What We Can Learn From Barbie Dolls
It’s not often I feel a call to praise a corporation these days. Many have become obsessed with hectoring their customers into accepting a progressive agenda that range from climate change to socialism to accepting a male transgender as the representative of its product in honor of International Women’s Day. Yet I am appreciative of Mattel’s recently announced new doll, which I will refer to as Down syndrome Barbie.
Personally I think Mattel’s Barbies have always been cool. I know people who've collected hundreds of them. As a collector of DC superhero stuff, I couldn’t resist buying a Wonder Woman and a Batgirl Barbie myself.
However, as nice as it is that Mattel sells Wonder Woman Barbies and such, it is much more important and admirable that they are now selling Down syndrome Barbie.
People with Down syndrome are being brutalized by modern society. According to a Senate report titled “Down Syndrome and Social Capital: Assessing the Cost of Selective Abortion,” 60-80% of children with Down syndrome are murdered in the womb. This number is terrifying. It is genocidal. It is not rooted in the belief that people with Down syndrome are destined to live short, painful lives — the referenced Senate report states “Medical advancements have helped increase life expectancy of people with Down syndrome from about 10 years in the 1960s to over 50 years in 2020” — but rather it is rooted in the belief that people with Down syndrome are too different, therefore their lives don’t matter.
Society has had this sort of view since the beginning. The famous scene in 300, in which Spartan babies deemed inferior were murdered, for example, is rooted in reality. In the modern Western world, this sort of killing is rooted in the rise of the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. Eugenics is essentially the belief that the human race would be improved by killing those who are undesirable because of mental or physical defect, ethnicity, poverty, or even sex. The killing, eugenicists believe, should be done in the womb, but they are not absolutiss on this point.
It was a philosophy espoused by an shocking number of prominent people, including W.E.B. Dubois, Winston Churchill, and even President Teddy Roosevelt, who once wrote, “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.” The following quote, from Margaret Sanger, is likely the summation of eugenics:
Birth control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced. It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extirpation of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.
Dismissing people as weeds to be plucked has helped inspire many of the horrors of the last century, including Nazism. Historian Edwin Black writes:
American raceologists were proud to have inspired the strictly eugenic state the Nazis were constructing. In those early years of the Third Reich, Hitler and his race hygienists carefully crafted eugenic legislation modelled on laws already introduced across America and upheld by the supreme court. Nazi doctors, and even Hitler himself, regularly communicated with American eugenicists from New York to California, ensuring that Germany would scrupulously follow the path blazed by the US. American eugenicists were eager to assist.
Hitler is not alone in being inspired by the eugenics movement. We see the devaluation, then taking, of innocent life for the benefit of society he championed in the treatment of Uyghurs in China, the butchering of as many as 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda, and the mass killing in Darfur.
Sanger’s legacy, Planned Parenthood, performs over 300,000 abortions a year. The women who are killing their unborn children are typically the women Sanger would want to do so. They are poor - “About half of women who had an abortion in 2014 were below the poverty line, with another quarter very close to poverty.” - and they are disproportionately women of color.
It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extirpation of defective stocks.
I saw an interesting documentary recently about China’s one-child policy titled “One Child Nation.” One of the things that still stands out for me as much as the forced abortions are how families, limited to only one offspring, would want that child to be a boy. When fate was not accommodating, female babies were put in baskets and left abandoned near markets. The filmmaker’s mother recounted one such incident involving helping her brother do this to his daughter:
We couldn’t discard the baby in broad daylight, so we kept her in a basket, climbed over mountains when it was still dark out. We put $20 in her clothes and left her on the meat counter in the market For two days and two nights, she was there. No one wanted her. Her face was full of mosquito bites. She eventually died.
Those human weeds.
Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, there have been approximately 10,000 children spared from abortion — a significant number but hardly enough.
Perhaps we need a reminder from a doll that children, regardless of their skin color, their gender, the income of their parents, or their defectiveness of their stock, are a heritage of the Lord.