The Planned Parenthood Scandal

I have been thinking over what I wanted to say about Planned Parenthood, abortion, and selling fetal body parts for over a week now, and I still don’t know how to address this issue.

Here are my random thoughts:

* I’m so glad the people at The Center for Medical Progress and David Daleiden who spearheaded this three-year plan to out Planned Parenthood and the companies to which they sell fetal body parts, had the courage of their convictions and acted.

* Because the liberal left so recently used undercover video to discredit Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, they don’t have a legitimate argument against these tactics.

* The mainstream media was initially slow to embrace the story, but some have given it a fair hearing. More recently, however, I don’t hear anything on the news about the new videos. Are they becoming indifferent to the horror? Or do they simply have nothing to say because there is no defense, yet they don’t want to encourage the logical opposition to Planned Parenthood funding by our tax dollars? Interestingly, Fox News is planning an exposé on Planned Parenthood September 5. Should be enlightening.

* I had no idea the extent of this aspect of the abortion industry. It’s far more horrific than I imagined and has been going on far longer than I realized.

* I don’t understand how thinking people can continue to support Planned Parenthood. Set aside the controversy over abortion for a moment, and ask whether or not Planned Parenthood is obeying the law against selling fetal tissue or not. They claim “reasonable compensation,” but they talk in the undercover videos like capitalists working to best monetize the commodity they have to offer.

* The bottom line is still the law that allows abortion. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1973 in the Roe v Wade case, the selling point for abortion was that the woman had the right to choose what she did with her own body. The fact that science has since proven that life begins at conception, that this zygotic/embryonic/fetal state is unique, no longer in fact “the woman’s body” but a separate individual with his or her own DNA simply has not been addressed.

* The issue of what we as a society do about life is a dividing point, with Christians on one side and atheists on the other. A large group of compatriots are “swing voters,” voting with their approval or disapproval, and moved largely by the emotion of the day. When women were fighting for a more equal stand in society, then those in the middle swung toward abortion, but when videos come out revealing the trafficking of infant body parts, making it impossible to ignore that the liver and heart and lungs and brains come from living humans, the swing group moves toward the pro-life position.

* Pro-life and women’s rights ought not to be seen as mutually exclusive. A woman ought to have the right to say no to sex that leads to pregnancy. Why isn’t that right brought front and center?

* The left-leaning proponents of “women”s rights” have confused a woman’s right to be who she is with a woman’s right to do what men do. So Rosanne Barr, in her 90s TV show, claimed the right to spit and chew and scratch the way men do. Oh, yay! But to the point of this article, sexual promiscuity has now become a woman’s right. And just like men who don’t have to bear the consequences of their licentiousness, so too, women wanted to be free of the product of their immorality. Birth control was the first step, abortion the end game when all else failed. So now women can be like men! That, the feminists say, is women’s rights.

* I read a NYTimes article today about women who are refused abortions. Apparently this does happen, most commonly, according to the article, when a woman doesn’t realize until late in the pregnancy that she’d going to have a baby. So if she goes to the wrong clinic—one that doesn’t do late term abortions—she may get turned away. This article says there needs to be more studies about the effect of a woman carrying and delivering a baby she wanted to abort. But what seemed shocking to me was that 95% of these women are glad they gave birth. Most bonded with their baby and, in the words of this slanted article, “adjusted.” The article, reporting about the woman in the anecdote who had been turned away from having an abortion, said, “S. now says that Baby S. is the best thing that ever happened to her. ‘She is more than my best friend, more than the love of my life.’ ” Still, this is held up as only one factor in measuring how well this woman is doing. How well off she is economically seems of equal value.

* None of these studies has anything to do with the spiritual aspect of what’s going on in a woman’s heart, so no matter what the findings of any of these studies appear to be (and there aren’t many studies—not even ones examining the effects of an abortion on the state of a woman’s mental health), they are incomplete.

* All this serious look at the well-being of the woman who wants to or who has aborted her baby, looks past the fact that the life of a child is at stake. Either a baby will have the chance to live or will be denied that chance, based solely on what the mother decides is good for her.

* The best thing churches can do to combat abortion in the long term, in my opinion, is to provide compelling, Biblical reasons to young people to avoid promiscuous sex. The secondary reasons aren’t enough. Young people need to determine if they love God more than they love sex.

* Apart from teaching the next generation, churches can also make a huge impact by caring for teens who are pregnant and have chosen not to abort. If we value life, we should be willing to put our hands to the plow and do the work that would honor life and help young, single moms learn to parent well. For many that may start with learning about their Creator God and how He fashioned their child in their womb.