In his latest Bastiat’s Window post, Bob Graboyes looks at the infamous Tuskegee Experiment, where government officials treated individuals as expendable pawns in their quest to improve society. After providing much detail about the experiment and the eugenics movement in general, he asks if we have learned anything.

He argues that while everyone condemns the Tuskegee Experiment, we continue to do the same general thing — letting authorities and supposed experts play at social improvement at the expense of individuals.

Graboyes writes:

Collective good over the sanctity of individual lives may be again on the ascent. In 2021, the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges resurrected the Harvey Jordan-Abraham Flexner vision in their Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts. This document implored doctors to

“shift the narrative … from the traditional biomedical focus on the individual and their behavior to a health equity focus on the well-being of communities.”

As technology and bioethics researcher Christine Rosen said of the document,

“[T]he tools of the medical profession are to be turned not to better health care, but to social justice.”

Ah yes — “social justice.” Leftist busybodies will trample all over the rights of individuals in order to achieve their utopian vision. That’s why Graboyes concludes that “there will always be another Tuskegee Experiment.”