Posted on 08/07/2015 6:01:00 AM PDT by Kaslin
For decades, I believed that displaying grisly photographs of aborted babies was the wrong way to make the pro-life case. Disturbing images, I thought, would only repel viewers, not persuade them. I now think I was wrong.
There are many ways to make an argument. The Center for Medical Progress has demonstrated that a 2 x 4 has its uses. These videos, precisely because they are graphic, shatter the complacency and denial that are essential for a regime of mass violence to proceed. They undermine the reassuring fiction that birth is a bright moral line. Five seconds before the baby emerges, it has no moral worth. Five seconds after -- all moral worth. That is untenable logically and pitiless psychologically.
No one who has a passing familiarity with man's inhumanity to man can be completely surprised that people who consider themselves humane can pull bags of body parts out of the freezer and pick through hands, eyes, lungs and hearts on a light tray.
As the footage was released, defenders of Planned Parenthood rushed to explain that many medical procedures are grisly. Writing in The New Republic, Dr. Jen Gunter protests, "These are not 'baby parts.' Whether a woman has a miscarriage or an abortion, the tissue specimen is called 'products of conception.'" Oh. If they're not baby parts, why are they valuable for research and sale? CNN's Errol Louis insisted, "Most of us would freak out if we listened to professionals ... discuss details of how a dying person's request to have their body parts donated ... actually gets carried out." No, we wouldn't. It isn't the gore that causes us to recoil; it's the intentional killing. It's knowing that if the abortionist's hand were stayed for just a few more weeks, that child could live out his whole life.
Following the release of the first video, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, blindsided and unaware of what was still to come, apologized for Dr. Deborah Nucatola's tone. Nucatola is the director of medical services who spoke of "less crunchy" techniques and getting intact "calvariums" (heads) and other organs. Euphemisms are as critical to Planned Parenthood's work as forceps, and as the other videos are demonstrating, pretty much everyone in that business adopts the same breezy tone about "products of conception." They are so callous that they don't recognize the gut-punch impact of a clinic worker casually noting that one of the samples was "a twin" or "a boy."
Another key fiction these videos retire definitively is that second-trimester abortions are vanishingly rare. As a Planned Parenthood employee assures the filmmakers, one clinic alone does 40 to 50 "procedures" (euphemism again) per month on 16- to 22-week-old fetuses.
At 23 weeks gestation, according to the March of Dimes Foundation, the chances of survival outside the womb are about 17 percent. By 26 weeks, the chances are 80 percent. Just three weeks' difference. When a pregnancy ends in miscarriage after 20 weeks, many states require a fetal death certificate. These rules do not apply when the death is intentional. Strange.
The most hardened abortion supporter (and we see that they are very hard) agrees that when the mother or both parents of a "product of conception" want that "product," the loss of a pregnancy is a tragedy. Who would be so cruel as to deny that the parents of a 23-week-old baby should have a funeral and burial if they request it?
The logic of Planned Parenthood is that human dignity and membership in the human family is completely contingent on the feelings of others, specifically mothers. Never mind that millions of couples wait impatiently for the chance to adopt infants. (There are even waiting lists to adopt Down syndrome children.)
Well, reply the abortion absolutists, such as the Sexual Health and Reproductive Justice group, adoption is not a "universal alternative" to abortion. Some women who place their babies for adoption do so with a "heavy heart." Yes, and some women who have abortions grieve for years. But subjective feelings are irrelevant to human decency. People who care for parents suffering from Alzheimer's and other disabilities also have mixed feelings. They would not be human if they didn't sometimes wish for the ordeal to come to a rapid end. Such feelings, however intense they may be, do not justify violence.
Planned Parenthood's defenders, including Hillary Clinton, stand exposed for their radicalism and evasion. Abortion, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren put it last week, is "the most difficult decision a woman will make in her entire life." There's the core dishonesty: If it's a "product of conception" and not a baby, why is it so difficult?
Indeed. The entire structure of liberalism is built on a foundation of euphemism.
As I watch self proclaimed “compassionate” liberals argue in favor of abortion it isn’t just the lack of compassion for the baby that jars me.
It’s the outright hostility they express for these little intruders who dare to show up and threaten a woman’s life.
Parasites - burdens. “Punishments”
They make pregnancy sound like an insurmountable medical condition that no one should have to endure if they don’t wish to.
Baby hatred - it’s what they do.
I’m watching Dexter right now and something strikes me. Even when someone likes the *idea* of killing bad guys, the reality is usually something that they can’t handle. Once you get to the disposal part, even hardened people can’t get past a body dump. Chopping them up and putting the parts in plastic bags is too much.
That’s the thing with the whole PP reveal. They took the ‘clump of cells’ argument and showed that we’re really dealing with parts. Just like in Dexter, the reality is so much more horrific than most imagined.
I still hear people say, “it’s just a clump of cells” but now I’m hearing, “Once it’s got all of it’s parts, fingerprints, a heartbeat, and a stimulus response reflex, it’s NOT a ‘clump of cells’.”
Even pro-choice people are waking up as reality sets in.
You’re wrong about a lot of things, Mona. Your good-taste conservatism (let’s not fight dirty, ooh! ohh! Those photos are icky!) is what has helped sink the ship of the republic.
Now that Planned Parenthood has been exposed as the equal of Dr. Josef Mengele, it’s going to be increasingly hard for the Left to defend that group—period.
Below is about the use of euphemisms by the Nazis to dehumanize their victims. Without resorting to euphemisms, Planned Parrenthood could not run their abortion mills and do their grisly business, devaluing unborn life and finding real value in it only when it is dead.
http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/staticpages/215.html
Nazi euphemisms played an important role in the dehumanizing process of the Holocaust. From the beginning Hitler spoke of the need to “purify” and “cleanse,” to rid the Reich of the Jewish “vermin,” and to “decontaminate” or “disinfect” the Reich of the Jewish “bacillus.”
Ultimately, the “Jewish problem” was solved through the “Final Solution” (Endlösung), a euphemism for extermination. Terms such as “euthanasia” and “mercy death” cloaked the murders of the handicapped (who were designated “unworthy of life”), which were committed for racial reasons—not to ease suffering. “Special treatment” (Sonderbehandlung) in euthanasia installations meant killing by gas.
Euphemisms were used in the death camps and in reference to the massacres conducted by Einsatzkommandos. Instead of “kill” or “murder,” terms such as “special action,” “evacuation,” and “resettlement” obscured the real intent. “Protective custody” (Schutzhaft) of opponents did not mean protection from danger but rather unlimited incarceration without trial. “Jewish residence district” (Jüdischer Wohnbezirk) was substituted for “ghetto.” The “East” and “Jewish settlement region” (Jüdisches Siedlungsgebiet) became collective euphemisms for the killing centers of Poland, with the death camps referred to only as “labor,” “preferential,” or “POW” camps.
Cruel deception and irony also marked the infamous camp-entrance signs: “Work Will Set You Free” (Arbeit Macht Frei). Within the camps, the gas chambers and crematoria received the harmless-sounding names “bath houses” (Badeanstalten) and “special installations” (Spezialeinrichtungen). Seldom has language been so cynically misused.
I have never watched that show and am not about to start
nazi pink shirts.
Try to avoid the 2007 Kevin Costner movie Mr. Brooks as well. It’s not overly grisly but it bizarrely makes the title character who is a serial killer a sort of anti hero.
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