"Free to Choose"

"Free to Choose: Insemination, Immigration and Eugenics" -- This week's VDARE.com column is up:

The artificial insemination business isn't as important as immigration in determining America's future. But in that field, fortunately, there's been encouraging progress toward allowing the rightful decision-makers to make their own decisions.

I've long believed that how many and who get born in America are decisions that should be made by American citizens in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

But doctors sure didn't feel that way, as Slate.com's David Plotz points out in his new book The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank:

"In this first generation of AID [Artificial Insemination by Donor], doctors tyrannized their patients. When a red-faced couple appeared at the office, mumbling about infertility, the doctor told them he would take care of everything. Mothers were discouraged from asking questions about the donor. The doctor did a little poking around for a suitable donor—often the closest medical student at hand. The doctor would make sure the donor was the right skin color—white parents got white donors. If the doctor was feeling benevolent, he would also try to match the eye color of the father."

Doctors assumed that doctors' DNA was the ideal—and that the parents who would actually raise the child shouldn't get a say.

But today, the consumer's freedom of choice reigns supreme in the sperm market. For instance, if you have a fast web connection, you can download the 26 page (and 2 meg) application that donors at the California Cryobank fill out.

Lesbians and other feminists are particularly enthusiastic and choosy clients.

Thus, according to numerous reports in the British press in 1998, two-time Oscar winning actress Jodie Foster had proudly announced to friends that, after a long search for the perfect DNA, she had had herself impregnated with the gametes of a tall and handsome scientist with an IQ of 160.

She was apparently so pleased with how her first child turned out that she obtained more sperm from the same brainy hunk for her second child.

What accounted for this dramatic increase in customer choice? The single most important individual in liberating the sperm bank industry from elite paternalism, according to Plotz's book, was the elderly, eccentric millionaire eugenicist Robert K. Graham. In 1980 he founded the endlessly-denounced Repository for Germinal Choice, better known as the Nobel Prize sperm bank.

Among his five initial donors were the inventor of the transistor, William Shockley—and also, according to Plotz, the inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk.

Unsurprisingly, because Graham valued IQ so highly, a disproportionate fraction of his donors were Ashkenazi Jews, like Salk.

Also, unsurprisingly but under the circumstances ironically, Graham was constantly denounced as a Nazi.

Yet, despite the calumny he had to put up with, Graham vastly improved the industry.

Plotz writes:

"Robert Graham strolled into the world of dictatorial doctors and cowed patients and accidentally launched a revolution…All he wanted to do was propagate genius. But he knew that his grand experiment would flop unless women wanted to shop with him… So Graham did what no one in the business had ever done: he marketed his men…

“His Repository catalog was very spare … but it thrilled his customers. Women who saw it realized, for the first time, that they had a genuine choice… Thanks to its attentiveness to consumers, the Repository upended the hierarchy of the fertility industry. Before the Repository, fertility doctors had ordered, women had accepted… Mother after mother said the same thing to me: she had picked the Repository because it was the only place that let her select what she wanted.

“Where Graham went, other sperm banks -- and the rest of the fertility industry—followed… All sperm banks have become eugenic sperm banks.”

I quote Plotz at length to show that, by any objective standard, Graham is an American hero.

Graham's place as a national benefactor is secure not because he accomplished his goal of improving the national germ plasm—donor insemination is rare enough and the results variable enough that the entire industry could barely move the most sensitive needle on a national scale—but because he turned the process of selection over to the people who rightfully should have the choice. [More]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer