John Stonestreet – Family Council

Misleading Claims About Abortion Laws

Oct 12, 2026John StonestreetAbortionAbortion, Life, Pro-life, Sanctity of Human Life

Every few months since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in its 2022 Dobbs decision, another article claims that prolife laws are keeping women from essential medical care, and higher rates of maternal mortality are inevitable. The most recent example is an article in Propublica magazine, which asserted in its title: “Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths Have Nearly Doubled. It’s Worse in States With Abortion Bans.”

Though the authors were careful to acknowledge other factors were involved, the clear insinuation of the article was that medical professionals in prolife states are either too afraid to offer proper care or are banned from giving it. According to the article:

ProPublica analyzed the data collected from every state by the CDC to look for patterns. The analysis shows a growing divide for women in states with strict abortion bans compared with those without. While the uptick in ectopic deaths occurred nationwide, the climb has been much steeper in states that banned abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. 

Of course, the article ignores the first and central fact of any abortion, which is that every single one kills. The article also ignored other studies that found no correlation between legalized abortion and better health outcomes for women. As LiveAction summarized of one study that looked at the Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) around the world:

Countries that have legalized abortion such as South Africa, India, Nepal, Cambodia, and Guyana have not seen the predicted maternal health benefits. By contrast, several countries that disallow abortion, such as Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Egypt, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Uganda have seen significant reductions in maternal mortality.

For abortion advocates, abortion is healthcare. Thus, unlimited rights to an abortion is essential for any society that cares about women. Any regulation on abortion will inevitably lead to suffering for women. The conclusion must be that Dobbs is killing women.

However, the data cited by Propublica simply does not support blaming the increased rates of maternal mortality on new prolife laws. In fact, it points to a different cause altogether. As Ryan T. Anderson summarized in a post on X, “The big jump in ectopic-related deaths occurs a year before Dobbs . . . and occurs in both pro-life and pro-abortion states.” Jamie Bryan Hall also addressed the numbers in an aritcle for National Review Online:

In the 21 years from 1999 to 2021, the United States averaged 4.2 ectopic-pregnancy-related deaths per million live births. Suddenly, in 2021, this figure surged to a peak of 9.8. It has averaged 7.8 over the past five years, which are five of the seven worst years for ectopic-pregnancy-related deaths since 1999.

In other words, how can post-Dobbs laws be blamed for what happened before Dobbs was decided? It can’t. In fact, another culprit better fits the timing. A far more likely explanation is that the sudden rise in chemical abortions in the last few years—which the same pro-abortion advocates claim is “as safe as Tylenol”-–is what is killing women.

Even more suspicious is how the spike in maternal deaths corresponds to the FDA loosening regulations on the abortion pill regiment. Today, as Michael J. New explained for National Review Online, prescriptions no longer require an in-person visit, a follow-up visit, an ultrasound, or a visit to a local pharmacist. Prescriptions for the abortion pill regimen are often given via telehealth “visits” and delivered through the mail.

Even if the FDA’s loosening of regulations is not the sole cause of this spike in maternal deaths, the first pill in the abortion regimen, mifepristone, is far more dangerous than advertised, with complications that include bleeding, and even death. When these side effects are tied to the already dangerous crisis of ectopic pregnancy, the outcome is darkly unsurprising.

The Perils of Prosperity: Guest Column

Oct 6, 2026John StonestreetCultureCulture, Socialism

A few weeks ago, the New York Post reported that, Gustavo Gordillo, a prominent official in the Democratic Socialists of America lived in a $1.5 million home owned by his parents who, in turn, live in a 5,000 square foot home in Boca Raton that’s listed for $3.1 million. Even accounting for NYC’s high housing prices, this seems pretty lush for someone speaking up for the oppressed of the country.

Recently, Ohio chocolate heiress Grace Ryan, who campaigned for one of the most radical DSA politicians, posted about the need for socialism from her boat while “summering” at the lake. And the new self-described socialist mayor of Seattle recently came under scrutiny when it was discovered that, at 43, her professor-parents pay for her child’s childcare, at $2,200 a month.

History is full of stories about the children of wealthy elites who adopt radical socio-political causes, coming out as enemies of “the system” that gave them their lives. Dubbed “Lulu Lenins,” and “Neiman Marxists,” these are modern incarnations of “champagne socialists” who have the financial luxury of never having to live out of their own bad ideas.

Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Mao Zedong also did not grow up poor but were comfortably middle class before embracing murderous ideologies. Ayaan Hirsi-Ali just reminded the world that Mohammed Atta, one of the leaders of the 9/11 attacks, was not born into an impoverished situation, but studied architecture and urban planning before turning radical. And, Osama bin Laden was the son of a billionaire.

As it turns out, there’s often a strong correlation between adopting extremist ideology and privilege. In more recent days, the new supporters of Islamism and neo-Communism tend to be college students from relatively well-to-do families.

Such is the danger of undisciplined prosperity. George Orwell once quipped that “some ideas (are) so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” And some are so unrealistic that only those insulated by comfort could entertain them, while never facing the consequences of worldviews and ideologies that get reality and the human condition so wrong.

