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E306: Why Modern Women Hate Motherhood w/Leah Sargeant | Lila Rose Show · The Lila Rose Show

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  Feminists have always been concerned with this core
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  question. What does it mean to be just to
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  women as women, not as generic on sexed human beings or as
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  defective men? You would think that if you live
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  in a slightly sexist society, one of the benefits of it would
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  be that the kitchen where people are picturing women would have
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  counters that are at the height that is typical for women.
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  You went to Yale University, but before that you were atheist.
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  Can you share about that story of going from atheist to
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  passionate Christian I? Think part of the attraction is
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  there are moments in our history where you'll see the feminist
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  movement as the primary one talking about a real injustice,
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  and I think they deserve credit for that.
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  Should birth be made free by the government?
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  Put the due date and the trimesters on my calendar
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  because I was so excited and I never did that again because
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  going through my Google Calendar and deleting each event was
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  horrible. Anyone listening today who
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  currently doesn't know what's going to happen to your baby?
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  You are this baby's mother or father today.
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  We're primed to be at war with our motherhood.
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  We have to be comfortable saying pregnancy does burden women,
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  Ageing burdens to the people around you and we respond to
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  that burden with love and support for the caregiver, not
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  by a annihilating the person who is interrupting the life you
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  imagined you would lead. Leah Sargent, welcome to the
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  podcast. Thanks for having me on.
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  You recently have a book out called The Dignity of Dependence
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  and you call it in the subtitle A Feminist Manifesto.
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  I do so I think the title has every word that is not a
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  definite or indefinite article is a word that someone warned me
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  against putting in the book along the way.
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  Dignity, dependence, feminist. I think manifesto people were
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  more willing to grant because they knew it was truth in
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  advertising. There are already people
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  listening right now who are a little bit triggered by the word
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  feminist. You are a Catholic mother of
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  three, you are a wife. You are a convert to
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  Catholicism. You're very passionate about
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  your faith, and yet you very publicly identify with the word
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  feminist. You know, I think part of it is
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  just telling the truth for me. I don't feel urgently that
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  everyone needs to identify or not.
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  But it was the feminism of my second wave mother that helped
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  me connect to kind of core truths about men and women that
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  helped lead me here, even though I think my mother would disagree
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  about some of the places I've extended them.
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  I think from the beginning feminists have always been
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  concerned with this core question, what does it mean to
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  be just to women as women, not as generic on sex to human
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  beings or as defective men. And I think the feminist
• 2:24
  movement has always been kind of a a rowdy scrum and has produced
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  wrong answers to that question. But that animating question,
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  what does it mean to be just to women as women, is what animates
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  my book. And I think the more that even
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  contemporary feminists kind of lean into that question, the
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  more hopefully they'll wind up where I am with the feminism
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  that can honor the dignity of women without building that in
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  the foundation of contempt for the unborn.
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  Now there's an underlying question with that.
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  There's an underlying, I should say, premise with that question
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  of what does it mean to be just to women?
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  That A, it's possible to be just to men and not just to women,
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  And that, B, perhaps we are being just to men, but we're
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  perhaps not being as just to women.
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  Would you agree? I would say that where we are
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  today is that we've made a lot of progress on justice to women.
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  And what holds us back in some circumstances is thinking that
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  in order to make the case for women's equal dignity, men and
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  women have to be or should be interchangeable.
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  And the more pressure you put on society and law, et cetera, to
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  say men and women are basically the same, the more likely you
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  are to wind up being unjust to men or to women or both, because
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  we aren't the same. And if you ask us to pretend to
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  be something we're not, you'll see on the side of women, women
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  doing violence to their own bodies and to their children to
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  better fit this mode of interchangeability.
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  And I think one of the most stark places where you see men
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  being shortchanged by this is when men are asked to fit a mold
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  that suits them more poorly that women can adapt to better.
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  And I think schooling is a big example of this.
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  All young kids need recess, my girls as well as my boys.
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  But boys suffer more when we build a structure of education
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  that women can fit into, even though it's not great for them,
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  but just doesn't work for a lot of young men.
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  I mean, I've heard that people say that a lot, that school is
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  more designed today for, for in elementary school anyways, for
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  girls than for boys and diagnose boys with ADD or other mental
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  issues or behavioral issues because they're just acting like
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  little boys. Yeah.
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  You know, I think you want to make sure that you build your
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  society around of respect for people as they actually are, as
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  God has made them. And if you design A school that
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  doesn't work for a large number of young boys, that's not a
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  problem with the boys, that's a problem with the school.
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  If you design a system of paid parental leave that doesn't work
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  for women, that's not a problem with women.
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  That's a problem with the system you've built that isn't
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  responsive to the truth of the gift of our bodies.
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  So there's so many questions to get into it, to explore this
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  question of Christian feminism because you're a Christian and
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  what that looks like. And I mean, there's a question,
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  of course, is that even a label that we should be using and then
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  explore what does that mean actually in politics and
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  society? Before we get there, though, I
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  think your conversion story is amazing.
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  You went to Yale University, that's where you got your
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  degree, and then you had this amazing experience of
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  encountering the faith, but before that you were atheist.
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  Can you share about that story of going from atheist to
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  passionate Christian? Well, so I grew up in a non
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  religious house in a fairly non religious school district, and I
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  think people can kind of underestimate how much I didn't
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  really know any Christians before college.
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  You're like, oh, well, maybe a little.
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  In my AP European class, when we were covering the Protestant
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  Reformation, we were covering the Lutherans.
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  And then someone, not me, I want to be clear, raise their hand to
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  ask, do Lutherans still exist? And the teacher to be like, yes,
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  I wanted the poor kids, like, yes they do.
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  I'm a Lutheran. We're like, what?
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  So growing up I was reading the New Atheist.
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  So I kind of saw Christians through that lens.
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  I've read history. So I did know Lutherans existed.
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  I'm like some of my classmates, but I would say most of my
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  exposure to Christians was purely mediated through politics
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  and popular culture, which I've got to say is a terrible lens
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  through which to view the faith, where you view mostly the
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  Christians who are good at getting on TV, which
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  unfortunately is not the kind of generous witness that you hope
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  to encounter. So when I went to college, it
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  was the first time I'd met real Christians face to face besides
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  the one Lutheran in my AP Euro class where I could ask them
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  questions and have a sustained conversation and where I knew
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  that they were good faith. And I'll put it bluntly, non
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  stupid people. I think a lot of the new
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  atheists were very much focused on attacking lowest common
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  denominator American evangelicalism for this, the
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  dumbest possible assembly of the faith.
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  And then I would meet people and I'd start arguing them with
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  arguments drawn from Dawkins and Hitchens, etcetera.
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  I'm like, well, you know, how can you say that?
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  You know, people can just read the Bible and figure out what
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  God wants. You know, people draw a lot of
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  different things from the Bible. It obviously doesn't work in
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  like, but yeah, that doesn't work.
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  That's why we have a Magisterium and people work within a
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  discipline. Like we we don't think you
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  should just read the Bible and then just try and figure
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  everything out by yourself. I'm like, OK, I'm going to go
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  back to the library and then argue with you again.
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  And I think that was really the first movement for me was
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  feeling like the arguments about Christian against Christianity
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  that I'd grown up with didn't have purchase with these people.
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  So I had to learn more about them so that I could, because I
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  loved them, talk them out of being Christian.
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  So it sounds like it was an intellectual process for you,
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  very much ascending to faith. And it was really that two parts
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  that pull push of both needing to learn more about Christianity
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  to argue with my friends better. And at the same time, you as an
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  atheist, no one can be just an atheist.
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  If you're trying to figure out, well, how do I live a good life?
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  You know, what does morality consist of and going like?
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  Well, there's no God that doesn't by itself answer any of
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  those questions. So at the same time I was trying
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  to argue my friends out of their faith.
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  I was trying to make my pitch for what a good life consists of
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  what it means to be good. You know, as a extremely normal
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  high schooler, very normal, I would say.
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  I was really into Immanuel Kant and deontology.
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  Philosophically, I was also really into Stoicism.
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  I think the second one makes more sense because if you're, if
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  you're really into deontology in high school, Stoicism fits
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  really nicely alongside that. Stoicism is very much focused on
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  what is within my control. You know, don't let me sorrow
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  over things that I don't have control over.
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  And the kind of high schooler is really into deontology, like not
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  very well liked, I would say. What is Deontology?
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  So deontology is Immanuel Kant's way of talking about what does
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  it mean to be good, how do we think about what is true and
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  it's a very rules based approach to morality.
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  So the shortest way of summarizing what he said is that
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  you should do nothing that you cannot will as a universal law.
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  And I think that she is a pretty helpful first pass of her moral
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  questions. You know, why shouldn't you lie?
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  Well, because you can only lie because you rely on other people
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  not lying. In a world where everyone lied
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  easily, your lie would buy you nothing because people couldn't
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  take statements as true. And I like this.
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  I like that it's very much focused on, you know, there's no
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  privileged moral place for you as the person thinking through
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  this question. What you want, you have to want
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  for everyone else. So I liked that.
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  Hi there friends, I hope you're having a wonderful Easter.
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  If you're enjoying this conversation so far, please hit
• 9:32
  that like button and make sure you're actually subscribed.
• 9:36
  And if you're on podcasts, leaving us five stars and a
• 9:39
  review means a ton. We read all the comments and
• 9:42
  love the feedback. All right, back to Leah.
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  What was your sense of identity before becoming a Christian?
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  How would you did you use the term atheist?
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  And then if you did, how would you say see yourself as Leah
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  than Libresco in the world? So when I went to the reason
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  rally as an atheist, I carried a sign that said like I'm a
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  deontology. At that point, I was a virtue
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  ethicist. So I was like carried a sign
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  that said I'm a virtue ethicist and an atheist.
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  And on the back I said, like, what's your follow in the blank?
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  Because I thought it is urgent that we have answers to these
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  questions about how to live, how to navigate different intuitions
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  about moral questions. And so I started as a
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  deontologist that's very rule based, focused of morality.
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  The more I pushed on it, in part because I was trying to
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  evangelize my friends. I was trying to say, stop being
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  a Christian, be a stoic deontologist instead.
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  There's fewer tracks to give out for that, right?
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  Like no one makes little bits of evangelical literature for that.
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  The more I found that it didn't satisfy me, and that was really,
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  for me, that shift to virtue ethicist.
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  In fact, there were three books I think that really helped me
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  along that way, and the first was CS Lewis's Mere
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  Christianity, which I valued so much because the opening part of
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  it is just making the case for morality as something objective
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  outside ourselves. And you were reading this to try
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  to know how to better engage your Christian friends and prove
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  them wrong like this is one of their best defenses for their
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  faith. So I'm going to dismantle CS
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  Lewis. And to their total credit, I got
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  it from Campus Crusade for Christ.
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  They set up a table at Yale that said free books.
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  And you know, from across the quad, I see them like free
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  books. And I come over like, these are
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  all Christian books. They tricked me, right?
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  But I was really grateful for the book, both in the long run
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  and the short run, because I think CS Lewis does a wonderful
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  job making the case that Christianity is fundamentally
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  sane. You know that this is more
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  coherent, more consistent than you might imagine from the
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  outside. I wasn't converted by the book,
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  but it made me have a sense of the elegance of some of the
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  arguments. And then after that I read
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  Chesterton Orthodoxy, and I think these go very well
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  together because Lewis is very much like holding your hand
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  patiently going like Christianity is very reasonable.
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  Sane people can believe this, smart people can believe this.
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  And Chesterton is actually, Christianity is very nuts.
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  Christianity makes wild, sweeping, paradoxical claims and
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  either they're true and you should give your whole life to
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  them, or if they're false, they're destructive.
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  You should give your whole life to destroying it.
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  I'm like, he gets me, Chesterton gets me, right?
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  And I think both are true, right?
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  That there's a lot of reason in the entire history of our church
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  in the unpacking of theology, but that the fundamental claim
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  the church makes is a radical 1, and that Louis acknowledges this
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  too. The claims we make about who
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  Christ is and what that means for our life either are
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  transformatively true or repulsively false.
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  The same As for the Eucharist. You see how Christ's own
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  disciples respond to this either.
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  This is the most profound gift that could possibly be given, or
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  it's a profoundly offensive suggestion to make.
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  So I liked both of those together at the fruitful tension
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  between them. And then the last book that
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  meant a lot to me was After Virtue by Alistair McIntyre.
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  And that's what kind of, for me, pushed that shift from
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  deontologist to virtue ethicist, where you're looking at what am
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  I directed for, what's in accordance with my nature when I
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  act, I don't just think can, I will.
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  This is a universal law, but what does it makes me most
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  myself? What does a just man do in this
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  circumstance? And here's the analogy I would
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  draw when I was a deontologist stoic.
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  I was just very interested in how can I do the hardest thing
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  possible. I thought the most morally
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  admirable person was someone who's like a personal bundled up
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  walking into a storm. Everything is pushing against
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  you. You kind of feel your strength
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  by the resistance you encounter. And virtue ethics, I would say,
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  views the moral life is more the way a ballerina walks across a
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  room. Not when she's dancing, right,
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  but that there's a beauty and integrity to her movements
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  because of all the training she's done.
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  So that the mere act of walking is lovely.
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  And it's not lovely because it's so hard, it's lovely because
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  it's perfectly integrated. And so that's what drew me to
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  McIntyre and virtue ethicists. But the problem for me is I read
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  this. I thought it was beautiful.
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  I showed it to my Catholic boyfriend I had in college.
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  It was part of the driving reason I needed an answer to
• 14:08
  these questions. I'm like, all right, Like, this
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  is what I want people to do. I want people to do virtue
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  ethics. And he's like, you know,
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  McIntyre became Catholic after writing that, right?
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  I'm like, shoot, no. He's like, yeah, he thought
• 14:21
  this, you know, led to Catholics.
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  I'm like well I will pick up the baton that McIntyre left dropped
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  in the dirt and be an atheist virtue ethicist, which I know
• 14:30
  from that point, I guess maybe it was 2 years until I also
• 14:33
  followed McIntyre into the church it.
• 14:35
  Was two years within two years. Yeah, from reading After Virtue,
• 14:38
  I think about two years from that point.
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  That's Presidio care.com/lila. OK, so at what point did you
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  decide? Yes, because he wasn't just
• 16:22
  Jesus as God, it was God exists. Those are two big leaps of
• 16:27
  faith. So how did you go from God
• 16:31
  doesn't exist till he exists? And then I want to ask how he
• 16:33
  went from God is to Jesus. For me, it was one leap.
• 16:36
  I will say it was one leap so. The more I argued and the more
• 16:40
  of the conversations I was having, the more it felt like
• 16:42
  Catholicism was this intricate, beautiful piece of clockwork,
• 16:47
  right where you can see how everything fits together, even
• 16:49
  though the hard teachings on sexuality clearly fit together
• 16:52
  as part of a unified whole. But you could look at this
• 16:56
  beautiful piece of clockwork and there's no motor to it.
• 16:58
  You're like, well, this is consistent.
• 17:00
  There's something beautiful about it, but I don't think it's
• 17:03
  true. It doesn't move.
• 17:04
  I could see how it would move if it were true, but it doesn't
• 17:07
  have that animating spark. And then my own philosophy was
• 17:10
  more like a patchy sail where it's like holding part of the
• 17:13
  wind. There's some parts I've managed
• 17:15
  to patch up. There's like, I will get to that
• 17:17
  bit later, but there's nothing in it I don't have confidence
• 17:20
  in. So that kind of felt like where
• 17:21
  I was. And then for me, you know, the
• 17:24
  biggest problem, the biggest hole in my sail I was dealing
• 17:27
  with was how do I come to have knowledge of the good?
• 17:30
  That's kind of always been a premise in how I live and how I
• 17:32
  think. And I think it is for most
• 17:33
  people that somehow we have knowledge of what's right and
• 17:37
  wrong in the same way that I have knowledge of the physical
• 17:40
  world. But what's the mechanism by
• 17:42
  which I received this knowledge? And I kept pushing out and not
• 17:44
  very satisfied with the answers. And then I was back at college
• 17:48
  after I'd graduated for a debate, which wasn't a debate
• 17:51
  about religion. And I just felt like when if
• 17:55
  you'd come into the room and you were from Mars, you didn't know
• 17:57
  anything about us, you didn't know anything about human
• 17:59
  religion, and you were just trying to clump people together
• 18:02
  based on how they were arguing. It was obvious that I would be
• 18:05
  in the Catholic clump of people, even though they might be on
• 18:08
  different sides of the particular question, which I
• 18:09
  think was about whether you should nationalize the
• 18:12
  curriculum, which is a prudential question.
• 18:13
  So you could be on either side as a Catholic.
• 18:15
  That's something about how we are arguing what the human
• 18:18
  person was, was uniting all of us in this cluster.
• 18:21
  It's like, that's weird. That's a little distracting.
• 18:23
  I'm in the middle of the debate right now, so I'm going to focus
• 18:25
  up. And then afterwards, you know,
• 18:29
  like many college students, we had a variety of traditions
• 18:32
  surrounding alcohol. And one of them was after a big
• 18:34
  alumni debate, a series of toasts would be given with an
• 18:38
  enormous toasting cup that traveled around the room.
• 18:40
  And you could give toast that attacked someone else for their
• 18:42
  speech. As long as you did it wittily,
• 18:44
  you could give a toast where you called for a song.
• 18:46
  There's a lot of latitude. And as the cup is going around,
• 18:48
  I had this impulse that I couldn't understand where it's
• 18:52
  like I should toast the Nicene Creed and become a Christian.
• 18:55
  What? And I well, that's how I felt,
• 18:57
  right? Like that?
• 18:58
  That is after your debate. After the debate, which was not,
• 19:01
  I was back as an alumni. I'm like OK, well wait, but
• 19:04
  that's very stupid. Like 1.
• 19:07
  I don't know the whole Nicene Creed by heart.
• 19:09
  So like, how could I do that? 2 I don't that's not how you
• 19:13
  become a Christian. I know that's not how you become
• 19:15
  a Christian. You know, you talk to a priest,
• 19:18
  you're baptized like, so that's not what?
• 19:20
  And three, I don't believe in God.
• 19:22
  And in retrospect, 3 really should be 1 I don't know why I'm
• 19:25
  worried about these other things first.
• 19:26
  So it's very distracting. I gave a bad toast.
• 19:28
  You did do the toast. No, I'm not.
• 19:30
  Not that toast I gave like some other toast.
• 19:32
  And pulse to toast. Not only the Christian.
• 19:35
  But to say I agree with it. Yes.
• 19:37
  And so the worst part is I came back for another debate three
• 19:39
  months later and the whole thing happened again.
• 19:40
  And so I didn't even go to toasting because I had the same
• 19:44
  feeling of like what side I was on in the debate.
• 19:46
  And so I didn't go to toasting. So I'm like, I don't want to go
• 19:49
  to Toasty and just try and become a Christian again.
• 19:50
  This doesn't make any sense. So I grabbed a friend of mine
• 19:53
  who's now an Anglican priest and who I knew wanted to be a
• 19:57
  priest. I'm like, if you want to be a
• 19:59
  priest, this is what you're signed up for.
• 20:00
  So I grabbed him. We both skipped toasty.
• 20:01
  I'm like Ben, here are my problems.
• 20:04
  I kind of laid them out and the the fundamental problem I was
• 20:08
  stuck on was still how do I come to have knowledge of the good?
• 20:11
  I have my eyes to have sense of the, you know, visual world.
• 20:14
  I have my hands to have sense of the physicality of it.
• 20:17
  But what is it in me that responds to what's?
• 20:19
  True. Did you not believe in a soul?
• 20:22
  Not really. So I was a math person is what I
• 20:25
  would say. And mathematicians are seldom.
• 20:27
  You couldn't. You couldn't empirically.
• 20:30
  I was a test of the soul, was I Platonist is what I would say
• 20:33
  where in mathematics, and this is kind of what I'm saying to
• 20:36
  pen, like it's normal to think that there are things outside us
• 20:39
  that are transcendent, that we talk and reason about something
• 20:43
  that we uncover the way an archaeologist does something we
• 20:46
  can't build and just assert to be true.
• 20:48
  And this is how all of math functions.
