The Undocumented Mark Steyn (41 page)

“But what about his distinguishing characteristics?”

“Oh, they’ve all got those.” And I noticed that down on the floor the President had begun humping my leg.

On the way home, I listened to the news: Tony Blair announced that he was cloning himself so that he could stand in all 650 constituencies. “We
believe,” he said in unison, “that this further demonstrates New Labour’s ability to fully and totally unite behind the leadership.”

“What’s the world coming to?” I said to my clone back home.

“Relax, have a drink,” he said. “Everything’s under control. I’ve washed the car, put the cat out, had sex with the wife. Nothing special, she won’t suspect.”

“Thanks,” I said. “What about the
Telegraph
column?”

“Done it.”

STORK REPORT

The Sunday Telegraph
, October 31, 1999

A FEW YEARS BACK
, I happened to be on a radio show with Gore Vidal, who, for some reason, assumed I was gay. During the off-air banter, another guest began talking about her newborn. The great man of letters gave me a conspiratorial twinkle and sighed wearily, “Breeders!”

Gore may still be a non-breeder, but he’s the last of a dying non-breed. The twenty-first century is upon us, everyone’s broody, and, in case Gore’s wondering, it no longer involves anything as ghastly as being in the same room as a woman with no clothes on. The stork has diversified: You don’t have to look for his little bundles of joy under the gooseberry bush any more—now you can order them online. And, as his traditional market—or, as
The Guardian
calls it, “the family lobby”—has shrunk, he’s moved on to expand his share of key niche demographics. Now, infertile women can have babies, and so can sexagenarian women and gay men.

Take Barrie and Tony, a couple from Chelmsford, Essex. They’d been trying for a baby for some time, but nothing seemed to work. Then it occurred to them that this might be because they’re both men. So they found a woman who happened to have four eggs lying around that she hadn’t yet auctioned over the Internet. You’d think two boys and a girl would have been enough, but they figured they needed someone else just to even up the numbers, so they roped in another woman who happened to have a rare nine-month vacancy in her fallopian timeshare. After that, it was just a question of getting the girls in the mood: the lights down low, Johnny Mathis on the hi-fi, the FedEx package with Barrie and Tony’s beaker of co-mingled sperm on the coffee table, the check for two hundred thousand dollars in the mail, and the turkey baster wandering in from the kitchen with a comehither look in his eye.

The result of this happy union is twins: a boy for him and a girl for him, to modify “Tea for Two.” Barrie Drewitt and Tony Barlow are planning to name their son and daughter (or vice-versa) Aspen and Saffron Drewitt-Barlow. In a landmark decision in a California court, the proud parents will be the first British couple to both be named as father on the birth certificate, though neither mother rates a credit.

The babies have not yet been born, but both mother and surrogate mother and co-father one and co-father two are doing well: Barrie and Tony still have a few eggs in the freezer from the same woman so, in a year or two, they intend to provide Aspen and Saffron with a sibling named after some other spice or ski resort. “This ruling,” said Tony, “affirms that gay couples are entitled to the same fundamental procreative freedoms as heterosexual couples.”

It’s fair to say heterosexual couples of the old school did not think of “procreative freedom” as an “entitlement”—like, say, public education or a senior citizen’s bus pass—but rather as, to use an archaic phrase, a “fact of life.” Today, though, there are no “facts of life”: de facto, it would seem biologically impossible for Messrs Drewitt and Barlow to come together to produce young Saffron or Aspen, but, de jure, it’s a breeze. Neither parent supplied the egg, neither parent carried the child, neither even went to the minimal effort of personally whacking the seed up the ol’ vaginal canal, but nonetheless the birth certificate will certify that they’re responsible for the birth—essentially for the reason that that’s the way they want it: Yes, sirs, that’s your baby / No, sirs, we don’t mean maybe. “The nuclear family as we know it is evolving,” said Barrie. “The emphasis should not be on it being a father and a mother but on loving, nurturing parents, whether that be a single mother or a gay couple living in a committed relationship.”

