You're listening to Breakpoint This Week, where we're talking about the top stories of the week from a Christian worldview. Today we're going to talk about legal abortion in Massachusetts. We're going to talk about alleged fraud at so-called gender clinics across the country. And we're going to talk about the WNBA. We have so much to get to this week.
Stick around. Welcome to Breakpoint This Week. From the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, I'm Maria Baer, alongside John Stone Street, president of the Coulson Center. John, this was a big news week. I feel like we say that a lot, but it certainly feels especially true this week.
And I want to start in Massachusetts, where the governor signed a bill this week undoing that state's previous protections for babies past 24 weeks gestation.
So basically, this new bill has legalized abortion after 24 weeks. Of gestation. This will likely lead to, because we know that this happens in such cases, partial birth abortion. It could also lead to babies being born alive and being denied medical care. We also know that many, many babies who are born after 24 weeks gestation are viable outside of the womb.
So this has. All kinds of implications, not just for individual babies and families and women, but also just culturally, especially after the Dobbs decision, which a lot of us looked at as. You know, a positive development in the fight for life. This feels, it's hard not to look at this as a huge step backwards.
Well, I think there's two things that stand out to me about this. I mean, the first was the photo op, and it kind of came across like some of the other photo ops from. Pro-abortion politicians over the last couple of years that have really signified this move away from anything resembling the safe, legal, and rare position that used to typify the pro-abortion side.
Now it's the shout your abortion, the celebrate your abortion. And this was a political photo op version of that. The other thing, and this is I think a really important point. made by Ramesh Paneroo at National Review. And his article on this thing is probably the best that I have seen.
It's entitled On Late Term Abortion, Massachusetts Removes the Fig Leaf. He makes the point here, and it's an important point, that this was a completely unnecessary law to pass. Even if you're pro-abortion, Massachusetts already had allowances in cases of exceptions. for late-term abortions. Which we are told.
Hardly ever happen anyway, and only happen in terms of when there's a real health risk to the mother, or if there's some abnormality that's discovered.
Well, those loopholes were already in the law there. In fact, It had a law that allowed a physician to deem it necessary, deem an abortion necessary to preserve a patient's mental health.
Okay.
So that's about as wide of a loophole as you can absolutely get.
So what was the point of this lock? The point of this law was simply to make a statement. It was to basically advance this. Not in terms of the specific situation of late-term abortions, which again, I mean, think about the critics tell us all the time, oh, this never happens. And if it only happens, it happens when a child has severe abnormalities or there's a real risk to the mom.
He lists here in four bullet points, and this is something that I think everybody that's concerned about this issue or should be concerned about this issue needs to know. First, there are far more late-term abortions. That happen, then there are other things that we have complete alarm about, like kids killed by gun homicide. Most abortions after the 20th week are elective. They're not based.
On these exceptions that were kind of worked into law, that then you never have to defend or never have to actually make a case for anyway. Let me read this one. It's hard even to imagine circumstances in which killing a child in the late stages of pregnancy rather than delivering the child early is even necessary to save a mother's life from death or physical harm. And that's a case that I think a lot of people have made. Including the folks over at Live Action, Lila Rose, and others, that there's hardly any circumstances, if any, where it's not actually just as safe to deliver the child.
as opposed to have an abortion after 20 weeks. It's actually usually safer to deliver the child because to have to go in and kill the child first, first of all, risks all kinds of complications, but also prolongs the situation.
So, if there's some kind of emergency in which we need to end a woman's pregnancy, delivering the baby is always safer than killing the baby first. Yeah. And listen, this is the final point, and it's really important when it comes to late-term abortion, is when you defend late-term abortion in law like this, it removes any and all exceptions. That they don't want any exceptions. whatsoever in any efforts to limit abortions in such case.
Is described as stealing even for elective cases, is described as stealing women's rights.
So the whole argumentation here, I think, has been a bait and switch. It's unnecessary for this law to have been passed given all the things That were already allowed in Massachusetts under the categories of. you know, helping. Preserve the health of the mother, or a child, quote unquote, incompatible with life.
So I thought this article was a terrific summary of this, and it also gets to the heart of. Why this thing went forward. Even if you are pro-abortion. This did not accomplish anything except basically make a statement where the state stands. And that bodily autonomy, quote unquote, when it comes to so-called women's health care is this highest value to which everything else.
Has to be subjective. That's really what this was about. Yeah, I have to wonder if that was the point, was sending that message. And it seems like this could implicate. You know, we've talked about this before, but the confidence of the pro-life movement post-Dobbs Has had ups and downs.
And this seems like a real down moment. I mean, Part of what Dobbs did was returned this decision to states. and it seems to have galvanized some states, like Massachusetts. To go big or go home. And I have seen people use this as a criticism of Dobbs to say, well, Dobbs wasn't what we hoped it would be, or we shouldn't celebrate, or whatever.
I don't think I would go that far, but does this kind of thing implicate Dobbs or implicate our confidence in the pro-life movement? No, I mean, I think it should instruct the pro-life movement. I don't think it should implicate Dobbs. If we're looking for the silver lining here around all the dark clouds of legislative losses and even ballot box losses state by state by state. It's that we now know what's happening.