• 20:50
  Mathematicians are never inventing.
• 20:53
  They're discovering, you know, to the extent they're inventing,
• 20:55
  they're inventing A scaffolding to get themselves to the next
• 20:58
  true thing. But it's true before anyone
• 21:01
  resolves whether the Riemann hypothesis is true or false.
• 21:04
  Whether it's true or false is already set right now, even
• 21:08
  though no proof in either direction has yet been found.
• 21:11
  I thought morality is the same kind of thing.
• 21:12
  And people really didn't give me a hard time about being a
• 21:15
  mathematician and an atheist the same way they did about morals.
• 21:18
  But to me, they felt like the same problem.
• 21:20
  And so I was going through all this with Ben.
• 21:21
  I'm like, but you know, it's not.
• 21:22
  The Platonist arguments don't work for me.
• 21:24
  You know, I don't feel like you just build a ladder up of
• 21:27
  abstractions versus math that's a little more plausible.
• 21:30
  And then goes like, well, look, it sounds to me like you've just
• 21:33
  been kind of wearing this rut for a while on this, like
• 21:36
  Platonism, no Platonism, math, morality.
• 21:39
  Like, why don't you just set that aside because it's not
• 21:41
  working for you and try and do something, anything that is new
• 21:45
  as a way of exploring this question.
• 21:47
  And so I paused for a second and then I blurted out, I guess
• 21:51
  morality just loves me or something.
• 21:56
  And then I like said like, OK, stop smiling.
• 21:59
  So let me think if I let me think if I think that's true.
• 22:03
  And ultimately, you know, with a little more conversation, a
• 22:06
  little more space to think if I had knowledge of something
• 22:09
  outside myself, something that was transcendent, something that
• 22:13
  was beyond what I was. And I didn't see a way that I
• 22:17
  was building a ladder up and yet I had it.
• 22:20
  Then the motion has to come from the other side, not me reaching,
• 22:24
  but me receiving something that comes to me.
• 22:27
  And although I could think of math or morality for a time as
• 22:30
  kind of a, an abstract rule book, if it's acting, it's not a
• 22:35
  rule book anymore. It's an actor, a being, an inert
• 22:39
  thing can't come to me. And once I'm saying like I'm
• 22:42
  talking about, you know, the form of the good, which rather
• 22:45
  than being just an abstraction in the distance is a being who
• 22:48
  is totally good and who has come down to me lowering itself to
• 22:53
  take the form of a slave for my sake.
• 22:55
  I, I know who I'm talking about. And so that's why for me it was
• 22:58
  all one leap. It was I, this is Jesus, like
• 23:02
  this is God, this is Jesus. This is the bridge between being
• 23:06
  itself and humanity that can't reach there on our own.
• 23:11
  And that whole clockwork mechanism, right, that felt
• 23:14
  complete but not alive, came to life for me.
• 23:17
  And at that point, it was maybe two or three in the morning, and
• 23:21
  it was that hinge between Saturday and Palm Sunday.
• 23:25
  That's when you had the realization that morality is a
• 23:28
  person. Yes, and it's Jesus who loves
• 23:30
  me. That's right.
• 23:32
  When you blurted that out Morality loves me, did you
• 23:38
  immediately you have a sense that you what you were really
• 23:40
  saying is Jesus loves me. Yes, like it.
• 23:43
  To me, it felt like, you know, I don't know if you did like P
• 23:47
  sets in college, but I would do computer science P sets.
• 23:50
  And there's a bit where you haven't written the program yet,
• 23:53
  but as you're working on the problem, you know, you have the
• 23:57
  path. Like you haven't even
• 23:58
  articulated the whole thing, but you're like, I was stuck.
• 24:00
  I'm stuck, I'm stuck. I'm not stuck like, and that
• 24:02
  comes before you're like, and I'll write it this way.
• 24:05
  And to me, saying that felt like that feeling of suddenly knowing
• 24:09
  you were unstuck. And it also felt like light,
• 24:11
  which is not how my computer science piece sets felt.
• 24:15
  How did you feel when you realized for the first time that
• 24:18
  God was real and that God loved you?
• 24:22
  You know, it was, it was a little overwhelming and sublime,
• 24:25
  I'd say. Like it's the kind of beauty
• 24:27
  that comes with awe and a sense of smallness, but you're not
• 24:31
  thinking about your own smallness because you're looking
• 24:34
  at this large thing, but you are aware of it.
• 24:37
  And for me, the big challenge was making the shift between.
• 24:41
  I've been thinking about God for a long time.
• 24:43
  I've been reasoning about God, arguing about God.
• 24:46
  And now I need to learn to live in relationship with him, to
• 24:49
  think with God, not about God. And so, you know, becoming a
• 24:52
  Christian is straightforward in the sense of I had to call up a
• 24:55
  priest, I had to get into RCIAI, had to be baptized.
• 24:58
  But living as a Christian for me was that big step of, I know
• 25:02
  intellectually God loves me. Like how do I live in this love
• 25:06
  with him? How did you do that?
• 25:08
  How did you live in live in experiential love?
• 25:11
  Because love can't be a concept, it has to be an action.
• 25:13
  Well. Part of it was, you know, making
• 25:15
  the shift of just praying at all, right, but really trying to
• 25:19
  break down the sense of I have times for prayer that I spend
• 25:22
  with God and then I have my life, which is its own other
• 25:25
  thing. And like, how do I make sure it
• 25:27
  feels like my whole life is prayer?
• 25:29
  How does it feel like, you know, I tried to think about at that
• 25:33
  time I was taking the metro into my job.
• 25:34
  You know, I want to do morning office on my metro ride in and
• 25:39
  evening office on my metro ride out, but I don't want to think
• 25:41
  about this as I do prayer then I do work, then I do prayer but
• 25:46
  almost that these are a set of parentheses that the whole of my
• 25:49
  work day is folded into this prayer and it's contained in it.
• 25:51
  The prayer just is never interrupted that the my job has
• 25:54
  to be part of this bridge between these two moments of
• 25:57
  explicit prayer that's still spent dwelling with God for me.
• 26:02
  And this is not for all comforts, like a lot of it was
• 26:05
  also about trying to embrace and receive embodied existence as a
• 26:10
  gift, right? As someone who'd been an
• 26:11
  atheist, I thought about my body as more a suit that carries
• 26:15
  around my intellect. You know, that isn't valuable in
• 26:18
  and of itself. And so I did more cooking.
• 26:21
  I'm cooking that I thought was like, intrinsically gross.
• 26:26
  I'm squeamish about touching eggs.
• 26:28
  I don't like the texture of them.
• 26:29
  And so I was like, all right, I'm making this enriched dough
• 26:31
  where I have to knead the eggs into the dough with my hands
• 26:34
  instead of a spoon because it's good to make food for my body,
• 26:39
  which is me. And it's good to be present to
• 26:42
  the world physically, not just intellectually.
• 26:44
  This is not a discipline that I think everyone has to undertake
• 26:47
  to become Catholic, but I think just Catholicism was just much
• 26:50
  more clearly pro embodiment than I was.
• 26:54
  That is such a beautiful expression of faith that it's
• 26:58
  pro, it's your, it's pro body and soul.
• 27:00
  And you are your body. You are your soul.
• 27:02
  And in the modern world, we don't understand this.
• 27:04
  Even a lot of Christians, I don't think understand this.
• 27:07
  They think we're more soul, Especially if you're departed
• 27:09
  from maybe the ancient faith of the Catholic faith and you're
• 27:13
  kind of caught up in, you know, some of the beautiful faith that
• 27:16
  does exist is evangelicals or Protestants.
• 27:18
  It's your soul is really you. The body is this.
• 27:22
  Well, I think it's easier to notice the places where the body
• 27:25
  becomes a cross and to think about, you know, I'm just
• 27:27
  struggling with the body. I, you know, and I think it's
• 27:29
  important to note the distinctions even made in the
• 27:31
  Bible between struggling with flesh in the sense of the
• 27:35
  inducement of sin, you know, the weakness of the flesh versus
• 27:38
  that the body is still a gift. You know, it's a sight of
• 27:40
  struggle. But God is calling us to rise in
• 27:43
  our resurrected bodies. He's not calling us to slap them
• 27:46
  off. He's calling us to restore the
• 27:48
  relationship we're meant to have with our embodied nature, to
• 27:51
  heal it, to participate in the salvation he's offering through
• 27:54
  Christ's body. And so I think people kind of
• 27:58
  get most easily like, oh, well, the body is a place of battle, a
• 28:01
  place of struggle, and it is that.
• 28:02
  But it's still a gift. And even those moments of
• 28:05
  struggle and battle are meant as medicine to heal our
• 28:08
  relationship with our body, not as a way to set aside or
• 28:11
  transcend our relationship with our body.
• 28:14
  And this belief you're describing about the body, about
• 28:17
  it's really holiness is the foundation even of your book
• 28:20
  Deity of Dependence and really any work that's going to be done
• 28:24
  to elevate the status of weaker bodies, ultimately including
• 28:28
  children. But you have to believe
• 28:30
  something special about the body and it's not just a burden like
• 28:34
  you're saying and. I think this comes out so
• 28:35
  strongly in the abortion debate overall, where it is the baby's
• 28:39
  body that's used as the evidence against him or her in the womb.
• 28:44
  You know, the baby can't possibly be a person because
• 28:47
  they are so small. They need someone else so much.
• 28:50
  They're so fragile. You know, I say in the book, you
• 28:53
  know, implicitly the argument is, could we do this to someone
• 28:57
  unless they deserved it, right? Would it be possible to use a
• 29:01
  vacuum cannula to RIP apart a baby's body except that they
• 29:04
  themselves are so weak and so fragile that it's possible, and
• 29:07
  you can't do it to an adult. And what I think comes out of
• 29:10
  this isn't just dangerous in a very obvious and explicit way
• 29:13
  for babies. It's dangerous for all of us
• 29:15
  because it really suggests that for all of us are claimed to
• 29:19
  being full human persons, are claimed to being the kind of
• 29:22
  person that the law says it's not licit to employ violence
• 29:26
  against. Well, that's always a fragile
• 29:28
  claim for everyone. It's extremely fragile for a
• 29:31
  baby. But we see increasingly at an
• 29:34
  older age that this claim of being a person gets more and
• 29:36
  more fragile, more and more attenuated.
• 29:38
  More and more governments are legalizing euthanasia on the
• 29:41
  grounds of, well, if you weren't so frail, like obviously this
• 29:45
  wouldn't be right to do to you. But since you are, since you're
• 29:48
  already on the path to dying, since you're unwell, since
• 29:52
  you're in pain, then you must be something different than a full
• 29:55
  human person. And I think what's, you know,
• 29:58
  important to remember And then part of what I think is at the
• 30:00
  core of any kind of feminist pro-life argument is no woman
• 30:05
  can endure this definition of being a human being.
• 30:08
  Leave aside the baby completely for a moment.
• 30:10
  No woman can live a full and flourishing life in a culture
• 30:13
  that says only autonomous persons are persons.
• 30:16
  Is even if you only had planned pregnancies, babies you totally
• 30:19
  embrace, you will become weaker in your pregnancy, your life
• 30:24
  will change. And in the view of this kind of
• 30:27
  autonomous ideal, you become less and less human as you need
• 30:31
  more from other people. And so even if you start from a
• 30:36
  point of view, if I don't care about the baby, this definition
• 30:38
  of what it means to be human can't possibly accommodate women
• 30:41
  in particular or anyone who will ever be injured.
• 30:45
  I'll elderly. What I think, and part of the
• 30:48
  reason I frame it as a feminist book is that women are kind of
• 30:51
  the Canaries in the coal mine here, right?
• 30:53
  Everyone will not live up to this ideal.
• 30:57
  Everyone will eventually find themselves exposed as a non
• 30:59
  autonomous person. But the question is, what gets
• 31:02
  you caught and when. Men get caught too, but it
• 31:06
  happens later and it's less of a universal experience.
• 31:09
  It might be when they're older, it might be when they get sick,
• 31:13
  it might be a sports injury kind of pushes you out of this
• 31:16
  category of autonomous person. But for women from an early age,
• 31:20
  we know that pregnancy will push us off this ledge, whether
• 31:23
  you're seeking it or avoiding it.
• 31:25
  That our nature is permeable to the needs of others and thus we
• 31:32
  both live in relationship, intimate relationship to people
• 31:35
  who are marked by need and that relationship will make us needy.
• 31:38
  So I think women catch on early if this is what our society, our
• 31:43
  law, our culture expects a person to be.
• 31:45
  I, I don't live up to this. And so my question is, will I
• 31:49
  try and pass for as long as I can try and disguise myself so
• 31:52
  no one else catches on to what I've learned about myself?
• 31:55
  Or will you say yes like I don't fit within this lie?
• 31:59
  Nobody does. Not a baby, not a senior
• 32:02
  citizen, not someone with a disability, not a man either.
• 32:06
  But it's obvious I can't live inside this lie and that's my
• 32:10
  gift, that I can't go along with this pressure and I have to tell
• 32:15
  the truth. Tell the truth about the dignity
• 32:18
  of defense. Exactly that.
• 32:19
  That's what people are. You know that autonomy is
• 32:22
  something you might enjoy, the autonomy of good health, of
• 32:25
  prosperity for maybe, I don't know, 30 to 40% of your life
• 32:29
  Max. You know, after you're born,
• 32:31
  you're not autonomous. There's no difference between a
• 32:34
  baby free delivery and post delivery in themselves.
• 32:38
  The difference is now the baby's radical need, their abject
• 32:43
  dependence can be met by someone other than their mother.
• 32:46
  That's a change in the people around them.
• 32:47
  That's not a change in the baby. It's really hard to find good
• 32:50
  content to watch with my kids for when they are allowed to
• 32:53
  have screen time. I'm always on the lookout for
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• 32:59
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• 34:24
  So I want to explore the your book more in a moment.
• 34:28
  I also want to explore feminism more before that though you like
• 34:33
  you said within two years you would became of reading
• 34:37
  Orthodoxy, Chesterton, McIntyre and Lewis, you are Catholic.
• 34:43
  That's right, you end up getting married, you have children.
• 34:48
  What was the experience like getting married and having kids,
• 34:51
  being now a Catholic? Well, you know, it was very
• 34:54
  exciting getting married. And I think because I come from
• 34:57
  a debate background, I get to do something nosy with my debate
• 35:00
  friends only, but that I think most people don't get to do it,
• 35:03
  which is when my friends get engaged.
• 35:04
  And if they're not Catholic, I ask them like, I'm so excited,
• 35:07
  congratulations. And what do you think happens
• 35:10
  when you get married? Because I want to know the
• 35:12
  answer. And in our culture, it's not
• 35:14
  obvious what the answer is. And I get a big range of
• 35:18
  responses. That's right.
• 35:18
  I get nothing happens. You know, this is a tax thing or
• 35:22
  a thing for our parents. I get, you know, this is our
• 35:26
  pledge that we want to build a life together for as long as
• 35:29
  it's good for both of us. But of course, it's very
• 35:31
  important because we love each other, that we'd be willing to
• 35:33
  separate if it weren't good for both of us.
• 35:36
  Like from the beginning. I get kind of the poetical,
• 35:39
  like, I think nothing will happen on the day we get
• 35:41
  married, but it's a formal recognition of something that
• 35:44
  happened gradually, you know, like a pile of sand becoming a
• 35:48
  keep. When did it happen?
• 35:49
  You only recognize it retroactively, which I think is
• 35:52
  actually one of the most common understandings of what marriage
• 35:54
  is nowadays, especially with people leaving as though they
• 35:57
  were married before marriage, that it's kind of the
• 36:00
  recognition of something that's already happening.
• 36:03
  But for me as a Catholic, being married is a sacrament.
• 36:07
  So not only do I get to make a family with this man I love,
• 36:10
  with whom I want to have kids, but we are building something
• 36:14
  that will not hinge on our strength alone.
• 36:16
  That marriage has a continual infusion of grace that God, by
• 36:22
  welcoming us into marriage, by accepting our vows, lends us his
• 36:25
  strength and makes each of us, you know, God willing, a
• 36:28
  preferred channel of grace for the other to help each other
• 36:31
  onto heaven. And so that's incredible, right?
• 36:34
  That's a gift that we can't receive from ourselves, right?
• 36:39
  And a sustaining force throughout our marriage.
• 36:42
  And also it was a big comfort in the earlier years of our
• 36:45
  marriage because my husband and I really wanted kids and we
• 36:49
  received them, but we didn't get to keep them.
• 36:51
  We had miscarriage after miscarriage and it with no
• 36:55
  guarantee that anything would change or that we would ever
• 36:58
  have living children, which we now do.
• 37:00
  And we had to think, well, what will our marriage look like if,
• 37:04
  and this is the pattern of our whole life, you know, if it
• 37:07
  never has the markers of external success, it doesn't
• 37:10
  live up to certain of our hopes. And I think having that sense of
• 37:13
  marriage is first and foremost two people together come in
• 37:17
  together to make a family and to help each other on to heaven
• 37:20
  meant we never lost sight of what it meant to be married.
• 37:23
  Even we weren't sure we would get to be mother and father to
• 37:26
  living children. So you had six miscarriages as
• 37:29
  part of that season before experiencing the the first live
• 37:33
  birth of your daughter, Beatrice.
• 37:35
  That's right. And so you a miscarriage before
• 37:38
  a first birth is live birth is very painful for any woman.
• 37:42
  Six of them as you endured is extremely painful because you're
• 37:46
  dealing with not only what is effectively feeling like
• 37:49
  infertility because you're not able to achieve a live birth,
• 37:53
  you're also dealing with loss after loss after loss.
• 37:56
  How did you handle that? It was just very hard, you know,
• 37:59
  and I think one of the things we had to think about is we
• 38:02
  couldn't take for granted that there would be any of the
• 38:05
  milestones you look forward to as a parent.
• 38:07
  And I in particular with our first baby, you know, the second
• 38:11
  we got the pregnancy test, I like put the due date and the
• 38:14
  trimesters on my calendar because I was so excited.
• 38:17
  And I never did that again because going through my Google
• 38:20
  Calendar and deleting each event was horrible.
• 38:24
  And what really forced us to think about, well, what do we
• 38:27
  want to do today, on this day when we believe our baby to be
• 38:31
  alive, to live together as a family?
• 38:34
  Because we have no guarantee that we're going to hit any of
• 38:38
  those calendar markers. You know, And for one of my
• 38:41
  miscarriages, where it was a kind of medically ambiguous for
• 38:46
  a while, and I had to keep going in for blood tests every two
• 38:48
  days to track what was going on. You know, I would walk past a
• 38:53
  playground every time I walked to the doctor's office.
• 38:57
  And I tried to take time to sit there and talk to my baby and
• 39:00
  say, like, OK, well, I don't have a lot of reason to expect
• 39:03
  I'm going to ever see you play here, right?
• 39:05
  So, you know, here's where I'm going.
• 39:08
  This is a place I wish I could be with you.
• 39:10
  Here's what I've been reading lately.
• 39:12
  And if there's something, you know, both charming and absurd,
• 39:14
  because I went, I was like, I've been reading, you know, this
• 39:17
  history of this one town on the border of the boundary between
• 39:21
  North and South during the Civil War, which you don't know about.
• 39:23
  Like, I can't explain the Civil War to a baby.
• 39:26
  Like, I don't know how to explain the Civil War to any
• 39:29
  child, right. But I was like, and, and this is
• 39:31
  what we're doing. How are we together in in this
• 39:33
  moment? Because I think the the big
• 39:35
  thing I would say, especially to anyone else going through the
• 39:37
  same circumstance or anyone listening today who currently
• 39:41
  doesn't know what's going to happen to your baby is you are
• 39:44
  this baby's mother or father today.
• 39:47
  And God, he's asking you to be mother or father then today.
• 39:52
  He isn't making you any promises about what's going to happen
• 39:54
  tomorrow. And you will just have to make
• 39:56
  today sufficient for itself. Did it bring you comfort
• 40:00
  thinking I know if I lose you to heaven?
• 40:04
  I haven't fully lost you. I'm going to get to see you
• 40:06
  again. Was that emotionally?
• 40:08
  Helpful or no, to be honest, you know, because.
