Paula Gianino, CEO of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis region, is having a real problem with the effort to achieve legal recognition of personhood for all human beings—born and preborn. She has come to the conclusion that pro-personhood Americans don’t believe in “the right to safe, legal abortion.”
Of course, she’s right, since those of us who understand basic biology and human embryology know that direct abortion kills a living human being. Apparently, Gianino missed that chapter in her Biology 101 class.
She writes that a recently approved informed-consent law in Missouri “is intended to add more distress, costs, burdens and barriers to abortion. It will create unnecessary delays and increase mid-trimester abortions (which has happened since the first waiting period law was passed).”
It’s this sort of rhetoric that helps proponents of abortion salve their consciences as they consistently deny that the act of abortion takes the life of a human being. The focus of such hyperbole is on the female, the expectant mother, who is never referenced as an expectant mother because abortion enthusiasts don’t admit that a child is growing inside his mother. Gianino wouldn’t write that abortion itself distresses and burdens the child in the womb to death, because she doesn’t believe it.
Gianino tells the reader, “An embryo and the fetus, for most of its nine months in utero, is not separate from the woman. It is completely dependent on the woman for its growth and development. Anti-choice groups disregard the woman entirely; the woman’s life, health and future do not matter. Elevating the status of the fetus over that of the woman is dangerous and dismissive of women, trivializes the issue and strips women of their integrity and humanity.”
First and most importantly, the preborn child has to depend on his mom for nutrition and housing, but so does a newborn infant. I never met a newborn who could lead a life of total independence. Why doesn’t Gianino give this little fact some thought? Just because the preborn child needs his mother in order to survive shouldn’t give anyone license to murder him.
Further, if pro-life Americans didn’t care for the expectant mom and want to do everything we could to assist her and her baby throughout her pregnancy and beyond, if she needs it, we wouldn’t be living up to our pro-life principles. We care deeply for each of these moms and their children, which is more than proven by the numerous pregnancy resource centers run by pro-lifers worldwide.
This outpouring of unconditional love is also the reason why it’s pro-life people who minister to post-abortive moms. Once she realizes that the actions she took have resulted in her being the mother of a dead child instead of a living, breathing bundle of joy, she can suffer numerous problems and even life-threatening illness. Pro-lifers are there for her because we care.
Stripping women of their integrity and humanity is precisely what happens every time a Planned Parenthood employee or any “reproductive health” specialist, for that matter, ignores the human personhood of the baby and the expectant mom’s real needs, focusing instead on getting rid of the “problem pregnancy” by requiring payment for and then committing an abortion.
Integrity begins with honoring the truth, and respect for humanity begins with recognition of motherhood and the fact that two people are involved in that pregnancy—mother and child.
So, if Planned Parenthood’s euphemisms are correctly translated, you’ll see that Gianino tells the truth when she writes, “Anti-choice groups never have worked with us on much-needed prevention programs for family planning or sexual health education. They openly oppose such bills and do nothing to address unintended pregnancy.”
If a pro-life American were to sidle up next to someone who promotes the killing of preborn children by denying their personhood, that would be an act of hypocrisy. I don’t know a single pro-life person who’s willing to do such a thing. We can’t help it that folks like Gianino refuse to recognize motherhood as a blessing but instead promote “reproductive choice” and a woman’s freedom to choose to kill her child.
Until such ideologues understand truth for what it really is, we have nothing to talk about.
An “unintended pregnancy” is a baby, and intended or not, that baby was planned by God. Our job is to affirm him and his mom, not betray her trust with falsehood.
No—we won’t sit down with folks who ignore undeniable facts. What we will do is keep struggling against the purveyors of death and destruction until every last one of them is out of business.