We now know kind of where the other side is coming from. We know the basis of their most important values, right? I mean, in other words, again, the safe, legal, and rare coding that was put on top of this terrible, terrible thing has been exposed for what it is. It was just a rhetorical sleight of hand. It didn't really define the movement and the commitment to.
How do I want to say this? The commitment to sexual autonomy and the commitment to moral relativism is for an awful lot of people, including. on a policy level On a platform level of the political liberals in America, it is the, these are the absolute values. These are the things that are non-negotiable. The bright spot is, I think we kind of know what we're dealing with now at a new level.
It's frustrating, it's disheartening. But it really just calls us back to the same work that's been Highlighted, I think, for 50 years, not that we shouldn't go for legislative victories, we should go for them in any place that we can. Anything that limits, we should go for those things, but at the same time, It should help us understand. the the importance of kind of all hands on deck, right? Uh the importance of getting directly to abortion-minded women.
As much as possible, the importance of doing work at the educational level to unseat these godless values. uh that have become kind of front and center Of the educational system in America. I mean, there's all kinds of things I think that it points to. And it'd be helpful to learn those lessons and move forward. Yeah, agreed.
I want to shift now to this new report that's come out from the Department of Health and Human Services.
So we're, you and I are recording this on Friday morning. This report released yesterday, alleging some really Heavy fraud. among gender clinics and children's hospitals and so-called gender medicine across the country. This report's been a long time coming, but immediately when this was released, Vice President J.D. Vance has now called for an investigation from the Department of Justice into some of these doctors and hospitals.
And their insurance practices. This feels like the beginning of a new chapter in this kind of cultural wave. My hope is that it's the beginning of the end of the institutionalization of what we've been doing to kids for the past 10 years in the name of so-called gender medicine. Essentially what this report found was that using de-identified insurance claim data, That the number of claims for things like endocrine disorder and precocious puberty have absolutely skyrocketed in the last 10 years. And that skyrocketing points to almost certainly fraud.
because the way these were coded is this there's kind of a rabbit hole here, but there's such a thing as medical coding where you give each diagnosis a number, and that's how the insurance companies know how much money to reimburse for different procedures. There is a code for gender dysphoria, but instead of using those codes, these doctors and hospitals were allegedly using things like endocrine disorder. When a child was perfectly physiologically healthy, but simply said they didn't have the hormones that they wanted, or their parents or their doctor said they didn't have the hormones that they wanted, so they called it an endocrine disorder. That is fraudulent. And in a lot of cases, I'm assuming a lot of doctors and hospitals did this because.
They knew that the gender dysphoria code is searchable, especially on Medicaid and Medicare, which is public information. And they didn't want to reveal how much those diagnoses were increasing. As the ideology permeated culture.
So they used these other long-standing diagnoses, which weren't accurate. And of course, the fraud is something that the government has within its purview to prosecute. Each instance of fraud represents is a family and usually a child. Who was manipulated by an institution that was supposed to protect them. And I'm just glad this is being revealed, but this is really a bombshell report.
Listen, this is a stunning report. It's revealing things again. If we could go back to something we said in the first segment, that was never happening, except that it was, right? We were told this was so absolutely rare and only when medically necessary and there's no financial incentives for hospitals and doctors to kind of head down this path. And this all demonstrates that it was a lie.
It was happening. And I think it. points to two other things. The first is, this was a vast social experiment. You told me yesterday about something else that goes along with this, which is.
That WPATH, which was this made-up professional organization, I hate to call it a professional organization because it wasn't. It was an organization of medical professionals who claimed to have expertise on medical affirming. Care was of social activists that had a cause that they wanted to advance. And they just made stuff up. And now on in court.
They're basically admitting that. They're admitting that they never claimed to have medical certainty or about these procedures or anything like that. But they certainly went forward as if they did. And the fact that both of these Things came out at the same time. The admission.
by WPATH that they really didn't know what they were doing. They were just trying stuff. And the admission. Here in this HHS report, that there was widespread practice. And if you go to these different places and say, well, what what was making you do this?
Where were you getting these ideas? They're going to point to WPath.
So That's another level. of um uh uh I don't even know what to call it. That's just another level of the brokenness of this. Whole topic. But you know what that means?
What that means is that this whole thing was. And we called it this. Other people called it this. We caught tons of flack for calling it this. This was a social experiment on children.
There's no other way to put it. If you put the revelations that this was happening in such a widespread way that it was driven by at least in cases of the hospitals, who should have known better and should have limited it at least according to risk. They were doing this on the financial backs of lost parents and children and so on. And That this was all experimental, well, that means it was a social experiment, and it was specifically a social experiment. on children.
That I think this Points to, and this is really important. I thought of this morning. abductor and and I've met this guy and I hate that I'm gonna I forget how to pronounce his first name, Dr. Eitine Heim. Eitan from Texas.
Eitan. How do you say it? Eitan. Eitan. Okay.
Yeah. Dr. Eitan Heim. I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Heim, I don't know, five or six years ago through our mutual connection with Alliance Defending Freedom.
