David Vance SubstackRead More
The Daily Mail had a headline in the past week that runs like this:
“World’s first ‘test tube baby’ Louise Joy Brown attends London gala of new film chronicling her birth starring James Norton and Bill Nighy”
This story is all about a made-for-TV feature length film that will be streamed in November on Netflix called: Joy.
This type of TV dramatisation is part of a trend of similar such films that lionise medical intervention. It is important because culture is where most people shape their views.
Anything that is do with light entertainment, be it stand-up comedy, TV dramas and film dramas and so on, are where most people form their views.
They don’t really watch current affairs and – even if they do – they would not see much that is not propaganda anyway.
The Netflix audience is very much the young audience.
Let’s read this line from the story:
“The film follows a young nurse, a visionary scientist and an innovative surgeon – played by Thomasin McKenzie, James Norton and Bill Nighy respectively – as they battle hostility to make the medical breakthrough.”
Ah!
There is the line my audience will have been waiting for.
“As they battle hostility.”
Movies are like that.
They tend to be black and white. They tend to be about good guys and bad guys.
And the bad guys in this movie are the people who voiced fears about where all this would lead.
This should be the axis of any drama or debate about IVF:
‘How far should we go in the struggle for life?’
Those are not my words.
Those words are the subtitle on the hardback copy of a book by the UK’s leading fertility doctor, Professor Robert Winston, called A Child Against All Odds.
Winston was in fact very close to the events of this film. He was an IVF pioneer working in London and moving in the same circles as Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards, the two scientists who effectively take the top tier plaudit for inventing IVF.
When you consider the phrase ‘battle hostility’, meaning people who raise questions about medical intervention, you need to remember this phrase: ‘How far should we go?’
Let me quote Professor Winston from a piece he wrote for the Daily Mail:
“Increasingly, people are offered the treatment most convenient to the doctor.”
And this is from Professor Winston’s book A Child Against All Odds:
“Perhaps the most taxing aspect of my career as a fertility specialist has been meeting women who have come to me after years of failed IVF treatment, only to discover within a few minutes that their problem could have been remedied in a few simple tests.
“In some cases, it is by this time too late to offer them successful treatment.
“Too often, IVF is seen as a cure-all by patients and practitioners alike.”
“There should always be proper attempts to determine underlying causes of infertility, and to consider other remedies, before IVF is even considered.”
Do you think we should go that far?
Do you think we should let doctors tell people to use IVF when they are not even infertile?
Do you think we should turn a blind eye to the way IVF has simply become commercialised to the point where it is not medically suitable?
I ask those questions because that is in effect what Professor Winston asks.
On the question of what we see on our television screens, this is part of an interview the Daily Telegraph conducted with Professor Winston a while ago:
‘“Winston was not part of this plot to exploit infertile couples because private practice was frowned on at Hammersmith Hospital where he, and others, focused on research – but surely he should have spoken out?
‘”Two years ago, when I was making A Child Against All Odds, the BBC said it didn’t want me to raise these issues,” he says sheepishly.’
As you can see, TV land does not like to criticise the medical industrial complex.
In the book A Child Against All Odds, Professor Winston recounts how he himself performed IVF.
But the book keeps asking the question ‘How far should we go?’
This, too, is the question he asks himself all the time as he is working: Can I get this woman pregnant using a lower-level of medical intervention with less risk than IVF?
It is not some blanket hostility to IVF.
It is simple common sense caution about using long-term high-risk medical intervention.
Sad to say, it seems as if the very worst fears of the IVF naysayers in the 1970s have come true. It is being used as a shop, often by customers who don’t know what they are buying. Not as a last resort medical intervention.
Let’s leave IVF for the moment and consider another film drama aimed at the Petite bourgeoisie audiences who lap all this up and use it to form their opinions.
This one is what I might call a Petite bourgeoisie film classic and it is part of a trend.
The film is called The Children Act, based on the book of the same name by that high priest of cultural narrow-mindedness Ian McEwan.
One of the key plot lines to the film is a 17-year-old Jehovah’s Witness, who is refusing the blood transfusion that would save his life.
And you can guess what happens.
The state over-rules the boy’s wishes.
And he lives.
The state intervenes with a forced medical intervention and they all live happily ever after!
Talk about the infantilisation of adults through sanitised storytelling.
The point is, the do-gooder class of novel writer and screen-writer is attracted to simple stories like this.
Yes, it is true that Jehovah’s Witnesses sometimes die from refusing blood transfusions.
But that is no reason to create hagiographies about the state or about forced medical intervention.
It is a fairly easy forecast to make that if someone does not have a blood transfusion, they may die.
What’s interesting about that observation?
