MONDAY. 26 October 2026. Noon eastern.
Democracy Reading Group with Atlantic staff writer and authorAnnie Lowrey.
We will discuss her new book The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It
This meeting will happen at Proton Meet. I will share a link with Paid Subscribers in the coming days. To join us, upgrade to paid at $48/year forever by clicking the button below.
This week’s newsletters are dissecting the new Executive Order on women’s and girls’ health. Prior installments are linked below for those who missed them.
In yesterday’s comments, someone brought up the phrase **replication studies. **Here’s the exact language from Section 2 of the EO:
(ii) advance and coordinate research on women’s health conditions at all phases of life, including
replication studies
According to Enago, an academic publisher that supports scientific researchers worldwide, a replication study is “repeating a study’s procedure and observing if the prior findings repeat in similar conditions. A study is replicated when the results of original study are as closely related to the newly collected data.”
In science and research, repeating a process, experiment, or study under the same conditions should produce similar results, thus confirming the original outcome.
For example, a 2025 replication study on abortion medications (specifically mifepristone) was conducted by the White Christian Nationalist “think tank” the Ethics and Public Policy Center. (GO HERE to read it.) Its findings were wildly different from prior studies, which led groups like the Guttmacher Institute and the Center for Reproductive Rights to attack the replication study as junk science. That hasn’t stopped the regime from ordering the FDA to conduct a “safety review” of mifepristone, guided solely by a “replication study” from an extremist White Christian Nationalist group.
Based upon their own language, their stated goals for families, and their endorsed policies so far, I believe the following will be attacked using replication studies:
Hormonal Contraception
I have written reams about this crowd’s hatred of hormonal contraception and insistence that all forms cause abortions. But they have also attacked contraception because it enabled women to delay or escape their Biblically-defined role: MOTHERHOOD.
I’m not going to reproduce this language here, but I covered it extensively in the newsletter below.
I believe this EO will fund numerous **replication studies **by extremist WCN groups like the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where all findings will assert that hormonal contraception is dangerous for women and girls. These findings will then be used to rewrite federal mandates surrounding hormonal contraception, restrict access, and/or ban it entirely.
Hormone Replacement Therapy
On 30 April 2026, I covered the EPA’s new directives to test drinking water for female hormones.
This directive came from junk science promoted by extremist anti-abortion groups who have cynically seized on environmental activism as a vector to punish and control women. The regime used these purported “findings” (including from replication studies) to enact this new testing mandate.
On 16 September 2025, I published another newsletter on HRT:
In that newsletter, I outlined why I believe Christian Nationalists will outlaw or severely restrict all female hormonal therapies:
They believe menopause is part of God’s design.
Suffering is part of a woman’s calling and God’s curse to endure.
Eliminating HRT for menopausal women will make it impossible for certain transgender people to illegally access gender-affirming care.
I believe this EO will fund replication studies that tout the dangers of all hormonal interventions for women and girls, which will effectively make female hormonal therapies impossible to access, including for transgender affirming care.
And as I stated in the EPA piece, testosterone will not be restricted or impacted. I think any replication studies on testosterone will recommend more aggressive High-T therapies for men, regardless of existing studies that confirm the dangers to men. The latter will be the new “junk science.” Does everyone understand how replication studies will work yet?
Mental Health Medications
We’ve already seen the regime attack mental health medications aggressively. I wrote a comprehensive newsletter as to why on 4 March 2025.
From that newsletter:
Christian Nationalists only believe in ONE mental illness: Sin. It is the ultimate mental malfunction.They believe manifestations of mental illness are a direct result of a person’s poor choices. Amongst themselves, they will call these choices “sinful.”
Here’s an example of this kind of CN thinking. SOURCE: The Gospel Coalition; Jeremy Pierre, professor of counseling at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (not linking to the article)
Psychiatric medication does not address the main dilemma in human trouble: sin.We must not mix up addressing sin’s effects with addressing sin itself.
Medication cannot produce the obedience of faith.As Clines eloquently reminds us, “The image is fully realized only through obedience to Christ; this is how man, the image of God, who is already man, already the image of God, can become fully man, fully the image of God.”Some Christian Nationalist pastors go so far as to say that mental health medications make people less receptive to God’s messages. Medicating the symptoms keeps people from addressing the “real” problem: their sin.
I believe the regime will use the research mandates in this EO to conduct replication studies that find most mental health medications to be dangerous to women and girls. This will then be used to rewrite federal policies surrounding these medications, which will lead to restricted access and/or a complete ban.
Sex Education
White Christian Nationalists do not want people, but especially girls, to understand how their bodies work. Women are taught to remain pure for their husbands and accept whatever sex he offers from their wedding night forward as “the only sexual instruction they need.”
I believe the regime will use this EO to conduct **replication studies **to show the dangers of secular sex education as a means of enforcing abstinence-based sex ed as the only option nationwide.
Pregnancy and childbirth
Pregnancy is a dangerous time for a woman. This 2023 article from Harvard cites numerous statistics and studies that illustrate how dangerous pregnancy is for women, a situation that has worsened since the fall of Roe.
I believe this EO will be used as a pretext to fund replication studies that advance the notion that pregnancy is not dangerous for women and girls. It could also be used to fund replication studies that encourage women to get pregnant as young as possible, reject all interventions that might delay pregnancy, and have as many babies as God gives them.
While voting won’t get us out of this mess, the Midterms are a chance to slow or stop this trajectory.
VOTE EARLY.
Check your ballot before you hit “Submit.” (There have been scattered reports of voting machines changing votes at the last minute.)
Print your ballot before you hit “Submit” if you can.
Track your ballot to make sure it is counted.
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