What are the moral ramifications of the desire for perfection within our society, and where do they intersect with the sanctity of life as seen through a Christian lens? Join us as we unravel the haunting legacy and chilling historical milestones spotlighting the intersection of ethics, disability, and societal values. Our conversation moves on to the pressing issues at the heart of our contemporary world. Through the lens of declining birth rates in developed nations and the utilitarian valuation of life, we confront the subtle resurgence of eugenic philosophy that threatens the Christian imperative to honor every life. Join us as we navigate the moral implications of these ideologies, reinforcing the call for Christians to bear each other's burdens with love and defend the sanctity of human beings against the undercurrents of modern eugenics. This episode serves as a potent reminder of the vigilance required to ensure that our advances in reproductive technology do not lead us astray from our ethical compass.
What are the moral ramifications of the desire for perfection within our society, and where do they intersect with the sanctity of life as seen through a Christian lens? Join us as we unravel the haunting legacy and chilling historical milestones spotlighting the intersection of ethics, disability, and societal values. Our conversation moves on to the pressing issues at the heart of our contemporary world. Through the lens of declining birth rates in developed nations and the utilitarian valuation of life, we confront the subtle resurgence of eugenic philosophy that threatens the Christian imperative to honor every life. Join us as we navigate the moral implications of these ideologies, reinforcing the call for Christians to bear each other's burdens with love and defend the sanctity of human beings against the undercurrents of modern eugenics. This episode serves as a potent reminder of the vigilance required to ensure that our advances in reproductive technology do not lead us astray from our ethical compass.
On today's episode…. Like a nutcase, today, assisted suicide has pretty much monopolized the news of social issues. In Canada, we have a number of states that allow it. What was crazy a generation ago is becoming commonplace today, and it's going to become expected in a generation from now.
Paul Snamiska:Welcome to the Life Challenges podcast from Christian Life Resources. People today face many opportunities and struggles when it comes to issues of life and death, marriage and family, health and science. We're here to bring a fresh biblical perspective to these issues and more. Join us now for Life Challenges.
Christa Potratz:Hi and welcome back. I'm Christa Potratz and I'm here today with pastors Bob Fleischmann and Jeff Samelson, and today we're going to talk about eugenics. This is a topic that we haven't really talked about just in one episode in the podcast, but it is one that we have thought about talking about for quite some time now. We just see a lot of these concepts just in our culture today, but specifically in our life, issues that we talk about too, and so really just excited to dive into this topic. It's kind of a big word. What does it really mean? What is eugenics, and can you just kind of tell us a little bit about what we're talking about today?
Jeff Samelson:I think a lot of people hearing the word today would say okay, you, okay, I think I'm familiar with that but genics? That probably has something to do with genetics and I just think one of the ironies is that the whole idea of eugenics and the coining of the term happened before there was really any understanding of genetics, which actually is one of the points which I'm sure we're going to end up coming back to later. But eugenics is basically the idea of good. That's the E-U. It comes from the Greek Good genes, but not so much genes in the sense of like chromosomes, but more in the sense of we want a good race.
Jeff Samelson:The Greek word that comes from there has the idea of a race or a generation. So it's basically how do we come up with the best people? And that's that's basically the idea of eugenics. And there are great big kind of philosophical isms associated with. This is like how are we going to create a, a master race, and then they're much more smaller scale kind of things like well, how can we make this group here or this family better, or what can we do to improve these outcomes, which are sometimes also called eugenic?
Christa Potratz:Yeah, so I mean, what is really the history of eugenics, like how far back does it go and what is that?
Jeff Samelson:Well, you could go back a really, really long way if you wanted to expand your definition of it enough and, just like you know, anytime you had people saying we're the good people, we want more of us, get rid of the bad ones. That's kind of a eugenic attitude In terms of it being a pseudoscientific approach that would really only go back to the 19th century. I'm guessing that Bob has a lot more of this knowledge fresh in his mind or whatever. But there was an English. I guess we'll just call him a scientist, francis Galton.
