FULLNESS AT THE CORE
Re: Paul Beston’s Carving
for Ourselves:
While I can generally understand Mr. Beston’s premise that
Presidents’ Day deserves the indifference with which it is
generally greeted, he should also be advised that not all American
citizens are so blithely dismissive of that significant holiday as
some would have it.
I personally, along with my family and some close friends, will
attend the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley,
California, this coming Presidents’ Day Monday and, on that
occasion, we will all be particularly mindful of what was perhaps
Mr. Reagan’s finest counsel to the American people:
“Let us renew our faith and our hope. We have every right to
dream heroic dreams.” (Jan. 20, 1981)
Happy Presidents’ Day to all,
— Samuel Keck
Indian Wells, CA
NO KICKING THE HABIT
Re: Jackie Mason & Raoul Felder’s A
Study in Ingratitude:
I sadly agree with Mr. Mason and Mr. Felder that most American
Jews follow in lockstep behind the Democratic Party and its long
list of candidates who care little about those who follow them so
blindly.
An exception to the rule is the observant Jewish community
(admittedly, a small percentage of American Jews). Observant Jews
are usually much more conservative, and more often than not,
support like-minded Republican candidates. The reason for this is
that observant Jews, unlike our more liberal-leaning,
secular-oriented co-religionists, share many of the same values as
conservatives. On issues such as affirmative action, abortion on
demand, and school vouchers, to name a few, we identify strongly
with the conservative viewpoint. Don’t take my word for it. Ask Mr.
D’Amato or Mr. Giuliani whether the observant Jewish communities
stood behind them during their political careers.
Those who disagree with us like to equate us with Islamic
fundamentalists by labeling us “ultra-orthodox.” They do this in
order to marginalize us by implying that anyone who is observant
is, by definition, an “extremist.” Their moral equivalency argument
compares us with those who teach their children to strap bombs to
themselves and commit murder by suicide. What an insulting outrage.
I wish they would just answer us on the issues, so we could at
least have an honest dialogue.
So, Mr. Mason & Mr. Felder, you are not alone; there are
other members of the tribe who see things clearly.
— Jay A. Shuman
Elizabeth, NJ
I’ve puzzled for many years over the mystery of American Jews’
slavish devotion to the Democrat Party.
I recently had an interesting insight into this mystery when I
came across a Hebrew translation of a Yiddish memoir written in
Warsaw, in 1912, by a man with the same family name as mine: Kotik.
The memoir, the Hebrew title of which translates to “What I Saw,”
turns out to have been the archetype for the Yiddish shtetl memoir
genre made famous by the like of Shalom Aleichem. I don’t read
Yiddish, but I blazed through the Hebrew edition, utterly
fascinated.
Kotik’s descriptions of the Jews’ lives in the Russian Empire,
and the survival strategies that they used in that deeply hostile
environment, seem to presage the current infatuation with the Dems.
The Jews in the Pale of Settlement feared the local peasants more
than anything else, so what they did was form a symbiotic
relationship with the Empire, on the one hand, and the local gentry
on the other. The Empire and the gentry provided physical
protection (mostly in the form of deterrence) to the Jews. The
Jews, in turn, provided local administrative services to the
Empire, and being literate, provided estate management services to
the gentry, who were mostly illiterate and mostly interested in
drinking, hunting and gambling. This seemed to work pretty well.
Local Jewish big shots (like my possible ancestor Aharon Layser)
became rich and powerful, and after the Polish Uprising of 1863 was
crushed, acquired many of the estates of the rebellious gentry (who
got killed or exiled by the Empire) who used to be their accounting
clients.
The basic model is this: suck up to an all-powerful State, and
manipulate it for gain at the expense of the rest of the
population. The Kotiks, and many other Jewish families, also got
into the liquor business, so there was a bit of the old
opiate-of-the-masses thing going on , too, with regard to the
locals.
Well, isn’t this what the current strategy of American Jews
reduces to?
Trouble is, of course, that it comes to no good end. The
peasants and the gentry eventually catch on. It is also a creepy,
and profoundly un-American way to get along.
What I cannot for the life of me understand is how it can be
that American Jews can’t figure this out. Whether the Democrat
thing has its roots in the shtetl or in FDR, how the hell does an
idea that is so obviously bogus persist? Seriously ! It isn’t
really in the genes, is it? So what gives?
On another note, I have a serious criticism of your work as
columnists : your columns are too few and too short. I’m certain it
is great fun screwing around with your legal and show business
hobbies, but it seems to me that at your ages you should spend more
time on serious things.
— Paul Kotik
Plantation, FL
Great article. But please include Milton Friedman as one of the
most important scientists of the 20th century, and perhaps of all
time.
His research, detailed in Monetary History of the United
States, placed the country on the path to economic
stability.
Without his analysis, the U.S. would still be slamming from
inflation to deflation, from boom to bust, from Republican
sensibility to Democrat corruption.
Recall the situation at the end of the 1920s when the Great
Contraction in money occurred, following the roaring economy of the
previous decades. The collapse that followed brought in sixty years
of incompetent, and venal Democrat rule. It has taken till today to
rid the country of this plague.
