Visiting Fellow in Bioethics @EPPCdc | 2025 Novak Award | formerly @yale, @HHSgov | ✍🏻 @nytimes, @NRO, @FirstThingsMag, @realDailyWire, @WNGdotorg | Mom of 4
Washington, DC
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An absolute honor to launch my Novak Fellowship project last night at the @TFASorg Journalism Awards Dinner. It’s called Technically Human: The End & Future of Emerging Reproductive Biotechnologies. Excited to begin a yearlong probe into reprotech & what it means to be human.
Honored to be receiving one of seven Robert Novak Journalism Awards at the annual @TFASorg Journalism Forum & Awards Dinner tomorrow night in New York City. 🌃
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We understand. We understand that @eminietfeld and many others think we, conservative women, are less than human. We’ve understood for a long time. But we’ll keep fighting for real, root-cause women’s healthcare. We’ll keep fighting for women to be taken seriously when they say that they’re in pain, and demand real treatment rather than a bandaid cover-up. We’ll keep fighting for women to have the children they want to have, ideally without the exorbitantly expensive and intimately invasive procedures that aren’t guaranteed to work. And we’ll do it even for the women who attack us, and all with a baby on our hip, a smile on our face, and a loving and supportive husband behind us. One day, they might even thank us. @WIRED
No IVF. No surrogacy. No polygenic tests. Emma Waters is leading a national fight against fertility tech—with her hot husband’s permission, of course. wired.com/story/emma-waters-…
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Katelyn Walls Shelton retweeted
This gets to the heart of the collectivist error exposed in the Nikole Hannah-Jones op-ed: treating personal love as an obstacle to progress. We don't love “humanity” in the abstract. We love in the particular. That is foundational to a humane society, not a social injustice.
I notice none of Nikole Hannah-Jones' critics try to answer to the basic question she wrestled with, which is: Why should my daughter get to go to a better school than other people's kids just because I work for the New York Times?
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I remember being shocked in college when a professor asked a class how many nights on average students ate dinner with their families when they were kids… and the majority only had dinner together once, maybe zero times per week!
Nightly family dinner — sometimes breakfast! — was the norm for me. My mom and dad also took their lunch break together, meeting up from across town. When I was in college I’d join for those lunch dates too. The hardest thing for me in grad school was eating almost all of my meals alone. Meal times should be communal ❤️
Children who eat dinner with their family most nights do better in school, have fewer behavioural problems, and are less likely to develop eating disorders. A 2023 umbrella review in the journal Nutrients combined the results of 57 reviews and found that family mealtimes were consistently linked to better outcomes across every domain measured.
The review found that children who ate with their families regularly had higher fruit and vegetable intake, lower rates of obesity, better academic performance, and fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety. The association held after controlling for income, parental education, and family structure.
The mechanism is not the food. It is the conversation. Family dinner is one of the few remaining settings in modern life where a child sits with adults, without a screen, and practises talking, listening, and being heard. The vocabulary exposure alone is significant: children at the dinner table hear a wider range of words than children who eat alone, and vocabulary at age five is one of the strongest predictors of academic success.
The review also found that the quality of the meal mattered less than the fact of sitting down together. A takeaway pizza eaten at the table with conversation produced similar benefits to a home-cooked meal. The key variable was the shared time, not the menu.
Nobody has time. Everybody is tired. The research says that twenty minutes at a table, phones off, food on plates, talking about nothing in particular, is doing more for your child's brain, body, and mental health than most interventions that cost money and require appointments. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3744…
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Katelyn Walls Shelton retweeted
Zygote. Embryo. Fetus. Newborn. Toddler. Teen. Adult.
All human. All worth protecting.
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Katelyn Walls Shelton retweeted
At @NRO today, I explain that increased ectopic pregnancy-related deaths show why @FDA must reinstate abortion pill safeguards. nationalreview.com/corner/in…
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Best take I’ve seen on this so far.
So, actively harming your own child to help other kids might be laudable in certain contexts. If harm is confined to “not getting the best of everything.” The problem is that this doesn’t WORK in the context, because people who are anti school choice are WRONG. The presence of solid families does not fix a school that is ideologically and politically designed to fail via utopian progressive ideas rooted in lies and willful blindness.
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Katelyn Walls Shelton retweeted
We are not talking enough about the implications of adopting AI in schools. We have a failing school system, and integrating AI systems into classrooms will only accelerate the decline. We have been outsourcing children to derelict unions/administrators, and next up: machines.