He was the whistleblower at Texas Children's Hospital. And I thought of him. And I thought of some of the other whistleblowers, including some that Well, I'll just leave it at that. I'm thinking of the one who was published from the university. of Washington and S and St.
Louis. She she herself was someone who identified as a lesbian. And just revealed how widespread this was, how it was disproportionately targeting young girls. And I think about the courage that they showed. I mean Doctor Heim was arrested.
He was arrested for violating HIPAA. He was charged with four felony counts from the Department of Justice. And he stuck to his guns. And I remember meeting him going, This guy is impressive. This guy has courage.
This guy is saying This is what's right. And I'm going to stand on what's right, even at great personal cost.
Now we know we have the D-transitioners. The HHS report, if you I had a chance to look at it at chapter five. are what is it, eight first hand accounts. of children and what they went through. It's going to be horrible reading.
But it's so important to understand that there were a group that were standing up for these kids. And standing up against the wrong that was being done against them in this vast social experimentation. But that's, you can't call it anything else. It was a vast social experiment. Yeah, I have to brag for a moment.
So, Dr. Heim was a huge part of this report, and he helped put a lot of it together. I'm going to brag for a moment because it was about eight months ago that my husband, Aaron, was in Washington and was meeting with some representatives from the White House and HHS and said. What we need is a sort of 9-11 commission report on gender medicine. And what he was referring to was after 9-11, there were all these systematic failures that were revealed.
That led to the attacks, including, you know, it was like the FBI had some knowledge. The CIA had other knowledge. They weren't communicating as well as they should have been, and things got missed that shouldn't have. And so there was this huge convened report and investigation into how did this happen? How do we prevent it from happening again?
And Erin said, we need this for gender medicine because it was always clear that this was a social experiment. It was always clear that it wasn't evidence-based. And it was clear that kids were being harmed and turned into patients for life.
So how did this happen? And Dr. Heim became kind of an early partner in it, as well as Dr. Aaron Cariati from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who was another really crucial. Part of this report coming together and helping everybody understand the medicine behind it.
Or the fake medicine behind it, frankly. But this was a colossal effort. And I'm really proud of Aaron. He was kind of the project manager. He did a lot of the writing in the report, and he's been pouring himself into this because he wants to look out for kids and families.
And the other thing that this revealed. we don't even know the extent of going in is that We've always known, you and I have talked about it before here. Like, how do we, how do we? How do we differentiate the true believers, like people who at least pay lip service to the idea that little boys can actually be little girls? and who actually believe that as crazy as it is.
How do we differentiate them between opportunists? And this report might help us do that because one of the things they found was that. The average amount of money spent on the lifetime health care of a typical American child from the time they're born till the time they're 18 is around $3,000. That's the average estimated cost of their healthcare during that time. Of a kid who goes through a gender clinic or is put on hormones or puberty blockers, it is upwards of $25,000 to $75,000.
And if you throw in surgeries, That can get as high as $170,000. And by the way, when you start down this road, you create a patient for life. And a lot of the detransitioners have told those stories: that once you have surgery, once you do these things to your body, it's not a one and done. You need medicine and intervention and care for the rest of your life. And the hospitals know that.
And they, Saw that when it was starting. And we would be absolute fools to assume that nobody had any ulterior motives, that nobody looked at that bottom line. And even if they weren't a true believer, they weren't the mid-level kind of purple-haired doctor with a rainbow lanyard. Who really believed in this, but they were in the C-suite saying, look at how much money this could make us. And they went ahead with it.
And I'm really hopeful that the Department of Justice investigation will reveal. More of that, and we'll frankly bring those people to accountability because this can't happen again. No, it can't. And you know, I think you asked if this is the beginning of the end. I think it's more than that.
I think it's such an instrument of significant leverage against this issue. I mean, we did have the inability of these hospitals to kind of remain quiet on this. And that, of course, was part of Dr. Heim's. A case And hospitals and gender clinics and so on stopping this treatment.
We had Vanderbilt who stopped. doing any of this even for adults. I mean, I think the medical any potential of the medical side of this is just unraveling in front of us. And then this right here, at least as it comes as far as it has to do with children, is going to be an incredible tool and such a significant thing, especially since now for the vice president to come out and and so get behind this report and so get behind the Department of Justice stepping into this. You know, we said this a couple weeks ago or several weeks ago.
We got some, some, some heat for it. There's people that need to go to jail. that seems to be that it seems at some level to be that, that's something that could happen as a result as well of this report. And that sort of consequence in the law is going to go a long way into making sure that it doesn't happen again. Yeah.
Well, John, before we break. Tell me what is happening in the WNBA. I know you've been following this, and I I've seen some of these videos. I think I just saw an NBA player. Who announced that he was committing to the WNBA draft?
What is happening?
Well, let's say, first of all, what's happening on Breakpoint this week, that we now are three weeks in a row talking about the WNBA. I think that's the only thing that's happening. This is the most the WNBA has ever been talked about in the history of the WNBA.
