David French:
After days of reeling from the most macabre revelations of the Center for Medical Progress’s undercover videos — from talk of “less crunchy” abortions, to the news that “a lot of people want liver,” to clinic employees staring at dismembered human remains and exclaiming “another boy” — Planned Parenthood’s defenders are launching their counterattacks.
There was of course no way that Planned Parenthood would go quietly. They’ve got the full support of a president who asks God’s blessings on the nation’s most prolific abortionists and the fanatical devotion of the sexual revolutionaries in the Democratic party, the academy, and the mainstream media. And the stakes are quite high: In the sexual revolution’s moment of triumph — with abortion legal, marriage redefined, and the biological facts of gender rendered irrelevant in the face of human will — it has suddenly been exposed for what it is, a tawdry and deadly exercise in human selfishness.
Planned Parenthood’s defenses fall into three general categories: the desperate, the immoral, and the nonsensical. The first — and most desperate — defense relied on buzzwords like “extremist,” and “anti-woman,” and “politically motivated” — almost always paired with an allegation that the tapes were edited. Yet by releasing the full tapes simultaneously with the condensed versions, the Center for Medical Progress was able to respond with simple truth. Yes, they were pro-life, and yes, they were running a sting. But the Planned Parenthood officials said what they said, and it was shockingly brutal.
Then came the immoral claim — that harvesting aborted fetal tissue for medical research is actually a good thing. Here’s Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern: “The graphic images of aborted fetuses are meant to disgust me, to convince me that abortion is a barbaric act of killing. But I don’t see death in these videos. I see hope.” How can one see hope in a mutilated child? Stern claims that by killing these kids and selling (or, excuse me, receiving handsome reimbursements for) their body parts, Planned Parenthood is helping advance medical research toward curing diseases like ALS, which killed a friend of his.
I too have known people who’ve died from ALS, and it is indeed a horrible disease. But the ALS sufferers I’ve known would never ask a single baby (much less thousands) to die for the sake of research that one day might possibly yield a treatment. And this is especially true when advances in adult-cell research may very well yield methods of potential treatment that don’t rely on fetal tissue at all. The only way for Stern and others to justify their moral calculus is to dehumanize the aborted child — and to do so in a way that defies science. After all, from the moment of conception a child is a distinct and separate human being, possessing its own DNA. In the face of this inarguable fact, Stern and others like him are judging not just that one human life is worth more than another but that other humans can and should be chopped to pieces, their body parts apportioned to labs for the sake of preserving a favored population.