Many people were shocked to watch the comments by Dr. Deborah Nucatola, the Senior Director of Medical Research at Planned Parenthood, on the abortionist trafficking of the organs of unborn children (see below for the original footage). Sadly, I was barely shocked at all; this story simply illustrates the inhumanity at the core of abortion practice itself.
When you spend enough time researching and campaigning on abortion, one of the most emotive and dark of subjects, it’s easy to become desensitised to the sheer callousness of it. This is true of the reasons chosen for abortion, such as sex-selective abortion, or the fact that we have abortion for disabled babies up to birth in the United Kingdom. It is equally true of the grisly practicalities of it, as with the gradual dismemberment of babies in second and third trimester abortions through use of powerful suction or surgical instruments. Abortion is always a barbaric reality, so it becomes simply unsurprising when a new layer of corruption is uncovered.
The fundamental fact is that to choose to abort an unborn baby is to choose to kill a defenceless child in the very place they should be safest – their mother’s womb. To not recognise this is to fail to see the forest for the trees. All abortion constitutes (even when intended for ostensibly nobler reasons) the reduction of a subject to an object; the treating of a human being as a means to be used, rather than an end to be respected.
Yet it misses the more important point, which is how a basic moral denial of human dignity leads to this kind of corruption.
If we are willing to accept the killing of an unborn baby because it will suit their mother, or society, then why should we be surprised that some people choose to harvest their body for organs? Planned Parenthood is essentially the BPAS of the United States, being the largest member of the American abortion industry. Why, from their point of view, if you had access to the bodies of thousands of aborted babies whom you are contracted to kill, would you not take the opportunity to recycle these remains to some benefit?
The logic may be chilling, but it is entirely consistent. The reason why Dr. Nucatola was able to blithely discuss researchers’ desire for livers and how abortionists can remove these intact as they “crush” a baby’s body in the right places, and all over a snack, is because of the ideological wrapping around her conscience that enables her to deny that an unborn baby morally matters at all.
Many people will focus on the legal side of these revelations: whether the video shows that Planned Parenthood are breaking U.S. law against selling human fetal tissue, or at the very least the Federal regulations that prohibit altering the timing or method of an abortion for the sole purpose of later using the tissue in research. This is undoubtedly an important point, and it is difficult to see how Planned Parenthood can wriggle away from it. Yet it misses the more important point, which is how a basic moral denial of human dignity leads to this kind of corruption.
Ask yourself what you can do to help the right-to-life movement in its campaign to re-humanise society’s view of the unborn child
Until Western culture ends its utterly incoherent approach to the unborn child – celebrating and saving some babies, whilst allowing others to be destroyed for the sake of social convenience – it will continue to experience the cognitive dissonance of short-term outrage (or at the very least discomfort) over cases like this. It is the task of the right-to-life movement to remind society of the truth of unborn humanity, and thereby force it to come to terms with the reality of abortion.
We cannot do this, however, by adopting the morality of our opponents. Those activists who caught Dr Nucatola revealing her coarsened conscience did so by pretending to be people they were not. That is, by lying. When people do this, they lower themselves to the very same logic of ends justifying means that lies at the core of abortion itself. A cause based on truth and justice cannot deny the former in trying to secure the latter.
If you felt outraged by this video therefore, don’t merely decry the symptom, but seek the cure by the right means. Ask yourself what you can do to help the right-to-life movement in its campaign to re-humanise society’s view of the unborn child, and secure respect for the dignity of every human being.
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