Jeff Samelson:I guess we'll just call him a scientist, francis Galton, and he was actually related to Charles Darwin and their work ended up kind of merging and mixing in many ways. He was interested in very many things, but one of the things that he's best known for is coining the term eugenics, and he was very interested in let's try to figure out how to have more of the best kind of people, perhaps fewer of the not best people, and he spoke very much in terms of races and such, and this will be really surprising, but as an Englishman, he seemed to think that white people of European descent were the best people and that we needed more of them.
Bob Fleischmann:A number of years, when Sarah Palin was the governor of Alaska and some rather callous speaking reporter had heard of her diagnosis of carrying a pregnancy of a child that had Down syndrome, and he callously asked you know, how will your normal children feel about this? And she said well, I'm not so sure that he wouldn't be the normal one. I'm not so sure that he wouldn't be the normal one. In other words, somebody has to. In a eugenics mindset or in a eugenics arena, someone has to be kind of the high one that has to determine who's worthy and who is not. Who's worthy of reproducing, who's not, which does break eugenics down into its two parts, which is positive eugenics and negative eugenics. Down into its two parts, which is positive eugenics and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics is basically encouraging the healthy, wealthy, smart to reproduce. Like just yesterday or the day before there was a story about how the IVF movement has really started gaining some momentum, has gotten a lot of press and how people are really looking for. They want children that look like them when they go to a sperm bank. Let's say it's not. They have to go to a sperm bank to get it or go to an egg place that would sell the eggs from a woman. But now they're looking for characteristics like high intellect, beauty, things of that sort, and that's because society has developed this. When you would ask, jeff, about history and going far back, I think the thing that has alarmed us the most is when science entered the whole discussion on eugenics, because then, all of a sudden, there's something about science. Science was great as a handmaiden to religion. Science became bad when it made religion a nuisance, you know. And so now you have leading with science, using genetics in crop development, using genetics in farming, you know, breeding animals. That's been done for a long time and with good, positive results.
Bob Fleischmann:Back in the late 1700s, thomas Malthus, who was a clergyman but also a scientist, had written a paper. There's like six versions of it, but it became known as the Malthusian theory. And the Malthusian theory said we're going to have a population problem, we're going to have so many people that we can't sustain the earth, because at that time, in a stronger agrarian society, having a large family meant that we can farm the fields, we can get an awful lot done. And so he said well, that's beginning to come back, and he was against birth control or anything like that. But he just kind of raised it as a concern and it became the foundation for the poor laws of England, you know, and the strictness, and it really had a lot of negative effects.
Bob Fleischmann:One of the things that Thomas Malthus had failed to calculate was that when genetics was applied in the area of agriculture, all of a sudden they were able to get far greater crops out of an acre of land than they did in the way he was figuring. And so that's why today it's kind of called the Neo-Malthusian or the Pseudo-Malthusian theory or it's an updated theory, pseudo-malthusian theory or updated theory. And what they had done is kind of like they began to apply the notion like we can create better crops, we can create better animals, and they started applying it to humans. And that's what really Francis Galton was doing. He was Francis Galton, depending on how you want to understand the biographies.
Bob Fleischmann:He was looking to create a niche. He's got a little plot in Africa that was named after him. He was trying to be part of a society, of upper society, and he kind of found his niche in this area of eugenics, and eugenics caught on in a major way in the late 1800s, which would be the 19th century. It caught on and it caught on in a big way. But surprisingly it caught on really in the United States. When it came over to the United States there were three eugenics conferences that were held, and then of course it fell out of favor when we got to Nazi Germany, because then we saw negative eugenics.
Christa Potratz:What was the history with the United States then? Because I do think that is one thing where people think like, okay, maybe eugenics, they maybe do associate it with Nazi Germany, but it was here before that. In what way?
Jeff Samelson:Well, there are lots of cultural things going on that were part of this One is. It may seem hard for us now with where we are with science and technology now when we think back to the past, but in the 19th century, beginning already around the early 1800s, there was just this amazing expansion of scientific knowledge and there was this real sense that, wow, we can do anything. That's why there were some very peculiar ideas that were very popular because, well, there's science behind it, so it must be right. And there was an attempt to make everything scientific. I've just been doing some reading lately about the history of theology and it's just amazing how there were so many people who were trying to make religion scientific, but that's what they were doing Anyway. So that was one thing.