• 40:10
  I'm here and now, yeah. Because I think, I think no one
• 40:14
  ever says to a parent who carries a baby to term like, oh,
• 40:18
  what a shame you're not guaranteed that your baby goes
• 40:20
  to heaven. Because sometimes people will
• 40:21
  say this in like the reverse version to me, like, oh, isn't
• 40:24
  it great? You know, this baby isn't like,
• 40:26
  no, I want the baby to be born. Like even risking their soul
• 40:29
  asking them to live a life, avoid sin, go to confession.
• 40:32
  I understand that that doesn't lock anything for them.
• 40:34
  I want to know my baby right now.
• 40:37
  And I think that makes sense, though.
• 40:38
  I think there are comforts, but it's always kind of crazy to say
• 40:41
  like, well, don't some of these comforts outweigh the loss?
• 40:44
  Like God did give us motherhood as a good.
• 40:47
  He doesn't ask us to pretend it's not a real loss, even as he
• 40:50
  shelters the baby himself. And, you know, I think one of
• 40:55
  the hardest parts for me was thinking like, if I, if I'm good
• 41:00
  at this, like if I'm good at there's, there's a part.
• 41:04
  The most comforting thing for me was knowing one of the sisters
• 41:07
  in the Dominican order at Hawthorne who care for the
• 41:10
  indigent poor who are dying of cancer.
• 41:13
  And I admired them so much, you know, that they welcome these
• 41:15
  people who don't have the money to pay for care, may not have a
• 41:18
  family to support them or maybe their family loves them, but
• 41:20
  can't do what they need for them in their end of their life.
• 41:23
  And they keep vigil with them. They can't cure them.
• 41:25
  They just love them day by day and know them.
• 41:27
  And I'm like, well, that's the work that God is calling me to
• 41:30
  for these children. But kind of the the I thought I
• 41:33
  did bring to prayers like, like, God, I hope you don't think that
• 41:37
  like I'm handling this well and you should just keep doing this.
• 41:39
  Like I, I can see both some of the real graces here, But I also
• 41:44
  want to be very clear, like I don't just want these graces.
• 41:47
  Like, please don't think of me as a specialist in loving babies
• 41:52
  who are dying. Please grant me a baby who
• 41:54
  lives. There's a tension between
• 41:59
  accepting the cross and suffering well with our Lord
• 42:03
  and, you know, offering it up, like letting him touch the
• 42:06
  wound, letting him in, and then also hoping that there will be
• 42:10
  an end to this particular suffering and that there is this
• 42:13
  bright path ahead, aka baby that lives, that doesn't die.
• 42:18
  How did you live in that tension?
• 42:20
  I really like Saint Francis de Sales as a guide here who's
• 42:23
  someone who's very attentive to the ways God is present in our
• 42:26
  ordinary lives. And we can think of kind of
• 42:28
  great griefs and great blessings and miracles as the way that God
• 42:32
  speaks in capital letters in our lives.
• 42:33
  But he's telling us the same thing about who he is and who we
• 42:37
  are all the time. And part of what we're
• 42:39
  encouraged to do is to say, like, Lord, help me hear your
• 42:43
  voice in the quiet things. You know, if what I need is for
• 42:46
  you to speak loudly in my life, like, let me desire that and let
• 42:50
  me hear you there. But please give me the grace to
• 42:52
  know you're still, quiet voice in the middle of an ordinary
• 42:56
  part of my life, rather than need the tremendous ups and
• 42:58
  downs to know you. What advice would you give to
• 43:01
  women or couples who are feeling hopeless about being able to
• 43:07
  have a baby because they're struggling with recurrent
• 43:09
  miscarriage or infertility? I might say, think about how you
• 43:12
  can support each other in prayer and how you want children and
• 43:16
  maternity and paternity to be part of your life no matter
• 43:18
  what. Not giving up the hope, but some
• 43:22
  people ask me to be godmother to their children while we were
• 43:24
  going through this season of our life.
• 43:26
  And it meant so much to me that they were making me part of
• 43:28
  their family, giving me a particular child to love and to
• 43:31
  pray for. And we've really tried to
• 43:33
  prioritize picking godparents, at least one for each baby who
• 43:37
  either doesn't have children now, has struggled to have
• 43:40
  children, or who won't have children 'cause they're in a
• 43:42
  religious order to make sure that this is part of their life.
• 43:45
  So saying, Lord, you've placed this in my heart for a reason.
• 43:49
  I hope you're going to answer it fully in the way I want.
• 43:51
  But where can I say yes to this love outside my immediate
• 43:55
  family? And I think it also makes sense
• 43:57
  to kind of between you and your husband or you and your wife.
• 44:00
  Think about how you want to approach us in prayer or trust
• 44:02
  each other in moments where it does feel too hard to pray with
• 44:06
  words. You know, we had a period where
• 44:08
  after I'd had surgery, after a miscarriage, it was, I both did
• 44:11
  want children, but it was too painful to even say aloud
• 44:16
  because that my body was still healing.
• 44:17
  You know what? When should I resume praying for
• 44:19
  this? When not?
• 44:21
  And so I asked my husband, will you just pray silently every
• 44:23
  night for us? Because I do want this to be
• 44:25
  prayed, but I can't say it out loud right now and I can't even
• 44:28
  hear you say it. But I can trust you to pray for
• 44:32
  our whole family as head of our family.
• 44:34
  But I need you to do it silently.
• 44:36
  And then after a period of time, we will feel like I want us to
• 44:38
  pray together aloud again. But I think it's just seldom the
• 44:42
  case in any marriage that both of you are suffering in the
• 44:45
  exact same way at the exact same time.
• 44:48
  That's not even about who's suffering more or less.
• 44:49
  It just mean mean something that's harder for one of you,
• 44:51
  that's easier for the other. And really, leaning into that
• 44:54
  asymmetry is a chance to serve each other.
• 44:57
  How did it feel when you were having your 7th baby to pass the
• 45:03
  milestones, getting into that second trimester that you had
• 45:06
  never before been able to pass? It was really hard to ever feel
• 45:09
  peace the whole nine months. You know, it was good to get to
• 45:13
  the first time we ever saw one of our babies heartbeat and that
• 45:17
  was a big gift and thinking, well, we've gotten here.
• 45:19
  That's never happened for us before.
• 45:22
  But every time I would go in for an ultrasound just for the
• 45:24
  normal check UPS or I was with midwives, they do a Doppler
• 45:27
  check. They were so kind because they
• 45:28
  do the Doppler check at the start of the appointment for me.
• 45:31
  So there's no suspense about can we hear your baby's heartbeat?
• 45:34
  No, like, oh, we'll get on the scale.
• 45:36
  Do this other thing first. Like we know you want to hear
• 45:38
  your baby. Here she is.
• 45:39
  But Even so, in the car ride over to the hospital, even if
• 45:43
  I'd been feeling the baby move in the car, it was hard when I
• 45:46
  was in the waiting room, if she wasn't moving that second, not
• 45:49
  to think I'm going to go in there and they're going to tell
• 45:52
  me that she's died. That was easier the second time
• 45:55
  around. I would say kind of it's almost
• 45:57
  like a half life where that feeling of, and this is going to
• 46:01
  be the part where they tell me that my baby has died has never
• 46:04
  gone away completely on any pregnancy.
• 46:06
  It's gotten to be a quieter and quieter voice.
• 46:09
  I'm sure there's some people wondering this right now, but
• 46:12
  did you do anything differently or get any kind of treatment to
• 46:15
  go from six back-to-back miscarriages to then having your
• 46:20
  first baby girl born? So we had a really wonderful
• 46:23
  Natpro Dr. and one of the things that was good about her, I will
• 46:25
  say is that she never promised us that there would be a root
• 46:28
  cause or that she could guarantee she could fix
• 46:30
  anything. And I think that was wonderful
• 46:32
  to have from the outset. We are working with her for
• 46:35
  three of our miscarriages. So it was not the case that
• 46:39
  getting to work up getting help guaranteed anything for us.
• 46:43
  Did that shift the probability overall?
• 46:46
  I don't know. But I'd say what meant the most
• 46:48
  to me is that we knew she'd explored everything she could
• 46:52
  licitly help us with, and that unlike other doctors I worked
• 46:55
  with, she wrote the name of every baby we lost in our chart.
• 46:58
  So it's never like miscarriage. This month, this year, it was
• 47:01
  this person and she prayed with us.
• 47:03
  So for some people I know that it may be that you go in, you
• 47:07
  get the blood tests, like this was the problem and now we can
• 47:10
  fix it for you. That wasn't our story.
• 47:12
  First of all, congratulations on your beautiful family and I know
• 47:16
  people listening are going to be given hope just by you sharing
• 47:20
  your story. So thank you.
• 47:22
  It's a blessing to other people. Your book Dignity of Dependence
• 47:26
  gets into a lot of explanations about how so much of the world
• 47:31
  today is based on male bodies, and this is a typical feminist
• 47:35
  complaint that it's all designed around men.
• 47:39
  Now the modern feminist response to this concern by saying, well
• 47:44
  then we need women to be alleviated of the burdens of
• 47:49
  motherhood at their will, basically no matter what.
• 47:53
  They need to be able to opt out of pregnancy.
• 47:55
  Therefore we need abortion. You have obviously a different
• 47:59
  response to that. Walk us through where we got to
• 48:03
  today with this setup where things are more designed for men
• 48:06
  and why, and then what is the what is the right response?
• 48:10
  So if you design anything narrowly, you'll exclude a lot
• 48:13
  of people. And in a lot of cases, the
• 48:16
  typical person we imagine using a tool moving through space
• 48:19
  might be a male person. And you can see that some kind
• 48:21
  of small things, kitchen counters, are put at a height
• 48:25
  that's the most natural work height for men.
• 48:28
  Which I think is kind of the funniest one.
• 48:29
  Because you would think that if you live in a slightly sexist
• 48:32
  society, one of the benefits of it would be that the kitchen
• 48:36
  where people are picturing women would have counters that are at
• 48:40
  the height that is typical for women so that you can roll out
• 48:42
  dough without having to stand on your tip toes to apply downward
• 48:45
  force. That's not how I roll out dough
• 48:47
  in my house because my kitchen counter, like a standard kitchen
• 48:50
  counter is a little too high for me to work comfortably at.
• 48:53
  And you'll wind up with a lot of these.
• 48:55
  You know, when people take well, what's normal here, it's just
• 48:57
  not a normal that fits women particularly well, but they can
• 49:00
  work around it. One of the ways that this shows
• 49:04
  up where women can't really work around this is the way that cars
• 49:07
  are designed. And I think very little of this
• 49:09
  is done with animus towards women.
• 49:10
  I would say it's just taking men as more representative than
• 49:14
  they're capable of being, which isn't fair or a burden that you
• 49:17
  can put on men. So the way cars are designed,
• 49:20
  you know, men and women tend to be different in height.
• 49:24
  And so if you share a car with your husband, I bet you guys
• 49:27
  have to scoot the seat back and forth, right?
• 49:29
  Because women, being shorter, have to get closer to the brakes
• 49:32
  to use the brakes. And that's fine for the brakes
• 49:34
  because the brakes are designed so that as long as you're in
• 49:37
  range of them, they work. But airbags aren't as flexible
• 49:41
  as the brakes are. The airbag in your car is.
• 49:43
  We don't think about it too much till you need it, but it's
• 49:46
  really a small bomb. It has an explosive charge
• 49:48
  behind it so that it can inflate rapidly and catch you as you
• 49:53
  move forward. You know, in a car accident
• 49:55
  before you go through the windshield.
• 49:58
  But if you're a shorter than average woman and you've cranked
• 50:02
  your seat pretty far forward to use the brakes in a way your
• 50:05
  husband doesn't have to do, then when the airbag goes off, you're
• 50:09
  actually too close to it. You're getting hit by it.
• 50:12
  Not when it's fully inflated and it's there to catch you as a
• 50:14
  cushion. You're getting hit by it while
• 50:16
  it's still exploding. So you're getting hit by the
• 50:18
  small bomb that lives in your car all the time, which is still
• 50:21
  hitting you with explosive force rather than catching you.
• 50:24
  And this is a known problem and it's been a problem for years.
• 50:27
  And it shows up in accident data.
• 50:29
  So in minor accidents, women are a lot more likely to walk away
• 50:32
  with shattered ribs or shattered pelvises than men are because
• 50:36
  they've been hit by the small bomb that lives in their car
• 50:38
  that they were too close to. And Caroline Crado Perez, who I
• 50:42
  would say is a more mainstream feminist but really attentive to
• 50:44
  this question of where are we not paying attention to women's
• 50:48
  bodies? You know, she writes about this
• 50:50
  and about the men who worked on design.
• 50:52
  And they were like, well, what do you expect?
• 50:54
  You can't accommodate everyone. Like, what on earth do you
• 50:58
  expect us to do? Women are just too small.
• 51:00
  They're too close to the wheel and they're too fragile.
• 51:04
  And to me, part of the goal of my book and part of the reason I
• 51:06
  do put the word feminist friend and center is I think pretty
• 51:09
  much every mainstream feminist can understand exactly what's
• 51:12
  wrong with that scenario. That you design something that
• 51:15
  doesn't work well for women, then you blame women for it
• 51:18
  hurting them. And what's the words you use you
• 51:21
  say too close to fragile. And what I'm trying to pitch
• 51:25
  people on doing both if they read the book as someone who
• 51:27
  doesn't agree with me about babies, or if you're reading the
• 51:30
  book as a pro lifer and you want to be able to talk to people in
• 51:32
  your life who don't agree with you, you can see that it's wrong
• 51:37
  to demand a woman be a man bodily.
• 51:40
  In this case, you can see that this language, too close and too
• 51:43
  fragile as a way of dismissing someone's existence, is not only
• 51:47
  wrong, but offensive. Glaringly horrible.
• 51:52
  And that's what we keep doing to babies.
• 51:54
  We say that they're too close to their mother, they're too
• 51:56
  fragile to be accommodated. What do you expect us to do?
• 52:00
  Someone has to be left out and in the car.
• 52:03
  It's shorter women and in our society overall, it's the
• 52:06
  unborn. But I kind of go through example
• 52:09
  after example of ways in which women's bodies are used as the
• 52:12
  excuse to treat women badly, or women are asked to solve the
• 52:16
  problem of being women by finding an accommodation, a way
• 52:19
  to use something in a non standard way.
• 52:21
  Some women would get a manual override to turn off their
• 52:24
  airbags when they were very short, which is kind of
• 52:26
  horrifying that that was the trade off and say, well, you
• 52:28
  know, a contraceptive culture, an culture that places abortion
• 52:33
  at the heart of women's liberty is doing the same thing.
• 52:36
  It's setting up a culture that's hostile to women and then asking
• 52:40
  women to do something unjust in order to navigate a culture that
• 52:45
  won't receive them as women. And, you know, have I flipped
• 52:49
  anyone in the moment? Absolutely not.
• 52:51
  It's a big shift to make. But I'm trying to get people to
• 52:53
  go like, I'm with you, I'm with you, I'm not with you.
• 52:57
  But I can see the parallel you're making.
• 52:59
  So why do I think it doesn't fit here?
• 53:02
  So really, I think as you know so well from your work, most
• 53:06
  people don't sit for very long with their views on abortion.
• 53:10
  So just getting people to say like, OK, I, I disagree with
• 53:13
  Leah. I know I disagree with Leah.
• 53:14
  But why do I disagree with Leah? Why when she's speaking about
• 53:18
  the same concern for justice I have in every other domain?
• 53:20
  Why do I think it doesn't apply here?
• 53:22
  I think people listening who might support abortion just to
• 53:26
  go go there right away would be OK.
• 53:29
  Well, you can't change the your stature.
• 53:32
  You know, you can work out, I guess.
• 53:33
  But you know, if you're short, you're short as a woman, you're
• 53:35
  never going to be your average woman is never going to be as
• 53:37
  big as your average man. And that's not your fault.
• 53:40
  But if you get pregnant, that is something that can be undone,
• 53:45
  unlike stature in that's abortion, That's the gift of
• 53:48
  abortion. And yes, the child, do they have
• 53:51
  rights? That's this and that.
• 53:53
  Well, they're not fully baked yet.
• 53:55
  You know, again, this is the argument.
• 53:56
  And so the burden, the undue burden of you having to deal
• 54:00
  with not just your given stature, but now this additional
• 54:03
  life that is so dependent on you and maybe even life threatening
• 54:06
  to you, it's just a bridge too far.
• 54:08
  So it's not so much against your dignity to remove this burden.
• 54:12
  It may damage their dignity a bit, but they're only half
• 54:15
  baked. So it's a, it's a, you know, a
• 54:17
  compromise that we'll make. And at least in this case,
• 54:21
  you've been freed not from your stature per SE, but from an
• 54:24
  additional burden that would have been placed in your already
• 54:26
  suffering stature. You know, and I think that the
• 54:29
  two arguments I'm making says that obviously we don't, we
• 54:32
  don't see any of these arguments as legitimate applied to a baby
• 54:34
  who's already been born, even though that baby is also
• 54:37
  disrupting your life, canceling your plans, you know, drawing
• 54:41
  directly from your body that after birth, we do view that
• 54:44
  person as a person. There's no magical change that
• 54:47
  happens. You know, you can say that
• 54:48
  there's the option for adoption in either case.
• 54:51
  So then that really undercuts a little bit the idea of it's
• 54:54
  important that you not be this baby's mother, right?
• 54:57
  Versus that you not have to be pregnant up till adoption.
• 55:01
  But I just think our we clearly live in relationship with people
• 55:04
  who need us profoundly, whose needs distort our plans.
• 55:07
  And it's only in the case of the very young and the very old, and
• 55:11
  that last one is new, that we view that as a reason that they
• 55:13
  can be legally be killed. And I think it, you know, it's
• 55:16
  something where I did change my mind before becoming Catholic
• 55:19
  was on euthanasia because I had thought that it might be
• 55:23
  possible to ease people's dying in a very limited way and in a
• 55:27
  very contained way. And when I read about what was
• 55:29
  going on in the Netherlands and in Belgium, I went, oh, I was
• 55:32
  wrong. Like, I thought of this as
• 55:33
  something where you could have a category of persons who you
• 55:37
  could kill and that category wouldn't naturally grow.
• 55:41
  And it has because once you say, well, look for all of us, we're
• 55:45
  we're people most of the time, but not when you're too frail
• 55:48
  and not when you need too much that keeps creeping outward of
• 55:52
  who needs too much from whom. No one remains secure in their
• 55:55
  humanity. And I think the other answer I'd
• 55:58
  give on that front is just, you know, being capable of having a
• 56:03
  baby is something that's intrinsically true of women,
• 56:05
  much more so than being short, right?
• 56:07
  Some women, most women are shorter than most men.
• 56:10
  Some women are taller than them. But if you're looking for
• 56:11
  something that's most intrinsic to is it a good thing to be a
• 56:15
  woman or not? It is the potential to carry a
• 56:17
  child. And if you have a culture that
• 56:19
  views that as primarily a burden, a shackle on women, you
• 56:22
  just have a culture that says it's bad to be women, it's bad
• 56:26
  to be women. Intrinsically.
• 56:27
  The best thing we can do is help you transcend being a woman.
• 56:30
  But I think we all agree it's bad to be a woman.
• 56:33
  If we could find a way to get rid of women would be a
• 56:36
  tremendous victory for the human race.
• 56:37
  And again, that's a profoundly unfeminist thought.
• 56:40
  And the best versions and traditions of feminism you have
• 56:42
  to take as a bedrock idea. It's okay to be a woman.
• 56:46
  In fact, it can be good to be a woman.
• 56:48
  The question that I've run up against, and I've done some of
• 56:50
  these campus debates, I was at Georgetown debating.
• 56:53
  Dr. Marianne Franks was her name.
• 56:57
  There were others, this woman who formerly headed up Catholics
• 57:01
  for Choice. Interestingly, this was actually
• 57:04
  at the Yale Political Union, which you're know.