Well, oh my goodness, I'll be left to the satirists. Yeah, so that's number one. Number two, yes, Ennis Kanner, who is a Innes Canner Freedom, who changed his last name to Freedom because he's always been this outspoken. A voice standing up against child labor, you know, from Nike and all kinds of things, has declared for the, I think he's 7-2. And played in the NBA, and then another former first-round draft pick in the NBA draft is also declared for the WNBA draft.
They're basically just calling the bluff. And the bluff is that, as a result of, A revelation of a s in a Sophie Cunningham interview.
Sophie Cunningham is a player on the Indiana Fever who just said that boys don't belong in girls sports and it has created the it was just a quote in an interview. And that has created this kind of crisis for the entire league. A league whose name is the Women's National Basketball Association, they actually called a task force. To basically answer the question, you know, who's eligible to play in the WNBA? And they were unable to do so.
So now this is a long process. And according to the rules, there's no reason. That Innes Canner can't actually declare for the draft.
Now What's funny is Coming out of this meeting where they were trying to come up with some sort of policy or address this. issue, the WMBA came out and condemned The behavior of these individuals, these men who declare for the WNBA draft, because they said they were disruptive or just trying to create attention or something like that.
So, in essence, that what they were saying is that a man simply can't declare himself a woman and be considered a woman.
Now, That's the whole point, right? And so it's really kind of a funny thing. The other thing that I was thinking of, though, is that all of this again was sparked by simply One player saying, you know what? We don't want men. Men shouldn't be allowed to compete against women.
Basketball is going to be a dramatic difference, and you've got a real potential problem here because. NBA G League players don't make nearly as much as W NBA players. G-League players would dominate the WNBA. You know, you're talking about being six to eight inches taller at every position, faster. Everything.
But I saw a tweet this week. Where somebody accused J. Kate Rowling of saying, I want all trans people killed. Which, of course, is ridiculous. It's absurd.
She's never said anything like that. All she has said, and she actually doesn't even say that. You know, they shouldn't be allowed to express themselves or anything else. She just says they don't belong in women's spaces in order to protect women. It was such an irrational crazy Thing to say about J.K.
Rowling, who is clearly on record on this. Like, she has never been quiet. about what she thinks.
So you look at just the hysteria. And this whole position is based on hysteria. The movement was always based on. Hysteria You know, you call someone a wrong pronoun and the reaction is nuclear, right? That's what's happened here.
But except it's happened at an institutional level. You look at Sophie Cunningham's original statement. And which was all couched by the, oh, you know, we need to love everyone and all that sort of stuff, but women shouldn't play in men's sports. She's literally being accused. of just hating people.
And you just see the irrationality.
Somehow, we've got to figure out how to have that conversation. Why is it? that a calm statement which does nothing. to deny someone's existence or Create harm. I mean, it's possible.
To critique the transgender ideology in a way that dehumanizes someone. This is not what's happened here. This was one statement in one interview. that in order to protect the WNBA, we shouldn't let men play in it. And the reaction has been to almost explode the entire league.
It's interesting to watch. This could be the end of the WNBA. Just basically because of Of the law of non-contradiction. I mean, I don't even know how to describe it, but for something as small as this one statement to create so much chaos for a league tells you an awful lot about this position. But it's reflected in all these other kind of irrational nuclear reactions of misgendering and dead naming and all this sort of stuff.
That was part of driving this movement forward over the last 10 years. And the rest of us now are just sitting here going, We never really bought it and you don't have to buy it anymore.
So I think it's fascinating to watch. Just because of that. Yeah, it had to come to this. Did you say Mr. Freedom is seven foot two?
I think so. He might be seven four. I can't remember. Oh my goodness. I don't want to give away too much personal information.
But he's like two full feet. Taller than me. I just find that outrageous. I'm personally. He's an enormous, he's an enormous human being.
But you know, I mean, look, there was a a player at the WMBA that was interviewed this week. I'm trying to remember who it was, or at least I saw the interview this week where She was asked about this, and she's like, Look, like it or not, if a G-League player, you know. Claims to be a woman and jumps in the draft simply because in the G League, they're going to make $60,000 or $75,000. And here they'll make a million. They'll dominate us.
And they all know it, you know? Uh it's it's it's obviously the case. This was just always the question. I mean, I testified at my state house like four years ago. Because we were going through all this nonsense about so-called anti-discrimination and whatever.
And I was saying, you don't want to go down this road because eventually you're going to have to answer. The state is going to put itself in charge of determining who is transgender enough. In quotes. Because if you're saying what you're saying today, then a person can walk into Target and say, I'm a girl, and go in the women's fitting rooms. And that is what's happening.
That happened in Target. And unless you have some specific rubric, like you have to have been saying you were a woman for six months, or you have to have, you have to own 10 blouses from a women's clothing company. And it would get absurd very, very quickly. But unless you have that kind of rubric, you're going to be in big trouble here. And the state representatives in that room, when I testified, you know, they can ask you questions afterwards.
They said, well, what's Target doing? We'll just do that. And I said, well, it's clearly not working. Like that was their answer. And I mean, this has been, it was always going to come to this.
