Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Attention Democrats: People Have Value. Even Poor Black People.
Over at National Review, Dominic Pino examines Janet Yellen’s rationalization of abortion from an economic perspective. Remarkably, Ms. Yellen said the following to Sen. Tim Scott:
…one aspect of a satisfying life is being able to feel that you have the financial resources to raise a child, that the children you bring into the world are wanted and that you have the ability to take care of them. In many cases abortions are of teenage women, particularly low-income and often black, who aren’t in a position to be able to care for children…
As you might imagine, Sen. Scott was unpersuaded by this argument: “I’ll just simply say that as a guy raised by a black woman in abject poverty, I’m thankful to be here as a United States Senator,” Scott told Yellen.
Mr. Pino goes on to eloquently explain the roots of this perspective of modern leftists:
More fundamentally, Yellen’s view of human beings is incorrect: She views them as macroeconomic liabilities rather than macroeconomic assets. In her view, they take up space, consume resources, and impose burdens on those who care for them. And of course, they do those things. But they don’t just do those things. They also come up with new ideas, produce resources, and care for other people. On balance, they are assets, not liabilities.
This is a point that progressives have failed to understand for years. From the eugenics proponents of the early 20th century to the environmentalists of today, progressives have never believed that human beings are, as economist Julian Simon called them, the ultimate resource. They’re forever stuck in the zero-sum world of Malthus, where people are problematic mouths to feed, instead of the positive-sum world we actually live in, where people are a creative force to invest in.
I often hear leftists rationalize their support of abortion by saying, “Look, I’m just being practical here. We’ve got to deal with realities, right?”
Mr. Pino explains why leftists’ economic arguments are even more absurd than their ethical rationalizations. No, killing babies does not make sense. Even if the mother is going through financial difficulties at the time of her pregnancy. Even if the mother is black. Even then, Ms. Yellen.
People have value. They have value from an ethical and spiritual perspective. We’re all God’s children, for Heaven’s sake.
But even if you don’t believe that, surely you can see that they also have economic value. Perhaps you might think they are limited economic value today. But what about some years from now? Could it be that they might improve themselves someday? People can do that, you know. Even if they are black and poor, Ms. Yellen. Even those people.
I’m struggling to get past the elitism and racism oozing from Ms. Yellen’s statement about poor black mothers like Sen. Scott’s Mom (pictured above). But even if I could get past that, I would point out to Ms. Yellen, “People have value, you idiot. Even poor black people, you racist snob. Who on earth are YOU to suggest that some people should be killed because they are currently of insufficient economic value? You’re a government bureaucrat, for Pete’s sake. What is your economic value to society? Should we vote you out of office, or take you out back and shoot you? Are you listening to what you’re saying? Do you want ME deciding if your life is worth living? Do you want anybody deciding that, other than yourself? Do your words make sense to you? Honestly?“
Every rationalization for abortion sounds absurd to me.
But some of them sound like pure evil.
I can’t believe Democrats are saying stuff like this out loud. To a black man, no less. In public. On national TV. Oh my God.
They can’t recognize evil, even when they say it themselves.
But at least they are helping others recognize evil. Make evil this obvious, and anyone can see it. Anyone who has eyes to see.
Just writing about Ms. Yellen’s statement makes me feel unclean. I feel like I need a long hot bath. And all I did was copy and paste it. She said it out loud. In public.
How do these people sleep at night?
Published in General
I disagree. Current trends include human engineering to perfect mankind, and even to literally (in elites’ minds) “change the species” into transhuman cyborgs. What this means to individual consciences, so-called agency, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and consideration of the purposes and commands of the Living God, I don’t see but the super-rich eugenicist/ genetic-engineering interests are exploring this right now.
Clearly, many people are not happy with themselves, or others, or the state of humanity, or with what they see as any future for humanity that remains unguided by their own visions of personal grandeur and the provocative possibilities as presented by neural links and even some sort of AI governance.
Indeed, they eschew the basic ideas of intrinsic human value, any higher morality or worth, or the existence of a Supreme God, and attempt to replace it all with a pseudo-logic of their own self-aggrandizing reason.
