I'm reading "Want a girl with blue eyes? Inside California’s VIP IVF industry/In the state’s low-regulation fertility clinics the perfect child may soon be available — for a price. Megan Agnew meets the doctors, mums and surrogates" (London Times).
From the anecdote that begins the article: "The couple conceived their first daughter, Aspen, the old-fashioned (and free) way, and she was born four years ago — her hair fiery red like her father’s. Soon afterwards Hartley wanted a second daughter. 'I grew up in a family full of girls,' says the stay-at-home mother. 'It was, like, girl family vibes.'... 'I thought, we have one redhead, let’s have a blonde. But my doctor said you can’t do that — yet. So then we were, like, OK, we’ll just have the girl.'...The couple received one round of IVF treatment at the Southern California Reproductive Center... It worked. Bardot arrived very quickly one night in autumn and is now nearly two — and, by chance, strawberry blonde. 'It was perfect... Bardot has my features, so I have my mini-me and Neil has his. So I got what I wanted in the end.'"
From the anecdote that begins the article: "The couple conceived their first daughter, Aspen, the old-fashioned (and free) way, and she was born four years ago — her hair fiery red like her father’s. Soon afterwards Hartley wanted a second daughter. 'I grew up in a family full of girls,' says the stay-at-home mother. 'It was, like, girl family vibes.'... 'I thought, we have one redhead, let’s have a blonde. But my doctor said you can’t do that — yet. So then we were, like, OK, we’ll just have the girl.'...The couple received one round of IVF treatment at the Southern California Reproductive Center... It worked. Bardot arrived very quickly one night in autumn and is now nearly two — and, by chance, strawberry blonde. 'It was perfect... Bardot has my features, so I have my mini-me and Neil has his. So I got what I wanted in the end.'"
Imagine naming your little girl Bardot, then going around enthusing about how she looks like you. Imagine going public about using IVF to sex-select and to try to get blue eyes.
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68 comments:
It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.
I have been reading Plato's Republic. This is an instance of the catastrophe that is democracy. Freedom without thought or virtue.
Dog breeders got really good at the colors
Cute how California parents are willing to pay tens of thousands for a singer or a tennis player but know with certainty there is no genetic component to intelligence.
Lots of people think evolution stops at the collarbone.
There's something oddly reassuring about someone really smart taking lots of money from rich people who are really dumb.
This is why we need to extend abortion to least a few days after birth—what right does the government, what right do we, have to tell that 8% they just have to live with a defective baby. It’s not what they ordered, why should they be stuck with it?
👍
John Locke apparently had to do some work to see why anyone would care for a helpless child. Seniors can at least dangle the bait of inheritance to get some action. Never mind the disabled.
So Locke is kind of forced to rely on parental tenderness. Yikes. A mixed blessing.
No Lemon Laws re: children as of this writing…
De-gene-rates, they're called.
This is why it's important to note that the United States is NOT a Democracy. It is a Constitutional Republic. The majority does NOT get to decide here.
My kid is red hot
Your kid ain't doodly squat
Brave new world indeed.
My Hall great-grandparents were prosperous merchants in the Boston area, and had 11 children. Five of them actually made it to adulthood, and the family was considered to have done quite well in that regard. GGF lived 1846-1933.
This all started with the Easy Bake oven.
Imagine going public about using IVF to sex-select..
this is INSANE!?! How would they (COULD THEY!) even know if the egg was going to be male or female?
That's up to The Person.. And eggs are NOT persons! (otherwise it'd be murder to terminate them.
Get With The Program!
You can no more pick if your child is a girl, than you can define what a woman is!
TRANSPHOBES!
wait 'til they can select for homosexual (or not)
people are ONLY people, IF (while!) they are wanted.
If a mother no longer wants her 10 year old fetus.. it was JUST A LUMP OF CELLS
Those poor kids.
"Imagine going public about using IVF to sex-select and to try to get blue eyes."
It's a short trip from there to decantment.
"Imagine going public about using IVF to sex-select and to try to get blue eyes."
I can imagine that in twenty years it won't seem strange at all.
I suspect the husband wishes his mini-me were a boy.
Poor girl will go through school as Bar DOT.
How much do they charge for a kid that is guaranteed to NOT be a Democrat?
Anti-redhead bias is open. (I grew up as a redhead, freckles and all.)
I remember hearing that one day people would want designer babies with a warning that if they didn't get what they want, they might easily dispose of whatever didn't meet their requirements. I recall being told this wouldn't lead to the type of stuff going on in Europe about 100 years ago related to certain uber races.
I'm not particular about eye color. Can I order one that's already 35 years old and gainfully employed?
