Medical ethicist Charlie Camosy exposes how Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s policies enable "comfort care" infanticide—withholding treatment from viable newborns, including those with disabilities, via "slow coding" without parental consent. He traces this to a secularized revival of ancient practices like the 1st-century Alexandria papyrus’ infant abandonment, now mirrored in NICUs and euthanasia advocacy groups like Compassion and Choices. Camosy links these trends to Nazi eugenics, redefined "brain death" criteria (e.g., Jahi McMath), and misdiagnosed vegetative states (Terry Schiavo), arguing modern bioethics’ utilitarian framework replaces Judeo-Christian dignity with trait-based valuations. The episode frames this as a moral crisis—from abortion to dementia care—where elites prioritize wealth over life, demanding resistance through faith-based institutions and cultural revival ahead of 2024’s ethical reckoning. [Automatically generated summary]
We're proud to announce live today episodes one and two of Art of the Surge that are available to watch on TuckerCarlson.com.
Now they're the first of a multi-part documentary series.
We're going to release episodes weekly on Wednesdays leading up to the election.
We've had someone in bed with the Trump campaign.
Amazing footage, Art of the Surge, available right now, Episodes 1 and 2.
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 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.
The media and the Democratic Party, same thing, have pushed back ferociously on this, fact-checked it.
You know, you're a medical ethicist.
This is right at the center of what you study for a living.
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'd 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 in NICUs across the country and around the world.
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, 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.
Yeah, or keeping the temperature appropriate and that sort of thing.
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 happens all the time.
The baby would be kept comfortable, and then he said, I'll tell you what would happen.
The baby would be 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.
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 want to live the rest of my life in this very particular way, so I'm going to have a DNR. Yeah, I don't want chemo.
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 chemotherapy or without other aggressive treatments, and to use the language of 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 are 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, very often, parents are encouraged to have abortions in these cases where they choose not to, right?
They 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 abortions.
Even very pro-life, very prenatal justice focused parents get bombarded by medical teams.
And yes, with a false diagnosis, without even getting it, 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.
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...
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 kill her child?
We have a large number who either feel neutral about this or who feel positive about it, who are active in it.
And let me just give you an example of how the thought process goes.
I wrote an article about this for the Public Discourse called The Right to a Dead Baby?
And the way that they sort of try to justify it, and 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 time, and for every medical team or every doctor, it'll vary.
They think of it more as 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, the article is in the public discourse, The Right to a Dead Baby?
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 of 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 families, and so they were just discarded.
And it's no surprise that as we have...
Repaganized 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 if 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 mean, it's no accident that abortion is used as a tool of oppression for this 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 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 Hillarion 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, 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, bye, essentially.
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?
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 re-paganizing culture.
Present in supposedly Christian Europe in the 30s and 40s.
And I just find it so interesting that, you know, 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 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.
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 um that physician-assisted suicide uh can't be uh consistent with any rational understanding of what health care is that's that's still explicitly said by 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 it was the nuremberg trials which which called out a lot of these practices then i'm aware of that and i'm 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.
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 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 U.S. states have adopted this, unfortunately.
I do think it's interesting that some deep blue states out here on the East Coast have resisted, in part because of the disability rights community.
I don't have all the information about that, but the main activist group is a group called Compassion and Choices, 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.
And they've been successful.
They've been successful in California.
They've been successful in my home state of New Jersey, unfortunately.
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.
What is not widely known, though, is that it's a misleading argument because Oregon, for instance, has had legalized physician-assisted killing since the 90s.
And 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.
Also in the top five is fear of being a burden on others.
Of course.
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...
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.
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, you know, 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...
We might be able to bring in some of the disability rights groups into the fight for prenatal deaths because you're just totally right that it's a mass slaughter.
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 basically they've been eliminated by prenatal testing and then abortion.
They've been targeted for killing and it's succeeded.
And if you run Again, I'm just grinding an axe here, but I wrote about them 30 years ago.
I've been 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.
So I've been around the movement a long time, and 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 something is clearly shifting in the pro-life movement, I think, 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, kind of post-mortem, after the 2016 election with In Connecticut, I think.
I was on a panel discussion with that, and I was talking about this very topic, abortion and the slaughter of disabled people via abortion.
And after the talk, this gentleman in his 70s with 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, you know, nobody ever talks about this.
Well, I mean, I don't, you know, 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.
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.
Well, throughout human history we've seen this be the norm rather than 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, in the very nature of who they are, the image of God is present.
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, right?
We were trying to better live out this principle of fundamental human equality.
As the Declaration 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 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.
