselves here in New Jersey. So again, it doesn't need to be limited to even Christianity at all.
Plenty of religious folks and even non-religious folks can imagine how this might work apart from it. I agree completely.
People who think there's an authority higher than themselves have the humility that is the foundation of wisdom and good decision-making people who think they're god you know always wind up going way off the rails i think i think that's right and and it's not an accident right again 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 fantasize in the ancient world for the reasons that we've already talked so 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, in order not to save lives, but to feel like God, because 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? There are medical ethicists who work in those spaces.
Most of them, if I can just speak frankly, have been compromised with regard to the kinds of stuff we've been talking about so far. So most of them would either be neutral or have no connection to the kinds of visions of human dignity and nonviolence.
So they're not really ethicists then? Well, they're certainly not ethicists that you and I would recognize as being good ethicists. In fact, they might call them bad ethicists.
Oragandists for murder. That's what I would say.
I mean, I don't know. I'm sure the Nazis had ethicists too.
I mean, it doesn't mean anything at a certain point. If you kill Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I'm sorry, you don't have any working ethicists on staff.
Yeah, the largest conference in bioethics in the United States is something called the ASBH,

the American society for bioethics and humanities conference.

And I stopped going a few years ago because I realized that the only place that my voice was really welcome.

There was in the Christian ethics interest group that met in the evenings,

the main,

the main papers,

the main panels,

not at all interested in hearing from someone like me.

Justifying evil was kind of their job. what like what are their guidelines exactly well 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 turns out autonomy really high on the list the first principle Non-maleficence, do no harm, which is a classic bioethics principle.
Beneficence, do good and justice, give everyone their due. But those things, those principles, 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.
But don't kill people is not on the list? Well, you might say that's non-maleficence. Well, clearly it's not.
They've killed a lot of people. Or 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? And if we have a disagreement about what is good, then we're going to disagree about what non-maleficence is. I have to say, first, do no harm, right?

Well, if I think 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?

It might in fact be saying,

I don't really need to test for hypothalamic function.

Let's just declare this individual dead

and decide that we can take their organs, right?

So when we have these four sort of generic principles which rule the day in secular bioethics today, you can really get anywhere you want with them. And so it turns out, frankly, that those of us who are doing theological bioethics end up having our own conferences, our own journals, our own sort of intra-insulated discussions.
And secularized medicine really does, with few exceptions, there are some exceptions, secularized medicine rarely gives us the kind of hearing. So there are no ethics without God.
Like, why would there be, actually? I mean, I think there's a strong case to be made that especially, I mean, the first bioethicists were, in fact, theologians. We invented the field.
Well, if there's no higher power, then how can there be absolute right or wrong? You can't say that. You can say, I prefer this thing to that thing.
But you can't say that anything is wrong. Why is slavery wrong? Why is murdering your neighbor wrong? You can say, well, it's bad in some sense.
But you can't say it's wrong, can you? I think- On what basis are you saying that? Yeah, I think it's kind of, I like the cut flower analogy, right? You can still say, well, here's a flower, right? And it's pretty and it's whatever, but it's been cut off from the thing that gives it life. It's dying.
It's on its way out. So there are secular people who do offer visions of human dignity.
They offer visions of human equality, but they've been so cut off from the tradition that God gave us. But they can't justify it.
Yeah. If you pin them down and you just go walk them all the way back.
Well, I just think this is preferable. Like life is better than death.
Cruelty is bad. Why is it bad? That's right.
Because I don't like it. Okay.
But that, well, maybe I do like it. So how can you say you're right and I'm wrong because they're not appealing to anything above themselves they're forced to circular argument and 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, irrational, you know, and trying to impose their point of view on others.
But in reality, if you just walk 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. Why do you think that right why do you think you should maximize the greatest good for the greatest number and why

do you think that's the primary thing you should do and there aren't any rules governing that at all

they don't have an answer for that tucker it's just something that grabs them by some sort of

authority or intuition or self-evidence but that sounds a lot like a faith claim right they're just

children what have you ever asked them what do you think of the nazi euthanasia program

was that justifiable and how is it different from what we have now oh they would say that um the

I'm not sure. They're just children.
Have you ever asked them, what do you think of the Nazi euthanasia program? Was that justifiable? And how is it different from what we have now? Oh, they would say that the reason why the Nazi program was problematic is because it didn't respect patient autonomy, the first principle of bioethics. And we differ in what way? Well, given the conversation over the last hour and a half or whatever it's been, I think it's very clear we also do not respect patient autonomy.
Well, anyone who forces a vaccine on somebody, by definition, is not respecting patient autonomy. If 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? I'm treating you as my slave, as a subhuman, right?