Have any of these people ever read “Brave New World”? Just asking…
Surrogate: rent-a-womb. Progress.
Imagine naming your little girl Bardot, then going around enthusing about how she looks like you.
At least it wasn't escargot.
I want one that smells like a new car.
There's this Monty Python sketch...
Trying to reply to Althouse's comment above but Blogger isn't letting me - I've found that anti-redhead bias is far stronger against boys - or young men, really. My oldest has had red hair his whole life - it isn't the fiery red but is definitely not auburn nor blonde. When he was small child, everyone thought he was adorable. As soon as he was of an age where the term "boy" started to be applied more than "child," he started getting picked on for his hair color. Once at his middle school, apparently there was "kick a redhead, punch a Jew" day. Yes, he did get kicked. Lovely.
He's grown, quite gainfully employed, and very handsome, not just in my judgment. But he hates his hair.
My neighbor's kid has one blue eye. They named him White Fang.
Time to rewatch Gattaca, where the weird kids were the ones born naturally.
Where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
The ginger snapped…
How ‘bout a kid with the coloring of Spuds McKenzie?
I’m certain her email will be bar.hartley. Has a nice ring to it.
The mirror image of Althouse's pieces yesterday about modern society's substitution of pets for children. These folks want the same control over which children they have as they would over which breed and dog they choose.
John Lennon:
Money don't get everything, it's true
What it don't get, I can't use...
I'm more concerned about poor little ASS Pen
I admit my anti-redhead bias. I have only dated a few redheads and they all seemed a little too intense. Maybe it is a perception bias on my part.
My wife and her sister both took after their father (a redhead) as kids. Both are now blonde like Althouse. I would not have been interested in her if she was a redhead when we met.
This is the current form of eugenics. A real form of eugenics has three characteristics.
1. It accepts natural selection as the basis of evolution instead of a mix of hybridization, chromosome rearrangement and gene shuffling.
2. It claims to know the direction of natural selection in human society in its own time.
3. It claims to have a workable social policy for speeding up the direction of natural selection in society.
You can see these three characters in the main forms of eugenics of the 20th century.
For example, The English Eugenics Society claimed that Darwin had shown in The Descent of Man in Sections based on the work of Francis Galton that civilization evolved by natural selection (1); that mental deficiency was slowing down the evolution of the English race (2); that incarcerating the mentally deficient to prevent reproduction would allow the English race to evolve. (3) The Eugenics Society then worked to pass the Feeble-Minded Control Act and to set up a chain of sanatoriums (medically superintended for the most part at the start by members of the Eugenics Society) in which the "feeble-minded" could be incarcerated for life. Single women who were pregnant were deemed morally feeble-minded; deaf people were of often mistaken for feeble-minded. The sanatoriums filled up, became expensive and no social improvement was observable by the Thirties.
Hence, the Nazi model of eugenics.
The Germans basically accepted the same evolutionary premises as the English though they based their theory of evolution on population genetics rather than blended inheritance. (1) Everyone who was disabled was considered a drag on society and non-Nordic foreigners, especially Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs were divergent from the true direction of evolution. (2) The course of English eugenics had shown that it would be expensive to try to isolate those with "bad blood" or bad inheritance in sanatoriums and that it would be ineffective because relatives would remain at large with much the same inheritance. (3) The "final solution" was the extermination of all those with a bad inheritance aka "greedy geezers," starting with the handicapped, then the Jews, then going on to the Poles and Russians.
History Background 1
At.least in California.
Then Planned Parenthood was founded by MS Sanger to speed up the process.
In exchange for mowing my lawn, I throw the bones over the fence to White Fang whenever we have steak.
History Background 2
The article is describing current eugenics and I am trying to show by historical examples this - how to know eugenics when you see it despite its protean evolution and its efforts to hide. Eugenics has three characteristics and individuals without those three characteristics are not eugencists merely because they support a social program or organization such as Planned Parenthood which eugenicists are using to advance their goals
This is relevant because after the Nazis were defeated eugenics had to hide. The English and American eugenics societies adopted the policy known them as "crypto-eugenics." This involved using advancing eugenic goals through organizations and campaigns such as Planned Parenthood and "Choice," which never mentioned eugenics but which, in fact, would advance eugenic goals without state compulsion.