We're saying now we do affirm the view, like equality is maybe one of the most...
Overused buzzwords around, right?
But I think of it almost like cut flowers 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 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, 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.
If it's alright 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, 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...
It also, interestingly, contrasts the way of life with the way of death in a way that...
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 to see my face, he says, in the poor, right?
See my image in the poor.
But, okay, so...
This goes all the way back to the very earliest parts of the church, right?
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 brain death, maybe not so briefly because we have a two-hour podcast here and it's somewhat complicated, but I need to set it up a little bit.
So I do a lot of work on secular utilitarian philosophy, and I'm actually friends with Peter Singer, who's a very well-known secular utilitarian philosopher.
We don't agree on many, many things, but I think he's wrong in really interesting ways.
And he sees, he's seen, and he's since the seventies, he's seen what it has meant to reject a Christian 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 pack 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.
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.
They 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 set a living...
A 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 then dies.
So it's just like the full confusion on display in one very short headline.
But maybe you remember this case from a few years ago, Jahai McMath in California.
She was this African-American girl who had a surgery go really terrible for sleep apnea.
Had a catastrophic brain injury.
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.
It would be as if from their, in my view, deeply misguided view.
They would say, well, you know, you can't just say a corpse is alive, right?
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.
I do think there's a strain within contemporary secularized medicine that is so ideological that if there's something that pushes back against their very secularized, whatever, I don't know what to call it, whatever the opposite of pro-life is perspective.
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.
Well, I think there would be at least two sets of reasons in the case of 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.
So 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 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.
But if you find yourself lying or ignoring harm to individuals on behalf of some If one has a view that what's at bottom true about ethics and morality is maximizing the greatest good for the greatest number.
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.
I think another angle into it, though, is a different kind of ideological angle, which is if we say that individuals who have catastrophic brain injuries But are clearly still functioning members of the species homo sapiens, just like you and I are, though very seriously disabled.
That has implications for human dignity that, if applied consistently, would undermine very foundational views, including with regard to abortion, right?
And this is explicitly said, so let's talk, if you don't mind, about so-called vegetative state.
Yeah, okay, so if I could get 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 as 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 their flatlining.
Yeah, so part of the problem here is There really isn't a good way to test for what's called whole brain death.
In part because, and this was actually after the Harvard report came out, something called the Uniform Commission, which is a nonprofit group that has surprisingly a lot of power to propose.
There's 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 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.
That's fine.
You could say that as a thing, but then we have to find ways to determine that.
And most of the ways, especially to determine whether there's brain stem activity 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 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've got to determine whether the whole brain is that or not.
And meanwhile, we've got this individual, regardless of what's happening here, who's fighting off infections, maybe gestating a child, maybe reaching their first period.
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 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 and your viewers think it's interesting, when the ancient Egyptians would mummify somebody, do you know what they did with the brain?
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.
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 do this modeling of your brain's information and upload it to the cloud and then 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.
We're ensouled 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 it's because we are so, especially in the developed West, focusing on rationality.
Again, I'm 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.
We are not thinking things.
We are ensouled bodies, right?
And we can have ensouled 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 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, 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.
Especially now that I teach at a medical school and I've been in academia for now almost two decades.
Those kind of humble approaches are not rewarded in these structures, in these systems.
What is rewarded is saying, I've got the answer, or I'm on my way to 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.
So, in part, but not only, because of the intense pressure on academics, and especially in academic medicine, to advance one's career through publications, there's been a real lack of humility in sort of sitting with data and books and studies and an attempt to sort of just push things out and get your name out there and get your publications out there.
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's 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...
And it's a deep and foundational problem that especially in areas which are ideologically charged, let'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.
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.
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, you know, 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.
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, or like, so-and-so followed behind them and 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 data was faulty.
And there's public pressure, in fact, to then have the journal address that and say, well, maybe 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, I think we've yet to see the end result of that.
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.
Like, who cares whether we can test for the function of the hypothalamus?
Who cares actually how much of the brain is dead?
They're not the person they ever will be again or something like this.
And getting back to one of our earlier discussions, 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, my parents, a friend, spouse, Listen, Charlie, 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?
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 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.
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.
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, Very well.
Very well.
And her husband and her family disagreed about what should be done.
To be clear, a persistent so-called vegetative state, no human being is a vegetable, but that's just sort of the language we use, or have used.
It's changing now.
But she did not have brain death.
A large part of her brain had been fundamentally compromised, but she had sleep and wake cycles, and she responded.
There's an amazing video online you can watch of her responding to music.
Somebody plays music.
Sort of leans over and sort of makes a noise that sort of almost smiles.
