By Mona Charen
Friday, August 07, 2015
For decades, I’ve believed that displaying grisly
photographs of aborted babies was the wrong way to make the pro-life case.
Disturbing images, I thought, would only repel viewers, not persuade them. I
now think I was wrong.
There are many ways to make an argument. The Center for
Medical Progress has demonstrated that a two-by-four has its uses. These
videos, precisely because they are graphic, shatter the complacency and denial
that are essential for a regime of mass violence to proceed. They undermine the
reassuring fiction that birth is a bright moral line. Five seconds before the
baby emerges, it has no moral worth. Five seconds after — all moral worth. That
is untenable logically and pitiless psychologically.
No one who has a passing familiarity with man’s inhumanity
to man can be completely surprised that people who consider themselves humane
can pull bags of body parts out of the freezer and pick through hands, eyes,
lungs, and hearts on a light tray.
As the footage was released, defenders of Planned
Parenthood rushed to explain that many medical procedures are grisly. Writing
in The New Republic, Dr. Jen Gunter protests that “These are not ‘baby parts.’
Whether a woman has a miscarriage or an abortion, the tissue specimen is called
‘products of conception.’” Oh. If they’re not baby parts, why are they valuable
for research and sale? CNN’s Errol Lewis insisted that, “Most of us would freak
out if we listened to professionals . . . discuss details of how a dying
person’s request to have their body parts donated . . . actually gets carried
out.” No, we wouldn’t. It isn’t the gore that that causes us to recoil; it’s
the intentional killing. It’s knowing that if the abortionist’s hand were
stayed for just a few more weeks, that child could live out his whole life.
Following the release of the first video, Planned
Parenthood president Cecile Richards, blindsided and unaware of what was still
to come, apologized for Dr. Deborah Nucatola’s tone. Nucatola is the Director
of Medical Services who spoke of “less crunchy” techniques and getting intact
“calvariums” (heads) and other organs. Euphemisms are as critical to Planned
Parenthood’s work as forceps, and as the other videos are demonstrating, pretty
much everyone in that business adopts the same breezy tone about “products of
conception.” They are so callous that they don’t recognize the gut-punch impact
of a clinic worker casually noting that one of the samples was “a twin” or “a
boy.”
Another key fiction these videos retire definitively is
that second-trimester abortions are vanishingly rare. As a Planned Parenthood
employee assures the filmmakers, one clinic alone does 40-50 “procedures”
(euphemism again) per month on 16-to-22-week-old fetuses.
At 23 weeks’ gestation, according to the March of Dimes
Foundation, the chances of survival outside the womb are about 17 percent. By
26 weeks, the chances are 80 percent. Just three weeks’ difference. When a
pregnancy ends in miscarriage after 20 weeks, many states require a fetal death
certificate. These rules do not apply when the death is intentional. Strange.
The most hardened abortion supporter (and we see that
they are very hard) agrees that when the mother or both parents of a “product
of conception” wants that “product,” the loss of a pregnancy is a tragedy. Who
would be so cruel as to deny that the parents of a 23-week-old baby should have
a funeral and burial if they request it?
The logic of Planned Parenthood is that human dignity and
membership in the human family is completely contingent on the feelings of
others, specifically mothers. Never mind that millions of couples wait
impatiently for the chance to adopt infants. (There are even waiting lists to
adopt Down Syndrome children.)
Well, reply the abortion absolutists, such as the
Reproductive and Sexual Health and Justice group, adoption is not a “universal
alternative” to abortion. Some women who place their babies for adoption do so
with a “heavy heart.” Yes, and some women who have abortions grieve for years.
But subjective feelings are irrelevant to human decency. People who care for
parents suffering from Alzheimer’s and other disabilities also have mixed
feelings. They would not be human if they didn’t sometimes wish for the ordeal
to come to a rapid end. Such feelings, however intense they may be, do not
justify violence.
Planned Parenthood’s defenders, including Hillary
Clinton, stand exposed for their radicalism and evasion. Abortion, as Senator
Elizabeth Warren put it last week, is “the most difficult decision a woman will
make in her entire life.” There’s the core dishonesty: If it’s a “product of
conception” and not a baby, why is it so difficult?
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