Speaking of keeping the wolves away from the cattle, The New Atlantis brings us this eye-opening book review by Cheryl Miller.
She asks too whether feminists’ commitment to equality and “social justice” is compatible with the eugenic possibilities of ART [assisted reproductive technologies - ed.], particularly the way clinics divide women into the different “categories” of donors and surrogates. “Most surrogates I come across are not typical donor caliber as far as looks, physical features, or education,” one doctor explains. “Most egg donors are smart young girls doing it for the money to pay for college. Most surrogates are—you know, they need the money; they’re at home with four kids—of a lower socioeconomic class.” Or as another physician more succinctly explains the value of this “breeder class” of women: “Moo.”Note to self: when someone says
“[I]t is insufficient to consider only the welfare of the child, which cannot, in any case, be isolated from that of the parent. Thus the primary concern should be for the welfare of the family as a whole.”
... what he means is ...
"The most important thing is fulfilling the narcissistic desires of adults. If we have to feed a few untermensch children-accessories, sperm donors, and breeder-women into a meat grinder in order to carry out the will of the free and equal superman, so be it."
Comments (11)
Liberals go from compassionate bleeding hearts to would-be genocidal misanthropes in seconds flat. It usually happens when someone realizes: golly, I don't really like or have anything in common with these poor people I purport to love.
Posted by Roach | October 4, 2007 1:37 PM
I'm willing, too, to say that surrogate motherhood contracts are morally wrong even if the surrogate mother believes herself to benefit from them (because she needs the money, doesn't feel emotionally upset, etc.). I am less inclined to speak and think here in terms of exploiting the surrogate women and more in terms of inducing them to participate in wrongdoing. But either way, it ought to be stopped.
Posted by Lydia | October 4, 2007 1:47 PM
surrogate motherhood contracts are morally wrong even if the surrogate mother believes herself to benefit from them
Don't we always tell ourselves that we are benefiting from the moral wrongs we participate in?
Posted by Brandon Field | October 4, 2007 2:05 PM
I consider this a both/and scenario: it is both exploitative, where the surrogates are concerned, and an act of commodification, reducing the child to a mere product, to be supplied upon the conjunction of desire and financing. I think the latter a graver evil, but both are species of the same (im)moral kind: the instrumentalization of human beings.
Posted by Maximos | October 4, 2007 3:31 PM
Liberals go from compassionate bleeding hearts to would-be genocidal misanthropes in seconds flat. It usually happens when someone realizes: golly, I don't really like or have anything in common with these poor people I purport to love.
I agree. One of my own rather unpopular notions is that this applies to Islam: that is, I think there is genuine danger that at some point liberalism will get seriously fed up with Islam, drop it into the bucket marked "untermensch-oppressor", and that the resultant process could make Hiroshima-Auschwitz look like a relaxing day at the zoo. This is far from predetermined, of course, but it is not in my view outside the realm of possibility. Under the modern liberal order everyone is free and equal as long as he is himself the self-created free and equal superman, is on his way to becoming the superman, or is an ally of the superman in the superman's project of exterminating the oppressor-untermensch to make way for the free and equal self-created new man.
Islam at present falls into the latter category: an ally of left liberalism against the oppressive remains of Western Christendom in the form of a vast right-wing conspiracy. But that is merely a matter of circumstance: there isn't anything inherent to Islam which prevents the worm from turning. (In fact the only thing which would inherently prevent any given group at all from finding itself on the wrong side of the gas chamber wall would be the actual triumph of the free and equal self-created superman. That won't ever happen though, because not only is it practically impossible, not only is it impossible in principle: it isn't even conceptually coherent).
Posted by Zippy | October 4, 2007 5:05 PM
Comrade Zippy, I humbly pass my tin foil hat to you. Combined with Wolfmowerman's kryptonite rosary beads, you may be able to withstand the fast approaching superman apocalypse.
Posted by Step2 | October 4, 2007 6:46 PM
Comrade Zippy, I humbly pass my tin foil hat to you.