This is, in addition to an incredible intellectual curiosity, what makes Ayaan Hirsi-Ali’s voice so credible. Not only has she experience life lived in both a family and in nations under the control of Islamism, but she also walked through the personal desert of trying to find meaning without God. When she reminds us of the true nature of Islamic radicalism and the struggle of secular elites to take seriously true belief, we should listen. As she so aptly put it:

Twenty-five years later, the more uncomfortable truth is that the West has become much better at finding, capturing, or killing men like Atta, but still hesitates to confront the milieu he emerged from: the institutions, networks, doctrines, funding streams, and civilizational ambitions that shape him long before he appears on a watchlist.

An obvious lesson is for parents who live with financial blessing. We must teach our kids to appreciate having what we did not earn without forgetting where it came from and how vulnerable it all can be. We need to teach them what is true, as well as how to recognize what is not true, especially when it comes in the form of oppression narratives and false compassion.

Teaching truth will sometimes look like letting them fail and, if so, what it means to be resilient and to try again. When done rightly, sports can be one of the most effective means to teach endurance, self-sacrifice, and the hard truth that success never comes easy. When done poorly, it can affect how they think about every other part of life.

And, of course, teaching history is essential. A generation that doesn’t know that socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried or that communist governments murdered millions in the twentieth century—or even that Osama Bin Laden was the bad guy of 9/11—will be easily deceived by simplistic and even silly ideas about people and how best to help them.

This would be doubly tragic since, as Ayaan Hirsi-Ali put it, we will need the next generation on the essential project of restoration. As she wrote:

Civilizational resilience is not a vague confidence that democracies always muddle through. It is the hard capacity of a people to see its vulnerabilities clearly, repair them in time, and deny its enemies the use of its virtues as weapons.

I’m pleased to announce that Ayaan Hirsi-Ali will be joining us for the 2027 Colson Center National Conference June 4-6, in Charlotte, NC. Register now at colsonconference.org!

The Power of Naming: Guest Column

Sep 21, 2026John StonestreetCultureCulture

Words shape how we understand reality, but they cannot redefine it. Scripture explains both the remarkable power and important limits of naming.

President Trump’s recent executive order not only renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America, it changed how millions of Americans remember what the Great Lakes are. HAMES just doesn’t have the same ring to it as HOMES. So far, President Trump has also renamed mountains and military bases, and he even floated renaming the Strait of Hormuz as the “Trump Strait.”

Political renaming is not new, of course, not for either side of the political aisle. As Bill Maher joked in his opening monologue to Real Time, “The liberals… say you can’t just go around changing things to fit your political agenda. . .. Just ask any Latinx birthing person.”

Things are renamed all the time, sometimes to reflect the ideological shifts of a culture and other times to reflect the growing ego of a leader. In recent years, mountains have been renamed and then renamed again, as have streets and holidays and food products and sports teams. More drastic and consequential has been renaming babies as fetuses, men as women, mothers as “birthing persons,” and the vast majority of everyone who has ever lived as “cisgender.”

That’s because there is real power in naming things. The more important the thing named, the more consequential naming is. A name, in other words, is more than a random label. Names frame how things are seen and understood.

This is an arena of thought, where a postmodern analysis comes close but ultimately misses. The influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger had a profound impact on how latter postmodern philosophers would understand language and reality. He proposed that humans could not really access reality outside of our language. Quite memorably, in an essay title “Language,” Heidegger wrote:

“In the naming, the things named are called into their thinging. Thinging, they unfold world, in which things abide and so are the abiding ones.”

The postmodernists he influenced took this notion further; that our language does not merely describe reality, it creates reality. Jacques Derrida famously said that “there is nothing beyond the text.” Reality is what we describe.

And, of course, our words are incredibly powerful. What we call things or people or pets tends to stick. Think of how powerful it is to name the day to ourselvesas “hard” or “blessed.” What we name our children or nickname our spouse becomes more than a mere identifier for them. It becomes, in a sense, who they are. Perhaps the best example is how a name invented by an oldest grandchild, even an otherwise random sound like “Babo,” becomes what a grandparent is called for the rest of their lives.

What the postmodernists missed is that there is a reality beyond our words. Yes, our words have creative power, but that’s because we are made in the image of God Whose words brought reality into existence. The power of our words reflects, in fact, the order of reality. We name our pets. Our pets do not name us. We name the forests and the lakes and the oceans where animals live, not the other way around.

Naming is prominent throughout Scripture. From the second chapter of Genesis to the second chapter of Revelation, and everywhere in between, namingprovides key markers of a person’s journey through life and with God. And there is a profound distinction between what God names and what God tasks His image bearers with naming. Adam was to name the animals, in part as a way of realizing the truth of what God had said about him, that he was alone and that was not good.

Because names matter, we should always take the God-given task of naming seriously. At the same time, we should not think that we can rename reality into something else. We might play our language games, demanding pronouns, calling good “evil” and evil “good,” or denying that there is a real world beyond our words. In the end, it is God’s words that ultimately determine what is, what is good, and what is true.