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IT'S WWW.ENDOFCIVILIZATION.COM

Culture/Society Opinion (Published) Keywords: EUGENICS, RON HARRIS,DESIGNER BABIES
Source: New York Post
Published: October 24, 1999 Author: Rod Dreher
Posted on 10/24/1999 00:10:20 PDT by expat

IT'S WWW.ENDOFCIVILIZATION.COM

By ROD DREHER

HERE'S one for the "Slouching Toward Gomorrah" files:

Eugenics are coming back into vogue (and Vogue) on a new Web site where fashion models offer their eggs for sale to infertile couples who want to have high-cheekboned children.

Ron Harris, a fashion photographer who just launched www.ronsangels.com, writes on the Web site that he's just helping folks do what comes naturally, Darwinically speaking.

"Natural selection is choosing genes that are healthy and beautiful," he says. "This celebrity culture that we have created does better economically than any other civilization in our history."

He continues: "And of course, we all want the best for ourselves and our children. This is why we work as hard as we do - to be able to afford the very best of everything."

Ah, yes: a pashmina shawl, Havana cigars, reservations at Balthazar, a designer baby.

Honestly, Sweetiedarling, can a life devoid of bee-stung lips and a Kate Moss waistline possibly be worth living? Good God.

Ron may be a scoundrel, but he's got one thing right: that his Web site reflects what society has become.

If the "Ron's Angels" story had appeared two years ago as a parody on theonion.com, we would have recognized it as a smart send-up of yuppie consumerism, the cybermarketplace and the shallow values of celebrity culture. But the culture now moves so quickly that it's hard to draw a satirical bead on events.

Those in the mainstream reproduction-assistance industry are shocked, shocked that someone would have the gall to sell a designer human egg in an auction. Come on, who are they kidding? There's no essential moral difference between what Ron Harris is doing and what egg-peddlers and sperm banks have been up to for years.

Harris only strips away the pretenses that allow the commodification of human life to be carried out with a veneer of respectability. Old Ron may be tacky as hell, but he's honest.

And he's doing us a favor, by calling attention to the need for Congress to regulate this appalling industry. How low can we go before this kind of thing is outlawed?

Most assuredly, ronsangels.com is not the bottom.

This Web site is the product of a materialist society that has decided pleasure and the avoidance of suffering are its highest virtues. When life itself is not believed to have intrinsic worth, this is what we get.

If it is permitted to provide eggs and sperm to infertile couples so that they can enjoy their "right" to happiness through having children, who are we to tell them they can't shop around for supermodel offspring?

If abortion on demand is permitted, who are we to tell the Chinese to quit aborting baby girls because they'd rather have male children? They do this, you know.

As genetic science proceeds, we will be able to discover in utero what our unborn children will look like.

On what grounds will ethicists lecture parents that they must not abort their unborn child because she is likely to be fat, or homely, or handicapped, or gay, or anything that might disadvantage the child in the real world?

We now think of poverty, illness and hardship - even the "hardship" of average looks - as intolerable. We are fast approaching the point where the poor, the sick and the unbeautiful will be thought of as enemies. And they will be dealt with accordingly.

The racist ideology of the Nazi doctors lives again in the apparently benign guise of a consumer service for status-obsessed yuppies who will not settle for less than the very best, and who will go to the barricades to defend their sacrosanct right to "choice."

A kinder, gentler, more fashion-forward eugenics is still eugenics. And it's still evil.

Ronsangels.com is a canary in the coal mine. E-mail: dreher@nypost.com