The main theory was the modern synthetic theory whose developers, Sewall, Wright, Julian Huxley and Ronald Fisher were members of the English or American eugenics societies. The modern synthetic theory proposed a theory of huma inferiority in this way: that within the human race and within each human group there was a lagging cohort (1); that this cohort could be identified, usually by IQ testing (2); that this cohort could be persuaded to use birth control more frequently that other favored groups which would result in declining birth rate and ultimately in extinction. In practice in the US eugenicists took aim at the black community; right-wing eugenicists developed IQ tests which the black community as whole did poorly on (2); and left-wing eugenicists founded all the major groups in England and America promoting birth control whether by contraception or abortion. (3) It was said that the blacks had a genetically lower IQ which left them unfitted to prosper in America's heavily technological society. They could however better themselves by having few or no children to support.
But for this policy to eugenically sucessful it had to persuade the disfavored cohorts and, substantially, only those cohorts to reduce family size. In fact it became evident to demographers in the American eugenics society, such as James Vaupel, that European and white American society were declining as fast as African and black American society or perhaps even faster.
These people are despicable and this practice is offensive, but... the London Times pokes at Cali. It has a certain snobbish England-is-superior-to-those-crude-Yanks tone.
This is all about treating kids as commodities, one of the greater evils of the decadent age we are living in. Making kids " the old-fashioned (and free) way," is the only way that should be legal. I sympathise with those who want kids but can't have them, but sometimes that is just the way it is and part of life is learning to accept that.
As an ex-redhead (it's all grey now), I can't say I remember an anti-ginger prejudice. Maybe it's part of being from the upper midwest where there are a lot of us thanks to our German-Scandinavian root stock.
The Present
The post World War II policy of crypto-eugenics was sucessful in that contraception and abortion became legal and acceptable and were not identified with eugenics. But contraception and abortion for the reasons understood by the general public led to whites and Chinese adopting anti-natalism on a practical level faster than other groups. They'd be better off; Women could have careers. This led to a differential birth rate adverse to those of European descent which was not the eugenic goal.
Moreover, IQ testing had become discredited and was widely and correctly seen as an unscientific, racist ploy.
The post World War II consensus on the correct form of eugenics thus collapsed around the year 2000. The major push came from the completion of the Human Genome project which required and enabled substantially new techniques of genetic study which in turn altered all previous "scientific" research in the social studies. For example, it undid all genetic IQ studies by showing that there very few human genes, so few that genes necessarity work their effects by combination and networking. Previously, it had been "proved" by racist research led by eugenic society members and sponsored by the Pioneer Fund that there was an "intelligence gene." It was now known that "intelligence", however defined, must be a combination of genes. And the same was true of human behavior - so far as behavior was materially determined by genes, it was an effect of many genes.
Moreover it became possible to see by looking at chromosomes that evolution proceeded by chromosome rearrangement, not by small changes driven by natural selection.
This theory was proposed by Irene Maonton in the late Forties and it is effectively the basis for research now. But this is not acknowledged and the control of the Federal government and foundations have over grant money explains this silence.
So actually eugenics no longer has a scientific basis because a real scientist cannot say that natural selection causes evolution. In the early years of this century when I became aware of these facts I believed that these facts by themselves would end eugenics. How little I understood power-seeking.
The current form of eugenics has no scientific basis in a theory of evolution. It is based rather on a sort of Hegelian theory that society has evolved along a certain line which some are followng - The left, the progressives, the Labour party, the Democratic party - and others - deplorables led by Donald Trump, pro-life-Catholics, Othodox Jews, evangelical Christians, believing Muslims and animists - are not. (1) Present day eugenic theory is aligned with a loose, non-scientific coalition of "progressives", progressive being what they have for a theory of evolution. (1) The direction of evolution within society is toward a centralized, regulatory state run solely on bureaucratic imperatives and directives and those who do accept this are the inferiors. (2). Eugenic society members have developed techniques which use the new genetics in association with very large social studies data sets to create understandings which will drive policy in desired eugenic directions.
And so we arrive at the article discussed in the post.
Thank goodness we know ALL about the genetic material involved. Yep, every one of the billions of possible changes from a different embryo can be ignored just so long as the frikkin' EYE color of the kid is selected.
And, FWIW, doesn't it SCREAM RAY-CIST (in today's world) to spend a fortune and undergo treatments to avoid the horrible brown eyed babies.
Doctor: Good afternoon Mr and Mrs. Hart. We're here to custom select the features of your future child. Now what is the most desirable characteristic you want?
Mr. Hart: Well both of us are short and it has created problems for both of us throughout life. Items on high shelves, not making the High School basketball team and a host of others.
Doctor: Not a problem. We can select for 6 feet or taller. Would that do?
Mr. Hart: Fabulous, sign us up.
And thus my favorite comedian, Kevin Hart, is never born.