Jeff Samelson:There was a sense of science can do anything and wow, and so people were latching on to like, well, this is scientific and we can be a part of it. And there was also, particularly when you get in the United States, particularly after the civil war and some of those national wounds were beginning to heal, there was this sense of optimism that we have conquered the worst of us, the worst of humanity, and now we're heading toward the sunny uplands of history. Everything is heading the right direction. The wrong kind of people are not, and this is something that we can all be a part of, and it was a optimism. Well, the bottom just fell out of it, but it's part of the reason why that built up so well and became so popular here in the United States.
Bob Fleischmann:When it came to eugenic legislation in the United States, I think a lot of people point to Indiana being the place where it started. It involved sterilization, the legalization of sterilizing the mentally infirm to prevent them from proliferating. And then when you get into the study of the history behind birth control, when Margaret Sanger was kind of on the road and she was a eugenicist which, by the way, today we talk about in very negative terms, she favored eugenics and everything, by the way, that was mainstream in her day. She had a lot of the big you know the Carnegie's, you know a lot of money Eastman, eastman, kodak. He was behind Kellogg. There was big money behind it.
Bob Fleischmann:What happened with Margaret Singer is that the son of the fellow who developed International Harvester McCormick McCormick's son turned out to have been schizophrenic and his wife was paranoid to have any type of sexual relations with him because she was worried about having schizophrenic children. And she happened to have heard about Margaret Sanger speaking and the long and short of it is she ended up doing a lot of the bankrolling of that early birth control movement and it was tied again. It was tied with trying to prevent ruling in which Oliver Wender Holmes on the court wrote the infamous statement that three generations of imbeciles are enough. But an imbecile was actually a common term used to describe people who were mentally infirm. I mean, today, you know, if you grew up and your mother called you an imbecile, she was not thinking history, she was insulting you. She was thinking history, she was insulting you. But back then you know that was. But of course today that phrase gets played around a lot to show how bad everything was.
Bob Fleischmann:Well, what was happening in the Buck versus Bell ruling was that a woman, 16-year-old woman, whose mother was considered to be mentally infirmed. She was an institution and this 16-year-old girl was being cared for by a family and she showed up pregnant and the idea was we have to sterilize her because she's having all these—she's just promiscuous. Well, they find out later that the foster home she was living in she was basically raped by the son in the house. But the long and short of it is that after she delivered her baby, she was forcibly sterilized. The state was given the right in the Buck v Bell ruling to forcibly sterilize people who were considered to be infirm Not the right kind of makeup, and that's eugenics. Now, one of the students of eugenics that came over from Germany was this guy named Mengele, and Mengele learned a lot about eugenics from American sources and then he came back to Nazi Germany and he brought it to the extreme negative end of it, which is the cruel experiments and all that kind of stuff.
Jeff Samelson:There's a lot there, bob, with the history and everything. Why is it important for us to know that and understand some of that history and some of these things were going on here. We can't just look back and say, well, we always did the right thing. There was a lovely woman in my congregation out in Maryland who had grown up in Pennsylvania and she confided in me once that it was one of the hardest things for her at all, that she and her husband were never able to have children. And it wasn't because of some genetic condition or medical condition. It was because she had been designated as legally blind when she was a child and she was institutionalized at that point in the state of Pennsylvania said okay, no more, and fortunately they haven't happened for a long time and we stopped doing that kind of thing. But it was a reality. It's helpful to have these things in mind, but part of it also is just to realize that just because we're not Nazi Germany doesn't mean that eugenics is not still something that we have to watch out for and look out for and fight against.
Jeff Samelson:We're not seeing so much usually of the negative, but a lot of the positive eugenics. You could say it's being applied in a negative way. Bob mentioned the he didn't use this terminology the designer baby effect of trying to. Okay, well, you know, as long as we can figure out what sperm is going into this or what egg or whatever. Increasingly, with IVF there is the ability to choose for whatever characteristics you want to choose for, and increasingly in the United States they're choosing for sex, which is problematic in many ways. Whatever, but it is a positive purpose. Okay, we want to create the best child for us. Okay, we're not talking about society, maybe we're talking about our family, but it is still negative in the sense that, okay, well, those embryos that we created through IVF, that don't have the traits that we're looking for.
