This week, Point of Inquiry looks into midwives, home births, and what they mean for a safe delivery for child and mother. Our guest is skeptic, obstetrician, gynecologist, and author of How Your Baby is Born, Dr. Amy Tuteur.  

Dr. Tuteur, a graduate of Harvard and the Boston University School of Medicine, and former clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, joins us to talk about some of the misinformation and unscientific theories being peddled to expectant mothers, and the harm that can come from them. Dr. Tuteur's blog is The Skeptical OB.

This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Stanton Peele, PhD., J.D.. Dr. Peele, an addiction expert and author of 12 books on the subject, discusses his views on the current ‘disease model’ view of addiction and the recent tragedy involving actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Peele holds the somewhat contrarian position that, depending on the person, abstinence or moderation are valid approaches to treat excessive drinking or other substance abuses. He argues that 12-step programs may do more harm than good and that there is no evidence that they perform any better than “quitting cold turkey.” Peele also suggests that the current model of addiction treatment may even violate standards of medical ethics.

In Dr. Peele’s most recent book, Recover!: Stop Thinking Like an Addict and Reclaim Your Life with The PERFECT Program, he describes mindfulness techniques to stop the behaviors which are detrimental to your life without becoming addicted to the recovery program itself.

This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Greg Dworkin, MD. Dr. Dworkin is a founding editor of Flu Wiki (http://fluwiki.info.) an international, wiki-format clearinghouse of Influenza information designed to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic. He’s an expert on pandemic Flu preparedness and is joining us to discuss the Flu, the vaccine and staying healthy this H1N1 season.

Dr. Dworkin is Chief of Pediatric Pulmonology and Medical Director of the Pediatric In-patient Unit at Danbury Hospital in Danbury CT, where he has been in clinical practice for eighteen years, and serves on the Danbury city and school Pandemic Flu Task Forces. Dworkin holds academic appointments as Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at New York Medical College and Adjunct Assistant Clinical Professor of Allied Health Science at Quinnipiac College. 

This week Point of Inquiry discusses satire in politics and American life with J.R. Havlan, eight-time Emmy Award winning writer on The Daily Show. J.R. was previously a stand-up comic, including a stint doing crowd warm-up for Politically Incorrect which led to writing jokes for that show's monologues. He's also co-author of the New York Times best-selling books America: The Book, Earth: The Book, and wrote for the 2006 and 2008 Academy Awards. Most recently, J.R. began his own podcast called Writers' Bloc, on which he interviews other television and film comedy writers about their backgrounds, beginnings and influences with a focus on the process of writing comedy.

Perhaps no other popular television show does more to defend rationality and to fight B.S. than The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. How do the show's writers think about their role in American culture? Does the show actively seek to oppose Fox News and the religious right? How does it use comedy to defend reason and secularism? As the show's longest-serving writer, J.R. Havlan has worked on the show longer than even Jon Stewart has. He gives us an exclusive glimpse inside one of the most culturally influential shows in America.

This week, Point of Inquiry welcomes Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale and co-author of a provocative essay in last week’s New York Times entitled Is the United States a ‘Racial Democracy? 

Dr. Stanley and his co-author, Dr. Vesla Weaver, argue that the disproportionate surveillance, imprisonment, and post-conviction voter disenfranchisement of black Americans threatens the very integrity of our democracy. On any given day, 5.85 million people are unable to vote because they are in prison, on parole, or disenfranchised as felons. A disproportionate percentage of them are black. Of the nation's 2.3 million prisoners, about 1 million are black, despite the fact that black people represent just 13% of the population. If current trends continue, 1 in 3 black men born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime. 

You don't even have to get arrested to be affected by the surveillance state. New research shows that any unwanted contact with police, even something as relatively brief as a stop-and-frisk, makes the target less likely to vote. Approximately 85% of those who were stopped and frisked in New York City last year were black or Latino. 

The essay raises pointed questions of interest to any skeptical citizen: Why do we strip prisoners of the right to vote in the first place? Does our fervent belief in democracy and equality blind us to the realities of our political system? How does racially-charged propaganda advance certain views while subtly stifling conflicting perspectives? 

Racial Democracy was a surprise breakout hit from the Times' philosophy blog. It rapidly became the ninth most-emailed and twelfth most-tweeted item on the entire New York Times website. Rarely does an essay that cites Plato, Aristotle, and Dewey beat out the Modern Love column, but this is an unusual essay.

This week Point of Inquiry is discussing Death. Specifically, Brain death and the efforts of some areas of the religious right and their attempts to eliminate whole brain Brain Death as the legal standard for death in America. 

To aid in that,Lindsay Beyerstein welcomes, head of the division of bioethics at New York University's Langone Medical Center, Arthur Caplan, PhD.

Dr. Caplan is the author of 32 books and over 600 papers on bioethics as well as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As the War on Christmas wages on, our host, Josh Zepps, interviews Rob Boston, Senior Policy Analyst for American's United for the Separation of Church and State, Editor of Church & State magazine and author of Close Encounters with the Religious Right : Journeys into the Twilight Zone of Religion and Politics.

Joining Lindsay Bernstein this week is Kathryn Joyce, one of the foremost reporters chronicling the Religious Right today.  She made “Quiverfull” a household name with her first book, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.Her new book is called The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption. The book is the product of four years of reporting from four different countries.

Joyce found that adoption has become the hot new spiritual fad among U.S. evangelicals, often with devastating consequences for children and families at home and abroad.

Evangelical adoption crusaders sell the idea that there are tens of millions of orphans just waiting to be “saved” by devout American parents. But the true number of orphans is much smaller. With pastors in mega-church pulpits exhorting their flocks to adopt, adopt, adopt, the demand for children now outstrips the supply leading to dubious activities.

Orphanages in countries like Ethiopia and Guatemala have come under pressure to produce phony orphans for baby-hungry American consumers. Birth mothers are tricked into signing over their children. Most American families prefer young children with clean bills of health. So, adoptive parents are told their children are younger and healthier than they really are. International adoption can be a Wild West where almost anyone can adopt any number of children. Some parents adopt several children at a time because it's cheaper in bulk.

Not all adoptive parents are up for the challenge and our guest discusses some cases involving abuse, neglect and death of children at the hands of their supposed saviors. 

This week on Point of Inquiry, Josh Zepps welcomes P.J. O’Rourke, humorist, cultural commentator, and best selling author of sixteen books. An early proponent of “gonzo journalism” and is a self-described libertarian, O’Rourke has served as editor-in-chief of National Lampoon, and has spent 20 years reporting for Rolling Stone and The Atlantic as the world’s only “trouble spot humorist,” going to wars, riots, rebellions, and other “Holidays in Hell” in more than 40 countries. O'Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and a frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! 

In this episode they discuss everything from abortion and privacy, to the party following the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the looting of the Baghdad Museum. They are, however, able to steer clear of the dicey topic of free will.