Content warning: Discussion of abortion,
murder,
infanticide, filicide, suicide, incest,
ableism, death... all I can say is please do
not watch this if you're not ready for
some dark stuff. Just go watch this video
about kittens instead. Hello class! Today
we're starting a little series titled:
Neoliberal Eugenics. It's sure to be a
fun light-hearted discussion.
[Jeremy] Eugenics is wrong
[Leslie] Oh wow this is great!
Jeremy Strawman and I are on the same
side! Not exactly a controversial issue
but I'll take it. Oh! And congratulations
on the incoming straw baby by the way,
you and your wife must be so excited.
[Jeremy] Yeah can't wait to play ball with the boy
[Leslie] I'm glad you're excited but what if
you find out in utero that the kid can't
play ball-- at least not in the same way
you can.
[Jeremy] What do you mean?
[Leslie] I mean: would
you abort a disabled baby? That's the
point I'm driving at here.
[Jeremy] Well, uh,  I-I think,
i-it's a woman's right to choose? Uh
Bodily autonomy. Feminism. *awkwardly clears throat*
Neoliberal Eugenics:
Selective Abortion.
I mean not all women can have babies and not all people who have babies are women.
(Trans rights. Hysterectomy rights.) And, of course, all people have a right to bodily
autonomy, but why would you no longer
want to keep a baby with a disability?
[Jeremy] Uh, it, uh, I mean
[Leslie] Is this is uncomfortable for you?
[Jeremy] I'm not a eugenicist because I think women should have the right to abortions.
[Leslie] No, no, I
agree. Anyone with a womb should be
allowed to abort for any reason. But why
abort a baby with disabilities?
What would an able-bodied baby give you
that a disabled one can't?
[Jeremy] okay would you prefer if your baby were disabled?
[Leslie] Well I can't afford any kind of baby right now.
I also never want to have a baby for my
own personal moral reasons.
But that's beside the point. If, in the
future, I made the decision to have a
baby that probably means I'm somehow in
the financial position to do so. If I had
the resources I wouldn't abort a baby
with disabilities, assuming I want a baby
at all, but I'd need the resources.
I hate to say "but what about the parents" but
what about the parents and all the lies
they're told about raising so called
~special needs~ children? Gifted children also have ~special needs~ and require extra
resources, but you don't see anyone
saying we ought to abort them. Tom
Shakespeare (no relation?) asserts that "the medical profession and the context in
which reproductive decisions are made
undermines the capacity for free choice."
Obstetricians, he goes on, basically
outright advise termination for fetuses
which tests positive for disorders,
specifically Down syndrome. Geneticists
and genetic counselors, thankfully, do
considerably less directive counseling.
Studies have shown that families with
disabled children are under comparable
amounts of strain to any other family. For instance, there is no difference in
divorce rate. And don't believe scarcity
myths about how society has too few
resources to care for disabled people.
Here's a video about why overpopulation
isn't really an issue and we have more
than enough resources to go around. I
don't really have time to go over
manufactured scarcity here.
However, this article examining family
well-being across socio-economic class
on a number of different factors
concludes that "Poor families of children
with a disability will be affected by
poverty more severely than either poor
families of non-disabled children or
affluent families of children with a
disability." Additionally, the longer a
child spends in poverty the more likely
they are to develop a mental or physical
health condition due to stress or
malnutrition. Poverty is already terrible,
a disability makes it worse for children
and parents alike. If you're not
financially secure, then having a child
with a costly disability (or really any
child at all) can seriously hurt
family's well-being. Not for any reason
intrinsic to your child, let me be clear
on that, that child is valuable and has
every right to be alive and happy.
Now if a person threatens to
bankrupt you, alienate your friends and
family, and makes you spend the rest of
your life laboring without pay or
assistance-- unless you kill your child
for him-- that's the bad guy. That's the
asshole here, not the necessary labor
that goes unpaid, certainly not the child
you would have to eliminate to regain
autonomy and function in a society
without social safety nets.