So I'm at least grateful it's coming out, but I do just feel like generally ashamed that. This happens to be my cultural moment that we are sitting here debating what the W and WNBA could possibly mean. Yeah, I think there's something else, though. And because I appreciate you bringing up that story, because that's the story we started this conversation with was the target. Dressing room story.
If we go back. Even on this program or as a culture, to, I don't know how long ago that was. Was it eight or nine years ago now? Five, six years ago? Gosh, yeah.
And that wasn't enough to blow the whole thing up. The observable fact that, on a general point, of safety, of privacy. Including at the kind of heyday of kind of women's rights and and and and equal opportunity and You know, the Increasing exposure of the abuse that women have been subjected to sexually at the hands of men. that this observable absurdity of allowing men into women's dressing rooms and Target protecting that. And not just Target, but it was Target.
Target was defending that practice and saying, oh, nothing will ever happen, and then downplaying the reports of abuse And that sort of thing that were emerging. That wasn't it. That wasn't the thing that unseated this culturally. You know what it was? Sport.
So at some point we're going to have to come back and think, what kind of culture are we? That the sports conversation meant more. than the privacy and locker rooms conversation did. The opportunity conversation meant more. I don't know if I'm okay with that.
I mean, I was on record, you know, 10 years ago going, oh, this won't last because there will be too many dads that won't want to see, you know, their too many soccer dads that won't want to see their daughters, you know, get hip-checked and bumped off the line, you know, by a boy. And that wasn't it. That's not what happened. But you know, now we have. you know kind of scholarships and Yeah, and and and paychecks and and other things.
I I I don't know. I just think There's going to have to be A deep evaluation. of why it was that we weren't triggered. Way earlier on this. Although it is encouraging that the hospital, at least when we got to the social experimentation on children, eventually that was because of, you know, again, people who were creative like your husband to create these things.
Courage of whistleblowers, the D-transitioners basically coming out going. You guys, you know. you know, did not support me. You said you did, but you didn't. Yeah, I mean, that's encouraging.
But what drives cultural change to me has always been interesting. But here it just says so much about who we are. That's true. That's true. That's a great point.
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Well, Don, I want to turn now to, gosh, Texas. This story involves three states, so I'm going to try to keep it straight as I kind of give you the outlines here. But I'm sure you've seen this news. There was a couple in California. Who hired a woman to be their surrogate, so to carry a baby for them that they would then pay her for.
The woman was from Alaska, the woman who agreed to be the surrogate. When she was around 20 weeks pregnant, they found out that the baby she was carrying had a heart defect. that was not fatal but was quite serious and would need immediate medical attention upon the baby's birth. When the couple who had been paying this woman to carry the baby found out, they pressured her into getting an abortion. They tried to claim a legal right to it.
They wanted her to kill the baby because they didn't want to deal with this medical condition. The surrogate, again, in Alaska, did not want to kill the baby.
So she fled to Texas where there are stronger protections for babies. And a Texas court ordered that she could not be forced to have an abortion.
Well, two days ago, the baby was born. His name is Gabriel. And according to news reports, he's now in the custody of the couple from California who paid the surrogate to carry him. Eddie is receiving medical care for this heart defect. And a lawyer for this couple, I think, told CBS News that.
The couple is focused on getting their son the best medical care that he can receive, and that was always their focus. I don't even know what to say about that, other than the reason I'm bringing it up is because this illustrates, again. the inherent risk and evil of surrogacy itself, Because when you institutionalize something like this, and even when you do it on an individual basis, you inevitably bring up the question. of rights and parental rights. And that's what has happened here.
I mean, this just has brought that debate to the fore. Um but the other really Gosh, this is just a tragedy all the way around. But one of the things that stuck out to me, I was reading just this kind of breaking news last night. that baby Gabriel had been born. And CBS News said The woman who carried this baby has been cut off from access to the baby.
And this was framed in CBS as a positive. Like, okay, the situation's cooling off, and the baby's getting medical care, and he's with, quote unquote, his parents. With no consideration to what that baby wants or frankly needs. And that, again, as I think some of the inherent evil in surrogacy, because when a baby is carried by a woman, That is the woman that the baby knows. And now we have completely severed that relationship.
And if that woman hadn't fought for the baby, he would now likely be dead. No, he would, and You know, the irony in that statement of CBS and other outlets, you know, basically proclaiming, including the attorneys from the for the this couple in California basically accusing McKenna of turning this into, as they put it, political. Theater You know, by all the rules of intersectionality that we were all told, you know, in terms of who has the power in this dynamic and who is the oppressed party and who is the vulnerable one. I mean, McKenna should win all the intersectionality, you know, contest in this.
So, I think it's interesting how, again, on this one issue, when it comes to sex and when it comes to basically autonomy and when it comes to you know Got them. The ability of adults to get whatever they want in this whole arena, suddenly all the rules get thrown out the window that we're supposed to be playing by. I also think though, and and this to me is Something that's illustrated not just in this story, but in all the stories we've talked about so far this week on this program. We're just, we were sold in the 90s this idea of kind of moral relativism that. You know, this stuff is just between you.