Jeff Samelson:well, we'll just discard those which is killing human life, or well, we'll just discard those, which is killing human life?
Christa Potratz:Is eugenics ever compatible with the Christian faith, or is that just something that oh nope, we're always against? I mean, I see, with the crops, okay, that sounds like that's good. Right, you could be able to grow a lot in a certain area, but beyond that, is that an idea that's compatible with the Christian faith?
Jeff Samelson:If you take a very, very broad approach to it, in the sense of, okay, things that are meant to make things good for people, that we want to have the healthiest population in our nation that we can, if we want people to have a good life, okay, in that broad sense, oh yeah, certainly that's Christian, that's love for your neighbor. But anytime you start getting down into the specifics about that of, okay, well, this is how we're going to make that happen, choices are being made, are being made, and once you're making choices that, well, we're going to benefit this person at the expense of that person, well then you've crossed over into areas where Christians are going to be, at the very least, uncomfortable, but in many cases have to say, well, we'll know that that's sinful.
Bob Fleischmann:To some degree and this is much more of an issue when I was younger and earlier in the pro-life work and that was, you know there was always a concern about burying children. When you get into your 40s. In fact, they used to say, once you're over 35, having children, you know you have increased risks of birth defects and so forth. So to some degree, you know, people Christians were just, they were trying to get their child bearing in early to assure the best possible chance for a healthy child. A lot of that has changed today, with just different medical advancements and so forth. I wouldn't fault anybody for thinking that way, because I think their desire was to protect people from hardship and so forth. To protect people from hardship and so forth.
Bob Fleischmann:Personally, I think eugenics is now becoming slowly the driving force behind things and you're seeing it in many disarming ways, like, for example, the United States was shocked when Governor Richard Lamb had made the comment that the elderly have a duty to die and to get out of the way, and in a sense that's a eugenic form. And what's happening is that we've really begun to buy in the mentality that we have to get rid of burdens and that sometimes it's a burden on the family, and families will say, well, I'm willing to carry it. And then people will say, if you're having children and they have mental problems, then they're going to go on Medicaid and then we're all going to have to pay for it and then we should be able to control whether you can have those children. That's how the idea is working today. So there are people I mean I have gotten mail from people who object to us operating a home for mothers by saying those people are doing nothing but sleeping around and having children. The best thing you can do for them is save the money that you're spending on the home for mothers and get them sterilized.
Bob Fleischmann:Welcome to eugenics. That's eugenics. It's creating a view of it, but I mean it infiltrates people who supposedly should know better. And now, if you want to really complicate the topic, as if it's not complicated enough. Now try to imagine a global culture. In a global culture, there's a concern about intellect and there's a concern about advancement. Now it's interesting. Just recently, the United States announced dumping billions of dollars into AI development artificial intelligence development to keep pace or to stay ahead of China. Now, in the times when eugenics really got its foothold, what was going on is your number one commodity was people. It wasn't even industry yet, it was people, and so we want the best people we can have. It's going to be interesting kind of sitting in the bleachers watching what this wholesale buy-in to AI is going to do.
Bob Fleischmann:It may actually lighten up the need for eugenics, but the reason I think eugenics is really the undercurrent that's going on today is because, I mean, every time you read a story that says Social Security is running out of money, then you get into it, and I just was involved with a crisis call the other day. A lady called me. She's in a situation where there's a high mentality that at this stage of life, why don't you just let them go? Why is this too expensive to maintain it? You get that strong mentality. That's a eugenics mentality.