It's the asshole who decides your
child's life isn't valuable, the asshole
who convinces your friends and family
you made the "illogical" decision if you
chose not to kill your child. The asshole
who takes all your money just so your
child can live. I'm not saying people
with disabled children are "brave
warriors" or anything like that, and I'm
sure as hell not excusing filicide. You
should be willing to make sacrifices for
your child regardless of their ability.
But too often disability activists kind
of skim over the fact that there are
some extra sacrifices that have to be
made, especially for those who aren't
financially secure, and instead they only
focus on shaming bad and abusive parents. Which, yeah, we should absolutely continue
doing that. But they do this without
contextualizing this behavior or
discussing the gross financial incentive
to abort disabled babies.
Disabled people: We need to shame parents AND society. We can do both.
And way, way, waaaay too often
the MUCH bigger problem is that parents
of disabled children focus on changing
their child rather than changing society.
We don't talk about the cost of life
because there's this big taboo against
it, but you know who makes the taboos?
The people who profit from them. You can say that we're expensive. It's not a secret
kept from disabled people that our mere
existence is often costly. But also
remember your child could become
disabled or turn out to be disabled or
neurodivergent at any moment. Autism isn't even apparent
until your kid is a toddler or older.
But, again, I'm not having any babies so my words are cheap.
[Jeremy] Exactly. We planned for a baby
that wouldn't be so... time-consuming. You
know they're talking about figuring out
tests for autism in the womb, those
Autism Speaks people.
It's good you decided not to pass on
your conditions to any potential offspring.
[Leslie] *surprised chuckle* My conditions aren't genetic? Or at least there's really weak evidence
for a genetic link, in my case. In fact,
the link between genetics and most
disabilities is far weaker than people
tend to assume. And let's not get started
on Autism Speaks, more like Autistics..be...
Silent. Here's a video about it by a
person with autism. The link between
genetics and autism is similarly weak,
there isn't a set of autism genes that
mean your baby is for sure going to be
autistic. And remember that this is a
variable and diverse condition anyway;
it's a spectrum. So who knows what "being autistic" would even mean in your baby's
case if researchers were somehow able to
test for this in utero. There are, of
course, several health conditions with
a strong, established genetic component
but these really aren't the majority of
disability cases. You don't inherit
complications due to infections or
disease, random genetic mutation, birth
complications, amputated limbs, many
psychological disorders, many
neurological disorders, or traumatic
brain injury, for instance. You can sort
of inherit trauma in the form of
epigenetic changes, that is, heritable
changes in the expression of genes but
not the actual DNA itself, which appear
to increase your risk of certain
diseases, psychological conditions, or
disabilities. It's, by far, no guarantee
that because your mom had depression you
will definitely have it - especially if
you're raised in an environment
conducive to good mental health. (Does
that exist in America?) It can be helpful
to be aware of family medical history to
know any potential health risks you
might inherit, I'm not opposed to being
informed. For example, based on
my family history, it's likely that I'll
one day have diabetes. So I try to eat
well, exercise regularly, watch out for
symptoms, and monitor my blood glucose
levels. But I may never have diabetes,
but if I do it's not going to be such a
huge deal as if this were to happen
randomly because it will hopefully be
caught early. Epigenetic therapies are
currently being explored for treatment
and prevention of diseases such as
diabetes and cancer,
and I have no problem with that.
[Jeremy] I mean, you don't know,
maybe all those people who became
disabled were genetically determined to
screw up and like hurt themselves or
they put themselves in those bad
situations for their mental health.
[Leslie] I- uh- wow. You do know there are such things as random events, right?
For instance, one study found that 55%, the majority of the cases they studied of intellectual
disability were due to a random mutation.
Not anything that could be traced back
to the parents own genetics. Random
mutations can happen to any sperm, ova, or
zygote. It's an essential element of
evolution, sometimes it's a feature, but
it's not something that can be
controlled or planned. It's complicated.
Humans have gotten this far due to our
incredible propensity for adaptation. My
biological anthropology professor said
that thanks to our diverse genomes and
random mutation [terrible German accent] "you could throw"
(h-he was, he was German)
"you could throw a bunch of lily-white honkies on an island and within 100 generations, they would all be chocolate black."
We need an occasionally
randomly mutating and diverse gene pool-
genetically diverse, ethnically diverse,
and neurodiverse-- in order to survive and
thrive as a species in a variety of
conditions.
[Jeremy] Sure... I support diversity but do you think all disabilities need saving?
Like, should moms continue drinking during pregnancy
so babies with
fetal alcohol syndrome continue to be born?
[Leslie] Not drinking is protective, not
abortive, and has nothing to do with
genetic diversity. I'm not saying people
living with fetal alcohol syndrome are
less valuable or don't have valuable
experience,
just like no one's saying people who had
polio before there was a vaccine were
not valuable people. *cough* FDR *cough*
If the pain can be prevented then
prevent it, but that can only work if we
can treat the disorder separately from
the whole person. If the disorder can be treated without
losing the person or sacrificing genetic
diversity or diversity of experience
then by all means do that! Get rid of
diabetes, get rid of cancer. But if you're
killing an entire person to get rid of a
non-communicable health condition...
maybe-maybe think on why you'd feel the need to do that.
Is it for the good of the child? Is it for the greater good? What does that mean? How do you define that?
Maybe it's because our current system
places greater value on a certain type
of person. Maybe it's because our system
punishes you for not practicing eugenics
by not providing a social safety net.
[Jeremy] Okay but what about genetic disorders like hemophilia?
Should we have let royal families keep breeding with each other?
[Leslie] Diversity, Jeremy. No, it's not
logically inconsistent to frown upon
selectively breeding out what are
considered disabilities and not be okay
with incest. This goes back to protective,
not abortive. The royal family WAS
practicing selective breeding that's
historically what incest has been. It
didn't go well.
A family tree needs to be a tree
not a spirograph.
I can be 100% supportive of a disabled
baby who had no choice in being a
product of incest and their right to
existence and acceptance, but not
supportive of incest itself. Look at
these dogs who have any number of health
problems due to selective breeding I
support them but not puppy mills.
Don't...d-don't do generational incest, guys, okay?
[Jeremy] So you're okay with breeding
out disorders from incest populations
but not okay with breeding out disorders
in general? How does that make sense?
[Leslie] Yeah, recessive conditions exist regardless of incest.
Incest just makes it worse. And people can
obviously inherit these conditions
outside of incest. How-how did we.. How did we get stuck on this incest thing?
Look, some genetic conditions actually come from useful adaptations, such as sickle cell
anemia. If you carry sickle-cell trait, a
recessive trait, then you have added
immunity against West Nile virus, which
is why this trait is common in both
African and Mediterranean populations.
Professor Robert Sapolsky has
hypothesized that conditions such as OCD,
schizophrenia, and epilepsy have been
selected for in some ways due to
potentially massive contributions to
religious, spiritual, and philosophical
thought. Go check out his lecture linked
in the description.
In fact, I recommend his whole Stanford
lecture series if you have any interest
in human behavioral biology. Basically,
maybe a little bit of schizophrenia can
actually be advantageous if you're in
the right society for it. And no, neither
Professor Sapolsky nor I are saying you
have to be "crazy" to believe in religion. Ugh, the c-word. There are many well studied
advantages to religious thought and
experience. Carl Jung, in fact, said that
he would have diagnosed himself with
schizophrenia as he regularly had
hallucinations, though he channeled his
experiences into his work on the
collective unconscious and received
great spiritual comfort from these
hallucinations. You can read about his
experiences and experiments in The Red
Book, though I personally haven't read it
so I don't know if it's any good.
