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August 5, 2015
The news has been full over the last few weeks of revelations about the “harvesting” of organs by Planned Parenthood from the remains of aborted children, so they can be sold for medical research. Reactions have varied. Some have offered technical arguments about the legality of this practice, while others have sought to attack the makers of the undercover videos. Planned Parenthood’s PR people have been busy. Some legislators have understandably and laudably initiated measures to stop their public funding, while others continue to attempt to defend the indefensible.
Most of us simply recoil in horror from this ghoulish practice.
This controversy has served one very valuable purpose. It teaches us that despite over forty years of legalized abortion, the human conscience has not been completely deadened. But there is another aspect to this that I think deserves more attention — the truth is coming out.
For decades, the advocates for legal abortion — with Planned Parenthood in the forefront — have minimized or denied the humanity of the unborn child. Handy euphemisms have been used to conceal the true nature of the target of abortion, such as “products of conception”, “blobs of tissue”, “uterine contents”, “terminating a pregnancy”, and the like.
Those tricks of misleading language are no longer viable, thanks to the Planned Parenthood staff members who were captured on these undercover videos, with their callous bluntness about what they were actually doing.
In fact, for once we can actually take Planned Parenthood at their word, because in these videos they don’t use euphemisms, but instead they openly acknowledge the humanity of the babies they have aborted and are now dissecting. This makes perfect sense. The whole point was that the child was really a human person, and their organs and other tissue could be sold for experiments.
In other words, the folks at Planned Parenthood finally told the truth about what they are actually doing when they abort over 300,000 babies each year – that’s more than 20% of all abortions in this country: they are putting an end to an innocent, fragile, defenseless, human life.
The importance of this is made particularly stark in a horrifying moment in one of the videos. A technician is exchanging small talk with the interviewer, all the while as she coldly describes her handling of the various organs of one of the aborted babies.
She is then heard to exclaim, “Another boy!”
The pathos of that scene is almost beyond human comprehension. But the acknowledgement of the truth is a pivotal moment. Nobody can hide from it any longer. It comes right out of their own mouths. It’s not a thing. It’s not just some tissue. “It’s a boy!” It’s a human, baby, boy.
Many years ago, during the great moral crusade to eliminate the human slave trade, a medallion was used by men such as William Wilberforce to advance their cause. It depicts a slave, bound in chains, and asks a simple question — “Am I not a man and a brother?”
“Another boy” now asks us that same question. How will we answer?