The notion that the future is what we design it to be is not Darwinian. It is a delusion that with some level of technology we are no longer subject to conditions and events that determine winners and losers. The fundamental humility that goes with setting the goal to do the best we can with the certainty that it will be an imperfect mix of trade-offs is removed by elitist fantasies of genetic and environmental power.
Except much of the prenatal testing is wrong- and it’s entirely predictable-up to 90%
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/01/upshot/pregnancy-birth-genetic-testing.html
hence, many of those “down babies” being aborted may actually be “normal”
I’ve lost count of the people I know and know of who were told their baby was Down Syndrome; they continued with the pregnancy and the baby was fine.
Wow. I thought I’d been hitting the bourbon a bit too hard recently. I guess I’m not all that bad off…
Yeah – just a bit of a stretch. Just perhaps.
Ok, Nanocelt. Maybe you were having a bad day. We all do, sometimes.
But I’m expecting an apology.
You don’t accuse me of being “part and parcel of a Eugenics industry“. That’s absolutely absurd.
And extremely offensive. I devote my life to healing the sick and you accuse me of pure evil? That is, to be very polite about it, extremely offensive.
Surely you can see that.
Sometimes I say things that, afterwards, didn’t sound quite as I meant them.
But my God. You’re so far out of line, here. So, so far out of line.
What on earth?
C S Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man” covered this years ago….
Precisely. It is the Golum story. The Tower of Babel, the Frankenstein story. Arrogance and madness. Fauci and Collins. Fetal tissue harvesting and chimeric experiments and on and on.
We physicians are all part of a system that is heavily based on eugenics notions. When I say “field of medicine” I mean as opposed to the fields of economics, or physics, etc.
I spent a short time in the genetics clinic at Hopkins in the 1970s when Victor McKusick was the physician in chief at Hopkins, He was a cardiologist who began seeing patients with hereditary syndromes with cardiac complications, like Marfan’s. His intense interest expanded that into the now online “Mendelian Inheritance in Man”. I also happened to sit through a lecture by Alan Guttmacher, in 2012, the then director of the Kennedy-Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human development. He was, and is (now retired) a Eugenicist, named for his Uncle, Alan Guttmacher, a Physician at Hopkins in the mid 20th Century, one time official of the American Eugenics Society, then an official in Planned Parenthood, and the founder of the Guttmacher Institute for the promotion of abortion. Alan Guttmacher, the nephew, began his lecture (to about 8000 high level scientists and physicians from around the world) with a slide referencing Francis Galton, the Father of Eugenics. Alan the nephew had instituted a motto at the Institute he directed: Every child healthy and wanted. A chilling eugenics motto. Further, he was the second in command of the human genome project under Francis Collins. I have seen my physician colleagues dissemble and deny and ignore their eugenicist foundations, repeatedly. Word limit does not permit adequate discussion of the unsavory events that I have experienced. I would encourage you, Dr. Bastiat, to learn more about Eugenics and its pervasive influence in our profession.
Minor point in response. Yuval Harari, who is perhaps the most quoted proponent of trans-humanism says that we humans are all just chemical reactions, without anything higher than the chemistry, and can be genetically and technologically tamed and trained into a higher non-human or minimally-human (or homo deus) species. I think that this counts as the highest evolutionary workings of those bugs which emerged from the primordial ooze.
I think the problem here is that you’re engaging in a generalization fallacy, sometimes called a “hasty generalization”. Proponents of the idea of systemic racism do a similar thing. The argument goes something like this:
1. Some people in the medical profession, even very influential people, hold eugenicist ideas and tendencies.
2. Therefore, the field of medicine is “heavily based” on eugenics.
Proponents of the concept of “systemic racism” argue in a similar way:
Hopefully my point is clear. Notwithstanding your own unhappy experience, sweeping characterizations of the “field of medicine” as based on eugenics are overwrought and almost certainly unjust.
I am alive today only because of great physicians, like @drbastiat , whose life pursuit had nothing to do with optimizing reproductive practices toward “desirable” ends. Their work was healing, not eugenics. No doubt there are more than a few people in the field of medicine who maintain execrable ideas about both means and ends of their work. But that doesn’t alter my fundamental point at all.
I’m sorry your own personal experience has brought you into close contact with the kind of thinkers you describe. But your own experience and influences are not the measure of medicine as an endeavor.
I think you owe Dr. Bastiat an apology.