That’s great news if you’re a gay couple living in a committed relationship or a single mother living in several uncommitted relationships, but in the murky territory in between lurk all kinds of unsuitable parents. In Britain, as was reported last week, Penny and Stephen Greenwood’s baby will emerge from the womb and immediately be taken away by social workers and put into foster care. The Greenwoods, of Bradford, who have already had one child
confiscated by the state, are both epileptics and, although they insist their conditions are mild and controlled, the authorities aren’t prepared to let them be loving, nurturing parents. Apparently, it could be very traumatizing for a child to see his parent with his head thrown back and his tongue lolling out—unless, of course, it’s at the local bathhouse.

Despite the claims of the technobores, in the second half of the century hardly anything has changed—except the nature of change. Our bathrooms, kitchens, cars, planes, and high-rises have barely altered. Instead, having run out of useful things to invent, we’ve reinvented ourselves and embarked, with a remarkable insouciance, on redefining human identity. In the two decades since the first test-tube baby, “procreative freedoms” have become the new frontier. We began with “a woman’s right to choose”—whether or not to abort. Next came an Asian’s right to choose the sex of his child and get rid of any unwanted female fetus (at one point China had 153 boys for every one hundred girls). We’ve now moved on to a couple’s right to choose their baby’s genetic characteristics on the Internet, a lesbian’s right to choose to be impregnated by a gay male friend, and a career woman’s right to choose to have her eggs frozen in her late twenties, stored away, and fertilized in her forties or fifties or whenever she feels she’s ready to raise a baby. There is a logical progression in all this: if you have the right to end life (with abortion), surely you also have the right to decide when, where, how, and with whom you wish to initiate it. And, in one sense, the culture of death and the culture of new life form a kind of balancing act: if there is a gay gene and straight parents start aborting their gay fetuses, it seems only fair to allow gay parenting as a kind of corrective. Likewise, if girl fetuses are shouldering an unfair percentage of abortions in regrettably misogynist societies, female numbers can be kept up by human cloning—which, in theory, eliminates the need for sperm. And, if you don’t need sperm, do you really need men? Women could go on cloning women until Amazons ruled the earth, except for a handful of gay male enclaves in West Hollywood and Miami.

Human cloning will happen, if only because there’s a market for it—as there’s proved to be with eggs and surrogates. If it were simply a matter of
wanting to be “loving, nurturing parents,” adoption would do it. But there’s a biological imperative driving these advances. Since Barrie and Tony are so proud of their “committed relationship,” it must be irksome to have to let Tracie the egg-donor and Rosalind the womb-renter into the picture, since neither woman has any commitment to the relationship once the check’s cleared. Lesbian parents, like the pop star Melissa Etheridge and her partner Julie Cypher, would in future have no need of third parties: the clone of one would grow in the womb of the other—and what could be more loving and nurturing than that? The first human clone will enter the world in a clinic in Mexico or Morocco or some such, but one day she will come to the United States or Britain and endeavor to get a driving license, and at that point, even if cloning remains illegal in those jurisdictions, the state will balk at turning her away because she’s officially a nonhuman. They will recognize her as a legal human being on the grounds that that’s what Morocco says she is—just as the British authorities are recognizing the California court’s decision on Barrie and Tony.

The public will most likely go along with these innovations. Half a century ago, Ingrid Bergman gave birth out of wedlock and it almost finished her career. Now, single mom Jodie Foster is put on the cover of
People
magazine as a paragon of motherhood, and everyone thinks it’s bad form to inquire who or where the dad is, never mind whether a woman who thinks the only function of a father is to get the globules of bodily fluid into the beaker and then push off is really such a great role model. As always, the dismantling of ancient social structures is more positively expressed as a tolerance for diversity. “There is no one ‘perfect’ model on which all family structures can be based,” Barbra Streisand recently told America’s leading gay newspaper,
The Advocate
. “If we surveyed human history, we would see representations of every type of possible social arrangement.” Miss Streisand doesn’t give any examples, but you could survey all human history and be hard put to find any precedent for Barrie and Tony’s social arrangement. The reality is that, rather than returning to some pre-Judeo-Christian utopia, we’ve chosen as an exercise in self-expression to embark on a radical rejection of a universal societal unit.

