American Eagle has roiled social media by featuring new advertisements showcasing actress Sydney Sweeney’s homonymic double entendre about her great jeans/genes. The ads are classically American: using sex to sell pants, with an attractive blonde, blue-eyed woman provocatively pushing them.
In an earlier age, the scolds who would have attacked the ads were feminists objecting to objectifying women’s bodies. Today’s scolds, however, object to the double entendre. The allusion to genes, they claim, is just code preparing us for an Aryan, white supremacist Mein Kampf America through “eugenics.”
With all the talk these last few days about eugenics, it’s amazing how much the real eugenics never gets mentioned.
Planned Parenthood, born of Margaret Sanger’s explicitly racist and eugenic convictions, has found a judge in Massachusetts ready to contort the Constitution to ensure, despite their congressional cutoff, that federal funds keep flowing to the abortion entrepreneur.
Proper abortion orthodoxy still maintains that no abortion anywhere, anytime, for any reason can ever be questioned. That includes abortion as a tool of sex selection, whose victims are overwhelmingly female. While the Economist recently conceded that sex-selection abortions motivated by son-first preferences seem to be down, a close reading of the text suggests it’s not because we’ve reacquired a sense of the intrinsic sacredness of every human life. Rather, it seems that in our elite culture, opposition to “toxic masculinity” has now seeped down to those ever-behind-the-eight-ball, harder-to-teach boys.
Likewise, while mainstream American disability advocates have changed the culture to accommodate Americans with disabilities (and ideological advocates have even tried to erase the notion “disability” itself exists), their achievements have generally stopped at Roe’s red line: They don’t extend before birth. The truth is that the number of disabled Americans might be decreasing not because we have eliminated disability, but because we eliminate the disabled. Science’s prenatal diagnosis regimes are well-honed at search-and-destroy missions before birth, and even Americans who might not admit they support prenatal killing for fetal disability will quietly wink and nod at its execution. The ongoing conflict over abortion in Poland—one of the few European countries still with meaningful protections for the unborn on its books—was engendered because the Constitutional Tribunal nullified the provision, inherited from the old communist statute, that allowed abortion where fetal deformity was “a probability.” That so many ignored that diagnoses of “probable” deformity—in Poland and beyond—result in perfectly normal and healthy newborns indicates that, like “health” under Doe v. Bolton, the term was elastic enough to justify anything.
When the Supreme Court decided Box v. Planned Parenthood in 2019, it sidestepped the question of Indiana’s prohibition of sex-selection abortions. That did not stop Justice Clarence Thomas from attaching a lengthy but masterful concurring opinion in which he traced the nefarious role of eugenics in American law and called sex-selection abortions exactly that. His opinion was a lightning rod drawing attacks, including from “pro-choice” authors of books against eugenics. It seems that in their mindset, “eugenics” only happens when the state mandates it. When individuals are motivated in their “private” actions by eugenically-driven criteria, well—no problem there.
Which leads us to the brave new world of artificial reproduction, where your baby can be made to order by sex, hair and eye color, build, and so forth. Want to buy an Ivy League grad’s ova to give Junior a leg up on brains? Not a problem—though it’s going to cost you. And with the ongoing normalization of “family formation” as an intentional act rather than a biological relationship (driven in part by ongoing fealty to the caricature of “marriage” enshrined in Obergefell), the trend will only grow stronger. After all, if childbearing is seen primarily through the rubric of “choice,” why shouldn’t that choice extend beyond the fact of childbearing itself to the characteristics one wants to bear? As former archbishop of Paris Michel Aupet it insisted when speaking of the “parental project,” when becoming a parent is seen primarily as a “project,” a child ceases to be a gift and becomes a product—and products can be rejected for quality control reasons.
Nor is it a question only of prenatal life. Virginia ex-governor Ralph Northam let the cat out of the bag in 2019 when he admitted that newborns who survive late-term abortions are not automatically given a guaranteed Fourteenth Amendment right to life. No, as Northam (a physician) admitted, the child’s life would be subject to “discussion” with the parents and doctors while the dying baby is given “comfort care.” How many children—especially handicapped children—die with immunity in the nursery remains a dirty little secret, not just since Roe but even the days of Ronald Reagan’s efforts to save Baby Doe from medical neglect in 1982.
The Sydney Sweeney ads seemingly identify another dimension of the currently atrophied American definition of “eugenics.” Not just the state, but anybody other than the individual is forbidden from defining aesthetics, appeal, desirability, or “good genes.” So, American Eagle and Dunkin’ Donuts (likewise scorned for its new, “tan” donuts) are subject to a hermeneutic of suspicion by featuring a white actor in a commercial because, either by forming public perceptions or in league with the state, they promote eugenic ideals.
Yes, eugenics is alive and well in modern-day America. Just not so much where most loudly claim it is to be found.
Image courtesy of American Eagle