Why don’t we see more high-profile dramas about the medical complexities of blood transfusion?
This was a high-budget production with the Queen of the Virtue Signallers herself, Dame Emma Thompson taking the lead role.
I raise the topic of blood transfusion for two reasons.
The first is because the infected blood scandal has been playing out in the UK for the past 40 years.
Those lucky enough to link causation to illness or death are due to start receiving payments this year.
The point I am making is that blood transfusion may not be as simple as people think it is.
A short-term gain could turn into a long-term risk. And perhaps even a lifetime of agony.
A religious ethic may, on occasion, underpin a medical reality.
The second reason why I mention blood is because there are many people who do not want to receive blood donated by people who received the Covid vaccine.
One way around that is, if someone has a planned operation, to donate their own blood to themselves so that it can be used in a pre-planned operation if they do need a blood transfusion during the operation.
And you can expand that concern beyond the topic of blood donation.
When we consider fertility treatment, there are people who would not want to receive eggs donated by someone who had received the Covid vaccine.
And the same applies to male gametes whose donor had received the Covid vaccine.
This gives them a bit more clout when it comes to answering back at authority. That is why culture is used to tame any pushback.
These books and films do not need big audiences to shape public opinion.
Once you have captured the mindset of the Petite bourgeoisie, the ruling class is well on the way to shaping the majority opinion of society as a whole.
Let’s return to the topic of IVF because I spoke recently about lesbian feminist Julie Bindel who has written quite a bit about her concern regarding the rise of the surrogacy industry.
Surrogacy has very quickly morphed from being last resort medical intervention into a commercial and often medically unnecessary activity.
There is a very interesting drama developing in Italy.
Until 2024, there was already an existing prohibition on surrogacy in Italy.
And just the other week, the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni kept an election promise and has now extended this ban on surrogacy so that Italians cannot now go abroad to circumvent the domestic law banning surrogacy.
Let me quote from the Politico website:
‘After the vote Meloni called the law a “rule of common sense, against the exploitation of the female body and children.” She said: “Human life is priceless and is not a commodity.”
‘Speaking in the Senate on Wednesday, Lucio Malan, a senator for Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, equated surrogacy with “child trafficking” in which “rich families take advantage of women in need.”
‘While the opposition claims to defend children, he said: “We think that the worst thing that can be done to a child is to deprive them of their mother.”’
That senator is, of course, smeared with the brush of being so-called “far-right”.
He equated surrogacy in some cases with “child trafficking”.
If you recall the material I put earlier this year, you will recall British feminist Julie Bindel calling some forms of surrogacy “womb trafficking”.
So here we have the so-called ‘far-right’ and a high-profile lesbian feminist on the same page.
Fancy that!
The truth about the views of Jehovah’s Witnesses in relation to blood transfusion and Catholicism in relation to surrogacy is that there is in fact a medical grounding in those views.
Both of those things can be undertaken, but they come with risk.
Why are these things presented as commonplace to us when they should be presented with caveats?
We are constantly being told by the medical industrial complex: It’s just a last resort. You won’t see much of it.
We were told this about the legalisation of abortion.
Then we were told the same about the advent of IVF.
And where are we now?
Abortion is off the scale.
And so, ironically, is IVF.
Struggling to conceive, madam?
And why would that be?
Any skeletons in the closet?
Before I finish up here, I just want to mention one other drama playing out in front of our eyes.
It is the assisted dying bill, which, of course, means the assisted killing bill.
We are being told – again – it will be a last resort, you really won’t see that much of it.
The luvvies of luvvieland, led by the ineffable Esther Rantzen are out promoting it left right and centre.
Here is a headline from a Daily Telegraph opinion piece:
‘Assisted dying is not going to be an easy win for Labour. Those who thought it would be were deluding themselves. Public trust is finite, and at its lowest ebb’
Let me quote this line from the piece, which was written by Tim Stanley:
‘Many elderly voters are now convinced that the plan to save the NHS involves pressuring them to die.’
Save the NHS!
Yes, remember that old chestnut?
Is there any medical ethic that cannot be thrown under the bus to save the NHS?
Do you think public trust might be at its lowest ebb after all the old people who fell ill or died shortly after receiving their Covid vaccine?
It is possible that the assisted killing bill will be passed, but not with the easy ride that this government hoped for.
Thankfully we still have the autonomy to turn our televisions off when Emma Thompson and Esther Rantzen appear.
But it looks as if, sooner or later, the dopey British public will be handing over even more of their bodily autonomy to allow the state to turn them off for good.
So, please, don’t leave it until your deathbed to realise how much these ghastly globalist politicians hate every bone in your God-given body.
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