Nobody has the right to tell somebody else what to do with their own bodies. And you see how when it comes to sexuality and marriage and babies, These are private acts that have incredible public implications, right? It's not just something that doesn't affect anyone else. Except You.
So no one should tell you what to do, whatever. These are just public things. And some vision of reality, some vision of morality, and some vision of the human person is going to drive forward. Whatever it is we decide to do as individuals and as a community. Those visions collide and they're incompatible.
You know, you can't have it both ways. You've got to decide. you know whether or not At the end of the day, the priority is going to be put on the desires of adults or the rights and well-being of children. You just got to decide that. That's exactly what was at stake in the story of.
The fraud that was taking place in so-called gender-affirming care. It's the story here as well. Here you have someone that looked primarily on the best interest of the child. And then you have others who basically saw the child as a product, a commodity that they had acquired through a commercial means. Treating it as such, right?
And I mean, that clearly they're being consistent at least with the whole practice by saying, you know, look, we ordered this child a particular way, we didn't get what we ordered. I mean, it's the same as if Starbucks messes up your coffee order, you're going to send it back and ask for a new one. And that's what happens when you treat children like commodities. That's what's happening, you know, in this story as well. I think you were the one that I heard say, correct me if I'm wrong, but you used to say, whenever you put a price tag on something, you cheapen it.
Well, you put a price tag on something that's priceless by definition. Yeah. And I did say it, but I was quoting somebody else who was quoting somebody else. I don't know who the original source is.
So I'll shout out Ben Mitchell, who taught me bioethics at. At at in seminary. But yeah, if if you start with something that's priceless, but then you put a price tag on it. Then it immediately makes it, you cheapen it. And that's the starting point here.
Are you starting with a? frame of reference that says every single life is Is priceless, right? Every single life is. uh sacred and of eternal worth. Because they're made in the image of God from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death.
You start there, then, yeah, there's. Everything else has to serve that. Yeah. If you don't, if you start with, well, what we're starting with here is a commodity. Which is surrogacy does that inherently.
Surrogacy, you may say, Well, that's not how I feel. It doesn't matter how you feel. The process creates a commodity of a child. That's what surrogacy does. And women and women's bodies, right?
The fascinating thing here that is just will be revealed, is being revealed here and will continue to be revealed as more stories like this happen is that. These things implicate not just children and babies, and children's rights versus adult rights, but the way we look at all of our human relationships. Because Like if you think about for a moment what these The people who paid for the surrogacy contract were saying, which was: we want a baby, but not one that we have to take care of in a way that we'd rather not. And I'm not saying that it's not, you know, if you're pregnant and you get a difficult diagnosis, that that's not devastating. Nobody wants their children to suffer.
And nobody plans to have a child who needs lifelong care or who has a scary medical condition. But to say that we've asserted a level of control over this now to the point where we only want it to go a certain way. I feel like we're doing that in so many areas of our lives. We're doing that in marriages, we're doing it in friendships, in parent-child relationships, where children say, You know, adult children say, you know, it takes too much energy to be around my parents, so I'm going to cut them off. Or, I don't like this friend because they drain my energy or they need too much from me.
So, I'm going to stop being there for. We've commodified every relationship to the point where relationships aren't relationships anymore. They're contracts or they're interactions, or they're all seen through the lens of what a person either can do for you or might take from you that you find unacceptable. Situations like this one are just, you know, just like bring that to the courtroom. But it's happening everywhere, and it's hideous, and it's not serving us.
And we wake up and wonder why we're in a loneliness crisis and a meaning crisis. But at the same time, as we say, like we fundamentally refuse to sacrifice for others at this point, and we find that to be untenable. We want more control and we want everything to go perfectly. It's just not how we were meant to live. Yeah.
You know, it's an interesting aspect of the story as well: is that had she gone through with. The abortion As the contract stipulated, it would have been a 24-week abortion.
So, this is the kind of abortion. That A, was it medically necessary? No, it didn't put her life at risk. The baby, you know, it was a treatable condition. Uh, the serious condition, don't get me wrong, but a treatable condition.
But this is the kind of thing that Massachusetts, the Massachusetts law just, you know, was created to basically celebrate and say, you know, and other situations, just if someone decides because of a relationship breakup or something like that, I no longer want to be. pregnant.
So again, this is the thing that never happens until it happens. Christian Educators, this is Billy Hutchinson with Colson Educators. And as a former teacher myself, I know you're busy. And I know you want to teach like a Christian, not just be a Christian who teaches.
Well that's why we created the Colson Educators app. You can get practical worldview training wherever you are, complete courses on your schedule, earn CEUs and connect with a community of like-minded educators. Download the Colson Educators app on the Apple App Store or Google Play.
Well, John, I want to shift to another cultural story.
So, this came out this week from a media outlet called Investment News.
Okay, I'm just going to read this. More than half of Gen Z investors. According to the 2026 Retail Investor Survey, they have redirected money that they would have set aside for investing towards sports betting. Fifty two per cent of respondents to their survey in Gen Z Had diverted funds they originally allocated for investing into sports betting, and 26% said they now see sports betting as a deliberate part of their long-term financial strategy.
