In Passing: “Those are babies that are being killed. Millions of them”

As the Reign of Terror into which the French Revolution descended progressed, with the tumbrils carting their victims – men, women and children – to the guillotine day after day, did the onlookers who were not part of the cheering mob think, “Will this evil ever end? What is there that can stop it?” Similarly, the African American victims of slavery in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries must have helplessly asked the same question. Their’s was a longer ordeal.

The victims – as well as the onlookers – of any human cataclysm must always surely feel this way, hoping for a better time. But these ordeals did end. Good men and women did overcome the forces of evil which these epochs embodied.

As the horror of the Planned Parenthood’s exposure in the USA gathers momentum we wonder if this might not be the Harriet Beecher Stowe / Frederick Douglass moment which will lead to the end of the mass killing of human beings which what we call our civilization has not only condoned but has also massively funded for the past few generations.

“Care no matter what” is this organization’s mantra. We now know that a great deal of things matter to Planned Parenthood, and that they have nothing to do with “care” for anyone. It’s a big business, stark and simple.

We all thought the movie, The Matrix, was a flight of scientific fantasy in which intelligent machines created by mankind eventually turned on them and began to harvest the humans’ bioelectricity as a power source for themselves. As we listen – on the videos being released by David Daleiden’s organization – to the apparatchiks of Planned Parenthood explain their procedures for harvesting the body parts of the innocent human beings whom they kill in the womb it is hard not to hear echoes of The Matrix.

Might this be the moment, the turning point in the history of this inhuman saga, when the wheels will come off the tumbrils of this reign of chilling slaughter which is embodied in the abortion industry?

The poison generated by this evil is nowhere more evident than in the total lack of moral coherence – not to mention logical coherence – in the scramble to defend this extraordinarily callous organisation by its liberal camp followers in recent weeks.

In his angry post in the New York Times when this story began to break, Ross Douthat does not mince his words in calling Planned Parenthood’s fellow travellers to order, shaming them for their little better than infantile efforts to defend the indefensible. What Douthat essentially did was call ‘halt!’ to those double thinkers who say that they are pro life but also pro choice.

These are the people whose case for Planned Parenthood is that because of the “good” they do providing contraceptive and other “caring” services – and everything that goes with them – you have to tolerate the continued funding of their abortion services and the grisly practices now being revealed.

So let’s be clear about what’s really going on here, he writes.

This is Planned Parenthood’s choice; it is liberalism’s choice; it is the respectable centre-left of Dana Milbank and Ruth Marcus (Washington Post columnists) and Will Saletan (of Slate.com)  that’s telling pro-life and pro-choice Americans alike that contraceptive access and fetal dismemberment are just a package deal, that if you want to fund an institution that makes contraception widely available then you just have to live with those “it’s another boy!” fetal corpses in said institution’s freezer, that’s just the price of women’s health care and contraceptive access, and who are you to complain about paying it, since after all the abortion arm of Planned Parenthood is actually pretty profitable and doesn’t need your tax dollars?

But to concede that pro-lifers might be somewhat right to be troubled by abortion, to shudder along with us just a little bit at the crushing of the unborn human body, and then turn around and still demand the funding of an institution that actually does the quease-inducing killing on the grounds that what’s being funded will help stop that organization from having to crush quite so often, kill quite so prolifically – no, spare me. Spare me. Tell the allegedly “pro-life” institution you support to set down the forceps, put away the vacuum, and then we’ll talk about what kind of family planning programs deserve funding. But don’t bring your worldview’s bloody hands to me and demand my dollars to pay for soap enough to maybe wash a few flecks off.

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia had to engage in a somewhat similar exercise as Douthat last month. Some Catholic voices seemed to be watering down the crime of abortion by drawing attention to the wider spectrum of Catholic morality.