To sum up
The entire point of the article is the assertion that it is established fact that we can now determine eye color, hair color - and other genetic traits. Science working with enormous data sets both genetic and social has formulated probability sets (Polygenic Complex Scores - PGS) with a practical result. You can have a little blue-eyed, blonde-haired child. It's certain. The hidden assertion is: she (or he) will have all the other Nordic behavioral traits.
And here's what's wrong with that. It is possible in breeding to get a single characteristic with fair degree of certainty. But it is not possible with any certainty to get a desired combination of two or three or more traits. Descendants of Secretariat will have something from him but how that will combine with other genes from the mother is simply impossible to predict. This has been known in horse racing and dog breeding for centuries. Human breeding will have that same unsatisfactoriness on the individual level - where all parents live. The child you get will have blonde hair - but what else?
The old time eugenicists used to say that the human breed would be naturally improved when wealthy, sucessful short men married long-legged, brainless beauties and sired tall, handsome, successful sons. But, countered the anti-eugenicists, perhaps the son will have his mother's brains and his father's legs.
Parents never will know what they are getting and only parents from the groups that can live with that will have children.
Europeans and those of European descent who think right thoughts are refusing to have children. Eugenicists would like to get them to think that they can get one child. One an ideal child - guaranteed! So have children!
No, the only thing guaranteed to this kind of parent is misery for them and for their children. Misery -the usual outcome for any eugenic program and for this one, too.
Here's science saying the same thing about the effective possiblity at present or ever of "choosing" a child based on a choice of behavioral traits.
"Even if parents ... did want to choose the ‘best’ embryo, deciding which is the ‘best’ soon becomes an impossible task. Lencz et al. only consider the situation where parents are choosing between embryos more or less likely to exhibit one or two complex traits; but what happens when several traits, each dependent on many genes, are of interest? A decrease in the risk of one health condition, for example, could lead to an increase in the risk of another. Trading off risks between schizophrenia and Crohn’s disease would be difficult, but when other characteristics such as genetic risks for height, IQ, and eye color are thrown into the mix, the decision becomes impossible. This ‘paradox of choice’ is a second reason that parents will not choose polygenic screening if they are properly informed about it (Schwartz, 2004)."
https://elifesciences.org/articles/73193
My eye color actually changed as I got older. When I was a young man, I had brown eyes. Now I have hazel eyes.
My hair color actually changed as I got older. When I was a young man, I had brown hair. Now I have grey hair.
Imagine having a teenage daughter who rightfully can blame you, the mother, for hair, eye color, etc. that was specifically forced upon the child by these actions. No blaming God, you, the mother, did it to her and ruined her life.
People forget, they are raising a child, they are raising a future adult.
Ha!
But seriously, it is not too uncommon in my family for hair to darken when one hits puberty. The most extreme example is a nephew whose hair went from Gwyneth Paltrow to Anne Hathaway.
Eye color is not a big thing for me either. If I had to choose, I guess it would be a warm brown. It seems like women take more note of eye color in people than men do.
Redheads are a little off-putting to me too. It’s not the hair color per se. It’s that redheads usually have that extremely pale complexion that usually comes across as sickly to me.
OTOH, redheads often seem to be blessed with better than average athleticism, which is a plus in both (sorry) sexes.
Lennon? Pfffft.
© Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford, recorded by Barrett Strong (1959).
I was classic blonde hair, blue eyes. I remember my mom once saying (either to me or in front of me) that blonde with blue eyes was boring. It’s more interesting to be blonde with brown eyes. So, I always wanted brown eyes. I wouldn’t have minded my parents genetically programming me more toward mom’s side of the family than dad’s. I’d have thicker hair, longer legs and narrower feet.
My sister and I look exactly like our Dad. Our mother was pissed off that neither of us looked anything like her. She suspected that maybe she wasn't our real mother.
Hoo boy, if this is the case, then it looks as if they've been spectacularly successful in all of the worst, most damaging ways possible to their own objectives. At least, when examining birth rates by worldwide demographics.
So, a blonde, then.
Brunettes can be bimbos, too. Redheads are righteous, and albinos are audacious.
Gilbar, this is known, at least in my circle of acquaintances as Danno's ten-year look-back rule.
Thank you for these posts, wildswan, I found the subject very thoughtful and thought-provoking.
I wonder: Considering the way eugenics has worked out in practise - i.e., mostly one unintended consequence followed by another, through the various iterations of eugenics - how does one now fit the proponents of open borders into this set of theories, first positing that the set of people pushing modern eugenics are an over-lapping set with those pushing open borders, and the degree of overlap is significant -? It seems on the face of it, that population decline is now an emerging theme, worldwide, and the decline is a panic-levels with western societies, who see the economic consequences of population collapse, as handwriting on the wall.
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