Rightly so, the recently released Planned Parenthood videos have renewed calls for Congress to defund what can only be described as an insidious and dehumanizing organization – one that encourages abortion, all under the dishonest label of health and vitality. With increasing horror, these videos display the sheer callousness of the abortion industry, and they indirectly confirm what most people already know to be true: In order to traffic in the brutal maiming of human life, you have to also be the sort of person who can chuckle while discussing the strategic crushing of babies’ bodies, all for the benefit of privileged onlookers. You have to be the sort of person who tallies the livers of the dead with the same desensitization one might have expected to see within some barbaric clan from the Stone Age.
Indeed, the unsavory nature of the videos makes it easy for pro-lifers to direct all of their rage toward the personnel involved in carrying out abortions. This rage, of course, is largely warranted, and it’s manifested itself in renewed pressure to end federal ties with Planned Parenthood, a much more likely outcome if Democrats weren’t so obsessed with spending money and with protecting this vague “right” to privacy that seems to have magically appeared in the halls of the Supreme Court a few decades ago.
But even if conservatives in Congress eventually manage to exclude Planned Parenthood from the budget, the pro-life movement will still face serious challenges: Not only do abortions remain protected by Supreme Court precedence, but they also are somewhat fixed in the public consciousness as an acceptable means to save oneself from a lifelong burden. If pro-lifers want to truly triumph legislatively and institutionally, then they will have to win the arduous battles that are constantly raging in the culture war. For ultimately, the long-term key to defeating abortion lies not in defunding Planned Parenthood per se, but rather in revealing to moderates the insanity of abortion as a concept which, taken to its logical conclusion, supports the extermination of human life.
Pro-lifers will, for the sake of honest debate, need to convince others to take abortion for what it actually is, removing from consideration the deceptive women’s-rights rhetoric leftists employ to avoid the central issue: the life of the fetus, and whether it should be treated as a being worthy of protection or as the messy result of careless sexual activity.
The case is a rather easy one to make: Abortion is, at its core, a medical procedure that deliberately terminates one life in accordance to the whims of that life’s politically protected counterparts. It is, more generally, an attempt to claim that a particular life is only valuable inasmuch as is capriciously deemed by someone who has already been born – buttressed by assertions that harken back to slavery, that consider the fetus to be the chattel of its mother rather than a human life with specific legal and moral protections.
In other words, abortion is the willful and grotesque subversion of human life; it is dehumanization and inequality encapsulated; it is the medical equivalent of telling someone that their rights are subject to another, who, it so happens, might want to continue to have unprotected and inconsequential sex more often, the biological ramifications of intimacy aside. The only true difference abortion shares with cold-blooded murder is this phony – and altogether political – dispensation of the idea of choice, even though there is no actual choice involved in the process as a whole.
In the end, the only good news is that the industry will continue to die as long as activists successfully communicate a particularly crucial reality – that with abortion, there is only death, and the resultant sadness.