Due to migraine, I often have visual
hallucinations which are entirely
harmless and sometimes maybe even a
little fun. Neurologist Oliver Sacks,
who also experienced these sorts of
migraines, wrote in his book
Hallucinations:  "To live on a day-to-day
basis is insufficient for human beings;
we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and
explanation; we need to see overall
patterns in our lives. We need hope, the
sense of a future. And we need freedom (or
at least the illusion of freedom) to get
beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes
and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning
technology or in states of mind which allow
us to travel to other worlds, to
transcend our immediate surroundings.
We need detachment of this sort as much
as we need engagement in our lives."
That's not to say these conditions can't
be seriously distressing, or even that
they are mostly distressing. I'm not
placing all the blame on the way society
is structured. No matter what world we
live in, compulsions are going to be
frustrating for people with OCD, even if
they're validated and accepted. I'm
simply giving examples of how such
traits may be adaptive.
And no, autism is not in the next step in human evolution.
Just stop that.
That's not how evolution works.
Autism has always been around,
we're just now recognizing and
diagnosing it. In fact, here's a little
secret, many children who may better fit
a diagnosis of, say, ADHD are often
instead falsely diagnosed with ASD in
order for therapists to receive enough
funding from insurance companies to
provide long term care and medication.
Also girls with ASD often go undiagnosed
because symptoms present differently. So,
basically, we don't have a clear picture
of how many people have ASD now or at
any other point in time.
My point is: all conditions genetic, environmental, or epigenetic exist on a spectrum
and this is all way more complicated than
"disability bad don't have disabled babies"
[Jeremy] But isn't disability bad? Don't
you think it would be better to avoid
making people with disabilities who will
suffer when we could choose to make
people without instead?
[Leslie] Why do you think it's so bad to live with a disability?
[Jeremy] Because, you know, you're in pain. You're tired and can't do much. You said you
often have entire days where you just
lie on the floor in pain from migraines
or you can't move due to fatigue.
That's not even accounting for the social stigma.
[Leslie] It's really not THAT bad.
The worst part is the stress from not
knowing if I qualify for SSI yet and all
the hoops I'm going to have to jump
through to prove my disabilities are
real. I feel happiness just the same as
any able-bodied person. I don't care for
the pain but
it doesn't define me. Perhaps it's even
contributed in some positive way to the
person I am. There are so many
foundational philosophers, writers,
scientists, artists, and historical icons
who were bedridden, housebound, non- neurotypical
or otherwise disabled. Michelangelo, Isaac Newton, Alexander the
Great, Leonardo da Vinci, Julius Caesar,
Joan of Arc, Kant,
Mozart, Descartes, Gramsci, Socrates,
Pythagoras, Nietzsche, Aristotle... there's
no way I can list them all. If you need
more names there's a link in the
description. It was noted by a Prussian
cop spying on Marx that he had "no fixed
times for going to sleep and waking up"
which led to like 20 people in a
Facebook group speculating that Marx may
have had non-24 or some other kind of
circadian rhythm sleep disorder. Anyway, I
don't know if we can claim him.
But I want to claim him.
We owe so much of our history and philosophy to those who were disabled or non-neurotypical.
Why are we trying to develop tests to abort them rather than fund ways to support them?
It can be argued that these people were
great despite their impairments but, like,
how can we reasonably separate the
people from the conditions? Especially in
the case of neurological or mental
health disorders. Pain doesn't
necessarily lead to productive
reflection; social exclusion can breed as
many bad ideas as good ones. I'm not here
trying to romanticize suffering like
some kind of young adult novelist. But
perhaps erasing what we currently view
as disabilities may also erase essential
and valuable perspectives. Even if no
disabled person ever again contributes
to the Western Canon that doesn't make
their lives less worth living.
[Jeremy] So I don't want to sound like eugenicist, but isn't it natural for people to
not want disabled babies?
[Leslie] No. Not at all, actually. People have been taking care of
the disabled and elderly since there
have been people. It's no more natural to
leave the disabled to died than it is to
work exactly 40 hours per week or invest
in the stock market. These are just
things we made up to fit our current
society, there are plenty of skeletal remains of full-grown adults with
deformities or signs of surgery who were
clearly cared for throughout life. Though,
of course, many of these surgeries were
misguided. One of the most famous
skeletons of all, King Tut, had
significant disabilities. But you can bet
your ass he wasn't about to be left for
dead.