Now, this is eye-popping for several reasons, but honestly, the first one for me was: is Gen Z investing? Should I be investing more than I am? You should be investing. Yes, you should. That's the answer to that.
You know, there are cynics and skeptics that will say, well, you know, playing the market or investing in the market. Is the same as gambling, but it's not. You're talking about completely different. Categories. You're also talking about the good of work.
You're talking about a level of. Um Knowledge that is available, at least, in terms of the companies and the products and the earnings and things like that. And you're also talking about an awful long track record, which is dramatically better than the track record that quote-unquote investors have with sports gambling. Look, all of these online gambling sites use these super highly paid. A-list athlete celebrities.
at a constant rate. Of commercials. The sheer investment there is stunning. And they're not going to do that if the return's not there. The house wins.
So yeah. But I you know, I think that this demonstrates.
something else that I guess it's another line of evidence of something we've talked about before, going back to. One of the founders of modern sociology who looked at civilizations and talked about whether they were. uh civilizations that were declining or civilizations that were you know rising And this is Paterum Sorokin.
Sorokin talked about the difference between. Those civilizations that were ideational, living for ideals, building towards ideals, and those that were sensei. That were basically unable to think about the future because they were kind of captivated by immediate gratification on a civilizational level. And in his view, if you look at the civilizations that were on the decline and eventually faded away, it's because they became sensate. They stopped building for the future.
And I always thought that bank accounts and things like that were great examples of this, right? If you always are cashing out of your bank and you're never putting anything in it. Then you're going to run out of money, right? That seems observably the case. And civilizations are like that, according to Sorokin.
But and I also Thought that in addition to the demographic crisis, the shrinking birth rate that we have across the Western world. Which a child is a vote for the future, as many people have said, that if you're not having children, When you think you're kind of meeting the quote-unquote need for a child with a dog or something like that, then you're not thinking about the future. You're thinking about yourself and all the stories that we've talked about in socially experimenting on children to get what we want, including surrogacy. You know, this is an example of that. But this is a dramatic example of that because the other thing that I always thought kind of pointed to the West being sensei were the incredibly high levels of debt.
Right. If you have high levels of debt, it can be because you've had some sort of crisis and you've just. You're down on your luck. It also. Could be because you bought a whole bunch of stuff you couldn't afford, and instead of save for it, you wanted it now.
This is a whole other level of that. Kind of see as an investment strategy. That is a Those two words are doing a lot of work in this story. An investment strategy. basically leading a a generation, as it says here.
In the article, Schwab chief executive Rick Worcester voiced concerns about, listen to this. I mean, this is just a loaded phrase: the blurring of gambling and investing. If you're a society that can't tell the difference between gambling and investing, that is a sign of being sensei, right? I mean, even beyond having debt. is just not being able to tell the difference.
That's an amazing thing. Even now that there are ways to gamble. on the markets based on kind of predictions, right? That blurring is, well, let's just say it's a problem. Yeah, and it doesn't take into account, I mean, using the word investment, just doesn't take into account the.
Addictive properties of gambling, which are so well known. I mean, how many kids who say they're using it as an investment strategy are addicted or are becoming addicted or at risk of becoming addicted? And I'm sure it's a lot. And that's the ugly side of this. And that's why I think this deserves the attention of lawmakers.
too, because this is just going to get worse. Yeah. I mean, we've talked about it's not just I think the blurring I think to your point, it's not just the blurring between investing and gambling. There's also a blurring between gambling and work. Right.
So the lines that you hear is: this is my investment strategy. No, no way. But you also hear is: this is my way of providing for my family. That's where that's super scary, right? Like, Because you're now you're talking about the fundamental purpose of what it means to be human.
Yeah, this is these are the kinds of things you hear from somebody who's trying to convince you they don't need to go get help, right? Like, I'm not going to take that fully seriously.
Well, we will keep our eye on that as well, but hopefully, you know, our lawmakers take notice. John, I do want to talk about some questions that we received from listeners. And just as a reminder, if you want to. Contact us, go to colsoncenter.org and click on contact us. We would love to hear from you and maybe to answer some of your questions on a future episode of Breakpoint this week.
This first question is a fun one. Who was the recent convert that you said witnessed to Chuck Couls? And can you share anything about their testimony? We were talking about Chuck's conversion on a previous episode. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, my first answer to this question is: read born again. Read born again. It's amazing. There's a group called Classical Conversations that. Requires the reading of Born Again by Chuck Coulson.
And I still, I mean, this is a book that's so old. But people still talk about how significant it is. I mean, these are, you know, high school students that are reading Born Again. But the story is about Tom Phillips, who was the CEO of a company called Raytheon, and Phillips was a client of Chuck's. Before he went to the White House as a lawyer, after Chuck resigned from the White House after his first term, this is not because of Watergate.
He basically engineered Nixon's reelection campaign. He talks about the open in the opening chapters of. Born again, how he's in the victory party, feeling empty, and here he's in his 30s. I mean, think about it. Where do you go if your whole kind of existence is about kind of.
political ambition. And you have an office beside the most empowerful man on the planet in your 30s. Like, how do you, what are you aiming for the rest of your life? And Chuck had that kind of crisis of meaning that so many people do. And so he leaves the White House.