• 57:05
  Well, you're stomping grounds. And this would be the refrain,
• 57:08
  right? Well, a parent is not required
• 57:13
  by law today in our system for a born child to give that child a
• 57:17
  kidney. If the child, you know, that was
• 57:19
  the only match the child just really needed the kidney, would
• 57:21
  die without it. You would not necessarily die
• 57:23
  without your kidney because you got 2, but you would not require
• 57:25
  you to give you, the child, your kidney.
• 57:28
  Why should the law require a mother to give her unborn child
• 57:31
  her body for nine months? You know, I think there's kind
• 57:34
  of a straightforward ethical claim, which is that it requires
• 57:38
  something active to separate the baby from you.
• 57:39
  This isn't AI can choose to give a kidney or not.
• 57:42
  There's that intrinsic distance in that example versus I am
• 57:46
  already supporting this baby and now I'm making the choice about
• 57:49
  whether to withdraw that support, not whether to
• 57:52
  affirmatively step into the breach.
• 57:54
  And in this case, I know no one else can do it.
• 57:57
  And I think that's kind of a nice like ethical intuition
• 58:00
  pump. But I think the most intrinsic 1
• 58:01
  is a lot of arguments about abortion kind of start the
• 58:04
  assumption of like, would you ask a mother to do this for a
• 58:06
  stranger? Would you ask the mother to do
• 58:08
  this for a violinist? Right.
• 58:09
  Like in the famous example of and I think that just also
• 58:14
  starts from a false premise, like you're not asking the
• 58:15
  mother to do this for a stranger.
• 58:17
  You're asking the mother to do this for her baby who is hers,
• 58:21
  like in this very intimate way. And if you don't start your
• 58:24
  account of what abortion is and what motherhood is from, well,
• 58:28
  in the one sense where strangers treat each other and that I
• 58:30
  don't know you very well, right? You're growing within me.
• 58:33
  Your heart is beating alongside mine.
• 58:35
  But what do you like? What gender are you?
• 58:38
  I don't know any of these things that you're a stranger to me in
• 58:40
  the sense, but you are mine in this very intense and intimate
• 58:46
  way. Your cells will be part of my
• 58:49
  body my whole life. You know, the ones that are
• 58:51
  floating in my blood cell can grow somewhere else in my body,
• 58:54
  can heal wounds in my body. So I think some of these just
• 58:57
  start with a a false distance in the question that isn't true of
• 59:01
  what abortion actually is. I think that's very well said.
• 59:05
  And I also think that let's just say under this theoretical this
• 59:08
  this hypothetical that there's this baby or this 2 year old,
• 59:11
  sorry, that needs the kidney and yadda yadda, right?
• 59:13
  Well, to make it properly match the hypothetical of pregnancy,
• 59:18
  this would be a situation where every two year old needs their
• 59:22
  parents kidney. You know, we all needed our
• 59:24
  mother's womb. It's not like just some rando
• 59:26
  baby that had a particularly interesting dependence.
• 59:28
  We all started life that way. And so the the better kind of
• 59:32
  hypothetical match would be if there was every single 2 year
• 59:36
  old at two years old needed a kidney from their mother or
• 59:39
  father. Or they die.
• 59:40
  Or they die and the mother and father wouldn't die from the
• 59:42
  kidney. Typically they'd be fine.
• 59:43
  Yeah, we should require. If that's the natural order of
• 59:46
  things, yes, you do owe your, you do owe your child a kidney
• 59:50
  at 2 years old. And I would argue for the law to
• 59:54
  affirm that so that it would be derelict parenting to all of a
• 59:57
  sudden everybody comes of age at two.
• 59:59
  You have the extra kidney. You refuse to give it suddenly
• 1:00:01
  because you just don't want to. No, you, you have to give the
• 1:00:04
  kidney. I mean, that's that's how I
• 1:00:06
  would also respond. To that and these hypotheticals
• 1:00:07
  kind of spiral into absurdity at a certain point.
• 1:00:10
  But I think, you know, again, even folks on the pro-choice
• 1:00:11
  side would go like, well, you know, you've got to be arguing
• 1:00:14
  at least that the even if you argue the law should be neutral
• 1:00:16
  here. That's itself kind of weird
• 1:00:18
  because we do think of parents sacrificing for the sake of
• 1:00:21
  their child as proper to what parenting is.
• 1:00:24
  You know, there might be some sacrifices that you're not able
• 1:00:26
  to make, but that's really different than are, is your
• 1:00:30
  relationship ordered such that this is what your life looks
• 1:00:32
  like as a parent. You know, often the role of the
• 1:00:36
  government isn't just like, well, we're mandating kidney
• 1:00:38
  donation for a friend or you. And this thing, it's about
• 1:00:40
  saying, OK, to build a functioning society, parents
• 1:00:44
  have to be free to respond to their duties, you know, free to
• 1:00:47
  give of themselves. And then you look at where can
• 1:00:49
  we build up other supports for parents?
• 1:00:51
  You know, in the kidney example, you know, it is about like,
• 1:00:54
  well, how does the parent have paid leave to give a kidney to
• 1:00:56
  your? But you actually don't start
• 1:00:57
  that example from like, how do we persuade the parent to give
• 1:00:59
  their child a kidney? You know, most parents would be
• 1:01:03
  sleeping outside the doctor's door, like getting an
• 1:01:05
  appointment. Like, I need you to check and
• 1:01:07
  see if my kidney can work for my child.
• 1:01:09
  That's what we think it means to be a parent.
• 1:01:10
  We're trying to get out of the parents way much more often than
• 1:01:13
  we're trying to compel them. And you have a lot of public
• 1:01:16
  policy recommendations about what this can look like to
• 1:01:18
  actually directly help parents as opposed to admonish them for
• 1:01:22
  what they should or shouldn't do.
• 1:01:23
  Before we get there, though, I want to talk about feminism.
• 1:01:26
  Yeah, you are. The author of a recently written
• 1:01:30
  feminist manifesto is a subtitle, and you use the word
• 1:01:33
  publicly. You're a passionate Catholic
• 1:01:36
  mother, wife, like we've already talked about.
• 1:01:37
  You shared some of your story there very beautifully.
• 1:01:41
  I have heard other good Catholic mothers and fathers, wives and
• 1:01:46
  husbands, you know, intellectuals that are people of
• 1:01:49
  good faith and goodwill say we should just totally get rid of
• 1:01:53
  the word feminism. It's so toxic.
• 1:01:56
  You know, we have 1,000,000 abortions.
• 1:01:58
  They would argue in the name of feminism.
• 1:02:00
  Modern feminism has become abortion basically alongside
• 1:02:04
  also now gender theory and all kinds of weird other stuff
• 1:02:07
  that's kind of pocketed into feminism today.
• 1:02:09
  Why are you trying to say the term Leah?
• 1:02:12
  Also, my sub stack is called other feminisms with an S, and I
• 1:02:16
  think that is a concession that I'm not winning this debate
• 1:02:18
  within feminism. Pretty obviously that kind of
• 1:02:21
  the autonomy favoring model of feminism is mainstream feminism.
• 1:02:26
  And if you start with the assumption that everyone ought
• 1:02:29
  to be autonomous, that does make it hard to value babies, but it
• 1:02:32
  also makes it hard to value women.
• 1:02:35
  But, you know, this is the fight I want to be in the middle of.
• 1:02:38
  I don't mind if other Catholic women say, like, I've never
• 1:02:42
  grown up in this. I don't feel like I'm the
• 1:02:45
  inheritor of this mantle. I don't want to get in the
• 1:02:47
  middle of the scrum. And I'm not going to go to the
• 1:02:49
  mats to say you have to identify as feminists.
• 1:02:51
  But I feel like I've been given a gift in that, you know, both.
• 1:02:54
  I come out of a feminist family, a feminist tradition.
• 1:02:57
  You know, I'm named for my middle name after Susan B
• 1:02:59
  Anthony. And there's a lot that's of
• 1:03:02
  value. They're mixed in with error.
• 1:03:05
  And I know it feels like a family affair to me.
• 1:03:07
  I want to be in the middle of it, to say here, here and here,
• 1:03:11
  I think you're profoundly motivated by a zeal for justice
• 1:03:15
  and an attentiveness of to the ways that our culture is hostile
• 1:03:18
  to pregnant women. And I think you're applying the
• 1:03:20
  wrong solution right. But given who you are, someone
• 1:03:24
  who's willing to sacrifice for women, you know, someone who's
• 1:03:27
  willing to speak up about this disparate burden, I feel like
• 1:03:30
  you were 70% of the way there. And often what's needed is a
• 1:03:34
  sense of, could it be possible to be just to women and babies
• 1:03:36
  at the same time? And I want to be that bridge.
• 1:03:39
  So it's not so much that you're saying everybody should call
• 1:03:41
  themselves a feminist. In fact, you're saying no, you
• 1:03:44
  don't have to if you don't want to.
• 1:03:45
  What you're saying is that you're on a missionary project
• 1:03:49
  to help feminists understand that within their own feminist
• 1:03:53
  framework, they should be passionately pro-life.
• 1:03:56
  They should ultimately come to see God as their Father in Jesus
• 1:04:00
  Christ, as Lord. And you're going to this is your
• 1:04:02
  project. You're going to keep going this
• 1:04:03
  route. Yes, you know, I'm, I'm Paul
• 1:04:05
  here, right? Like I've come out of this
• 1:04:07
  community and now I want to speak to this community.
• 1:04:09
  And I think, you know, maybe my most controversial claim here is
• 1:04:12
  there are really good seeds to work with.
• 1:04:14
  This isn't something that's poisoned from the root that
• 1:04:16
  these are women animated by care for women who have seen what
• 1:04:20
  pregnancy means for friends and thinks, well, this is hard.
• 1:04:25
  We have a culture that isn't welcoming to babies or to
• 1:04:28
  pregnant women. What can I do that's just in
• 1:04:31
  this circumstance? And they, I would say, kind of
• 1:04:33
  suffer from a lack of hope, right?
• 1:04:34
  That could you actually be just to women and baby at the same
• 1:04:38
  time. And if you think that's
• 1:04:38
  impossible, you try and do the best you can.
• 1:04:40
  You're doing triage. And my pitch really is it is
• 1:04:44
  possible to do better. It is right to demand more.
• 1:04:47
  And I like the the slogan that I often hear from the humanized
• 1:04:52
  international folks of just, you know, abortion is oppression
• 1:04:54
  redistributed, that you are not shielding yourself.
• 1:04:58
  You're displacing something that you're right to recognize is
• 1:05:00
  unjust, and you're just placing it onto someone who's more
• 1:05:02
  vulnerable than you are. There are those that make the
• 1:05:04
  argument, as you just referenced, that that feminism
• 1:05:07
  has a toxic root. You know, a rotten root and you
• 1:05:11
  can't redeem it so that your project, it's failed from the
• 1:05:14
  beginning and you're just going to end up sustaining the, you
• 1:05:18
  know, it may be accidentally sustaining the evils of feminism
• 1:05:22
  because you're kind of telling people, well, you can have it
• 1:05:24
  both ways. Yeah.
• 1:05:26
  You know, I think if you take a a clear historical survey, you
• 1:05:29
  can see that feminism has been a messy coalition from the
• 1:05:32
  beginning. So it'd be very hard to say it
• 1:05:34
  was intrinsically good or intrinsically evil.
• 1:05:36
  From the fruit piece. It's always been a kind of
• 1:05:38
  crowded scrum of different people who are animated by
• 1:05:41
  different concerns but kind of keen to meet together by saying
• 1:05:45
  there's something wrong about how our culture looks at women.
• 1:05:47
  There's something that doesn't value their gifts, doesn't value
• 1:05:50
  their dignity, doesn't treat them correctly, doesn't make
• 1:05:53
  room for babies. And then people bring different
• 1:05:55
  solutions or perspective. Like, what would it mean to do
• 1:05:56
  this correctly? But that question is always the
• 1:05:59
  right question. And I think it's too diverse a
• 1:06:03
  movement to just have one root. I'll say one thing that stuck
• 1:06:06
  out in the more recent, you know, feminist struggles is
• 1:06:09
  there's a excellent nonfiction book that came out recently
• 1:06:12
  called Without Consent. And it's about the history of
• 1:06:16
  laws in America that outlaw marital rape.
• 1:06:19
  And this is something that was much more spearheaded by secular
• 1:06:22
  feminists than it was by us, unfortunately.
• 1:06:25
  I think part of the attraction is there are moments in our
• 1:06:28
  history where you'll see the feminist movement as the primary
• 1:06:31
  one talking about a real injustice.
• 1:06:33
  And I think they deserve credit for that.
• 1:06:35
  And the question is, how do we make the case credibly?
• 1:06:38
  You will have the protections for where you're right within
• 1:06:42
  our movement, but you do have to give up the places where you're
• 1:06:45
  wrong. What is the Catholic case
• 1:06:47
  against marital rape that it's and also can you define what
• 1:06:51
  marital rape is? So this is about whether if you
• 1:06:53
  have sex with your wife, when she says no, is that rape?
• 1:06:57
  And in the original test cases, you know, something where I
• 1:07:00
  think we would say today, incredibly unambiguous.
• 1:07:02
  Unfortunately, the first case to go to trial was a woman who said
• 1:07:05
  no to her husband. He beat her.
• 1:07:07
  She ran to a neighbor's house. She begged them to call the
• 1:07:10
  police. He found her, he dragged her
• 1:07:12
  back to the house and he had violent sex with her.
• 1:07:15
  Then she immediately afterwards went back to the neighbors,
• 1:07:17
  called 911. What year was this it?
• 1:07:20
  Was in the 1970s. And what was the?
• 1:07:21
  Do you have any more context where they already?
• 1:07:23
  I mean it sounds like the relationship.
• 1:07:24
  They were married. They had a difficult.
• 1:07:26
  Relationship. Well, yeah, they were married,
• 1:07:28
  but the relationship was on the rocks, Yes.
• 1:07:29
  Significantly, yes. And so you would think this is,
• 1:07:32
  I think from today's point of view, a pretty unambiguous case
• 1:07:35
  that you you can't do this to your wife.
• 1:07:38
  He was acquitted, unfortunately, in the 70s, yes.
• 1:07:42
  He went on to commit other rapes later in his life.
• 1:07:45
  Of his wife or other girlfriends.
• 1:07:47
  But part of what came out of this was, you know, what was
• 1:07:50
  the, what was the alternate answer that was being put
• 1:07:52
  forward? Part of it was like, well,
• 1:07:53
  there's privacy concerns. The state should never look into
• 1:07:55
  what goes on within a marriage. People would say, and I think
• 1:07:57
  this is kind of the least Catholic response.
• 1:07:59
  Well, you know, if a woman's being brutalized within her
• 1:08:02
  marriage, she should turn to divorce but not bring a charge
• 1:08:05
  against her husband. And that's actually not our
• 1:08:07
  response to that. We are the opposite, Separate,
• 1:08:10
  even legal divorce, yes. There's no such thing as
• 1:08:13
  divorce. Divorce.
• 1:08:14
  And then yeah, you can. You could do a legal charge if.
• 1:08:17
  You might or might not be eligible for a moment, but you
• 1:08:19
  definitely are allowed to physically make yourself safe
• 1:08:21
  from anyone who's abusing you, and you're allowed to use the
• 1:08:23
  tools of the state to do it. And then you go to a Canon
• 1:08:25
  lawyer and work out all the other complexities first.
• 1:08:27
  But you're always allowed to run from abuse.
• 1:08:29
  Yes, but this was a state by state fight to criminalize it
• 1:08:32
  and to make the case that it could be possible to do
• 1:08:35
  something to your wife that was wrong.
• 1:08:38
  And I think actually the strongest Catholic case, you
• 1:08:40
  know, for there to be criminal churches for marital rape is
• 1:08:43
  that the law is a teacher. And you know, there are two
• 1:08:45
  terrible things happening when a man uses force against his wife
• 1:08:48
  in a marriage. And the first is that she's
• 1:08:50
  being abused. And the second is he's in danger
• 1:08:53
  of hell. And part of the role of the law
• 1:08:56
  is to protect her physically and to protect him spiritually by
• 1:08:59
  forcing him to confront someone who tells him who's larger than
• 1:09:02
  him, which is what the state can be, that this is wrong.
• 1:09:05
  That he's not going to be put in a position where he's got the
• 1:09:07
  near occasion of sin of hurting his wife anymore, even if we
• 1:09:10
  have to jail him to do it and he has to amend his life.
• 1:09:13
  Now, I think there's somebody who may readily quote Scripture
• 1:09:17
  here and say, well, do not deny each other.
• 1:09:21
  You're not. You're supposed to obviously
• 1:09:22
  submit to each other and you should not be denying each other
• 1:09:26
  in marriage of sex. So if there's a woman who says
• 1:09:28
  no to sex, then she's denying her husband.
• 1:09:31
  She's actually the one at spiritual risk, moral risk, and
• 1:09:36
  he has the right to sex regardless of her feelings.
• 1:09:40
  Saying that, you know, men and women should come together,
• 1:09:44
  right and with appropriate pauses for NFP, for healing
• 1:09:47
  after birth, etcetera, is very different than saying that if a
• 1:09:50
  husband feels like his wife isn't living up to this, that he
• 1:09:53
  has the right to beat her or force her.
• 1:09:55
  You know, you know, in any marriage, you know, any moment
• 1:09:58
  where you feel like one spouse is failing the other in any
• 1:10:00
  particular way does not give the other spouse the right to use
• 1:10:02
  violence to get what they believe is owed to them.
• 1:10:05
  I agree with you of course, and I think that obviously the
• 1:10:09
  scripture is about a mutual gift.
• 1:10:12
  That's the end game of a marriage.
• 1:10:13
  It's mutual gift to in in the sacrament to mirror the love of
• 1:10:18
  God, which is always persevering in its faithfulness, in its
• 1:10:22
  kindness and it's goodness, right?
• 1:10:24
  That's what we're called to be as wives and as husbands.
• 1:10:27
  So the idea that you, you are called to be sexually intimate,
• 1:10:32
  yes, of course, often you know, this is a gift in the marriage.
• 1:10:37
  But this idea that the other person owes you something and
• 1:10:40
  you're not, and you're to override their concerns, their
• 1:10:43
  physical health, their feelings in order to get the thing that
• 1:10:47
  you're owed is actually the opposite of love.
• 1:10:49
  Yes, and it's it's honestly very hard to picture right.
• 1:10:52
  You know, not to picture it happening, but to picture it
• 1:10:54
  being fruitful for a marriage that the goal of husband and
• 1:10:57
  wife again is to help each other to heaven, to grow in unity
• 1:10:59
  together. And sex is part of that unity.
• 1:11:02
  But you know, for a spouse, husband or wife like to try and
• 1:11:05
  pressure the other person into sex.
• 1:11:07
  Even though sex can be good for the relationship, the pressure
• 1:11:09
  is not. And I think it's also just a
• 1:11:11
  personal responsibility question of if you're a woman or if
• 1:11:14
  you're a man, you should be open to loving your spouse in every
• 1:11:19
  way that you can to make them feel loved.
• 1:11:21
  And that needs to include sex. Yes.
• 1:11:23
  And so that's the other piece that's missing here.
• 1:11:25
  But there's usually a reason, you know, I think this kind of
• 1:11:28
  stereotype of there's this arbitrary withholding of sex or
• 1:11:32
  of good, yes, that can happen. There are psychopaths or you
• 1:11:35
  know, or there are people that are, you know, doing bad things,
• 1:11:39
  right. Or or marriages where there's a
• 1:11:41
  different tension that's kind of coming out in this way, but you
• 1:11:44
  can't just solve it purely in the bedroom.
• 1:11:46
  Right. Yes.
• 1:11:47
  And that's usually the reason actually for the problems in the
• 1:11:49
  bedroom don't start in the bedroom.
• 1:11:51
  And I think if we oversimplify a relationship to the bedroom and
• 1:11:55
  forget the the rest of the relationship where the bedroom
• 1:11:59
  is really the culmination of this most intimate, you know,
• 1:12:01
  expression of love between the two, then we do a disservice to
• 1:12:04
  their love and to their union. There's one secular writer who I
• 1:12:07
  do like, though. I feel like if I give my kids
• 1:12:09
  this book, I have to give her them an expurgated copyright.
