Pavone: Planned Parenthood’s Collision Course

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote years ago that Roe v. Wade, the decision that infamously resulted in over 58 million deaths by abortion, was “on a collision course with itself.”

Today, the same can be said of Roe v. Wade’s greatest and most notorious profiteer, Planned Parenthood.

Justice O’Connor made her comment with regard to Roe’s reliance on “viability,” the stage at which an unborn baby can survive outside the womb. Thanks to medical advances, viability doesn’t mean what it used to mean. More and more babies now survive birth at younger ages. As a result, the words of Roe v. Wade, while never logical, are now in conflict with reality.

And so it is with Planned Parenthood. The abortion giant is at war with its own words.

As I explain in my new book, Abolishing Abortion: How You Can Play a Part in Ending the Greatest Evil of Our Day, the entire abortion industry is on a collision course with itself. Its two central tenets, that abortion terminates “products of conception,” not babies, and that it benefits women, are demonstrably untrue. And the evidence continues to pile up.

With the undercover videos recently released by the Center for Medical Progress, Planned Parenthood’s collision course has reached sudden impact.

For years, Planned Parenthood’s motto was “Every child a wanted child.” Implicit in the slogan was a deadly message to every unwanted person – you’re nothing. You don’t belong and you really shouldn’t be here. You’re really just a problem, one that one of Cecile Richards’s abortionists would have handled if given the chance.

“Every child a wanted child” was pure Planned Parenthood – innocuous if you don’t think about it for very long; horrifying if you do.

Today, Planned Parenthood’s slogan is “Care. No matter what.”

No matter what, indeed.

The recent videos, as well as those that Life Dynamics and Priests for Life publicized back in 2000, show us exactly what Planned Parenthood cares about – procuring aborted baby body parts and getting “reimbursed” for its efforts. They also show how much Planned Parenthood cares about women and their babies – which is to say, not at all.

Planned Parenthood officials reveal in recorded conversations that they will alter the manner in which they perform abortions in order to obtain the body part – or the body – that a procurement company wants.  Their goal is not to make the abortion easier or less traumatic for the woman, it’s to get an undamaged brain, heart, liver, or an entire intact baby. As one Planned Parenthood executive puts it, “We deviate from our standard in order to do that.”

So, Planned Parenthood cares – about money. Abortion is its moneymaker. And rivers of profit are bigger when there are more tributaries. That’s probably why a Planned Parenthood official in one of the undercover videos calls the “reimbursement” her organization receives for providing aborted baby body parts a “diversification of the revenue stream.”

In one sense, then, Planned Parenthood cares about women and their babies. Without babies to abort, it would go out of business. In order to stay in business, though, it can’t call the children it terminates “babies.” That would be too gruesome, too… honest.

So, instead, Planned Parenthood talks about “products of conception,” which in its eyes is actually appropriate. To the abortion business, dead babies are its product. And if this product can be recycled to maximize profit, like plastic bottles or scrap paper, so much the better.

Commodification of the unborn child, of course, is not exclusive to Planned Parenthood. Over a year ago, it was revealed that the remains of babies aborted in Canada, and Great Britain were thrown into incinerators, some in the U.S., to generate heat for homes and hospitals. It epitomized the utilitarian view. Planned Parenthood has just found a more lucrative way to further exploit “products of conception.”

After all, why burn money?

Planned Parenthood’s procurement of organs, blood, and tissue from aborted babies is problematic for the organization, though. If the “clumps of cells” extracted from women have eyes, hearts, lungs, livers, legs, and arms, they’re not really clumps of cells, are they?

The dilemma for Planned Parenthood, then, is that its policy of organ and tissue “donation” proves that what it calls “products of conception” are actually human babies.

We’re left, then, with Planned Parenthood telling us that babies aren’t babies.  Why?  Because it says so.

Further, when Planned Parenthood tells us that it doesn’t make any profit from the harvesting of organs and tissue, the matter is supposed to be settled. Why? Because it says so.

And when a Planned Parenthood worker casually directs a technician to use a scissors to slice open a tiny boy’s chin, mouth, and nose to extract his brain – a child whose heart was beating a moment before – there are no words. But perhaps the banality of evil that exists in the offices of our nation’s largest taxpayer-subsidized abortion chain could inspire a new slogan.

Planned Parenthood. Barbarism with a human face.

Father Frank Pavone is National Director of Priests for Life. For more information on the Planned Parenthood scandal, and to the see the videos, visit www.BabyBodyParts.com. For Fr. Frank’s new book, see www.AbolishingAbortion.com.