Fetal tissue, euphemisms, and Planned Parenthood videos
The Planned Parenthood sting videos garnered a lot of attention initially, but as more have come out, I’m seeing less and less coverage. Let me start by addressing the videos themselves.
Are they edited? Almost certainly. Edited to only contain content the organization that shot them wants you to see? Likely, but to me, that’s beside the point. Organ harvesting is just a secondary stomach twist to the gut wrenching horror that goes on regularly in our country.
We love euphemisms in this country. Euphemisms mean we don’t have to think about what is actually going on. “Fetal tissue” is a much safer word than “baby”. “Evacuating the uterus” is much more comfortable than “sucking out the baby”. “Donating fetal tissue” is preferable to “cutting up the body for parts for scientific research”.
A straight up outlaw of abortions will not win the kind of victory needed here. A percentage of women will turn to back alley, unsanitary procedures which will endanger their own lives as well. That’s not what we should be going for.
We need to ask important questions. Why are women seeking abortions? Are they in abusive situations? Do they have access to contraceptives? How do we help women, and prevent them from getting to the point where they want an abortion?
We need straight talk. If a woman wants an abortion, she needs to know several things. How developed is her baby? Describe the abortion procedure step by step in real terms. Is the baby sucked out of the womb with a vacuum? Is the head crushed and then the body extracted? This is not going to be an easy conversation. Some women have been brought to this point by a trauma in their lives, and it may again be traumatic to discuss. But the choice she is making will be traumatic on the baby, and a life deserves at least an uncomfortable talk.
If, at the end, an abortion is still elected, then so be it. It would be my hope that these steps would dissuade some women from the procedure. But let’s be truthful. You may support abortion because you don’t think women should have to carry babies if they don’t want to. Fine. But don’t tell me it’s about a right to do whatever you want with your body. It’s about a right to kill babies if we don’t want them.
Pretending that some magical transition happens when a baby is born that transforms a “fetus” into a real person is absurd. As medical advances are made, babies are surviving outside the womb at much younger gestational ages than before. This is going to continue to eat away at the claim that a fetus is a body part of the mother. All body parts of a person have that person’s DNA in them. A fetus has its own DNA. It is its own living organism.
For some reason, killing babies after they are born is considered horrifying, when just a few months prior, it’s totally legal and done in clinics by doctors. We owe it to people to be real and honest about what is going on. We aren’t just “donating fetal tissue to research”, we are killing babies. Babies that couples looking to adopt would be so happy to have, and give so much love to. We need to educate women about what is actually happening, in hopes that, given the choice, women will stop choosing abortion.