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EPPC’s @Mr_Jamie_B_Hall and @RyanTAnd are at it again, revealing the truth about mail-order abortion. Hint: it’s bad for women (and their unborn children). And it’s not Dobbs’ fault👇🏼
Earlier this month ProPublica tried to blame prolife states post-Dobbs for a big recent increase in ectopic pregnancy deaths.
@Mr_Jamie_B_Hall accessed the underlying CDC data, and it tells a very different story:
The big jump in ectopic-related deaths occurs a year before Dobbs. So hard to pin it on Dobbs.
It occurs in both pro-life and pro-abortion states. Though it is higher in pro-life states.
What could the explanation be?
The big jump occurs right after the removal of the last remaining in-person safeguard for the abortion pill, and women in pro-life states probably purchased online mail-order abortion pills at higher rates than in pro-abortion states.
Hence the jump occurring when and where and at the rates it did.
The removal of the in-person dispensing requirement for the abortion pill, not Dobbs, is most likely to blame.
Jamie's analysis linked in next tweet:
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Katelyn Walls Shelton retweeted
Insurance will pay $15-30k for an IVF cycle. Insurance won't pay $500 for a full fertility hormone panel.
Insurance will pay for months of expensive fertility drugs. Insurance won't pay for nutrition counseling or the functional testing that identifies root causes.
Insurance will pay for surgical procedures to retrieve eggs. Insurance won't pay for the lifestyle work that would improve those eggs before retrieval.
The whole insurance framework is built around fertility as a medical intervention, not a state of health to be restored. Downstream fixes get funded. Upstream root cause work doesn't.
And the fertility clinics that benefit from the current system have ZERO incentive to change it.
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I took the advice of the reply guys in my seminary thread and asked my husband about them.
You cannot poast, Reply Guy Anon.
I am a servant of the Wife Guy Collective, wielder of the band of Matrimony.
You cannot poast.
The dark fire of theobro opinions will not avail you, O Default Egg. Return to the timeline from whence you came!
YOU. SHALL. NOT. POAST!
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Katelyn Walls Shelton retweeted
Surrogacy treats children as commodities. There is no best practice that escapes this. It's just a fact about it.
This story is absolutely HORRENDOUS 😩
A man in China commissioned triplets through surrogacy in Florida. When they were born, he didn’t even come to get them.
He sent “baby handlers" YEARS LATER.
BABY HANDLERS.
People literally paid to collect newborn babies, sort out their documents and move them across borders.
One of those three babies later died. The other two ended up in an international custody battle.
DO NOT start calling this “surrogacy gone wrong.” This IS surrogacy. Once pregnancy and children become contractual services, an entire industry inevitably appears around the buying, transferring and delivering of babies 🤮
The same investigation describes men commissioning children on an industrial scale : 21 children in one case, more than 100 in another.
How is any of this normal?
I AM DISGUSTED.
thecut.com/article/surrogate…
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Can someone please tell me how this, one of the stupidest sentences I’ve ever read, made it past several editors and into the storied pages of the @NewYorker ?
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I love it here already
Heading to Rochester for the @FairerSexFD Women’s Convention
Tell me if I’ll see you there!
(Please remember I am very faceblind and tell me your name when you say hi, even if I should know)
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Wake up, babe — @FamStudies has already been cited in the first session here at the Women’s Convention
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Let me tell you about definitions. In the 1960s, ACOG updated the definition of “conception” to occur at the moment of implantation, rather than at the moment of fertilization, when a unique human life with its own DNA begins to exist. Fertilization can happen ~10-14 days before implantation, meaning new life exists for 1-2 weeks before you ever test positive. At the same time, developers of the hormonal birth control pill were seeking approval & classification from the FDA for its brand new pill. The new definition allowed the Pill to be classified as non-abortifacient (all forms of hormonal birth control thin the lining of the uterus and can prevent implantation).
So let’s stop with the confusion over pregnancy and when it begins. The only people who are “confused” about it are the people who are fine with killing babies.
Pregnancy tests draw a misleading, somewhat arbitrary, binary between a state of being pregnant and not being pregnant. You can be kind of pregnant, a little bit pregnant, or almost pregnant, or maybe pregnant, and still test positive for pregnancy. Pregnancy tests, particularly at-home urine tests, capture a moment in time at which an embryo has implanted and is interfacing with the uterus in some way. “We define how we understand the beginning of pregnancy based on this snapshot, but such a freeze-frame contains limited information,” Apoorva Tadepalli writes. Read more about the difficult task of determining when pregnancy actually begins: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Q9…
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“One AI founder told me recently over lunch that the Chernobyl-like event is the best case scenario he could hope for.” The other is total loss of human control, and it’s much more likely. One employee recently told Stuart Russell that the chances of human extinction are 60%.
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