Literature buffs may recall Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, a story set in 17th century Puritan Boston, Massachusetts. In the book, Hawthorne writes, “No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
We can apply this literary wisdom in real life today to Planned Parenthood and the latest missive written by its president, Cecile Richards. In it, Richards accuses David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress team of entrapment, while explaining to members of Congress that Planned Parenthood “adheres to the highest standards and follows all laws.”
The trouble is, Planned Parenthood officials have been caught on tape agreeing to a profit margin that benefits everyone when selling baby body parts to entities in need of fetal remains, like human tissue purveyor StemExpress. While Planned Parenthood argues that the videos are “heavily edited” and claims to be “donating” the cells, tissues, and other parts—including intact “fetal cadavers”—the truth cannot be hidden by rhetoric. All anyone, including a politically correct member of Congress, has to do is watch and listen to one of the videos or read the transcripts online to understand the game Planned Parenthood is playing and to understand that its claims are unfounded.
Planned Parenthood’s letter, which could well have been written with the blood of the thousands of preborn babies lost to its abortion practice, explains that only a few of its facilities actually “offer tissue donation” and they do this in one of two ways: “through tissue procurement organizations” or by partnering or participating “in research studies being conducted by major research programs connected to some of our nation’s most prestigious universities, medical schools, and research laboratories.” Apparently Richards is of the opinion that the elitist language suggesting the respectable nature of its work is supposed to disguise the facts about the harvesting of baby body parts at PP facilities. Obviously Richards is working very hard to communicate her belief that everything Planned Parenthood is doing is proper and compliant with the law.
And sadly, it may well continue to appear that way to the unsuspecting public because her most prominent cheerleader, President Barack Obama, will stop at nothing to punish states that decide to defund his Planned Parenthood pals.
Yet, Senator Ted Cruz, among others, alleges that Planned Parenthood is breaking the law and has possibly committed numerous felonies.
Will anything substantive come of this? Time will tell.
In reading Richards’ letter, we see that she maintains that the various practices in which Planned Parenthood is involved are always in the best interests of the woman—and it is the woman who is the only patient PP recognizes as having rights. The preborn child is irrelevant since PP’s business is based on the fact that, legally, the preborn individual is not a human person. So of course those tiny arms, feet, legs, and organs that we saw in some of those videos must be something other than human body parts!
This leads us to the obvious question: Why pretend that you are not killing people since in the United States of America it is perfectly legal to do so as long as the person in question is not yet born?
Do we really need 10 pages of gobbledygook to get that?
What we really get is this: The face Planned Parenthood wears is false and eventually, as Hawthorne wrote, bewilderment or something worse will set in.
The truth needs no apologist, no 10-page rhetorical blather to be understood. As Christ explains in Mark 7:21-23, “For it is from within, from the heart, that evil intentions emerge: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within and make a person unclean.”
The truth is as clear as crystal: Human beings begin at their biological beginning and no law, no for-profit deal made over a dead body, no masquerade, no lie will ever change this.
Planned Parenthood’s Scarlet Letter will come back to haunt this organization. If not here, then in the hereafter.