John Stonestreet – Page 7

We’ve Seen the Dire Wolf Movie and it Doesn’t End Well: Guest Column

May 13, 2025John StonestreetEthicsBioethics, Ethics, Medical Ethics

Recently, TIME magazine announced that the biotechnology company Colossal has resurrected the dire wolf, a species that went extinct thousands of years ago. “This is Remus,” read the caption over a photo of a robust-looking white wolf. “He’s a dire wolf. The first to exist in over 10,000 years.” According to Colossal, this is a first step to resurrecting other long-extinct animals, like the woolly mammoth.

As it turns out, the headline is an exaggeration. Remus, his brother Romulus, and their sister Khaleesi contain no DNA from the dire wolf. Rather, they are modern gray wolves with genes tweaked by the company to mirror the DNA of the dire wolf. And they were more than likely engineered to look like the fictional giant wolves from HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”

The most common comment on the TIME story was some variation of the sentiment, “I’ve seen this movie, and it doesn’t end well.” Most people likely had in mind Jurassic Park, in which a company uses genetic technology to bring back dinosaurs. Spoiler alert, it doesn’t end well. In fact, the seventh installment of the franchise will release this summer, each containing the same message as the 1993 original: Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.

Dozens of movies reflect the dangers of genetic tinkering, human reengineering, and other forms of scientific hubris. From The Island of Dr. Moreau to Gattaca to Planet of the Apes to The Island, not to mention about half of all zombie movies ever made, we’ve been thoroughly warned about the illusion of human control over nature.

Maybe this is just the story of directors sprucing up a plot, or perhaps a surprising amount of wisdom in the arts has been overlooked or ignored by scientists and tech pioneers. A popular meme from Twitter quotes an imaginary science fiction author saying, “In my book, I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale,” immediately followed by a tech company exec announcing: “At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.” Even more, there is a strange disconnect between pop culture’s ability to anticipate the negative consequences of our scientific advances and our overall willingness to volunteer as guinea pigs.

This is as true for Artificial Intelligence as for medical technology. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to A.I. to Terminator to I, Robot, to Avengers: Age of Ultron, we’ve been warned about AI. Wall-E warned how we’d lose our humanity if we relied on technology to solve all our problems. Ready Player One warned against getting lost in virtual reality. Children of Men depicted what would happen if society stopped having enough babies. Minority Report questioned the justice of a surveillance state.

What all these movies have in common is that their warning has been ignored in the real world. People will jokingly say, “I’ve seen this movie, and it doesn’t end well,” but we continue to adopt every new technology that promises comfort, convenience, and control without a serious discussion about purpose or boundaries.

Even when the warnings aren’t exactly accurate or even realistic, these films often raise questions worth asking. And yet, our curiosity wanes once the credits roll. As in the Terminator movies, artificial intelligence continues to gobble up vast areas of life and human creativity without much protest. And despite all the Jurassic Park references, Colossal’s wolves will likely be the first of many bioengineering projects that prioritize profit and publicity over the welfare of animals or humans.

You won’t hear me say this often, but it’s time to pay closer attention to Hollywood. Despite the garbage that comes from the entertainment industry, there’s a willingness to question “progress” that is lacking at MIT, medical labs, and Silicon Valley.

C.S. Lewis wrote that reason is the organ of understanding, and imagination is the organ of meaning. We need both, which is why we should listen when someone asks, even in film, “What could go wrong?” Asking whether we should do something is a skill that should not be extinct.

Guest Column: The Abortion Pill Harms Women

May 8, 2025John StonestreetAbortionAbortion, Life, Pro-life, Sanctity of Human Life

Last week, Amna Nawaz of PBS News asked Dr. Marty Makary, new commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, if he planned to impose restrictions on the distribution and use of mifepristone and misoprostol in chemical abortions. The FDA approved mifepristone for chemical abortions in 2000, after a selective, limited study determined that it was “safe and effective.” Since 2016, citing that conclusion, the FDA eroded all safeguards on chemical abortions. Today, chemical abortions can be prescribed in every state, without an in-person visit, by someone who is not a physician, and distributed through the mail. Women self-administer the abortion drugs at home without a required follow-up visit. Clinics or administrating entities are not required to report adverse effects.

Even so, Dr. Makary said that he “ha(d) no plans to take action on mifepristone,” but then added:

I believe as a scientist, you got to evolve as the data comes in.

And, as you may know, there is an ongoing set of data that is coming into FDA on mifepristone. So, if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, then I — we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data that we have not yet seen.

Almost on cue, a new report was released on Monday by the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Whereas the FDA originally relied on data from 10 clinical trials with nearly 31,000 participants, the new data is based on the “largest-known study of the abortion pill” and “is based on analysis of data from an all-payer insurance claims database that includes 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions from 2017 to 2023.” In other words, this data is the most recent available and is far more representative of the chemical abortions typically obtained today. The women in this dataset are,

[B]roadly representative of the women who obtain mifepristone abortions in the U.S.; they are not a prescreened group of generally healthy women recruited into various clinical trials conducted at different times around the world.

Also, the medical care these women received is common to chemical abortions and not “the carefully controlled regimen of care that ordinarily prevails in clinical trials.”

The results, according to this analysis, is that the abortion pill harms women. Some of the disturbing findings found that 10.93% of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion. The real-world rate of serious adverse events following mifepristone abortions is at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of “less than 0.5%” in clinical trials reported on the drug label.

Of course, even if the new study suggested that mifepristone is “safe and effective” for women, it would still be a dangerous lie to claim, as proponents have, that it is “like Tylenol.” As Ob-Gyn physician Dr. Christine Francis argued in a What Would You Say video, having an abortion is nothing like treating a headache. When Tylenol works, pain is eliminated. When mifepristone works, a developing human life in the womb is ended. “If the medication is successful,” Francis observed, “someone always dies. That is the furthest thing from safe.”

Even more, women are not sufficiently warned that they are, to put it gently, likely to see the result of their chemical abortion. What the EPPC study does not quantify is the emotional and psychological trauma that women have experienced.

Also, like the data used by the FDA to justify its systemic reduction of all restrictions on mifepristone, the comparison with Tylenol is misleading and false. The claim is based on the total number of hospitalizations of each, but that comparison is “terribly misleading” since so many more people take Tylenol than mifepristone. When compared on a per capita basis, there is no comparison.

In the interview with PBS News, Dr. Makary called himself “a data guy.” I believe that he is. At the very least, these data findings require a reexamination of the FDA’s current regulations and protocol on chemical abortions. The Ethics and Public Policy Center further recommends:

The FDA should reinstate the original patient safety protocols that were required when mifepristone was first approved. Doing so will likely reduce the harms to women and permit better monitoring to determine whether this drug should remain on the market.

Certainly, it should not remain on the market. But this study is incredibly important to reverse some of the damage the FDA has caused. The stakes could not be higher. Today, the vast majority of chemical abortions “are performed using a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol,” and “chemical abortions now account for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the United States.” Fifteen years ago, the world learned that the mass-murdering abortionist Kermit Gosnell had been enabled by a severe lack of oversight and regulation. This new report from the EPPC suggests that chemical abortion is its own “house of horrors.”

Guest Column: The Manufactured Consensus Around Trans ‘Medicine’

May 1, 2025John StonestreetTransgenderLGBT, Transgender

A question that ought to haunt the Western world is how, over the last decade, an obviously unscientific claim—that men can become women and vice versa—birthed an anti-scientific movement that still, somehow, won the endorsement of virtually the entire scientific and medical community in the developed world? Within a few short years, nearly every association involved in healthcare affirmed not only that a person can be “transgender,” but also a litany of ghoulish, harmful procedures that were called healthcare.

At least part of the answer to this gnawing question is that the endorsements were the result of close ties between medical groups and radical gender activists. As The Daily Wire recently reported, according to findings by the watchdog group, the American Accountability Foundation, one woman was listed as “managing” or “executive” director on tax documents for 26 major medical organizations around the United States. Sue O’Sullivan holds these numerous roles through her position as co-founder of Veritas Association Management, an Illinois-based professional services company. However, she is also managing director for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH.

Aside from showing up on social media and at WPATH events, O’Sullivan is listed on multiple documents by that organization promoting transgender “medical procedures,” including “putting children on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.” Her organization has led in promoting the most extreme forms of “affirming medicine,” including “removal of breasts for girls who identify as boys,” and has “opposed laws to protect kids from such procedures.” WPATH also condemned President Trump’s recent executive order cutting funding for these practices.

Tax documents also show that O’Sullivan spent around eight times as many hours working with WPATH on trans issues as she did with any of her other management roles. Those roles included titles at The American Pediatric Surgical Association, The American Society of Andrology, The Society for Cardiovascular and Magnetic Resonance, The Society of Academic Bone Radiologists, The Society for Vascular Medicine, and the Society of Ob/Gyn Hospitalists, to name a few.

Beyond the organizations that listed O’Sullivan in key roles, this watchdog group identified another 25 names with “ties to Veritas.” Many of these individuals have issued statements in recent years “in support of so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ for children or backing transgender ideology.” In a remarkable understatement, American Accountability concluded that “the ties between O’Sullivan and WPATH could jeopardize the medical integrity of other organizations managed by Veritas Association Management,” specifically by causing “the radical transgender procedures advocated for by WPATH to be normalized in the medical mainstream.”

This would be laughable and ethically horrible if it had not resulted in the mutilation and sterilization of many children in this country. However, organizations like these lead the American medical establishment and command expected public trust. This trust has been irreparably broken by issuing statements and taking positions as if they were the conclusions of careful investigations by experienced physicians. Instead, it turns out their public statements were the equivalent of marching orders, handed down from headquarters run not by doctors, but by ideologues, who presumably kept doctors in line through fear.

None of these revelations can undo the damage already done to lives irreversibly changed. Still, it is important to understand how the whole medical establishment was sucked in to this incredible evil. The vast failure of experts to resist what amounted to a pseudoscientific coup must be investigated thoroughly. The last decade has exposed an unbelievable amount of cowardice and incompetence among the medical establishment, especially in protecting children from powerful adults entrusted with their care. To be frank, a lot of people need to lose their jobs. Some should be prosecuted.

This is also a warning for the future. Every field, even medicine, is susceptible to values and worldview. Basic beliefs about the human person and the sanctity of life have consequences. Physicians and other providers with integrity must have the courage to stand up to ideological emperors, especially the ones with no clothes. And as frustrating as it is to be called “anti-science,” Christians must be prepared to defend created reality, and protect the most vulnerable from the next manufactured “consensus.”