• 1:12:12
  But Emily Nagowski, who are the book Come as You Are about men
• 1:12:15
  and women's sexuality. I think it's a wonderful job
• 1:12:18
  kind of of pointing us outside the bedroom to solve the
• 1:12:20
  problems of the bedroom. That for women, it's easier to
• 1:12:23
  be intimate when you are safe, right?
• 1:12:25
  When you feel comfortable, when you've rested.
• 1:12:27
  But that, apart from how she puts it, is like for men.
• 1:12:30
  There is a difference between men and women's desire.
• 1:12:33
  And men are much more ready to have sex at any particular
• 1:12:37
  moment. And for women, you know foreplay
• 1:12:39
  really starts long before you're upstairs, right?
• 1:12:42
  It starts in just time spent together quietly in moments of
• 1:12:47
  love share between the two of you of genuinely.
• 1:12:50
  This is a mix of both helping a woman by taking things off her
• 1:12:53
  plate and then helping the anxiety.
• 1:12:54
  If does everything have to be done perfectly?
• 1:12:56
  Maybe I'm not sweeping tonight and that's okay so that I have
• 1:12:59
  the time I need and Nikoski really puts the effort for
• 1:13:02
  women. It's responsive desire and that,
• 1:13:03
  you know, it's not important to just say, well, we'd like to
• 1:13:07
  have sex tonight, so we've got to just do the sexiest things
• 1:13:09
  possible. But that's actually not what
• 1:13:10
  brings men and women together. It's also a matter of releasing
• 1:13:13
  the brakes of anxiety, of other troubles, of just time spent.
• 1:13:16
  And love together is what brings men and women together.
• 1:13:19
  Yeah, I think that there obviously the modern world has
• 1:13:22
  hyper objectified maybe sex and it's all obsessed with
• 1:13:26
  technique, appearances, immediate stimuli or simulation
• 1:13:30
  and it forgets that actually sex is 100% the body, but it's also
• 1:13:34
  the souls coming together and it and it really has to be both.
• 1:13:37
  Well, I think this is really a lot of it is fully.
• 1:13:39
  Rewarding sexual experience. This is also the influence of
• 1:13:41
  pornography, where even if you're not watching it, you live
• 1:13:44
  in a culture that's kind of saturated by it, and it really
• 1:13:47
  takes sex away from a thing done between two people for each
• 1:13:51
  other to a thing two people are doing for the benefit of an
• 1:13:54
  absent third. You know, where everything is
• 1:13:56
  more visual, more performance. And I think it makes it really
• 1:13:59
  hard for men and women to know how to come together.
• 1:14:01
  You know, there is a really kind of heartbreaking This American
• 1:14:04
  Life episode where they're talking to frat boys, you know,
• 1:14:07
  who are trying to talk to each other like how, how are you with
• 1:14:09
  a woman? You know, and they're they're
• 1:14:11
  reaching for both pornography, but also each other as a source
• 1:14:15
  of advice about how to be generically good at sex, which
• 1:14:18
  is not actually a skill anyone can have.
• 1:14:20
  Sex is relational and one of the boys is so mad because one of
• 1:14:24
  his frat Perez told him like women like it if you nipple on
• 1:14:27
  their ear and then his girlfriend did.
• 1:14:28
  And he's like, which of them is telling me the truth?
• 1:14:31
  She says she doesn't like it. He says that women do like it.
• 1:14:35
  What am I supposed to do? And my heart went out to him,
• 1:14:38
  right? Because he's trying to be
• 1:14:40
  thoughtful, right? He's trying to say, OK, I want
• 1:14:43
  to be good at kissing, at sex. Like, how do I learn to do this
• 1:14:47
  generically and then do it to a woman?
• 1:14:50
  And he actually has to live in a relationship with her.
• 1:14:52
  You know the frat bro can't give him advice about what all women
• 1:14:55
  want. This is why I think it's so
• 1:14:56
  important for there to be a very personalized really shroud
• 1:15:01
  around sex. And this is where modesty
• 1:15:03
  actually really does matter. Modesty isn't about some sort of
• 1:15:06
  let's follow the moral law and like be all buttoned up.
• 1:15:08
  It's actually about loving the person in their, in their
• 1:15:12
  uniqueness and their individuality.
• 1:15:14
  Because if you approach sex with technique in mind, with like
• 1:15:18
  images in mind, you have to achieve a certain approach in
• 1:15:21
  sex. Because this is what the world
• 1:15:23
  is somehow telling you and outside.
• 1:15:25
  Judging your head and not with. Your wife and it's and it's
• 1:15:27
  actually kind of insane when you think about it.
• 1:15:29
  But and this idea that well, you need to be taught sex or you
• 1:15:33
  need to be shown sex or you need to be sexually instructed in
• 1:15:36
  order to achieve good sex, I think is a complete and utter
• 1:15:39
  lie. You discover sex.
• 1:15:41
  I mean, that's the thing it's a beautiful discovery of sex.
• 1:15:44
  Not even it's more discovery of the other person and their body.
• 1:15:47
  They're uniquely personal body that is not like any other body
• 1:15:51
  in all of human history, right. There are some, you know,
• 1:15:54
  principles obviously that are similarities, but how that body
• 1:15:57
  responds is not just in that moment, right, but it's and the
• 1:16:01
  relationship that is 100% unique.
• 1:16:02
  Every marriage is unique. Every relationship is unique.
• 1:16:05
  So it's such a dangerous thing to put specific technique or
• 1:16:09
  prescriptions on sex because you can actually completely miss the
• 1:16:13
  relationship absolutely and the person and have terrible sex by
• 1:16:16
  the way, but think you're trying to achieve good sex and then get
• 1:16:19
  frustrated because it's not working and.
• 1:16:21
  That's one of the other things I do appreciate about Nagowski
• 1:16:22
  because she has a big emphasis on the natural asymmetries
• 1:16:25
  between men and women. And that I think a lot of the
• 1:16:27
  unhappiness comes out of when you picture your husband
• 1:16:30
  underwife is you but with different genitals, right?
• 1:16:33
  And that's not the case. So you want to be attentive to
• 1:16:35
  who they are and what are both the broad sex based asymmetries
• 1:16:38
  between the two of you and also who they are as an individual.
• 1:16:41
  All right, so going back to thank you that I think that's a
• 1:16:44
  very beautifully said and an important topic and it is
• 1:16:47
  popping up more I think in discourse as especially people
• 1:16:51
  who more identify as conservative or who are
• 1:16:52
  Christians try to understand what do we do in the wake of a
• 1:16:54
  sexual revolution that's destroyed sexual morality and
• 1:16:58
  also good enjoyment, quite frankly.
• 1:17:01
  And it's competed on an axis we're never going to win on in a
• 1:17:03
  way that degrades us sometimes where it's like, Oh well, we'll
• 1:17:06
  prove we're sex positive. I've got a boudoir shoot in my
• 1:17:09
  conservative women's magazine. Like you're not helping here,
• 1:17:13
  right? Like nothing that is purely
• 1:17:15
  visual is going to help men and women live in relationship to
• 1:17:18
  each other. And you can't prove you're the
• 1:17:20
  cool mom by swearing or by having low cut tops.
• 1:17:24
  And they're like, well, actually we're not as.
• 1:17:27
  We're very sexy because we look sexy the way you're sexy.
• 1:17:30
  Yeah, you're never going to win on that front.
• 1:17:32
  You can't compete on this and you don't want to try with porn
• 1:17:34
  is what you're yes. What you're trying to do is give
• 1:17:37
  people just going for external sexual stimuli.
• 1:17:39
  Yes, You're giving people pictures the real freedom to go
• 1:17:41
  like, actually there is a totally different axis you
• 1:17:44
  should be thinking along. And it's not just does this look
• 1:17:46
  as sexy as possible in a photograph, It's about what does
• 1:17:50
  this relationship look like? And you know, lots of these poor
• 1:17:54
  images of how men and women relate sexually, like obviously
• 1:17:57
  can't be true because they don't work.
• 1:17:59
  When you guys get older, you know, every model of marriage
• 1:18:03
  has to be a model of marriage. That is true when neither of you
• 1:18:06
  is attractive to an outside observer.
• 1:18:09
  But you can still be attractive to each other because you look
• 1:18:11
  at each other with the eyes of love that doesn't look through
• 1:18:13
  the lens of a of a of a sexy. Photo shoot because.
• 1:18:16
  If you're looking at your spouse through the lens of a sexy photo
• 1:18:19
  shoot, you're actually not looking at your spouse and
• 1:18:21
  you're. Guaranteeing that this marriage
• 1:18:23
  can't last in this form. You know, marriage is something
• 1:18:26
  such that it has to be true when you're young and just on fire
• 1:18:30
  with love for each other in that sense of full desire.
• 1:18:33
  It has to be true when you're kind of directed outwards
• 1:18:36
  towards your kids and then still trying to keep that relationship
• 1:18:39
  just between the two of you. And whatever is true of marriage
• 1:18:41
  has to be true when you're holding your husband's hand as
• 1:18:45
  you die. And there is the whole love life
• 1:18:50
  of love, which is never going to be dependent on you sexually.
• 1:18:54
  Please me in this moment. Exactly, you know.
• 1:18:58
  Even though sexual pleasure is absolutely going to be.
• 1:19:00
  It's going to be a part of that story, right?
• 1:19:03
  But fundamentally, the vows we make in marriage aren't about
• 1:19:06
  what we can guarantee we will do for each other forever.
• 1:19:09
  They aren't about and it will always be fun to have sex with.
• 1:19:12
  I will always have a steady paycheck.
• 1:19:14
  They are about our persistence and hope and love through
• 1:19:17
  sickness and through health. We're tiptoeing up to something
• 1:19:19
  that I think is such an important topic tonight.
• 1:19:21
  I mean, we're already talking. It's all important.
• 1:19:23
  So I love this, but OK, trad wife, aesthetic, traditional
• 1:19:29
  marriage as is sort of presented today in media, right?
• 1:19:33
  More conservative leaning or coded media.
• 1:19:36
  The man provides, the woman is a stay at home wife and these are
• 1:19:41
  roles that are essential to the marriage.
• 1:19:44
  And I think there's some beauty there and goodness that is sort
• 1:19:48
  of flipped on its head in modern culture, which just eliminates
• 1:19:51
  the responsibilities and quite quite frankly, the gift of self
• 1:19:55
  that we are to bring to marriage.
• 1:19:57
  But the danger of it is, is like, I'm not marrying you.
• 1:20:02
  My husband, I'm marrying provider or I'm not marrying
• 1:20:05
  you, my wife I'm marrying one day mother, stay at home mother.
• 1:20:09
  And then you know, all life happens and sometimes provision
• 1:20:15
  falls through. Sometimes you can't be the stay
• 1:20:17
  at home mother because you can't even be a mother.
• 1:20:19
  You know, you struggle with infertility, whatever it is.
• 1:20:22
  What is your take on this? I think the really stark black
• 1:20:25
  and white provider model of marriage really undervalues men
• 1:20:31
  because if a man is primarily a provider, primarily an economic
• 1:20:35
  bulwark, he can be replaced by money from somewhere else.
• 1:20:39
  And that actually is a much less kind of sexed argument for what
• 1:20:42
  marriage is. In our marriage, we've had a
• 1:20:45
  variety of incomes in different ways.
• 1:20:47
  But because my husband is a Catholic High School teacher,
• 1:20:49
  which is not a particularly remunerative profession, there
• 1:20:53
  have been plenty of times where I out earn him.
• 1:20:55
  Now, none of that makes him not my husband and not
• 1:20:58
  distinctively, you know, sex in our relationship.
• 1:21:02
  And what I find so weird about this is, you know, first of all,
• 1:21:06
  the things that matter most to us in our distinctness, you
• 1:21:08
  know, have to do with our children, have to do with him
• 1:21:11
  leading prayer as the head of our family spiritually.
• 1:21:14
  Which nobody else could be for you.
• 1:21:16
  Exactly, you know, and no. One knows the government can do
• 1:21:18
  the direct deposit. In my paycheck can do.
• 1:21:20
  That or you, let's say you went into the marriage with a trust
• 1:21:22
  fund. Yeah.
• 1:21:23
  And you just will always have more cash.
• 1:21:25
  On that you'll never you'll never want her money.
• 1:21:27
  Like what does the husband do then?
• 1:21:28
  Right is he? How can he provide?
• 1:21:29
  He provides in the most significant way he possibly can,
• 1:21:32
  which is to help lead you to heaven.
• 1:21:33
  Yes, which is the vocation of a husband.
• 1:21:36
  And that in our relationship, we are trying to give our kids, you
• 1:21:39
  know, in some sense we have to be an icon of Christ in the
• 1:21:41
  church and only we can do that. And we can only do that in our
• 1:21:44
  particular sex relationships. And honestly, the other thing I
• 1:21:47
  find kind of bizarre about this is it, you know, rather than a
• 1:21:50
  husband's identity being rooted in Christ and what he does in
• 1:21:54
  Christ mode, it means that he's a better husband depending on
• 1:21:57
  which employer he works for. Which again, really cuts against
• 1:22:01
  you a lot of what the church values about service to the
• 1:22:05
  poor. No, no one working in service to
• 1:22:07
  the poor is getting rich. Like, are those men all bad
• 1:22:09
  husbands? No, it's very bizarre to kind of
• 1:22:12
  ask the job market to tell you whether your man is a good man
• 1:22:17
  or not. Now, I think the weaker version
• 1:22:20
  of this argument, which is truer, which is that women value
• 1:22:23
  someone who can be trusted with responsibility and authority and
• 1:22:26
  a job can be a proxy for that, but it's a very imperfect proxy.
• 1:22:30
  And so, you know, my husband and I got engaged when he was in his
• 1:22:33
  first year out of college, not making a lot of money as you
• 1:22:37
  don't your first year out of college.
• 1:22:38
  But I didn't need his job as the sign that he could provide in
• 1:22:42
  the sense that he could handle authority, whether hardship.
• 1:22:45
  Let the buck buck stop with him because he was homeschooled and
• 1:22:49
  he'd started an entire Shakespeare theatre troupe among
• 1:22:51
  homeschoolers where even though the adults were all rooting for
• 1:22:54
  him, the adults also didn't view it as their job to bail him out.
• 1:22:57
  So if kids didn't learn their lines, that was his problem.
• 1:23:00
  You have someone got sick and then he had to step in as
• 1:23:03
  Falstaff. That was his problem.
• 1:23:04
  And I think what's harder for folks is not having domains
• 1:23:08
  outside their job where they go. I'm taking responsibility for
• 1:23:12
  this project and this group of people.
• 1:23:13
  I'm in authority over them, so I have to be a good steward of
• 1:23:16
  their talents. That's the training ground for
• 1:23:19
  fatherhood. And I think increasingly kids
• 1:23:23
  aren't really given freedom to take on projects that they're
• 1:23:26
  allowed to fail at. So then you do just look to the
• 1:23:29
  job as the main metric of are you capable of handling real
• 1:23:32
  responsibility? But you should be getting that
• 1:23:34
  somewhere else too. The focus on let's be a
• 1:23:37
  traditional family and what does that even mean right.
• 1:23:39
  We're kind of exploring what that even means and where it
• 1:23:42
  gets where it's wrong and where it's right because just because
• 1:23:44
  something happened in the past doesn't mean is good.
• 1:23:46
  You should examine it though, is it good and you know, take what
• 1:23:48
  is good. Of course, by the way, that's
• 1:23:50
  the project of conservativism is conserve what is the project
• 1:23:53
  should be conserve what is good that's right in the past what is
• 1:23:56
  good, true and beautiful bring it into the future, but.
• 1:23:59
  You're not a Renfair reenactor. You're not slavishly
• 1:24:01
  reinterpreting. Because it just happened before
• 1:24:04
  us, right? You should have deference and
• 1:24:06
  respect for what you know our ancestors did, but you should be
• 1:24:11
  willing to reject what were defects and you should be
• 1:24:14
  willing to try to grow and and do better.
• 1:24:16
  So anyways, today there is, you know, there, there it is more
• 1:24:20
  common today than ever before maybe in human history for a man
• 1:24:23
  to enter a marriage and think, OK, she she needs to bring 50%
• 1:24:26
  of the money to the table. I even know people that are
• 1:24:29
  more, you know, in a maybe Catholic Christian ish world
• 1:24:33
  whose husbands want them to work and they are confused as to why
• 1:24:38
  they would want to stay home with the children.
• 1:24:39
  And they see, well, I need you to help with the income of the
• 1:24:42
  family. It's a big deal as a man to have
• 1:24:44
  to provide for this family in today's economy on one income
• 1:24:48
  because the economy is not set up for that.
• 1:24:50
  Which by the way, is another argument against feminism, which
• 1:24:52
  I want to get into. So what would you, what would
• 1:24:55
  you say to that? You know, I think mostly it
• 1:24:57
  doesn't matter who earns more money in a family, but the the
• 1:25:00
  financial habit I think is really bad for marriage is
• 1:25:02
  anything where you're keeping separate accounts.
• 1:25:04
  You know, when money comes into the family, whether the husband
• 1:25:07
  is earning most of it or the wife is earning most of it, it's
• 1:25:09
  all the family's money. And whoever is working is able
• 1:25:13
  to work because of the support they get at home.
• 1:25:15
  And everything goes into one account and no one is going
• 1:25:17
  like, well, you know, we keep separate accounts.
• 1:25:19
  And then I have a budget where I can do this.
• 1:25:21
  And he has a budget where he can do this.
• 1:25:23
  And you know, because of what we do, I do 30% of the rent and he
• 1:25:26
  does 70%. Like you're married, you live in
• 1:25:28
  this house, it's your home. So, you know, again, once money
• 1:25:32
  hits our bank account for our family, it doesn't matter who
• 1:25:34
  earns it. We spend it as a family.
• 1:25:36
  We earn it. Whoever is earning more as a
• 1:25:38
  family, we're one economic unit. The word economic comes from
• 1:25:43
  oikos, from the household. I think it's that breakdown in
• 1:25:46
  the sense of everything that comes in is for the household
• 1:25:50
  and supported by the household that's destructive, not the
• 1:25:52
  exact balance of earnings in any case, I think.
• 1:25:55
  What's at play though, is some women feel that this these men
• 1:25:59
  that are sort of products of the day and the age because it's how
• 1:26:02
  they were raised, right, That they don't appreciate the work
• 1:26:05
  of mothering and the domestic work enough and they don't
• 1:26:08
  understand it enough. And so they want you like, why
• 1:26:11
  can't you be out working? Why can't you bring in money?
• 1:26:13
  I'm working really hard and trying to bring in money and
• 1:26:16
  it's not enough. And he needs you to do the same.
• 1:26:18
  Well, I think that's really hard when a relationship kind of
• 1:26:20
  spins around that question. And of course, it is always hard
• 1:26:23
  when money is tight in a relationship.
• 1:26:25
  I think the more that you guys are in agreement on the big
• 1:26:27
  things, especially kids, from the beginning, if you're getting
• 1:26:30
  married, you're called to be open to life, which means you're
• 1:26:32
  open to an interruption of plans, to a disruption to your
• 1:26:36
  budget. And it's very hard to say, well,
• 1:26:39
  we're open to kids that I'm not open to my wife.
• 1:26:40
  As a mother, you can't hold both those thoughts at the same time.
• 1:26:44
  So I think that fundamental feeling of not feeling valued
• 1:26:46
  when it's not in economic terms is really corrosive to a
• 1:26:49
  marriage. But I also wonder if in those
• 1:26:51
  marriages, like the husband doesn't feel valued as a
• 1:26:53
  husband, if he's like, well, I'm earning this and you're earning
• 1:26:55
  this, so I'm definitely contributing.
• 1:26:57
  Like while he's contributing money, does he feel valued as a
• 1:27:00
  father? Like, does he want more time at
• 1:27:03
  home or to think about like, while I get home after dinner?
• 1:27:06
  And so I don't get the goods of fatherhood with our kids.
• 1:27:10
  So I'd really want both of them to have room to feel like
• 1:27:12
  they're particularly valued in their maternal and paternal
• 1:27:14
  roles. I like what you're saying in
• 1:27:16
  that I think if we ver to are on the side of the man just makes
• 1:27:19
  the money, the woman stays at home, then it's also devaluing
• 1:27:22
  his role as a father. And the most important thing a
• 1:27:24
  man does as a father is to help lead his children to heaven.
• 1:27:27
  And it's, you know, economic provision is a part of that,
• 1:27:30
  which I think is shared by the woman, you know, in a way that
• 1:27:33
  they figure out works best for their unique family.
• 1:27:35
  And also that honors her unique role as a mother and his as a
• 1:27:38
  father. But it's not that's not the
• 1:27:41
  first thing that God like what does God say about fathers?
• 1:27:44
  Is the first thing that it got that God says about a man who's
• 1:27:47
  a father? How much money are you making
• 1:27:48
  for your family? Or is the first thing that now
• 1:27:51
  if he's a completely derelict of his duty, he's like laying
• 1:27:53
  around and lazy all day? Maybe God the Father would say,
• 1:27:56
  hey, I need you to get up and toil, right?
• 1:27:58
  You know, or is it who are you helping your children understand
• 1:28:03
  who I am and who God is and what is their character formation and
• 1:28:07
  their journey? There needs to be food on the
• 1:28:09
  table. But is some of these sort of
• 1:28:11
  economic expectations that you're placing on yourself and
• 1:28:13
  your family? Are these really from God your
• 1:28:16
  Father in heaven, or are these from the culture in the world?
• 1:28:18
  You know, my kids don't see our tax returns, so who earns more
• 1:28:21
  money is not a question that occurs to them when they see us
• 1:28:24
  living in relationship as man and woman.
• 1:28:25
  I think it comes out very strongly when I'm pregnant or
• 1:28:29
  nursing and then, you know, in a more muted form at other times.
• 1:28:31
  But what they see is that for the sake of a baby, my strength
• 1:28:36
  turns inward and I'm less able to do other things that aren't
• 1:28:39
  the baby, you know, both because I'm tired or I'm sick or I'm
• 1:28:43
  sitting down nursing again and again.
• 1:28:45
  And therefore I can't go out and scoot with you and I can't make
• 1:28:48
  this dinner that I like making. There are so many I can't that
• 1:28:51
  come for the sake of this big yes to the brother or sister.
• 1:28:54
  But they see kind of the directionality of my strength as
• 1:28:58
  a mother and my husband's strength as a father.
• 1:29:00
  Mine turns inwards towards the baby, and it makes me weaker in
• 1:29:04
  different ways. His cannot turn inward in the
• 1:29:06
  same way. His goes out in a more varied
• 1:29:09
  way. Well, what can you do for me?
• 1:29:10
  Oh, is he taking care of me when I'm sick?
• 1:29:12
  Is he picking up extra tasks that he doesn't do when I'm not
• 1:29:14
  pregnant or not nursing? But they see these two
• 1:29:18
  complementary forms of generosity, one that's very
• 1:29:21
  intermittent inward, one that's outward facing.
• 1:29:24
  I think that tells them a lot more about how men and women
• 1:29:26
  live together in Amity than our W twos.
• 1:29:29
  Do you think that women entering the workforce at the amount that
• 1:29:34
  they do today to the to the point that they do today, and
• 1:29:37
  also women being encouraged to be college educated and then be
• 1:29:40
  eligible for certain parts of the workforce?
• 1:29:42
  And you, there's even programs to specially incentivize some
• 1:29:45
  women over some men to be educated in certain fields,
• 1:29:49
  right. Do you think that that has come
• 1:29:52
  at the cost of the work of the mother in the home?
• 1:29:57
  Well, you know, I think when you look at the survey data, a lot
• 1:29:59
  of moms of young kids want part time work.
• 1:30:02
  And I think the challenge is not that the availability of work is
• 1:30:06
  necessarily crowding that out, but that there aren't enough
• 1:30:08
  models of part time work, flexible work to meet women's
• 1:30:11
  real demand for it. And what I think actually is
• 1:30:14
  that probably over the next 10 years is going to be a good
• 1:30:17
  shift for moms because after COVID, there's a lot more
• 1:30:21
  experimentation with can this be telework?
• 1:30:23
  Can this be remote work? Can this be a two days in the
• 1:30:25
  office, 3 days out? Can this be part time versus
• 1:30:29
  this kind of inertia of we've always had this job work this
• 1:30:32
  way, whether it's a man or a woman that always work the same
• 1:30:34
  way. Why would we make an exception
• 1:30:36
  for you? Well, we lived in a state of
• 1:30:38
  exception for a whole year and then everyone went OK.
• 1:30:41
  And actually we've got more flexibility than we think.
• 1:30:43
  So I worry a lot less about whether women have the desire to
• 1:30:46
  be with their kids. Manifestly they do.
• 1:30:49
  You know, a decent chunk of women want just time at home
• 1:30:51
  after a baby. A decent chunk want part time
• 1:30:53
  work and some want full time work, but we're not lacking the
• 1:30:57
  desire, we're lacking some of the accommodations and
• 1:30:59
  flexibility. I think about some stories that
• 1:31:02
  I've heard, you know, there's a recent video, I think I did a
• 1:31:05
  response video to it online, you know, one of those obnoxious
• 1:31:07
  response videos that I do comment.
• 1:31:09
  I hope you some of you guys like it.
• 1:31:10
  I'm sure some hate it, but I find value in doing them.
• 1:31:12
  So I still do them. Anyways, there was this woman on
• 1:31:14
  TikTok talking about her newborn baby and she couldn't wait to
• 1:31:18
  get back into the corporate workforce within three to four
• 1:31:20
  months after her maternity leave.
• 1:31:22
  And she had a 2 year old and a 2 year old.
• 1:31:23
  She would put in daycare during her maternity leave because it
• 1:31:27
  was overwhelming. She couldn't fathom how your
• 1:31:30
  typical stay at mom, stay at home mom handled both a newborn
• 1:31:33
  and a 2 year old. And she finishes the video with
• 1:31:36
  some, you know, pronouncement about herself.
• 1:31:37
  Like, you know, I belong in the corporate world and you guys,
• 1:31:41
  you, some of you, I guess, belong in the home.
• 1:31:43
  And I hear that and it doesn't sound true to me.
• 1:31:48
  Now, I don't know her personally at all.
• 1:31:49
  All I'm watching is a video of her on the Internet, but that
• 1:31:52
  doesn't tell me this is an authentic truth about this
• 1:31:55
  woman. My intuition tells me what I
• 1:31:57
  know about God's design. That something actually is
• 1:32:00
  broken here with how she experiences motherhood, that she
• 1:32:03
  feels she has to leave her four month old or her three month old
• 1:32:07
  and go spend, you know, 8-9 hours a day at an office.
• 1:32:10
  What do you think? You know, I kind of can't put
• 1:32:13
  myself inside her head, but it would have been almost
• 1:32:15
  impossible for me to do that. So I have 3 kids and I've had a
• 1:32:19
  variety of jobs across the kids and I've always had at least
• 1:32:23
  three months fully paid maternity leave for each baby,
• 1:32:26
  which is a big blessing in terms of just not thinking about work
• 1:32:29
  at all, just being with the baby, focusing on healing.
• 1:32:31
  In some cases, I had some complicated deliveries along the
• 1:32:34
  way. But just me, my baby, my husband
• 1:32:38
  for as long as I can get him. And then after that, for each
• 1:32:41
  job, I've either been working from home completely and don't
• 1:32:45
  tell my employers in all cases, but just working alongside my
• 1:32:49
  baby in a way that worked out well for me and for what my boss
• 1:32:52
  needed of me. You know, with occasional zooms
• 1:32:54
  where I'd have to like tilt my camera up a little so you can't
• 1:32:57
  see that I'm nursing on the zoom until like a little hand comes
• 1:33:00
  up and it's like grabbing my chin like, oh, just just who
• 1:33:03
  knows what that was right? But and then for my current job,
• 1:33:07
  I work in public policy in DC and I work on family policy.
• 1:33:10
  So I was really happy about how my boss handled it.
• 1:33:13
  So I was supposed to go back to work about six months after my
• 1:33:18
  baby was born in person as opposed to just remote and only
• 1:33:21
  two days a week. But I couldn't get my baby to
• 1:33:24
  take a bottle. And my boss, not like all
• 1:33:26
  bosses, I would say I was like, well, obviously if your baby
• 1:33:28
  won't take a bottle, you can't come into the office because
• 1:33:31
  your baby won't be OK. So you know, you're working on
• 1:33:35
  that. Let me know how it's going.
• 1:33:36
  You'll come back into the office when it works.
• 1:33:38
  And after working with lactation consultant, like they maybe took
• 1:33:40
  another month, month and a half, but we sorted everything out.
• 1:33:43
  And then I was back at work two days a week and nursing when I
• 1:33:46
  was at home and pumping when I was at work.
• 1:33:48
  I don't like pumping very much. I'd never had to with any of my
• 1:33:51
  other kids. But I'm so glad it kept that
• 1:33:52
  connection for us. But I'm most glad that my boss
• 1:33:55
  was just kind of a fundamentally reality oriented person who
• 1:33:58
  said, well obviously you can't separate a mother and baby until
• 1:34:01
  the baby will be OK, and I can't be part of making a comeback to
• 1:34:05
  work before it's obvious your baby could spend that time
• 1:34:09
  without you. Well, and what you're describing
• 1:34:11
  I think should be every boss. I mean, and we're going to get
• 1:34:13
  into your, you know, specific recommendations for public
• 1:34:16
  policy here and also for what bosses should be doing and and
• 1:34:18
  everything else. But I think it's the larger
• 1:34:20
  question of, you know, the way that people frame it to be more
• 1:34:23
  precise is, is the old way better with some little
• 1:34:27
  improvements like the pre feminist sort of way of how
• 1:34:32
  women were treated and seen and behaved versus today and all the
• 1:34:36
  insanity you get along with abortion.
• 1:34:38
  And then I also included this example of this woman on TikTok,
• 1:34:40
  right? There's more of her than we may
• 1:34:44
  realize. I mean, I know there are more.
• 1:34:45
  There's a lot of women like this.
• 1:34:47
  And I think it's because women have been primed, because of our
• 1:34:51
  modern culture, to be kind of at war with their motherhood.
• 1:34:56
  We're primed to be at war with our motherhood.
• 1:34:58
  Well, and I think also if you don't see very many models where
• 1:35:00
  you get to have some of the goods of your career and more of
• 1:35:04
  your time with your baby, then you can also just lock into a
• 1:35:06
  OK, well, I definitely can't have this much time with the
• 1:35:09
  baby. So what will I do versus, OK,
• 1:35:12
  well, is there some room to negotiate?
• 1:35:14
  Are there other models I can explore?
• 1:35:16
  Because I think for lots of folks, you know, and we talk a
• 1:35:18
  lot about kind of the girl bosses at the top end of the
• 1:35:20
  income spectrum. But it's women at the lowest end
• 1:35:22
  of the income spectrum who have the most pressure to go back to
• 1:35:25
  work because they're afraid they won't make rent, right?
• 1:35:27
  Someone who is an executive suite lawyer, like could go a
• 1:35:31
  couple months without income and not have any disruption to her
• 1:35:34
  life, right? But those women face real
• 1:35:36
  economic pressures and they have this real sense of tornness of I
• 1:35:40
  wish I could be with my baby but it's not possible for my family.
• 1:35:43
  And that's where I think it's less that I want to spend a lot
• 1:35:45
  of time arguing with the TikTok lady and more I want to respond
• 1:35:47
  to the women to go I know what I'd like.
• 1:35:50
  It doesn't feel possible for me to have and try and make it
• 1:35:53
  easier for them. So you're saying let's just meet
• 1:35:56
  the real world needs and that's going to overall improve
• 1:35:59
  everything for everyone, You know, prove it largely improve
• 1:36:02
  things for more, more people than criticizing or even
• 1:36:06
  exploring. How did we get to this place
• 1:36:08
  where we have these women who are like this?
• 1:36:09
  I'm saying we're not in as bad a spot with regard to desire as we
• 1:36:12
  may think, right? There's more desire for babies
• 1:36:15
  than there are babies being born.
• 1:36:16
  There's more desire for time at home and part time work than
• 1:36:18
  there are people taking them. The average woman wants about
• 1:36:22
  half a baby more on average than she has, obviously, So she
• 1:36:25
  doesn't literally want half a baby.
• 1:36:26
  And that's where the averages are.
• 1:36:27
  I think we can start some culture war arguments as though,
• 1:36:31
  well, these people have completely hardened their hearts
• 1:36:33
  and we've got to figure out how to break their hearts and open
• 1:36:35
  them again. But statistically they haven't.
• 1:36:39
  They have really mixed feelings and things don't feel possible
• 1:36:41
  or their heart is open to a baby, but they're also afraid of
• 1:36:44
  this other thing. And I think we just have to
• 1:36:46
  remember there's more to work with on the other side than we
• 1:36:49
  may fear. All right, I need to ask you
• 1:36:51
  this question because I see it asks all the time and you're
• 1:36:53
  going to give a great answer to it.
• 1:36:54
  I already know what you're going to say, but I want to hear the
• 1:36:56
  why behind it. There are people arguing today
• 1:36:58
  that we should repeal the 19th Amendment.
• 1:37:01
  No. So as as a daughter spiritually
• 1:37:05
  of Susan B Anthony, obviously I have a no on this.
• 1:37:07
  But I think what also comes out of these arguments, I've seen
• 1:37:09
  them too, is they're not usually rooted in something, you know,
• 1:37:15
  suffragist versus anti suffragist arguments about like,
• 1:37:17
  how much of A sphere should there be outside of politics?
• 1:37:19
  Like when you push on them, a lot of the folks making this
• 1:37:21
  argument online are pretty naked in their contempt for women.
• 1:37:24
  And I think if women were the kind of people they imagine,
• 1:37:27
  people who couldn't vote couldn't too.
• 1:37:29
  Emotional is the argument. Too emotional.
• 1:37:31
  Don't marry one. Gosh I can't imagine living with
• 1:37:33
  someone like the people they're imagining women are.
• 1:37:36
  And you wouldn't want her raising your kids.
• 1:37:38
  You wouldn't want someone who's too emotional, too irrational.
• 1:37:42
  Lead aside, voters like the people they're describing can't
• 1:37:44
  possibly form your kids for sainthood.
• 1:37:47
  And if this is what you think women are, voting is the least
• 1:37:49
  of your problems. Your problem is you think these
• 1:37:51
  are fundamentally like subhuman persons who don't have what's
• 1:37:56
  required of them to be Saints, let alone citizens.
• 1:37:59
  You know, I kind of see this kind of wildly schizophrenic
• 1:38:01
  point of view where it's like women shouldn't be in the
• 1:38:04
  workplace. They're too irrational.
• 1:38:05
  They're not truth seeking. They don't have the capacity to
• 1:38:08
  make decisions when the stakes are high.
• 1:38:10
  They shouldn't vote. They should be at home running
• 1:38:12
  the homeschool Co-op. And like, what do you think it
• 1:38:15
  takes to run the homeschool Co-op?
• 1:38:16
  Like you have to be formed for prudence no matter what your
• 1:38:19
  vocation in life is. There's no vocations got us
• 1:38:22
  calling us to that. Don't ask us to be virtuous.
• 1:38:23
  Don't ask to us to be prudent. Don't ask us to make hard
• 1:38:26
  choices under time pressure. So either you think women can't
• 1:38:30
  do that in any domain and therefore you also really want
• 1:38:33
  to minimize your kids time with them, or women are who God
• 1:38:38
  created us to be. You know are capable of being
• 1:38:40
  the Proverbs 31 woman, and are able to apply this prudence and
• 1:38:44
  virtue, and are called to develop it as a duty both at the
• 1:38:47
  home and in other domains. They might try to attempt to
• 1:38:51
  respond to what you're saying something like, well, women are
• 1:38:55
  more prone to nurture and like empathy and try to, you know,
• 1:38:59
  all of us get along and they can be a little neurotic and
• 1:39:01
  emotional, not going to as many decision making.
• 1:39:03
  But me as the man, I do that part.
• 1:39:05
  They're still really need to be like the nurturer in the home.
• 1:39:07
  I will, I guess, oversee the home school curriculum and just
• 1:39:10
  check on a check on the homework, so to speak.
• 1:39:12
  And then it's all going to work out.
• 1:39:14
  No one is called to do either of these things.
• 1:39:17
  Have aggressive, wryly truth seeking and like soft nurturing
• 1:39:21
  period by it themselves. Like, and you can't raise good
• 1:39:24
  kids that way. A mom who is a pure nurturer
• 1:39:26
  who's afraid of conflict can't get the kids to stop hitting
• 1:39:29
  each other, right? When dad is off making all this.
• 1:39:32
  Money, yes. So again, I just think no one,
• 1:39:37
  the virtues are not divided up this family that's not a
• 1:39:39
  Christian. The male, the woman and the man
• 1:39:41
  are equally called a virtue. Yes, and I this is where I
• 1:39:43
  think, you know, the example of the Catholic Church is so
• 1:39:45
  helpful in a society that doesn't know how to talk about
• 1:39:48
  men and women, because the example of the Saints reveals a
• 1:39:53
  range of ways of life. You have Saint Joan of Arc, who
• 1:39:56
  had martial virtues when that was what God called her to.
• 1:40:00
  You have Saint Teresa Felicia, who lived a cloistered private
• 1:40:04
  life that in the eyes of the world, by the reckoning of the
• 1:40:07
  world, doesn't matter and yet was a profound St. with
• 1:40:11
  something to tell us about what God was saying to her.
• 1:40:13
  You have the example of the Martens as a married couple who
• 1:40:16
  were Saints. Who worked together and worked
• 1:40:19
  together his work to join her business and they had a family
• 1:40:22
  business together. And what kind of unites all
• 1:40:24
  these people is not well, when I look at all these women Saints,
• 1:40:26
  does it mean I'm called to lead or to turn in words to it's God,
• 1:40:31
  or to run a business? Like you're called to act
• 1:40:35
  faithfully in whatever God has put before you.
• 1:40:37
  And I think that should be a great relief to men and to
• 1:40:39
  women, that we're not all called to a narrow mold.
• 1:40:43
  We're all called to the virtues of prudence, of courage.
• 1:40:45
  And what those virtue will look like in each of our lives will
• 1:40:48
  be distinct based on what God is asking of us.
• 1:40:51
  You were saying earlier talking about the countertops, the
• 1:40:54
  airbags. I mean certainly the fact that
• 1:40:58
  women alone get pregnant. Yes, despite what some people
• 1:41:00
  are saying today, women do alone get pregnant.
• 1:41:03
  I'm sure there's other examples we can use that effectively.
• 1:41:07
  Women even in the modern, our modern society today do have,
• 1:41:12
  even with our legal system and many of our customs, a shorter
• 1:41:15
  end of the stick than your average man.
• 1:41:19
  Now there's a lot of men and women who would hear that and
• 1:41:22
  say, actually, it's flipped now women have effectively more
• 1:41:25
  rights than men. Abortion is an example.
• 1:41:27
  If you call that a right because the man can't defend or kill
• 1:41:30
  their baby, but the woman can, she can choose life or death for
• 1:41:33
  the baby. The man has no say in abortion
• 1:41:35
  as just one example, right. And when you look at academia,
• 1:41:40
  you know more women are graduating college than men
• 1:41:43
  today. There is now a, you could really
• 1:41:46
  say, a push for women to be more successful economically.
• 1:41:51
  And this is making more men struggle.
• 1:41:53
  And it's not fair because also now these women want to have
• 1:41:56
  children and then they want flexible work time.
• 1:41:58
  And then this is increasingly disadvantaging men who have to
• 1:42:00
  work even harder to accommodate these women and on and on and
• 1:42:03
  on. What are your thoughts?
• 1:42:05
  So on the abortion example, obviously you know where I am,
• 1:42:08
  which is that this isn't a good thing.
• 1:42:10
  Women have won for themselves, but a degradation of women, you
• 1:42:14
  know, for school. It's interesting because pretty
• 1:42:16
  much all colleges with competitive admissions practice
• 1:42:20
  strong affirmative action for men.
• 1:42:22
  Men get in with lower scores, men getting committed at higher
• 1:42:25
  rates relative to what they're presenting at admission.
