The Butchers of Planned Parenthood

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Mitchelle Blair, not knowing what to do with the bodies of two of her children, whom she had murdered, stuffed them in her freezer. She’d tortured them for months first — strangling them, suffocating them with plastic bags until they passed out, starving them, burning them with boiling water.

She said she killed her son by accident; she’d intended to torture him further. Her daughter she killed on purpose.

“If I had the chance to do it again, I would,” the mother said. Pleading guilty, she asked the court to impose the death penalty on her. Prosecutors regretfully informed her that Michigan has no death penalty.

Of course the children had different fathers. Of course this was in Detroit. Of course they all resided in a beyond-dismal housing project called the Martin Luther King Homes, a pit of despair that those of us whose faith is less than unshakeable might in our weakness suspect has been abandoned by the One of Whom the Reverend King was a minister.

Dr. Deborah Nucatola has had a different sort of life. She doesn’t live in low-income housing in Detroit; she practices medicine in Los Angeles. She works as the director of medical services for Planned Parenthood and also is employed by another firm founded by a former White House staffer in the Obama administration who, naturally, became a federal contractor.

Nucatola also is responsible for putting some children in the freezer — not two, but millions.

In a now-infamous video, Nucatola discusses — over lunch in a Los Angeles restaurant — how Planned Parenthood facilitates trafficking in fetal organs and tissue. She discusses prices and confesses that Planned Parenthood’s doctors are happy to alter care in order to further the organization’s organ harvesting, for example using ultrasound where they ordinarily wouldn’t, in order to prevent damage to valuable organs. In her own words:

    So then you’re just kind of cognizant of where you put your graspers, you try to intentionally go above and below the thorax, so that, you know, we’ve been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I’m not gonna crush that part, I’m going to basically crush below, I’m gonna crush above, and I’m gonna see if I can get it all intact. And with the calvarium, in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it’s not vertex, because when it’s vertex presentation, you never have enough dilation at the beginning of the case, unless you have real, huge amount of dilation to deliver an intact calvarium.

“Calvarium” is the sterile way of saying “head.” “Vertex presentation” means head-first delivery, i.e. the normal presentation. What she’s talking about here is repositioning the baby in the womb to enable more effective organ harvesting.

Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards is the daughter of the late Texas governor Ann Richards, whose dedication to the cause of dismembering unborn children was absolute. Richards says that Planned Parenthood regrets the “tone” of Nucatola’s lunch-table conversation. But that blasé tone is not alien to the organization: A former Planned Parenthood clinic director tells of being mystified that in her clinic various keypads and passwords were set to 2229 — “Spells out ‘baby,’” a staffer helpfully informed her. The garbage truck that hauled away the clinic’s “products of conception” — human scraps — was mockingly referred to by staffers as “the nursery.”

It is possible for human life to be reduced to a very, very low level. Survivors of famines and totalitarian prison camps tell of doing things and seeing things done that they would never have imagined civilized people, themselves included, capable of. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin,” T. S. Eliot wrote. Horrible things happen to people — no, that isn’t quite right: Horrible things are done to people. Detroit is not the Jiabiangou Labor Camp, and lunch in sunny Los Angeles is not the Arduous March. These are free people in the most prosperous and peaceful nation this world has ever known, and these butchers might have chosen anything.

This is what they chose.

Human beings are not lumps of labor. They are not capital, consumer goods, taxpayers, commodities — or meat. The philosophy of Planned Parenthood (and Eros is a jealous god) is the philosophy of men-as-meat, and that philosophy is not long compatible with liberty and human dignity. When Erich Fromm wrote his famous book on the dream of religion without deity, he titled it “You Shall Be as Gods.” The truth is that without an understanding of the uniqueness of human beings and the consequent value of every human life, you will not be as gods — you will be as meat.

And meat gets butchered, packaged, and sold. It gets stuffed in the freezer.