Since 2006, October 15 has been designated by Congress as Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day in the United States.
This day is intended for the remembrance of “pregnancy loss and infant death, which includes but is not limited to miscarriage, stillbirth, SIDS, or the death of a newborn.”
This is a lovely recognition of the painful loss of a baby, something millions of Americans have experienced. It’s a loss no parent ever wants to know.
Exactly one week before this date, the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing titled, “Planned Parenthood Exposed: Examining Abortion Procedures and Medical Ethics at the Nation's Largest Abortion Provider.” The hearing, which will take place in the Rayburn House Office building, will address issues raised by the release this summer of a series of videos showing Planned Parenthood officials haggling over the details of harvesting organs from aborted unborn children -- and even discussing techniques for aborting those children so as to optimize the collection of their body parts.
The irony is almost overwhelming: We are rightly compassionate toward women whose loss of their littles ones causes such pain, but the Left is fiercely defending the nation’s largest provider of abortion by trying to discredit the organization that revealed its evil behaviors and minimizing the gravity of what Planned Parenthood does to almost-born babies.
The late Anglican theologian John R.W. Stott, writing about abortion and its related wrongs, wrote this more than 25 years ago:
Any society which can tolerate these things, let alone legislate for them, has ceased to be civilised. One of the major signs of decadence in the Roman Empire was that its unwanted babies were ‘exposed’, that is abandoned and left to die. Can we claim that contemporary Western society is any less decadent because it consigns its unwanted babies to the hospital incinerator instead of the local rubbish dump? Indeed modern abortion is even worse than ancient exposure because it has been commercialised, and has become, at least for some doctors and clinics, an extremely lucrative practice. But reverence for human life is an indisputable characteristic of a humane and civilised society.
The only thing that has changed is the further coarsening of our culture and the greater number of unborn deaths. And that’s why the battle for life and for the dignity of women preyed upon by the abortion industry goes on.
