Commentary

Who thinks that it’s OK to buy and sell human beings?

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From The Public Discourse.

Excerpt:

Having children is currently our only legal path to achieving both genetic and memetic immortality. But having kids isn’t easy. You have to find a mate. You have to look outside yourself and into the eyes of another person and convince him or her of your decency, your desirability.

[…]There are two categories of infertility: clinical and social. Clinical infertility arises from physical medical problems. Social infertility occurs when someone is unwilling or unable to attract someone of the opposite sex to procreate with.

Studies indicate that up to 15 percent of couples of childbearing age are clinically infertile. Much of this is due to our toxic environment, pollution, and unsafe chemicals, but there is also something to be said about our toxic behavior. At least one quarter of female infertility is a direct result of sexually transmitted infections.

The sperm bank industry initially began as a mission in eugenics, but ballooned due to our unspoken epidemic in low sperm count. Clinically infertile heterosexual couples began quietly using donated sperm. After a while, they began to be open about using donated sperm and insisted that biology doesn’t make a difference for the child’s well-being.

Then lesbian couples began using sperm donors. They argued, if biology doesn’t matter for a child’s well-being, then why should a parent’s gender? They declared that parenting is a set of tasks and obligations, and women can fulfill those tasks just as well as men can. Single-moms-by-choice followed, saying if biology and gender don’t matter, why should the number of caretakers?

So what happens when fathers become disposable? Public Discourse readers are well aware that fatherlessness invites a stark range of social ills. For instance, 90 percent of homeless and runaway youth come from fatherless homes, as do over 80 percent of rapists with anger problems. Now, those who promote fatherlessness via sperm donation are celebrating motherlessness via egg vending and surrogacy.

Think motherhood is sacred? One surrogate pregnancy can generate $100-300,000. Today, the motherless child has become the fertility industry’s most lucrative enterprise.

Because this is an industry, we shouldn’t be surprised that fertility industry professionals are trying to industrialize the process and do things more efficiently. Surrogacy attorney Theresa Erickson was an “industry sweetheart” until she was convicted of baby-selling. Rather than waiting for commissioning parents to sign a contract before conception, Theresa expedited the process. She shopped for egg and sperm donors on her own and found surrogates to impregnate. Then, after the baby reached the second trimester, she would find parents, lie to them and tell them the original couple had backed out, and charge up to $180,000 per child. She created thirteen babies this way.

The only thing illegal about what Erickson did—the only reason she was put in jail for baby-selling—is that the paperwork was done after conception rather than before.

At a workshop where I once was on a panel with Theresa, she justified separating children from their parents by commenting that her mother was adopted, so what’s the difference? Most people I speak to relate third-party reproduction to adoption just as she did.

We’ve accepted adoption as a good. And adoption can often be very good; it is an institution that finds parents for helpless children who desperately need a decent home. But, at some point, our concept of adoption slid. Many people now think of it primarily as a way of “getting” kids. We know that adoption is made possible by the fact that the relationship between biological parent and child has been severed. So if adoption is good, some reason, then the severing of that relationship must at least be neutral.

But it is not neutral. It’s actually very sad.

Adoption is only morally sound as an institution that provides a loving home for existing children who—for some uncontrollable reason—cannot be raised by their biological parents. Third-party reproduction is inherently unethical, because it serves as a market to manufacture children for any adult who wants them, purposely severing the biological parent-child relationship for the sake of profit.

I hate to write about these things without offering some solutions, but it’s hard to come up with solutions when there are so many powerful, wealthy people wanting to buy and sell other human beings. How am I supposed to stop that? But I actually do have a course of action, even if it’s just a shot in the dark.

My thinking is that we need to be focused on courting properly and having strong marriages, and being more open about showing off the love in our marriages and homes. I think that Christians need to take courting and marrying more seriously as a witness to the watching world. We need to be more serious about how our partnerships can influence the outside world by setting a standard for love of spouse and love of children. If people knew that there was a real difference if you do marriage right – the right pre-marital behaviors, the right courting, the right commitment – then maybe they would learn to be more careful and less selfish with children. It might help people to think more carefully about their own plans and focus on making decisions that will allow them to welcome children into the world and give them what they need.

News

Huffington Post leftist credits black Republican woman’s election win to “white privilege”

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Republican Congresswoman Mia Love
Republican Congresswoman Mia Love

The Daily Caller reports.

Excerpt:

Mia Love, the former mayor of Saratoga Spring, Utah, won her race for Utah’s 4th congressional district Tuesday and will now be the first black Republican woman (and first Haitian-American) to sit in the United States Congress.

The heads of leftists have been exploding ever since Love’s victory as they attempt to come to grips with how a black woman could champion bedrock conservative principles such as fiscal discipline, limited government and personal responsibility.

The most fascinating treatise about Love — thus far —comes via The Huffington Post where Darron Smith, a desperately confused blogger with a Ph.D. in education, accuses Love of benefitting from a form of “white privilege.”