He presented a simple exercise in basic reasoning: On a spectrum of bad things to do, theft is bad, assault is worse and murder is worst. There’s a similar texture of ill will connecting all three crimes, but only a very confused conscience would equate thieving and homicide. Both are serious matters. But there is no equivalence. The deliberate killing of innocent life is a uniquely wicked act. No amount of contextualizing or deflecting our attention to other issues can obscure that.

This is a paraphrase of what the Archbishop wrote in his diocesan website last month. It is helpful, very helpful. With a bit of luck it will help clear the muddled minds of those who see something evil but fail to recognise it as such because a politically correct world’s group think has clouded their vision.

His words are also a helpful antidote for the Irish electorate now being softened up for the kill by the advocates of abortion on demand. Ireland’s media, fresh from its same-sex marriage victory at the polls, has again abandoned all pretence of objectivity as day after day, article after article, programme after programme, it argues for the destruction of the unborn who might be deemed an inconvenience to their progenitors in a self-centred society.

Archbishop Chaput asked American Catholics to reaffirm their commitment to their Church’s social teaching, “a seamless garment of respect for human life, from conception to natural death”. Ireland’s bishops are asking for nothing less. Catholics do not have a one-track morality. Sexual morality is not their only ethical concern. Catholic morality is multi-layered and penetrates every aspect of human behaviour in the demands it makes on Catholic consciences.

Of course it makes no sense, Chaput says, to champion the cause of unborn children if we ignore their basic needs once they’re born. Thus, he points out, it’s no surprise that – year in and year out – nearly all Catholic dioceses in the United States… devote far more time, personnel and material resources to providing social services to the poor, to education and to young people, than to opposing abortion.

But that does not mean, he went on to argue, that objectively and on the scale of personal wilfulness there is not a ranking of evil which every person has to attend to. “Children need to survive the womb before they can have needs like food, shelter, immigration counselling and good health care. Humanity’s priority right – the one that undergirds all other rights – is the right to life.” He quotes the American bishops of 1998:

Opposition to abortion and euthanasia does not excuse indifference to those who suffer from poverty, violence and injustice. Any politics of human life must work to resist the violence of war and the scandal of capital punishment. Any politics of human dignity must seriously address issues of racism, poverty, hunger, employment, education, housing, and health care . . . But being ‘right’ in such matters can never excuse a wrong choice regarding direct attacks on innocent human life.

Indeed, the failure to protect and defend life in its most vulnerable stages renders suspect any claims to the ‘rightness’ of positions in other matters affecting the poorest and least powerful of the human community. If we understand the human person as the ‘temple of the Holy Spirit’ — the living house of God — then these latter issues fall logically into place as the crossbeams and walls of that house.

All direct attacks on innocent human life, such as abortion and euthanasia, strike at the house’s foundation. These directly and immediately violate the human person’s most fundamental right — the right to life. Neglect of these issues is the equivalent of building our house on sand.

Like Douthat, Chaput attacks double-thinkers. He questions the logic – and that’s the least of it – of those who say that abortion is mainly a cultural and moral issue, and politics is a poor solution to the problem. He finds it curious that some of the same voices that argue against political action on the abortion issue seem quite comfortable urging vigorous political engagement on issues like health care, homelessness and the environment. He defines politics in practice, as the application of moral conviction to public discourse and the process of lawmaking.

He points out:

Law not only constrains and defends; it also teaches and forms. Law not only reflects culture; it shapes and reshapes it. That’s why Christians can’t avoid political engagement. Politics is never the main content of Christian faith. It can never provide perfect solutions. But no Christian can avoid the duty to work for more justice and charity in our life as a nation, a task that inescapably involves politics. 

Ruben Navarrette, Jr., is a veteran “pro-choice” voice. But in his August 10 column on the Daily Beast website he expresses his revulsion at the whole, ugly, system-wide barbarism of Planned Parenthood’s fetal trafficking. Navarrette was brought to his senses on the issue when his pro-life wife said to him:

Those are babies that are being killed. Millions of them. And you need to use your voice to protect them. That’s what a man does. He protects children – his own children, and other children. That’s what it means to be a man.