I'll keep it with the rest of my collection.
Not "fast approaching" though. I'd be as surprised as anyone if secularists started marching Muslims into gas chambers tomorrow. In general secular liberal forms like communism don't get serious about large-scale overt murder until they are under some form of significant existential stress (think bread lines, hyperinflation, unwanted pregnancy, etc -- the kinds of things that make it tempting to view the cause-of-oppression as less than human); and modern first world liberals are for the moment about as far away from being under that kind of personal stress from Muslims as it is possible to be. Fat dumb and happy is the state of the moment, which is part of why Islam is viewed on the Left with such aplomb.
But it is a mistake in my view to think that the behavior we see in the FDH state is the behavior we should expect under a very different state. Once the "crisis pregnancy" occurs it is better not to be the fetus.
Posted by Zippy | October 4, 2007 7:13 PM
Yes, but it's a heck of a lot easier to murder a fetus than a bunch of suicide bombers or guys in black head-masks wielding AK-47s. The Muslims will have something to say about all of that, and my own theory is that the liberals will never have the actual ubermenschian strength to do anything of the sort. By the time they wake up, or get made, or whatever, the actual concrete power won't be theirs anymore.
I suppose that's getting OT, though. On the original post, I think you should post the link to the story you put up on your own blog about the girl who was so upset at not knowing who her father was and never having had a father at all. The sperm-donor baby. That goes with the bit in this story about who have had the same sperm donor getting together to show their 17 children (or whatever it is) what all their half-siblings look like with the "trademark blue eyes." Are these women completely insane, or what?
While I'm rambling, I remember being told by a Christian friend when I said being artificially inseminated was wrong and that, esp. if it involved donor sperm, it bore significant similarities to adultery, that this didn't seem to her to be true because you didn't enjoy the act. Makes ya' think.
Posted by Lydia | October 4, 2007 7:23 PM
By the time they wake up, or get made, or whatever, the actual concrete power won't be theirs anymore.
That is another possible outcome. All I am suggesting is that it isn't the only one.
I suppose that's getting OT, though.
I suppose the author of the post ought to smack me back on topic, eh? :-)
I think you should post the link to the story you put up on your own blog about the girl who was so upset at not knowing who her father was and never having had a father at all.
Here is the link, for the time being.
Posted by Zippy | October 4, 2007 7:33 PM
...if it involved donor sperm, it bore significant similarities to adultery, that this didn't seem to her to be true because you didn't enjoy the act. Makes ya' think.
What it makes me think is that she has it backward though. The enjoyment in adultery is about the only good thing which accompanies it. The enjoyment -qua- enjoyment of illicit sex in general seems to me to be the one good thing about it. (It is a minor good compared to the wickedness of the act and could never justify the act, but it is flat wrong in my view to look upon enjoyment-in-itself as an evil, or as what makes an act evil).
Posted by Zippy | October 5, 2007 8:52 AM
“We remain a hunted people. Now you think you have a destiny to fulfill in the land that historically has been ours for forty thousand years. And we’re a new Mestizo nation.”
“Our devil has pale skin and blue eyes…”
“We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him.”
– Professor Jose Angel Gutierrez, founder of La Raza
"Around the year 2040, whites will become a minority in the United States and, believe me, it will be 'payback time'."
- Pro-Immigration Activist, Jorge Sanchez
“And the one idea is, how we are going to exterminate white people because that in my estimation is the only conclusion I have come to. We have to exterminate white people off the face of the planet to solve this problem.”
- African Studies professor, Dr. Kamau Kambon
"Blond hair and blue eyes are a biological defect."
"The white race is a disease, and the only cure is a bullet. The rule of whites is history. Soon they will be our serfs. It's now the Age of the Brown Man."
- Hindu nationalist, Ramesh Sharma
“The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Make no mistake about it we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed–not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed."
- Jewish studies professor, Dr Noel Ignatiev
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Posted by Orthdox Paleo | October 8, 2007 9:53 PM