John Stonestreet – Page 19

“Egg Producers” or Moms?

Sep 11, 2023John StonestreetTransgenderTransgender

According to The Daily Mail, the Biden administration’s health secretary recently endorsed a gender clinic in Alaska. The secretary is a man who identifies as a woman. The clinic advocates for replacing the term “mother” with “egg producer.”

Somehow “Happy Egg Producer Day!” doesn’t have the same ring to it as “Mother’s Day.” As a colleague of mine noted when she heard the story, “That really is The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Language matters. Especially from people who occupy positions of cultural power, from the media who call this man a “she,” to politicians who claim he is a powerful woman, to a clinic obscuring reality. When they detach from reality, incoherent and dangerous ideas like this are the result.

Reality, however, has hard edges, and neither our bad ideas nor our bad language can change that. The farther afield from reason and science our cultural elites wander, the more revolutionary it will be to say what is true.

Guest Column: Marijuana and Teen Suicide

Sep 4, 2023John StonestreetMarijuanaMarijuana

By John Stonestreet

A feature of life in Colorado is the prevalence of pot. There are dispensaries on virtually every corner, and everywhere I travel I hear a pot joke. Something else my adopted state is becoming known for is the harmful aftereffects of legalized marijuana. According to state statistics, the drug was found in the system of some 42% of teen suicides, a rate nearly twice as much as with alcohol and four times of any other substances.

Of course, correlation doesn’t mean causation, but it can mean connection. If nearly half of stroke victims were taking the same medicine, would we wonder if there was a link? Why the reluctance to connect the dots here?

Marijuana might not cause suicide, but numbers don’t lie. It encourages or exacerbates problems that lead down that deadly road, especially for a group at high risk. The link is there for those willing to see it. Since suicide rates have risen every year that it has been legal, we’re far past giving the benefit of the doubt.

If Pro-Life Laws Threaten Your IVF Practice, You’re Doing It Wrong

Aug 30, 2023John StonestreetBioethicsBioethics

A recent BBC article questioned what last year’s Dobbs decision could mean for in vitro fertilization. The owner of a self-described “boutique fertility clinic” in Austin, Texas, told reporters that she’s worried abortion restrictions will be bad for business: “If you say life begins at fertili[z]ation, then how can I grow an embryo in a lab, or biopsy it for genetic testing, or freeze it or thaw it, or implant it in somebody, or leave it frozen?”

These questions should have been asked before IVF became big business. In most fertility clinics today, human lives are put in real danger, especially those embryos designated “extra.” These are either aborted, left indefinitely on ice, discarded, or donated for medical experimentation.

The few clinics committed to a more (though not completely) ethical IVF, by creating a single embryo at a time or requiring that every embryo is implanted, won’t be affected by abortion restrictions, but most of them will. And they should be.