• 1:42:28
  Because schools know that both men and women want roughly equal
• 1:42:31
  numbers of men and women at school to have a healthy social
• 1:42:35
  environment. And so then they have to do kind
• 1:42:37
  of anti meritocratic admissions to make sure there are enough
• 1:42:41
  men on campus. I don't have a problem with the
• 1:42:44
  fact that they do this because I also wouldn't want to go to a
• 1:42:47
  campus that was kind of 7030 girls either go to a women's
• 1:42:51
  college or to a mixed campus. Are you saying that women are
• 1:42:55
  doing better? There's more.
• 1:42:56
  Women do better in high school, so there's more women to fill
• 1:42:59
  seats at elite college. So women have better test scores
• 1:43:02
  than men, and so women technically should be getting if
• 1:43:05
  you just look at Test scores into college at a higher rate
• 1:43:08
  than men, but they the men actually have affirmative
• 1:43:10
  action. Yes, if you colleges have
• 1:43:12
  affirmative action if you. Did gender blind score based
• 1:43:14
  mission would get wildly more women than men?
• 1:43:17
  And there was an essay written by, you know, college admissions
• 1:43:20
  officer that's kind of an apology to all the girls she's
• 1:43:22
  rejected who are on paper stronger than some of the boys
• 1:43:25
  she's admitted. But, you know, she feels stuck
• 1:43:27
  between these different goals of a balanced campus, purely
• 1:43:31
  meritocratic admissions. Now, I don't have a problem with
• 1:43:34
  that as our kind of Band-Aid over this.
• 1:43:36
  I think that really should turn us back towards high school and
• 1:43:38
  middle school and elementary school and say it seems like
• 1:43:41
  we're not doing right by boys here.
• 1:43:42
  I don't think boys are intrinsically worse than girls.
• 1:43:45
  But if we have this big disparity, you're asking both
• 1:43:48
  what opportunities are open to them and what's making it easier
• 1:43:52
  for girls to stay on track and harder for boys.
• 1:43:55
  I think at the lower grades, you have more of the trouble of, is
• 1:43:58
  this too much desk time, too much lecturing time?
• 1:44:01
  Is that harder for boys to tolerate than girls?
• 1:44:03
  I think the answer is yes. But I think, you know, you also
• 1:44:07
  kind of are hurt as you go up the educational ladder of just
• 1:44:13
  is school kind of framed too much around just like pleasing
• 1:44:15
  the teacher versus like taking ownership of different projects.
• 1:44:18
  Are there ways to give students more responsibility, to make
• 1:44:21
  them feel like they're growing into their own strength, not
• 1:44:23
  just passing through these endless checkpoints?
• 1:44:26
  But again, I think women on average have an easier time
• 1:44:29
  navigating than men, though I don't think it's great for
• 1:44:32
  either of them. And I'm not sending my kids to a
• 1:44:34
  school where I feel like, oh, my girls will do fine because girls
• 1:44:37
  tolerate this better. I don't like it for either of
• 1:44:39
  them. So that's really where I would
• 1:44:41
  start by looking. I think what's really troubling
• 1:44:44
  and what bothers me most on like where are men getting overall
• 1:44:46
  deal is increasingly in kind of the culture people find it hard
• 1:44:51
  to articulate what a positive view of masculinity is.
• 1:44:54
  You get the via negative of the this is toxic masculinity.
• 1:44:57
  Don't do XY and Z, but no one can have a vocation of no.
• 1:45:01
  You have to have a positive thing that you're calling people
• 1:45:04
  to. I think for men, it's really
• 1:45:05
  distinguished by the fact that men, as they grow, are larger,
• 1:45:09
  are bigger, are stronger. And the question that's posed to
• 1:45:13
  every young man as he starts to, you know, tower over the girls
• 1:45:16
  in his classes. But what is this strength for?
• 1:45:18
  Why am I bigger? And it's in order to extend your
• 1:45:22
  strength over others. But if you don't give people
• 1:45:24
  very many opportunities to do that, you know, that can feel
• 1:45:27
  like it turns inward, that it's sworded, it has no outlet.
• 1:45:31
  And I think that's a really hard way to live.
• 1:45:33
  And this goes right back to dignity of dependence, because
• 1:45:36
  if your strength or your capacity to be a mother is not
• 1:45:39
  to protect other people and also to bring life into the world,
• 1:45:42
  then it's you're unmoored. Yeah, if it's purely
• 1:45:45
  superfluous, that's really hard. It's really hard.
• 1:45:47
  And then you also don't get to discover what you're designed
• 1:45:50
  for. And it's not you're not happier
• 1:45:53
  because of that. And I think for women, you know,
• 1:45:55
  the big thing women have going for us, that's an advantage over
• 1:45:58
  what men have, is you do get a lot more storytelling and
• 1:46:01
  conversation about like, what does it mean to be a woman?
• 1:46:04
  What are the range of things you can be?
• 1:46:06
  And you know, some of those kind of tilt too hard away from
• 1:46:08
  motherhood, but you're still hearing it as a live
• 1:46:10
  conversation. I think so much of the
• 1:46:11
  conversation around men is a conversation of no.
• 1:46:14
  What do you think men should be told instead?
• 1:46:16
  You know, I think it is really, you know, that on average, like
• 1:46:21
  God has made you bigger. God has given you the strength
• 1:46:23
  that won't get drawn out of you naturally in the way that
• 1:46:26
  pregnancy draws it out of a woman.
• 1:46:28
  And your job is going well. What should I rush towards?
• 1:46:31
  Where is there a gap around me? I've got to have this initiative
• 1:46:33
  to go find the gap and stand in it.
• 1:46:36
  But you need then a whole culture around you in a
• 1:46:38
  neighborhood that is looking for opportunities to call that out
• 1:46:41
  of you, to invite you in. And I think that's where men are
• 1:46:44
  really left out. You know, girls, as they become
• 1:46:46
  teenagers, are more often invited to be babysitters in
• 1:46:48
  their neighborhood, which is oriented towards their
• 1:46:50
  maternity. But we're a much more prosperous
• 1:46:54
  society, and that's great in many ways.
• 1:46:55
  We have to go like, well, where is that cutting against
• 1:46:57
  something we need? It's much more common that
• 1:46:59
  you're going to have a gig worker come clear up your lawn,
• 1:47:04
  come manage, you know, assembling or calling away this
• 1:47:07
  thing versus like, OK, after every big snow, our parish keeps
• 1:47:11
  a list of people who can't shovel out, you know, and then
• 1:47:13
  it expects the team boys to do it.
• 1:47:16
  And not even for money necessarily, just with a, wow,
• 1:47:18
  you've grown into this period where we can trust you with
• 1:47:21
  this. Like, Missus Mcgillicuddy can't
• 1:47:22
  shovel out. Everyone knows that this year,
• 1:47:25
  like last year, you were too small.
• 1:47:26
  This year, you can do this for her.
• 1:47:28
  And we're asking you to do it. But I think you could ask you a
• 1:47:31
  group of teenage boys, how often do you feel necessary to your
• 1:47:35
  community? And I think often people have
• 1:47:37
  the expectation, while I I won't have anything to contribute till
• 1:47:40
  I'm a grown up, until I earn a salary, right?
• 1:47:42
  And that's not true. I think about the old adage,
• 1:47:45
  idle hands are the devil's work or the devil's play thing.
• 1:47:50
  And if you don't have something to do with your new new found
• 1:47:53
  strength or your new found even desire to nurture, I think about
• 1:47:56
  the teenage girls babysitting, right?
• 1:47:58
  Then you're, you kind of are aloft.
• 1:48:00
  And then you also get into a drift, I should say, and you get
• 1:48:02
  into trouble. And this is this.
• 1:48:04
  This is the problem with a lot of these boys today, you know,
• 1:48:08
  that are full of their strength and are not given a direction.
• 1:48:12
  And that's why people fall into gangs and drugs and violence.
• 1:48:15
  Why are those crimes more prone to be crimes that men commit
• 1:48:19
  than women? It's because there's no
• 1:48:21
  direction for their masculine strength.
• 1:48:24
  It's also because they're very risk tolerant, you know, and so
• 1:48:26
  part of it, again, the goal is not to say, wow, boys have this,
• 1:48:30
  you know, slowly developing, you know, frontal lobe that's
• 1:48:34
  helping them navigate risk. We've got to just keep them
• 1:48:36
  inside, keep them from doing dangerous things.
• 1:48:38
  You go like boys have this kind of yen to do risky things.
• 1:48:41
  Let's make sure there are good risky things on offer.
• 1:48:43
  You know, sports is part of that.
• 1:48:45
  You know, that feeling of pushing your body as far as you
• 1:48:47
  can, of leaping as high as you can, etcetera.
• 1:48:49
  Like that's part of it, building things as part of that.
• 1:48:52
  Eagle Scouts do a little of this.
• 1:48:54
  But you know, our goal is always not to tell men, well, look,
• 1:48:57
  you're too much, be less. It's like, OK, you have this
• 1:49:01
  impulse. Like part of this impulse is
• 1:49:03
  from God. You need an appropriate outlet.
• 1:49:06
  And it's funny you brought up the example of gangs because
• 1:49:08
  obviously I don't think that's the appropriate outlet.
• 1:49:10
  But one of the things that gives young men is like an age mixed
• 1:49:13
  group where you can lead younger boys and younger boys have older
• 1:49:19
  boys to look up to. That's obviously not a healthy
• 1:49:23
  way of living out that relationship, but I think it's
• 1:49:26
  really destructive that in our culture there's so much tight
• 1:49:29
  age segregation of you're just interacting with kids your age.
• 1:49:32
  Everyone is your peer, not you are mentoring people younger
• 1:49:36
  than you as you come up, you're looking to people older than you
• 1:49:38
  who do have some responsibility for you, who think, OK, well, I
• 1:49:42
  could do this. But then, you know, the 4th
• 1:49:44
  grader who is my little brother in a buddy program, like we'll
• 1:49:48
  think of doing it too. And I'm kind of tempted, but I
• 1:49:51
  don't want it for him. Where are those vertical
• 1:49:54
  relationships for men, even when they are younger, not when
• 1:49:57
  they're grownups, where they follow other young men they
• 1:50:01
  admire and they have younger boys who they know are watching
• 1:50:04
  them? Another common question that
• 1:50:07
  people are asking in the kind of more trad repeal the 19th sort
• 1:50:13
  of space, which I think you do a beautiful job of responding and
• 1:50:16
  helping understand it. You know, it's not to condemn
• 1:50:18
  anyone or anything. It's just to understand really
• 1:50:20
  what are what are people actually aiming at here and what
• 1:50:23
  are what is the solution? But is the draft, and there's
• 1:50:27
  some people who say, well, today the draft is male based in the
• 1:50:32
  United States anyways. And that's not fair because what
• 1:50:37
  is the other public policy or law that is female based that
• 1:50:43
  requires women today to do something sometimes
• 1:50:47
  extraordinary to the point of giving their life, which is what
• 1:50:50
  men are required to do with a draft?
• 1:50:52
  It's pregnancy, right? But today we have abortions I.
• 1:50:56
  Know, but you know, I think that's that's you can.
• 1:50:57
  Delete your draft. I mean, it doesn't.
• 1:51:00
  Effect also move to Canada you know like you know you can you
• 1:51:02
  can dodge the draft you know it doesn't take violence to do it
• 1:51:05
  but in both cases what you see here is that men and women.
• 1:51:08
  That's a question. Can you, if you're called for
• 1:51:10
  the draft and you're American citizen, you're a man.
• 1:51:12
  Can you just move to another country?
• 1:51:13
  I mean, you, they can try and pursue you, right?
• 1:51:16
  But in Vietnam, people just made it across the.
• 1:51:18
  Border, I think the point is it's illegal and it's not
• 1:51:21
  illegal to have an abortion. I'm never going to be out here
• 1:51:23
  saying all of our laws are in accordance with morality right
• 1:51:27
  now. But it's the abortion law, not
• 1:51:29
  the draft law that's wrong. You know, both men and women
• 1:51:32
  have these distinct ways where they know they may be called to
• 1:51:34
  offer their life, not that they desire to, but that they might
• 1:51:38
  be called to make a gift of their life for the sake of
• 1:51:41
  protecting someone else. For men, it is the draft, you
• 1:51:45
  know, and it is more broadly the sense of draft or no draft, war
• 1:51:48
  and no war. A husband will think it's my job
• 1:51:51
  to step in front of my family if they're in danger, you know, and
• 1:51:55
  thanks be to God, you know, I live in a safe neighborhood.
• 1:51:57
  We live in a prosperous time. The only time we've gotten
• 1:52:00
  remotely close to that for my family was when a dog off a
• 1:52:03
  leash came running at me and the kids and I had a stroller, a kid
• 1:52:08
  in a stroller, and a kid tied to me right in a wrap, and my
• 1:52:12
  husband was immediately between US and the dock.
• 1:52:15
  Nothing happened. It was a friendly, exuberant
• 1:52:17
  dog, but he didn't know that it's running towards him, so he
• 1:52:20
  doesn't need a draft to think. It's my job to interpose my body
• 1:52:24
  between my family and danger, and I don't need any help from
• 1:52:27
  the law to know that the primary site in which Ioffer my body is
• 1:52:31
  pregnancy. And I think this is the deepest
• 1:52:35
  reality of provide and protect versus mother and nurture or
• 1:52:38
  Karen nurture where only a mother can mother, especially
• 1:52:42
  with a young child, she needs her body to do it.
• 1:52:45
  And in order to empower the mother to do that and to be her
• 1:52:50
  her husband, the man is going to be doing provide protective
• 1:52:53
  activities that only he can do uniquely in that in that
• 1:52:56
  circumstance. I wouldn't even say exactly,
• 1:52:58
  only he can do uniquely because of course if I were walking
• 1:53:00
  alone with the stroller, I would get between the stroller.
• 1:53:03
  And or you could hire a bodyguard.
• 1:53:05
  I would never that's. Just so weird but.
• 1:53:07
  I think that's the thing. Like this is where women are
• 1:53:09
  called to the virtue of courage and can be called to the virtue
• 1:53:11
  of self sacrificial love in this interposing yourself between and
• 1:53:15
  external danger in your kids. But if your husband is walking
• 1:53:18
  with you, it's obvious who is going to take that.
• 1:53:20
  Step I I think the whole entity that keeps popping up between
• 1:53:25
  men and women online on the more right or among the more
• 1:53:28
  conservatives or among the more Christians or Catholics,
• 1:53:32
  Christians and Catholics is obviously Catholics or
• 1:53:33
  Christians, But the people that wouldn't say they're Catholic,
• 1:53:35
  that they're evangelical or Protestant or Baptist or
• 1:53:37
  whatever, it's just just so unnecessary.
• 1:53:40
  It just it, it grieves me personally because I'm like, you
• 1:53:43
  don't have to hate me and I don't have to hate you and we
• 1:53:46
  can celebrate each other. So this whole enmity about
• 1:53:50
  between us, the, you know, this warring of the sexes is
• 1:53:53
  completely useless. You know, I think it's very hard
• 1:53:56
  online when people kind of get clout from picking fights.
• 1:53:59
  But as someone who picks some fights myself, I think the main
• 1:54:03
  thing is there's no one you can fight with online or in the real
• 1:54:07
  world that you're allowed to hate.
• 1:54:10
  And for me personally, for prayer, what I do is that when I
• 1:54:13
  am picking a fight and I'm like, I think this is a necessary
• 1:54:15
  fight. And since I'll go to my husband
• 1:54:16
  and go like, should I fight with this person?
• 1:54:17
  And they're like, no, do not bother, right?
• 1:54:19
  But but I'm like, I think this fight is worth having.
• 1:54:21
  I think this person is really corrosively wrong.
• 1:54:24
  I think they're leading other people into error.
• 1:54:25
  I want to fight with them. What I try and pray for is I'm
• 1:54:27
  like, dear Lord, like let me desire sainthood for this person
• 1:54:32
  and let me love them such that if I die and they've died before
• 1:54:37
  me and they are in heaven welcoming me into heaven,
• 1:54:40
  there's not a single part of me that would hesitate to take
• 1:54:42
  their hand or be embraced by them.
• 1:54:43
  Beautiful, Leah. Because we're just not allowed
• 1:54:45
  to be divided from other people. That's so beautiful.
• 1:54:48
  I often think with some of these online wars that it's just not
• 1:54:53
  worth it to engage when there is any sort of contempt or apparent
• 1:54:58
  anger coming from my adversary online.
• 1:55:01
  And it's hard because there's a part of it that wants to engage
• 1:55:04
  to justify myself and my position because I know they're
• 1:55:07
  misunderstanding or mischaracterizing, you know,
• 1:55:09
  characterizing me, or because I think they're just wrong or I
• 1:55:12
  think they're doing it maybe out of bad will.
• 1:55:14
  I don't know. But it seems that way, right?
• 1:55:16
  And so I want to engage because I see other people watching and
• 1:55:18
  like the pylon. But then I think what good comes
• 1:55:22
  from engagement from somebody that seems to be, you know,
• 1:55:28
  characterizing me in the worst way they can and, you know, a
• 1:55:33
  lack of charity and who is very much punching up in terms of
• 1:55:38
  their attempting. Or sometimes it's a punch down,
• 1:55:40
  but they're attempting to create a viral moment, quite frankly.
• 1:55:43
  I mean, this is how they're building a brand, particularly
• 1:55:46
  through engaging people and mischaracterizations, in my
• 1:55:48
  view, to to kind of build it, build their own case.
• 1:55:50
  I mean, isn't a straw man argument is what it is.
• 1:55:52
  And so I'm like, what good comes from engaging them publicly when
• 1:55:57
  this is only the going to fuel the fire that they're
• 1:55:59
  intentionally creating in order to, you know, build their brand,
• 1:56:02
  blah, blah, blah. This is the like don't wrestle a
• 1:56:04
  pig. You get muddy and the pig likes
• 1:56:06
  it. They're a pig because they're my
• 1:56:08
  brother in Christ and I love them.
• 1:56:10
  They're not trying to have an argument with you, They're
• 1:56:12
  trying to do something publicly to get attention.
• 1:56:15
  You know, what I think think about is, you know, I want to
• 1:56:18
  make sure I don't live my life in a way such that if you're
• 1:56:20
  rude to me, you get to jump the line for me to engage with you.
• 1:56:25
  And if I. That's such a great way to look
• 1:56:27
  at it, Leah. Yeah, but people should get to
• 1:56:29
  be in first in line because they're engaging thoughtfully,
• 1:56:31
  you know, and they have something to say.
• 1:56:32
  You know, maybe it's wrong, but like, it seems like there's
• 1:56:34
  someone I can have a dialogue with.
• 1:56:35
  Those people should go to the front of the line.
• 1:56:37
  If I have extra time, then it's for the people who don't feel
• 1:56:40
  like they're engaging in full good faith.
• 1:56:42
  I think the other thing I think about is, you know, when someone
• 1:56:44
  turns up because they're taking a shot at me, you know, God has
• 1:56:48
  definitely brought them to my attention so that I can pray.
• 1:56:51
  At minimum. Yes, whether or not I'm supposed
• 1:56:54
  to engage, that I don't know, right?
• 1:56:56
  I try and live my life so that I'm taken for a sucker at least
• 1:56:59
  some of the time, right? If I'm not sure if this person
• 1:57:01
  is in good faith, like, let me engage as though they are.
• 1:57:04
  Let me give them a shot, but I don't do that as my full time
• 1:57:07
  job. But if I go through a whole
• 1:57:09
  month and I haven't engaged with someone who didn't really live
• 1:57:11
  up to the engagement, like I'm not giving people enough of a
• 1:57:13
  shot. If I'm primarily engaging with
• 1:57:15
  people who don't seem like they're in good faith, I'm
• 1:57:17
  giving them too much of my time. I'm letting think it's.
• 1:57:19
  Tricky as you can click on someones timeline and I am not
• 1:57:23
  the primary target of the abuse and you are likely not either.
• 1:57:26
  It's definitely. Not.
