Visiting Fellow in Bioethics @EPPCdc | 2025 Novak Award | formerly @yale, @HHSgov | ✍🏻 @nytimes, @NRO, @FirstThingsMag, @realDailyWire, @WNGdotorg | Mom of 4
Washington, DC
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An absolute honor to launch my Novak Fellowship project last night at the @TFASorg Journalism Awards Dinner. It’s called Technically Human: The End & Future of Emerging Reproductive Biotechnologies. Excited to begin a yearlong probe into reprotech & what it means to be human.
Honored to be receiving one of seven Robert Novak Journalism Awards at the annual @TFASorg Journalism Forum & Awards Dinner tomorrow night in New York City. 🌃
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Just finished giving a talk on these very things at a classical Christian school in Virginia. The students were all abuzz afterward and asked such insightful questions. Like I told them: Understanding the human body and what it is for will be the defining task of humanity in the 21st century.
I was asked to give a lecture next week at a church in Minnesota on what I see as the most pressing issues facing Christians. Here's my rundown I'm working on for my lecture.
— The beginning of life: Reproduction and human dignity.
— The manufacture of life: Genetic engineering and designer children.
— The simulation of life: Artificial intelligence and digital personhood.
— The enhancement of life: Transhumanism and human augmentation.
— The embodiment of life: Biological sex and bodily identity.
— The commodification of life: Surrogacy and reproductive markets.
— The manipulation of life: Surveillance, algorithms, and human agency.
— The extension of life: Longevity and the pursuit of immortality.
— The quality of life: Disability, dependency, and the meaning of dignity.
— The end of life: Assisted suicide and euthanasia.
In a word: bioethics.
The central moral question of our age is increasingly whether human nature is a gift to be received, enhanced beyond our native capacities, or a problem to be solved.
Christians need to be prepared to answer it. I am confident that our doctrine of the imago Dei, coupled with the Christian natural law tradition, provides a sufficient basis and bulwark to guide civilization, if civilization will entertain them.
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Katelyn Walls Shelton retweeted
You will never be able to bioengineer your way out of sorrow and suffering.
This is Lucy. Born in December. Not because of luck. Because of a choice.
She doesn't have to become a patient before she becomes a person. She just gets to be a kid.
For 300,000 years, every parent handed their child a genetic hand they’d never seen. That era is over. We are the first life form to read its own source code and select the next generation. Soon this will be the default way we have babies.
I want to end the genetic lottery and let every family make their own luck.
All of human history, we rolled the dice.
We don’t have to anymore.
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I’m sure @noor_siddiqui_ neglected to tell her audience that if her grandparents had used Noor’s technology on her mom, her mom nor she would have ever been born.
I went to TED to talk about the biggest injustice in the world nobody takes seriously.
The genetic lottery is wildly unfair. Why should a dice roll decide your life?
It robs babies of the ability to walk. To talk. To make it to her first birthday. One wrong letter out of 3 billion. And we shrug and call it bad luck.
It blinded my mother. After years of testing, the answer was: there’s nothing we can do.
She’s not alone. 400 million people live with a rare genetic disease. Half are children. 95% have no approved treatment.
I’m done pretending it’s fate. It’s a typo. And for the first time in history, we can read all 3 billion bases before a pregnancy begins.
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Story time. When I was the Special Assistant for Global Women’s Health during Trump I, we fought for optimal women’s health throughout the lifespan, recognizing abortion is not healthcare and that when we reduce “women’s health” to abortion, women suffer.
When the Biden Admin took back over in 2021, they quickly transformed our work into a White House Gender Policy Council (couldn’t even say the word “woman” lol) that fell back on the women’s health status quo: expanded access to contraception and abortion (plus LGBTQ activism), all across the globe.
