By Judie Brown
Planned Parenthood has an ugly way of helping even the cold of heart think about the reality of every abortion. In a recent headline, for example, we read, “Planned Parenthood Botched Abortion So Badly the Baby Was Still Inside the Mother’s Womb.”
Let that sink in for a moment. According to the story:
The New York Times published the article, entitled “Botched Care and Tired Staff: Planned Parenthood in Crisis,” on February 15. In the article, writer Katie Benner began by relating a story of a New York woman who went to a Planned Parenthood facility for an abortion when she was just eight weeks pregnant. The abortion failed, leading to heavily bleeding, “painful cramps,” and a trip to the emergency room, where she discovered – despite assurances from Planned Parenthood staff that the procedure had been successful – that “the baby was still in her womb.”
While this report is about a singular event, this is not the only horrific story out of Planned Parenthood’s facilities. And if abortion were not designed to take someone’s life, there would never be a report like this. Though the immediate response of pro-life groups was to ask President Trump to cut off Planned Parenthood funding, there is a more egregious matter at hand. It is called legitimate murder.
The Catholic Church, along with most pro-life groups, recognizes the deadly act for what it is. In 1974, in its “Declaration on Procured Abortion,” the Catholic Church stated:
The tradition of the Church has always held that human life must be protected and favored from the beginning, just as at the various stages of its development. Opposing the morals of the Greco-Roman world, the Church of the first centuries insisted on the difference that exists on this point between those morals and Christian morals. In the Didache it is clearly said: “You shall not kill by abortion the fruit of the womb and you shall not murder the infant already born.” . . . Tertullian did not always perhaps use the same language; he nevertheless clearly affirms the essential principle: “To prevent birth is anticipated murder; it makes little difference whether one destroys a life already born or does away with it in its nascent stage. The one who will be a man is already one.”
The act of directly killing the preborn child has been, from the beginning of time, a deadly, egregious assault on human dignity. Nobody with the presence of mind to think this through will deny it.
So when a medical professional in our day suggests that defunding abortion cartels around the world is the equivalent of forcing women to bear their children, one is left wondering what happened to the philosophy that motherhood was not only a blessing but a point of encouragement within society, regardless of federal funding, policy, or anti-family rhetoric. We know the answer, of course, and it boils down to one statement coined by the treacherous Planned Parenthood: “every child a wanted child.”
If a woman is pregnant and does not wish to be in that condition, she can deem her baby unwanted and get rid of him. That is the Planned Parenthood way, the inhumanity of which is clear. All talk and encouragement to practice chastity before marriage and fidelity within it are lost in a society with such craven attitudes.
So it is really not shocking at all to read in a midwestern newspaper the headline, “GOP Has Launched a Sneaky Plan to Ban Abortion in Kansas.” Since when is it sneaky to protect innocent children from death?
This is the state of things in a nation that has forgotten that children are a blessing, families are the core of society, and love for them both is imperative.
Pope John Paul II once said, “A nation that kills its own children is a nation without hope.”
Indeed. That is our current nightmare—one we can only end when we stop the killing.