Call it Planned Non-Parenthood

So Planned Parenthood sells baby parts.  You are surprised because (a) Planned Parenthood is a  paragon of virtue as organizations go (b) Planned Parenthood loves babies (c) Planned Parenthood only wants what’s best for babies (d) Planned Parenthood wants to make sure ALL babies have an equal chance in life . . . as if.

People: get a grip, Planned Parenthood is one of the most disgusting, grotesquely inhumane organizations that has ever existed.  Hitler couldn’t, in his wildest dreams, imagine creating such an organization that has state funding and has the capacity to wipe out whole generations, all in the name of acting “humanely.”  It is truly bizarre that we have accepted the idea that killing babies is a humane thing to do, when we say it’s “inhumane” for people to hunt wild animals or eat chickens.   Up is down, right is left, evil is good.

What is profoundly disturbing about the recent video that surfaced isn’t that Planned Parenthood sells "harvested tissue" from dead babies, or even that Planned Parenthood is in the dead baby business, but that someone in the higher echelons of the organization could casually discuss these things over dinner, as if talking about the latest episode of their favorite television show or what the kids are doing over the summer.  You know, you just crush this part above and crush this part below and you can still harvest the tissue in between.  Oh, by the way, do you mind if I take the last roll?

We have taken the last step towards moral oblivion.  I know people who are otherwise concerned about what’s going on, but take a blind eye approach to abortion.  They would still argue the “woman’s body argument” or some other such unnecessary nonsense (I have already discussed this at length here).  What we have learned from this video isn’t that we should be disgusted that Planned Parenthood is selling baby parts; no, what we have learned is that Planned Parenthood has an utterly callous view of babies altogether.  The name of the organization is ironic.  It should be called Planned Non-Parenthood.

You see what this tells us is it’s all about definitions.  Planned Parenthood and its supporters say that a baby in the womb is a clump of tissue, a fetus, a sub-human, a non-human.  Frankly, we have defined babies in the womb this way for almost 50 years.  I read one person recently who argued that a fetus simply doesn’t deserve to be called a human because it doesn’t meet some preconceived standard this person had defined as a requirement for humanness.  Isn’t it safer for us to err on the side of caution when defining what it means to be a human being, rather than creating artificial standards which allow us to soothe our consciences when we strike one dead?  We vilify serial killers for doing so, but abortionists are treated as heroes in some quarters.

Look, I understand that in a pluralistic society like the United States not everyone will agree with me that life beings at conception.  But I also understand that we should be worried when we slip into the kind of intellectual coma that we’ve slipped into when it comes to abortion.  The kinds of definitions we offer up today to permit abortion could be used against the very people who created them as they age.  I have watched my father slip into dementia over the past 10 years to the point where he truly recognizes only two people: my mom and my sister.  Everyone else is a faint shadow that struts and frets their hour upon his brain and are heard no more.  Should we define him as less than human because he is no longer an autonomous being, capable of existing on his own?  My dad is every bit as helpless as a baby in the womb right now.  Should someone have a right to terminate his life because he doesn’t fit some arbitrary definition of what it means to be human?  His DNA still says human on it.  By my understanding, he remains in the imago dei – in the image of God.  So are children in the womb.

We have to be careful when we start adding definitions beyond human DNA as characteristic of what it means to be human.  After all, isn’t that what so many racists did when trying to justify treating blacks as less human than whites?  By defining human beings as we have been doing for the past half-century, we are denigrating what it means to be human.  Once we start defining dementia devastated elderly as non-human, who is next?  People with Down’s Syndrome?  Severely autistic people?  What about someone who has severe physical handicaps but has a fully functioning mind?  Where does the definition begin and end?  More importantly, who gets to make such definitions?

Planned Parenthood, and those who are in concert with its goals, have to find a way to salve their consciences because they know, they know full well, that what they are doing is wrong and evil.  The callousness of this doctor talking over a meal as if dead children are nothing more than a commodity speaks of a cold-heartedness that ought to terrify all of us.