Well, that's the argument that we've heard now for several years,

which is, isn't it interesting that

many of you were all about bodily autonomy,

are all about bodily autonomy

when it comes to reproductive rights, so-called,

but then we're very happy to jettison

conscience rights and bodily autonomy rights when it came to those sorts of issues. It doesn't seem to be, again, a kind of coherent vision of the good.
What did the ethicist community say to that? Well, I'm sure they went all in on the VAX mandates. I mean, of course they did.
Yeah. I mean, as you know, there have been a lot of important questions asked across the board recently that weren't asked at the time.
But at that point i think there was just a ton of fear right a sense that like um you know they this is almost always how it works right these sort of things get eroded because of claims that are so fearful not to be mean or whatever but that is my default um don't we have ethicists precisely for the moments that are ruled by fear isn Isn't that, that is what, when we lack a clear consensus on the right direction and when our judgment is muddled by panic, that's exactly the moment we need clear thinking ethicists.

Correct?

Correct.

That's why we employ them.

That's right.

And it was at that moment that they like were swept away by panic too?

In what? Not all of them but but a lot of but a lot of them a lot of them i was one of the ones arguing that um you know catholicism actually has a very robust sense of conscience right uh say like oh conscience is the place where you meet god in the most profound way and um and where you and where God speaks to you in the most profound way. And conscience rights actually have been coded left for a lot of the church's history in recent years.
But it's interesting, again, when this sort of fear took over, the focus on conscience sort of went away, right? Like this sense 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 reasonable people can disagree about that but i would say hey this is enough of a serious argument we ought to respect people's conscience rights to choose not to take the vaccine it's exactly because but but it's so interesting that those arguments sort of evaporated in light of all that fear.

Well, you didn't even hear them.

At least I didn't.

Okay, so last question.

I'll just say it because I know that you're a Catholic theologian, and I'm a lifelong Protestant.

So I've always been for contraception. I've never really thought about it.
It was one of the things we used to make fun of the Catholics about. They were against birth control.
Okay. They had these giant families, which we, for some reason, considered bad.
Don't! Like low rent, too many children. What are you, Irish? Oh, stop.
It's like I'm laughing because it's like, it's hard even to imagine having those attitudes now, but I once did. But anyway, I'm saying that by way of confession.
But 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. That's what they're focused on.

It's the one right you possess is the right to have an abortion.

That's the only right to speak freely,

to have control of your own money,

to gather with like-minded people,

to protest or petition your government.

None of those rights still exist.

The only right you have

is the right to end your pregnancy.

And of course, to prevent it in the first place through birth control.

And I just, I'm sensing a theme here.

I'm not a genius, but I have noticed that the thread that connects all of their main concerns is the same. And it's, they don't want you to have kids.
And why is that? It's a multivariant problem. I 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, right? You think? Yeah.
Yeah. And the reasons they give are very interesting.
Both Vance and Waltz in the recent debate were asked about paid family leave as a possible option um uh to