I called then for conservatives to step back into the women’s health arena, which had long been ceded to the left. I couldn’t be more excited to see @FLOTUS, @POTUS, @SusieWiles47, and @SecKennedy doing just that. I wrote for the @realDailyWire about it today:
“Where the Left has long conflated “women’s health care” with expanded access to contraception and abortion, conservatives are ushering in a golden age of AI-fueled discovery.”
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Unlocked for today! dailywire.com/news/what-wome…
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Understanding the human body and what it is for will be the defining task of humanity in the 21st century. Adding to my book list.
I was able to read an advance copy of this forthcoming book from Andrew Borror (with @ivpacademic).
Folks, you need to put this on your 2027 reading list. It’s just a wonderful book, the single best theological treatment of fitness culture and exercise I’ve read.
And it’s not just for gymgoers; it’s a book for any Christian who wants to think more deeply about why bodies matter and what they are for.
Check it out here: ivpress.com/fit-for-what?srs…
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This was an enjoyable and informative read. @jayshelt, I told you so.
"The thermometer I have is the kind you point at someone’s head. Clearly it’s a scam. At times, I’ll pull the trigger and the number that I get seems almost right. At other times, the readout is absurd. I know when it’s the latter case because, as a human being, I possess a sensate hand. Evolution has deployed a field of thermo-sensing cells on the glabrous surface of my skin, and I’ve found that when these are laid against the forehead of my child, they may produce the following diagnosis: He is hot. Or else: He seems normal. No further probing is required." theatlantic.com/health/archi…
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“President Donald Trump is expected to establish the Women’s Health Division and a White House Women’s Health Task Force aimed at overhauling the federal government’s approach to women’s health, according to a White House document obtained by USA TODAY... The task force will be led by Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles” 👀
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Nolan riffs on time. Gerwig riffs on color.
Frances Ha (2012), an early film Gerwig co-wrote and starred in, was black and white. In Little Women (2019), she uses color to distinguish between timelines. Barbie (2023) is so pink that it depleted the global supply of fluorescent pink paint. And now the Narnia trailer has been released, it’s notable (though not surprising!) how saturated the colors are, and especially how she uses color to depict Aslan singing a world into existence.
You can always count on Gerwig for color. I will likely have my disagreements on the content just like I did with Barbie, but I really can’t wait to see where Gerwig takes this. She’s a masterful director.
This sequence of Aslan singing the world into being is something I’ve wanted to see on screen for so long. I love the visualization of his cosmic self bursting with color as he brings Narnia to life.
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This has now become a collection thread of cool Narnia art :)
Here’s some Narnia art I really like.
The artist researched the planetary symbolism that backgrounds the “atmosphere” of each story (Lewis often said how much he liked the atmosphere of a story) and developed it into images that have both a naturalism and a sense of the supernatural.
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Katelyn Walls Shelton retweeted
Bottom line: The two most protective factors for health and flourishing are religious practice and marriage.
Suicide attempts among married Americans held steady from 2008 to 2019.
Among the unmarried, they rose 50%.
In an increasingly isolated age, marriage looks like one of the last reliable social anchors. Yet fewer Americans have one.
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Banger: "In a world with superintelligence, none of the doom scenarios quite persuade me that humans will be easily steamrolled or go naively into the silicon night."
My first column for @TheFP is a guide to the robot apocalypse:
thefp.com/p/ross-douthat-how…
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“People inside the AI labs claim to have evidence that makes them more worried, and they are not allowed to talk about it. This makes it a very difficult situation on the outside to evaluate how worried we should be.”
@dwarkesh_sp on @nytimes’ Interesting Times with @tylercowen today
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This is also why those new IVF screening packages for things like height, eye color, IQ, or various diseases don’t work, btw. It’s only a prediction, but people see “68.7% chance of having blue eyes” and forget there’s a 31.3% chance of having something other than blue eyes (or breast cancer or high IQ, etc. etc.). It only makes parents dissatisfied when what they thought they screened out… wasn’t screened out after all. And it will lead to a lot of children feeling like products made-to-order incorrectly, and will also likely wind up with parents suing the screening companies.
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