People who were there, like her parents said, they responded to her.
It was a huge fight.
You remember it sort of engulfed the nation in the early part of this millennium, early aughts.
Anyway, it's interesting.
I think nefarious husband won that battle and they starved her and dehydrated her to death after declaring essentially that she was no longer there.
In fact, if anybody would challenge me on this, I challenge them to look at the gravestone that her husband created for her.
It says that on the date of her catastrophic brain injury that she departed this earth, I think it was 1990, he uses the phrase departed this earth.
And then I think it was 2003 when they dehydrated her to death.
It says she was at peace.
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 with yes being imagine you're playing tennis and no being read a book in your room.
And they answer by what parts of their brain light up correctly.
They answer these yes or no questions correctly.
We've further learned that with the right kind of therapies, Joe Finn points out in this book.
You can actually prove that more and more, either they weren't conscious before, and then they become conscious because of the therapy, or they were conscious the whole time, and the therapies end up showing that they give them opportunity.
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.
Just an extraordinary story.
But yet, so many people have this idea that Terry Schiavo's husband had, which is like people who are in a vegetative state have departed this earth despite this human body that is very clearly here.
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... These are all emotional subjects for people, particularly the end-of-life stuff, because everyone by middle age has seen it with a loved one, and it's so sad, and you imagine yourself in that position, and you think, I don't want this for myself.
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.
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 infanticide.
They were interested in what you just described, right?
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.
Back in the day, I think it was medieval practice, rich people would routinely ask, Invite the poor beggars outside the cathedral to pray for their loved ones at their funeral because they would think these people bear the face of Christ in a special way and I better get...
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, 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, it was so heartening for me to hear J.D. Vance talk about both, to say like, yeah, we got some challenges right now with prenatal justice and we have to re-earn trust, but we don't need to choose between trying to protect babies in utero and neonatally now and supporting very...
Poor women and families who feel pushed often into contexts where they have a desperate situation in front of them and they don't know what else to do.
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?
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.
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 of 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, you know, 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...
You know, people who shouldn't be here or whatever, victims of crime, they don't care.
Because they don't care about other people, actually.
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 are 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.
But my only defense would be, I think I felt guilt and shame.
Probably not enough.
You should feel bad.
And 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 Laden-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.
I don't think a country can, I mean, could there really be a truly Christian country that loved its enemies?
Maybe we get invaded the first day.
I don't know.
I'm not a statesman or a 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.
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 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.
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 it's 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...
But 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 room until they die.
And 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, the number of people 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?
In a book I wrote called Losing Our Dignity, How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality, I finished the last three chapters by saying...
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.
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 vision of human dignity, fundamental equality that we've been talking about here.
You've spent the last month or so I've heard you say you've been, I don't know if I'm putting words in your mouth here, but rejuvenated or you have some sort of really positive experience as a result of this.
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 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 we've just jettisoned, the cut flowers are dying, there's no way to reattach them to the roots, and we just have to find a way to work through it somehow?
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.
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 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 subjects to a greater authority?
Not a government authority, but authority above that?
Or do we see ourselves as gods?
I mean, these are all 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 they think they're God.
And the result has been a pretty hollow culture.
It's 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 ardently.
But I don't think in the end they satisfy.
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...
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.
Like, 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, you know, 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 and irrelevant.
That is the point of AI and transhumanism is to kind of eliminate people.
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 had these structures already in place.
And interestingly, when some of my colleagues do things like teach a class that would involve a technology fast, for instance, those classes are totally full.
I just am amazed, you know, given how many addictions I've beaten in my life, you know, things I never thought I would stop doing, like smoking especially.
Amazingly, I quit at the age of 45 or drinking, you know.
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.
And we've got, as you've talked about on your show a few times now, we've got the best scientists, including social scientists and chemists and others, who are working very hard to make sure that's the case.
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...
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 young men and boys see this on their phones and on their TV screens.
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 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.
Maybe I'm revealing too much here, but I mean it.
You know, we all have preferences.
I've never really understood that.
Violence?
Really?
No.
Violence is not hot.
But anyway, here's the point.
I've talked to more than three young men who were like, oh yeah, this is a constant request that I'm not that into from women.
I would joke with my students and say, you know, you guys claim to be these wild people and you look at my generation, the older generation, as fuddy-duddies or whatever.
My strong, overwhelming sense is that the distrust between the sexes, particularly among 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 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 in terms of basic middle class life that's 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 we have, obviously, something that didn't exist back then, our addiction to our phones and our social media, which is constantly calibrated to make us feel anxious and depressed.