[Jeremy] But don't chimps, our closest living relative, do it?
[Leslie] We're also just as
closely related to bonobos, but you
don't see us solving conflicts by
rubbing each other's genitals. I mean if
I get a vote, I vote we do that instead
of, like, shooting each other.
I'll be the first to enlist in the upcoming genital rubbing war.
Remember Robert Sapolsky?
Well, he's probably best known for his
work with stress and aggression in baboons.
Baboons [Sapolsky's voice] "not just metaphorically but literally have been the textbook
example of a highly aggressive
male-dominated hierarchical society. And
because these animals hunt, because they
live in these aggressive troops on the
savanna parentheses (and just like we
humans used to and thus we evolved very
similarly) they have a constant baseline
level of aggression which inevitably
spills over into their social lives."
In one particular group of baboons he
studied, the Forest Troop, the alphas all
ate trash and died of bovine
tuberculosis. Interestingly, the lower
ranking males didn't fight their way up
the ranks, beating up smaller baboons
along the way. Nor did the females. In
fact, more pro-social behavior began to
be rewarded within this group. Bullying
behaviors like fighting the smaller
females, became rare. Sapolsky assumed
this would end with the influx of new
males from other groups because male
baboons migrate to other troops around
puberty. However, when he returned six
years later there was only one male from
the original group left and yet this
more equanimous culture persisted. And
persisted for decades. All the members,
even the lowest ranking members had
significantly reduced levels of stress
compared to their own population in the
before Alpha die-off times, and similar
contemporaneous control groups who
didn't have an alpha extinction event.
They still fought, of course, but males in Forest Troop can be distinguished
from other troops by fighting within
rank, that is, they only picked on someone
their own size rather than bullying and beating up easy
targets, which is common among baboons.
And males of all ranks in Forest Troop
reciprocate grooming with females and
groom one another-- a behavior considered
incredibly rare [Sapolsky] "it would have been less shocking if these guys had wings or were
photosynthetic or something. Up to
then I had seen like 30 seconds of male-male grooming in the course of 15 years."
This is a major cultural shift in a
primate population, which led to more
care for physically weaker members and,
hey, it looks like it went pretty well
for everyone. (Until they found more trash
and their troop kind of fragmented since
they didn't really need to rely on one
another for subsistence anymore.) Anyway,
my point is what is natural, even for
stereotypically aggressive primates,
appears to be more shaped by
environmental and cultural factors than
we once thought.
If baboons can adapt to being nicer to
one another and all benefit then surely we can do it too.
[Jeremy] I don't get your point. Do
you think abortion should be outlawed so
so people can discover the joys of
having a disabled baby?
[Leslie] I think we need a social safety net which is actually safe and then we can talk about selective
abortion in a way that isn't tainted by
the morally reprehensible values of
capitalism. Saying all disabilities are
equally good or equally bad is a trap
that both disability activists and
proponents of selective abortions fall
into. I understand that if a person is
religious then they might argue that all
souls are valued the same but I don't
believe in souls so I'm obviously not
comfortable articulating any religious
arguments here. I'll leave that to people
in the comments. I believe we need to
re-evaluate how we view suffering and
pain and understand that disability is
not synonymous or even necessarily
related to either of these words. But we
also have to face the uncomfortable
truth that, there are some , not at all the majority,
but some conditions detectable in utero
which are almost entirely full of
suffering and pain like severe organ
defects which lead to death within
anywhere from minutes to months. And
disabilities like infantile Tay-Sachs
for which symptoms usually start around
six months of age and result in death
before 3-5 years of age. Outright banning people from aborting
fetuses with disabilities detected in
utero would force these parents to watch
their baby die horribly, painfully, and
slowly. And perhaps some people see value
in that experience but others don't want
to deal with that level of emotional
strain and I I don't think they should
have to. My mom worked in a neonatal
intensive care unit for close to thirty
years. It was so hard for her to watch
parents try every treatment available
for certain babies knowing they had
little to no chance of survival and then
inevitably have to watch those babies
die slowly, painfully, and expensively. I
know it was her job but that doesn't
diminish the pain of watching babies die
constantly. She, of course, had a few
success stories of children living past
their prognosis and having happy lives
with minimal medical intervention but
these were a tiny minority of cases.
Being so close to these babies who maybe
would have been aborted had the parents
known of their condition, some of whom
lived but most of whom died, my mom
supports selective abortion. Not so
much for Down syndrome or what she
considers, like, minor impairments which
generally don't require much prolonged
medical care, but had these babies been
aborted or euthanized,
she argues, then more care could have
been directed to babies with better
chances of survival. For her it's about
resource management and I think it's
important to remember when discussing
selective abortion that medical
resources are currently limited in this
way. My mom was severely overworked and
underpaid. To be clear: medical resources
don't have
to be limited. This is yet another case
of manufactured scarcity due to
neoliberal austerity measures like
hospitals constantly trying to cut costs
to raise profits. That's the way it is,
and because of that I can understand my
mom's perspective. However, I think if
there were fewer labor intensive babies
being born then rather than there being
less work for nurses, the hospital would
simply hire fewer nurses and keep them
just as overworked as they are now.
Basically, I believe that, regardless of
disability, if the parents don't want
that baby, don't think they could care
for and love that baby, then they should
probably not have it. But they need to be
fully informed of the disability
prognosis and support systems present in
their community and what the experience
would really be like raising a disabled
child. If parents find in utero that
their baby will have a condition which
requires extra care and they know they
won't be able to provide that care or
feel they would resent that child for
needing care and find themselves loving
the fetus less and less then I feel it
would be better for the baby to not be
born rather than be given up for
adoption or go unloved. It's a hard
belief to justify to myself, a baby who
had there been some way of knowing my
future conditions would maybe have been
aborted, not by my mom specifically, but
other parents maybe. But when it comes
down to it. I value the parents bodily
autonomy more than the life of any fetus,
disabled or otherwise, and I support the
parents' right to an informed choice.
In an ideal world, we would value the
diversity of our species and we wouldn't
have an economic system founded upon
eugenics, but this is clearly not an ideal world.
The fact that there are
children in the foster care system is
why I can't morally justify having a
child of my own.
My grandpa was adopted, tons of my
cousins are adopted-- it's always seemed,
to me, like the right option. Peter Singer
(yes, the animal rights guy)
stated that both biological and adoptive
parents prefer able-bodied babies as if
this fact proves inherent loss of value.
However Harriet Mcbride Johnson
contended non-white babies have the same
chance of being adopted on our current
foster care system as disabled babies
but no one's saying we should abort
Black babies because they'll go unwanted.
*disappointed in humanity* 
Well maybe some people might say that.
being female in many societies is,
functionally, a disability. Even in our
own society, women have a lower earning
potential than men and we've seen what's
happened with the sex ratio with the
rise of sex-selective abortions in China
and India. When asked what the difference
was between aborting a disabled baby and
aborting a mixed-race baby Peter Singer
responded that, unlike race, disability
makes a person "worse off." To which Harriet McBride Johnson responded: "Are we 'worse
off'? I don't think so. Not in any
meaningful sense. There are too many
variables. For those of us with
congenital conditions, disability shapes
all we are. Those disabled later in life
adapt.
We take constraints that no one would
choose and build rich and satisfying
lives within them. We enjoy pleasures
other people enjoy, and pleasures
peculiarly our own. We have something
the world needs."
Alright, so stay tuned
for the next video which will be about
euthanasia, manufactured consent, and a
continued discussion on the concept of
"quality of life."
I probably said some stuff here that people, disabled or otherwise, will be mad about but you know what?
I had too many subscribers anyway so, uh,
yeah
that's the end of the video