Bob Fleischmann:Right now, it seems still relatively benign, right to most people. We get to go to heaven. Hey, there's nothing wrong with that and everything. Just remember, with every inclination of the heart being evil, you've got to play out your worst nightmare and figure it might not get there in your lifetime, but probably in your kids. For sure in your grandchildren's lifetime, that worst nightmare would be reality. I still remember when Jack Kevorkian was advocating people be having the right to terminate their own lives. I mean, when that happened I spoke at a pastor's conference down in Phoenix and one of my classmates sent me a certificate a one-time certificate to visit Jack Kevorkian and everyone just laughed because this guy sounded like a nutcase. Today, assisted suicide has pretty much monopolized the news of social issues. In Canada. We have a number of states that allow it. What was crazy a generation ago is becoming commonplace today and it's going to become expected in a generation from now, if you're a pro-life Christian, you should recognize that you're always coming up against this eugenic impulse or instinct.
Jeff Samelson:Certainly, okay, well, we're going to abort the babies that are less than ideal. Okay, that's definitely a eugenic idea, but so is the argument, you know. Okay, we should be in favor of this, because the people who are drain on our society are going to be eliminated this way and maybe assisted suicide today, but tomorrow it'll be a little bit more active euthanasia on our part. And then you get situations in nations where healthcare, basically, is entirely in the government's hands. Well, governments only have so much money to spend on things, and so decisions are getting made. Well, these lives are not a priority for us to preserve because it's too costly for society. Right, that's a eugenic impulse there that we are seeing, and it's the kind of thing that we, as Christians, need to be aware of and recognize that. Yeah, this isn't just this one particular case we're dealing with. This is a societal, cultural thing that we have to be aware of. And then we have to argue against.
Christa Potratz:And we have to argue against. Yeah, I mean I think you know you both have really said it too is just this idea that somebody has to carry the quote unquote burden I think of too.
Christa Potratz:Like which country is it Iceland that doesn't have the Down syndrome children, and decided, all right, well, we don't want to carry that burden here. Decided, all right, well, we don't want to carry that burden here. And so just this idea that there is a burden and we don't want it just seems to kind of be at that underlying principle with that because and as Christians I mean, there's a burden here. Oh well, like, well, like, let's do what we can to help that person, or to be to rally around that mom, or to help that individual or help that family or help that nation, and instead it's just like, well, let's just not even have the problem is the best way to deal with it.
Bob Fleischmann:You know, a lot of times when you read statistics on national health statistics, they talk about developed and undeveloped countries or underdeveloped countries, third world countries, and there's an undergirded presupposition in that the developed countries are the ideal.
Bob Fleischmann:In other words, you want to be like them. And it's interesting because in the birth rate we've talked about, I think, on past episodes, that the birth rate of the United States is below the replacement level. It's below the replacement level in a lot of the developed world Japan, bulgaria, some of these countries have a birth rate that's way below South Korea. Some of these countries have a birth rate that's way below South Korea, way below the replacement level, and it's creating consequences down the road. Okay, so if we have these consequences down the road, then the question to be asked is maybe we're not the ideal. I grew up on the old Johnny Weissmiller Tarzan movies and I just remember at some time when I was a kid there was an episode or a movie in which Tarzan was brought to the United States, civilized country and everything, and he didn't like it. He wanted to go back. A lot of what's behind eugenics is designed to support what we've got in a developed country. In other words, we're going to need money. In order to have money, we can do more things. In order to do more things, we're going to need to get rid of burdens, get rid of the people who are a problem, and so we approach life in that sense. And what it is is again and I've beat this drum before but when you buy into a society that's trying to build heaven on earth, there's going to be casualties, and sometimes it's the unborn child, sometimes it's the elderly, sometimes it's the people who've got mental health problems, sometimes it's people with the physical problems.
Bob Fleischmann:Nazi Germany. I got involved with studying the eugenics movement because I tried to figure out not why evil men like Mengele could do the evil things that he did, but how do you get an entire nation to go along with it. And that was the issue that tormented me and it happened subtly and, by the way, just to kind of pick on a little bit of that how do you get a country to accept it? You know the eugenics movement was very. The way it manifested itself in Nazi Germany was first of all against mentally infirm and the disabled and the World War I veterans who were disabled. They were the first casualties. That was part of what was called the T4 program in Nazi Germany.
