In the film Expelled, Ben Stein shows the link between Darwinism and the Eugenics movement of the 1910’s-1930’s. Even though Darwinism doesn’t necessarily lead to Eugenics, many proponents of Eugenics justified and promoted their ideas using the concepts of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest,” as well as the notion that there were more highly evolved and less highly evolved breeds of human beings. People think of racists as backward hicks in whtie hoods, but in the early days of the last century, many racists were sophisticated intellectuals who thought that the “inferior races” of people should be reduced or even eliminated.
Do you think there are two many black people in America? Some folks called Planned Parenthood offices and made assertions like that one. They offered a donation to the group, if they could designate it for the abortion of an African-American baby. What’s shocking is that in more than one instance the office worker was willing to accept such a donation and did not rebuke the caller for espousing racist views.
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, thought that people in slums were “unfit.” She wanted to provide them with birth control devices in order to reduce their numbers. Apparently some of the workers in Planned Parenthood are willing to promote the same notion. Rather than helping young black women keep and raise their babies or helping them adopt them out to loving parents, they promote abortion.
Some African Americans are becoming aware that abortions are occurring at a much higher rate in their community than among white people. They are even charging Planned Parenthood, hyperbolically, with genocide. They want federal funding of the organization cut. As a young lady named Lilly Epps [quoted by FOX News] said, “I am a mad black woman. Words cannot say how angry I am, how ignorant I was. But I thank God I came to the truth.”
10 responses so far ↓
jeffsdeepthoughts // April 27, 2008 at 7:29 am |
I think it’s a really bad move for we Christians to be making anything out of the fact that Social Darwinism is a perverted decendent of Darwinism. Regardless of whether we think the neo-darwinian account is correct, it’s a really foolish idea for us to set the precedent that we can hold a parent idealogy responsible for the offspring which result.
The reason that this is a bad idea is that allowing for this precedent takes away our justification for discriminating between the Christianity that we practice and the Christianity that lead to the crusades, that lead to the inquistion, that even lead to David Koresh situation in Waco Texas.
I also think we can do way better than abortion. I agree there are ethnic and economic aspects of this problem. But I’d like to take issue with the statement: “Rather than helping young black women keep and raise their babies or helping them adopt them out to loving parents, they promote abortion.”
The whole point is that the pro-abortion people don’t see anything wrong with what they are doing. They don’t see a fetus as deserving as rights. Within their world view, they could quite reasonably see themselves as heros as they are “liberating” the inner city women from a “burden”. (I don’t operate within this world view, but I recognize that they do.)
I’m not shocked or surprised by the fact that workers for planned parent hood are promoting abortion.
I am however, shocked by the number of people who are anti-abortion who don’t want to work on what to do with these children once they are born.
There are amazing organizations and people who are working on solutions to the whole picture. But for every pro-life person who is interested in the big picture: (health care for the mother, cleaning up the adoption system, long-term support, care, and education for the mother and child) it seems that there are dozens who think it’s enough to throw a bumper sticker on their car and throw money at organizations that haven’t actually dealt with the question “Now that we’ve stopped the abortion, what happens next?”
janie // April 27, 2008 at 8:20 am |
Ok, I agree with jeffsdeepthoughts that if we are going to be consistently and thoughtfully pro-life, we have to be concerned with the whole life of the child we are concerned not die in the womb. Pro-life people I know in my church do responsibly carry this concern and do something about it.
But I do want to call a spade a spade. I grew up with a mother who was crusading for Planned Parenthood from the fifties on. She almost singlehandedly got a grant and got it set up in the state I grew up in. She expressed great concern about all the “undesirables” reproducing and “ruining our standard of life”. Not in public, of course. I watched from the sidelines, honestly wondering if that’s what she and her PP cronies talked about when they were alone together. So I’m really glad that women like Lilly Epps are waking up and getting mad.
modestypress // May 1, 2008 at 6:49 pm |
As a secular person who considers evolution (which I don’t think should be called “Darwinism”) a more likely explanation than Intelligent Design, etc. of the development of life, I appreciate Jeff’s sensible comments.
RG’s Response: I don’t usually use the term Darwinism, unless I am talking about it in a historical context, in which case it is completely appropriate to refer to Darwin’s theories as Darwinism. I know why people object to the term, but I think it honors the man who supposedly gave the first best explantion for evolution.
Abortion is a difficult issue. When my wife became unexpectedly pregnant in our first year of marriage (and it’s likely we would never have chosen to have children) we decided to keep and raise the child. When my brother’s wife (a midwife and later the head nurse of an obstetrical department of a large hospital) became pregnant after raising two daughters to near adult age, they decided to keep and raise their “oopsie” as they called it. Like my wife and I, they are secular people.
I don’t consider myself “pro-abortion.” However, I would strongly object to trying to criminalize abortion for either doctors who perform the procedure or for women who undergo one. My suggestion (unsatisfactory as it may be to many people who strongly oppose abortion) is to make it as easy as possible to choose NOT to have an abortion rather than trying to make it illegal or impossible to have one.
RG’s Response: I’ve seen your views expressed before. I have kind of an odd view, I suppose. I would make abortion against the law, if I could. But I would not punish the desparate woman; that seems cruel. I would simply shut down any establishments that provided abortions and hit the doctors with a high enough fine that their dirty little business would not be worth it.
It’s already as easy as possible to choose NOT to have an abortion. With crisis pregnancy centers set up all over the place with help for women who want to keep their baby or adopt it out (to one of the myraid couples willing to do so), there is never any reason for a woman to have an abortion–except that it is easier for her. (It’s not too easy for the baby, however. Check out what actually happens during “pregancy termination”. It would turn your stomach. At least, it should.
