Much has been written about Planned Parenthood’s abort-for-organs video. That’s encouraging; not to have seen an effusion of outrage, pain, grief, and sheer horror would have been a dreadful commentary on our national hardness.
As Ed Stetzer notes, “progressive” Evangelicals and Mainstream Protestants, usually the first to accuse the pro-life community of caring more about the unborn than (a) their mothers, (b) babies after they are born, or (c) virtually immeasurable cryptosporidium pollution in certain public water shelves (we plead guilty to the last), “have been conspicuously absent, when they've spoken up on so many other issues.”
Many who take compassionate, unequivocal, and unashamed stances on the sanctity of unborn life and the predation of the abortion industry on vulnerable women commented with unusual passion and eloquence. Here are few choice selections:
Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, writing in Politico
The true import of the Nucatola video is its casual moral grotesqueness. Manipulating a baby in the womb to kill it in a fashion best suited to selling off its organs is a repellant act, pure and simple … We have long been told how unborn babies are “blobs of tissue” that deserve no moral respect or legal protection. Yet here is an official from the leading abortion provider in the country talking of their livers, lungs and hearts, and of preserving those organs for their value. What Deborah Nucatola describes is the reality of abortion. If you can’t handle it, you can’t handle the truth.
U.S. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), speaking on the floor of the Senate
… It doesn't bring me comfort to know that one child is torn apart so that maybe they can do research on the child's organs to in some future moment help a different child. Not every woman is being asked that her aborted child would be used for research and we really don't know the whys. Maybe they're looking for particularly healthy moms. Maybe they're looking for very mature, healthy babies. Maybe it's a situation where a particular mom couldn't afford to have the abortion procedure and so they swap off and say if you can't afford to have the abortion procedure maybe we can cover the cost by then possibly selling some of these organs then. We don't know. But I think maybe the question needs to be asked.
Peter Wehner, Ethics and Public Policy Center
Dr. Nucatola adds, “I’d say a lot of people want liver. And for that reason, most providers will do this case under ultrasound guidance, so they’ll know where they’re putting their forceps.” So think about this: Planned Parenthood opposes the use of ultrasounds when their purpose is to reveal the humanity of a child (and in doing so may discourage abortion) – but it supports the use of ultrasounds when the purpose is for selling the body parts of unborn children. After all, how are we going to know which parts of an unborn child to crush without ultrasound guidance?
Albert Mohler, President, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Writing at Cosmopolitan magazine, abortion supporter Robin Marty said that she had seen the video. Then she said, “Now, frankly, I’m just going to yawn.” Maybe she will, but if so that will require a massive act of denial. Later in her own essay she stated: “I shuddered when listening to the discussion of how the fetus can be removed, and the idea of a ‘menu’ of fetal tissue and organs that could be procured depending on the gestational age of the pregnancies being terminated and the number of patients who consent to donating is one I hope I never have to encounter again.”
Once again, which is it?
I give the last word to Briton Timothy Stanley, writing in CNN.com:
What matters about this video is what it appears to reveal about the reality behind America's sanitized image of abortion; the reality of what an abortion is and how it morally compromises us all … It's like watching Hannibal Lecter discuss making a human casserole and protesting that all the ingredients were provided willingly … We've been too casual for too long about some of the terrible problems that lie around us -- be they abortions or the poverty and desperation that can drive women to seek one. The Planned Parenthood video holds up a mirror to a society that has become compromised by horrors that it regards as "every day." The face of 21st-century America is Nucatola's: discussing pulverized lungs and hearts between mouthfuls of salad.
Let’s pray for Dr. Nucatola, for Cecile Richards, for all of their Planned Parenthood colleagues, and for the thousands of women looking for help and healing instead of an abortionist’s scalpel and a culture’s grand, cold, deathly lie.
