The amazing circumstances surrounding the emergence of the Center for Medical Progress and its investigative work on Planned Parenthood’s baby body parts effort still astound us.
Writing about a new CMP video that was recently leaked, blogger Matt Walsh summed up the impressions of many when he wrote:
I feel very certain that many of these people—abortionists and abortion industry executives—are demonically possessed. Or maybe that’s almost wishful thinking. Maybe I still, after all this time, cannot bring myself to believe that human beings who are not insane or infested by demonic legions would not only kill children, but laugh and joke about it. How can a non-crazy, non-possessed person be THAT incredibly, profoundly, fantastically evil?
I can’t understand it, but they can be. They are. The “how” is sin, we already know that. But there’s just something about watching these women sit in folding chairs in nondescript hotel banquet halls, under florescent lights, with a tray of snacks on the table in the back of the room, talking calmly and even excitedly about stabbing children in the head. It sends chills down my spine. I feel like I’m looking right into Hell itself. And, in some ways, I guess I am.
Speaking of spine chilling, these videos have also created a political buzz on Capitol Hill, including a defund Planned Parenthood vote in the House of Representatives last week. According to LifeNews, the bill was passed “on a 240-189 vote margin with all but seven Republicans voting for the bill and only one Democrat willing to vote to defund Planned Parenthood after it kills unborn babies in abortions and sells their body parts for profit.” I guess one could say that was a pretty safe vote, considering the fact that the Senate will not pass a veto-proof measure and Obama will never sign it. But in politics the beat goes on.
Even with all this, there is one simple fact worth repeating: With all the hoopla, the commentary, and the Congressional investigations and votes, babies are still dying by surgical actions at the rate of one every 30 seconds. And sadly it does not look like that statistic—as grim as it is—will change anytime soon.
In fact, if we add in the abortions by reproductive technology laboratories, chemicals, and devices, the numbers climb higher still—and continue to grow. Why is that, you might ask? We see a telltale answer in a quote by a reporter, writing about surveys in America about abortion: “Americans’ attitudes toward abortion depend on how researchers ask questions.”
No kidding! Rare is the pollster who asks directly about the human individual who dies during an abortion or who defines the various types of abortion distinctly so that the person being surveyed has to think about his answer in terms of people dying. The more ambiguous the questions, the more unreliable the results. And that is the real problem. Pro-life Americans talk to themselves a whole lot, but seldom impact the general public.
It’s obvious to me that the “attitude” about abortion is what matters in our secular society, not the truth that every abortion murders a person, whether that person is in stage 1 of development or seconds away from birth.
Given this state of ignorance in our nation, it would be a very good idea for each of us to revisit the basics—the real reasons why we fight against the culture of death. There are millions of them: Each one is a baby preparing to be born. She may be a single cell in size or she may weigh a few pounds. It doesn’t matter. Each one is precious; each one is, as St. John Paul II taught, “a manifestation of God in the world, a sign of his presence, a trace of his glory.”
Pray for our enemies, convert the disinterested, and for God’s sake, focus on that baby.