Education departments are an excellent place to go if you want to learn nothing at all of practical value, but borrow a lot of money to do it. It’s maybe not as useless as English, but it’s pretty useless.

More:

[…][Smith] can’t understand, though, how Love doesn’t agree with his own political ideology. Because she disagrees with him, he declares that the principles she espouses go against her interests — because of the color of her skin and the sexual organs she possesses.

“Love’s political convictions show a strong support for values that do not necessarily represent her interests as a member in any of these oppressed groups,” Smith writes. “For example, blacks are not doing well with respect to education, economics and health outcomes, while women still trail behind in salary and significant positions of power, and conservative politics are not typically known to aid these groups in such key issues. These actualities of Mia’s existence seem to be diametrically opposed to her values that are grounded in a white, male, Christian context.”

Smith then lays down his blogger coup de grâce:

“She appears publicly unhampered by the daily grind of white racism that affects other racial minorities within the United States,” he proclaims. “Unlike most of them, Mia gets to walk through the hallowed doorways of white institutions controlled by elite, powerful men. She is allowed to pass through in her black, female body with the understanding that she must not see, speak or openly advocate for anything related to race or gender — an unholy compromise. Hence, she might look black, but her politics are red. This is one way white privilege is reproduced at the legislative level of government.”

“Mia and others like her are seemingly out of touch with the political realities of African Americans and what remains at stake for them,” the blogger concludes, hastening to add that “[i]t would be a mistake to assume that all black people are monolithic and share the same political inclinations.”

I think I know why Democrats are losing elections. They are so focused on learning how to recognize racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. in university that they forget how to advocate for policies that actual work for normal people. People who work for a living instead of doing PhDs in Education, for example. So then, when a Republican talks about economic growth, stronger families, school choice, national security, lower health care costs, developing energy resources, reducing the national debt, etc., and wins an election, it really confuses the left. They think that people should  win elections by focusing on “important things” like race divisions, class divisions, sex divisions, and most important – FREE BIRTH CONTROL! That’s what they think are the important things – that’s what they learned in university. They are so focused on ideology that they can’t understand that elections are about right-sizing government so that working people’s lives improve. Mia Love won her election on the merits. But the secular left can’t make any sense of it.

News

Video: Obamacare architect admits deceiving the public was needed to get it passed

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CNS News reports.

Excerpt:

A key architect of Obamacare has been caught openly boasting about taking advantage of, what he calls, “the stupidity of the American voter.”

MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber spoke at a panel on October 17 on the political hurdles Obamacare faced in 2009-10. The video was unearthed and posted on Youtube by American Commitment.

Gruber was instrumental in crafting the legislation that was signed into law in March 2010.

In the midst of his explanation, Gruber bragged about the multiple deceptions the Obama White House perpetrated on the American people:

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. So it was written to do that. In terms of risk related subsidies, if you had a law which made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to get the thing to pass.”

This is a jaw dropping disclosure of the political lengths those in the Obama Administration were willing to go to avoid the hard truths about their signature legislative achievement.

This story is in the news, but this isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about Gruber.

Last November, I wrote about an interview with Jonathan Gruber.

Gruber said this:

“We currently have a highly discriminatory system where if you’re sick, if you’ve been sick, if you are going to get sick, you cannot get health insurance,” Gruber told host Chuck Todd. “The only way to end that discriminatory system is to bring everyone into the system and pay one fair price. That means that the genetic winners, the lottery winners, who’ve been paying their artificially low price because of this discrimination, now will have to pay more in return. And that, by my estimate is about 4 million people. In return, we’ll have a fixed system where over 30 million people will now, for the first time, be able to access fairly priced and guaranteed health insurance.”

So if I’m a man who chooses not to use drugs, I am a genetic winner, and I need to pay more to cover the substance abuse treatment coverage for those genetic losers who do choose to use drugs. If I’m a man, who doesn’t want to be a woman, I have to pay more in insurance to cover the sex-change surgery of men who do want to be women. If I’m a man who marries and has kids, I have to pay for the IVF of the career feminists who never marry and wait until they are 40 and want suddenly want IVF. And so on.

So according to Gruber, this law was about redistributing wealth from the beginning.

Imagine Obamacare applied to auto insurance. It would be like paying more for your auto insurance on a low-risk SUV to cover people who drive expensive motorcycles, which are more risky. You aren’t subject to high risk, but your must pay for those who are. That was the whole point of the law. And eventually, more mandatory coverages will be added for politically correct treatments like IVF, breast enlargements and sex changes, as is done in other socialized health care systems in the UK (breast enlargements, IVF) and some provinces in Canada (sex changes).

Think about that when the insurance premiums for Obamacare exchange plans finally get published and the premium are much higher. They. Knew.

UPDATE: The Daily Caller reports that University of Pennsylvania has now pulled the video but the one I linked to above is still live.