A similar situation would’ve occurred following the latest
“bubble” if the Federal Reserve had allowed another collapse in the
American economy. The Democrats would’ve pandered to the country’s
worst fears, gotten themselves re-elected, and bungled foreign
policy bad enough to get us in a real shooting war, instead of the
police actions we’re in now.
Instead, the Fed and the markets are moderating and preventing
the damaging effects of wild swings in money, and the country will
weather the latest business cycle easily. The Republicans will gain
the power that they have so long deserved, and the nation will be
better off.
Please tell the world how important Professor Friedman’s work
is. I don’t think he even understands how powerfully he has
affected the world.
— Jim Klein
Catholics vote Democrat lock-step as do the Jewish people.
Catholics vote Democrat because “Mom and Dad voted Democrat and if
I voted Republican, they’d flip in their graves” and “Herbert
Hoover was a Republican and we suffered in the Depression.” The
fact that the Clinton Democrat party bears no resemblance to the
Truman Democrat Party, has no meaning for these Johnny
One-Notes.
— Agnes McDermott
ARTIFICIAL FERTILIZATION
Re: George Neumayr’s In
Vitro Defects:
As a far from liberal or godless infertility specialist, I feel
it my duty to address some of the points that George Neumayr
attempts to make in his article at The American Prowler
entitled “In Vitro Defects.” I want to discuss the specifics of the
study that Mr. Neumayr refers to in detail, but will first address
some more general points.
Mr. Neumayr states that “[t]he studies support exactly what the
dismissed moralists of the 1970s argued: it is not good for
children to begin their lives in petri dishes.” I guess that
depends on whether you think not beginning a life at all is better
than beginning a life in a petri dish. The fact remains that there
are literally tens of thousands of babies born each year using
these assisted reproductive techniques (ART) such as in vitro
fertilization (IVF), the vast majority of which are completely and
perfectly healthy. Without these techniques, these children would
not be born. The part of my job that is the most satisfying is
assisting these couples, who would otherwise remain infertile and
childless, in bringing a new life into the world. Think about it.
Would you deny these people the right to have children? I have
actually had people in my religion tell me that they thought that
there must be a reason that God had not allowed them to have
children naturally so we ought not intervene. Using that argument,
you’d have to abandon all medical treatment since, for example, if
God “allowed” someone to get cancer or appendicitis, who are we to
intervene?
As for the study that Mr. Neumayr refers to in his article, a
few notes of caution. It is always dangerous to take news reports
describing medical studies at face value. They are frequently
misrepresented or their significance overstated. And that is
certainly the case here. The reported incidence of
Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome (BWS) is 1 per 13,700 to 1 per 14,300
live births. This study showed a total of six cases of BWS out of
45,074 IVF births in the UK, giving an incidence of 1 per 7,149
births. Let’s assume that this study is definitive (which it is
not). The incidence of BWS is twice as high in this study (which
has its methodological flaws — that I won’t go into unless you
want me to), but the fact remains that the incidence of BWS is
still remarkably low and the chance of having a child born with
this malady remote. Is a 1 in 7,149 chance of having this occur
worth calling for an end to IVF or decrying it as evidence that the
technology is flawed? As a matter of fact, there are numerous
studies which have investigated whether there is an increase in
birth defects with ART and the vast majority of them have shown
there to be absolutely no difference between the naturally
conceived pregnancies and IVF groups.
Mr. Neumayr goes on to state that we are “killing” thousands of
embryos every year in our labs. I would like to discuss briefly my
perspective on embryos. Being an infertility specialist, I do
indeed assist in bringing gametes together that results in the
creation of an embryo. I watch their development in our petri
dishes and it humbles me to be involved in such a miraculous
process. The more I learn, the more amazed I am that reproduction
ever occurs much less with my help. And in the end, my experience
has taught me that God is still in charge. But I have also come to
know that not every embryo is created equally, and by that I mean
that not all have the potential to become a viable pregnancy that
will result 9 months later in the birth of a child. Of the oocytes
that fertilize, only about half will grow normally and continue to
divide. The ones that don’t divide or grow normally have been
studied in the past and the majority of them found to be
chromosomally abnormal. In other words, they were destined from the
moment of fertilization to never result in the live birth of a
child. Am I “killing” these embryos (or by implication a child) by
discarding them? Most certainly not; they never had the potential
to become a child.
And the fact that there are so many abnormal embryos is not a
reflection of the technology but rather a confirmation of what has
been observed in spontaneous conceptions (i.e. a high “miscarriage”
rate). A study was done in which women took a home pregnancy test
every day. A surprisingly high number of women turned up with
positive pregnancy test results prior to their expected period.
Approximately 40% of these women (with a positive test prior to
missing a period) ended up having a normal period at the expected
time and thus “lost” the pregnancy without knowing they were ever
pregnant (or at least they wouldn’t have know they were pregnant if
they hadn’t been in the study). The best information we have says
that this is because that embryo created that month did not have
the potential under any circumstances to become a child.
While I do think that these things need to be investigated
further, it is unnecessarily alarmist to point to this study and
say “Aha, I told you IVF was bad.” By far, the most common outcome
in those who get pregnant is to have a normal and healthy baby.
Let’s not lose sight of that fact. And let’s figure out how we can
do things better.
Respectfully,
— Frederick W. Larsen, M.D.
Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility
