One of the most dispiriting things about being a pro-life activist is not so much the daily reminders of abortion’s depravity, but witnessing how many of our countrymen not only tolerate but celebrate it.
Almost unanimously, the culture of death’s apologists in the press, elected office, academia, entertainment, and professional activism support slaughtering our young, at any point without regard for any of the victims’ suffering, and for any reason, no matter how petty or bigoted.
They shed crocodile tears over the crimes of Kermit Gosnell while championing indistinguishable abortions performed in a more sanitary manner. So deep are there consciences buried that not even a president letting abortionists starve already-delivered newborns to death crossed the line.
Yet most wrap their shilling for such raw evil in empty rhetoric about “not taking abortion lightly” or prenatal execution being a reluctant necessity. “I’m pro-choice but not pro-abortion,” they insincerely stress.
On very rare occasions, though, the horror is too much, and a pro-choicer challenges her side to reckon with it in more than platitudes. For columnist Kirsten Powers, the Gosnell case was her breaking point, and now in the Huffington Post, Donna Carol Voss has identified Planned Parenthood’s ongoing organ harvesting scandal as another.
Huffington Post writer Donna Carol Voss
Identifying as an early-to-mid term pro-choicer who “see[s] no value in returning to back alleys and coat hangers,” Voss nevertheless condemns the “cold indifference” on display in the video—which, she says as a post-abortive woman, “may get you through the procedure” but “is no match for the emotional fallout that burns in most women thereafter.”
What follows is a somber, visceral journey through her experience, which leaders her to “wonder how many of those [who favor no limits whatsoever] have actually had an abortion”:
What I learned, and what almost any woman who has passed through that portal can tell you, is that abortion is a physical solution–not an emotional one. Women who escape the backlash of sorrow are the lucky ones.
Ticking along with our biological clocks is a wisdom clock, a growing awe for the creation and meaning of life. I never had another chance to have a baby, so I can speak only for the ache of what I threw away out of ignorance; rows of tiny shark teeth that constantly gnaw on the outer edges of my contentment.
For women who go on to have children after an abortion, do little shark teeth eat around the joy they feel with their children?
Voss then turns to the first video’s unwitting star, Planned Parenthood’s Deborah Nucatola, whom she “suspect[s] must number herself to the fact that she is terminating potential life after potential life”:
What struck me the most is “huddle” at the beginning of a surgery day to match the abortions on her schedule with “the list” of needed organs. As a “reasonable” provider, she plans which organs to harvest from which fetuses […]
Planned Parenthood is in the business of solving problems, and like all problem solvers, depends for its survival on the problems continuing. Only by continuing to treat millions of women can they continue to receive hundreds of millions, more than half a billion, of tax dollars each year.
In the puppy mill business, upstream production creates downhill consumption, which creates more upstream production. Has Planned Parenthood created a similar business cycle on the backs of unwanted fetuses?
“Something is wrong with this equation,” Voss determines, calling on Planned Parenthood to be more upfront about abortion’s emotional consequences as well as how its abortionists change the procedure for the company’s benefit rather than the woman’s: “I’m pretty confident I didn’t sign a release that allowed Planned Parenthood to turn my fetus around feet first in order to extract the head intact.”
For any full pro-lifer, there is plenty to disagree with here—preborn lives are not “potential,” and the fear of back alleys and coat hangers she cites for keeping abortion legal is rooted in myth, not history. Yet unlike so many writers we’ve responded to on this site, Donna Carol Voss comes across as the sort of pro-choicer with whom we could discuss those disagreements civilly and productively.
Stale platitudes about women’s health and abortions gravity are mere window dressing; draw attention to abortion’s dark side and Planned Parenthood’s less altruistic motives are not. They suggest her compassion is real, that allegiance to abortion hasn’t yet snuffed out her objectivity.
Kermit Gosnell
They also show how the abortion-on-demand regime will ultimately be toppled: death by a thousand cuts. The regime can coast on propaganda campaigns that desensitize the masses with abstractions, but its true nature is always festering beneath the surface, and cannot help but show itself now and then. In 2008 it manifested as infanticide, a few years later as Gosnell, and today as this.
And make no mistake, there will be more—not just more organ harvesting videos (though those are coming too), but more manifestations of abortion’s barbarity in horrifying ways we can’t even imagine yet.
And every time the mask slips, more Americans in the middle will wake up, question their assumptions, and realize these aren’t aberrations in the prenatal execution business—“this is it, what it’s always been, and always will be until we join the majority and end this madness.”