pursue and it was very interesting to hear them both offer sort of vaguely supportive ideas with regard to that a 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 others uh 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. Elizabeth 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.
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. No one wants to hang around a 15-year-old.
I got it. But when they're five, most women would like to raise their own kids and not import people from another country to do it.
And that seems like the most human of all desires. And it's the one desire that we thwart.
And 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. That's right.
Why do we have to choose between the two? Exactly. Well, how about the thing that people really want, like want like above all else which is to be with their own children the most important thing they'll ever do is have children maybe they like to be with them for a couple years no one even mentioned that i think they don't you know i'm just pure speculation i think one reason people don't mention it is precisely because of how deeply um the systems and structures which have led the two-income trap are foundational in our culture.
We would have to undo so much of what our culture has become. Well, I hope we do it immediately because it's so rotten and anti-human.
It's denying people the true source of joy in their lives and substituting it with like a banking job or something that's utterly pointless and destructive. No, what you really need to do instead of having kids is help us loan money and interest.
I mean, that's so disgusting to me. Sorry.
And actually the exploit of lending money and interest used to be called usury and it used to be considered a intrinsically evil act in the tradition, by the way. Well, my house so that's how i feel about it strongly um but that's considered wildly controversial i mean like you know having six trans kids is considered great but criticizing user is considered like whoa off the charts you're crazy well i find it disgusting i just want to be on the record saying that.
But anyway, why would you want to deny people children? What is that impulse? Again, I think it's multivariant. The other variable I would include is the climate crisis that is constantly thrown at people, right? To say, like, I don't want to bring children into a world where everyone's going to die for things related to climate change.
I think also- They're not worried about nuclear war, which they've, I mean, they brought us to the brink of nuclear war where we are as of right now, October 2nd, I think it's October 2nd, we're on the brink of nuclear war right now, but nobody cares. But they're worried about climate change.
I mean, what is going on? It doesn't make any sense. And again, there's no reason that we need to choose between the two, but at least I can't think of one.
But then there's also the drug companies here as well. And 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.
We talk about getting kids on a regimen, which makes pharma shit tons of money for almost their whole lives. Well, how about getting a young girl on birth control from the time she's 12 until the time she has menopause, right right think about that windfall think about um what that means uh for the broader culture uh too and we support we support patient autonomy right except for 12 year old girls where the doctor just okay it's time for you to be on contraception now and everyone sort of goes along ho-hum and uh and we're just now really starting to reckon with what this might be doing to women's bodies and beyond.
Well, it's a disaster. And young women know that.
And I think the number of young women getting off the pill is extraordinary. You know, extraordinary.
Right. For 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.
And I'll only mention that either. Not allowed.
But 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. And it's hard to escape the conclusion that there's a spiritual force behind that.
Yeah. And it's a spiritual force that may again run throughout the different topics we've engaged.
You know, it's, it's again, treating women, not as fully autonomous individuals, ironically, though that's the language which use, which is used to suggest that they need to do this, right. Except 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 i want to put this poison in my body right um that's again one of the things that's pushing uh back from this we we use the language which actually inverts what is actually happening we use the language of autonomy and empowering women when in reality it's it's doing precisely the opposite it's it's interesting though the connection i'm so glad you pointed that out it's not just like evangelicals in iowa no who are suspicious of the current program it's also like you know the furry armpit girls who are for that who i support strongly i should just say that um but what are they what do those two have in common no but it's it's kind of secular granola people too yeah to the extent they still exist there aren't many of those left i wish we had more they're great people yeah but what do they have in common with religious people well they're both kind of grounded yes actually in something beyond the digital world and they're both more in touch with themselves like those are the two groups in america who might actually have a moment of silence every day where they can listen you know what i mean yeah and and skeptical of what's being foisted on them by corporations and others who want to make money off it's only when you have that silence that you can be skeptical otherwise your senses are hijacked hijacked by the machine in your hand, and you don't have time to think.
And more important, you don't have time to listen. You don't have time for silence.
And it's in silence that you receive wisdom, obviously. Obviously.
And so the rest of the country goes to sleep with the TV on, and only the granola chicks and the religious people don't have it on and maybe they're hearing something that the rest of us should be hearing and 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 can we can we make space for that silence right that that that place again where god meets us in our most foundational way like that is i think that maybe 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, to put the phone away, to put the pounding feed that just helps you do, like not helps you, pushes you to doom scroll and feel terrible. But instead think critically, but also think creatively.
I 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. But that's always where it comes.
I have a chair outside my, I take a sauna every day. Not for health reasons.
I'm obviously like one of the more unhealthy people you'll meet. I plan to buy a tin of chewing tobacco today.
So I'm not a health guy at all, but I am a silence person and that's why I do it. And it's known as my cedar church.
And I was like, you know, if I get 15 minutes to sit buck naked in a hot room in silence, like that's a massive improvement over not doing it. And I have a chair outside my sauna.
I 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. So I don't know.
I'm not articulating it for you. You are.
No, you got it. And that and that's historically again to take it back to the to the tradition um that i'm that i'm bound by uh there was so much emphasis on finding these times for silence right to imitate christ going into the wilderness to to hang out with the with the monks to 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.
It seems like a pretty scary religion you've signed up with, Charlie. I can see why people hate it.
It turns out. Silence and nonviolence and imagination and critical thinking.
Who wants that? Caring for disabled kids. Yeah, man.
Whoa, slow down, man.

You're freaking me out.

Sorry about that, Tucker.

I sure appreciate your taking all this time. That was absolutely my pleasure.
To talk about all of this. Last question.
If people are interested in, and I interrupted you so many times, I'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, where can they read you? So my Twitter handle is at C Camosy.
So at C C A M O S Y, but probably the book I've written, I'm starting 10, or I'm trying to finish book 10 by Thanksgiving, but 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. So maybe we could talk about that some other time too.
But 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.

And that book really is the,

offers the kind of vision

that I've been trying to articulate.

I hope you'll come back

when your death book comes.

I actually have seen a good death.

Yeah.

I was privileged,

really privileged to see that

with someone I love.

And boy, you know it when you see it,

don't you?

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

So, but I haven't thought very deeply about it. You clearly have.
So I hope you will come back to talk about that. I will.
And boy, you know it when you see it, don't you? Yeah. Yes.
But I haven't thought very deeply about it.

You clearly have.

So I hope you will come back.

I will.

Thank you.

Thank you, Tucker.

The one thing that unites us all.

It's going to happen.

Charlie, thank you very much.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

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