Maybe it will work out. Maybe in fifteen years’ time Aspen and Saffron will be sitting in class surrounded by offspring of lesbian couples and geriatrics plus a handful of clones, and they’ll all be happy and well-adjusted. Or maybe they’ll be like America’s vast army of children born out of wedlock—six times more likely to develop drug addictions or commit serious crimes. Those statistics are part of the new “facts of life.” If you can afford it, like Barrie and Tony and Melissa Etheridge, you get to create your own “facts.” It will fall to the next generation to live with them.

THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE

Syndicated column, May 31, 2008

“
SOMEONE WINS
,
SOMEONE
doesn’t win, that’s life,” Nancy Kopp, Maryland’s treasurer, told
The Washington Post
. “But women don’t want to be totally dissed.” She was talking about her political candidate, Hillary Clinton. Democratic women are feeling metaphorically battered by the Obama campaign. “Healing the Wounds of Democrats’ Sexism,” as
The Boston Globe
headline put it, will not be easy. Geraldine Ferraro is among many prominent Democrat ladies putting up their own money for a study from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard to determine whether Senator Clinton’s presidential hopes fell victim to party and media sexism. How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy with a résumé you could print on the back of his driver’s license; a Rolodex apparently limited to neo-segregationist racebaiters, campus Marxist terrorists, and indicted fraudsters; and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates. “On this Memorial Day,” said Barack Obama last Monday, “as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes—and I see many of them in the audience here today. . . .”

Hey, why not? In Obama’s Cook County, many fallen heroes from the Spanish-American War still show up in the voting booths come November. It’s not unreasonable for some of them to turn up at an Obama campaign rally, too.

But what of the fallen heroine? If it’s any consolation to Senator Clinton, she’s not the only female to find that social progress is strangely accommodating of old-time sexism. There was a front-page story in London last week about a British Indian couple in Birmingham—she’s fifty-nine, he’s seventy-two—who’d had twins through in vitro fertilization and then abandoned the babies
at the hospital when they turned out to be daughters, announcing their plans to fly back to India for another round of IVF in hopes of getting a boy. In the wake of the media uproar, the parents now claim something got “lost in translation” and have been back to the hospital to visit the wee bairns. But think of mom and dad as the Democratic Party and the abandoned daughters as Hillary, and it all makes sense.

There’s a lot of that about. Sex-selective abortion is a fact of life in India, where the ratio has declined to one thousand boys to nine hundred girls nationally, and as low as one thousand boys to three hundred girls in some Punjabi cities. In China, the state-enforced “one child” policy has brought about the most sex-distorted demographic cohort in global history, the so-called
guang gun
—“bare branches.” If you can only have one kid, parents choose to abort girls and wait for a boy, to the point where in the first generation to grow to adulthood under this policy there are 119 boys for every one hundred girls. In practice, a “woman’s right to choose” turns out to mean the right to choose not to have any women.

And what of the western world? Between 2000 and 2005, Indian women in England and Wales gave birth to 114 boys for every one hundred girls. A similar pattern seems to be emerging among Chinese, Korean, and Indian communities in America. “The sex of a firstborn child in these families conformed to the natural pattern of 1.05 boys to every girl, a pattern that continued for other children when the firstborn was a boy,” wrote Colleen Carroll Campbell in
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
the other day. “But if the firstborn child was a girl, the likelihood of a boy coming next was considerably higher than normal at 1.17-to-1. After two girls, the probability of a boy’s birth rose to a decidedly unnatural 1.51-to-1.”

By midcentury, when today’s millions of surplus boys will be entering middle age, India and China are expected to account for a combined 50 percent of global GDP. On present trends, they will be the most male-heavy societies that have ever existed. As I wrote in my book
America Alone
, unless China’s planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what’s going to happen to all those excess men? As a general rule, large numbers of
excitable lads who can’t get any action are not a recipe for societal stability. Unless the Japanese have invented amazingly lifelike sex robots by then (think Austin Powers’s “fembots”), we’re likely to be in a planet-wide rape epidemic and a world of globalized industrial-scale sex slavery. And what of the western world? Canada and Europe are in steep demographic decline and dependent on immigration to sustain their populations. And—as those Anglo-Welsh statistics suggest—many of the available immigrants are already from male-dominated cultures and will eventually be male-dominated numbers-wise, too: circa 2020, the personal ads in the Shanghai classifieds seeking SWF with good sense of humor will be defining “must live locally” as any
ZIP
code this side of Mars.