Bob Fleischmann:And then they set their sights on the Jewish community, and the Jewish community was the part that I was studying the most is how it got set on that Already the Jewish community had gotten into positions of influence and authority and so forth and they were liked and not liked, depending upon what you needed from them. That's kind of like any culture. But then what happened is they felt that the treaty at Weimar after World War I, they felt, was terribly unjust and personally and again you can debate me on it, just an opinion it didn't seem like a fair settlement, the way things kind of landed. But after that is when the German people were looking for scapegoats and so they began to pick on classes of people and in order to restore Germany to its greatness, because the reparations and everything that were made against Germany were burdensome, they were embarrassing, they put everybody into a hardship and nobody wanted the hardship, remember, because Germany had become developed and they were enjoying prosperity. And then they lost World War I and nobody wanted to go backwards.
Bob Fleischmann:And if we had to face something like that in the United States, I'm frightened to imagine the choices that people are going to make, because they had in a sense created heaven on earth and all of a sudden that was being compromised for them. So somebody had to pay, and so the people who had to pay were the disabled and the infirm, and then the Jewish people. And people bought into it and they didn't want to be involved with the dirty work, but they had developed such a dislike for them so that by the time we got into the middle 30s and the late 1930s, when things were starting to be taken care of in a eugenics way, the people just kind of laid quiet Not all of them. If you read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he was leading a small group of people trying to tell everybody that some of us object to this. But that's what happens.
Christa Potratz:Kind of a takeaway then here what is the best Christian response to eugenics and the ideas and practices that we see going on today?
Jeff Samelson:I'm kind of picking up with what you were talking about earlier about bearing people's burdens, love. Love for God, which respects life because it's his gift and he gives its value, and so we don't have any sense of oh well, this life is unworth our care or unworthy of life. We value it all, every human being, whatever stage, age or condition. And then love for the neighbor. Love which says, oh, this person over here is struggling, this person over here presents a challenge to me, this person over here has created a burden for my life. We respond not with resentment, not with a sense of we're going to be ruthlessly efficient here and eliminate. No, we respond with love, care, service. That's what we do as Christians and that's something we should be eager to be known in society for. That we are the ones. It's one of the things that set Christians apart in the early years of Christianity in the Roman Empire, people said what are those Christians doing? And it changed the world.
Bob Fleischmann:First of all, I 100% agree with what Jeff said. I cannot control what the president's going to say. I cannot control what my state senator is going to do, but I can control what I do. And a lot of times you know we work so hard to affect in the United States some sort of policy change, public change, which I think we should be working on, but we get the priority mixed up.
Bob Fleischmann:And when Jeff is talking about loving our neighbor and so forth, you love your neighbor in the biblical sense, the agape sense, which means you recognize that sometimes it's going to hurt, sometimes it's going to require sacrifice, sometimes it's going to involve carrying a burden and sometimes it involves never getting thanked, never getting honored, never getting appreciated for, but all you're doing is reflecting the love that was shown to you in Jesus Christ.
Bob Fleischmann:And eugenics can only be battled on the individual basis, because it's going to come down to conversations you're going to have in the home around the dinner table. It's going to come down to talking to your children about what they've learned in school and how to approach that. Then it's going to come down to what you do for others and how you care for them when families sacrifice to take care of other people, and the children see it and they observe it. They become the future of imitating that, and I think that's how you fight it, and you can't control public policy as well as you'd like. So, regardless of public policy, you work to make sure your life is not reflecting some form of eugenics.
Christa Potratz:Well, thank you both for this discussion today and if anybody has any questions or comments, please reach out to us at lifechallengesus, and we look forward to having you back next time. Thanks a lot, bye.
Paul Snamiska:Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Life Challenges podcast from Christian Life Resources. Please consider subscribing to this podcast, giving us a review wherever you access it and sharing it with friends. We're sure you have questions on today's topic or other life issues. Our goal is to help you through these tough topics and we want you to know we're here to help. You can submit your questions, as well as comments or suggestions for future episodes, at lifechallengesus or email us at podcast at christianliferesourcescom. In addition to the podcasts, we include other valuable information at lifechallengesus, so be sure to check it out. For more about our parent organization, please visit christianliferesourcescom. May God give you wisdom, love, strength and peace in Christ for every life challenge.