K. M. // May 5, 2008 at 1:09 pm |
I don’t really know what happens during pregnancy termination. But I suspect it is not too different from what happens in a poultry farm. In both cases lifes are terminated. I assume you don’t object to poultry farms. Why do you abject to abortion?
RG’s Response: May I suggest that you find out what happens when a human fetus is aborted. I’ve been to a poultry farm. I don’t actually like everything that goes on there, but I do think humans are a bit different from poultry. I object to abortion because it is the taking of a human life. I was once a fetus, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be burned with saline solution or pulled apart by a vacuum hose.
K. M. // May 5, 2008 at 2:00 pm |
Humans are certainly different from poultry. Human’s can think and that is the source of rights. You say you wouldn’t have wanted to be burned with saline solution or pulled apart by a vacuum hose. But you couldn’t have wanted anything at all when you were a fetus. Fetuses are not conscious for a long time. Not in the sense of thinking or having desires (i.e, not in the human sense of consciousness).
RG’s Response: I agree with the Declaration of Independence that our rights are give to us by our Creator. I think you are making an assumption about the consciousness of fetuses. While I suspect that they do not have consciousness to the extent that you and I do, it has been proven that at different stages their nervous systems become responsive to stimuli and that they probably feel pain. What else they are conscious of, I don’t think anyone knows. For all we know, they have a more heightened conscious than we do after we are born.
K. M. // May 6, 2008 at 10:32 am |
I am not making any assumption. Obviously fetuses cannot be conscious in the sense of a human consciousness. Consciousness presupposes something to be conscious of. Thoughts are thoughts about something. Clearly there is very little for a fetus to be conscious of and almost nothing to think about.
But that is besides the point if you hold that rights are given to us by a creator. That is an arbitrary assertion that defies argument.
I hold that rights derive from the fundamental requirements of man’s survival. They derive from the fact that man must act to survive, that he must think to act, that he can only think for himself and that his mind is his sole judge of truth.
If you grant that, then a fetus which can neither act nor think certainly has no rights.
renaissanceguy // May 6, 2008 at 7:50 pm |
“Clearly there is very little for a fetus to be conscious of and almost nothing to think about.”
The key words are little and . Once you start talking about how much or how little consciousness a being has, a case could be made for exterminating the mentally disabled and the mentally ill. I don’t want to go there.
“That is an arbitrary assertion that defies argument.”
It is not arbitrary. That would imply that between the two options–there is a Creator or there is not a Creator–people toss a coin to decide which one they believe. The people who hold each position do so because they believe the evidence supports their view.
“. . .the fact that man must survive. . .”
Why must man survive? Even if mankind must survive, and that sounds more arbitrary than the proposition that God exists, why must any given person survive? The race of man will survive as long as there is one fertile man and one fertile woman left. Using your line of reasoning, my wife and I could annihilate everyone but ourselves and our children.
“. . .a fetus which can neither act nor think. . .”
Of course, you couldn’t have written those words had your mother aborted you.
K. M. // May 8, 2008 at 4:02 pm |
“. . .the fact that man must survive. . .” I did not say that. I said “…the fact that man must act to survive…”
I was emphasizing that freedom of action is needed if man is to survive. Since this applies to all men, all men have the right to be free of physical force from other men. That is the only fundamental right. Everything follows. Of course, the choice to live or die is a fundamental choice. Ethics (and thus politics) applies only if the choice to live is made.
I don’t want to argue here about the existence of God. But no matter what you believe, the assertion that rights come from God is arbitrary. No one can have any evidence for that. Supposed revelation to some prophet is not evidence.
renaissanceguy // May 8, 2008 at 5:00 pm |
I’m sorry. I read sloppily.
jeffsdeepthoughts // May 10, 2008 at 2:54 pm |
I’m going to stand aside from the debate on abortion… I think that a debate about abortion often times is really not about abortion at all but rests on more fundamental understandings. I think these debates are incredibly important to have but I just don’t have anything to add to this aspect of it.
As for whether to call it Darwinism, etc.:
It’s actually an oversimplification to state that either that Darwin had the first theory of evolution or that the term “Darwinism” is identical to “evolution”.
The most accurate name of the current mainstream account of how life developed is Neodarwinian evolution. The “Neo” part springs from the joining of traditional Darwinian understandings with the work done by Gregor Mendel, a monk who was the first guy to start to understand how genes and inheritance work. (Darwin’s account is missing the actual mechanism for heriditary. Mendel figured out how it worked; Watson and Cricke actually identified where it was in the cell and what it looked like.)
Obviously, the word “evolution” means slow change. Darwin did not develop the first theory that organisms undergo slow change. He was probably quite familiar with the work of a guy named Lamerk (spelling?) who stated using a trait makes it bigger and more likely to be passed on: ancestors of the giraffe, for example, might have had shorter necks. Stretching their necks made them longer. Lemark believed that a parent who stretched out his own neck would pass this long neck on.
Darwin’s contributition include the observation that the girafee ancestors will have a variety of neck lengths quite randomly, but the ones with the longest necks will be slightly better at surviving and having offspring.
Darwinism, then, is a specific evolutionary theory. The suffix “ism” takes a lot of flack, because there are several unpopular idealogies that end in “ism” (nazism, fascism, etc.) opponents of the theory sieze on this and sometimes try to imply that believers unthinkingly accept Darwinian tennants.
I personally find this to be a silly attack and find it most accurate and specific to refer to the account as Darwinism, or even more properly, Neodarwinism.