• 1:57:28
  Many they have many targets they pick AT and I am upset on behalf
• 1:57:32
  of those targets most of the time because I'm like, you are
• 1:57:34
  not being fair to those people. And so why would I play the game
• 1:57:37
  for me? It's almost like adding insult
• 1:57:40
  to injury for those people. I almost think about it as and
• 1:57:42
  maybe I'm I'm more maybe I'm too careful, Maybe I'm too much the
• 1:57:48
  path of let's just speak what I know to be true will engage
• 1:57:50
  people respectfully in in the in different forms.
• 1:57:52
  It's a university debate or it's here, you know, on the show or I
• 1:57:55
  go on somebody else's show. And I have been I have had these
• 1:57:58
  people engage me very poorly. And then some of them have
• 1:58:01
  invited me on their shows and I will go on their show.
• 1:58:04
  Not everyone's show that asks me will I go on.
• 1:58:06
  If they're a show that has, you know, a small amount of
• 1:58:08
  subscribers and they just spend their entire time hating people,
• 1:58:11
  then I might say this is not the best use of my God-given time
• 1:58:14
  and talent. Every moment I'm doing this, I'm
• 1:58:16
  away from my kids. So I'm going to use this time
• 1:58:19
  carefully. If they have a much larger
• 1:58:21
  platform and they're more or outside of my bubble and they're
• 1:58:24
  doing this, you know, you know, bad faith game, maybe I will
• 1:58:28
  like enter into that arena for the sake of souls.
• 1:58:30
  As I see it, this is all the prudential decision making that
• 1:58:33
  comes into it. I.
• 1:58:33
  Think the other option that doesn't always feel live to
• 1:58:35
  people in the moment, like as the attack is coming in, is that
• 1:58:37
  you can engage laterally. You can say like, OK, this
• 1:58:40
  person is really angry. I think they're engaging in bad
• 1:58:42
  faith, that they're kind of straw manning my argument or not
• 1:58:44
  listening to me. But they do have this following.
• 1:58:47
  So what is it that draws people towards them?
• 1:58:48
  It makes this feel satisfying and no one does evil except for
• 1:58:52
  the sake of a perceived good. So if someone is attacking me, I
• 1:58:55
  always try and ask whether or not I engage with them directly.
• 1:58:57
  Well, what good thing do they think they're protecting from me
• 1:59:01
  that they think I'm menacing or damaging?
• 1:59:04
  And to be honest, like this comes up for me most often.
• 1:59:06
  Not with Bros on the Internet who mostly don't beef with me
• 1:59:09
  that much, and many of the loudest ones don't know I exist.
• 1:59:12
  God preserve them in that ignorance, right?
• 1:59:14
  It comes up in some of the anti feminist, Catholic feminist
• 1:59:17
  fights. And I think there's no one on
• 1:59:19
  the other side where I think they're in this primarily out of
• 1:59:22
  malice or, you know, because they're just trying to pick a
• 1:59:26
  fight. You know, a lot of our divisions
• 1:59:28
  come out of well, they're worried that if I prevail, this
• 1:59:32
  bad thing will happen. And in some cases what I'm
• 1:59:35
  trying to do is say like, OK, like you're right to worry about
• 1:59:37
  that. We're united on thinking that I
• 1:59:40
  don't want more people to move into mainstream feminism, you
• 1:59:42
  know, and I don't want them to think that autonomy is good.
• 1:59:46
  But what I want you to hear from me is that I think autonomy is
• 1:59:50
  destructive to those very goods of what does it mean to be a
• 1:59:53
  woman? What does it mean to be just to
• 1:59:54
  a woman? And I think the feminists notice
• 1:59:56
  this, like, as an undercurrent. And I want to lean into that.
• 1:59:59
  Now, is that satisfying to everyone on the other side?
• 2:00:01
  No, not necessarily. But, you know, that's a division
• 2:00:04
  where I can say, OK, people get heated up about this because
• 2:00:07
  they are trying to preserve a good thing.
• 2:00:08
  And often it's a good thing. I also want to serve, and we're
• 2:00:12
  arguing about how best to serve it.
• 2:00:14
  I think that's so good. And I think that that if that
• 2:00:17
  really was understood, it's hard to understand why there's a
• 2:00:21
  resistance to it. I do understand that, you know,
• 2:00:25
  feminism, the word itself, there's no redeem, redemptive
• 2:00:28
  quality whatsoever. But then I think about Saint
• 2:00:30
  John Paul the Second, who is an actual St.
• 2:00:33
  And he used the term Catholic feminism, and it's a little,
• 2:00:37
  it's a little much, I think to come against a Pope and Catholic
• 2:00:42
  St. In saying that, we have to fully
• 2:00:45
  throw away the word complete in its entirety.
• 2:00:47
  In 100 years, like I don't really care whether anyone is
• 2:00:50
  using the word or not. I care about whether we're being
• 2:00:52
  just to women and babies. But you know, I had an event at
• 2:00:55
  my parish which is much more intimidating than fighting with
• 2:00:57
  people on the Internet because I live alongside everyone that was
• 2:00:59
  on the topic of my book, The Dignity of Dependence.
• 2:01:02
  And I put up kind of these big poster boards and little post
• 2:01:06
  its that said, you know, how would you define feminism?
• 2:01:10
  And then had two sections for I would define feminism as blank
• 2:01:14
  and you're a feminist and I would define feminism as and
• 2:01:17
  you're not a feminist. I think it was helpful for
• 2:01:18
  everyone just to see how varied the definitions were and that
• 2:01:23
  many people wouldn't endorse the definition that people who
• 2:01:26
  didn't identify with the word use that we could agree.
• 2:01:29
  Like I don't think women are intrinsically better than men.
• 2:01:32
  You know, I don't think men are dangerous like intrinsically.
• 2:01:37
  And I think that was fruitful. And that's why when it's when
• 2:01:40
  I'm in a really heated discussion that fundamental is
• 2:01:42
  about a word, I always want to be straightforward.
• 2:01:43
  Like when I say feminist, what I value about it is the question
• 2:01:47
  of what does it mean to be just to women as women and not see
• 2:01:50
  women as needing to be interchangeable with men.
• 2:01:52
  And someone's like, well, I like that, but I wouldn't use the
• 2:01:54
  word. I'm like, cool, then let's just
• 2:01:56
  talk about what we want to do. I don't need to get bogged down
• 2:01:59
  in the word with you right now. Tell me about the public
• 2:02:01
  policies that you think we should be enacting in order to
• 2:02:05
  make this country a more welcoming place for mothers,
• 2:02:08
  fathers and babies. So obviously, I do want to see a
• 2:02:11
  total federal ban on abortion. I'm not going to get in the near
• 2:02:14
  term. So I focus a lot on what can I
• 2:02:17
  do in the near term. That's right.
• 2:02:18
  And just for families that may take off some of those financial
• 2:02:21
  pressures, even if it doesn't solve everything I'd like to
• 2:02:24
  solve, I think it's helpful to think about, well, what is the
• 2:02:27
  state good at it? The state isn't good at kind of
• 2:02:29
  intense social nudges. And, like, how exactly should
• 2:02:34
  you raise your family? Should we open up a lot of
• 2:02:36
  childcare centers because everyone needs childcare?
• 2:02:38
  The state's best at saying all right well how do I give
• 2:02:41
  families room to make the next right choice?
• 2:02:44
  So one of the things I'd really like to see happen would be a
• 2:02:46
  baby bonus, a newborn credit so that families right after a baby
• 2:02:50
  is born, get, let's say, $2000 stapled to your Social Security
• 2:02:54
  card so that you're free to make the next right choice for your
• 2:02:57
  baby. Because we know that in that
• 2:02:59
  first year and before you get any of the tax benefits like the
• 2:03:02
  CTC, the child tax credit, the next year on that, families go
• 2:03:06
  through an economic shock. Even moms who think they'll go
• 2:03:09
  back to work may be surprised to find out that they've changed
• 2:03:11
  their mind or that they had a difficult delivery and they're
• 2:03:14
  not ready to go back on the schedule they imagined.
• 2:03:16
  So most people lose income in that first year, whether they
• 2:03:18
  plan to or not. I think it's appropriate that
• 2:03:22
  the state supplement that income for new families so that they're
• 2:03:27
  able to take care of their baby without pressure to return to
• 2:03:30
  work before they're ready. And this is something a lot of
• 2:03:33
  other countries have done, too, in part to kind of fill the gap
• 2:03:36
  of paid leave programs. Now, we don't have one at all,
• 2:03:38
  but other countries have relied on a newborn credit to make it
• 2:03:40
  easier for moms in particular. But however, families want to
• 2:03:44
  balance it to take time away from work, even if you're not
• 2:03:47
  covered by another paid leave program.
• 2:03:49
  And in the United States, unfortunately, the main
• 2:03:51
  protection we have is the unpaid leave of FMLA leave, which some
• 2:03:55
  moms can't afford to take even though they've earned it.
• 2:03:57
  They're entitled to time away from work.
• 2:04:00
  So that's where I'd like to start.
• 2:04:01
  I think there's room for us to expand other kind of well tested
• 2:04:04
  family supports like the child tax credit, especially for young
• 2:04:07
  kids in those years when parents are earning less because they're
• 2:04:10
  younger, parents have lower savings because they the parents
• 2:04:13
  are younger and it's appropriate to help them out.
• 2:04:16
  And I think we have good programs.
• 2:04:17
  We just need to expand or supplement with the newborn
• 2:04:20
  credit rather than we need a fully centralized childcare
• 2:04:24
  program, like a massive new program.
• 2:04:28
  And that's again, because I think the desire is there.
• 2:04:30
  We're trying to allow people to live it fully.
• 2:04:34
  Should birth be made free by the government?
• 2:04:37
  I think that would be great, Yo. I do want people to know, and
• 2:04:39
  this is good news, that about 42% of births are already free
• 2:04:43
  for the lowest income moms. If you're eligible for Medicaid,
• 2:04:46
  you have a free birth. And I think that's completely
• 2:04:48
  correct. I think other moms might be
• 2:04:49
  above the Medicaid cut off who have trouble navigating the
• 2:04:52
  cost. But what I think is really
• 2:04:54
  important is it's as much the uncertainty about the cost as
• 2:04:57
  the cost. Yes, you know, the median
• 2:04:58
  hospital bill is about $3000. Plenty of families would
• 2:05:01
  struggle with that expense. But but I think it's so
• 2:05:03
  stressful for families as you go into the hospital and you have
• 2:05:06
  no real control over how complicated A delivery you'll
• 2:05:09
  have and then how much you'll pay.
• 2:05:11
  So I think it be very appropriate to make birth free
• 2:05:14
  to court or simply to cap it to say that the point of having
• 2:05:17
  insurance is to have a predictable co-pay that you're
• 2:05:20
  not paying above this amount. You can budget for it and either
• 2:05:23
  of those would be progress for families.
• 2:05:25
  So possibly mandating a set co-pay for any kind of birth,
• 2:05:28
  whether it's C-section, that's right, whether it's vaginal or
• 2:05:31
  also NICU if it involves. What's what's the point of a
• 2:05:34
  co-pay in insurance? The point of the co-pay is to
• 2:05:37
  discourage people from seeking care that they don't need.
• 2:05:40
  That's bad value for money. Now, you know, when I had an
• 2:05:43
  emergency C-section for my first baby, there was no one who says
• 2:05:47
  like, oh, now have you thought about the cost?
• 2:05:48
  Let me quote you what the hospital's going to charge.
• 2:05:50
  They said your baby is having heart D cells.
• 2:05:52
  Like sign this paper right now. You're going to be the OR 10
• 2:05:54
  minutes later. That price pressure doesn't
• 2:05:57
  really factor in for births in the same way.
• 2:06:00
  So people would say sometimes to some of these ideas, which I
• 2:06:03
  think are all great, Okay, well, there's going to be a real cost
• 2:06:06
  because, you know, now the government, the bureaucratic
• 2:06:08
  government is in charge of like handing out cash payments after
• 2:06:11
  collecting it via tax. And already taxation is theft
• 2:06:14
  and there's too much tax and we're already too bloated as a
• 2:06:16
  government. So would you, in addition to
• 2:06:19
  having these cash payments for newborns, would you change
• 2:06:22
  anything about the existing system to make it, you know,
• 2:06:28
  more frugal or make it less bloated?
• 2:06:30
  And would you change our taxation policy at all?
• 2:06:32
  You know, I think we do need a broad based tax policy.
• 2:06:36
  So it's kind of obviously illusatory to say like, oh,
• 2:06:40
  well, what we're going to do is only tax millionaires and
• 2:06:42
  billionaires and that will be able to pay for everything else.
• 2:06:44
  You know, we do, we do or should tax effort a little bit through
• 2:06:47
  the payroll tax or other taxes. But it has to be because we have
• 2:06:50
  confidence that we're getting value for money.
• 2:06:52
  We're going to do something together that we wouldn't
• 2:06:54
  otherwise do, that we endorse. And that really means that there
• 2:06:58
  has to be transparencies that people earn our confidence when
• 2:07:00
  they're asking for our money and that we're spending on things
• 2:07:03
  that are fruitful. Now, I do think spending on
• 2:07:05
  babies and a newborn credit on kids and child tax credit, these
• 2:07:09
  are some of the best programs we can possibly have.
• 2:07:11
  And the reason is they are universal.
• 2:07:13
  So everyone, every single person is a baby at some point.
• 2:07:18
  Will you or I live long enough to collect Social Security?
• 2:07:21
  It's not totally clear. We don't have that guaranteed to
• 2:07:24
  us. Will Social Security be there
• 2:07:25
  when we get there? It's a little messy, but we have
• 2:07:28
  so many kind of one off or strange policies.
• 2:07:32
  But you know, I think the main criticism I get is like, well,
• 2:07:35
  aren't you privileging parents over anyone else?
• 2:07:37
  But a baby credit helps you when you are a baby.
• 2:07:42
  You can go on to have other babies or not.
• 2:07:44
  You can grow up to take religious values.
• 2:07:46
  You can grow up and be single. You can grow up and be married
• 2:07:48
  and have children of your own. But every single American
• 2:07:51
  benefits from a newborn credit because it helps their parents
• 2:07:54
  take care of them when they are born.
• 2:07:56
  I love that. And there's, I mean, I, I always
• 2:07:59
  say, I mean, I know this isn't going to solve for paying every
• 2:08:02
  out every, paying out every newborn credit, but you know, we
• 2:08:05
  can be defunding Planned Parenthood.
• 2:08:07
  I mean, there's there, there are truly billions of dollars that
• 2:08:11
  can be defunded if you remove payments for abortions and for
• 2:08:15
  Planned Parenthood and for contraception and things like
• 2:08:17
  that, that are not actually helping people in the end.
• 2:08:20
  Absolutely. I mean, nothing would make me
• 2:08:22
  happier than to briefly fund baby bonuses through vice taxes.
• 2:08:27
  But to be honest, I could never see that as a long term
• 2:08:30
  sustainable way of funding it. Because of course I don't want
• 2:08:33
  to just tax pornographers and then have a sustainable revenue
• 2:08:36
  fund. I want to tax them and see them
• 2:08:37
  go out of business and going back to what we can do for young
• 2:08:40
  men. Same for gambling sites, right?
• 2:08:42
  I think we see more and more vice industries that target
• 2:08:44
  young men in particular and make it hard for them to be prepared
• 2:08:48
  for family life. To make it more expensive, you
• 2:08:50
  would argue, as opposed to banning it?
• 2:08:52
  Should we ban porn or should we tax it?
• 2:08:54
  I'd like to ban it if I can get away with it.
• 2:08:56
  I think there's no reason not to tax it as a vice, but I would
• 2:08:59
  never build it in as my perpetual revenue source because
• 2:09:02
  my hope is that it won't be there.
• 2:09:03
  What about alcohol? You know, I think it is
• 2:09:06
  appropriate attacks because what these industries have in common,
• 2:09:08
  porn is intrinsically wrong. Alcohol is not.
• 2:09:11
  But what porn, alcohol and gambling have in common is that
• 2:09:14
  the vast majority of the profits come from degrading the people
• 2:09:18
  who are addicts. And so you can be someone who
• 2:09:21
  uses alcohol responsibly. That's a real category of person
• 2:09:23
  you could be. You can't say the same for porn.
• 2:09:25
  But in both cases, you know the thing that unites them.
• 2:09:28
  For alcohol and gambling in particular, you have to think
• 2:09:30
  like, well, how can I manage this being available to me in a
• 2:09:34
  way that doesn't degrade my brother?
• 2:09:36
  What a great idea. And cigarettes and alcohol and
• 2:09:39
  you know, cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, porn.
• 2:09:42
  I would just say ban. It that there's no just usage of
• 2:09:46
  it. Yes, but such a such What about
• 2:09:48
  sugary sodas and really toxic cookies and Ritz crackers, by
• 2:09:53
  the way, have actual ingredients that you know are incredibly
• 2:09:56
  toxic to the body we. Put those in the different
• 2:09:58
  category where it's not where you get like 80% of the revenue
• 2:10:00
  from 20% of the users, which is kind of that this is built on
• 2:10:04
  exploiting a small group of people.
• 2:10:06
  Because obesity is a real problem and you get you become
• 2:10:10
  obese not because you don't have access to food, but because you
• 2:10:14
  have too much access to to too much bad food.
• 2:10:17
  There, I think you're always trying both to say no to what's
• 2:10:19
  bad, but like a big affirmative yes to what's good.
• 2:10:21
  And I think about this a lot with my kids.
• 2:10:23
  Not so much through food, where I feel like I make no progress
• 2:10:26
  on the picky age whatsoever, but I think about it in terms of
• 2:10:30
  reading. You know, my kids deserve and
• 2:10:33
  need excellent books, beautiful art, to be able to form their
• 2:10:38
  tastes. And it's not just a matter of
• 2:10:40
  banning things that are bad, it's a matter of making sure
• 2:10:42
  there are beautiful, nourishing things to form their
• 2:10:45
  imaginations. So subsidized local organic
• 2:10:48
  farmers and tax Nabisco well and.
• 2:10:51
  Promote Promote flexible work so that you're home to cook it,
• 2:10:55
  including cook it with your kids.
• 2:10:56
  Like one of the things that helps people eat in a
• 2:10:58
  sustainable and healthy way is being part of making it.
• 2:11:01
  I love that. All right, this is your book.
• 2:11:04
  It's beautiful. The dignity of dependence.
• 2:11:06
  It's out now and people can order it.
• 2:11:09
  Any final words that you want people to know about the message
• 2:11:12
  that you are sharing in this book?
• 2:11:14
  The dignity of Dependence. You know, one thing I liked
• 2:11:16
  about doing the book is they designed a better cover than I
• 2:11:19
  would have come up with. But I think sometimes people
• 2:11:21
  will do pictures of mothers and babies in this kind of gauzy,
• 2:11:25
  overly romantic way. And the best compliment I got is
• 2:11:27
  someone looked at the cover and went that baby looks heavy.
• 2:11:31
  And I think that's really the thesis of the book.
• 2:11:32
  The. Baby.
• 2:11:33
  The baby is a. Chunky baby and this, but it's a
• 2:11:35
  very bright and cheerful color. Color and it's both, right?
• 2:11:38
  Like it's mingled joy and it is a real burden.
• 2:11:41
  And that we have to be comfortable saying pregnancy
• 2:11:43
  does burden women. Aging burdens the people around
• 2:11:46
  you. And we respond to that burden
• 2:11:48
  with love and support for the caregiver, not by annihilating
• 2:11:51
  the person who is interrupting the life you imagined you would
• 2:11:54
  lead. Beautiful Leah, this is amazing.
• 2:11:57
  Where can people find you and your books?
• 2:11:59
  So you can find me at my sub stack at other feminisms.com.
• 2:12:04
  You don't have to endorse the word, but you do have to type it
• 2:12:06
  in your browser. You can find me on Twitter at at
• 2:12:09
  Leah Labresco. And you can find my book almost
• 2:12:13
  anywhere. Amazon or other places will
• 2:12:15
  carry it, and sometimes in your local library.
• 2:12:17
  Amazing. Thank you so much, Leah.
• 2:12:19
  My pleasure. A big thank you to our channel
• 2:12:21
  partner. EWTNEWTN is the world's largest
• 2:12:25
  religious broadcast network, reaching millions of people
• 2:12:28
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• 2:12:32
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• 2:12:36
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• 2:12:41
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