Yesterday, pro-life and pro-abortion activists and spectators went berserk on social media upon the release of a video resulting from a 30-month undercover investigation by the Center for Medical Progress. This video shows Dr. Deborah Nucatola, senior director of medical services for Planned Parenthood, meeting with people who posed as medical researchers looking for fetal organs and tissue.
In these meetings she talks of trying to crush the fetuses in such a way that the desired organs are left intact for buyers with pre-orders. To do this, Nucatola says, “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.”
She also talks about putting the fetus in the breach position to have better precision at getting intact parts. In other words, the baby is aborted through partial-birth abortion, a felony in the United States.
Descriptions like these are hard for most people to stomach. We are confronted with gruesome imagery that depicts the dismembering of body parts, the crushing of skulls, the taking of remains and shipping them out like a mere commodity.
I scoured the comments from Planned Parenthood supporters to see their reactions. Of course, pro-abortion activists treat Planned Parenthood like a deity, an organization that can do no wrong. The overwhelming line of defense for the trafficking of fetal body parts was, “Why is this a big deal? It is better than wasting the tissue.”
Amanda Marcotte, contributor for Slate.com, wrote in her latest article:
Abortion is gross, no doubt about it. It becomes grosser the later in a pregnancy it gets. But so is heart surgery. So is child-birth, for that matter. […] We also shouldn’t deny women who want to donate fetal or embryonic remains to science any more than we would deny someone who wants to be an organ donor.”
Right? What is the big deal? Why deny women the opportunity to do good with the remains of their offspring?
Sure, if what is growing inside the mother’s womb is not a person, but rather a clump of cells, a product of conception, a parasitic potential person, there really should not be any outrage. Abortion is just a normal procedure like heart surgery, and the donated fetal tissue remains are an added benefit used in medical research to help others. End of story. Who cares?
But once again, what is being missed here is the outright dehumanization of the pre-born. Let’s be careful not to get so caught up in body part trafficking that we are missing the point. These tiny human beings are denied personhood. A person’s value is not determined by degree of dependency, size, or manner of conception.
When the person inside the womb is dehumanized, it is incredibly easy to justify killing him or her, and what happens to the “tissue” afterwards, thrown away or donated or sold, is a nonissue.
As Georgia Right to Life recently said, “If what Planned Parenthood does with baby body parts after they rip them apart is the part that shocks you, then you’re missing the point.”
Trafficking fetal body parts? Yes, be outraged. But don’t let it take precedence over the main issue here. One cannot be human without being a person as well, and all people have the right to life.
