If you’ve been anywhere near the internet recently you have heard all about the videos circulating that condemn Planned Parenthood and their (now admitted) practice of altering abortion procedures to procure fetal tissue and “donating” (a debatable position) it for biomedical research. You may not have watched the videos for yourself (which I urge you to watch at least videos four, five and seven; and if you are skeptical of the “editing” you can view the full, unedited footage here), but you’ve likely heard the rhetoric surrounding them. While I have written several posts on the topic, I was most recently struck by this brief section of the 8th video. The video Stem Express tried desperately to keep the public from seeing.

Stem Express (SE) was secretly filmed discussing their fetal tissue trade operations with Planned Parenthood by the sting operations of The Center for Medical Progress (CMP). All eight of CMPs videos are exceptionally grotesque and seem to hold, at least some shock value even for those who still support Planned Parenthood. But I think perhaps some of the more damning quotes, at least morally speaking, exist in this portion of the video, for it is here they discuss the dismemberment and careful presentation of dead babies for the sake of the fragile consciences of the labs who will experiment on their remains.

SE: They’ll open the box [containing an intact fetus], go, ”Oh God!” [laughter] So yeah, so many of the academic labs cannot fly like that, they’re not capable.
Buyer: Why is that? I don’t understand that.
SE: It’s almost like they don’t want to know where it comes from. I can see that. Where they’re like, “We need limbs, but no hands and feet need to be attached.” And you’re like, ? Or they want long bones, and they want you to take it all off, like, make it so that we don’t know what it is.
Buyer: Bone the chicken for me and then we’ll—
SE: That’s it.
Buyer: And then I’ll eat it, but.
SE: But we know what it is. I mean, [laughter], but their lab.
Buyer: But then it goes to that whole stigma.
SE: Oh yeah. And their lab techs freak out, and have meltdowns, and so it’s just like, yeah. I think, quite frankly, that’s why a lot of researchers ultimately, some of them  want to get into other things. They want to look at bone marrow, they want to look at adipose- sort of adult human, kind of adult based sampling. They want to avoid publishing a paper that says it was derived from fetal tissue.

You see, those small fingers and toes, they are a piercing dart to our hearts, they weigh our consciences with doubt, and to continue in our barbarity, we must remove them from sight. It is why Planned Parenthood is notorious for keeping the ultrasound images away from mothers, and it is why so much of the abortion debate is weighed down with nuanced phrasing and politically correct terms. We must dehumanize these babies so that our appetite isn’t spoiled as we murder them and extract from their corpses what we can use in order to secure our own futures.

What Planned Parenthood is in the business of doing, and is desperately seeking to defend their right to continue (and what Stem Express is capitalizing on), is not new, and CMP is only scratching the surface of the problem (and they are scratching well enough that our country can’t go on denying its existence). This idea of sacrificing the least among us to secure our personal prosperity and health is not a new human trait. Infanticide and abortion are long held practice in the history of humanity, some sacrificed their sons and daughters to the mythical gods of their own making, others to their philosophical ideals; like freedom from poverty, protection against overpopulation, and ethnic cleansing (at least that’s what Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger hoped for). But what is perhaps most ironic about the current Progressive narrative that purports and pushes for “pro-choice” rights is that they are actually seeking to maintain a barbarity that existed in those societies they claim they have progressed beyond, those societies where people could be purchased as property, where women were considered less than men, where race was seen as a defining factor for rights, these were the same societies that perfected infanticide and abortion so that they could maintain a reign of power for the powerful. In our sordid human history we continually seek to oppress the weak, and to marginalize and dehumanize the most vulnerable among us so that our future will be secured as prosperous. This isn’t new to America, and it isn’t new to the world.

What is perhaps the most new to the human method of murdering the defenseless, is a politicizing and sterilizing of the language we use. We’ve learned well from Stalin, Hitler, and Sanger; if we want to get away with the murder of the innocent, we have to change its name, and convince the masses that they need it to ensure their own survival and success. We have to obscure the faces of the victims, we have to take away their names. And now we have to remove their hands and feet so they don’t hinder our conscience as we carry out the business of eradicating those we fear will weigh down our utopian vision that is so fragile the weakest among us will upset its delicate balance.

So, we go on murdering to supposedly better our societies, and we make butchery sound palatable to the greater public. Then we can easily discuss it over dinner and drinks, where the only discomfort we experience, as we discuss the murder of children is that we may utter something that’s not politically sensitive and offend someone. We convince ourselves that these murders are necessary for our societal structure to function, we convince ourselves that we are providing a benevolent service, and to remove such a service will result in a crumbling of an already unstable system, we are convinced that we cannot function without our system and our murders, and that to deviate from this narrative is to equate yourself with those who cling to a past that is backwards, naive and behind the natural progress of humankind. And we turn our ears deafly to the repeated nature of history, we ignore those nazi diaries, those inconvenient quotes from Sanger, the eery repetition of Stalin’s promise of progress and the necessity of a “few broken eggs”, those similarities that are so painfully similar we must laugh them off as a joke so we can go on living in the bountiful promise of utopia and euphoric apathy.

But we saw a crack in these thinly veiled lies, and it has left us uncomfortable, we saw a small boy wriggling after being mercilessly extracted from his mother’s womb because he hindered her future, and because he was more valuable as parts to be used to secure the health of someone else. We saw his death, we saw his face, we saw his hands and his feet, and we have given him a name. And this narrative that provides endless euphemisms for horrific acts is suddenly crumbling before the eyes of its creators. And they scramble to defend it, they deceive, excuse, and explain away the horrors we see. And it is left to us to decide, will we adopt their propaganda so we can continue the barbarism of sacrificing our children to yet another god of humanity’s making? Will we look at those hands and feet that have been torn apart in the name of “progress” and continue the practice for our system? Or will we have mercy and stand with the God who’s hands and feet were pierced with nails so that we might unhinge the trajectory of humanity’s bend towards slaughter and injustice?

The gods of our own making all lead to death, and they demand the destruction of those who are weak and inconvenient. But the one true God, he leads to life, and he demands we protect and defend those who are weak, and that inconvenience is not as we perceive. If we claim any allegiance to this one true God who offers us life, we cannot stand with those who have looked into the face of evil and have partnered with it for the sake of “progress”.