Planned Parenthood Defenders Rely on Tortured Logic

[Valin]

National Review:

Mona Charen

August 7, 2015

 

For decades, I’ve believed that displaying grisly photographs of aborted babies was the wrong way to make the pro-life case. Disturbing images, I thought, would only repel viewers, not persuade them. I now think I was wrong.

 

There are many ways to make an argument. The Center for Medical Progress has demonstrated that a two-by-four has its uses. These videos, precisely because they are graphic, shatter the complacency and denial that are essential for a regime of mass violence to proceed. They undermine the reassuring fiction that birth is a bright moral line. Five seconds before the baby emerges, it has no moral worth. Five seconds after — all moral worth. That is untenable logically and pitiless psychologically.

 

No one who has a passing familiarity with man’s inhumanity to man can be completely surprised that people who consider themselves humane can pull bags of body parts out of the freezer and pick through hands, eyes, lungs, and hearts on a light tray.

 

As the footage was released, defenders of Planned Parenthood rushed to explain that many medical procedures are grisly. Writing in The New Republic, Dr. Jen Gunter protests that “These are not ‘baby parts.’ Whether a woman has a miscarriage or an abortion, the tissue specimen is called ‘products of conception.’” Oh. If they’re not baby parts, why are they valuable for research and sale? CNN’s Errol Lewis insisted that, “Most of us would freak out if we listened to professionals . . . discuss details of how a dying person’s request to have their body parts donated . . . actually gets carried out.” No, we wouldn’t. It isn’t the gore that that causes us to recoil; it’s the intentional killing. It’s knowing that if the abortionist’s hand were stayed for just a few more weeks, that child could live out his whole life.

 

(Snip)