RUSH: I don’t know how long ago I said this. It’s just more evidence, ladies and gentlemen, that I know exactly what I’m talking about, particularly when I am talking about our good friends, the commie libs. Mr. Snerdley, you might be able to help me remember when this was. This had to be back in the late eighties, early nineties, in the midst of the then-feverish debate over abortion. One of the things that I pointed out was that we’re starting to eliminate life in this country based on convenience to the living. We’re doing it at the elderly end and we’re doing it at the beginning and in the womb. In the midst of all this, a story came out about medical genetics and how they were advancing.
The Colorado governor was talking about genetics, and how we can maybe make designer babies. That we’re learning to identify in the womb the traits that kids are going to have, and I said, ‘This is going to require some really serious ethics here, folks, because if we’re not careful, we’re going to be able to tell prospective parents that their kids going to be prone to freckles, red hair, and overweight,’ and on the basis of that, parents might decide to terminate the pregnancy and try over, because who wants to bring a fat redheaded freckle-faced person into the world? Then I said if there is a genetic link to homosexuality — I said if — and if they ever find that, you are going to see the fastest turnaround from pro-choice to pro-life that you’ve ever heard. Can you imagine prospective parents going into the OB-GYN and the doctor says, ‘Guess what we just found out? Your kid is going to be fat freckle-faced red hair and potentially gay.’ What will the parents do?
I warned you this is all coming, this concept that if you don’t like the original conception of your child, that you can just scrub it and start over, and here we have an Australian newspaper story. The News. ‘Couples should be able to design the characteristics of children – including personality traits -during IVF treatment, according to an Oxford University expert. Australian-born ethicist and chair of Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Julian Savulescu told NEWS.com.au that couples seeking IVF should have the right to give their future-child ‘greater opportunities’ through genetic manipulation. ‘If they were having IVF for other reasons and they wanted to select from a bunch of embryos already created for some legitimate purpose, I don’t see why we shouldn’t give couples information that (manipulation is) available,’ Professor Savulescu said. ‘If we could enable couples to influence the degree of self-control that their children have, I think that’s the sort of thing we should be offering people.” This is an ethicist! Exactly what I warned. No ethics whatsoever is out there now suggesting that in-vitro fertilization couples should actually design their kids.
I knew this was going to happen. This has roots to the eugenics movement. The eugenics movement was making sure, ‘Well, we only want a population with certain IQ, certain race,’ and this has roots to it. You start getting into designer babies — well, where do you draw the line? Where do you stop it? You’re asking the wrong person. Snerdley said, ‘Wouldn’t it kind of be cool to have the kind of kid you always wanted?’ Presumes you always wanted one. I think this is fraught with great potential harm, big harm, as for all of society, for civilization, I really do.
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RUSH: We’ll go to Toledo next.
RUSH: This is Christina. You’re up on the EIB Network hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s an honor to talk with you.
RUSH: Thank you very much.
CALLER: About 12 years ago I wrote a paper in college regarding eugenics and Human Genome Project and the idea of designer babies, basically. And it was literally, you know: ‘one boy, blond hair, easy on the eyes. Please hold the stupidity.’ That’s literally the paper I titled it, and it really had to do with, when you take away a trait that might be genetically what might be considered, you know, undesirable — let’s even say the potential for, you know, stupidity — are you maybe taking away a trait that will keep that child from maybe having cancer at a later date, or if you get rid of a cancer trait, might there be another defect?
RUSH: Wait. Are you suggesting there’s a link between stupidity and cancer?
CALLER: No, no, no. I’m saying it’s kind of like the bully on the playground. You take away one bully, there might be another bully waiting in the wings to come up strong.
RUSH: Oh, I see what you’re saying. It’s a good point. What you’re saying is, we really don’t know enough to be monkeying around with this is not our place.
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CALLER: No.
RUSH: This is not our purview to be messing around with this kind of stuff. That is my point. It’s just the height of arrogance. It is vanity like you can’t believe. So you’re saying if you remove a genetic trait such as stupidity, you might open the doors for something else to happen to the kid who might not be as stupid as he would have been?
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: What do we do with a bunch of Mensa members? Are they going to do the daily jobs that maybe someone of not such a high intelligence is able to do, and would they be?
RUSH: Have you ever met a Mensa member? (Giggles.)
CALLER: No, I haven’t. Are you one?
RUSH: No. No, no, no. I may qualify, but I’m not a member. But the best way to express this to you, to show you, is with Bill Buckley. In one of his many classic lines, he said, ‘I would prefer to be governed by the first 100 names from the Boston phone book than the faculty at Harvard.’
CALLER: Wow.
RUSH: Right, and essentially this is what you’re saying. Christina, thanks much.
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RUSH: Chris in San José, California, I’m glad you waited. You’re next on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hey, mega dittos, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: On the designer baby issue, there was a scifi movie release not too long ago called Gattaca, and what the parents would do is the doctor would tell them of these undesirable gene traits and they could just remove them from the embryo before conception, and what that created was a class division where you had these flawless people and then the rest of the population was like you and me and they called them ‘degenerates.’ So it may not increase abortions, but if life imitates art, then it might be a movie worth looking at. It’s called Gattaca.
RUSH: I think I’ve seen Gattaca. It rings a bell. I may not have been able to get all the way through it. Who starred in this movie, do you remember?
CALLER: Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Ernest Borgnine, and that — that tall English fellow.
RUSH: Okay, then I saw it. Yes, I saw it. I think I have it in my KScape system.
CALLER: Uh-huh.
RUSH: But I did see it. It’s a dangerous thing. That’s a science fiction movie, and of course there’s an element here of reality that they base it on, which is true of all science fiction. But it would be dangerous to extrapolate real life circumstances to movies. A lot of people do it. But I disagree. I think it would enhance abortions, at this stage. Now, if we go down the line here a number of years, I don’t know how many, and they go in there and actually tinker with the embryo without aborting it… I’m just telling you, I think the whole thing is scary. We’re getting into areas that we don’t belong. There are questions, ladies and gentlemen, human beings will always be able to ask; but we will never, ever get the answers, not in this life, to some of those questions. I don’t care what we do. I don’t care how smart we think we get. There are certain things that we are just not going to know. I understand the quest for knowledge and wanting to know these things, but the day that human beings are able to take a little petri dish and squirt something in it and from nothing have life, it ain’t ever going to happen. You can dream it all you want, but it ain’t going to happen.