No, I... My phone is my alarm clock, for so many people.
So, immediately.
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.
But how many mornings have you sort of woken up and there's 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.
So, like, you know, the kinds of things I think about almost all day long are horrific things, right?
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 the 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 and 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 she's involved in this lifestyle as well.
But again, the companies that make...
Shit tons of money from this stuff have hired the best social scientists in the world to make sure that we're going to do the best job to make us fail in these opportunities.
And I've tried multiple times.
We even have this thing that we haven't used yet.
We bought it.
It's apparently this box you can sort of put your phone into and you have to have a specific combination.
To open it.
And 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.
What is the good way that we live with those things?
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.
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.
Catholic Institutions and Conscience Rights00:15:28
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 a different kind of category to care for people that doesn't exist just in a clinic with a bed somewhere, but is a broader 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, the first hospital was...
It was, of course, a Christian hospital, right?
This was invented in the Middle Ages.
Nurses, we were talking about at breakfast, all the original nurses were Catholic women religious.
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 happen when we put mammon and consumerism and efficiency at the center of what we do.
And we are well-primed to do something like that.
Again, one in seven beds, it's a massive opportunity, and it doesn't need to be limited to Catholic institutions.
There are plenty of non-Catholic institutions as well.
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 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, 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, frankly.
And 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.
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 um yeah our guys who have brain dead not dead uh and you're not going to force us um to call them dead and we're going to carve out religious freedom exemption for ourselves here in new jersey um so again it doesn't need to be limited to even christianity at all plenty of uh religious folks and even non-religious folks can can can imagine how this might work apart i agree completely um
And it's not an accident, right, again, that historically it was Jews, it was Christians, and even Muslims to a certain extent, who were very much connected in their early stages to both Christianity and Judaism, who pushed back on abortion and infanticide in the ancient world for the reasons that we've already talked about.
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?
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 papers, the main panels, not at all interested in hearing from someone like me.
Well, it depends who you talk to, but 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, actually.
Non-maleficents, do no harm, which is a classic bioethics principle.
Beneficents, 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.
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.
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.
And the thing that I find so frustrating about this is my secular counterparts in these fields sort of criticize religious people for being You know, 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Both Vance and Waltz in the recent debate were asked about paid family leave as a possible option.
To pursue, and it was very interesting to hear them both offer sort of vaguely supportive ideas with regard to that.
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 suggest that they would much rather not be in a two-income trap, right, where they feel like they must be away from their kids all the time and work.
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 is the one desire that we thwart.
And I found that conversation about paid family leave nauseating, actually, because no one ever mentioned the possibility that maybe women could raise their own kids.
I think one reason people don't mention it is precisely because of how deeply the systems and structures which have led to the two-income trap are foundational in our culture.
We would have to undo so much of what our culture has become.
Actually, the exploit of lending money and interest used to be called usury and it used to be considered an intrinsically evil act in the tradition, by the way.
And again, there's no reason that we need to choose between the two.
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 exploitative 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?
Think about that windfall.
What that means for the broader culture, too.
And we support patient autonomy, right?
Except for 12-year-old girls where the doctor just says, okay, it's time for you to be on contraception now.
And everyone sort of goes along, ho-hum.
And we're just now really starting to reckon with what this might be doing to women's bodies and beyond.
And I think the number of young women getting off the pill is 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.
You're not allowed to 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.
Except for women who do want to precend 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.
That's, again, one of the things that's pushing back from this.
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 doing precisely the opposite.
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 make space for that silence, right?
That place, again, where God meets us in our most foundational way.
Like that is, I think that maybe, I don't want to speak for you, maybe one reason you moved up here to Maine, because at least in my short time here, this seems like a wonderful place to encounter that silence, to put the phone away, to put the pounding.
Feed that just 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.
And that's historically, again, to take it back to the tradition that I'm bound by, there was so much emphasis on finding these times for silence, right?
To imitate Christ going into the wilderness, to hang out with the monks, to get out of the situation you're in and allow this voice to speak to you in a way that allows you to be both critical and creative.
I sure appreciate your taking all this time 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. Probably the book.
I've written, I'm starting book 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.
So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing our show.
I know.
Shocking.
That in an election year, with everything at stake, Google would be putting its thumb on the scale and preventing you from hearing anything that the people in charge don't want you to hear.
But it turns out it's happening.
So what can you do about it?
Well, we could whine about it, but that's a waste of time.
We're not in charge of Google.
Or we could find a way around it, a way that you could actually get information that's true.
It's not intentionally deceptive.
And the way to do that on YouTube, we think, is to subscribe to our channel.