Yes. Almost all of the great engineering projects of the pre-industrial age used slave labor. That doesn’t mean that being an engineer today is somehow slavery-related.
I liked your comment, but then I thought about the children in pits mining rare earth minerals for electronic components and I had to think again. . .
But, on second (third?) thought, I don’t blame that on the engineers. I blame it on the environmentalists who won’t allow affluent societies like ours to mine the needed materials. “People of affluence don’t live in effluence” — Steven Hayward. They don’t use children as slave labor either.
According to Boss Mongo’s wife. There are tests that say a baby might have Down Syndrome.
So obviously that makes Dr. Bastiat part and parcel of the eugenics industry. I wear socks. Charles Manson wore socks. Does that make me a serial killer?
Dr. Bastiat refuses to conduct non-medical abortions for reasons of conscience. What the heck else is he supposed to do to distance himself from eugenics?
I do not read @NanoceltTheContrarian as saying or implying that Dr. Bastiat is part of the eugenics industry in the sense that he is morally tainted or personally responsible in any way. His suggestion that Dr. Bastiat seems not to be aware of the “pervasive influence” of eugenics in the medical profession is on the face of it an encouragement to more education on the subject, and if true, something more of us ought to be aware of.
I sure read it that way. Nanocelt needs to climb off his high horse and apologize.
I think you misunderstand my point. I’m not blaming you for the state of affairs in Medicine. Nor challenging your assessment of Yellen’s statements. Nor accusing you of pure evil. To the contrary. I fully agree with your perspective. I’m just raising the point that our field (medicine) is heavily influenced by Eugenics and that many if not most of the leading thinkers in medicine are Eugenicists. That includes Francis Collins, the recently retired NIH director. By your reaction I would conclude that you know little about the history of Eugenics, or its persistence, indeed resurgence, presently.
For example, consider the discovery of DNA. That is thought to be a disinterested triumph of pure science. Robbert Dijkgraaf, when he was director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, wrote a short book updating Flexner’s essay on The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge. In that book he stated that the greatest discovery representing pure knowledge for knowledge’s sake alone, was the discovery of DNA.
That’s a bald-faced lie. The reality is that the discovery of DNA was due to a forced march on the genetic basis of life in order to exploit that knowledge for Eugenics purposes, funded primarily by the Rockefeller Foundation, and primarily at Cal Tech, the hottest hotbed of Eugenics in the US at the time–under the auspices of the board of Cal Tech more forced sterilizations were performed than at any other institution in America, the records of which remain under lock and key. Linus Pauling, avid Eugenicist, was heavily involved in that effort. He sent James Watson, his acolyte, to work with Crick on nucleic acids.
Yes it did. That book seems to be more prescient with each passing year.
@NanoceltTheContrarian, I hope you will write a post about this when you have time. The “every child healthy and wanted” motto is indeed chilling, especially since it sounds so benign.
And it doesn’t exclude the possibility of children being healthy, but still not wanted.
I think it would be better if I were aborted or non-painful infanticide was done against me. If life is mostly pain and you can’t convince people that Thomas Sowell is right why endure the burdens of life?
Good question, why have you?
Life appears to be entirely painful for some who yet struggle mightily to live. Those who endure do so for many reasons, including a love of life itself, and a desire to help relieve the burdens suffered by others. That some in the medical profession are, according to Nanocelt, arrogantly substituting their own wills purportedly in the service of healing is to live and promote a lie, as he has pointed out.
Two things:
I interpreted his comment as a joke …
Eugenics and modern medicine are actually at loggerheads.
The central complaint of eugenics is that modern medicine is keeping people alive (and reproducing) who carry genes that should have been eliminated from the gene pool by evolution (i.e., natural selection).
The more or less imminent solution to the conflict is that medicine is learning to fix defective genes, instead of keeping people alive in spite of them.
Of course they are at loggerheads but who will win, i.e., who has the money?
Modern medicine, hands down.
And that’s even without considering that genetic engineering makes eugenics obsolete.
Sort of goes to the preeminence of human worth that (by nearly universal acclamation) the sick are to be healed by either human (medical) or godly (supernatural) agency; though, sure, it could be said that for the sake of human improvement these people should be left to suffer and die in order to “clean out” the gene pool.
So you think that Fauci, et al will just surrender?