This is before Watergate really heats up, certainly before he's implicated in it. And he goes and visits Tom Phillips. And Phillips had just come to Christ. uh at a Billy Graham Crusade. And as he walked in, Chuck often would tell the story that One of Philip's colleagues has, you know, warned him, he doesn't want to talk about business.
He just wants to talk about Jesus. And that's what he did. And Chuck went over to his house later on that I think that same week and Phillips read to him from Mere Christianity, a passage in which C. S. Lewis talks about pride being the greatest sin.
And how that just cut Chuck to his heart, that really at the source, at the heart of this crisis of meaning he was having. It was pride and that he needed uh to be forgiven for that. And that was What started it, you know, Chuck. Took more than a couple people to Tom Phillips' driveway, where he sat in his car after leaving Phillips' home. It was late at night.
Phillips and his wife were going to bed. And Chuck was sobbing in the driveway, wrestling. with God because of this. And that's a story of Tom Phillips. But the real answer to the question is: Readborn Again.
If you've never read it, it's worth it. That's awesome.
Well, speaking of Chuck.
Someone else wrote in about one of our breakpoint commentaries about quote-unquote Nixon maxing. And this person wrote: This post is somewhat disappointing. We would like to hear a quote or two from Colson himself about what he thinks. God would have thought of Nixon's priorities and methods. Those carrying forward the legacy of Chuck Coulson should have a pretty clear read on his post-conversion opinion of Nixon and his administration's.
Ethical or unethical choices. What did Chuck think of him post-conversion?
Well, you know, hey, tell me you didn't read the the whole breakpoint without telling me you didn't read the whole breakpoint, because we actually talked about that in the breakpoint.
So I don't know when the person says, you know, about the post. It it maybe he's just talking about the headline or something like.
Something like that. I also thought it was funny because the number of people who are really sure of what Chuck Colson would have done and said, and that we should know that, you know, we get those emails an awful lot. All right, I'll stop complaining. Here's what I'll say: because I think it is. There are two things true here.
And we said this in the commentary. And I wanted to address this question just to say this out loud. Not so much to respond to the question, because I think it's a really important point. When J.D. Vance said not too long ago that if the Watergate scandal had happened today, it would take up the news cycle for 48 hours and would move on.
I think he was exactly right. I think that the Kind of Corruption that we see now. And so on is far worse. Kind of come to a place in a society as a society where we allow uh the separation. Between a personal morality and public service to be dramatic, I think it goes back to Bill Clinton and before, where we saw some real change.
in terms of how a society addresses this and and kind of how the rules play for politics. and so on. And I think that's exactly right. I also know that Chuck Colson never. ever.
Would downplay the corruption. From the President. From President Nixon. He never did. I think He thought that there were some ways that Nixon was mistreated, that there were some accusations he wasn't guilty of.
But he talked often about the allure of political power. He talked often about how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He talked often about the capacity. humans have to delude themselves and how we shirk accountability. And so he warned of the political illusion.
He commended people to be involved. in the political process, but to keep politics in its lane. and not allow it to become the thing that dominated everything else. He was wary of that, and it had a lot, and it was all because of what he had experienced and his own self-delusion. That he admitted to later on.
One of the things that many people miss in Chuck's own story. Is that he was not implicated on Watergate charges? He was implicated on Watergate-related charges. He could not plead guilty to what the. what what they were asking him to plead guilty of.
In order to avoid a jail sentence, so he pled guilty. to something else that was unrelated, that wasn't even one of the charges. And all that had to do with him kind of coming to terms with his own sin, his own guilt, and all of this.
So, I've thought a lot about it since I've read the vice president's comments about Nixon maxing and all that. Like, this wasn't. as big of a deal. I don't think that Chuck would have ever said that this wasn't a big deal. He also, by the way, understood.
how much public trust had been lost and violated. Because of the Watergate scandal. And that was a big, big deal for someone who was supposed to be a public servant.
So, you know, obviously we have, I think, a real inability as a culture to hold these kind of views all at the same time. But I think Chuck did. I think Chuck would have seen. how uh underwhelming The Watergate thing was compared to other things that would have been a much bigger deal today. But he also kind of understood the role that it played and it kind of Leading to some of these things that we see today.
So I don't think Chuck ever downplayed. How Wrong. Nixon was? And Where it came from. I think he understood it.
I think the other thing, too, I didn't say this earlier, that was another part of this, in addition to the things I've already mentioned. Is that politicians are people? And the illusion that you're somehow more than a person, and so therefore you can play or a different kind of person and you can play by a different rule, that's part of the political. Power, confusion. and corruption that he talked about.
And so I think all those things. are true at the same time.
So that's how I'd answer this question. Probably also go read Born Again. Again, if you have. Yeah, go read Born Again. It's all in Born Again.
There you go. Yeah. Well, that is going to do it for the program this week. Thank you so much for listening to Breakpoint This Week from the Coulson Center for Christian Worldview. I'm Maria Baer, alongside John Stone Street.
Have a great week, everybody. We'll see you all back here next time. God bless.
