The Ultimate Weapon Against the Culture of Death

The third installment from the Center for Medical Progress exposing the human trafficking of aborted babies by Planned Parenthood has been released.  I want to warn you that at 8:40 in the video, things get graphic.  It has been a well-executed campaign, partially because the CMP didn’t go straight for gory shock and awe, but have unwound a story for the viewer.  If you haven’t watched the first two videos, I would recommend starting there before you watch the most recent installment.  Some people need to see the graphic truth of it to be convinced while others don’t. After I saw The Silent Scream as a sophomore in high school, black and white though it was, I don’t feel the need to see that inhumanity ever again.  You can link to the third video here: http://thefederalist.com/2015/07/28/third-video-of-planned-parenthoods-organ-trafficking-scheme-released/

It’s tough for me, though, because while I don’t outright reject the graphic depiction of abortion, I think it should only be used where the gain is balanced by the harm it may cause.  Let me elaborate: I don’t support people who carry signs to protest abortion depict broken, twisted little bodies.  Aside from the fact that the children shown have already been exploited once,  I think those signs as a tool of engagement are largely counter-productive.  For any person that you shock into believing that the gore represented truly aren’t, as Planned Parenthood contends, simply unformed tissue or “POCs” (“products of conception”), you hurt parents who have lost babies due to miscarriage or stillbirth.  You force parents of children that are too young to understand but old enough to be afraid to confront the issue, not on age-appropriate terms of their choosing, but in the most brutal and ugly way possible.  You re-break the hearts of post-abortive parents and grandparents who may be repentant and live with their own personal Hell daily.  Meanwhile, the flash-in-the-pan attack on your senses isn’t enough to convince those who are undecided or who are opposed to you- it further entrenches their belief that “This couldn’t be true because it’s too horrible to be believed.” The scorched earth that is left between those and who we aim to help is too vast to cross.

I also realize the value of the truth. I guess you could say that I have skin in the game.  I don’t fault those who hold the camera that doesn’t blink, because it was that image of the baby running away from the abortionist’s tool playing through my mind at age 17 while an agent of Planned Parenthood at my local health department spent 45 minutes trying to browbeat me into aborting my baby that allowed me to say “no”.  If abortion had been a vague notion, I might have buckled under the pressure, which is why I try not to judge other girls who have bought the lie that an abortion makes the baby just “go away”.  There but for the grace of God, go my eldest daughter and I.  Being a teenage parent wasn’t easy, but being an emotionally immature kid trying to live with the consequences of having followed through with the “free” procedure they were offering me would have been devastating.  That is probably why a majority of post-abortive women report depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation, if not attempts.

So how do we view or share this newest video that rightfully exposes the ghoulish aim of the Planned Parenthood organization?  In the same way that a Roman Catholic catechism teacher lovingly, but firmly showed myself and 20 other 15 year olds The Silent Scream: in context.  You don’t throw it in people’s faces and hope that it shocks them.  That’s not how Christ worked, and it is not the example held up for us.  Christ worked through relationships that He built with people by connecting with them where they were.  It takes a heart that is inclined toward the person you want to influence to accomplish that.  You build it into a conversation that is about respect for life, a scientific exploration of human development, and an intolerance for the iconoclasm that is abortion.  It is an iconoclasm that not only shatters that tiny human being, but the parents who will forever mourn, and the society that hardens itself to accept it as just one more “right”.  Abortion will not be hated out of existence.  It must be loved out of existence.  This is where that “Loving your enemy” thing really makes the rubber hit the road.  As Abby Johnson recently said, we have to leave room in our hearts to love even those who work in the clinics enough to show them the way out.  We have to love the mothers and fathers as much as the babies.  It doesn’t mean abandoning that righteous indignation that rises up in the soul of every person at the realization that the things depicted in these videos are true, but it does mean not allowing that indignation to carry us on a wave of unchecked passion into believing that to help save one group makes it okay to hurt others with impunity. Lord have mercy on us if we push abused, scared, and exploited women into having that abortion because we present to them as a scarier alternative than the scrubbed, white-washed tomb that is Planned Parenthood.  It is an incredibly hard line to walk, but then, Christ never promised that it would be easy.