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It’s Not Just Planned Parenthood

Original Article

Many were shocked by a video released by the pro-life organization, Center for Medical Progress, showing abortion doctor and Planned Parenthood executive, Deborah Nucatola, blithely discussing the selective placement of forceps during abortions so she could “crush” fetuses in such a way as to preserve organs for distribution.

Nucatola’s insouciant attitude—as she chowed down while chirpily explaining how Planned Parenthood affiliates charge $30-100 for pre-ordered organs from a killed fetus, may put viewers off their own food. But no one should be surprised that killing fetuses for a living fosters utter callousness toward the value of unborn human life. After all, those who we would systematically kill, we must first dehumanize—whether in war, terrorism, or abortion.

This isn’t the first time that a Planned Parenthood representative has unintentionally revealed the gruesome face of Planned Parenthood and its utter indifference to pointed lethality. Less than three years ago, a PP lobbyist testified in Florida against a bill requiring abortion doctors to save the lives of infants they inadvertently allowed to be born. Alisa Laport Snow, the lobbyist representing the Florida Alliance of Planned Parenthood Affiliates, testified in opposition to the bill, explaining to lawmakers that her organization believes the decision to kill an infant who survives a failed abortion should be between the mother and her abortion doctor. From the Weekly Standard story:

So, um, it is just really hard for me to even ask you this question because I’m almost in disbelief,” said Rep. Jim Boyd. “If a baby is born on a table as a result of a botched abortion, what would Planned Parenthood want to have happen to that child that is struggling for life?”

“We believe that any decision that’s made should be left up to the woman, her family, and the physician,” said Planned Parenthood lobbyist Snow.

Make no mistake: This is Planned Parenthood. This is pro-abortion. Subsequent fence-mending and semi-apologies about “tone” cannot hide that truth.

Planned Parenthood isn’t alone neither in being callously indifferent toward unborn human lives— nor in its radical pro-abortion beliefs bleeding into support for outright infanticide. Many in bioethics believe that unborn and newly born human beings do not possess the cognitive capacities to qualify as a “person”—and hence, abortion equals infanticide—and it is all just peachy keen. As just one example—many could be adduced—some readers might remember the article published in theJournal of Medical Ethics in 2011 arguing that infants can be killed at the will of parents because—as human “non-persons”—they have no greater value than fetuses. From, “After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?”

We argue that, when circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible.

In spite of the oxymoron in the expression, we propose to call this practice ‘after-birth abortion’, rather than ‘infanticide’, to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which ‘abortions’ in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be.

Killing fetuses and harvesting them has also served as a pretext to pay women to abort—even to wait longer in their pregnancy before termination. Thus, Jacob M. Appel wrote in the Huffington Post:

Since far more women have legal abortions each year in the United States than would be required to clear organ wait-lists, if only a small percentage of those women could be persuaded to carry their fetuses to the necessary point of development for transplantation, society might realize significant public health benefits.

The government could even step into the marketplace itself to purchase fetal organs for patients on Medicare and Medicaid, ensuring that low-income individuals had equal access to such organs while keeping the “asking price” elevated… Someday, if we are fortunate, scientific research may make possible farms of artificial “wombs” breeding fetuses for their organs — or even the “miracle” of men raising fetuses in their abdomens.

That day remains far off. However, the prospect of fetal-adult organ transplantation is a much more realistic near-term possibility. A market in such organs might benefit both society and the women who choose to take advantage of it.

If one thinks that human beings can be categorized into the valuable (persons) and the disposable (non-persons—which also includes long-born people who have lost their “relevant mental capacities” due to injury, age, or illness), it is a baby step to thinking these humans should be strip mined for their valuable body parts.

Alas, Planned Parenthood is just the tip of the iceberg of an accelerating advocacy trend aimed at reducing our perception of the most helpless human to so many corn crops ripe for the harvest.

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.